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

straw — or at a straw man. How long has he been dead?’
    â€˜Died this spring.’
    â€˜Mrs. Berent said something tonight I didn’t understand, something about seeing the last of her husband?’
    â€˜Why, they’ve brought his ashes out here,’ Robie explained.
    â€˜There’s a place up in the mountains, a high pasture with a low rim of forest all around it, nine or ten thousand feet above sea level. Professor Berent used to say it seemed to be pressed against the sky; and you have that feeling when you’re up there,
that the sky is within arm’s reach overhead. He loved the spot, and he hoped his ashes might be scattered there. I think he knew he wouldn’t live long. That’s why they’re here. I judge Ellen would have preferred to come alone, but for once her mother apparently insisted.’
    Harland was silent, hushed in thought. They sat in darkness save for the fair light of the stars; and he remembered that for ten thousand years men had told tales under the quiet stars, sometimes beside a flickering little fire, huddling to its warmth for a while before they sought the solitudes of sleep. It was in darkness, surrounded by the mysteries of night, that the story-teller first found his imagination stimulated into speech, and there he first found his audience too. Robie’s cigarette glowed under a last drag, and he stubbed it out; and Harland said: ‘Well, if we’re starting early. . .’
    â€“ V –
    The fishing camp lay at the junction of two canyons, and the spot was walled in by steep wooded slopes rising four or five hundred feet above the level greensward where the cabins were placed. The riders reached there in late afternoon, the horses picking their surefooted way down the last sharp slant of rocky trail; and already in the bottom of the canyon shadows lay, so that it was as though they went down into a clear pool of faintly tinted water. The brooks sang in the high silence; and when they paused to alight, Mrs. Berent groaned and declared she would never let herself be set upon a horse again. ‘I feel as though I’d been paddled with a hammer,’ she cried, and demanded to be lifted from her horse, gasping with angry pain at every touch.
    Harland and Robie next morning fished downstream two or three miles to where the main brook plunged into a narrower canyon, with cascades a dozen feet high and deep pools alive with trout. Robie said this lower gorge extended six or eight miles till the brook came to desert lands and lost itself. ‘It’s hard walking,’ he admitted. ‘But there’s good fishing all the way. Sometimes
when we’re going out to the ranch I fish down through, have a horse meet me at the lower end.’
    â€˜I’d like to try that.’
    â€˜Better wait till we leave,’ Robie advised. ‘It’s too long a tramp down and back in one day.’ So this adventure was postponed.
    Harland at first, though he was intensely aware of her, saw little of Ellen. She took a horse every morning and rode away alone, reappearing just in time to change for dinner. But on the fourth day, ranch business would engage Robie; and when Harland heard this, preferring not to fish alone, he asked:
    â€˜What about a wild turkey?’ On the twenty-mile ride in from the ranch, they had seen three flocks of hens and chicks. ‘Danny told me to be sure and shoot one for him.’
    â€˜Go ahead,’ Robie assented. ‘They’re out of season, but we can spare one. Take a gun and ride around till you see a flock and then put your horse right at them. They hate to take wing, and they never try it unless they can get a level or a downhill run for a takeoff. If you can drive them uphill you can often get right among them. It’s tricky shooting, but you’ll have some fun out of it.’
    Ellen — they were at breakfast — spoke from across the table. ‘I can help you get