Read Online Leave Her to Heaven by Ben Ames Williams - Free Book Online Page A

over the brink. When the riders came to the spot, it seemed impossible that anything larger than a fox could have descended the broken declivity;
but the horses were gone, already out of sight in the wooded deeps.
    â€˜Did they go down there?’ Harland cried, doubting his own eyes; and Lin laughed.
    â€˜Sure. They’re a mile away by now. They’re like mountain goats, and just about as wild.’ He was tremendously proud of this success, and Harland to please him asked many wondering questions, till presently they moved on, now homeward bound.
    Half an hour after they saw the horses, they emerged upon a tree-clad rim from which they looked out across a high grassy basin perhaps a mile wide. Lin checked his horse in the fringe of trees; and Harland, pausing beside him, saw three mounted figures sitting quietly in the center of the basin. He recognized at once Robie’s big, light-colored hat, and the two people with him were clearly feminine; but far away across the basin another rider went at a swinging gallop, describing a circle around these three; and even at a distance Harland was sure this was Ellen.
    Tess said in quick dismay: ‘Oh, I didn’t know they were coming up here today. Get back, Lin.’ Lin reined his horse among the trees again. ‘They won’t want us butting in,’ Tess explained, and Harland too retreated; and for long minutes they stayed there watching, while Ellen rode at a headlong run the circuit of the basin.
    When she passed below where they hid, Harland saw that she held something in the curve of her left arm, pressed against her breast as a mother holds a child; and her right arm swung in the motion of a sower, regularly as a pendulum; and he understood what it was she thus broadcast upon the rocky sward, and he thought of a priestess at her rites, and he thought of old pagan festivals, and he thought there was a pounding and barbaric rhythm in the thudding of her horse’s hooves, and he thought of the ride of the Valkyries. For there was a singing in the way she rode, erect and sure, her head high and proud; and he heard that singing in his blood while he watched her bring her father’s ashes to the spot the dead man she loved had chosen, to this high meadow pressed against the sky.

    The three watchers stayed hidden, and they saw her turn at last, still at full gallop, and plunge into the forest at the border of the basin, diagonally across from them. So she disappeared; and Harland heard a choked sound beside him and turned and saw that Tess had tears in her eyes; but she smiled at him.
    â€˜That was — sort of wonderful, wasn’t it,’ she said frankly. ‘Professor Berent was a fine old man.’
    Harland nodded, and Lin said in a low voice: ‘That’s the trail to camp, the way she went.’ Even the boy had felt the solemn beauty of this scene. He turned his horse back among the trees. ‘Come on,’ he called softly. ‘We’ll go home another way so they won’t know we were here.’
    They went headlong, plunging down rocky draws, racing at full gallop through the forests; and the horses, instantly responsive to the neck pressure of the reins or even to the inclination of the rider’s body, wove through the trees in a graceful measure like a dance. They reached camp before the others. Walking to the lodge from the corral where they left their horses, Tess said warningly: ‘We mustn’t let them know we were watching, Lin.’
    â€˜What do you think?’ he demanded, scornfully indignant at the suggestion.
    She touched his arm in affectionate reassurance. ‘I know you won’t,’ she assented. ‘But I’m glad we saw them, all the same.’ Lin nodded soberly, and she said to Harland: ‘It was — sweet, wasn’t it, Mr. Harland.’
    â€˜I’m glad we were there, yes,’ he agreed.
    While Harland was in his shower, Robie and Mrs. Berent and Ruth