As the evening fell Gaspard grew rapidly weaker, the doctor relieving as best he could his pain and distress throughout the dreary hours of the night. Then at the breaking of the day his spirit fared forth to meet the dawn.
All through the summer the valley looked on with amazed approval and sympathy at Paul as with a man’s wisdom and courage he ran the Pine Croft ranch. Looked on, and more. More than once the neighbours gathered in an old-fashioned bee and helped the boy with the crops, the fencing, the branding of stock and with other ranch operations before which Paul, with his lack of experience and labour, would have been quite helpless. Under the burden of responsibility and of incessant work the boy developed a gravity of demeanour and a strength of purpose far beyond his years. With all childish games and sports he had done. Sleeman, who had disappeared from the valley upon the day of the tragedy, he never saw, but never forgot. Asa he ignored completely and avoided, but Adelina he frequently met in his lonely rides round the range. Her he found it impossible to ignore. She would not permit him to do so, and indeed, after the first shock which the sight of her gave him, Paul came to tolerate, then to enjoy, her company on those lonely rides of his. She was a good comrade, a capable assistant in emergencies and with an amazing endowment of tact and delicacy of feeling.
At the “big white house” Paul was a welcome and frequent visitor, but not upon the old footing. His lessons were done with. He had no time for them, but more than that he had assumed, with his responsibility as a man, a man’s attitude toward life and a man’s manners. For some weeks Peg openly resented this new rôle of Paul’s, ridiculing it as a thing “put on,” a mere pose. But the boy’s gravity and gentleness, his preoccupation in his work and his constant association with her father and the men effectually shut Peg out from his life. She found before the summer was over that the fourteen-year-old boy had in a single day become a man, and a man to whom she had become a mere child. She had lost a playmate and had not yet acquired a friend.
But if she had lost one playmate she gained another, in the little blind Tanna, who in great measure helped her to endure her loss and to overcome her resentment. Through the long summer days Peg found in the little girl a new and altogether delightful interest. After much persuasion on Peg’s part and after approval by Paul, the little girl was allowed by her mother to mount old Tubby’s back behind old Tubby’s mistress and to take many a sober jaunt hither and thither along the quiet trails. Those were golden days for Peg, when Paul could make it chime with his work to join them in their jaunts or to meet them at a convenient rendezvous and share their lunch. With Paul, his very shadow everywhere, went Peter, a silent, dour, devoted henchman, rejoicing to fetch and carry for his chief.
The mother, thus left much alone with her grief, withdrew more and more from the life of the household. Like a dark shadow she glided about the house, rarely speaking except to her little blind child, and spending most of her days in the woods near to the enclosed plot on the pine-shadowed hillside where was the new-made grave beside the two others, which held all that had made life for her vivid with love and gladness. Except when spoken to by Paul her face was masked by the passionless colour of the dead. Paul alone could kindle a flicker of light in her sombre eyes and set tremulous life waves rippling over her face. Often she would be found by Paul, wearing her Indian dress and roaming the woods, ostensibly seeking for roots and herbs for medicinal use. It seemed as if her loneliness and grief were driving her away from the newer environment of the white men’s civilisation and back to the ancient racial and primeval precincts of her own people.
In late September the word went through the valley that Sleeman had returned and had shut himself up in his ranch, holding communication with none but his own people. That word produced a strange effect upon the Indian woman. The casual mention of Sleeman’s name seemed to galvanise into vivid life her dead face. A new gleam appeared in the depths of her sombre eyes and burned there with a steady glow. Her wanderings began to take her to the hills behind the Sleeman ranch. One afternoon, wearied with a long day in the saddle after straying cattle, Paul, allowing his pinto to graze at will, lay down to rest and fell asleep in a thicket. He was startled into wakefulness by the sense of some living thing near him, which becomes second nature with those bred in the wilds. Creeping stealthily toward the edge of the thicket which sheltered him he saw erect upon an out-jutting rock a woman’s figure with wind blown tresses, with one hand outstretched toward the Sleeman ranch and in her outstretched hand a long hunting knife. It was the Indian woman Onawata. In the rhythmic cadence of a wailing chant her voice rose and fell, thrilling with suppressed and passionate emotion. The boy shuddered as he listened, but deemed it wisdom to remain hidden from her view. As he lay watching the chanting ceased, the woman fell upon her knees, lifted her face toward the skies, her lips moving as if in prayer, raised high above her head her knife, pressed the naked blade to her lips, made the sign of the cross, bowed her head a few moments as if again in prayer, then rose to her feet and wearily took her way. A weird mingling it was of primal human emotions, expressing themselves in a ritual in which Christian and pagan symbolism found a place. Shocked, startled, terrified, the boy waited a sufficient time to allow her to remove from the vicinity, then mounting his pinto rode hard to the “big white house,” where he laid before the Colonel the thing he had seen and heard.
“What does it mean, Paul?” inquired the Colonel when the boy had finished his tale.
“Why, Uncle Colonel, it means only one thing, the thing I would mean if—if—God would let me. But He won’t let me. Besides,” he added as if to himself, “I promised Daddy.”
“You are right, boy. It is not given into our hands to take vengeance. God will——”