The pioneer

by Geraldine Bonner

During the rest of the morning she remained in her room trying to sort her clothes and pack her bag. Her mind was in a state of stupefied confusion. She could find nothing, could not remember where anything had been placed. At times a sensation of nausea and feebleness swept over her, and she was forced to stop in the work she was doing, and sit down. When at midday the servant summoned her to lunch, the gathered possessions and souvenirs of years were scattered over the furniture and about the floor.

In the afternoon she wrote the letter to the Colonel. She wrote rapidly, not letting herself pause to think, the pen flying over the paper. When it was finished, she sealed it without reading it over.

The rest of the day passed with lightning swiftness. As she roamed from room to room, or sat motionless with drawn brows and rigidly clasped hands, the chiming of the hours from clocks in various parts of the house struck loud on her listening ear. The clear, ringing notes of three seemed hardly to have sounded when four chimed softly. The hours were rushing by. With their headlong flight her misery increased. There was now no sitting quiet, spellbound in waiting immobility. She moved restlessly from window to window looking out on the desolation that hemmed her in. It had no pity for her. Her little passion, a bubble on the whirlpool of the mining town, was of that world of ephemera that the desert passed over and forgot.

At sunset the landscape flushed into magical beauty and then twilight came, and suddenly, on its heels, darkness. The night was a crystalline, deep blue, the stars singularly large and lustrous. As she put on her hat and jacket she felt that her mouth was dry, and if called upon to speak she would have had difficulty in articulating. Over her face she draped a thin, dark veil sufficient at this hour to obscure her features entirely. On the way out she called the Chinaman and gave him the letter for the Colonel, whom she did not expect back before Wednesday.

She made her way to the end of the town through the upper residence streets. They were quite dark at this hour and she slipped by, a slim shadowy shape, touched now and then into momentary distinctness by the gleam of a street lamp. Outside the clustering lights of the city, she turned downward toward where the Geiger grade, looping over the shoulder of the mountain, enters the town. Once on the road itself she walked with breathless speed, the beating of her heart loud in her own ears. She passed the last of the hoisting works, the sentinel of the great line that was stirring the world, and saw the road stretch gray and bare before her.

Her light footfall made no sound in the dust. Straining to penetrate the darkness with a forward gaze she advanced, less rapidly. The dim form of the deserted cabin loomed up, and then, just beyond it, gradually taking shape out of the surrounding blackness, a buggy with a muffled figure in the seat.

For a moment she stopped, feeling faint, her clearness of reason and vision becoming blurred. But in an instant the weakness passed and she walked on hesitatingly and softly, staring at the indistinct figure and drawn irresistibly forward. As she approached, she saw that the man sat motionless, his back toward her. She was close to the buggy when the soft padding of her footsteps in the dust caught his ear. He turned with a start, revealing by the faint starlight that section of a coarse, strange face to be seen between the peak of a woolen cap and the edge of an upturned coat collar.

“Pardon, lady,” he said in a hoarse voice, “Mr. Barclay hasn’t come yet.”

June came to an abrupt halt by the side of the carriage. She stood without movement or sound, paralyzed by the unexpectedness of the unknown voice and face. For the first dazed moment following on the shock there was a complete suspension of all her faculties.

There had been much surreptitious speculation in the livery stable as to whom Jerry Barclay was driving into Reno. The man now in the buggy had been sure it was a woman. Seeing his suspicions verified he tried to distinguish her features through the darkness and the veil she wore. He leaned forward, eying her keenly, but making out nothing beyond a slender shape, the face concealed by a film of gauze.