THE NEXT DAY Amanda suffered deeply for her husband. Though he was running some fever and his hand was in a condition that moved Hugh to violent profanity, Dart insisted on going back to the mine and facing his detractors.
Tom Rubrick drove him to the mine, since Dart could not drive, and tried to reason with him. “Ye should’ve stayed in bed, lad, like the doctor says. Give ’em time to cool off up there. They’ll overlook a bit of a mistake, when they’ve cooled off. Ye meant no ’arm, I know.”
Dart twisted around and gave Tom a strange look.
“Such a look as I ever seen,” Tom told Tessie later, “like ’e was King George ’imself and I was a mad dog yapping at ’im. Yet I was fair sorry for ’im. It’s bad for ’im all right, and that poor young wife o’ ’is. They was all aginst ’im up on the ’ill.”
“Oh, dear. Oh, dear,” said Tessie. “What will they do?”
“I fear the old man’ll fire ’im. Mablett’s ’ot for it. Keeps yammering that Dartland’s dangerous. Tiger Burton’s acting foreman already.”
Dart’s interview with Tyson and Mablett in the General Manager’s Office that morning had been doomed from the start. Tyson, forced into a distressing muddle he had neither will nor strength to cope with, had already made up his mind, and Dart’s attitude did nothing to change it.
Dart stood before the manager and the superintendent, looking down at them with remote contempt. He offered no defense except the monotonous reiteration that he had given the signal and the hoistman had not answered.
It was his word against Riley’s, and Tyson, led by Mablett and reinforced by his own questionings of Riley and that young man’s excellent record, felt that he had no choice but to believe that Dart lied. That Dart had carried his insubordination to Mablett too far at last, and indulged in a foolhardy, melodramatic attempt to prove his own superiority, and thereby cost the life of a man. Indirectly, it was true—everyone knew of Craddock’s poor state of health—but the shock and fear of that moment waiting for the blast had been the death of the old miner.
So Dart left the hill in disgrace. He came home again at noon and Amanda suppressed a frightened cry when she saw his face. It was set in an iron mask, grim, relentless, the lines from his nose grooved to his indrawn mouth. It was, in fact, the face of Tanosay when he set out to avenge injustice. But for Dart, product of a more complicated civilization, there could be no quick release into revenge. There was no object that he knew of to wreak revenge upon. There was no explanation for the circumstance which had made of him a laughingstock.
“Oh, Dart—tell me. Talk about it—” Amanda pleaded, for since he had come home he had sat silent for hours, staring at the floor. She knelt down beside him, looking up into his face. “Please speak to me. Don’t shut me out. Maybe I can help.”
“There’s nothing to say,” he answered not looking at her. “They think I lied.”
“You’ve never lied in your life,” she cried hotly. “That much I know about you, though I know so little.”
He moved his bandaged hand and seemed to withdraw from her. He did not speak.
But still she tried again. “Dart—I don’t understand it very well—but could you—might you be wrong about giving the signal? Could you have had a sort of a—a hallucination?”
He looked at her then, and his eyes were black as winter ice. “I’m sure of no one else in the world,” he said, “but I am sure of myself.”
She got up from the floor, and turned from him. Yes, that’s true, she thought, and maybe that’s the trouble, too. He needs nobody. He doesn’t need me.—But during those moments of terror the night before when she had been in mortal fear for him she had tasted the agony of loss—and love.
Because of this she tried again. “Dart, you saved two lives, the Mexican’s and your own, by a great act of courage, and you tried to save Craddock’s. Hugh explained that to me. Doesn’t the thought of that help?”
He gave a sharp laugh. “They think I staged it all. Leave me alone. I don’t want to talk.”
She sighed, baffled and unhappy, then suddenly a memory came to her. Big Ruby’s cryptic warning last February—“There’s a guy at the mine’s got it in for your husband—just put a flea in hubby’s ear.”
“You have an enemy, Dart—Mablett—could he have engineered something, something to hurt you?”
Dart shrugged. “I’ve plenty of enemies, it seems, and Tyson too.” He rose violently. “Leave me alone, I tell you!” He plunged his injured hand through the sleeve of his jacket, and flung open the door.
“Dart, you’re not going off like that, not with that hand! Dart, please!” But he was gone.
Amanda threw herself across the bed. No help. No one to turn to. No way to help Dart, either. He would not be helped. And he had no job! This was the realization she had not yet faced. How often had she thought of this with longing, “I wish he would lose his job here.” But not like this, not in this way that hurt him more than anything else could have, reflecting on his competence, shaking the deepest structure of his pride.
What could she do for him—for them—and for the baby...?
After a while she got up and washed her face, and she walked out of the house toward town, turning past Bosses’ Row down Back Lane. The lane was deserted in the afternoon heat and she knocked on Big Ruby’s door.
An angry voice called from inside. “Who’s there? What do you want? I’m busy.”
Amanda knocked again.
Ruby’s flushed face appeared in the crack of the door. She had been drinking heavily, and she had a client inside, one of the miners from the graveyard shift. “What the hell d’you mean by bothering me?” she shouted.
The girl drew herself up and spoke fast. “My husband’s in trouble, no fault of his. I want to know what you meant by telling me there was a man at the mine had it in for him. I want to know who it was. Please....”
“Shut up, you little fool!” Ruby hissed, casting a quick glance behind her. She had already heard the story of the mine accident from her client. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, except your precious husband’s been fired, and good riddance, I guess.”
“But you said, when I talked to you last spring...” Amanda began. The door slammed in her face. She heard the sound of a bolt being drawn.
Amanda walked back up the lane. She had no plan. Her mind held no thoughts, she simply walked. She felt no emotion but a formless longing, for what she did not know. For rest, perhaps—for peace, for communion with something. Her mind floated in this longing, and her body continued to walk. It took her without her conscious knowledge to the ghost town and up the avenue of vanished palms to Calise’s mansion. And in this state that was close to somnambulism, she knocked on still another door. And this one was, after a little while, opened to her.
“Ma chère enfant!” cried Calise, shocked out of her preoccupation, when she saw the girl. “What is it?” She came out on to the porch beside Amanda, who shook her head in a dazed way.
“I don’t know why I came, Mrs. Cunningham, or just how I got here. But Dart’s in trouble. You must have heard the siren last night. Bad trouble. He’s been fired from the mine. Something happened, I don’t know exactly what. I went to Big Ruby...”
“Wait, child—you went to Big Ruby—who is she?”
“She’s one of the crib girls down in town. She knows something, something about a man who had it in for Dart. She won’t tell me. Dart’s gone off to the mountains, I guess, and he’s hurt. He won’t let anybody help him. I had to talk to someone. I don’t know why I came. I’ll go now. I just had to talk.”
And before Calise could speak Amanda turned and walked down the steps.
Calise did not try to stop her. She watched the little figure walk down the trail and disappear around the corner of the opera house, then she herself went back into her sanctuary.
There were two candles lit on the prie-dieu where she had been praying. On the piano there lay open a Bach cantata which she would presently sing in the twilight, releasing her soul in the pure melody untouched by human passion. Untouched by human passion, was it not towards this that her whole life was directed? Cleansing herself from human passion into purity. She stood beside her prie-dieu, and the light streamed on her, light that did not come from the candles, and mingling with the light as perfume mingles with the rose, she heard a voice speaking.
She sank to her knees holding her face up to the light; but it brought her no joy, for the light grew terrible and blinding, and it seemed that it asked of her what she could not do.
I cannot, she whispered in her heart, I can stand no more than I already have to bear. Surely at last I am forgiven.
The light faded, leaving her in darkness.
She bowed her head and tears ran down her cheeks, for she felt the dreaded drumming along her nerves, a thickness and a coarsening. Memories began to assault her helpless mind. Raoul’s face bent over hers with lust. The smell of the heavy scent she had worn. The smell of blood. Ah, not so soon again! she cried out in terror. What have I done that it should come so soon again....
And faintly beneath the din of her despair a different question chimed. “What have I NOT done?” But to this she would not listen.
Amanda’s pace slowed as she left the ghost town. The energy which had sent her on the two impulsive visits drained away. She became suddenly very tired, and when she reached home again, her feet dragged in the dust, it seemed more than she could manage to get up the steps into the shack. The familiar room had suddenly taken on the menacing quality of a dream not quite nightmare, but removed from it only by a thick veil which deadened sharp perception. She closed her eyes and a sudden sleep fell on her.
It was pain that woke her up, though she did not at first recognize it. She opened her eyes and stared up at the shadows beneath the dim rafters, waiting for a repetition of that strange summons. It was dark now in the room and she wondered vaguely how late it was. She heard the fretful buzzing of some insect in the kitchen, and the distant barking of a dog.
Her attention was pulled downward to her body; a formless ache in her back, which had not reached the first level of her attention, seemed to be gathering insistence. What’s that? she thought, still without identification. Did I hurt my back—walked too far—and she turned over onto her side. At once the bed and the room dissolved into a reeling merry-go-round, bitter liquid rose in her mouth and she retched violently. The nausea passed and the pain passed. She sat up on the edge of the bed and groped for the matches. Then she lit the kerosene lamp, and by its yellow flickering light she saw a dark stain on the bed where she had lain.
“Dart!” she called wildly, staring at the stain. “Dart!” She sat on the edge of the bed for a long time, while the pain like a summons from far outside herself came back and called her and ebbed away. “Stop it—” she whispered. “Make it stop—please,” and plain she saw her mother’s face bending over her—“Why, it’s all right, baby, just a bad dream—my silly baby, to be frightened.”
And for a few minutes Amanda believed this. The incantation had worked. Then the pain came back again, and the nausea.
She tottered to the kitchen sink and vomited. She heard herself whimpering, and the feeble, mindless sound shocked her into full awareness.
She set her jaw and straightened up as best she could. She crept out of the back door, and down the road to the hospital.
There was nobody in the waiting room, where one feeble electric light flickered incessantly.
“Hugh!” cried Amanda, sinking onto the rattan couch, and gasping while a pain seized her. When it passed she was too weak to search further, she slipped off her shoe and hammered with its heel on the floor, then lay panting.
She did not hear shuffling steps approach but she opened her eyes to see Maria peering down at her.
“Whassa matter with you? You sick?” Maria was dressed in a sleazy red satin and rhinestone earrings. Her hair was slick with brilliantine. She had been sneaking out to a baile in Mex town.
“Where’s the doctor—” whispered Amanda.
“Doc’s pretty drunk.” Maria hunched her shoulder in the direction of Hugh’s quarters. “All afternoon he drink mebbe so a bottle of hootch.”
“Get him somehow—make him come to me....”
Maria showed her beautiful teeth in a faintly pitying smile. She enjoyed drama. She particularly enjoyed the abasement of the snooty blonde girl on the couch. Just like everyone else, scared and messy when this happened. “You’re having a miss,” she said shrugging. “Doc can’t do nothing.”
“Maria—for God’s sake!” Amanda struggled up on her elbow. “Get the doctor—I can’t—I can’t stay here—I——”
Maria was suddenly frightened by the glistening pallor, the dilated staring eyes. She muttered something, and going back to Hugh’s bedroom she shook his shoulder violently. “Wake up, Doc! Wake up! Emergency.”
Hugh had taught her to use this word, and it penetrated through his stupor. He got on his feet cursing. He slapped water over his face with a wet towel. His vision cleared, and the formless rage that welled up in him focused on Maria in the red dress—sneaking out again—the bitch—and he lunged for her, his fist clenched.
She side-stepped quickly, and past her through the open door Hugh saw the huddled figure on the couch, heard a long moan.
“God damn it!” he muttered, and he staggered through into the waiting room. “How long has this been going on?” he growled to Amanda, his shaking fingers digging into her pulse.
She looked up at him through the haze of fear and pain. His eyes were bloodshot and half closed, his breath stank of bootleg liquor.
“I don’t know—about an hour, I guess. Hugh—help me—make it stop.”
“How the hell can I make it stop! Come on, get upstairs to bed.”
“I can’t. I can’t walk anymore.”
“I’m certainly not going to carry you. Buck up, Andy.
You’re not the first and you won’t be the last. —Here, you bitch—” he added to Maria, who had been gaping, fascinated. “Take her arm.”
Hugh took Amanda’s other arm, and they dragged her up the stairs and into one of the vacant rooms.
“Dart—” whispered Amanda when she lay on the cot. Her voice rose high and thin, she began to throw herself from side to side. “Dart—Dart, I want Dart!” She felt Maria’s rough hands on her shoulders holding her down. “Lay still now—whassa matter with you hollering like that. You’d ought to be shamed.” She heard Hugh’s voice thick and angry, swearing about something.
Then she felt the sharp prick of a needle in her arm. Alone, alone—she heard the words tolling like a funeral bell. “Alone—alone on a wide, wide sea, and never a saint took pity on...” Nobody took pity on. There was no answer.
Amanda lost her baby during the dawn hours, and after that she was unconscious from exhaustion and the whiffs of ether Hugh had given her. She did not know that Dart had come in at five, and had sat silently by her bed for an hour while she slept. Then, in response to Hugh’s call, he had gone downstairs to the hospital kitchen for coffee.
“She’ll do now,” said Hugh, shoving a steaming cup across the table to Dart. “Be okay in a week or so, unless there’s infection.”
“Infection?” repeated Dart.
Hugh shrugged. Amanda had been threatened with gross hemorrhage; it had been necessary to curette and then pack. “Depends upon how sterile the instruments were; my technique was sketchy, near as I remember.”
He spoke with a weary contempt. His head pounded, and he had already finished the remains of the whisky bottle.
“Poor kid,” said Dart, twisting the cup around with his left hand and staring into it. “Poor kid—it’s tough.”
Hugh gave a derisive laugh. “Tough nothing. Mighty lucky I’d say, with you bounced right out of your job. At least there won’t be three of you to live on grasshoppers and acorns.”
Dart raised his head and sent the doctor a long speculative look, as though he were going to speak. But he did not speak.
“Suppose I’ve got to dress that goddam hand of yours,” Hugh said. “Boy wonder—little Rollo and his daring rescue act, half a hand cheap at the price.”
“It doesn’t need dressing,” said Dart. “Go to bed and sleep your drunk off. I’m grateful for what you did for Amanda. Now shut up.”
“What d’you mean it doesn’t need dressing?” Hugh stared at Dart’s hand. “What the hell is that yellow stuff you’ve got on there?”
“A poultice made from one of the spurges.”
“My God—Indian stuff!”
“Exactly.” Level and expressionless, Dart’s gray eyes rested on Hugh’s disgusted face. Hugh’s next words died on his lips. He turned his head away. He walked out of the kitchen to his own room and slammed the door.
Dart returned to Amanda. He sat down beside the bed and waited.
When Amanda struggled up at last through layers of consciousness to blinding August sunlight, she saw Dart sitting there. But she gave him no welcome. She twisted her head away from him and stared at the scabrous papered wall beside the bed.
“Andy—” he said softly, he bent over and kissed her on her moist forehead where disheveled hair stuck in sweat-dampened whorls. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Terribly sorry.”
She did not answer. Painfully she moved her bruised body so that her back was towards him. She lay very quiet, staring at the wall.
This repudiation shocked him more than the loss of the baby had. Always she had been the one to cling, to beg, to assault his own self-contained inviolability.
“I didn’t mean to fail you—I couldn’t know. I had to be alone—you understand that-” He heard his own anxious voice with astonishment. Never complain, never explain—the motto which seemed to him most admirable was not then all inclusive.
“Andy, dear,” he said very low, “don’t turn from me like that. I know things are bad for us now—but we’ll fight through together, somehow.”
She spoke then, her lips barely moving, so that he had to bend down to hear. “ ‘Together.’ When you need nobody but yourself. When you’ve never done a single thing I wanted. When you’ve put everything else ahead of me—your profession, your Indian memories, even rocks and desert.”
He sank back on the chair looking at the back of her small, tousled head, the tender childish line of her neck. “That’s not quite fair,” he said quietly. “I love you....”
“I doubt it....” She closed her eyes so that she might not see the peeling wall. It seemed to her that she no longer knew what love was, but only hate. This loathsome place which had killed her baby, the evil of foul minds and tongues, and disgrace, sordid and besmirching all it touched. And this man who had failed her.
There was silence in the tiny hospital room. Down the road there came a rumble and the grinding of gears. Dart glanced out of the window to see one of the ore trucks from the mill, carrying the concentrates to Hayden Junction. A miner, Gus Kravenko, was sitting beside the driver and laughing. What’s he doing off shift at this hour? Dart thought, I’ll have to check——He averted his eyes from the window, and a black curtain descended in his mind.
He turned sharply back to the bed. “Andy—do you still want me to search for the Pueblo Encantado?”
His harsh question did not at first reach her through the heavy mists where she now drifted. Pueblo Encantado? The Enchanted City, the bright flower which had once beckoned so seductively. How strange that Dart should ask that.
“I don’t know...” she whispered. “So far away ... I’m tired, nothing’s real ... you’re not real...” Her voice trailed into an incoherent murmur.
Dart sat on quietly beside the cot. He had in that moment made up his mind, though there had been forerunners of his decision while he wandered over the mountains during the night. The values on which his life had been based were torn from him by injustice. His profession had repudiated him. And had not in fact his Indian heritage repudiated him, too? With Saba’s death the last link was broken, as she had wished it. Why, then, cling to a superstitious fear of taboo?
If the lust for gold were in fact a disease as he had always felt, then he would now forcibly inoculate it into his own blood. Gold meant power. It was for this the white men loved it. He would now act as white men did, using as they did for their own ends whatever help they could extort from the Indian. And further than that there was Amanda. If there were truth in her complaint that he had never done a single thing she wanted, it would be true no longer.
He turned all his concentration, and all his practical knowledge upon the problem. He reached in his pocket for pencil and paper, impatient at the awkwardness of his injured hand. The search must wait until it healed, of course. That would make the expedition probably the first week in September. An excellent time for the mountains. His salary would be paid for another month, Tyson had said. This would buy the necessary supplies. Supplies for how many? It was then that he debated the problem of taking Hugh. There would be advantage in having a companion, another gun, another pair of hands. Disadvantages, too, inherent in Hugh’s nature. Still, Dart decided finally in the affirmative. They’d have no whisky with them, and Hugh, whatever his peculiarities, deserved a break. It never occurred to him to take Amanda.
Amanda recovered rapidly. Hugh’s dire predictions as to infection were not realized. In a week she was up and around, heartily tired of Maria’s grudging ministrations, but she continued to stay on in the hospital. She found in herself a great reluctance to return home to Dart. She had suffered too much in that cabin, and too, there was fear. Fear of being overwhelmed again by passion. The baby’s death and that night of anguish had hardened her. She, too, felt betrayed as Dart did, though for different reasons, and she walled herself against him. She was sick of emotion, sick of love. There was one channel left for all her thoughts. The Pueblo Encantado.
For, as she recovered strength, she also recovered her interest in the search. Thanks to Dart’s change of mind, this search was now at last within the bounds of realization. But the character of her interest had changed. Too late—she thought during many night hours on her hospital cot—too late for the soft beautiful things it had promised her once. Too late for augmenting the baby’s comfort, too late for softening the harshness of her life with Dart, for bringing to their marriage the grace of luxury.
The gold that must be there—for still she had this certainty that it was there—now meant for her but one thing: escape. By means of her share she would be able to return to that other life. Independent of such men as Tim Merrill, independent of anyone’s bounty, she might do as she pleased. Travel around the world with her mother, perhaps a year in Paris. A new life in which all pain and failure would be forgotten.
Hugh had taken Dart’s capitulation in astounded silence for it came just as Hugh was preparing for renewed attack. Then as he listened to Dart’s carefully thought-out plans, Hugh could not hide his exultation. Dart, as Amanda had earlier, saw the green eyes gleam with a greedy light which revolted him, despite his decision to inoculate himself with the same disease. And he said coldly, “You’re quite aware that we may find nothing; and if we do find anything your share will be exactly one third. Also there’ll be no boozing on this expedition, and I suggest you get yourself in some kind of training before we start.”
“Yes, my lord,” said Hugh.
Dart looked at him keenly. A foreboding came to him, and he dismissed it, though it prompted him to say, “There’ll be danger, Hugh. You know that, don’t you? We might not come back. Are you sure you know what you’re getting into?”
Hugh’s lips tightened and he jerked his head. “You needn’t think you can frighten me out of it, Dartland. I’m going.”
So, it appeared, was Amanda. To all of Dart’s objections she presented an impervious front.
“The whole search was my idea in the first place, as you very well know, and I most certainly intend to be part of it.”
“But you’ll hold us up, Andy. You’re not strong enough for a thing like this, and my God, think what a fuss you made over a few bugs at the rancheria!”
“I’ve changed since then.”
Yes, she had changed, Dart thought. She smiled seldom during those three weeks of preparation, her blue eyes had lost their eager friendliness and avoided his. She seemed to have encased herself in a brittle skin of ice, and he could no longer read her thoughts.
Whether this were the sign of increased emotional maturity, or the sulky withdrawal of a hurt child, he did not know, though he was more acutely conscious of her than he had ever been. She lived on in the hospital, helping a little with the other patients, while he resumed the old familiar bachelor’s life in their shack. He made no further attempt to woo her back, after the first morning. He had come to believe that her attitude sprang from contempt. That she shared in the general Lodestone attitude that he had made a pernicious fool of himself, and it was resentment that finally quelled his objections to including Amanda on the expedition.
“Okay,” he said angrily. “Have it your own way, but you’ll be treated like another man. No quarter, no coddling. You apparently don’t wish me to consider you my wife, any more, so you won’t be.”
“I know,” she said. She looked at his lean tanned face, the stubborn black hair, the bandaged hand, and she turned away. “All I want is my share of the gold, then we can go our separate ways.” Her voice wavered but she added at once firmly, “That’s what we both seem to want, isn’t it?”
“So it seems,” answered Dart with equal coldness. They did not look at each other.
The three of them had drawn up an agreement in triplicate, apportioning whatever they might find into thirds. They had each signed it and retained a copy. Hugh put his in a locked desk drawer with Viola’s photograph. Amanda put hers in the fitted dressing case which she had moved to the hospital and kept under her cot. Dart carried his out to the Cunningham mansion and put it in his old trunk, when he went to retrieve Saba’s basket and the original Pueblo Encantado data.
He did not see Calise on this trip nor did he wish to. He went up the back staircase into the servant quarters without disturbing her.
She saw him, however, as he walked back down the trail, and though he held himself as straight as ever, and his effortless walk was as rapid, she saw an indefinable change, a diminishing of the clear honesty she had always known in him. Again, and more imperiously, she received an impression of what she must do, and this time she did not quite deny it. “Bientôt, bientôt,” she murmured, “quand j’aurais plus de force —” And she knelt down to pray.
So isolated were the Dartlands and Hugh from the life of Lodestone now that they had no difficulty in hiding their plans. Hugh, who alone still had contact with the mine, telephoned Mr. Tyson one day and abruptly announced that he was taking a vacation the beginning of September. Tyson protested that that was most inconsiderate at short notice, to which Hugh replied that he didn’t give a damn, that he didn’t expect to practice much longer in this rat hole in any case. They might do what they liked about it.
Tyson sighed. “Well—I suppose we can use a Globe doctor until you get back—By the way, Slater, how’s Mrs. Dartland? I heard she’d been sick.”
“She had a miscarriage. She’s okay now.”
“Too bad. Too bad. That whole Dartland business was most unfortunate—it bothers me—I used to be able to trust my judgment about men——”
“Well, you can stop bothering,” cut in Hugh. “The Dartlands are pulling out of here next week.”
So people knew that they were leaving, but nobody came near them except Tessie and Tom Rubrick.
Tom got no satisfaction from his farewell interview with Dart, who answered the shift boss’s clumsy sympathy in monosyllables.
“Did ye get another job then?” inquired Tom anxiously. “Did Mr. Tyson write a decent letter o’ recommendation for ye?”
“No,” said Dart.
“But I ’eard ’im fighting it out with Bull’ead, ’e said ’e was going to. A mort o’ the men’re for ye, Dart, they think ye ’ad a raw deal, no matter wot ye did.”
“Thanks,” said Dart.
“I wish ye was back m’self, I do. Tiger don’t do so good bossing the ’ole show, gets flustered-like, and the men’re grumbling a good bit. We’re running into ’eavy ground on the thousand, too, let alone ’alf me Cousin Jacks won’t work there on account o’ Craddock dying there.”
Dart stood up and walked to the door. “Good-bye, Tom. Thanks for coming.”
From her visits to Amanda Tessie got no satisfaction either. The girl seemed glad to see her, her eyes filled with tears when Tessie tried to comfort her about the baby. “It was naught but the shock o’ that dreadful night at the mine, dear—you’ll likely never have trouble again. Start another one soon, that’s the best way to forget—” but Amanda answered all sympathetic questions with silence.
Tessie’s warm heart ached for the Dartlands. She could feel that something was very wrong between the two of them, let alone the troubles you could see, like losing the baby and Mr. Dartland losing his job and leaving town under a cloud. But it certainly was queer the way the girl stayed on in the hospital after she was well—though Tessie almost alone in Lodestone did not impute this behavior to a guilty passion between Amanda and the Doctor. She was wiser than this, and shrewder, too. Amanda’s was the behavior of extreme innocence, not intrigue.
“It’s just that those two young Dartlands hasn’t learned how to get along,” she said to Tom. “When trouble comes they draw apart and think about themselves, instead o’ finding comfort in each other.” She patted her husband’s hand and he responded with an affectionate grunt.
“All the same—’’added Tessie thoughtfully—“I wonder where they’re off to, next week. It seems very strange.”
How strange Tessie could not know. Nor would she ever have understood the illusion that danced on the horizon for the three disparate human beings who were linked together in the quest. For each the fox light that lured them to the lost treasure took a different form, but for each the cold beckoning gleam sprang from the ashes of disillusion and bitterness.