1
The Naulahka
A Story of West and East
1892
Rudyard Kipling
and
Wolcott Balestier
I
There was a strife 'twixt man and maid-- Oh that was at the birth o' time! But what befell 'twixt man and maid, Oh that's beyond the grip o' rhyme. 'Twas: 'Sweet, I must not bide wi' you,' And: 'Love, I canna bide alone'; For baith were young, and baith were true, And baith were hard as the nether stone. Auchinleck's Ride.
NICHOLAS TARVIN sat in the moonlight on the unrailed bridge that crossed the irrigating ditch above Topaz, dangling his feet over the stream. A brown, sad-eyed little woman sat beside him, staring quietly at the moon. She was tanned with the tan of the girl who does not mind wind and rain and sun, and her eyes were sad with the settled melancholy of eyes that know big mountains, and seas of plain, and care, and life. The women of the West shade such eyes under their hands at sunset in their cabin-doors, scanning those hills or those grassless, treeless plains for the homecoming of their men. A hard life is always hardest for the woman.
Kate Sheriff had lived with her face to the West and with her smouldering eyes fixed upon the wilderness since she could walk. She had advanced into the wilderness with the railroad. Until she had gone away to school, she had never lived where the railroad ran both ways. She had often stayed long enough at the end of a section with her family to see the first glimmering streaks of the raw dawn of civilisation, usually helped out by the electric light; but in the new and still newer lands to which her father's civil engineering orders called them from year to year there were not even arc l