"You travel a good deal on your figure,pardner,don't you?"she said,with a certain admiration that was quite sexless in its quality;"but I don't see how you pick up a living by it in the Carquinez Woods.So you're going,are you?You might be more sociable.Good-by.""Good-by!"He leaped from the opening.
"I say pardner!"
He turned a little impatiently.She had knelt down at the entrance,so as to be nearer his level,and was holding out her hand.But he did not notice it,and she quietly withdrew it.
"If anybody dropped in and asked for you,what name will they say?"He smiled."Don't wait to hear."
"But suppose I wanted to sing out for you,what will I call you?"He hesitated."Call me--Lo."
"Lo,the poor Indian?"
"Exactly."
The first word of Pope's familiar apostrophe is humorously used in the Far West as a distinguishing title for the Indian.
It suddenly occurred to the woman,Teresa,that in the young man's height,supple,yet erect carriage,color,and singular gravity of demeanor there was a refined,aboriginal suggestion.
He did not look like any Indian she had ever seen,but rather as a youthful chief might have looked.There was a further suggestion in his fringed buckskin shirt and moccasins;but before she could utter the half-sarcastic comment that rose to her lips he had glided noiselessly away,even as an Indian might have done.
She readjusted the slips of hanging bark with feminine ingenuity,dispersing them so as to completely hide the entrance.Yet this did not darken the chamber,which seemed to draw a purer and more vigorous light through the soaring shaft that pierced the roof than that which came from the dim woodland aisles below.
Nevertheless,she shivered,and drawing her shawl closely around her began to collect some half-burnt fragments of wood in the chimney to make a fire.But the preoccupation of her thoughts rendered this a tedious process,as she would from time to time stop in the middle of an action and fall into an attitude of rapt abstraction,with far-off eyes and rigid mouth.When she had at last succeeded in kindling a fire and raising a film of pale blue smoke,that seemed to fade and dissipate entirely before it reached the top of the chimney shaft,she crouched beside it,fixed her eyes on the darkest corner of the cavern,and became motionless.
What did she see through that shadow?
Nothing at first but a confused medley of figures and incidents of the preceding night;things to be put away and forgotten;things that would not have happened but for another thing--the thing before which everything faded!A ball-room;the sounds of music;the one man she had cared for insulting her with the flaunting ostentation of his unfaithfulness;herself despised,put aside,laughed at,or worse,jilted.And then the moment of delirium,when the light danced;the one wild act that lifted her,the despised one,above them all--made her the supreme figure,to be glanced at by frightened women,stared at by half-startled,half-admiring men!"Yes,"she laughed;but struck by the sound of her own voice,moved twice round the cavern nervously,and then dropped again into her old position.
As they carried him away he had laughed at her--like a hound that he was;he who had praised her for her spirit,and incited her revenge against others;he who had taught her to strike when she was insulted;and it was only fit he should reap what he had sown.She was what he,what other men,had made her.And what was she now?What had she been once?
She tried to recall her childhood:the man and woman who might have been her father and mother;who fought and wrangled over her precocious little life;abused or caressed her as she sided with either;and then left her with a circus troupe,where she first tasted the power of her courage,her beauty,and her recklessness.She remembered those flashes of triumph that left a fever in her veins--a fever that when it failed must be stimulated by dissipation,by anything,by everything that would keep her name a wonder in men's mouths,an envious fear to women.
She recalled her transfer to the strolling players;her cheap pleasures,and cheaper rivalries and hatred--but always Teresa!
the daring Teresa!the reckless Teresa!audacious as a woman,invincible as a boy;dancing,flirting,fencing,shooting,swearing,drinking,smoking,fighting Teresa!"Oh,yes;she had been loved,perhaps--who knows?--but always feared.Why should she change now?Ha,he should see."She had lashed herself in a frenzy,as was her wont,with gestures,ejaculations,oaths,adjurations,and passionate apostrophes,but with this strange and unexpected result.
Heretofore she had always been sustained and kept up by an audience of some kind or quality,if only perhaps a humble companion;there had always been some one she could fascinate or horrify,and she could read her power mirrored in their eyes.
Even the half-abstracted indifference of her strange host had been something.But she was alone now.Her words fell on apathetic solitude;she was acting to viewless space.She rushed to the opening,dashed the hanging bark aside,and leaped to the ground.
She ran forward wildly a few steps,and stopped.
"Hallo!"she cried."Look,'tis I,Teresa!"
The profound silence remained unbroken.Her shrillest tones were lost in an echoless space,even as the smoke of her fire had faded into pure ether.She stretched out her clenched fists as if to defy the pillared austerities of the vaults around her.
"Come and take me if you dare!"