第54章

She explored the whole top of the rock, but that did not use up more than fifteen minutes, as it was so small that every part was visible from every other part.However, she found a great many wild flowers and gathered a huge bouquet of the audacious colors of nature's gardens, so common yet so effective.She did a little botanizing--anything to occupy her mind and keep it from the ugly visions and fears.But all too soon she had exhausted the resources of her hiding place.She looked down into the valley to the north--the valley through which she had come.She might go down there and roam; it would be something to do, and her young impatience of restraint was making her so restless that she felt she could not endure the confines of that little rock.It had seemed huge; a brief experience of freedom, a few hours between her and the night's horrors and terrors, and it had shrunk to a tiny prison cell.Surely she would run no risk in journeying through that trackless wilderness; she need not be idle, she could hasten her destiny by following the creek in its lonely wanderings, which must sooner or later bring it to the river.The river!

She was about to get the two remaining eggs and abandon her stronghold when it occurred to her that she would do well to take a last look all around.She went back to the side of the rock facing the house.

The woman had suspended knitting and was gazing intently across the hollow to the west, where the road from the north entered the landscape.Susan turned her eyes in that direction.Two horsemen at a gallop were moving southward.The girl was well screened, but instinctively she drew still further back behind the bushes--but not so far that the two on horseback, riding so eagerly, were out of her view.The road dipped into the hollow.

the galloping horsemen disappeared with it.Susan shifted her gaze to the point on the brow of the hill where the road reappeared.She was quivering in every nerve.When they came into view again she would know.

The place she was watching swam before her eyes.Suddenly the two, still at a gallop, rose upon the crest of the hill.Jeb and her Uncle Zeke! Her vision cleared, her nerve steadied.

They did not draw rein until they were at the road gate of the little house.The woman rose, put down her knitting in the seat of her stiff, rush-bottomed rocker, advanced to the fence.The air was still, but Susan could not hear a sound, though she craned forward and strained her ears to the uttermost.She shrank as if she had been struck when the three began to gaze up at the rock--to gaze, it seemed to her, at the very spot where she was standing.Was her screen less thick than she thought?

Had they seen--if not her, perhaps part of her dress?

Wildly her heart beat as Jeb dismounted from his horse the mare behind which she had made her wedding journey--and stood in the gateway, talking with the woman and looking toward the top of the rock.Zeke Warham turned his horse and began to ride slowly away.He got as far as the brow of the hill, with Jeb still in the gateway, hesitating.Then Susan heard:

"Hold on, Mr.Warham.I reckon you're right."Warham halted his horse, Jeb remounted and joined him.As the woman returned toward the back doorstep, the two men rode at a walk down into the hollow.When they reappeared it was on the road by which they had come.And the girl knew the pursuit in that direction--the right direction--was over.Trembling and with a fluttering in her breast like the flapping of a bird's wings, she sank to the ground.Presently she burst into a passion of tears.Without knowing why, she tore off the wedding ring which until then she had forgotten, and flung it out among the treetops.A few minutes, and she dried her eyes and stood up.The two horsemen were leaving the landscape at the point at which they had entered it.The girl would not have known, would have been frightened by, her own face had she seen it as she watched them go out of her sight--out of her life.She did not understand herself, for she was at that age when one is no more conscious of the forces locked up within his unexplored and untested character than the dynamite cartridge is of its secrets of power and terror.