Wayland could not answer. His eyes had filled. He rode with his hand on the pommel of the saddle. Her words had fallen like whiplashes. It was true. You could not cut out and disconnect with life. He had dreamed of this last ride as a sort of mid-heaven ecstasy; and behold, instead of love's dream, the lifting kick to a limp spine. If only one's friends would oftener give us that lifting kick instead of the softening sympathy! If only they would brace our back bone instead of our wish bone!
Then, she turned to him with a sudden tenderness: "What a beast I am to speak so to you when you've just had the blow of public dismissal on top of five years' continuous grilling," and he saw that the flame in her cheeks, in her eyes, was not anger but a gust of passionate love.
"I can't thank you Eleanor," he said. "This is beyond thanks."
"And your old editor man was so funny about it," she went on. "You know Dick, I think he had really come round to the hotel to have a consolation drink with you; and he almost let it out; but just at the last moment he changed the word and said he'd come 'to shake' with you on being dismissed together."
"When do you leave?" asked Wayland dully.
"I don't leave! I haven't the slightest intention of ever leaving this Valley! Why, Dick, would you have me exchange this splendid big free new life where men and women do things, for a parish existence—working slippers for a curate and talking dress, Dick—dress like the Colonel's wife, and chronicling what Shakespeare calls 'small beer'? I don't intend ever to leave the Valley! Tennyson sung of 'the federation of the world,' Dick! You and I are seeing it in the making! Think of the fun of my staying and seeing it and having a finger in the making, just a little quiet finger that nobody knows about but you and me! United States of the World, Dick; and you are going after the Man Higher Up just as you went after those blackguards into the Desert." She laughed joyously, joyous as a child, swinging out her arms to the sweep of the roaring Forest wind. "Don't look shocked. I'll not stay on alone at the Ranch House for the Rookery to talk about! I'll insist on the foreman marrying an aged house keeper for me; or I'll move over to the Mission School; or—Oh, I'll plan out something; but I am not going to leave the West."
Wayland suddenly wheeled his horse across her way and faced her. "So you've been trouncing the hide off my back for an hour or more to make me believe all this doesn't mean renunciation? They splashed their filthy hogwash on your skirts to foil me; and that was nothing! The fight was to go on just the same. I was not to stop because of any injury that came to you. Then, they assassinated your father; and you know as well as I do he was shot down by that drunken Shanty Town sot in mistake for me; but the fight is to go on just the same. That, too, is nothing if the cause be won. Now, you take a slice of your fortune and slam it into the cause, backing me; and you renounce everything that gives meaning to life for a woman, pretending that renunciation is a privilege—"
"It is," interrupted Eleanor, "if it weaves the thing worth while into the warp and woof of your life so it can never be anything but a part of you! Turn your broncho round here and ride along side of me. Look at our Mountain ahead! It isn't a Cross: it's a Crown! Do you think I'm going to push a crown away from myself for the sake of having a lot of flunkeys in a land I don't know bending themselves in their middle at me all my life?" She laughed joyously, flinging her arms wide to the drive and toss of the rolling wind tunneling up the trail on their backs. She had pulled off her hat and the wind tossed forward her hair in a frame of curls round an enamel miniature that always haunted Wayland. "I love it," she said, "the harder it blows, the harder I want to ride! You remember that night coming down the Ridge in the storm? It was like Love and Life! And smell the air, Dick! It has all the sunbeams of the summer imprisoned, done up in balsam fir and balm of gilead and spices! Exchange this life in the open, here, in the very thick of things doing, for that ancient tapestry plush upholstery blue-book existence?"
"I can't ask you, Eleanor! I haven't a thing on earth to offer but a broken reputation and a lot of plans in the ditch! I ought never to have let you know I loved you! I ought never to have let you care for me! You know what you think and you know what I think of a man who lets a woman give all. He isn't worthy of her. You know you have never been out of my thoughts day or night since I met you, dear! I couldn't have come through that Desert thing alive without you; and I'll hold you in my heart every day of my life till I die." He had taken off his hat and kicked the stirrups free and was riding with loose rein.
When a man tells a woman that he is down and out financially and dare not ask her to marry him, do you think there is an end of it, dear reader? Do you think a Silenus would hesitate and stickle and scruple over a point of honor; though some of us have seen Silenus blunder into a paradise which he promptly transformed into a sty? And do you think the descendant of the Man of the Iron Hand thought anything less of her lover for refusing to accept renunciation as his right? If Wayland could have trusted himself to look at her, he would have seen that she was riding with a whimsical smile. They came to a bend in the upward climbing trail that overlooked the Valley and faced the opal shining peak.