Foxfire (38 page)

“She'll do now,” said Hugh, shoving a steaming cup across the table to Dart. “Be okay in a week or so, unless there's infection.”

“Infection?” repeated Dart.

Hugh shrugged. Amanda had been threatened with gross hemorrhage; it had been necessary to curette and then pack. “Depends upon how sterile the instruments were; my technique was sketchy, near as I remember.”

He spoke with a weary contempt. His head pounded, and he had already finished the remains of the whisky bottle.

“Poor kid,” said Dart, twisting the cup around with his left hand and staring into it. “Poor kid—it's tough.”

Hugh gave a derisive laugh. “Tough nothing. Mighty lucky I'd say, with you bounced right out of your job. At least there won't be
three
of you to live on grasshoppers and acorns.”

Dart raised his head and sent the doctor a long speculative look, as though he were going to speak. But he did not speak.

“Suppose I've got to dress that goddam hand of yours,” Hugh said. “Boy wonder—little Rollo and his daring rescue act, half a hand cheap at the price.”

“It doesn't need dressing,” said Dart. “Go to bed and sleep your drunk off. I'm grateful for what you did for Amanda. Now shut up.”

“What d'you mean it doesn't need dressing?” Hugh stared at Dart's hand. “What the hell is that yellow stuff you've got on there?”

“A poultice made from one of the spurges.”

“My God—Indian stuff!”

“Exactly.” Level and expressionless, Dart's gray eyes rested on Hugh's disgusted face. Hugh's next words died on his lips. He turned his head away. He walked out of the kitchen to his own room and slammed the door.

Dart returned to Amanda. He sat down beside the bed and waited.

When Amanda struggled up at last through layers of consciousness to blinding August sunlight, she saw Dart sitting there. But she gave him no welcome. She twisted her head away from him and stared at the scabrous papered wall beside the bed.

“Andy—” he said softly, he bent over and kissed her on her moist forehead where disheveled hair stuck in sweat-dampened whorls. “I'm sorry,” he said. “Terribly sorry.”

She did not answer. Painfully she moved her bruised body so that her back was towards him. She lay very quiet, staring at the wall.

This repudiation shocked him more than the loss of the baby had. Always she had been the one to cling, to beg, to assault his own self-contained inviolability.

“I didn't mean to fail you—I couldn't know. I had to be alone—you understand that-” He heard his own anxious voice with astonishment. Never complain, never explain—the motto which seemed to him most admirable was not then all inclusive.

“Andy, dear,” he said very low, “don't turn from me like that. I know things are bad for us now—but we'll fight through together, somehow.”

She spoke then, her lips barely moving, so that he had to bend down to hear. “ ‘Together.' When you need nobody but yourself. When you've never done a single thing I wanted. When you've put everything else ahead of me—your profession, your Indian memories, even rocks and desert.”

He sank back on the chair looking at the back of her small, tousled head, the tender childish line of her neck. “That's not quite fair,” he said quietly. “I love you....”

“I doubt it....” She closed her eyes so that she might not see the peeling wall. It seemed to her that she no longer knew what love was, but only hate. This loathsome place which had killed her baby, the evil of foul minds and tongues, and disgrace, sordid and besmirching all it touched. And this man who had failed her.

There was silence in the tiny hospital room. Down the road there came a rumble and the grinding of gears. Dart glanced out of the window to see one of the ore trucks from the mill, carrying the concentrates to Hayden Junction. A miner, Gus Kravenko, was sitting beside the driver and laughing. What's he doing off shift at this hour? Dart thought, I'll have to check——He averted his eyes from the window, and a black curtain descended in his mind.

He turned sharply back to the bed. “Andy—do you still want me to search for the Pueblo Encantado?”

His harsh question did not at first reach her through the heavy mists where she now drifted. Pueblo Encantado? The Enchanted City, the bright flower which had once beckoned so seductively. How strange that Dart should ask that.

“I don't know...” she whispered. “So far away ... I'm tired, nothing's real ... you're not real...” Her voice trailed into an incoherent murmur.

Dart sat on quietly beside the cot. He had in that moment made up his mind, though there had been forerunners of his decision while he wandered over the mountains during the night. The values on which his life had been based were torn from him by injustice. His profession had repudiated him. And had not in fact his Indian heritage repudiated him, too? With Saba's death the last link was broken, as she had wished it. Why, then, cling to a superstitious fear of taboo?

If the lust for gold were in fact a disease as he had always felt, then he would now forcibly inoculate it into his own blood. Gold meant power. It was for this the white men loved it. He would now act as white men did, using as they did for their own ends whatever help they could extort from the Indian. And further than that there was Amanda. If there were truth in her complaint that he had never done a single thing she wanted, it would be true no longer.

He turned all his concentration, and all his practical knowledge upon the problem. He reached in his pocket for pencil and paper, impatient at the awkwardness of his injured hand. The search must wait until it healed, of course. That would make the expedition probably the first week in September. An excellent time for the mountains. His salary would be paid for another month, Tyson had said. This would buy the necessary supplies. Supplies for how many? It was then that he debated the problem of taking Hugh. There would be advantage in having a companion, another gun, another pair of hands. Disadvantages, too, inherent in Hugh's nature. Still, Dart decided finally in the affirmative. They'd have no whisky with them, and Hugh, whatever his peculiarities, deserved a break. It never occurred to him to take Amanda.

 

Amanda recovered rapidly. Hugh's dire predictions as to infection were not realized. In a week she was up and around, heartily tired of Maria's grudging ministrations, but she continued to stay on in the hospital. She found in herself a great reluctance to return home to Dart. She had suffered too much in that cabin, and too, there was fear. Fear of being overwhelmed again by passion. The baby's death and that night of anguish had hardened her. She, too, felt betrayed as Dart did, though for different reasons, and she walled herself against him. She was sick of emotion, sick of love. There was one channel left for all her thoughts. The Pueblo Encantado.

For, as she recovered strength, she also recovered her interest in the search. Thanks to Dart's change of mind, this search was now at last within the bounds of realization. But the character of her interest had changed. Too late—she thought during many night hours on her hospital cot—too late for the soft beautiful things it had promised her once. Too late for augmenting the baby's comfort, too late for softening the harshness of her life with Dart, for bringing to their marriage the grace of luxury.

The gold that must be there—for still she had this certainty that it was there—now meant for her but one thing: escape. By means of her share she would be able to return to that other life. Independent of such men as Tim Merrill, independent of anyone's bounty, she might do as she pleased. Travel around the world with her mother, perhaps a year in Paris. A new life in which all pain and failure would be forgotten.

Hugh had taken Dart's capitulation in astounded silence for it came just as Hugh was preparing for renewed attack. Then as he listened to Dart's carefully thought-out plans, Hugh could not hide his exultation. Dart, as Amanda had earlier, saw the green eyes gleam with a greedy light which revolted him, despite his decision to inoculate himself with the same disease. And he said coldly, “You're quite aware that we may find nothing; and if we do find anything your share will be exactly one third. Also there'll be no boozing on this expedition, and I suggest you get yourself in some kind of training before we start.”

“Yes, my lord,” said Hugh.

Dart looked at him keenly. A foreboding came to him, and he dismissed it, though it prompted him to say, “There'll be danger, Hugh. You know that, don't you? We might not come back. Are you sure you know what you're getting into?”

Hugh's lips tightened and he jerked his head. “You needn't think you can frighten me out of it, Dartland. I'm going.”

So, it appeared, was Amanda. To all of Dart's objections she presented an impervious front.

“The whole search was my idea in the first place, as you very well know, and I most certainly intend to be part of it.”

“But you'll hold us up, Andy. You're not strong enough for a thing like this, and my God, think what a fuss you made over a few bugs at the rancheria!”

“I've changed since then.”

Yes, she had changed, Dart thought. She smiled seldom during those three weeks of preparation, her blue eyes had lost their eager friendliness and avoided his. She seemed to have encased herself in a brittle skin of ice, and he could no longer read her thoughts.

Whether this were the sign of increased emotional maturity, or the sulky withdrawal of a hurt child, he did not know, though he was more acutely conscious of her than he had ever been. She lived on in the hospital, helping a little with the other patients, while he resumed the old familiar bachelor's life in their shack. He made no further attempt to woo her back, after the first morning. He had come to believe that her attitude sprang from contempt. That she shared in the general Lodestone attitude that he had made a pernicious fool of himself, and it was resentment that finally quelled his objections to including Amanda on the expedition.

“Okay,” he said angrily. “Have it your own way, but you'll be treated like another man. No quarter, no coddling. You apparently don't wish me to consider you my wife, any more, so you won't be.”

“I know,” she said. She looked at his lean tanned face, the stubborn black hair, the bandaged hand, and she turned away. “All I want is my share of the gold, then we can go our separate ways.” Her voice wavered but she added at once firmly, “That's what we both seem to want, isn't it?”

“So it seems,” answered Dart with equal coldness. They did not look at each other.

The three of them had drawn up an agreement in triplicate, apportioning whatever they might find into thirds. They had each signed it and retained a copy. Hugh put his in a locked desk drawer with Viola's photograph. Amanda put hers in the fitted dressing case which she had moved to the hospital and kept under her cot. Dart carried his out to the Cunningham mansion and put it in his old trunk, when he went to retrieve Saba's basket and the original Pueblo Encantado data.

He did not see Calise on this trip nor did he wish to. He went up the back staircase into the servant quarters without disturbing her.

She saw him, however, as he walked back down the trail, and though he held himself as straight as ever, and his effortless walk was as rapid, she saw an indefinable change, a diminishing of the clear honesty she had always known in him. Again, and more imperiously, she received an impression of what she must do, and this time she did not quite deny it.
“Bientôt, bientôt,”
she murmured,
“quand j'aurais plus de force
—” And she knelt down to pray.

So isolated were the Dartlands and Hugh from the life of Lodestone now that they had no difficulty in hiding their plans. Hugh, who alone still had contact with the mine, telephoned Mr. Tyson one day and abruptly announced that he was taking a vacation the beginning of September. Tyson protested that that was most inconsiderate at short notice, to which Hugh replied that he didn't give a damn, that he didn't expect to practice much longer in this rat hole in any case. They might do what they liked about it.

Tyson sighed. “Well—I suppose we can use a Globe doctor until you get back—By the way, Slater, how's Mrs. Dartland? I heard she'd been sick.”

“She had a miscarriage. She's okay now.”

“Too bad. Too bad. That whole Dartland business was most unfortunate—it bothers me—I used to be able to trust my judgment about men——”

“Well, you can stop bothering,” cut in Hugh. “The Dartlands are pulling out of here next week.”

So people knew that they were leaving, but nobody came near them except Tessie and Tom Rubrick.

Tom got no satisfaction from his farewell interview with Dart, who answered the shift boss's clumsy sympathy in monosyllables.

“Did ye get another job then?” inquired Tom anxiously. “Did Mr. Tyson write a decent letter o' recommendation for ye?”

“No,” said Dart.

“But I 'eard 'im fighting it out with Bull'ead, 'e said 'e was going to. A mort o' the men're for ye, Dart, they think ye 'ad a raw deal, no matter wot ye did.”

“Thanks,” said Dart.

“I wish ye was back m'self, I do. Tiger don't do so good bossing the 'ole show, gets flustered-like, and the men're grumbling a good bit. We're running into 'eavy ground on the thousand, too, let alone 'alf me Cousin Jacks won't work there on account o' Craddock dying there.”

Dart stood up and walked to the door. “Good-bye, Tom. Thanks for coming.”

From her visits to Amanda Tessie got no satisfaction either. The girl seemed glad to see her, her eyes filled with tears when Tessie tried to comfort her about the baby. “It was naught but the shock o' that dreadful night at the mine, dear—you'll likely never have trouble again. Start another one soon, that's the best way to forget—” but Amanda answered all sympathetic questions with silence.