He literally fled from her, down the hallway, with the open doorways sending their lurid light and hissing noise across his passage. As he reached the dining-room he heard her bang the door and with aggressive noise turn the key in the lock and shoot the bolt. Even at that moment the lack of necessity for such a precaution caused a bitter smile to move his lips.
Her wrath at last loosened, her control was instantly
swept away Page [41]
He entered the dining-room and sat down by the table, his head on his hands. It was very quiet; no noise came from the street outside, sinking into the deep restfulness of midnight, and from within there was only the tearing sound of the flaring gases and an occasional cool dropping from the filter in the pantry. He sat thus for some hours, trying to think what he should do. He found it impossible to come to any definite conclusion for the future; all he could decide upon now was the necessity of leaving his wife, getting a respite from her, withdrawing himself from the sight of her. He had never loved her, but to-night the pity and responsibility he had felt seemed to be torn from his life as a morning wind tears a cobweb from the grass.
The dawn was whitening the window-panes when he finally got pen and paper and wrote a few lines. These, without prefix or signature, stated that he would leave the city for a short time and not to make any effort to find where he had gone or communicate with him. He wrote her name on the folded paper and placed it in front of the clock. Then he stole into his bedroom—they had occupied separate rooms for over six months—and packed a valise with his oldest and roughest clothes. After this he waited in the dining-room till the light was bright and the traffic of the day loud on the pavement, before he crept down the long stairway and went out into the crystal freshness of the morning.
CHAPTER IV
OUT OF NIGHT AND STORM
When Rose Cannon woke on the morning after her arrival at Antelope, a memory of the snowflakes of the evening before made her jump out of bed and patter barefooted to the window. It seemed to her it would be “lots of fun” to be snowed up at Antelope, and when she saw only a thin covering of white on the hotel garden and the diminishing perspective of roofs, she drew her mouth into a grimace of disappointment.
With hunched-up shoulders, her hands tucked under her arms, she stood looking out, her breath blurring the pane in a dissolving film of smoke. It was a cold little world. Below her the garden—the summer pride of Perley’s Hotel—lay a sere, withered waste, its shrubs stiff in the grip of the cold. The powdering of snow on its frost-bitten leaves and grizzled grass added to its air of bleakness. Beyond rose the shingled roofs of Antelope’s main street. From their white-coated slopes black stovepipes sent aloft spirals of smoke, a thinner, fainter gray than the air into which they ascended. The sky lowered, low-hanging and full of menace. The snowflakes that now and then idly circled down were dark against its stormy pallor. Rose, standing gazing up, wondered if her father would go on to Greenhide, the new camp twenty miles from Antelope, where an important strike had recently been made.
Half an hour later when they met at breakfast he told her he would not leave for Greenhide that morning. Perley had warned him not to attempt it, and he for his part knew the country well enough to realize that it would be foolhardy to start under such a threatening sky. It would be all right to stop over at Antelope till the weather made up its mind what it meant to do. It might not be fun for her, but then he had warned her before they left San Francisco that she would have to put up with rough accommodations and unaccustomed discomforts.
Rose laughed. Her father did not understand that the roughness and novelty of it all was what she enjoyed. He was already a man of means when she was born, and she had known nothing of the hardships and privations through which he and her mother had struggled up to fortune. Rocky Bar the night before and Antelope this morning were her first glimpses of the mining region over which the pioneers had swarmed in ’49, Bill Cannon, only a lad in his teens, among them.