 CHAPTER XVIII. AT THE RAINBOW'S END Helen's lips are drifting dust, Ileon is consumed with rust, all the galleons of Greece drink the ocean's dreamless space, lost with Solomon's purple show, restless centuries ago, stately empires wax and wane, Babylon, Barbary, and Spain. Only one thing, undefaced, lasts, though all the worlds lie waste, and the heavens are overturned. Dear, how long ago we learned, Frederick Lawrence Knowles. Starlet and Moonlet Leagues, the slow, fresh dawn, in the cool of the morning, Bransford came to the crest of the groundswell known as Fringeman's Ridge, and saw low-lying Arcadia dim against the north, a toy town huddling close to the shelter of Rainbow Range. He splashed through the shallow waters of Alamo, failing to a trickle before it sank in the desert sands, and so came at last to the mode of Arcadia. With what joyous and eager choking heartbeat you may well guess, not the needlessness of those swift pulses or of that joy, for Eleanor was not there. With Mrs. Hoffman she had gone to visit the Sutherlands at Rainbow's End, and Jeff could not go on, Arcadia rose to greet him in impromptu Roman holiday. Poor Bransford has never known clearly what chanced on that awful day. There is a jumbled, whirling memory of endless kaleidoscopic troops of joyful Arcadians, Billy White, Monte, Jimmy, Clark, the grim smiling sheriff, the judge. It was dimly born upon him, by one or both of the two last, that there were yet certain formalities to be observed in the matter of his escape from custody of the law and of the horse he had borrowed from the courthouse square. Indeed it seemed to Jeff in a hazy afterthought, that perhaps the sheriff had arrested him again. If so, it had slipped Jeff's mind, swaddled up in a gruesome horror of congratulations, hand-shakings, back-slapping, bad-nitch, and questions, heaped on a hero, heart-sick, dazed and dumb. Pleading weariness, he tore himself away at last, almost by violence, and flung himself down in a darkened bedroom of the Arcadian Atalanta. One thing was clear, headlight was there. A foresaid Smith Madison, but his nearest friends, Pringle, Beebe, and Ballinger, though they had hasted back to Arcadia to fight Jeff's battles, were ostentatiously absent from his hollow and hateful triumph. Johnny Dines had pointedly refused to share his night ride from Helms, and Jeff knew why, sadly enough, the gods take pay for the goods they give, and now that goodly fellowship was broken. The thought glung fast. It haunted his tossing and troubled slumbers, where Eleanor came through a sunset glow, swift-footed to meet him, where his friends rode slow and silent into the glimmering dusk, smaller and smaller, black against the sky. The Sutherland Place made an outer corner of Rainbow's Inn, bowered about by a double row of close and interlaced cotton woods on two sides by vigorous orchards on the other two. The house had once been a one-storyed adobe, heroically proportioned, thick walled, cool against summer, warm in what went by the name of winter. The old-time princely hospitality was unchanged, but Sutherland had bought lots in Arcadia of early days, and now the old gray walls of the house were smooth with creamy stucco, rod of gypsum from the white sands. The windows were widened, and there was a superimposed story overhanging wide and low. The gables were double-windowed, shingled and stained nut-brown. The gentle sloping roof shingled, dormered and soft green. The overflow projecting two broad verandas on either side, very like an umbrella, a bungalow with two birthdays, 1866, 1896. Miss Eleanor Hoffman had deserted veranda, rocking chair and hammock, with a sewing basket beside her, she sat on a pine bench under a cotton wood of 1867, ostensibly basting together a kimono, tinted like a dripping seashell and faced with peach blossom. The work went slowly, her seat was at the desert corner of the homestead, which was itself the desert outpost of a desert town, and her blood stirred to these splendid horizons. The mysterious desert scoffed and questioned, drew her with promise of strange joys and strange griefs. The iron-hard mountains beckoned and challenged from afar, wove her their spells of wavering lights and shadows. The misty warp and woof of them, shifting to swift fantastic hues of trembling rose and blue, and violet, half veiling, half revealing, steeps unguessed, and dreamed of sheltered valleys, and all the myriad voice of moaning waste and world-rimming hill cried, Faint, fitful undertones of drowsy cords, far peeling of elf and bells, that was pulsing of busy acyclias, tinkling of mimic waterfalls. The clean breath of the desert, groomed by, bearing a grateful fragrance of apple-boisons near, it rippled the deepest green of alfalfa to undulating sheen of purple and flashing gold. The broad fields were dwarfed to play-garden prettiness by the vastness of overwhelming desert to right to left, before, whose nearer blotches of black and gray and brown faded far off to a nameless shimmer, its silent leagues dwindling to immeasurable blur, merging indistinguishable in the burning sunset. East by up, over guarding the oasis, the colossal bulk of rainbow walled out the world, with grim-tiered cliffs, cleft only by the deep gashed gates of rainbow pass, where the swift river broke through to the rich fields of rainbow's end, bringing fulfillment of the fabled pot of gold, or unused to shrink and fail and die in the thirsty sand. Below the willow-channel wandered forlorn, rainbow no longer but lost river, to a disconsolate delta, waterless, save as infrequent floods, found turbulent way to the sink, where wild horse and antelope revisited their old haunts for the tender green luxury of these brief, belated springs. Incidentally Miss Hoffman's outpost commanded a good view of Arcadia Road, winding white through the black tar brush. When she looked, she might have seen a slow horseman, tiny on the bare plain below the tar brush, larger as he climbed to the gentle slope along that white winding road. But she bent industrious to her work, smiling to herself, half singing, half humming, a foolish and lillty little tune. A tisket, a tasket, a green and yellow basket, I wrote a letter to my love, and on the road I lost it. I grithed it, I grothed it, I locked it in a casket, I misted it, I lost it, and here Miss Hoffman did an unaccountable thing. Wise Penelope unraveled by night the work she wove by day. Like her in this, Miss Eleanor Hoffman now placidly snipped and ripped the basting threads, unraveled them patiently, and set to work afresh. Now there's no such thing as a ginkgo tree, there never was, though there ought to be, and tis also true, though most absurd, there's no such thing as a wallaby bird. Miss Hoffman was all in white with a white midi-blouse, dreamed in scarlet, a scarlet ribbon in her dark hair, a fine-length gold chain, showing at her neck, a very pretty picture she made, cool and fresh against the deep shade and the green, but of course she did not know it. She held the shaping kimono at Arne's length, admiring the delicate color, and fell to work again. Oh, the jolly miller he lives by himself! As the wheel rolls round he gathers in his spelf, a hand in the hopper and another in the bag, as the wheel rolls round he calls out, grab! So intent and preoccupied was she that she did not hear the approaching horse. Good evening! Oh! Miss Hoffman jumped, dropping the little suffering kimono. A horseman with bared head had rained up in the shaded road alongside. How silly of me not to hear you coming! If you're looking for Mr. Sutherland, he's not here, Mr. David Sutherland that is, but Mr. Henry Sutherland is here, or was a while ago, maybe half an hour since, he was trying to get up a set of tennis, perhaps they're playing, over there, on the other side of the house, and yet if they were there, we'd hear him laughing, don't you think? Mr. Bransford, for it was Mr. Bransford, and he was all dressed in clothes, waited with extreme patience for the conclusion of these feverish and hurried remarks, but I'm not looking for Sutherland, I'm looking for you. Oh! said Eleanor again, then after a long and deliberate survey, the light of recognition dawned slowly in her eyes. Oh! I do know you, don't I? To be sure I do, you're Mr.—the gentleman I met on Rainbow Mountain near Mayhill, Mr.—ah, yes, Bransford. Why, so I am, said Jeff, leaning on this apple horn. One half of Mr. Bransford wondered if he had not been making a fool of himself, and taking a great deal for it, the other half, though considerably alarmed, was not at all deceived. Miss Eleanor did not actually put her finger in the corner of her mouth. She merely looked as if she had. Oh! won't you, um, get down? She said helplessly. What a beautiful horse! Why, yes, thank you, I believe I will. He left the beautiful horse to stand with dangling reins, and came over to the bench, silent and rather grim. Won't you sit down, said Eleanor politely. Fine day, isn't it? It's a wonderful day, a marvellous day. A stupendous day, said this exasperated young man. No, I guess it's not worthwhile to sit down. I just wanted to find out where you lived. I asked you once before, you know, and you didn't tell me. Oh! didn't I? Oh! do sit down. You look so grumpy. Tired, I mean. Rather grudgingly she swept the sewing basket from the bench to the grass. Jeff's eyes followed the action. He saw, if you call it seeing, the snipped threads on the grass, the yet unpicked bastings white against the peach-pink facing, but he was a mere man, hard circumstanced, and these eloquent tidings were wasted upon his glumsy intellect, as had been the surprising good fortune of finding Miss Eleanor exactly where she was. Nerving himself with memory of the Quaker Lady at the masquerade, if indeed that had ever really happened, Jeff took the offered seat. The young lady matched two edges together, smoothed them, eyed the result critically, implied a nimble needle, then she turned clear and guileless eyes on her glooming seat-mate. You look older somehow than I thought you were, now that I remember, she observed, biting the thread. You've been away, haven't you? I thought you were going away yourself, so wild and fierce, said Jeff, evading, been away indeed. Eleanor threaded her needle. Mama was talking of going for a while, she said tranquilly, but I'm rather glad we didn't. We're having a splendid time here, and Mr. White's going to take us to the White Sands next week. He'll be down to-morrow, at least I think so. He's fine, he took us to Mescalero early in the spring, and the young people here at Rainbow's End are simply delightful. You must meet them. Listen, there they are now. I hear them. They are playing tennis. Come on up, and I'll introduce you. I can finish this thing any time." She tossed the poor kimono into the basket. No, said this unhappy young man rising. I believe I'll go on back. Goodbye, Miss Hoffman. I wish you much happiness. Why, surely you're not going now. There are some nice girls here. They have heard so much of you, but they say they've never met you. Don't you want, Jeff groaned, fumbling blindly at the bridle? No, I wish I'd never seen a girl. Why, that's not very polite, is it? Are you mad at me? said Eleanor, in a meek little voice. Mad? Oh, no, said Jeff bitterly. I'm just coming to my senses. I've been dreaming. Now I've woke up. Angry, I mean, of course. I just say it that way. Are you mad at me? Sometimes to be—to be—nice, Mr. Ranford. You needn't bother. Goodbye. But I'll see you again. Never. When you're not so cross, Jeff reached for his stirrup. Oh, well, if you're going to be huffy, never it is, then, by all means. No, wait, I must give you back your present. I have never given you a present. Some other man, doubtless, you should keep a list, said Jeff, with bitter and cutting scorn. The girl turned half away from him and hid her face with trembling hands. Her shoulders shook with emotion. Look the other way, sir, turn your head. You shall have your present back, and then, if you're so anxious to go, go. Miss Hoffman, I never gave you a present in my life, Jeff protested. You did, thubbed Eleanor. She turned upon him, stamping her foot. You said, when you gave it to me, that you hoped it would bring me good luck, and you forgotten. You'd better keep a list. Turn your head away, I tell you. She sank down on the bench. Infused, mazed, bewildered, Jeff obeyed her. She sprang to her feet. She was laughing, blushing, glowing. In her hand was the little gold chain. Now you may look. Hold out your hands, sir. Jeff's mind was whirling. He held out his hand. She laid a little gold locket in his palm. It was warm, that little locket. I have never seen this locket before in my life, gasped Jeff. He opened it. The little Eopus glared up at him. Eleanor, Charlie Gibson, Toby, Jeff, Jamie. The little Eopus stared unweaking from the grass. End of Chapter 18. End of Bransford of Rainbow Range by Eugene Manlove-Roads.