"Lock the house before it's defiled."
"And then, dear?"
"When she's gone, I'll come to the cave, too."
Kate took David, letting me kiss him, letting me kiss her, even knowing everything, let me take her into my arms. She was very white, very quiet. She even remembered to take her servant, and the two Chinamen, making some excuse to get them away. I locked the house and the old cabin. Then I made the long call to Ephrata, and went to the Apex Rock, calling until he answered from among the dog-tooth violets. He climbed straight up the steep rocks, whimpering, because I'd scarcely called him once in fourteen months. He rubbed against me, forgetting he hefted eleven hundred pounds, and I had to scratch his neck before we started up to the house, then to the left along the wagon track just past Cathedral Grove.
The wagon was swinging round the end of the grove at a canter, and when I let out a yell for the last warning, the woman only snatched at the driver's whip to flog the team faster. Then I turned loose my bear, he rearing up nine feet or so to inspect that outfit.
The horses shied into the air, then off at a gallop straight for the edge of the cliffs. The woman was shot out as the wagon overturned, the driver caught for a moment while his wagon went to match-wood. He lay in the wreckage stunned, but the horses went blind crazy, taking that twelve hundred feet leap into the Fraser Rapids. So I had aimed, and as I'd promised my lady to do no murder, I kept my bear beside me.
The driver was awake and staggering to his feet. He would have talked, only my bear was with me, hard to hold by the roach hair. The man needed no telling, and after he escaped from my ranch, I did not see him there in the years which followed.
The woman, standing in the wreckage of her trunks, wanted to talk. We herded her, Eph and I, to the foot of the pack-trail, which leads up by steep jags to the rim-rock of the upper cliffs, then on through the black pines to Hundred Mile. We herded her up the pack-trail, my bear and I, and pointed her on her way, alone, afoot. If she lived through that eighty miles, she would remember the way, the way which is barred.
* * * * * *
Kate's Narrative