Told in the Hills: A Novel

by Marah Ellis Ryan

The prosaic suggestion seemed an interruption of his own tendencies, which were not prosaic. The girl slipped her fingers gently but decidedly from their resting-place so near his lips, and laid her one hand on his arm.

"Yes, we must be going, or"—and he knew she was smiling, though the darkness hid her—"or it will look as if there are two witched folks in our chapel—our white chapel—to-night. I'm glad we happened here, since the thought is any comfort to you; but I hope it will be many a day before you are brought here, instead of bringing yourself."

He took her hand, and through the white masses turned their faces down the mountain. The mare followed meekly after. The stimulant of bread and whisky—and more, the coming of this man, of whom she was so stubbornly confident—had acted as a tonic to Rachel, and she struggled through bravely, accepting little of help, and had not once asked how he came to be there instead of the ranchmen.

Perhaps it was because of their past association, and that one night together when he had carried her in his arms; but whatever he was to the other people, he had always seemed to her a sort of guardian of the hills and all lost things.

She did not think of his presence there nearly so much as she did of those ideas of his that seemed "uncanny." He, such a bulwark of physical strength, to speak like that of a grave-site! It added one more to the contradictions she had seen in him.

Several things were in her mind to say to him, and not all of them pleasant. She had heard a little of the ideas current as to his Indian sympathies, and the doubt with which he was regarded in camp; and, while she defended him, she many times felt vexed that he cared so little about defending himself. And with the memory of the night before, and feminine comments at the ranch after he had gone, she made an attempt to storm his stubbornness during a short breathing-spell when they rested against the great bole of a tree.

"Genesee, why don't you let the other folks at the ranch, or the camp, know you as I do?" was the first break, at which he laughed shortly.

"They may know me the best of the two."

"But they don't; I know they don't; you know they don't."

"Speak for yourself," he suggested; "I'm not sure either way, and when a man can't bet on himself, it isn't fair to expect his friends to. You've been the only one of them all to pin faith to me, with not a thing to prove that you had reason for it; it's just out-and-out faith, nothing else. What they think doesn't count, nor what I've been; but if ever I get where I can talk to you, you'll know, may be, how much a woman's faith can help a man when he's down. But don't you bother your head over what they think. If I'm any good, they'll know it sometime; if I'm not, you'll know that, too. That's enough said, isn't it? And we'd better break away from here; we're about the foot of the mountain, I reckon."