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Page 69
Of all this, however, Liberty knew little and cared less. The
solitude appealed to her sense of freedom; she did not "hanker"
after a society she had never known. At the end of the first week,
when the doctor communicated to her briefly, by letter, the
convincing proofs of the death of her father and his entombment
beneath the sunken cliff, she accepted the fact without comment or
apparent emotion. Two months later, when her only surviving
relative, "Aunt Marty," of Missouri, acknowledged the news--
communicated by Doctor Ruysdael--with Scriptural quotations and the
cheerful hope that it "would be a lesson to her" and she would
"profit in her new place," she left her aunt's letter unanswered.
She looked after the cows and calves with an interest that was
almost possessory, patronized and played with the squaw,--yet made
her feel her inferiority,--and moved among the peaceful aborigines
with the domination of a white woman and a superior. She tolerated
the half-monthly visits of "Jim Hoskins," the young companion of
the doctor, who she learned was the doctor's factor and overseer of
the property, who lived seven miles away on an agricultural
clearing, and whose control of her actions was evidently limited by
the doctor,--for the doctor's sake alone. Nor was Mr. Hoskins
inclined to exceed those limits. He looked upon her as something
abnormal,--a "crank" as remarkable in her way as her patron was in
his, neuter of sex and vague of race, and he simply restricted his
supervision to the bringing and taking of messages. She remained
sole queen of the domain. A rare straggler from the main road,
penetrating this seclusion, might have scarcely distinguished her
from Waya, in her coarse cotton gown and slouched hat, except for
the free stride which contrasted with her companion's waddle.
Once, in following an estrayed calf, she had crossed the highway
and been saluted by a passing teamster in the digger dialect; yet
the mistake left no sting in her memory. And, like the digger, she
shrank from that civilization which had only proved a hard
taskmaster.
The sole touch of human interest she had in her surroundings was in
the rare visits of the doctor and his brief but sincere commendation
of her rude and rustic work. It is possible that the strange,
middle-aged, gray-haired, intellectual man, whose very language was
at times mysterious and unintelligible to her, and whose suggestion
of power awed her, might have touched some untried filial chord in
her being. Although she felt that, save for absolute freedom, she
was little more to him than she had been to her father, yet he had
never told her she had "no sense," that she was "a hindrance," and
he had even praised her performance of her duties. Eagerly as she
looked for his coming, in his actual presence she felt a singular
uneasiness of which she was not entirely ashamed, and if she was
relieved at his departure, it none the less left her to a delightful
memory of him, a warm sense of his approval, and a fierce ambition
to be worthy of it, for which she would have sacrificed herself or
the other miserable retainers about her, as a matter of course. She
had driven Waya and the other squaws far along the sparse tableland
pasture in search of missing stock; she herself had lain out all
night on the rocks beside an ailing heifer. Yet, while satisfied to
earn his praise for the performance of her duty, for some feminine
reason she thought more frequently of a casual remark he had made on
his last visit: "You are stronger and more healthy in this air," he
had said, looking critically into her face. "We have got that
abominable alkali out of your system, and wholesome food will do the
rest." She was not sure she had quite understood him, but she
remembered that she had felt her face grow hot when he spoke,--
perhaps because she had not understood him.
His next visit was a day or two delayed, and in her anxiety she had
ventured as far as the highway to earnestly watch for his coming.
From her hiding-place in the underwood she could see the team and
Jim Hoskins already waiting for him. Presently she saw him drive
up to the trail in a carryall with a party of ladies and gentlemen.
He alighted, bade "Good-by" to the party, and the team turned to
retrace its course. But in that single moment she had been struck
and bewildered by what seemed to her the dazzlingly beautiful
apparel of the women, and their prettiness. She felt a sudden
consciousness of her own coarse, shapeless calico gown, her
straggling hair, and her felt hat, and a revulsion of feeling
seized her. She crept like a wounded animal out of the underwood,
and then ran swiftly and almost fiercely back towards the cabin.
She ran so fast that for a time she almost kept pace with the
doctor and Hoskins in the wagon on the distant trail. Then she
dived into the underwood again, and making a short cut through the
forest, came at the end of two hours within hailing distance of the
cabin,--footsore and exhausted, in spite of the strange excitement
that had driven her back. Here she thought she heard voices--his
voice among the rest--calling her, but the same singular revulsion
of feeling hurried her vaguely on again, even while she experienced
a foolish savage delight in not answering the summons. In this
erratic wandering she came upon the spring she had found on her
first entrance in the forest a year ago, and drank feverishly a
second time at its trickling source. She could see that since her
first visit it had worn a great hollow below the tree roots and now
formed a shining, placid pool. As she stooped to look at it, she
suddenly observed that it reflected her whole figure as in a cruel
mirror,--her slouched hat and loosened hair, her coarse and
shapeless gown, her hollow cheeks and dry yellow skin,--in all
their hopeless, uncompromising details. She uttered a quick,
angry, half-reproachful cry, and turned again to fly. But she had
not gone far before she came upon the hurrying figures and anxious
faces of the doctor and Hoskins. She stopped, trembling and
irresolute.
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