Part 10 (1/2)

Jon Maddocks looked away from me out the window and said nothing. He knew, I thought. But I had to go on.

”There was a box on a rosewood table, and when I touched it I was so frightened that I had to run out of the room. Do you know what's in that box?”

I.

125.

”Why don't you open it and see?”

”Because I have a feeling that if I do something dieadful will happen.”

”When you're ready you'll open it,” he said, and I remembered his telling me that perhaps I had to earn the right to know. His a.s.surance made me angry. How could he possibly understand that I was trying to be my own woman, trying to fight for my life?

”I'll tell you something else,” I went on. ”Gail Cullen left that door unlocked for me deliberately. She knew I'd go in there. For some reason she wants to frighten and upset me. But I'm not going to open that box. Because if I do . . . Oh, what's the use! No one understands. I know what my husband would say if he were alive. He would tell me I can never be free until I open whatever needs to be opened. Hillary thinks that too. He thinks I should open all the boxes. But if I do, perhaps I really will go out of my mind!” I could hear my voice rising, and I hated its pitch.

”Whoa now,” Jon said as though he gentled Sundance. ”I think there's more of Persis Morgan in you than you know. You'll find that out when you stop fighting it.”

I backed down feebly. ”I didn't mean to explode like that. I'm sorry-”

”Don't be. Explode if you like. Maybe you hold in too many things. If you like, I'll go into that room with you. I'm pretty good at fighting ghosts, when I have to.”

”Yes.” Memory took me back. ”You helped me fight them once before, didn't you? All those years since then I've had a dream of riding a pony up the valley toward Old Desolate. Everyone has always said it was only a dream, but I've known it was real. I could hear hooves pounding after me because someone was following, and a terrible fear comes through in the dream. Why did you follow me? Why was I running away, and 126.

why did I feel so desperately that I had to ride toward the mountain?”

He hesitated for a moment before he answered. ”You were frightened. Terrified. You might have been hurt if you went on alone. There was no one else to ride after you just then, so I did. Though I didn't know myself what was happening at the time.”

I put my hand on the post at the top of the stairs to steady myself and closed my eyes. Now I could remember being thrown. I could remember arms about me and a young boy, frightened himself but holding me, trying to comfort me-the sort of comfort that I had yearned for ever since and never found again. But that child was gone, lost in the past, and so was the boy who had held her. I opened my eyes and looked into Jon Maddocks' face-the face of a stranger. I wanted to thank that boy for what he had done, but I couldn't speak such words to this man who seemed to be waiting for something more that must come from me, and that I didn't know how to give, no matter what the need of my grandmother.

”I'm going home soon,” I told him woodenly.

”That's a good way to escape what's real and present.”

I marched down the stairs and out of the house, not waiting to hear anything more Jon Maddocks might say to me, not daring to listen.

Hillary and Gail were coming back along the street and Hillary was gesticulating dramatically, using Domino as his stage. I was struck by the contrast between him and Jon. The one always exuberant, excited, always onstage; the other quiet, indrawn, giving little away, yet always watchful, perhaps a little arrogant-thinking what? It disturbed me that I should find myself caring, wanting to know.

As Hillary danced about, light on his feet as he would be in a stage duel, Gail followed him, entranced, the way women always did. I knew all about Hillary's fascination as an actor, 127.

though sometimes I had the curious feeling that I didn't know what he was like as a man. A new objectivity was stirring in me that I couldn't altogether welcome.

He saw me on the porch and stopped waving his arms. ”What a marvelous place, Laurie! Come down here-I want to show you something. Look-this was a saloon in here. There's what's left of a sign lying there that says, Open All Night.'”

I went to him quickly, putting new uncertainties behind me. When I bent to look through a broken doorframe, I could see sagging ceiling beams and a splintered bar with shelves behind it-all fallen in upon themselves. A small pine tree thrust upward where there had once been a roof.

”Can't you see the boys from Shoot-'em-up Corral coming in here, Laurie? I'll bet they really did. I'm beginning to get a feeling for all this. For the Opera House in Jasper, and for this little ghost of a town. It might be fun to put on Girl of the Golden West again. Put it on right there in Jasper-when people start coming in. Or perhaps I might even write a western play of my own.”

”We're leaving very soon,” I reminded him.

”But why should you?” Gail put in. ”You're not through yet, Laurie. You must stay a few more days-a week, at least.”

I knew what she meant. Enough time to open that box. Enough time to bring everything down like a pack of cards. Why should she want that? Why should she want Mark Ingram to be home free? And why should she say this if she had put the wreath on my door to frighten me away?

”I suppose we could stay a little while longer,” Hillary said. ”It's not going to make all that much difference, is it, Laurie?”

I recognized his excitement over this place. It wasn't fair to bring him out here and then turn off this new eagerness that kindled him.

”All right. But, please-not for long.”

”Did you find anything interesting in the house?” lie asked.

128.

I pulled out the strip of wallpaper to show him. ”Just this.” His imagination caught fire as he held up the bit of paper. ”Daisies-those mountain daisies! Years and years old!”

”From a room my grandmother lived in when she was a little girlHe gave the paper back to me. ”Keep it, Laurie. It will help you to remember your coming here.”

Companionably he linked his arm through mine, and as we walked along the street together I felt comforted. A little. Of course Hillary and Gail would like each other. He liked everyone-exactly the way Red did. But it didn't mean anything. I'd seen women turn calf's eyes at him before, and he still came back to me. Because I fired his imagination. He'd told me so once. Because J was a Pandora's box full of undisclosed secrets, he'd said. Sometimes I'd wondered uneasily whether I would still interest him once he knew everything there was to know. But at least he had understood how I felt about the wallpaper, where Jon Maddocks, the pragmatist, had not. I closed my mind against the thought of Jon. I mustn't let him in at all. In that direction lay danger. The connection with the past was too strong, and I must be careful.

We picked our way past stunted pine trees that grew here and there in a street made narrow because of mountain walls on either side. Gra.s.s waved in the wind wherever it had seeded in, and clumps of columbine, lavender and white, grew in rotting debris. In one corner flaming-red Indian paintbrush made an orangey slash of color.

I tried to let all confusion and inner conflict flow away so that I could accept this place, know all of it that remained. Already I loved these lonely remnants of what had once been a thriving mining camp. I wanted to carry them back with me in memory, just as I would carry away that tangible bit of wallpaper tucked into my pocket. All this was Domino, and somehow Domino was part of my flesh and blood and bones, as I had never expected that it would be.

If it hadn't been for Domino, I wouldn't be walking this street now. Perhaps I wouldn't even be alive. Persis had said I looked like Sissy Tremayne. There was kins.h.i.+p for me here with my own people, with my very roots. Hillary might use Domino as a springboard for his imagination, but for me it was reality-a past to which I still belonged, yearned to belong.

I walked on to the end of what had been a street, lost in a feeling for the past that had never touched me before. My eyes misted with grief for something I had never known, and I was closer here to Persis Morgan than I had felt standing beside her bed. If I were to stay a few days more to please Hillary, perhaps there was something I could do. Some way in which I could help her. A new resolve began to rise in me that I had never felt before.

The town had ended, running off into high gra.s.s that climbed the gulch, and we turned back toward our horses. Jon waited for us, astride Sundance. He looked right in a saddle, as a man should. He would never bother with fancy gaits in a horse, or proper posting with no saddle horn. A saddle horn was for roping, and Jon grew in his saddle, belonging to these western mountains as we did not. Even though Gail rode well, she looked a little like a dude, while Hillary and I were plainly easterners. Jon was real-a man who lived and worked in an environment he had loved and returned to. Perhaps he had never felt real in New York.

Something contrary was happening in me. Something that made me compare Hillary with Jon to Hillary's disadvantage. If this was disloyalty, it was also a clearer viewing than I'd ever had before. And if this must come, better that it should happen now, before our commitment to each other had gone too far. For Hillary as well as for me.

When we'd mounted, Jon came with us, leading the way.

130.

”Do you want to see what's left of the mine?” he asked, looking back at me. ”From the outside, that is?”

”I'd like that,” I told him. I might never come here again, and I was eager to see everything I could.

Gail and Hillary seemed uninterested, and rode on alone.

A switchback trail brought Jon and me to the top, where pieces of rusting machinery were strewn about, along with a few tumbledown sheds. The rusted wheels and frame of the ore car I'd noticed earlier lay on its side among twisted cables, while an equally rusted track ran into the mountain. Bare mounds of tailings fell away below us.

”Was there a smelter here?” I asked Jon.

”No. Smelters were mostly down on the plains. The ore was taken out by mule team to Jasper, where the railroad picked it up. Down there on your left is what they used to call the Glory Hole, where there was a big strike. There was a cave-in later, where a dozen men were buried under tons of earth. What's left of them is still down there.”

I s.h.i.+vered as we rode on, and the narrowed way seemed even more precarious. That was what mining had always been-the threat of sudden, cruel death-yet there had always been men willing to be miners.

”Is the entrance to the mine still open?” I asked.