Chapter VII: Part 7

"But it was more, more, more! Benjamin, my brother, these hands of mine picked that very flower. And I see that it has pleased her. She had taken it up and placed it in her hair. It changes her. My flower brings her close to me. It means that we have found a thing which pleases us both. Just as you and I, Benjamin, are drawn together by the love of one horse. So that flower in her hair is a great sign. I dwell upon it. It is like a golden moon rising in a black night. It lights my way to her. Words rush up from my heart, but cannot express what I mean!"

"Let it go! Let it go!" said Connor hastily, brushing his way through this outflow of verbiage, like a man bothered with gnats. "I gather what you mean. But the point is that about nine-tenths of what you think you'd better not say. If you want to talk--well, talk about yourself. That's what I most generally do with a girl. They like to hear a man say what he's done."

"Myself!" said David heavily. "Talk of a dead stump when there is a great tree beside it? Well, I see that I have much to learn."

"You certainly have," said Connor with much meaning. "I'd hate to turn you loose in Manhattan."

"In what?"

"Never mind. But here's another thing. You know that she'll have to leave pretty soon?"

The meaning slowly filtered into David's mind.

"Benjamin," he said slowly, "you are wise in many ways, with horses and with women, it seems. But that is a fool's talk. Let me hear no more of it. Leave me? Why should she leave me?"

Triumph warmed the heart of Connor.

"Because a girl can't ramble off into the mountains and put up in a valley where there are nothing but men. It isn't done."

"Why not?"

"Isn't good form."

"I fail to understand."

"My dear fellow, she'd be compromised for life if it were known that she had lived here with us."

David shook his head blankly.

"In one word," said Connor, striving to make his point, "she'd be pointed out by other women and by men. They'd never have anything to do with her. They'd say things that would make her ashamed, hurt her, you know."

Understanding and wrath gathered in David's face.

"To such a man--to such a dog of a man--I would talk with my hands!"

"I think you would," nodded Connor, not a little impressed. "But you might not be around to hear the talk."

"But women surely live with men. There are wives--"

"Ah! Man and wife--all very well!"

"Then it is simple. I marry her and then I keep her here forever."

"Perhaps. But will she marry you?"

"Why not?"

"Well, does she love you?"

"True." He stood up. "I'll ask her."

"For Heaven's sake, no! Sit down! You mustn't rush at a woman like this the first day you know her. Give her time. Let me tell you when!"

"Benjamin, my dear brother, you are wise and I am a fool!"

"You'll do in time. Let me coach you, that's all, and you'll come on famously. I can tell you this: that I think she likes you very well already."

"Your words are like a shower of light, a fragrant wind. Benjamin, I am hot with happiness! When may I speak to her?"

"I don't know. She may have guessed something out of what you said to-night." He swallowed a smile. "You might speak to her about this marriage to-morrow."

"It will be hard; but I shall wait."

"And then you'll have to go out of the Garden with her to get married."

"Out of the Garden? Never! Why should we?"

"Why, you'll need a minister, you know, to marry you."

"True. Then I shall send for one."

"But he might not want to make this long journey for the sake of one marriage ceremony."

"There are ways, perhaps, of persuading him to come," said David, making a grim gesture.

"No force or you ruin everything."

"I shall be ruled by you, brother. It seems I have little knowledge."

"Go easy always and you'll come out all right. Give her plenty of time. A woman always needs a lot of time to make up her mind, and even then she's generally wrong."

"What do you mean by that?"

"No matter. She'll probably want to go back to her home for a while."

"Leave me?"

"Not necessarily. But you, when a man gets engaged, it's sometimes a couple of years between the time a woman promises to marry him and the day of the ceremony."

"Do they wait so long, and live apart?"

"A thousand miles, maybe."

"Then you men beyond the mountains are made of iron!"

"Do you have to be away from her? Why not go along with her when she goes home?"

"Surely, Benjamin, you know that a law forbids it!"

"You make your own laws in important things like this."

"It cannot be."

And so the matter rested when Connor left his host and went to bed. He had been careful not to press the point. So unbelievably much ground had been covered in the first few hours that he was dizzy with success. It seemed ages since that Ruth had come running to him in the patio in terror of her life. From that moment how much had been done!

Closing his eyes as he lay on his bed, he went back over each incident to see if a false step had been made. As far as he could see, there had not been a single unsound measure undertaken. The first stroke had been the masterpiece. Out of a danger which had threatened instant destruction of their plan she had won complete victory by her facing of David, and when she put her hand in his as a sign of weakness, Connor could see that she had made David her slave.

As the scene came back vividly before his eyes he could not resist an impulse to murmur aloud to the dark: "Brave girl!"

She had grown upon him marvelously in that single half-day. The ability to rise to a great situation was something which he admired above all things in man or woman. It was his own peculiar power--to judge a man or a horse in a glance, and dare to venture a fortune on chance. Indeed, it was hardly a wonder that David Eden or any other man should have fallen in love with her in that one half-day. She was changed beyond recognition from the pale girl who sat at the telegraph key in Lukin and listened to the babble of the world. Now she was out in that world, acting on the stage and proving herself worthy of a role.

He rehearsed her acts. And finally he found himself flushing hotly at the memory of her mingled pleasure and shame and embarrassment as David of Eden had poured out his amazing flow of compliments.

At this point Connor sat up suddenly and violently in his bed.

"Steady, Ben!" he cautioned himself. "Watch your step!"

_CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN_

Ben Connor awoke the next morning with the sun streaming across the room and sprang out of bed at once, worried. For about dawn noises as a rule began around the house and the singing of the old men farther down the hill. The Garden of Eden awakened at sunrise, and this silence even when the sun was high alarmed the gambler. He dressed hastily, and opening his door, he saw David walking slowly up and down the patio. At the sight of Connor he raised a warning finger.

"Let us keep a guard upon our voices," he murmured, coming to Connor. "I have ordered my servants to move softly and to keep from the house if they may."

"What's happened?"

"She sleeps, Benjamin." He turned toward her door with a smile that the gambler never forgot. "Let her waken rested."

Connor looked at the sky.

"I've come too late for breakfast, even?"

A glance of mild rebuke was turned upon him.

"Surely, Benjamin, we who are strong will not eat before her who is weak?"

"Are you going to starve yourself because she's sleepy?"

"But I have not felt hunger."

He added in a voice of wonder: "Listen!"

Ruth Manning was singing in her room, and Connor turned away to hide his frown. For he was not by any means sure whether the girl sang from the joy she found in this great adventure or because of David Eden. He was still further troubled when she came out to the breakfast table in the patio. He had expected that she would be more or less confused by the presence of David after his queer talk of the night before, but sleep seemed to have wiped everything from her memory. Her first nod, to be sure, was for the gambler, but her smile was for David of Eden. Connor fell into a reverie which was hardly broken through the meal by the deep voice of David or the laughter of Ruth. Their gayety was a barrier, and he was, subtly, left on the outside. David had proposed to the girl a ride through the Garden, and when he went for the horses the gambler decided to make sure of her position. He was too much disturbed to be diplomatic. He went straight to the point.

"I'm sorry this is such a mess for you; but if you can buck up for a while it won't take long to finish the job."

She looked at him without understanding, which was what he least wanted in the world. So he went on: "As a matter of fact, the worst of the job hasn't come. You can do what you want with him right now. But afterward--when you get him out of the valley the hard thing will be to hold him."

"You're angry with poor David. What's he done now?"

"Angry with him? Of course not! I'm a little disgusted, that's all."

"Tell me why in words of one syllable, Ben."

"You're too fine a sort to have understood. And I can't very well explain."

She allowed herself to be puzzled for a moment and then laughed.

"Please don't be mysterious. Tell me frankly."

"Very well. I think you can make David go out of the valley when we go. But once we have him back in a town the trouble will begin. You understand why he's so--fond of you, Ruth?"

"Let's not talk about it."

"Sorry to make you blush. But you see, it isn't because you're so pretty, Ruth, but simply because you're a woman. The first he's ever seen."

All her high coloring departed at once; a pale, sick face looked at Connor.

"Don't say it," murmured the girl. "I thought last night just for a moment--but I couldn't let myself think of it for an instant."

"I understand," said Connor gently. "You took all that highfaluting poetry stuff to be the same thing. But, say, Ruth, I've heard a young buck talk to a young squaw--before he married her. Just about the same line of junk, eh? What makes me sick is that when we get him out in a town he'll lose his head entirely when he sees a room full of girls. We'll simply have to plant a contract on him and--then let him go!"

"Do you think it's only that?" she said again, faintly.

"I leave it to you. Use your reason, and figure it out for yourself. I don't mean that you're in any danger. You know you're not as long as I'm around!"

She thanked him with a wan smile.

"But how can I let him come near me--now?"

"It's a mess. I'm sorry about it. But once the deal goes through I'll make this up to you if it takes me the rest of my life. You believe me?"

"I know you're true blue, Ben! And--I trust you."

He was a little disturbed to find that his pulse was decidedly quickened by that simple speech.

"Besides, I want to thank you for letting me know this. I understand everything about him now!"

In her heart of hearts she was hating David with all her might. For all night long, in her dreams, she had been seeing again the gestures of those strong brown hands, and the flash of his eyes, and hearing the deep tremor of his voice. The newness of this primitive man and his ways and words had been an intoxicant to her; because of his very difference she was a little afraid, and now the warning of Connor chimed in accurately with a premonition of her own. That adulation poured at the feet of Ruth Manning had been a beautiful and marvelous thing; but flung down simply in honor of her sex it became almost an insult. The memory made her shudder. The ideal lover whom she had prefigured in some of her waking dreams had always spoken with ardor--a holy ardor. From this passion of the body she recoiled.

Something of all this Connor read in her face and in her thoughtful silence, and he was profoundly contented. He had at once neutralized all of David's eloquence and fortified his own position. It was both a blow driven home and a counter. Not that he would admit a love for the girl; he had merely progressed as far as jealousy. He told himself that his only interest was in keeping her from an emotion which, once developed, might throw her entirely on the side of David and ruin their joint plans. He had refused to accompany the master of the Garden and the girl on their ride through the valley because, as he told himself, he "couldn't stand seeing another grown man make such an ass of himself" as David did when he was talking with the girl.

He contented himself now with watching her face when David came back to the patio, followed by Glani and the neat-stepping little mare, Tabari. The forced smile with which she met the big man was a personal triumph to the gambler.

"If you can win her under that handicap, David," he said softly to himself, "you deserve her, and everything else you can get."

David helped her into the saddle on Tabari, and himself sprang onto the pad upon Glani's back. They went out side by side.

It was a cool day for that season, and the moment the north wind struck them David shouted softly and sent Glani at a rushing gallop straight into the teeth of the wind. Tabari followed at a pace which Ruth, expert horse-woman though she was, had never dreamed of. For the first time she had that impression of which Ben Connor had spoken to her of the horse pouring itself over the road without strain and without jar of smashing hoofs.

Ruth let Tabari extend herself, until the mare was racing with ears flat against her neck. She had even an impression that Glani, burdened by the great weight of David, was being left behind, but when she glanced to the side she saw that the master half a length back, was keeping a strong pull on the stallion, and Glani went smoothly, easily, with enormous strides, and fretting at the restraint.

She gained two things from that glance. The first was a sense of impatience because the stallion kept up so easily; in the second place, the same wind which drove the long hair of David straight back blew all suspicious thoughts out of her mind. She drew Tabari back to a hand gallop and then to a walk with her eyes dimmed by the wind of the ride and the blood tingling in her cheeks.

"It was like having wings," she cried happily as David let the stallion come up abreast.

"Tabari is sturdy, but she lacks speed," said the dispassionate master. "When she was a foal of six months and was brought to me for judgment, I thought twice, because her legs were short. However, it is well that she was allowed to live and breed."

"Allowed to live?" murmured Ruth Manning.

"To keep the line of the gray horse perfect," said David, "they must be watched with a jealous eye, and those which are weak must not live. The mares are killed and the stallions gelded and sold."

"And can you judge the little colts?"

Her voice was too low for David to catch a sense of pain and anger in it.

"It must be done. It is a duty. To-day is the sixth month of Timeh, the daughter of Juri. You shall witness the judging. Elijah is the master."

His face hardened at the name of Elijah, and the girl caught her breath. But before she could speak they broke out of a grove and came in view of a wide meadow across which four yoked cattle drew a harrow, smoothing the plow furrows to an even, black surface.

It carried the girl far back; it was like opening an ancient book of still more ancient tales; the musty smell completes the illusion. The cattle plodding slowly on, seeming to rest at every step, filled in the picture of which the primitive David Eden was the central figure.

"Yokes," she cried. "I've never seen them before!"

"For some work we use the horses, but the jerking of the harrow ruins their shoulders. Besides, we may need the cattle for a new journey."

"A journey? With those?"

"That was how the four came into the Garden. And I am enjoined to have the strong wagons always ready and the ox teams always complete in case it becomes necessary to leave this valley and go elsewhere. Of course, that may never be."

_CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT_

He brought Glani to a halt. They had left the sight of the meadow, though they could still hear the snorting of the oxen at their labor, a distant sound. Here, on one side of the road, the forest tumbled back from a swale of ground across which a tiny stream leaped and flashed with crooked speed, and the ground seemed littered with bright gold, so closely were the yellow wild flowers packed.

"Two days ago," said David, "they were only buds. See them now!"

He slipped from his horse and, stooping, rose again in a moment with his hands full of the yellow blossoms.

"They have a fragrance that makes them seem far away," he said. "See!"

He tossed the flowers at her; the wind caught them and spangled her hair and her clothes with them, and she breathed a rare perfume. David fell to clapping his hands and laughing like a child at the picture she made. She had never liked him so well as she did at this moment. She had never pitied him as she did now; she was not wise enough to shrink from that emotion.

"It was made for you--this place."

And before she could move to defend herself he had raised her strongly, lightly from the saddle, and placed her on the knoll in the thickest of the flowers. He stood back to view his work, nodding his satisfaction, and she, looking up at him, felt the old sense of helplessness sweep over her. Every now and then David Eden overwhelmed her like an inescapable destiny; there was something foredoomed about the valley and about him.

"I knew you would look like this," he was saying. "How do men make a jewel seem more beautiful? They set it in gold! And so with you, Ruth. Your hair against the gold is darker and richer and more like piles and coils of shadow. Your face against the gold is the transparent white, with a bloom in it. Your hands are half lost in the softness of that gold. And to think that is a picture you can never see! But I forget."

His face grew dark.

"Here I have stumbled again, and yet I started with strong vows and resolves. My brother Benjamin warned me!"

It shocked her for a reason she could not analyze to hear the big man call Connor his brother. Connor, the gambler, the schemer! And here was David Eden with the green of the trees behind, his feet in the golden wild flowers, and the blue sky behind his head. Brother to Ben Connor?

"And how did he warn you?" she asked.

"That I must not talk to you of yourself, because, he said, it shames you. Is that true?"

"I suppose it is," she murmured. Yet she was a little indignant because Connor had presumed to interfere. She knew he could only have done it to save her from embarrassment, but she rebelled at the thought of Connor as her conversational guardian.

Put a guard over David of Eden, and what would he be? Just like a score of callow youths whom she had known, scattering foolish commonplaces, trying to make their dull eyes tell her flattering things which they had not brains enough to put into words.

"I am sorry," said David, sighing. "It is hard to stand here and see you, and not talk of what I see. When the sun rises the birds sing in the trees; when I see you words come up to my teeth."

He made a grimace. "Well, I'll shut them in. Have I been very wrong in my talk to you?"

"I think you haven't talked to many women," said Ruth. "And--most men do not talk as you do."

"Most men are fools," answered the egoist. "What I say to you is the truth, but if the truth offends you I shall talk of other things."

He threw himself on the ground sullenly. "Of what shall I talk?"

"Of nothing, perhaps. Listen!"

For the great quiet of the valley was falling on her, and the distances over which her eyes reached filled her with the delightful sense of silence. There were deep blue mountains piled against the paler sky; down the slope and through the trees the river was untarnished, solid, silver; in the boughs behind her the wind whispered and then stopped to listen likewise. There was a faint ache in her heart at the thought that she had not known such things all her life. She knew then what gave the face of David of Eden its solemnity. She leaned a little toward him. "Now tell me about yourself. What you have done."

"Of anything but that."

"Why not?"

"No more than I want you to tell me about yourself and what you have done. What you feel, what you think from time to time, I wish to know; I am very happy to know. I fit in those bits of you to the picture I have made."

Once more the egoist was talking!

"But to have you tell me of what you have done--that is not pleasant. I do not wish to know that you have talked to other men and smiled on them. I do not wish to know of a single happy day you spent before you came to the Garden of Eden. But I shall tell you of the four men who are my masters if you wish."

"Tell me of them if you will."

"Very well. John was the beginning. He died before I came. Of the others Matthew was my chief friend. He was very old and thin. His wrist was smaller than yours, almost. His hair was a white mist. In the evening there seemed to be a pale moonshine around his face.

"He was very small and old--so old that sometimes I thought he would dry up or dissolve and disappear. Toward the last, before God called him, Matthew grew weak, and his voice was faint, yet it was never sharp or shaken. Also, until the very end his eyes were young, for his heart was young.

"That was Matthew. He was like you. He liked the silence. 'Listen,' he would say. 'The great stillness is the voice; God is speaking.' Then he would raise one thin finger and we caught our breath and listened.

"Do you see him?"

"I see him, and I wish that I had known him."

"Of the others, Luke was taller than I. He had yellow hair as long and as coarse as the mane of a yellow horse. When he rode around the lake we could hear him coming for a great distance by his singing, for his voice was as strong as the neigh of Glani. I have only to close my eyes, and I can hear that singing of Luke from beside the lake. Ah, he was a huge man! The horses sweated under him.

"His beard was long; it came to the middle of his belly; it had a great blunt square end. Once I angered him. I crept to him when he slept--I was a small boy then--and I trimmed the beard down to a point.

"When Luke wakened he felt the beard and sat for a long time looking at me. I was so afraid that I grew numb, I remember. Then he went to the Room of Silence. When he came out his anger was gone, but he punished me. He took me to the lake and caught me by the heels and swung me around his head. When he loosened his fingers I shot into the air like a light stone. The water flashed under me, and when I struck the surface seemed solid. I thought it was death, for my senses went out, but Luke waded in and dragged me back to the shore. However, his beard remained pointed till he died."

He chuckled at the memory.

"Paul reproved Luke for what he had done. Paul was a big man, also, but he was short, and his bigness lay in his breadth. He had no hair, and he stood under Luke nodding so that the sun flashed back and forth on his bald head. He told Luke that I might have been killed.

"'Better teach him sober manners now,' said Luke, 'than be a jester to knock at the gate of God.'

"This Paul was wonderfully silent. He was born unhappy and nothing could make him smile. He used to wander through the valley alone in the middle of winter, half dead with cold and eating nothing. In those times, even Luke was not strong enough to make him come home to us.

"I know that for ten days at one time he had gone without speech. For that reason he loved to have Joseph with him, because Joseph understood signs.

"But when silence left him, Paul was great in speech. Luke spoke in a loud voice and Matthew beautifully, but Paul was terrible. He would fall on his knees in an agony and pray to God for salvation for us and for himself. While he kneeled he seemed to grow in size. He filled the room. And his words were like whips. They made me think of all my sins. That is how I remember Paul, kneeling, with his long arms thrown over his head.

"Matthew died in the evening just as the moon rose. He was sitting beside me. He put his hand in mine. After a while I felt that the hand was cold, and when I looked at Matthew his head had fallen.

"Paul died in a drift of snow. We always knew that he had been on his knees praying when the storms struck him and he would not rise until he had finished the prayer.

"Luke bowed his head one day at the table and died without a sound--in spite of all his strength.

"All these men have not really died out of the valley. They are here, like mists; they are faces of thin air. Sometimes when I sit alone at my table, I can almost see a spirit-hand like that of Matthew rise with a shadow-glass of wine.

"But shall I tell you a strange thing? Since you came into the valley, these mist-images of my dead masters grow faint and thinner than ever."

"You will remember me, also, when I have gone?"

"Do not speak of it! But yes, if you should go, every spring, when these yellow flowers blossom, you would return to me and sit as you are sitting now. However you are young, yet there are ways. After Matthew died, for a long time I kept fresh flowers in his room and kept his memory fresh with them. But," he repeated, "you are young. Do not talk of death!"

"Not of death, but of leaving the Garden."

He stared gravely at her, and flushed.

"You are tormenting me as I used to torment my masters when I was a boy. But it is wrong to anger me. Besides I shall not let you go."

"Not _let_ me go?"

"Am I a fool?" he asked hotly. "Why should I let you go?"

"You could not keep me."

It brought him to his feet with a start.

"What will free you?"

"Your own honor, David."

His head fell.

"It is true. Yes, it is true. But let us ride on. I no longer am pleased with this place. It is tarnished; there are unhappy thoughts here!"

"What a child he is!" thought the girl, as she climbed into the saddle again. "A selfish, terrible, wonderful child!"

It seemed, after that, that the purpose of David was to show the beauties of the Garden to her until she could not brook the thought of leaving. He told her what grew in each meadow and what could be reaped from it.

He told her what fish were caught in the river and the lake. He talked of the trees. He swung down from Glani, holding with hand and heel, and picked strange flowers and showed them to her.

"What a place for a house!" she said, when, near the north wall, they passed a hill that overlooked the entire length of the valley.

"I shall build you a house there," said David eagerly. "I shall build it of strong rock. Would that make you happy? Very tall, with great rooms."

An impish desire to mock him came to her.

"Do you know what I'm used to? It's a boarding house where I live in a little back bedroom, and they call us to meals with a bell."

The humor of this situation entirely failed to appeal to him.

"I also," he said, "have a bell. And it shall be used to call you to dinner, if you wish."

He was so grave that she did not dare to laugh. But for some reason that moment of bantering brought the big fellow much closer to her than he had been before. And when she saw him so docile to her wishes, for all his strength and his mastery, the only thing that kept her from opening her heart to him, and despising the game which she and Connor were playing with him, was the warning of the gambler.

"I've heard a young buck talk to a young squaw--before he married her. The same line of junk!"

Connor must be right. He came from the great city.

But before that ride was over she was repeating that warning very much as Odysseus used the flower of Hermes against the arts of Circe. For the Garden of Eden, as they came back to the house after the circuit, seemed to her very much like a little kingdom, and the monarch thereof was inviting her in dumb-show to be the queen of the realm.

_CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE_

At the house they were met by one of the servants who had been waiting for David to receive from the master definite orders concerning some woodchopping. For the trees of the garden were like children to David of Eden, and he allowed only the ones he himself designated to be cut for timber or fuel. He left the girl with manifest reluctance.

"For when I leave you of what do you think, and what do you do? I am like the blind."

She felt this speech was peculiar in character. Who but David of Eden could have been jealous of the very thoughts of another? And smiling at this, she went into the patio where Ben Connor was still lounging. Few things had ever been more gratifying to the gambler than the sight of the girl's complacent smile, for he knew that she was judging David.

"What happened?" he asked.

"Nothing worth repeating. But I think you're wrong, Ben. He isn't a barbarian. He's just a child."

"That's another word for the same thing. Ever see anything more brutal than a child? The wildest savage that ever stepped is a saint compared with a ten-year-old boy."

"Perhaps. He acts like ten years. When I mention leaving the valley he flies into a tantrum; he has taken me so much for granted that he has even picked out the site for my house."

"As if you'd ever stay in a place like this!"

He covered his touch of anxiety with loud laughter.

"I don't know," she was saying thoughtfully a moment later. "I like it--a lot."

"Anything seems pretty good after Lukin. But when your auto is buzzing down Broadway--"

She interrupted him with a quick little laugh of excitement.

"But do you really think I can make him leave the valley?"

"Of course I'm sure."

"He says there's a law against it."

"I tell you, Ruth, you're his law now; not whatever piffle is in that Room of Silence."

She looked earnestly at the closed door. Her silence had always bothered the gambler, and this one particularly annoyed him.

"Let's hear your thoughts?" he asked uneasily.

"It's just an idea of mine that inside that room we can find out everything we want to know about David Eden."

"What do we want to know?" growled Connor. "I know everything that's necessary. He's a nut with a gang of the best horses that ever stepped. I'm talking horse, not David Eden. If I have to make the fool rich, it isn't because I want to."

She returned no direct answer, but after a moment: "I wish I knew."

"What?"

She became profoundly serious.

"The point is this: he _may_ be something more than a boy or a savage. And if he _is_ something more, he's the finest man I've ever laid eyes on. That's why I want to get inside that room. That's why I want to learn the secret--if there is a secret--the things he believes in, how he happens to be what he is and how--"

Connor had endured her rising warmth of expression as long as he could. Now he exploded.

"You do me one favor," he cried excitedly, more moved than she had ever seen him before. "Let me do your thinking for you when it comes to other men. You take my word about this David Eden. Bah! When I have you fixed up in little old Manhattan you'll forget about him and his mystery inside a week. Will you lay off on the thinking?"

She nodded absently. In reality she was struck by the first similarity she had ever noticed between David of Eden and Connor the gambler: within ten minutes they had both expressed remarkable concern as to what might be her innermost thoughts. She began to feel that Connor himself might have elements of the boy in his make up--the cruel boy which he protested was in David Eden.

She had many reasons for liking Connor. For one thing he had offered her an escape from her old imprisoned life. Again he had flattered her in the most insinuating manner by his complete trust. She knew that there was not one woman in ten thousand to whom he would have confided his great plan, and not one in a million whose ability to execute his scheme he would have trusted.

More than this, before her trip to the Garden he had given her a large sum of money for the purchase of the Indian's gelding; and Ruth Manning had learned to appreciate money. He had not asked for any receipt. His attitude had been such that she had not even been able to mention that subject.

Yet much as she liked Connor there were many things about him which jarred on her. There was a hardness, always working to the surface like rocks on a hard soil. Worst of all, sometimes she felt a degree of uncleanliness about his mind and its working. She would not have recoiled from these things had he been nearer her own age; but in a man well over thirty she felt that these were fixed characteristics.

He was in all respects the antipode of David of Eden. It was easier to be near Connor, but not so exciting. David wore her out, but he also was marvelously stimulating. The dynamic difference was that Connor sometimes inspired her with aversion, and David made her afraid. She was roused out of her brooding by the voice of the gambler saying: "When a woman begins to think, a man begins to swear."

She managed to smile, but these cheap little pat quotations which she had found amusing enough at first now began to grate on her through repetition. Just as Connor tagged and labeled his idea with this aphorism, so she felt that Connor himself was tagged by them. She found him considering her with some anxiety.

"You haven't begun to doubt me, Ruth?" he asked her.

And he put out his hand with a note of appeal. It was a new role for him and she at once disliked it. She shook the hand heartily.

"That's a foolish thing to say," she assured him. "But--why does that old man keep sneaking around us?"

It was Zacharias, who for some time had been prowling around the patio trying to find something to do which would justify his presence.

"Do you think David Eden keeps him here as a spy on us?"

This was too much for even Connor's suspicious mind, and he chuckled.

"They all want to hang around and have a look at you--that's the point," he answered. "Speak to him and you'll see him come running."

It needed not even speech; she smiled and nodded at Zacharias, and he came to her at once with a grin of pleasure wrinkling his ancient face. She invited him to sit down.

"I never see you resting," she said.

"David dislikes an idler," said Zacharias, who acknowledged her invitation by dropping his withered hands on the back of the chair, but made no move to sit down.

"But after all these years you have worked for him, I should think he would give you a little house of your own, and nothing to do except take care of yourself."

He listened to her happily, but it was evident from his pause that he had not gathered the meaning of her words.

"You come from the South?" he asked at length.

"My father came from Tennessee."

There was an electric change in the face of the Negro.

"Oh, Lawd, oh, Lawd!" he murmured, his voice changing and thickening a little toward the soft Southern accent. "That's music to old Zacharias!"

"Do you come from Tennessee, Zacharias?"

Again there was a pause as the thoughts of Zacharias fled back to the old days.

"Everything in between is all shadowy like evening, but what I remember most is the little houses on both sides of the road with the gardens behind them, and the babies rolling in the dust and shouting and their mammies coming to the doors to watch them."

"How long ago was that?" she asked, deeply touched.

He grew troubled.

"Many and many a year ago--oh, many a long, weary year, for Zacharias!"

"And you still think of the old days?"

"When the bees come droning in the middle of the day, sometimes I think of them."

He struck his hands lightly together and his misty-bright eyes were plainly looking through sixty years as though they were a day.

"But why did you leave?" asked Ruth tenderly.

Zacharias slowly drew his eyes away from the mists of the past and became aware of the girl's face once more.

"Because my soul was burning in sin. It was burning and burning!"

"But wouldn't you like to go back?"

The head of Zacharias fell and he knitted his fingers.

"Coming to the Garden of Eden was like coming into heaven. There's no way of getting out again without breaking the law. The Garden is just like heaven!"

Connor spoke for the first time.

"Or hell!" he exclaimed.

It caused Ruth Manning to cry out at him softly; Zacharias was mute.

"Why did you say that?" said the girl, growing angry.

"Because I hate to see a bad bargain," said the gambler. "And it looks to me as if our friend here paid pretty high for anything he gets out of the Garden."

He turned sharply to Zacharias.

"How long have you been working here?"

"Sixty years. Long years!"

"And what have you out of it? What clothes?"

"Enough to wear."

"What food?"

"Enough to eat."

"A house of your own?"

"No."

"Land of your own?"

"No."

"Sixty years and not a penny saved! That's what I call a sharp bargain! What else have you gained?"

"A good bright hope of heaven."

"But are you sure, Zacharias? Are you sure? Isn't it possible that all these five masters of yours may have been mistaken?"

Zacharias could only stare in his horror. Finally he turned away and went silently across the patio.

"Ben," cried the girl softly, "why did you do it? Aside from torturing the poor man, what if this comes to David's ear?"

Connor snapped his finger. His manner was that of one who knows that he has taken a foolish risk and wishes to brazen the matter out.

"It'll never come to the ear of David! Why? Because he'd wring the neck of the old chap if he even guessed that he'd been talking about leaving the valley. And in the meantime I cut away the ground beneath David's feet. He has not standing room, pretty soon. Nothing left to him, by Jove, but his own conceit, and he has tons of that! Well, let him use it and get fat on it!"

She wondered why Connor had come to actually hate the master of the Garden. Sure David of Eden had never harmed the gambler. She remembered something that she had heard long before: that the hatred always lies on the side of injurer and not of the injured.

They heard David's voice, at this point, approaching, and in another moment a small cavalcade entered the patio.

_CHAPTER THIRTY_

First, a white flash beneath the shadow of the arched way, came a colt at full run, stopping short with four sprawling, braced feet at the sight of the strangers. It was not fear so much as surprise, for now it pricked its ears and advanced a dainty step or two. Ruth cried out with delight at the fawn-like beauty of the delicate creature. The Eden Gray was almost white in the little colt, and with its four dark stockings it seemed, when it ran, to be stepping on thin air. That impression was helped by the comparatively great length of the legs.

Next came the mother, walking, as though she was quite confident that no harm could come to her colt in this home of all good things, but with her fine head held high and her eyes luminous with concern, a little anxious because the youngster had been out of sight for a moment.

And behind them strode David with Elijah at his side.

Ruth could never have recognized Elijah as the statuesque figure which had confronted David on the previous day. He was now bowing and scraping like some withered old man, striving to make a good impression on a creditor to whom a great sum was owing. She remembered then what David had told her earlier in the day about the judging of Timeh, the daughter of Juri. This, then, was the crisis, and here was Elijah striving to conciliate the grim judge. The old man kept up a running fire of talk while David walked slowly around the colt. Ruth wondered why the master of the Garden did not cry out with pleasure at sight of the beautiful creature. Connor had drawn her back a little.

"You see that six months' mare?" he said softly, with a tremor in his voice. "I'd pay ten thousand flat for her the way she stands. Ten thousand--more if it were asked!"

"But David doesn't seem very pleased."

"Bah! He's bursting with pleasure. But he won't let on because he doesn't want to flatter old Elijah."

"If he doesn't pass the colt do you know what happens?"

"What?"

"They kill it!"

"I'd a lot rather see them kill a man!" snarled Connor. "But they won't touch _that_ colt!"

"I don't know. Look at poor Elijah!"

David, stopping in his circular walk, now stood with his arms folded, gazing intently at Timeh. Elijah was a picture of concern. The whites of his eyes flashed as his glances rolled swiftly from the colt to the master. Once or twice he tried to speak, but seemed too nervous to give voice.

At length: "A true daughter of Juri, O David. And was there ever a more honest mare than Juri? The same head, mark you, deep from the eye to the angle of the jaw. And under the head--come hither, Timeh!"

Timeh flaunted her heels at the sun and then came with short, mincing steps.

"At six months," boasted Elijah, "she knows my voice as well as her mother. Stay, Juri!"

The inquisitive mare had followed Timeh, but now, reassured, she dropped her head and began cropping the turf of the patio. Still, from the play of her ears, it was evident that Timeh was not out of the mother's thoughts for an instant.

"Look you, David!" said Elijah. He raised the head of Timeh by putting his hand beneath her chin.

"I can put my whole hand between the angles of her jaw! And see how her ears flick back and forth, like the twitching ears of a cat! Ha, is not that a sign?"

He allowed the head to fall again, but he caught it under his arms and faced David in this manner, throwing out his hand in appeal. Still David spoke not a word.

With a gesture he made Elijah move to one side. Then he stepped to Timeh. She was uneasy at his coming, but under the first touch of his hand Timeh became as still as rock and looked at her mother in a scared and helpless fashion. It seemed that Juri understood a great crisis was at hand; for now she advanced resolutely and with her dainty muzzle she followed with sniffs the hand of David as it moved over the little colt. He seemed to be seeing with his finger-tips alone, kneading under the skin in search of vital information. Along the muscles those dexterous fingers ran, and down about the heavy bones of the joints, where they lingered long, seeming to read a story in every crevice.

Never once did he speak, but Ruth felt that she could read words in the brightening, calm, and sudden shadows across his face.

Elijah accompanied the examination with a running-fire of comment.

"There is quality in those hoofs, for you! None of your gray-blue stuff like the hoofs of Tabari, say, but black as night and dense as rock. Aye, David, you may well let your hand linger down that neck. She will step freely, this Timeh of mine, and stride as far as a mountain-lion can leap! Withers high enough. That gives a place for the ligaments to take hold. A good long back, but not too long to carry a weight. She will not be one of your gaunt-bellied horses, either; she will have wind and a bottom for running. She will gallop on the third day of the journey as freely as on the first. And she will carry her tail well out, always, with that big, strong dock."

He paused a moment, for David was moving his hands over the hindlegs and lingering long at the hocks. And the face of Elijah grew convulsed with anxiety.

"Is there anything wrong with those legs?" murmured Ruth to Connor.

"Not a thing that I see. Maybe the stifles are too straight. I think they might angle out a bit more. But that's nothing serious. Besides, it may be the way Timeh is standing. What's the matter?"

She was clinging to his arm, white-faced.

"If that colt has to die I--I'll want to kill David Eden!"

"Hush, Ruth! And don't let him see your face!"

David moved back from Timeh and again folded his arms.

"The body of the horse is one thing," ran on Elijah uneasily, "and the spirit is another. Have you not told us, David, that a curious colt makes a wise horse? That is Timeh! Where will you guess that I found her when I went to bring her to you even now? She had climbed up the face of the cliff, far up a crevice where a man would not dare to go. I dared not even cry out to her for fear she would fall if she turned her head. To have climbed so high was almost impossible, but how would she come down when there was no room for her to turn?

"I was dizzy and sick with grief. But Timeh saw me, and down she came, without turning. She lifted her hoofs and put them down as a cat lifts and puts down wet paws. And in a moment she was safe on the meadow and frisking around me. Juri had been so worried that she made Timeh stop running and nosed her all over to make sure that she was unhurt by that climb. But tell me: will not a colt that risks its life to climb for a tuft of grass, run till its heart breaks for the master in later years?"

For the first time David spoke.

"Is she so wise a colt?" he said.

"Wise?" cried Elijah, his eye shining with joy at the opening which he had made. "I talk to her as I talk to a man. She is as full of tricks as a dog. Look, now!"

He leaned over and pretended to pick at the grass, whereat Timeh stole up behind him and drew out a handkerchief from his hip pocket. Off she raced and came back in a flashing circle to face Elijah with the cloth fluttering in her teeth.

"So!" cried Elijah, taking the handkerchief again and looking eagerly at the master of the Garden. "Was there ever a colt like my Timeh?"

"The back legs," said David slowly.

Elijah had been preparing himself to speak again, with a smile. He was arrested in the midst of a gesture and his face altered like a man at the banquet at the news of a death.

"The hind legs, David," he echoed hollowly. "But what of them? They are a small part of the whole! And they are not wrong. They are not very wrong, oh my master!"

"The hocks are sprung in and turned a little."

"A very little. Only the eye of David could see it and know that it is wrong!"

"A small flaw makes the stone break. At a rotten knot-hole the great tree snaps in the storm. And a small sin may undermine a good man. The hind legs are wrong, Elijah."

"To be sure. In a colt. Many things seem wrong in a colt, but in the grown horse they disappear!"

"This fault will not disappear. It is the set of the joint and that can never be changed. It can only grow worse."

Elijah, staring straight ahead, was searching his brain, but that brain was numbed by the calamity which had befallen him. He could only stroke the lovely head of the little colt and pray for help.

"Yesterday," he said at length in a trembling voice, "Elijah, as a fool, spoke words which angered his master. Back on my head I call them now. David, do not judge Timeh with a wrathful heart.

"Let the sins of Elijah fall on the head of Elijah, but let Timeh go unpunished for my faults."

"You grow old, Elijah, and you forget. The judgment of David is never colored by his own likes and dislikes, his own wishes and prejudice. He sees the right, and therefore his judgments are true."

"Aye, David, but truth is not merciful, and blessed above all things is mercy. When you see Timeh, think of Elijah. How he has watched over the colt, and loved it, and played with it, and taught it, by the hours, the proper manners for a colt and a mare of the Garden of Eden."

"That is true. It is a well-mannered colt."

Elijah caught at a new straw of hope.