Lucy Ware studied his face for a moment; then, turning to the Indian stairway, she measured it with a practised eye.
“You go up first,” she suggested, and when he had scaled the slippery height and turned he found her close behind, following carefully in his steps.
“Well, you are a climber!” he cried admiringly. “Here, give me your hand.” And when he had helped her up he still held it––or perhaps she clung to his.
Before them lay a little glade, shut in by painted rocks, upon whose black sides were engraved many curious pictures, the mystic symbols of the Indians; and as they stood gazing at it an eagle with pointed wings wheeled slowly above them, gazing with clear eyes down into the sunlit vale. From her round nest in the crotch of a sycamore a great horned owl plunged out at their approach and glided noiselessly away; and in the stillness the zooning of bees among the rocks came to their ears like distant music. Beneath their feet the grass grew long and matted, 233 shot here and there with the blue and gold of flowers, like the rich meadows of the East; and clustering along the hillsides, great bunches of grama grass waved their plumes proudly, the last remnant of all that world of feed which had clothed the land like a garment before the days of the sheep. For here, at least, there came no nibbling wethers, nor starving cattle; and the mountain sheep which had browsed there in the old days were now hiding on the topmost crags of the Superstitions to escape the rifles of the destroyers. All the world without was laid waste and trampled by hurrying feet, but the garden of Hidden Water was still kept inviolate, a secret shrine consecrated to Nature and Nature’s God.
As she stood in the presence of all its beauty a mist came into Lucy’s eyes and she turned away.
“Oh, Rufus,” she cried, “why don’t you live up here always instead of wasting your life in that awful struggle with the sheep? You could––why, you could do anything up here!”
“Yes,” assented Hardy, “it is a beautiful spot––I often come up here when I am weary with it all––but a man must do a man’s work, you know; and my work is with the sheep. When I first came to Hidden Water I knew nothing of the sheep. I thought the little lambs were pretty; the ewes were mothers, the herders human beings. I tried to be friends with 234 them, to keep the peace and abide by the law; but now that I’ve come to know them I agree with Jeff, who has been fighting them for twenty years. There is something about the smell of sheep which robs men of their humanity; they become greedy and avaricious; the more they make the more they want. Of all the sheepmen that I know there isn’t one who would go around me out of friendship or pity––and I have done favors for them all. But they’re no friends of mine now,” he added ominously. “I have to respect my friends, and I can’t respect a man who is all hog. There’s no pretence on either side now, though––they’re trying to sheep us out and we are trying to fight them off, and if it ever comes to a show-down––well––”
He paused, and his eyes glowed with a strange light.
“You know I haven’t very much to live for, Miss Lucy,” he said earnestly, “but if I had all that God could give me I’d stand by Jeff against the sheep. It’s all right to be a poet or an artist, a lover of truth and beauty, and all that, but if a man won’t stand up for his friends when they’re in trouble he’s a kind of closet philosopher that shrinks from all the realities of life––a poor, puny creature, at the best.”
He stood up very straight as he poured out this torrent of words, gazing at her intently, but with his 235 eyes set, as if he beheld some vision. Yet whether it was of himself and Jeff, fighting their hopeless battle against the sheep, or of his life as it might have been if Kitty had been as gentle with him as this woman by his side, there was no telling. His old habit of reticence fell back upon him as suddenly as it had been cast aside, and he led the way up the little stream in silence. As he walked, the ardor of his passion cooled, and he began to point out things with his eloquent hands––the minnows, wheeling around in the middle of a glassy pool; a striped bullfrog, squatting within the spray of a waterfall; huge combs of honey, hanging from shelving caverns along the cliff where the wild bees had stored their plunder for years. At last, as they stood before a drooping elder whose creamy blossoms swayed beneath the weight of bees, he halted and motioned to a shady seat against the cañon wall.