Now it was hideously easy to carry him. It seemed to Dean Wolcott as if he must walk on without pausing, past Golindas’, through the doctor’s camp, to Monterey, to San Francisco, bearing the small, broken body in his arms until he found the Scout Master, and said—“See, I have brought him back to you, Elmer Bunty, the boy you sent me, the one I ordered especially—to whom I could boast and brag of my woodcraft and wisdom. I said I would make a man of him. You see what I have made of him.”
It was almost grotesque to find how near they had been to White Pines all along, and it was another world, clean and green and fresh. He laid the Scout down on a bed of bending brakes and went methodically to look after the horses.
Snort was gone. The Mabel horse greeted him thankfully, but his own mount, the wild red roan who had betrayed him at Dos Pozos, had deserted him now in his dark hour.
He offered a cracker to Rusty but the dog refused it in bitter preoccupation. The lone lion was calling his mate quite close to them now, but the Airedale paid no heed.
Dean Wolcott sat down beside the body of his Scout, his head bare, his heart heavy, his face hidden in his hands. The sound of the mourning beast’s lament fitted blackly into his mood. The world was a bleak place of loss. The quaint, engaging little creature who had established himself so snugly in his heart was dead; Snort was gone; he had only imagined that Ginger yielded to his arms that night, that far-away night of laughing and music at the Lodge. Ginger would go back to her cattle ranch and marry ’Rome Ojeda: she had spent a whole winter in the east and never made him a sign. It would not be necessary, now that he had seen her, and demonstrated his brilliant ability to sit a horse, to go to Dos Pozos. He would telegraph the regular Ranger to come back and release him: then he would return to Boston, to the Wolcott connection, to cool, correct, comfortable people who lived upstairs in their minds—who did not harry body and heart like this.
And then his aching and rebellious grief for his good Scout came over him and shook him like a harsh wind, and he gave way to it unashamed, thankful for solitude.
But Rusty, the Airedale, rose at the strange sound and left his deathwatch to come padding softly over to him. He pressed hard against him with his shabby little body; he put his forefeet on the young man’s knees and reached upward, lapping the cold, clenched hands with his warm tongue.
CHAPTER XVIII
GINGER came to him in the morning, riding over the crest of the hill with the sunrise. It was as if she had found the new day, somewhere in the black misery of the night, and given it to him.
He was saddling Mabel and he stopped and stared at her, bewildered, unbelieving.