“He’s called Comanche,” Chris went on. “A beauty, a regular beauty, the perfect type of the Californian cow- pony. And his lines—why, what’s the matter?”
Don’t let us ride any more,” Lute said, “at least for a while. Really, I think I am a tiny bit tired of it, too.”
He was looking at her in astonishment, and she was bravely meeting his eyes.
“I see hearses and flowers for you,” he began, “and a funeral oration; I see the end of the world, and the stars falling out of the sky, and the heavens rolling up as a scroll; I see the living and the dead gathered together for the final judgement, the sheep and the goats, the lambs and the rams and all the rest of it, the white-robed saints, the sound of golden harps, and the lost souls howling as they fall into the Pit—all this I see on the day that you, Lute Story, no longer care to ride a horse. A horse, Lute! a horse!”
“For a while, at least,” she pleaded.
“Ridiculous!” he cried. “What’s the matter? Aren’t you well?—you who are always so abominably and adorably well!”
“No, it’s not that,” she answered. “I know it is ridiculous, Chris, I know it, but the doubt will arise. I cannot help it. You always say I am so sanely rooted to the earth and reality and all that, but—perhaps it’s superstition, I don’t know—but the whole occurrence, the messages of Planchette, the possibility of my father’s hand, I know not how, reaching, out to Ban’s rein and hurling him and you to death, the correspondence between my father’s statement that he has twice attempted your life and the fact that in the last two days your life has twice been endangered by horses—my father was a great horseman—all this, I say, causes the doubt to arise in my mind. What if there be something in it? I am not so sure. Science may be too dogmatic in its denial of the unseen. The forces of the unseen, of the spirit, may well be too subtle, too sublimated, for science to lay hold of, and recognize, and formulate. Don’t you see, Chris, that there is rationality in the very doubt? It may be a very small doubt—oh, so small; but I love you too much to run even that slight risk. Besides, I am a woman, and that should in itself fully account for my predisposition toward superstition.
“Yes, yes, I know, call it unreality. But I’ve heard you paradoxing upon the reality of the unreal—the reality of delusion to the mind that is sick. And so with me, if you will; it is delusion and unreal, but to me, constituted as I am, it is very real—is real as a nightmare is real, in the throes of it, before one awakes.”
“The most logical argument for illogic I have ever heard,” Chris smiled. “It is a good gaming proposition, at any rate. You manage to embrace more chances in your philosophy than do I in mine. It reminds me of Sam—the gardener you had a couple of years ago. I overheard him and Martin arguing in the stable. You know what a bigoted atheist Martin is. Well, Martin had deluged Sam with floods of logic. Sam pondered awhile, and then he said, ‘Foh a fack, Mis’ Martin, you jis’ tawk like a house afire; but you ain’t got de show I has.’ ‘How’s that?’ Martin asked. ‘Well, you see, Mis’ Martin, you has one chance to mah two.’ ‘I don’t see it,’ Martin said. ‘Mis’ Martin, it’s dis way. You has jis’ de chance, lak you say, to become worms foh de fruitification of de cabbage garden. But I’s got de chance to lif’ mah voice to de glory of de Lawd as I go paddin’ dem golden streets—along ‘ith de chance to be jis’ worms along ‘ith you, Mis’ Martin.’”
“You refuse to take me seriously,” Lute said, when she had laughed her appreciation.
“How can I take that Planchette rigmarole seriously?” he asked.
“You don’t explain it—the handwriting of my father, which Uncle Robert recognized—oh, the whole thing, you don’t explain it.”
“I don’t know all the mysteries of mind,” Chris answered. ” But I believe such phenomena will all yield to scientific explanation in the not distant future.”
“Just the same, I have a sneaking desire to find out some more from Planchette,” Lute confessed. “The board is still down in the dining room. We could try it now, you and I, and no one would know.”
Chris caught her hand, crying: “Come on! It will be a lark.”
Hand in hand they ran down the path to the tree-pillared room.
“The camp is deserted,” Lute said, as she placed Planchette on the table. “Mrs. Grantly and Aunt Mildred are lying down, and Mr. Barton has gone off with Uncle Robert. There is nobody to disturb us.” She placed her hand on the board. “Now begin.”
For a few minutes nothing happened. Chris started to speak, but she hushed him to silence. The preliminary twitchings had appeared in her hand and arm. Then the pencil began to write. They read the message, word by word, as it was written:
There is wisdom greater than the wisdom of reason. Love proceeds not out of the dry-as-dust way of the mind. Love is of the heart, and is beyond all reason, and logic, and philosophy. Trust your own heart, my daughter. And if your heart bids you have faith in your lover, then laugh at the mind and its cold wisdom, and obey your heart, and have faith in your lover.—Martha.
“But that whole message is the dictate of your own heart,” Chris cried. “Don’t you see, Lute? The thought is your very own, and your subconscious mind has expressed it there on the paper.”
“But there is one thing I don’t see,” she objected.
“And that?”
“Is the handwriting. Look at it. It does not resemble mine at all. It is mincing, it is old-fashioned, it is the old- fashioned feminine of a generation ago.”
“But you don’t mean to tell me that you really believe that this is a message from the dead?” he interrupted.
“I don’t know, Chris,” she wavered. “I am sure I don’t know.”
“It is absurd!” he cried. “These are cobwebs of fancy. When one dies, he is dead. He is dust. He goes to the worms, as Martin says. The dead? I laugh at the dead. They do not exist. They are not. I defy the powers of the grave, the men dead and dust and gone!
“And what have you to say to that?” he challenged, placing his hand on Planchette.
On the instant his hand began to write. Both were startled by the suddenness of it. The message was brief:
