As before said, it was not the accidental juncture of distance and fatigue that had caused Bull to stop for the last rest on the plateau. From its edge the trail fell steeply down a watercourse between high walls of shale into a rocky pocket, then climbed the opposite bank to a lesser eminence. Huge boulders occurred all over the level. Launched down the watercourse as through the bore of a giant stone cannon, they could be depended upon to do terrible execution upon a file of mounting men.
After Lee and Gordon disappeared, using his rifle barrel for a lever, Bull pried loose and rolled to the plateau edge over a dozen of the largest. Before them he built an ambush of sage that would look, from below, like ordinary chaparral. Whereafter, he sat down on a boulder and looked out over the Pass, the rugged outlines of which were beginning to form in the pale dawn.
Than this hour, when day stirs in the womb of night, there is none so fraught with a sense of imminence; presage of things to come, calamity or joy, accomplishments and failure, disaster, triumph, defeat. For who shall say what the day may bring forth? In far-off times the first pallid lights had often revealed these very mountains shaken upon their great bases; valleys suddenly buried under the green inundations of rushing seas; cyclonic disturbances that have registered so strongly in the racial consciousness of man that he may never watch without awe the emergence of the new day from the baptism of dawn. As Bull sat, like a man of the stone age in wait for a great cave bear, the feeling was strong upon him.
In such moments a man’s whole life is apt to be thrown, like a cinema drama, on the curtains of his mind. But Bull’s reflections began with his new birth at Los Arboles. Vividly there rose before him the golden pastures rolling off and away to the mountains; in the foreground, coming at full gallop down the opposite slope, fair hair floating on the wind, he saw Lee following her father in chase of the Colorados.
Next flashed up the sick-room, where she sat for long hours in mute white fear on the opposite side of Carleton’s death-bed. He saw her, after the funeral, coming toward him through the patio gateway, swaying like a lily in a breeze, the whiter by contrast with Phyllis Lovell’s rich, dark beauty.
Followed happier pictures. A slight smile marked a memory of her diligence in his own reconstruction; her delight when her pains yielded some small return in the way of an amended fault, correction remembered. All of it, from the coming of Gordon, the pains and perplexities of match-making, to the triumphal conclusion, moved slowly through his thought; then, from the end, his mind returned and lingered with one scene.
Once again she was giving him her usual critical survey the morning he started for Torreon. While he stood smiling with embarrassed pleasure her eyes rose from the tie she was straightening to his. As she read their sympathy and intelligence, the hands flew up around his neck, her face buried itself in his breast.
Now he was looking down on Arboles from the ridge, her last words still in his ears, the thrill of her soft, cool arms still at his neck. Then, as he turned and rode northward toward the Mills rancho, memory leaped the gap in time and distance—he was sitting in the widow’s kitchen, Betty curled up on his knee, watching the compounding of Lee’s birthday cake.
From that through the stages of their acquaintance down to the last tender scene the night before he left for Torreon, Memory spread her pictures. Again he was looking down on the house, almost hidden in the bougainvillea whose crimson blossoms splashed the golden walls. Now he was inside, living again that one perfect evening, Betty snuggled warm in his arms, her mother sewing while the flooding sunset faded into dusk. She was speaking, holding out hope for his regeneration. As always in that vision, her hand came fluttering like a small white bird through the dusk. Dark flashed into day. He was listening to the last words that his ears would ever take from her lips; the words that confirmed her ownership.
“I shall expect you soon?”