Heart's Kindred

“What of it?” said he. “Look at the lots of ’em there are!”

She said nothing.

“Who’d miss it?” he argued. “Who wants it? You always kill things.”

“I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “I don’t know why. But it don’t seem right.”

Women were like that, he reflected. They hated blood. But – a bird! It was unfathomable.

High noon found them on the summit of Whiteface, looking down upon the crouching shoulders of the east foothills. Where they stood, the sun beat hotly, and the bare rocks and the coarse growth lay in intense brooding quiet. Everything there was flat, as if the long pressure of the sun had told, like weight.

Electrically, the Inger’s spirits returned to him. Here on the height, kindling fire, boiling water, spreading food, were no such business as these had been to him down on his little shelf. Here everything had a way of being that was hitherto unknown to him. When their table was spread in the shade of a pine, and the wood duck roasted slowly over the fire on a spit which he had fashioned, he stood up and surveyed their work, and his look fell on the girl, sitting relaxed, with loosely fallen hands, the sun striking her hair to brightness.

For a moment he let himself watch her, and catching his look, she smiled, as she had smiled when his eyes had met hers as he woke.

“Yi – eh! Yi – eh! Yi – e – h!” he suddenly shouted with the strength of his lungs.

The echo rolled back to them like a taunt.

She sprang up.

“If they’re huntin’ us – ” she said, trembling, “oh, they’ll hear that!”

He looked at her in horror. Fool! Would he never have done with his blundering…

“Oh, my God, I forgot,” he exclaimed, contritely, and dropped to the ground. “I don’t get rested between kicking myself for being a damn fool,” he said.

While they ate, he was quiet. There was no way to let her know how much he hated himself, and his thought was occupied with nothing else. And it was as if she divined, for she became very gentle.

“I guess maybe you wanted to do somethin’ else to-day,” she said.

He shook his head.

“It’s awful, me makin’ you do this,” she added. “Don’t you think I don’t know that.”

“I ain’t doin’ anything – what am I doin’?” he burst out.

She looked at him gravely.

“You’re takin’ me out of a good sight worse’n death,” she answered. “And don’t you think I’ll ever forget it.”

There was about her manner of saying this something infinitely alluring. She fell in a sudden breathlessness, and her voice had a tremor which seemed to lie in the very words themselves. And with this, and with what she said, the Inger found himself suddenly utterly unable to deal.

“Oh, g’on,” he said, feebly.

She said no more, and for a moment he was wretched again lest he had offended her. But the gentleness and softness of her manner reassured him. Moreover, he became conscious that of the cheese and bread she was leaving the greater part for him, and pretending to have finished.

After their lunch, a consuming content fell upon the man, and he lay stretched on his back, under the pine, staring upward, thinking of nothing. For a little she moved about, and then she came and sat beside him, saying nothing. More than he knew, this power of hers for silence conquered him. When a man knows how to live alone, he may or may not understand words, but he always understands silence.

Presently he looked over at her, and seeing that her eyes were heavy, he sat erect, with the memory of her night’s vigil.

“Could you go to sleep?” he demanded.

She nodded. “I could,” she said. “I guess there ain’t the time,” she added.

“Yes, there is,” he said eagerly. “We can get down from here in no time. You rest yourself.”

She regarded him for a moment. Then, without a word, she drew her blanket toward her, rested her head upon it, and relaxed like a child. In a moment she lay sleeping.

Then he looked at her. All that day he had averted his eyes, in his shame. But now that there could be in her look no rebuke, no reminiscence of the night, he looked at her as freely as he had looked that day on the desert, when she had sat his horse before him. Only then his look had been a flame, and now it was as if the sight of her was to him a healing power. For she still trusted him. She was lying here asleep, and she had set him to watch. Immeasurably, she was giving him back his self-respect, restoring to him his own place in her eyes and in his own. He had no knowledge that this bore so strong a part in the creeping sweetness which possessed him. He only knew that he was happy, that he dreaded the time when she should awaken almost as much as he longed for it; and he hoped with childish intensity that the afternoon would never end.

That was an hour such as the man had never known. Women had followed him, tempted him, run from him, but never in his life had a woman either begged his help, as one being of another, or walked with him, comradely. And with women he had always moved as lord and dispenser, avoiding them, taking them for granted, occasionally pursuing them, but always as chief actor. Now, suddenly, he had become in his own sight, infinitely the lesser of the two; and even that grateful return of belief in himself was a thing which she was, so gently, bestowing. He sat, sunk in the newness of what had come upon him, making no effort to understand, and looking neither forward nor back. He was beset alike by the knowledge that she trusted him, and by the soft movement of her breathing and by the flushed ripeness of her, and by the fact that, at any second, she might waken and then smile upon him.

When, toward four o’clock, she did waken, her smile, that was as instant as at a child’s awakening, was straightway darkened by a cloud of fear.

“It’s late,” she said. “The train – can we get it now?”

“Can we get it now…” The Inger paused to taste this before he answered.

“Easy,” he said. “You mean the eight: fifteen for Barstow?”

“Yes,” she said. “The eight: fifteen.” She had not meant for Barstow, but that, as the farthest eastern destination of those who usually took train from Inch, was the limit of the Inger’s imagining.

“Easy,” he repeated.

The way of descent, in the slanting light, was incredibly lovely. The time had assumed another air. With that low sun, everything was thrown sharply against the sky, like a pattern on a background. Something of the magic of the Northern days lay upon that Southern land.

Once, feeling suddenly articulate, the Inger looked over his shoulder at her, as she followed.

“It’s hell, ain’t it?” he said admiringly.

She understood this as the extreme of expression, anywhere applied.

“Ain’t it?” she agreed fervently.

It was not yet seven o’clock when they emerged from the last cañon, and tramped across the sage brush toward the town. There the lights were slowly shining out, and all the tawdry, squalid play of the night was beginning, as night after night it begins in the ugly settlements where men herd on the Great Desert under solemn skies. As the first sound of rattling music came to the man and the woman, she turned to him.

“Is big towns like little ones, do you know?” she asked.

He reflected, remembered San Francisco, and replied:

“Yes,” he said, “I s’pose so, mostly. But the parts where the folks try to be nice,” he added, vindictively, “are worse’n this and Inch.”

“Why?” she demanded, in surprise.

“Because,” he said, “they get too nice. They’re slush nice,” he explained it.

She mulled this.