Джек Лондон
Moon-Face, and Other Stories
“You try it, Story,” he said.
Uncle Robert, still laughing, and urged on by Lute and his wife, took the board. Suddenly his face sobered. His hand had begun to move, and the pencil could be heard scratching across the paper.
“By George!” he muttered. “That’s curious. Look at it. I’m not doing it. I know I’m not doing it. Look at that hand go! Just look at it!”
“Now, Robert, none of your ridiculousness,” his wife warned him.
“I tell you I’m not doing it,” he replied indignantly. “The force has got hold of me. Ask Mrs. Grantly. Tell her to make it stop, if you want it to stop. I can’t stop it. By George! look at that flourish. I didn’t do that. I never wrote a flourish in my life.”
“Do try to be serious,” Mrs. Grantly warned them. “An atmosphere of levity does not conduce to the best operation of Planchette.”
“There, that will do, I guess,” Uncle Robert said as he took his hand away. “Now let’s see.”
He bent over and adjusted his glasses. “It’s handwriting at any rate, and that’s better than the rest of you did. Here, Lute, your eyes are young.”
“Oh, what flourishes!” Lute exclaimed, as she looked at the paper. “And look there, there are two different handwritings.”
She began to read: “This is the first lecture. Concentrate on this sentence: ‘I am a positive spirit and not negative to any condition.’ Then follow with concentration on positive love. After that peace and harmony will vibrate through and around your body. Your soul – The other writing breaks right in. This is the way it goes: Bullfrog 95, Dixie 16, Golden Anchor 65, Gold Mountain 13, Jim Butler 70, Jumbo 75, North Star 42, Rescue 7, Black Butte 75, Brown Hope 16, Iron Top 3.”
“Iron Top’s pretty low,” Mr. Barton murmured.
“Robert, you’ve been dabbling again!” Aunt Mildred cried accusingly.
“No, I’ve not,” he denied. “I only read the quotations. But how the devil – I beg your pardon – they got there on that piece of paper I’d like to know.”
“Your subconscious mind,” Chris suggested. “You read the quotations in to-day’s paper.”
“No, I didn’t; but last week I glanced over the column.”
“A day or a year is all the same in the subconscious mind,” said Mrs. Grantly. “The subconscious mind never forgets. But I am not saying that this is due to the subconscious mind. I refuse to state to what I think it is due.”
“But how about that other stuff?” Uncle Robert demanded. “Sounds like what I’d think Christian Science ought to sound like.”
“Or theosophy,” Aunt Mildred volunteered. “Some message to a neophyte.”
“Go on, read the rest,” her husband commanded.
“This puts you in touch with the mightier spirits,” Lute read. “You shall become one with us, and your name shall be ‘Arya,’ and you shall – Conqueror 20, Empire 12, Columbia Mountain 18, Midway 140 – and, and that is all. Oh, no! here’s a last flourish, Arya, from Kandor – that must surely be the Mahatma.”
“I’d like to have you explain that theosophy stuff on the basis of the subconscious mind, Chris,” Uncle Robert challenged.
Chris shrugged his shoulders. “No explanation. You must have got a message intended for some one else.”
“Lines were crossed, eh?” Uncle Robert chuckled. “Multiplex spiritual wireless telegraphy, I’d call it.”
“It IS nonsense,” Mrs. Grantly said. “I never knew Planchette to behave so outrageously. There are disturbing influences at work. I felt them from the first. Perhaps it is because you are all making too much fun of it. You are too hilarious.”
“A certain befitting gravity should grace the occasion,” Chris agreed, placing his hand on Planchette. “Let me try. And not one of you must laugh or giggle, or even think ‘laugh’ or ‘giggle.’ And if you dare to snort, even once, Uncle Robert, there is no telling what occult vengeance may be wreaked upon you.”
“I’ll be good,” Uncle Robert rejoined. “But if I really must snort, may I silently slip away?”
Chris nodded. His hand had already begun to work. There had been no preliminary twitchings nor tentative essays at writing. At once his hand had started off, and Planchette was moving swiftly and smoothly across the paper.
“Look at him,” Lute whispered to her aunt. “See how white he is.”
Chris betrayed disturbance at the sound of her voice, and thereafter silence was maintained. Only could be heard the steady scratching of the pencil. Suddenly, as though it had been stung, he jerked his hand away. With a sigh and a yawn he stepped back from the table, then glanced with the curiosity of a newly awakened man at their faces.
“I think I wrote something,” he said.
“I should say you did,” Mrs. Grantly remarked with satisfaction, holding up the sheet of paper and glancing at it.
“Read it aloud,” Uncle Robert said.
“Here it is, then. It begins with ‘beware’ written three times, and in much larger characters than the rest of the writing. BEWARE! BEWARE! BEWARE! Chris Dunbar, I intend to destroy you. I have already made two attempts upon your life, and failed. I shall yet succeed. So sure am I that I shall succeed that I dare to tell you. I do not need to tell you why. In your own heart you know. The wrong you are doing – And here it abruptly ends.”
Mrs. Grantly laid the paper down on the table and looked at Chris, who had already become the centre of all eyes, and who was yawning as from an overpowering drowsiness.
“Quite a sanguinary turn, I should say,” Uncle Robert remarked.
“I have already made two attempts upon your life,” Mrs. Grantly read from the paper, which she was going over a second time.
“On my life?” Chris demanded between yawns. “Why, my life hasn’t been attempted even once. My! I am sleepy!”
“Ah, my boy, you are thinking of flesh-and-blood men,” Uncle Robert laughed. “But this is a spirit. Your life has been attempted by unseen things. Most likely ghostly hands have tried to throttle you in your sleep.”
“Oh, Chris!” Lute cried impulsively. “This afternoon! The hand you said must have seized your rein!”
“But I was joking,” he objected.
“Nevertheless…” Lute left her thought unspoken.
Mrs. Grantly had become keen on the scent. “What was that about this afternoon? Was your life in danger?”
Chris’s drowsiness had disappeared. “I’m becoming interested myself,” he acknowledged. “We haven’t said anything about it. Ban broke his back this afternoon. He threw himself off the bank, and I ran the risk of being caught underneath.”
“I wonder, I wonder,” Mrs. Grantly communed aloud. “There is something in this… It is a warning… Ah! You were hurt yesterday riding Miss Story’s horse! That makes the two attempts!”
She looked triumphantly at them. Planchette had been vindicated.
“Nonsense,” laughed Uncle Robert, but with a slight hint of irritation in his manner. “Such things do not happen these days. This is the twentieth century, my dear madam. The thing, at the very latest, smacks of mediaevalism.”
“I have had such wonderful tests with Planchette,” Mrs. Grantly began, then broke off suddenly to go to the table and place her hand on the board.
“Who are you?” she asked. “What is your name?”
The board immediately began to write. By this time all heads, with the exception of Mr. Barton’s, were bent over the table and following the pencil.
“It’s Dick,” Aunt Mildred cried, a note of the mildly hysterical in her voice.
Her husband straightened up, his face for the first time grave.
“It’s Dick’s signature,” he said. “I’d know his fist in a thousand.”
“‘Dick Curtis,’” Mrs. Grantly read aloud. “Who is Dick Curtis?”
“By Jove, that’s remarkable!” Mr. Barton broke in. “The handwriting in both instances is the same. Clever, I should say, really clever,” he added admiringly.
“Let me see,” Uncle Robert demanded, taking the paper and examining it. “Yes, it is Dick’s handwriting.”
“But who is Dick?” Mrs. Grantly insisted. “Who is this Dick Curtis?”
“Dick Curtis, why, he was Captain Richard Curtis,” Uncle Robert answered.
“He was Lute’s father,” Aunt Mildred supplemented. “Lute took our name. She never saw him. He died when she was a few weeks old. He was my brother.”
“Remarkable, most remarkable.” Mrs. Grantly was revolving the message in her mind. “There were two attempts on Mr. Dunbar’s life. The subconscious mind cannot explain that, for none of us knew of the accident to-day.”
“I knew,” Chris answered, “and it was I that operated Planchette. The explanation is simple.”
“But the handwriting,” interposed Mr. Barton. “What you wrote and what Mrs. Grantly wrote are identical.”
Chris bent over and compared the handwriting.
“Besides,” Mrs. Grantly cried, “Mr. Story recognizes the handwriting.”
She looked at him for verification.
He nodded his head. “Yes, it is Dick’s fist. I’ll swear to that.”
But to Lute had come a visioning. While the rest argued pro and con and the air was filled with phrases, – “psychic phenomena,” “self-hypnotism,” “residuum of unexplained truth,” and “spiritism,” – she was reviving mentally the girlhood pictures she had conjured of this soldier-father she had never seen. She possessed his sword, there were several old-fashioned daguerreotypes, there was much that had been said of him, stories told of him – and all this had constituted the material out of which she had builded him in her childhood fancy.
“There is the possibility of one mind unconsciously suggesting to another mind,” Mrs. Grantly was saying; but through Lute’s mind was trooping her father on his great roan war-horse. Now he was leading his men. She saw him on lonely scouts, or in the midst of the yelling, Indians at Salt Meadows, when of his command he returned with one man in ten. And in the picture she had of him, in the physical semblance she had made of him, was reflected his spiritual nature, reflected by her worshipful artistry in form and feature and expression – his bravery, his quick temper, his impulsive championship, his madness of wrath in a righteous cause, his warm generosity and swift forgiveness, and his chivalry that epitomized codes and ideals primitive as the days of knighthood. And first, last, and always, dominating all, she saw in the face of him the hot passion and quickness of deed that had earned for him the name “Fighting Dick Curtis.”
“Let me put it to the test,” she heard Mrs. Grantly saying. “Let Miss Story try Planchette. There may be a further message.”
“No, no, I beg of you,” Aunt Mildred interposed. “It is too uncanny. It surely is wrong to tamper with the dead. Besides, I am nervous. Or, better, let me go to bed, leaving you to go on with your experiments. That will be the best way, and you can tell me in the morning.” Mingled with the “Good-nights,” were half-hearted protests from Mrs. Grantly, as Aunt Mildred withdrew.
“Robert can return,” she called back, “as soon as he has seen me to my tent.”
“It would be a shame to give it up now,” Mrs. Grantly said. “There is no telling what we are on the verge of. Won’t you try it, Miss Story?”
Lute obeyed, but when she placed her hand on the board she was conscious of a vague and nameless fear at this toying with the supernatural. She was twentieth-century, and the thing in essence, as her uncle had said, was mediaeval. Yet she could not shake off the instinctive fear that arose in her – man’s inheritance from the wild and howling ages when his hairy, apelike prototype was afraid of the dark and personified the elements into things of fear.
But as the mysterious influence seized her hand and sent it meriting across the paper, all the unusual passed out of the situation and she was unaware of more than a feeble curiosity. For she was intent on another visioning – this time of her mother, who was also unremembered in the flesh. Not sharp and vivid like that of her father, but dim and nebulous was the picture she shaped of her mother – a saint’s head in an aureole of sweetness and goodness and meekness, and withal, shot through with a hint of reposeful determination, of will, stubborn and unobtrusive, that in life had expressed itself mainly in resignation.
Lute’s hand had ceased moving, and Mrs. Grantly was already reading the message that had been written.
“It is a different handwriting,” she said. “A woman’s hand. ‘Martha,’ it is signed. Who is Martha?”
Lute was not surprised. “It is my mother,” she said simply. “What does she say?”
She had not been made sleepy, as Chris had; but the keen edge of her vitality had been blunted, and she was experiencing a sweet and pleasing lassitude. And while the message was being read, in her eyes persisted the vision of her mother.
“Dear child,” Mrs. Grantly read, “do not mind him. He was ever quick of speech and rash. Be no niggard with your love. Love cannot hurt you. To deny love is to sin. Obey your heart and you can do no wrong. Obey worldly considerations, obey pride, obey those that prompt you against your heart’s prompting, and you do sin. Do not mind your father. He is angry now, as was his way in the earth-life; but he will come to see the wisdom of my counsel, for this, too, was his way in the earth-life. Love, my child, and love well. – Martha.”
“Let me see it,” Lute cried, seizing the paper and devouring the handwriting with her eyes. She was thrilling with unexpressed love for the mother she had never seen, and this written speech from the grave seemed to give more tangibility to her having ever existed, than did the vision of her.
“This IS remarkable,” Mrs. Grantly was reiterating. “There was never anything like it. Think of it, my dear, both your father and mother here with us tonight.”
Lute shivered. The lassitude was gone, and she was her natural self again, vibrant with the instinctive fear of things unseen. And it was offensive to her mind that, real or illusion, the presence or the memorized existences of her father and mother should be touched by these two persons who were practically strangers – Mrs. Grantly, unhealthy and morbid, and Mr. Barton, stolid and stupid with a grossness both of the flesh and the spirit. And it further seemed a trespass that these strangers should thus enter into the intimacy between her and Chris.
She could hear the steps of her uncle approaching, and the situation flashed upon her, luminous and clear. She hurriedly folded the sheet of paper and thrust it into her bosom.
“Don’t say anything to him about this second message, Mrs. Grantly, please, and Mr. Barton. Nor to Aunt Mildred. It would only cause them irritation and needless anxiety.”
In her mind there was also the desire to protect her lover, for she knew that the strain of his present standing with her aunt and uncle would be added to, unconsciously in their minds, by the weird message of Planchette.
“And please don’t let us have any more Planchette,” Lute continued hastily. “Let us forget all the nonsense that has occurred.”
“‘Nonsense,’ my dear child?” Mrs. Grantly was indignantly protesting when Uncle Robert strode into the circle.
“Hello!” he demanded. “What’s being done?”
“Too late,” Lute answered lightly. “No more stock quotations for you. Planchette is adjourned, and we’re just winding up the discussion of the theory of it. Do you know how late it is?”
* * *
“Well, what did you do last night after we left?”
“Oh, took a stroll,” Chris answered.
Lute’s eyes were quizzical as she asked with a tentativeness that was palpably assumed, “With – a – with Mr. Barton?”
“Why, yes.”
“And a smoke?”
“Yes; and now what’s it all about?”
Lute broke into merry laughter. “Just as I told you that you would do. Am I not a prophet? But I knew before I saw you that my forecast had come true. I have just left Mr. Barton, and I knew he had walked with you last night, for he is vowing by all his fetishes and idols that you are a perfectly splendid young man. I could see it with my eyes shut. The Chris Dunbar glamour has fallen upon him. But I have not finished the catechism by any means. Where have you been all morning?”
“Where I am going to take you this afternoon.”
“You plan well without knowing my wishes.”
“I knew well what your wishes are. It is to see a horse I have found.”
Her voice betrayed her delight, as she cried, “Oh, good!”
“He is a beauty,” Chris said.
But her face had suddenly gone grave, and apprehension brooded in her eyes.
“He’s called Comanche,” Chris went on. “A beauty, a regular beauty, the perfect type of the Californian cow-pony. And his lines – why, what’s the matter?”
“Don’t let us ride any more,” Lute said, “at least for a while. Really, I think I am a tiny bit tired of it, too.”
He was looking at her in astonishment, and she was bravely meeting his eyes.
“I see hearses and flowers for you,” he began, “and a funeral oration; I see the end of the world, and the stars falling out of the sky, and the heavens rolling up as a scroll; I see the living and the dead gathered together for the final judgement, the sheep and the goats, the lambs and the rams and all the rest of it, the white-robed saints, the sound of golden harps, and the lost souls howling as they fall into the Pit – all this I see on the day that you, Lute Story, no longer care to ride a horse. A horse, Lute! a horse!”
“For a while, at least,” she pleaded.
“Ridiculous!” he cried. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you well? – you who are always so abominably and adorably well!”
“No, it’s not that,” she answered. “I know it is ridiculous, Chris, I know it, but the doubt will arise. I cannot help it. You always say I am so sanely rooted to the earth and reality and all that, but – perhaps it’s superstition, I don’t know – but the whole occurrence, the messages of Planchette, the possibility of my father’s hand, I know not how, reaching, out to Ban’s rein and hurling him and you to death, the correspondence between my father’s statement that he has twice attempted your life and the fact that in the last two days your life has twice been endangered by horses – my father was a great horseman – all this, I say, causes the doubt to arise in my mind. What if there be something in it? I am not so sure. Science may be too dogmatic in its denial of the unseen. The forces of the unseen, of the spirit, may well be too subtle, too sublimated, for science to lay hold of, and recognize, and formulate. Don’t you see, Chris, that there is rationality in the very doubt? It may be a very small doubt – oh, so small; but I love you too much to run even that slight risk. Besides, I am a woman, and that should in itself fully account for my predisposition toward superstition.
“Yes, yes, I know, call it unreality. But I’ve heard you paradoxing upon the reality of the unreal – the reality of delusion to the mind that is sick. And so with me, if you will; it is delusion and unreal, but to me, constituted as I am, it is very real – is real as a nightmare is real, in the throes of it, before one awakes.”
“The most logical argument for illogic I have ever heard,” Chris smiled. “It is a good gaming proposition, at any rate. You manage to embrace more chances in your philosophy than do I in mine. It reminds me of Sam – the gardener you had a couple of years ago. I overheard him and Martin arguing in the stable. You know what a bigoted atheist Martin is. Well, Martin had deluged Sam with floods of logic. Sam pondered awhile, and then he said, ‘Foh a fack, Mis’ Martin, you jis’ tawk like a house afire; but you ain’t got de show I has.’ ‘How’s that?’ Martin asked. ‘Well, you see, Mis’ Martin, you has one chance to mah two.’ ‘I don’t see it,’ Martin said. ‘Mis’ Martin, it’s dis way. You has jis’ de chance, lak you say, to become worms foh de fruitification of de cabbage garden. But I’s got de chance to lif’ mah voice to de glory of de Lawd as I go paddin’ dem golden streets – along ‘ith de chance to be jis’ worms along ‘ith you, Mis’ Martin.’”
“You refuse to take me seriously,” Lute said, when she had laughed her appreciation.
“How can I take that Planchette rigmarole seriously?” he asked.
“You don’t explain it – the handwriting of my father, which Uncle Robert recognized – oh, the whole thing, you don’t explain it.”
“I don’t know all the mysteries of mind,” Chris answered. “But I believe such phenomena will all yield to scientific explanation in the not distant future.”
“Just the same, I have a sneaking desire to find out some more from Planchette,” Lute confessed. “The board is still down in the dining room. We could try it now, you and I, and no one would know.”
Chris caught her hand, crying: “Come on! It will be a lark.”
Hand in hand they ran down the path to the tree-pillared room.
“The camp is deserted,” Lute said, as she placed Planchette on the table. “Mrs. Grantly and Aunt Mildred are lying down, and Mr. Barton has gone off with Uncle Robert. There is nobody to disturb us.” She placed her hand on the board. “Now begin.”
For a few minutes nothing happened. Chris started to speak, but she hushed him to silence. The preliminary twitchings had appeared in her hand and arm. Then the pencil began to write. They read the message, word by word, as it was written:
There is wisdom greater than the wisdom of reason. Love proceeds not out of the dry-as-dust way of the mind. Love is of the heart, and is beyond all reason, and logic, and philosophy. Trust your own heart, my daughter. And if your heart bids you have faith in your lover, then laugh at the mind and its cold wisdom, and obey your heart, and have faith in your lover. – Martha.
“But that whole message is the dictate of your own heart,” Chris cried. “Don’t you see, Lute? The thought is your very own, and your subconscious mind has expressed it there on the paper.”
“But there is one thing I don’t see,” she objected.
“And that?”
“Is the handwriting. Look at it. It does not resemble mine at all. It is mincing, it is old-fashioned, it is the old-fashioned feminine of a generation ago.”
“But you don’t mean to tell me that you really believe that this is a message from the dead?” he interrupted.
“I don’t know, Chris,” she wavered. “I am sure I don’t know.”
“It is absurd!” he cried. “These are cobwebs of fancy. When one dies, he is dead. He is dust. He goes to the worms, as Martin says. The dead? I laugh at the dead. They do not exist. They are not. I defy the powers of the grave, the men dead and dust and gone!
“And what have you to say to that?” he challenged, placing his hand on Planchette.
On the instant his hand began to write. Both were startled by the suddenness of it. The message was brief:
BEWARE! BEWARE! BEWARE!
He was distinctly sobered, but he laughed. “It is like a miracle play. Death we have, speaking to us from the grave. But Good Deeds, where art thou? And Kindred? and Joy? and Household Goods? and Friendship? and all the goodly company?”
But Lute did not share his bravado. Her fright showed itself in her face. She laid her trembling hand on his arm.
“Oh, Chris, let us stop. I am sorry we began it. Let us leave the quiet dead to their rest. It is wrong. It must be wrong. I confess I am affected by it. I cannot help it. As my body is trembling, so is my soul. This speech of the grave, this dead man reaching out from the mould of a generation to protect me from you. There is reason in it. There is the living mystery that prevents you from marrying me. Were my father alive, he would protect me from you. Dead, he still strives to protect me. His hands, his ghostly hands, are against your life!”
“Do be calm,” Chris said soothingly. “Listen to me. It is all a lark. We are playing with the subjective forces of our own being, with phenomena which science has not yet explained, that is all. Psychology is so young a science. The subconscious mind has just been discovered, one might say. It is all mystery as yet; the laws of it are yet to be formulated. This is simply unexplained phenomena. But that is no reason that we should immediately account for it by labelling it spiritism. As yet we do not know, that is all. As for Planchette – ”
He abruptly ceased, for at that moment, to enforce his remark, he had placed his hand on Planchette, and at that moment his hand had been seized, as by a paroxysm, and sent dashing, willy-nilly, across the paper, writing as the hand of an angry person would write.
“No, I don’t care for any more of it,” Lute said, when the message was completed. “It is like witnessing a fight between you and my father in the flesh. There is the savor in it of struggle and blows.”
She pointed out a sentence that read: “You cannot escape me nor the just punishment that is yours!”
“Perhaps I visualize too vividly for my own comfort, for I can see his hands at your throat. I know that he is, as you say, dead and dust, but for all that, I can see him as a man that is alive and walks the earth; I see the anger in his face, the anger and the vengeance, and I see it all directed against you.”
She crumpled up the scrawled sheets of paper, and put Planchette away.
“We won’t bother with it any more,” Chris said. “I didn’t think it would affect you so strongly. But it’s all subjective, I’m sure, with possibly a bit of suggestion thrown in – that and nothing more. And the whole strain of our situation has made conditions unusually favorable for striking phenomena.”
“And about our situation,” Lute said, as they went slowly up the path they had run down. “What we are to do, I don’t know. Are we to go on, as we have gone on? What is best? Have you thought of anything?”
He debated for a few steps. “I have thought of telling your uncle and aunt.”
“What you couldn’t tell me?” she asked quickly.
“No,” he answered slowly; “but just as much as I have told you. I have no right to tell them more than I have told you.”
This time it was she that debated. “No, don’t tell them,” she said finally. “They wouldn’t understand. I don’t understand, for that matter, but I have faith in you, and in the nature of things they are not capable of this same implicit faith. You raise up before me a mystery that prevents our marriage, and I believe you; but they could not believe you without doubts arising as to the wrong and ill-nature of the mystery. Besides, it would but make their anxieties greater.”
“I should go away, I know I should go away,” he said, half under his breath. “And I can. I am no weakling. Because I have failed to remain away once, is no reason that I shall fail again.”
She caught her breath with a quick gasp. “It is like a bereavement to hear you speak of going away and remaining away. I should never see you again. It is too terrible. And do not reproach yourself for weakness. It is I who am to blame. It is I who prevented you from remaining away before, I know. I wanted you so. I want you so.
“There is nothing to be done, Chris, nothing to be done but to go on with it and let it work itself out somehow. That is one thing we are sure of: it will work out somehow.”
“But it would be easier if I went away,” he suggested.
“I am happier when you are here.”
“The cruelty of circumstance,” he muttered savagely.
“Go or stay – that will be part of the working out. But I do not want you to go, Chris; you know that. And now no more about it. Talk cannot mend it. Let us never mention it again – unless… unless some time, some wonderful, happy time, you can come to me and say: ‘Lute, all is well with me. The mystery no longer binds me. I am free.’ Until that time let us bury it, along with Planchette and all the rest, and make the most of the little that is given us.
“And now, to show you how prepared I am to make the most of that little, I am even ready to go with you this afternoon to see the horse – though I wish you wouldn’t ride any more… for a few days, anyway, or for a week. What did you say was his name?”
“Comanche,” he answered. “I know you will like him.”
* * *
Chris lay on his back, his head propped by the bare jutting wall of stone, his gaze attentively directed across the canyon to the opposing tree-covered slope. There was a sound of crashing through underbrush, the ringing of steel-shod hoofs on stone, and an occasional and mossy descent of a dislodged boulder that bounded from the hill and fetched up with a final splash in the torrent that rushed over a wild chaos of rocks beneath him. Now and again he caught glimpses, framed in green foliage, of the golden brown of Lute’s corduroy riding-habit and of the bay horse that moved beneath her.
She rode out into an open space where a loose earth-slide denied lodgement to trees and grass. She halted the horse at the brink of the slide and glanced down it with a measuring eye. Forty feet beneath, the slide terminated in a small, firm-surfaced terrace, the banked accumulation of fallen earth and gravel.
“It’s a good test,” she called across the canyon. “I’m going to put him down it.”
The animal gingerly launched himself on the treacherous footing, irregularly losing and gaining his hind feet, keeping his fore legs stiff, and steadily and calmly, without panic or nervousness, extricating the fore feet as fast as they sank too deep into the sliding earth that surged along in a wave before him. When the firm footing at the bottom was reached, he strode out on the little terrace with a quickness and springiness of gait and with glintings of muscular fires that gave the lie to the calm deliberation of his movements on the slide.
“Bravo!” Chris shouted across the canyon, clapping his hands.
“The wisest-footed, clearest-headed horse I ever saw,” Lute called back, as she turned the animal to the side and dropped down a broken slope of rubble and into the trees again.
Chris followed her by the sound of her progress, and by occasional glimpses where the foliage was more open, as she zigzagged down the steep and trailless descent. She emerged below him at the rugged rim of the torrent, dropped the horse down a three-foot wall, and halted to study the crossing.
Four feet out in the stream, a narrow ledge thrust above the surface of the water. Beyond the ledge boiled an angry pool. But to the left, from the ledge, and several feet lower, was a tiny bed of gravel. A giant boulder prevented direct access to the gravel bed. The only way to gain it was by first leaping to the ledge of rock. She studied it carefully, and the tightening of her bridle-arm advertised that she had made up her mind.
