Part 36

“Well, what did you do last night after we left?”

“Oh, took a stroll,” Chris answered.

Lute’s eyes were quizzical as she asked with a tentativeness that was palpably assumed, “With—a—with Mr. Barton?”

“Why, yes.”

“And a smoke?”

“Yes; and now what’s it all about?”

Lute broke into merry laughter. “Just as I told you that you would do. Am I not a prophet? But I knew before I saw you that my forecast had come true. I have just left Mr. Barton, and I knew he had walked with you last night, for he is vowing by all his fetishes and idols that you are a perfectly splendid young man. I could see it with my eyes shut. The Chris Dunbar glamour has fallen upon him. But I have not finished the catechism by any means. Where have you been all morning?”

“Where I am going to take you this afternoon.”

“You plan well without knowing my wishes.”

“I knew well what your wishes are. It is to see a horse I have found.”

Her voice betrayed her delight, as she cried, “Oh, good!”

“He is a beauty,” Chris said.

But her face had suddenly gone grave, and apprehension brooded in her eyes.

“He’s called Comanche,” Chris went on. “A beauty, a regular beauty, the perfect type of the Californian cow-pony. And his lines—why, what’s the matter?”

“Don’t let us ride any more,” Lute said, “at least for a while. Really, I think I am a tiny bit tired of it, too.”

He was looking at her in astonishment, and she was bravely meeting his eyes.

“I see hearses and flowers for you,” he began, “and a funeral oration; I see the end of the world, and the stars falling out of the sky, and the heavens rolling up as a scroll; I see the living and the dead gathered together for the final judgement, the sheep and the goats, the lambs and the rams and all the rest of it, the white-robed saints, the sound of golden harps, and the lost souls howling as they fall into the Pit—all this I see on the day that you, Lute Story, no longer care to ride a horse. A horse, Lute! a horse!”

“For a while, at least,” she pleaded.

“Ridiculous!” he cried. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you well?—you who are always so abominably and adorably well!”

“No, it’s not that,” she answered. “I know it is ridiculous, Chris, I know it, but the doubt will arise. I cannot help it. You always say I am so sanely rooted to the earth and reality and all that, but—perhaps it’s superstition, I don’t know—but the whole occurrence, the messages of Planchette, the possibility of my father’s hand, I know not how, reaching, out to Ban’s rein and hurling him and you to death, the correspondence between my father’s statement that he has twice attempted your life and the fact that in the last two days your life has twice been endangered by horses—my father was a great horseman—all this, I say, causes the doubt to arise in my mind. What if there be something in it? I am not so sure. Science may be too dogmatic in its denial of the unseen. The forces of the unseen, of the spirit, may well be too subtle, too sublimated, for science to lay hold of, and recognize, and formulate. Don’t you see, Chris, that there is rationality in the very doubt? It may be a very small doubt—oh, so small; but I love you too much to run even that slight risk. Besides, I am a woman, and that should in itself fully account for my predisposition toward superstition.

“Yes, yes, I know, call it unreality. But I’ve heard you paradoxing upon the reality of the unreal—the reality of delusion to the mind that is sick. And so with me, if you will; it is delusion and unreal, but to me, constituted as I am, it is very real—is real as a nightmare is real, in the throes of it, before one awakes.”

“The most logical argument for illogic I have ever heard,” Chris smiled. “It is a good gaming proposition, at any rate. You manage to embrace more chances in your philosophy than do I in mine. It reminds me of Sam—the gardener you had a couple of years ago. I overheard him and Martin arguing in the stable. You know what a bigoted atheist Martin is. Well, Martin had deluged Sam with floods of logic. Sam pondered awhile, and then he said, ‘Foh a fack, Mis’ Martin, you jis’ tawk like a house afire; but you ain’t got de show I has.’ ‘How’s that?’ Martin asked. ‘Well, you see, Mis’ Martin, you has one chance to mah two.’ ‘I don’t see it,’ Martin said. ‘Mis’ Martin, it’s dis way. You has jis’ de chance, lak you say, to become worms foh de fruitification of de cabbage garden. But I’s got de chance to lif’ mah voice to de glory of de Lawd as I go paddin’ dem golden streets—along ‘ith de chance to be jis’ worms along ‘ith you, Mis’ Martin.’”

“You refuse to take me seriously,” Lute said, when she had laughed her appreciation.

“How can I take that Planchette rigmarole seriously?” he asked.

“You don’t explain it—the handwriting of my father, which Uncle Robert recognized—oh, the whole thing, you don’t explain it.”

“I don’t know all the mysteries of mind,” Chris answered. “But I believe such phenomena will all yield to scientific explanation in the not distant future.”

“Just the same, I have a sneaking desire to find out some more from Planchette,” Lute confessed. “The board is still down in the dining room. We could try it now, you and I, and no one would know.”

Chris caught her hand, crying: “Come on! It will be a lark.”