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Destiny At Drybone
by
“Lusk has gone,” said he. “I don’t know what he expected you would do, or I would do. But we will catch him before he gets to Drybone.”
She looked at him with her dumb stare. “Gone?” she said.
“Get up and ride,” said McLean. “You are going to Drybone.”
“Drybone?” she echoed. Her voice was toneless and dull.
He made no more explanations to her, but went quickly about the cabin. Soon he had set it in order, the dishes on their shelves, the table clean, the fire in the stove arranged; and all these movements she followed with a sort of blank mechanical patience. He made a small bundle for his own journey, tied it behind his saddle, brought her horse beside a stump. When at his sharp order she came out, he locked his cabin and hung the key by a window, where travellers could find it and be at home.
She stood looking where her husband had slunk off. Then she laughed. “It’s about his size,” she murmured.
Her old lover helped her in silence to mount into the man’s saddle–this they had often done together in former years–and so they took their way down the silent road. They had not many miles to go, and after the first two lay behind them, when the horses were limbered and had been put to a canter, they made time quickly. They had soon passed out of the trees and pastures of Box Elder and came among the vast low stretches of the greater valley. Not even by day was the river’s course often discernible through the ridges and cheating sameness of this wilderness; and beneath this half-darkness of stars and a quarter moon the sage spread shapeless to the looming mountains, or to nothing.
“I will ask you one thing,” said Lin, after ten miles.
The woman made no sign of attention as she rode beside him.
“Did I understand that she–Miss Buckner, I mean–mentioned she might be going away from Separ?”
“How do I know what you understood?”
“I thought you said–“
“Don’t you bother me, Lin McLean.” Her laugh rang out, loud and forlorn–one brief burst that startled the horses and that must have sounded far across the sage-brush. “You men are rich,” she said.
They rode on, side by side, and saying nothing after that. The Drybone road was a broad trail, a worn strip of bareness going onward over the endless shelvings of the plain, visible even in this light; and presently, moving upon its grayness on a hill in front of them, they made out the wagon. They hastened and overtook it.
“Put your carbine down,” said McLean to Lusk. “It’s not robbers. It’s your wife I’m bringing you.” He spoke very quietly.
The husband addressed no word to the cow-puncher “Get in, then,” he said to his wife.
“Town’s not far now,” said Lin. “Maybe you would prefer riding the balance of the way?”
“I’d–” But the note of pity that she felt in McLean’s question overcame her, and her utterance choked. She nodded her head, and the three continued slowly climbing the hill together.
From the narrows of the steep, sandy, weather-beaten banks that the road slanted upward through for a while, they came out again upon the immensity of the table-land. Here, abruptly like an ambush, was the whole unsuspected river close below to their right, as if it had emerged from the earth. With a circling sweep from somewhere out in the gloom it cut in close to the lofty mesa beneath tall clean-graded descents of sand, smooth as a railroad embankment. As they paused on the level to breathe their horses, the wet gulp of its eddies rose to them through the stillness. Upstream they could make out the light of the Drybone bridge, but not the bridge itself; and two lights on the farther bank showed where stood the hog-ranch opposite Drybone. They went on over the table-land and reached the next herald of the town, Drybone’s chief historian, the graveyard. Beneath its slanting headboards and wind-shifted sand lay many more people than lived in Drybone. They passed by the fence of this shelterless acre on the hill, and shoutings and high music began to reach them. At the foot of the hill they saw the sparse lights and shapes of the town where ended the gray strip of road. The many sounds–feet, voices, and music–grew clearer, unravelling from their muffled confusion, and the fiddling became a tune that could be known.