Douglas Durkin - The Heart of Cherry McBain (Douglas Durkin) (Literary Thoughts Edition)

The girl was the first to speak.

"You must have been riding hard," she said. "I thought I'd never catch up with you."

"Catch up?" King thought to himself, and was at a loss to understand.

"Come on," she said quickly, and before he was able to reply, "I'm going to ride a little way with you."

She drew her rein back, pulled her horse about, touched him lightly on the flank with her quirt, and was off at an easy canter along the trail, leaving King to follow or not as he pleased. With a slow smile of recognition of the somewhat anomalous position he was in, he turned into the trail and rode after her.

When he came up with her he drew his horse in a little and together they rode for the next half hour through little valleys and over gently rounding hills dimly outlined in the failing twilight.

Here and there a rabbit started up in the trail before them and ran its foolish frightened race ahead of them until the dog came and put it to cover in the low underbrush beside the roadway. Occasionally a partridge or a prairie chicken got up suddenly from its dust bath in the middle of the trail and hurried off with much clucking and beating of the wings. Once a coyote stood with pricked ears before them on the trail until the sight of Sal sent him off with a lazy, half defiant lope to a little knoll, where he perched himself and waited while they rode past. They caught the delicate aroma of dew on the grass, and brushed a warm fragrance from the foliage as they swept close to where the trees leaned a little over the trail. Frequently they splashed through little hurrying streams where the cold water ran only a few inches deep, or rode through low meadows where the mist lay like white shrouds and settled lightly above the long grass that carpeted the hollows. And behind them the sky had deepened to a blood-red hue with long ribbons of pale gold stretching along the horizon already far to the north of where the sun had gone down.

They had rounded the brow of a hill and had come out of cover to a point in the trail where it afforded them a wide outlook across a meadowy valley. The girl brought her horse to a stand and King reined in beside her.

"I like this," she said, waving her hand toward the valley.

King looked at her, but she had not so much as turned her head towards him. For the first time he was able to look at her without embarrassment. He was no artist to analyze the fine points of symmetry in face and figure. But he was a man – and the man in him told him that she was beautiful. What he liked best about her was the strength of her beauty. He knew at a glance that she was not of the delicate, clinging kind that practise a languid air and never forget their sex. Here was a girl whose heart-beat was strong with the confidence and the reliance she had learned to place in herself – and every line of her face, every movement of her body, bore evidence to the fact. And yet, as she sat and looked out over the valley half hidden under the mists, there was a soft warmth in her dark eyes that made her presence luminous. For King the girl who sat before him embodied in tangible form, it seemed, all he had ever aspired to, all he had ever even vaguely dreamed of.

Her voice, when she spoke, was not the voice of reproach that she had used earlier in the afternoon. Now it was soft, quiet, even deep.

"I like it, too," he said, in response to her simple expression of admiration for what lay before them. "But you haven't come all this way for that" – he waved his hand gently in the direction of the valley.

She turned to him quickly. "No – I have seen it before – though I don't remember when it was ever so beautiful."

"Nor I," thought King, though he kept his thoughts to himself.

"What is your name?" she asked suddenly and with a directness that brought a smile to King's face.

He told her.

"And I am Cherry McBain – my father is Keith McBain – 'Old Silent,' the men call him," she replied. "I came to tell you that I need your help – not for me – for my father."

King looked at her strangely. "But a man," he said slowly, "a man who takes a dare – "

"Don't be silly!" she broke in suddenly. "I only half believed that."

"Don't you think that's bad enough?" replied King.

"Can you fight?" asked the girl abruptly, disregarding his reply.

The smile that had rested upon King's face during the conversation vanished all at once before the old grave look that was habitual with him. He did not answer at once – he turned the question over and over again in his mind.

"Cherry McBain," he said at last, "I'm not used to women – and women's ways." His eyes were looking off across the valley when he spoke, and his voice was like that of a man speaking to himself. "I've known some women – a few – but no woman ever asked me if I could fight – only once – but she was a foolish woman – she wasn't good. No good woman ever asked me that before."

He turned his face towards her slowly and looked at her with searching eyes.

"But you," he said hesitatingly, "you're good, Cherry McBain."

He was silent as he looked at her now, and his lips tightened before he spoke again. "Years ago," he said at last, "I fought, and the man I struck – we were boys then – was a brother. I was not myself – I struck him in anger. When I understood what I had done I left him – left my home and all – and came west. That was ten years ago. I wrote him a letter and he asked me to come back. He said he had forgotten – but I – I could never go back."

"Do you think that's silly too?"

She shook her head.

"I have not hit any man since that day," he said with emphasis. "I can fight – I would fight – quicker for a good woman than anything else."

Cherry McBain held out her hand to him. "I needn't have asked you that," she said. "I didn't know. But promise me that you will come and see my father when you are on your way back – old Gabe has told me you are carrying the mail for the settlement."

King pressed her hand gently.

"I guess I'll come," he said.

A smile brightened the girl's face.

"Come," she said. "We'll have raspberries for tea."

"If it rains wildcats," he declared as he released her hand.

"To-morrow afternoon, then," she said, and the next moment she was gone.

King stood and watched her, hat in hand, until she had vanished from his sight. When the beat of the hoofs on the hard trail was no longer audible he shook his horse's bridle gently and resumed his way.

King did not cease to think of his brother when the last sound of hoof-beats had died in the distance. His conversation with Cherry McBain had started in his mind a train of thought that he could not control.

As long as King could remember, his best friend in all the world, the one he had loved the most – even during that one mad regrettable moment of passion – was his younger brother, Dick. As boys at home in eastern Canada, Dick had always been the lucky one – King's pranks had always been discovered. In the ten long years that had elapsed since King had struck west in shame and humiliation, it was the thought of having left Dick that weighed most heavily upon him. It was the memory of Dick's laughing face that had made his heart burn with remorse whenever he remembered how weak, how foolish he had been. During those ten years his heart had quailed before one fear only – the fear that something might happen to Dick before he could see him again.

And now as he rode alone over the trail that was all but hidden in the heavy dusk, this fear had gripped his heart so fiercely that he was helpless to shake himself free. A nameless dread, a pressing sadness brooded over him. He was seized with a sense of utter loneliness.

Some will say that there is no such thing as presentiment. But when King Howden reached the end-of-the-steel that night and found among the mail a letter for himself announcing the death of his brother, Dick Howden, he was convinced, whether reasonably or not, that voices had spoken to him out of the silence – had been speaking to him, indeed, for years, if he had only heard and tried to understand.