Once she called Central up on the telephone. Central answered that the Ridge line had been cut. Such duties as men's hands could not do round ranch houses, she finished in a dream, turning with a touch the house into a home; flowers for the middle of the big table, dishes pitchforked down replaced in order, corner cobwebs speared with a duster on a broom, Navajo rugs uncurled and squared, stale cooking expelled from littered shelves, flies pursued to the last ditch, breaks in the mosquito wire round the piazza tacked up, heaps of mended socks and overalls sent out to the bunk house for the ranch hands, milk cans buried—it had always been one of the absurdities she was going to reform, that people used canned milk in a cow country; but, unfortunately, the obstacle to that reform was that cows could not be milked on horseback.

After mid-day meal, she ensconced herself in a steamer chair on the piazza facing the mountain; but her book lay face downward. It was a book on coniferous trees. She had thought the Valley monotonous when she had first come back. Now she knew it never remained the same for two whole hours. The dazzling white of morning had given place to the yellow glow of afternoon. The River that had flowed quicksilver now swept seaward pure amber rilled with gold. The fleece clouds herded by wandering winds had massed to towering cumulus where the sheet lightnings played; and the Mountain where the silver snow-cross had glistened in the morning seemed to have changed perspective, to have retreated and withdrawn to a weird upper world. You no longer saw the wind-blown cataracts. Purpling shadows, palpable sabling mournful ghost-forms, folded and wrapped the Ridge with here and there shafts of slant light, yellow as bars of gold. You could no longer hear the rampant roar of streams disimprisoned from snow by mid-day sun. With the slant light came the sibilant hush, the quiet tangible.

She reclined very still in the steamer chair. Life and love and mystery wrapped her round, the great reverie of the race, the ecstasy of devotees that sent to death and crusade in the Middle Ages, the lovelight of life brooding warm and radiant. She no longer saw the shining pageant of sunlight on the argent fields of an infinite universe; the sparks and spangles of light in silver cataracts; a world veiled in gold mist, flame-fired of joy, little cressets of rose edging every sky-line. She was possessed, obsessed, bathed, enveloped in a flame of new life. If she thought at all, 'twas in the symbol of the old Apostle, "in Him we live and move and have our being." She recalled that God had been defined in the consciousness of the race as Love. Deep draughts of new existence whelmed her. No longer life coursed somnolent through unconscious veins. Life ran riotous of gladness tingling to a living joy so poignant it became pain. Was it fool-joy born of swifter pulse and time-old inheritance in the flesh? Was it the rhapsody of self-hypnotism, which ancients would have called vision? Of such dreams does creation spring full born and enfleshed. Of such dreams does heroism laugh at death. Of such dreams does life invest the daily round with rain-bow mist, with the spectrum gamut of all the colors that blend to the pure white light of daily life. As a lense splits up light, so love had brought out the hidden colors of existence, of eternity; as she dreamed, eternity itself seemed short.

Then came the restlessness that had shaken Wayland on the Ridge the night before, the fire that tests the vessel; and whether the life go to pieces depend on whether the vessel be both strong and clean. Yet she was not afraid. She remembered their talk the night before of the snow flake falling to the same law as the avalanche; and was she not also a part of the Great Law?

She knew he could not be free till six. She must not go up to the Ridge. Last night, she had gone heedlessly. She could never go so again. Then, she realized why the Missionary's wife had linked her fate with Williams'—a frail bit of china putting itself to the coarse uses of earthenware—washing, scrubbing, sandpapering three generations of morals and bodies to make an ideal real. It was Wayland who had first described Mrs. Williams in that metaphor: "a piece of Bisque or Dresden," he had said, "and what those lousy Indians need is a wooden wash tub with lots of soft soap." Then, she wanted to see Mrs. Williams, to study her with this new knowledge.

A picket fence in imitation of a home in the East ran round the Mission House. Pitiful attempts at gardening lined the gravel entrance, periwinkle dried up in the blazing Western sun, sickly scented geraniums that shrivelled to the night frost, altheas that did better but refused to bloom. "They don't transplant East to West, any better than they do West to East. Better follow the Senator's advice and domesticate our Western ones." Then, the whimsical thought came perhaps that was what her father had done with her.

The drone of a man's voice from the Mission Parlor surprised her; for Mr. Williams had gone off with her father to the Upper Pass.

"Here is Miss Eleanor, herself! We were just speaking about you, Eleanor! This is an old friend of your father's, Mr. Matthews from Saskatchewan!"

A little woman in gray drew Eleanor inside the Mission Parlor, a little woman with a white transparent skin trenched by lines of care, but somehow, when you looked twice, they were lines of beauty chiseled by time. She was garbed in gray and her hair was almost white, but, from the first time Eleanor had looked at her hands, the girl wanted to kiss and cover them with her own—they were such beautifully kept hands but so gnarled and misshapen with toil. There had been only one child; but there were eighty Indian children in the Mission School. Had the love dream paid toll for such toil—Eleanor had asked herself when first she had seen the Missionary's wife. Now she knew that, whether the love dream paid toll or not, love would do and was doing the same thing time without end and everywhere.

Then, she became aware of the massive form of a man topped by an enormous head of white hair rising in links and hinges from a chair in the corner till his figure towered above the little woman.

"So this—is Eleanor—MacDonald? Well, well, well!"

He was shaking hands at each word. "A knew your grandfather well. Many's the time we have raced the dogtrains down MacKenzie River an' the canoes down the Saskatchewan! 'Twas your grandfather set the bagpipes skirling when Governor Simpson used to come galloping down the Columbia in the forties with his paddlers splitting the wind, a dark fearsome man, child, but a brave one, tho' his heart was hard as his hand, and his hand was iron—Bras de Fer, Arm of Iron, the Indians called him; for his left hand, he lost in a duel; and his false hand was a true hand of iron metal that made many a lazy voyageur bite the dust. Bless me, but you are a MacDonald to your dainty feet—" holding her off from him at arm's length. "Eyes true to pedigree, and the curly hair, and the short upper lip, the only one of all the MacDonalds that's kept the race type. 'Tis good to see you! A'm right glad to see you! A'm gladder than you know-"

Eleanor did not wait for any second thought. "And did you know my mother's people, too?"

The old man sat back in his corner. "No, A cannot say A did! A had left the Company an' was building railway bridges in the Rockies when your father left Canada."

She felt the hot flush mount.

"Such an absurd thing, Eleanor," Mrs. Williams was explaining. "Mr. Matthews came by the Holy Cross last night. Mr. Wayland told Calamity to show him which way to turn; and she sent him the wrong way, to the cow-boy camp, you know! He had to sleep out all night at our very door. Such a shame! That put him so late that he missed Mr. Williams. You know they have gone to the Upper Pass and can't possibly be back for weeks—excuse me, some of my school people seem to want me," and she flitted from the room. To Eleanor, her life seemed a constant flitting at the beck of bootless duties, nagging duties that only an expert time keeper of Heaven could credit.

"Yes! Sent me a mile along the road in the wrong direction—into a nest of mid-night birds. A nice bunch o' beauties, too, hatching some Devil plot to ruin the poor sheepmen! A man in a white vest was there, who by the same token didn't belong; tho' A'm no so sure he was any better than his company. They didn't see me! A didna' just speak to them, but A heard them plain enough,—'leave for the South at once;' and 'crowd 'em to beat Hell,' and 'send 'em over without a push' an' 'see that no harm comes to the boy'—Eh, why, what is the matter?"

Eleanor had sprung forward with white lips.

"It's Fordie! He's taking the sheep to the Rim Rocks with the Mexican herders. Don't frighten his mother! It may not be too late! He may not have reached the Rim—"

"Let's telephone that Ranger fellow?"

Then, it all dawned on her, the deadly, suave, incredibly malicious pre-planned thing!

"The wires had been cut since morning," she said.



CHAPTER VII

WHILE LAW MARKS TIME, CRIME SCORES

They did not tell the boy's mother.

The German cook hitched the fastest bronchos to the yellow buckboard with the front wheel brake; and, the old frontiersman flourishing the reins, they had whisked off for the Ridge trail before Mrs. Williams could return to the Mission Parlor.

"The Ranger will be able to tell whether the sheep have passed down the Ridge," she explained.

The old man caught the light on her face as she spoke the name. It was like the flash in the dark that betrays a diamond, or the scintilla of light through the leaves that tells of an Alpine lake; but he made no comment except to the ponies.

"Go it, little ones! Make time! Split the wind! Show y'r heels! Tear the air to tatters! there!" And he whirled the whip with the skill of all the old Adam stirring within him, while the buckboard went forward with a bounce.

"We can't take the wagon up yon Ridge trail—"

"No, but I can climb straight up and not mind the switch back, if you'll wait."

He muttered some commonplace about "true Westerner;" and, springing out, she had gone scrambling up the slope avoiding delay of the zig-zag by climbing almost straight.

Quizzically, the old man gazed after her; the first hundred feet were easy, a mossed slope with padded foot-hold. Then came steep ground slippery with pine needles; but the mountain laurel and ground juniper gave hand grip; and she swung herself up past the third tier of the switch back where the Ridge arose a rock face and trees with two notches and one blaze marked the lower bounds of the National Forests. Here he saw her run along the bridle trail marked by one notch and one blaze: then, she was swinging over moraine slopes to the fifth bench of the trail. There she disappeared round a jut of rock—he remembered a mountain spring trickled out at this place bridged by spruce poles. Then he noticed that the cumulous clouds which had been flashing sheet lightning all afternoon, were massing and darkening and lowering closer over the Valley, with zig-zag jags of live fire down to the ground and sounds more like the crack of a whip or splinter of wood than thunder. The cliff swallows dipped almost to the grass; and the flowers were hanging their heads in miniature umbrellas. All the trembling poplars and cotton-woods seemed to be furled waiting. Then, the lower side of the slate clouds frayed in the edge of a sweepy garment to sheets and fringes of rain. A little tremor ran through the leaves. The horses laid back their ears.

"We'll get it," said the old man tightening the reins.

She had paused for breath round the buttress of a gray crag when she noticed the churn of yeasty blackness blotting out the Valley and felt the hushed heat of the air. A jack rabbit went whipping past at long bounds. The last rasp of a jay's scold jangled out from the trees. Then, she heard from the hushed Valley, the low flute trill of a blue bird's love song. Ever afterwards, either of those bird notes, the scurl of the jay or the golden melody of the blue warbler, brought her joyous, terrible thoughts, too keen to the very quick of being for either words or tears; for a horseman had turned the crag leading his broncho. It was the Ranger in his sage green Service suit wearing a sprig of everlasting in his Alpine hat.

"Why, I've been trying to get you by telephone all day," he said, "but the wires are cut—"

In the light of the sudden strength on his face, she forgot the brooding storm, the impending horror.

"Has Fordie brought the sheep down?"

"Yes, ages ago; he passed at noon with the whole bunch, fifteen thousand of 'em, strung along the trail from the top of the Ridge to the bottom. Don't you see how they skinned every branch? That's why the cattlemen hate 'em! Ford will be on the Rim Mesas now. Why; anything wrong?"

She did not remember till afterwards how it was she had met both his hands with her own as she repeated the old frontiersman's report. She knew, if time stopped and storm split the welkin, it would be all the same. She felt the heat hush come up from the Valley, felt the quivering pause of the waiting air, the noiseless flutter of the foliage, the awed quiet, then the exquisite tingling pain of her own being,—

"Eleanor, look at me! Look in my eyes! Look up at me—"

She felt the rush of her being to meet and blend and fuse in the flame of his love. Then, she looked up. His eyes drank hers in one poised moment of delirious recognition, of tempestuous tenderness. The world swam out of ken. All but the fluted melody of the blue bird; and she knew they must always sound together, the trill and the rasp, the blue bird and the jay, the true and the false, love and its counterfeit.

"We go into this fight together," he said very quietly, "And forever!" He placed the sprig of everlasting in her hand. "You can count me on the firing line."

Then he had thrown the reins over his broncho's neck, headed the horse back up the Ridge and was slithering down the steep slope giving her hand-hold as of steel-springs. So short was the interval, it could not be measured in time. Yet it had rivetted eternity. She saw the rolling clouds of ink writhing up the Valley turning everything to blackness: yet she did not know it. The little flutter of air changed to whiplashes and puffs of wind that curled the black hair forward over her unhatted face in a frame. Wayland looked at her and felt his masterdom going to those same winds; for the pace had painted her ivory cheeks, not rose color, but the deep flame of the wild flower. Some day, perhaps,—no matter; he set his teeth and screwed the whipcord muscles taut; for the moraine stones had begun to roll, and there was a zig-zag flash of lightning that sent fire balls sizzling over the rock. He braced her to the leap down the steep sliding moraine, and felt the frenzy of joy from her touch.

"There! We took the jump together! You didn't push me over the edge of things," he said, as their feet touched the pine needle slope.

This time, the lightning came with a ripping splintering rocking echo.

"It's like Love and Life racing in the picture," she laughed back and they bounded into the buckboard, Wayland standing braced behind the seat, "to stop her kiting down the hill if we break loose," he said; she, forward with the driver, feet braced to the iron foot-rest, hands holding the seat-guard. Then, the brim of his felt hat flapping, the bronchos' ears laid back, necks craned out, the old man whirling the whip, they were off for the Rim Rocks. The breaking storm, the whipping winds, the wild pace, the rush of the fringed rain, seemed a part of the furious exaltation breaking the bounds of her own consciousness.

"Cross the ford, Sir," shouted the Ranger bending forward, "it's shorter than the bridge;" and her hair tossed in his face as the buckboard splashed into the River and bounced up the far side with hind wheels swaying.

"Are y' all right, there?" called the old driver over his shoulder.

"Stay with it," yelled Wayland, "straight ahead where the road cuts the Rim Rocks."

"We're splitting the air all right," shouted the old man. "Ye mind y' talked of sawing air. Split it, man, an' y'll get somewhere."

Up a hummock, down a ravine, over a fallen log with a hurdle jump that threatened to break the buckboard's back.

"Are ye there yet?" called the old man.

"Split the wind, Sir," shouted Wayland; and the rig went rattling up the red earth road of the Rim Rocks not a wheel's width from the edge.

"We're leaving the storm behind; look back," she said.

Up the Valley swept the rains in a wall of whipped spray jagged by the zig-zag streaks of lightning.

"Hold on till we turn the next switch back," warned the Ranger. The buckboard wheeled a point as he spoke and the bronchos floundered to a fagged trot. They saw it coming: the rain wall, frayed at the edge to a fringe, the wind lashing their faces, the red rocks of the battlements jutting through the cloud wrack spectral and ominous. A toothed edge of rock above, then a belt of cloud cut by the darting wings of the countless swallows.

The trees of the Ridge across the Valley seemed to bend and snap. There was a funnelling roar, sucking up earth and air, trees and brushwood; whips and lashes and splintering crashes of rain and wind and jagged light-lines; the bronchos cowering against the inner wall of the trail. Then the funnelling wind tore the pinnacled rock tops clear of the billowing mist.

"There goes your hat, Sir," cried Wayland as the black felt went sailing down the precipice.

"What's that!" demanded the old man, springing from the seat and pointing upward with his whip.

Over the edge of the sky line, on the rimmed red battlements, jumping, jumping, jumping; as sheep jump at shearing time from the hot center to the cool outside, or over the backs of one another in winter cold, when the outer line jumps to the huddled center; came the herd in a gray woolly shapeless whirling mass! Shouts, cries, shrill bleatings, storm muffled bang, bang and thud of guns! Just for an instant, emerged from the mist on the skyline of the battlements the figure of a man in sheep-skin chaps, a riderless white horse, shadows of other men, the sheep in a living torrent pouring over into the nothingness of mist; then a boy, a little boy, riding hatless, craning far forward over the neck of his pinto pony, shouting, waving, screaming, trying to head the sheep back from the precipice edge!

"The dastard coward, blackguard Hell-hatched hounds!" roared the old man, shaking his impotent fist. Then he funnelled his hands and shouted the lad's name.

It happened in the twinkling of an eye. The man in the sheep-skin-chaps clubbed his rifle at the galloping pony. The pinto reared, flung back, pitched over the edge of the Rim Rocks. Then the cloud blot, earth and air sponged into the wet blur of a washed slate, shrieking furies of peltering rain, a roar of the hurricane wind, a blinding flash, the air torn to tatters! The cloud burst hurled down in sheets, the red clay road runnelling flood torrents. Wayland had caught her under shelter of the rock wall. The old man hurtled to the heads of the shivering bronchos, gripping both bridles. A splintering crash that rocketted from crag to crag and rumbled below their feet; and the thing was over quick as it had come. The funnelling whirl of clouds eddied over the Pass behind the Holy Cross Mountain; the opal peak radiant and dazzling above the Valley; the air a burst of yellow sunlight quivering in the smoking rain mist; the red battlement rocks above dripping and bare; and somewhere a song sparrow trilling to the tinkle of the subsiding waters. A roil of cloud rolled from below.

The sound came first, smothered and pain-piercing; then the old frontiersman had uttered something between a curse and a groan. She sprang from shelter and looked over the edge. Jumbled at the foot of the pinnacled red rocks heaved a writhing mass, a weltering maimed horror. On the outer edge, arms under head, face to sky, tossed backwards, lay the body of the boy beside the pinto pony, the neck of the horse broken under in the fall, the child pitched beyond the mass by the double turn of his falling horse.

For a moment none of the three uttered a word. She was trembling so that she could not speak. There were tears in the old man's eyes. To Wayland's face had come a look. It was like the blue flash of a pistol shot. The pupils of his eyes had focussed to pin points of fire. He moistened his lips.

"May Hell be both deep and hot!" he said.

It was the cry of the primal man beneath all the culture of the schools that disprove Hell; the cry of human red-blooded manhood against all the white-corpuscled sickly sentimentality that ever sacrifices innocence on the altar of guilt.

While the Law marked time, the swift feet of crime had not paused nor slackened pace. While the Law argued, learnedly, disputatiously, with the handing up and the handing down of inane decisions, Crime scored; and Who or What tallied? The men round the fire the night before in the cow-camp, the men of "the bunco game" had stacked cards and played trump; but unfortunately, they had jumbled the white-vested fighter's orders about the boy. The cattlemen had taken care of themselves after a code not honored by the law of nations.

Also, they had gone into the fight together: the one who saw the right but did not understand the fight; the one who understood the fight but sometimes lost his vision of the right; and the one who saw in the fight for right, not the quarrel of a Valley, or a Faction, or a Ring, but the saving of the Nation, the repudiation of a world lie, the welding of right and might into an eternal harmony.



CHAPTER VIII

A VICTIM OF LAW'S DELAY

For years, Eleanor could not let herself remember the details of that night. We like to persuade ourselves that by some miraculous chance, some trickery of fate, good may come in a vague somehow out of evil; contrary to the proofs from the beginning of time that good fruit never yet grew from evil seed. The girl was too honest for such fetish faith. She could not turn up the whites of her eyes in a pious resignation that it had been the will of God evil should triumph. So she shut out the details of the horror from mind's memory and set her teeth, knowing well that when lewd horrors triumph it is not because the God of the Universe is a fool but because the powers for right have not fought valiant as the powers for evil.

She remembered the Ranger had tossed a revolver to the old frontiersman and Matthews had gone tearing up the slippery clay of the Mesa road ripping out oaths of his unregenerate days that he would have "the scoundrels' scalps if he had to tear them off with his own hands." Somehow, Wayland had headed the draggled horses round on the narrow Rim Rock trail.

"Go down and break the news to his mother. I'll get the body," he had said; and she had driven the buckboard down with her foot on the wheel brake. Not a soul appeared around the Senator's place as she passed the white square of fenced buildings. All the mosquito doors were hooked. Everything looked deserted; branding irons lying in disorder round the k'raal. The River had swollen too turbulent for fording and she had crossed the white bridge—she remembered she had crossed at a gallop contrary to the little notice tacked on the board railing. Then, the horses steaming from rain had stopped in front of the Mission gate and Mrs. Williams had come out "wondering about Fordie in the storm." With her back to the waiting mother, Eleanor had spent an unconscionable time tying the ponies, trying to control her own trembling lips and threshing round for some way to tell the untenable. She remembered the roil of the raging waters, the floating star blossoms on the muddy swirl, the light sifting in beaten rain dust through the silver pine needles, the curve and dip of the joyous swallows. Then, she had followed the little white haired lady into the Mission Parlor.

Almost hysterically, that saying of an old profane writer came to mind, "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb;" and all her inner being was shouting in rebellion "Does He, Does He?" Then she shut the door. She knew very well how she ought to have broken the news with the pious platitudes that everything is for the best, with the whitewashed lies that every damnable tragedy is a blessing in disguise, that every devil-dance of fool circumstance is beneficent design, that disease is really health in a mask and sin a joke, a misnomer, that crime is really a trump card up Deity's sleeve to play down some wonderful trick of good; but—was it the Indian strain in her blood back many generations? She could not mouthe the hollow mockery of such sophistries in the presence of Death.

"Eleanor—what is it? Why do your eyes look so strange?"

The little woman clasped both the girl's hands and gazed questioningly up in her face. At the same moment, she began to tremble. She tried to ask and faltered; a tremor pulsed in the upper lip. Then the grand-daughter of the man of the iron hand had gathered the little white haired lady in her arms as if to ward the blow.

"The outlaws drove Fordie over the Rim Rocks with the herd," she said.

"Is he dead? Is he dead?"

The little woman had drawn her body up its full height.

Eleanor tried to answer. The words would not come from her lips. She nodded. There again she had to shut the door of memory; for, when we break the news, it isn't the news we break; it's the news breaks us.

After what seemed an interminable quiet, Mrs. Williams was asking through dry tearless sobs:

"What does it all mean? Have we not given our whole lives to God? How could this thing happen—to an innocent child? There isn't any justice or right in this whole world."

"We must not be quiescent any more, Mrs. Williams. We must fight. We have such a habit of letting things go, and things let go—go wrong. It isn't God's fault at all: it's us—us humans: it's our fault. Every one of us ought to have been ready to die to prevent crime; and we've been letting things go. We mustn't be quiescent any more. We must fight wrongs and evils. And much more;" the girl in tears, the little woman fevered, red-eyed, gazing with glazed look into dark spaces, kneading her clasped hands together. Once the door opened and the shawled head of the old half-breed woman poked in.

"Ford?" Calamity asked.

"Go 'way, Calamity," whispered Eleanor.

She saw the little woman rise slowly.

"He is murdered," Mrs. Williams said, "he is murdered just as truly as if Moyese had cut his throat with his own hand." It was not for months after, that Eleanor recalled the look on Calamity's face as the Indian woman heard those frenzied words. Then Mrs. Williams broke in uncontrollable sobbing. "Leave me! Go out—all of you. Leave me alone!"

Eleanor shut the door and led the dazed Indian children from the outer hall. In the Library, opposite the Mission Parlor, she found old Calamity sitting on the floor with the shawl over her head. The half-breed woman sat peering through the shawl as Eleanor lighted the hanging lamp. No Indian will mention the name of the dead. She fastened her eyes on Eleanor, snakily, sinister, never shifting her glance.

"What is it, Calamity?"

"Is dat true? Senator man he keel heem—keel leetle boy?" she asked slowly.

Eleanor thought a moment.

"Yes, it is entirely true," she said, never heeding the import of her words to the superstitious mind of the Indian woman.

A little hiss of breath came from the crouching form. She rose, drew the shawl round her head and at the door, turned.

"Dey take mine," she said, "and now dey keel heem, an' white man, he yappy—yappy—yappy; not do—not do any t'ing! He send for Mount' P'lice, mabee no do anyt'ing unless Indian man . . . he keel." The little hiss of breath again and a cunning mad look in the eyes.

"Go 'way Calamity! Go home to our ranch house!"

By and by, came Wayland. She knew why he had come after dark, carrying the slender body against his shoulder. A white handkerchief had been thrown over the face; and she saw that he held the arms tightly to hide the fact that both had been broken in the fall. The rains had matted the curly hair and brought a strange rose glow to the cheeks. There again—Eleanor had to shut the doors of memory; for they had carried him in together. The wind was not tempered to the shorn lamb; and it is the living, not the dead, who beat against the Portals of Death.

They kept watch together, she and Wayland, in the Library across from the closed door of the Mission. Parlor, black-eyed Indian urchins peeping furtively from the head of the stairs till bells rang lights out. Then silence fell, stabbed by the creak of floor, the swing of door, the click and rustle of the cotton wood leaves outside.

There was a slight patter of rain-drip from the eaves somewhere. A gate swung to the wind; and, from across the hall, they could hear the driven footsteps pacing up and down the parlor. Then, the drip,—drip,—was broken by longer blanks, and stopped. The cotton wood leaves ceased to rustle and flutter. Only the twang of the night hawk's wing hummed through the stillness; and the distracted tread no longer paced the Mission Parlor. When Eleanor came back from across the hall, she shut the Library door softly.

"She is praying," she said.

Wayland had been extemporizing a morris chair into a lounge with his Service coat for a pillow. He threw a navajo rug across. Then, he faced her. The look of masterdom had both hardened and softened. She did not know that the hunger-light of her own face hardened that hardness; and she gazed through the darkened window to hide her tears. He stood beside her with his arms folded. A convulsive shudder shook her frame. Wayland tightened his folded arms. Sympathy is so easy. The sense of her nearness, of her trust, of the warm living fire of her love was pushing him not over the precipice but into the battle, out beyond the firing line. What did one man matter in this big fight anyway? They heard the sibilant hush of the River flood-tide; and the warm June dark enveloped them as in a caress. They could see the sheet lightning glimmer on the bank of cumulous clouds behind the Holy Cross. The humming night-hawk, up in the indigo of mid-heaven, uttered a lonely, far, fading call, as of life in flight; and a rustle of wind, faint as the brushing of moth wings, passed whispering into silence.

"You don't really think death is the end of all, do you?" she asked.

Wayland could not answer. If she had looked, she would have seen his face white and his eyes shining with a strange new light. He drew back a little in the dark of the window casement, with his hand on the sill. It touched hers and closed over it. Then, somewhere from the dark came a night-sound heard only in June, the broken dream-trill of a bird in its sleep. When she spoke, her voice was low, keyed as the dream-voice from the dark.

"Where did the spray of flowers you gave me come from?"

"Sprig I'd stuck in my hat band."

"Was that all? Didn't you mean to tell me more?"

"It's a pearl everlasting blossom," answered Wayland.

She waited. He heard the slow ticking of his own watch.

"I was dreaming of your face," he blundered out, "and when I wakened, the thing had blown down on—the hammock." It was a clumsy subterfuge; and he knew that her thought meeting his half-way divined his dream.

The wind passed whispering into silence. He felt the quiver of the pine needles outside, trembling to the touch of wind and night. The sense of her nearness, of her trust, of the warm living fire of her love swept over him unstemmed; and, when she turned and looked in his eyes, he caught her in his arms and held her there with a fierce tenderness, her face thrown back, the veins of her throat pulsing to the touch of wind and night, her lips parted, her lashes hiding her eyes.

"Tell me that you are mine," he whispered.

She did not answer for a moment. Then she lifted her eyes. He drank their light as a thirsty man might drink waters of life. Neither spoke. The rustling wind passed whispering. The June dark enveloped them in the warm caress of the night. By the dim flare of the library lamp he saw her lips trembling.

"Tell me," he commanded.

"Do I need to tell you?"

"Yes, yes! I must have a seal of memory for the dark future," and his tongue poured forth such utterances as he had not dreamed men could use but in prayer. "I must know from your own lips."

He felt the tremor, felt the two hands rise to frame his face, felt the catch and take of breath, heard the broken notes of gold.

"Then, take it," she said.

He bent over her lips in an exquisite torture that could neither give nor take enough till she struggled to free herself, when he crushed her the closer, and kissed the closed eyes and the forehead and the hair and the pulsing throat. Then he opened his arms.

She sank on the morris chair and hid her face in her hands. They neither of them spoke nor heard very much but the pounding of their own hearts. Wayland gazed out in the dark at the shiny flood-tides of the river. She had not meant—she had meant always to be free; she had not meant to mingle her life currents in the destiny of others.

The door opened suddenly. It was old Calamity, red-shawled and stooping.

"Missa Vellam say not for vait no longer, Mademoiselle! She aw' right. She say t'ank you now for to go home!"

Eleanor rose with a shuddering sigh

"Come then, Calamity," she said.

Wayland walked with her to the ranch house, the old half-breed woman pattering behind. The gray dawn-light lay on the river mistily. At the gate, she turned.

"Has Mr. Matthews come back yet, Calamity?"

Calamity gave a vigorous shake of her head.

"I am going up to the Rim Rocks at once to see what's become of him. Go on in, Calamity; I want to speak to Miss MacDonald! Forgive me," he pleaded. "I had no right. I have no right to anything till I have cleaned up this damnable hell-work. I must not leave duty till I have fought this thing out; and I must not drag you in; but I wanted—" he paused; "I couldn't help it."

She trembled, but she took refuge in neither the subterfuge nor the pretence of the Eastern woman.

"It was yours," she said.

Wayland's eyes flashed their gratitude. "It's so God-blessed beautiful, Eleanor; it's so wonderfully beautiful I mustn't spoil it with my man hands! I couldn't believe it true without the memory you've given me; but you must keep me in line! Now that I have that memory in my heart I'll drink it, and hike for the firing line! My place isn't here; you must never let me break my resolution again."

"I never will," interrupted Eleanor.

"We've got to fight this thing to the last ditch! If the innocent may be done to death by our law makers; if murder can be planned and carried out unpunished; there's an end to our democracy! Last year it was a little school teacher strangled down in the Desert; nobody punished, because that would have interfered with a voting gang on election day. This year, it's Fordie. If these crimes had been committed under a monarchy, the people would have tanned the hide of the king into boot leather! Last year it was the little school teacher. This year it's Fordie. Tomorrow, it may be any man, woman or child in the Valley. If they'd keep their crimes among their own kind, there would be some excuse for this let-alone policy; but when freedom to do what a man likes means freedom to push crime into your life and mine, freedom to deprive others of freedom, it's time the Nation jumped on somebody! We've got to fight this damnable thing to the last ditch, Eleanor!"

"Good luck and God speed," she said without looking up; and she turned without once looking back, and walked up the slab steps of the rustic entrance to the ranch house.



CHAPTER IX

RIGHT INTO MIGHT

Don't wait for Mr. Matthews and me. We are setting out on the Long Trail. It is the Long Trail this Nation will have to travel before Democracy arrives. It is the Trail of the Man behind the Thing; and we'll not quit till we get him. You remember what our old visitor said about "splitting the air to get somewhere." We are going to quit "sawing the air" and "split it to get somewhere." We are going to set out after the Man; the little codger first, as a foot print on the Long Trail to the lair of the Man Higher Up.

You cannot stab a lot of things to life as you did last night and the night before, and then expect them to lie quiet and be the same. You have sent me forth on the Long Trail, Eleanor; and I shall hunt the better because you have stabbed me alive and will never let me go to sleep again. I thank you; and yet, I can't thank you, mine Alder Liefest—look up and see what that means in old Saxon—Yours in Life and Death and Always and Out Beyond.

Dick.

I have ordered a wreath from Smelter City for Fordie. Find it hard to stop writing and go from you; but the darned old Mountain doesn't look the same; it's all draped out in such "dam-phool 'appiness" that I am glad in the shadow of Death.

Dick. (2nd)

Don't forget every day dawn and sunset, I come to renew the Seal. Ever study Algebra in college? Then look up what this means.

Dick. (nth)

And because she had graduated from girl to woman between sunset and daydawn of that Death Watch, she kissed the last signature, right in the midst of the German cook's dishes, set all higgeldy-piggeldy on the oilcloth top instead of the linen cover, owing to the distraction of the night's tragedy. It was his first love letter; and because it was his first, he did not know it was a love letter. He had written it on the pages of a field note book. On the reverse side, were figures of triangulations and scaled timbers, which Eleanor fingered lovingly because the dumb signs seemed to connect her life with his before—before what? Ask those who know!

The note was lying at her breakfast place when she came out from a sleepless night, a night that seemed to pass swinging between the gates of Life and the gates of Death, with phantoms on the trail between, of Love so terrible its glory blinded her, of Crime so dark its shadow obscured her faith in God. For hours, she had lain quivering to the consciousness of that moment when Life leaped up to meet and blend with Life in Love. For hours, she had lain quivering to the consciousness of Crime stalking satyr-faced amid the shadows of Life, Greed and Murder and Lust, hiding beneath suave words, behind conventionality, draped in all the broad phalacteries of law, ready to leap fanged at the throat of Innocence in a Land of Let-Alone; and she emerged from the conflict of these two forces no longer what would be called a Christian, no longer a Quiescent, no longer a Let Alone. She emerged knowing that Democracy must become a joke, and Christianity the laughing stock of the ages, unless Right could be made over into Might.

Then, she found the Ranger's note at her late breakfast—it was a shockingly late breakfast, it was after the noon hour—the note saying that he had set out on the Long Trail that the Nation must travel, the trail of the Man behind the Thing, the Man Higher Up. It was as it had been from the first with him, the meeting half-way of their thoughts from different beginnings; and she kissed the signature with a gesture that played havoc with the breakfast dishes and sent Calamity snivelling and muttering from the kitchen. The ignorant half-breed's knowledge of life among the miners of the Black Hills and the shingle men of the Bitter Boot saw-mills didn't admit explanations of love that kissed signatures and impelled tears.

And yet while revolution convulsed two souls you could have gone from end to end of the Valley that week or to every cabin on the Homestead Claim of the Ridge and not heard a living soul speak one word of the tragedy on the Rim Rocks. Were they moral cowards? I don't think so. Wasn't it more of that spirit of Let Alone? If you had mentioned the terrible episode to a casual settler, he would have given you a blank look and remarked "that he hadn't heard."

The story set down here, I could not myself have learned if a chance ramble over the foot hills of the Rim Rocks had not led one day to a solitary little grave, surrounded by a picket fence marked by the figure of a kneeling child carved in rough sand stone. As the guest of the Mission School, I made the mistake of asking the mother, herself, whose grave that was. Women, who are neither politicians nor politic, have a plain way of uttering harsh facts. She did not speak about the author of her boy's death in soft words, that little white haired mother. She used a term oftener heard in the purlieus of criminal courts. "To think," she exclaimed bitterly, "to think that Fordie, descended from generations of Williams who have pioneered and fought for and built up this country since ever the first Williams landed in Boston in 1666, was done to death by this murderer, this truckster, this political trickster, this outcast from the European gutters, this huckster of lazaretto morals and bawd houses, who is overturning our Nation with his oiled villainies and peddler ways! No, we have never taken Government aid and we never shall! I like to know that my Indian girls are safe." What more she added, I do not relate; for an angered mother has a way of uttering terrible truths.

To-day, if you visit that grave on the crest of the saddle back, you will find it flanked by two others, a man's on one side with the figure of a trader carved in sandstone by the Indians; on the other, old Calamity's with a plain granite slab; though I have heard strict people say her body ought not to have been laid there because of the vagrant character of her early life.

Indian boys from the school had shaped the coffin and carved the figure for the stone. A girlish teacher read the Church Services for the dead; and the children's voices rose a thin tremulous treble in the funeral hymn around the grave. Wild flowers covered the casket, pearl everlasting and the wind flower and the white Canada violet and the painter's brush vari-colored as a flame; and a wreath had come up from Smelter City.

Sights and sounds that have been a setting for sorrow, haunt the mind. After that day, Eleanor could never hear the hammer of the woodpecker, the lone cry of circling hawk, the whistling of the solitary mountain marmot, without hearing also the thin treble of the Indian pupils breaking and silencing on that funeral hymn till only the mother's voice sang clarion to the end. She heard the low melting trill of the blue bird and the wrangling rasp of the jay—true and counterfeit, peace and discord—had God put right and wrong in the world for the friction of the conflict between, to develop souls? Had one been set over against the other, like light and shadow, to train the spiritual eye to know?

Then, the Indian boys began to lower the casket. One young pall bearer faltered and slipped his hold; it was the little white haired mother's hand steadied the rope that lowered, and slowly lowered, out of sight for ever. Then one of the girl teachers dropped in a great bunch of mountain laurel. Eleanor succeeded in leading the mother away.

Were the amethyst portals still ajar to the infinite life; or did the shadow of the Cross, of the time-old ever-recurring crucifixion, darken the vista of a glad future? The Indian children filed in through the gate of the Mission school. At the gate, the mother looked up the Saddle back. She had no time for the pampered luxury of self conscious grief. She had directed the making of the coffin and the carving of the sandstone and had led the funeral hymn to the end; but now she looked back. Ashes of roses across the sky, creeping phantom shadows, and in her heart, the sombre presence of the after-desolation which neither faith nor fortitude casts out. She would go to sleep dull with the woe of it and dream depressed of its loneliness, to waken heavy with the memory. Then, by and by, would come the peace that the dead send, which is not forgetfulness. But now she looked back, looked back with the wrench that was the tearing of flesh and spirit asunder. Above the new-made grave, across those topaz sunset gates, stood the figure of the native woman, shawl thrown from her head reaving the long black hair; and from the hill crest came such a long low cry as might have been a ghost echo of all the age-old world sorrows. Eleanor felt the quick twitch on her arm. Without a word, without a tear, the boy's mother had fainted.

"We ought to have looked out for that," explained one of the girl teachers from the school. "We ought to have left Calamity home. She has always done that since they took her child away."

"Had she a child?" asked Eleanor.

"Yes; and they took it away when she went insane."

Eleanor slept with the leaves of the field-book under her pillow that night; but she slept the heavy dreamless sleep of baffled hope.



CHAPTER X

THE HANDY MAN GETS BUSY

If you think the Senator had had anything to do with the terrible events of the Rim Rocks, you are jumping to conclusions and must surely have failed to follow the activities of Mr. Bat Brydges the morning after the tragedy.

The first newspaper office that the handy man visited was owned by the Senator. That was easy. Bat went into the reporters' long room where the typewriters usually clicked. This morning they were silent. The men were out on their assignments. The news editor was taking a message over the telephone. Bat sat down on the table and waited. The news editor was thin-faced and nervous and alert and immaculately groomed. Bat was round-faced and sleepy-eyed—tortoise-shell eyes—and all that prevented his suit from looking positively slovenly was that his own ample avoirdupois filled every wrinkle.

The news editor adjusted his glasses to his nose and answered, "Yes, Yes," impatiently over the telephone.

"It's a parson," he explained with an irritable snap of his black eyes towards Bat.

Bat smiled sleepily. "Thinks you're hungering and thirsting for news of his flock, does he?"

"No, blank it," snapped the news editor.

"It's another kind of flock that's worrying us this morning."

Bat's smile faded to a sly haze in his sleepy eyes.

"What has the old boy got to say?"

"How do you know he is old?" snapped the news editor.

Bat didn't volunteer on that point.

"Ask him what his name is," suggested Brydges.

"What did you say the name was? Matthews—Matthews—is that it? Wait, please!" The news-editor put his hand over the mouth piece of the telephone.

"Know anything about him, Bat?"

"I should say I do! Choke it off! He's staying with Missionary Williams at the Indian School, and you know about how much love is lost between Williams and Moyese."

"But we can't possibly suppress this, Bat. It will be all over the country."

"Better see whose ox is gored," advised Brydges.

"But we've got to get this, Brydges! The stage driver's told one of my men, already! Every bar-room buffer in the country side will know it by night."

"Then you had better get it straight," advised Bat.

The news-man looked in space through eyes narrowed to an arrow. Bat watched sleepily. "If we choke this old chap's account off, can you give one to us?"

"Got it in my pocket! I've just come in on the stage!"

"I thought you came down in a motor with the Senator? Didn't he take the morning limited for Washington?"

"Well, the darn thing broke down so often it was bad as the stage. Anyway, I've got the story for you—"

"Senator O. K. it?" The news-man hung the telephone receiver up, still keeping his hand over the mouth piece.

"Lord, no!" Bat slid off the table, tore the sheets from his note book and handed the story of the Rim Rocks across to the editor.

"What do you take the Senator for? He knows nothing about it; but it's in his constituency, and I guess his own paper should see that the account which goes in is straight."

The news-editor hoisted his foot to the seat of a chair and stood racing his eyes through sheet after sheet of Brydges's copy. Bat lighted a cigar, put his hands in his pockets and pivoted on his heels. There was the squeak, squeak, squeak of a child's new boots coming up the first flight of stairs; and a squeak, squeak, squeak up the second flight of stairs; and a little girl, not twelve years old, resplendent in such tawdry finery as might have stepped out of an East End London pawn shop, presented herself framed in the doorway of the reporter's room. She plainly belonged to the immigrant section of Smelter City. The news-editor never took his eyes from Bat's copy. They were eyes made for drilling holes into the motives behind facts. Bat emitted a whistle that was a laugh.

"Hullo," he said. "I knew they were coming on younger every year; but I didn't know we had gone into the kindergarten business yet. You don't want a job? Now don't tell me you want a job?"

The little person lifted a pair of very sober eyes beneath the brim of some faded plush headgear.

"Is thus th' rha-porther's room?"

"Sure! you bet!" Bat wheeled on both heels. The little person looked at him very steadily and solemnly.

"A' wannt," she said in that mongrel dialect of German-American and Cockney-English, "A wawnt an iteem."

"Sure," says Bat, "nothing easier."

"Wull thur be eny chaarge?"

"Not for ladies," says Bat, saluting, hand to hat, and grinning more sleepily than ever.

"Then, A wull guve it t' y': wull y' write it, sor?"

"Sure!" Bat squared himself to one of the reporters' high desks.

"Mestriss Leez-y O'Fannigan," dictated the little publicity agent.

"Miss O'Funny Girl," with a look to his fat cheeks as of a bag blown full of air.

"No Sor, O'Fan-ni-gan-"

"Perhaps," said Bat, "You'd like to know we're in the same boat, except that you're seeking exactly what I'm trying to avoid, Miss O'Finnigan?"

"Wull dance t' night—" continued the little publicity seeker.

"Will she dance in her copper-toe boots?" asks Bat.

"Wull dance at the H—— i-o-f lodge meetin' at—"

"That'll do, get her out of this," ordered the news-man. "It grows worse every day. Every damphool thinks the world is aching for an interview with himself, from the mining fakirs to the Shanty Town brats: it's seeped down to the kids. You go home, kid, and tell your mother to spank you special extra—"

They heard the fat little legs stumping down the stairs. "That kid belongs to Shanty Town. She dances for the bar room buffers now; she'll dance later, like you and me, Bat, for bigger bluffers. Freedom of the press! Damn it, I'm sick of the bunco game, Bat—"

"Draw it easy," drawled Bat. "If you're sick of it, it's dead easy to get out. I guess the kid is doing the same thing as you and me: 'Give us this day our daily bread.' How's the story? Will you give it a flare head?"

"Will there be any charge?" ironically repeated the news-man.

"Not for Moyese," smiled the handy man sleepily, "and say, if I were you, I'd do one of two things, get rid of my conscience or get a tonic for my nerves."

The telephone rang. The news-man ran to the receiver and a moment later slammed it back on the hook.

"Old frump, giving namby pamby talks on woman's influence in politics without votes." The news editor spat aimlessly.

Bat tapped the story of the Rim Rocks with his pencil. "Well," he asked.

"We'll give this flare."

The news man put heavy underscores in blue beneath the words TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS REWARD, BY THE VALLEY CATTLE ASSOCIATION FOR PROOF OF THE PERPETRATORS OF LAST NIGHT'S VILE CRIME.

"We'll put this in red! God! The Senator is an artist! I like having to lick the hand that leashes me."

"And feeds you, eh?" added Bat.

Beneath the flare heading followed a statement of facts (more or less) to the effect that in an altercation between the drovers of some outside cattlemen and the herders belonging to the MacDonald ranch, the sheep herd had been hustled—("I like your alliterations, Bat, it gives flavor of quality," commented the news-man with a snap of his black eyes,) too close to the edge of the Rim Rocks with the unintended and tragical result that several hundred sheep had been shoved over the battlements. ("What I like specially is what you don't give," commented the news-man.)

There was not a word about broken backs and slashed lambs and disemboweled ewes; nor of what had been found on the Upper Mesas. As a sort of addendum it was stated that a boy belonging to the Mission school had lost his life in the melee.

"Anyway, we're in style! Way to tell a thing now adays is to turn all around it, and not tell anything at all. Auto suggestion, eh, Bat?"

Bat's fat cheeks blew up in the explosion of a bursting paper bag. "You bet it's auto all right. If you'd heard the old man talking all the way down on the iniquity of the thing: he kept it going harder than the buzz wagon."

"Better inform a breathlessly eager public that he's gone to Washington?"

"Here, I've got that, too! He dictated that straight, 'for the express purpose of taking up the whole question of eliminating the grazing areas from the National Forests when it will be possible for the State authorities to protect the live stock interests,'" Bat handed across the second item.

"What in thunder have the National Forests to do with the Rim Rock massacre?" The newsman looked up through his glasses.

"And who in thunder is going to ask that?"

Bat tapped the last item sharply with his pencil. "They'll read that and they'll read the other, and I'll bet dollars to doughnuts nine men out of ten will begin jawing and spouting and arguing that if there were no National Forests, there would be no Range Wars. If they draw a false impression, that's the public's look out. If we weren't dealing with damphools, we couldn't fool 'em."

"But it didn't happen on the National Forests."

"But it's only the tenth man who will stop to think that out. You put in one of those big middle page cartoons—National Forests with the Federal sign board, KEEP OFF, the sheep being massacred inside the sign board and the State sheriff unable to go in and stop it—"

"But you didn't say massacred! You said they accidently went over the edge."

"But it's only the tenth man will stop to think that. You run the cartoon, see?" said Bat, and, though he asked it as a question, if sounded final. The news-man went tearing back to the front editorial rooms. Bat went whistling down stairs, two steps at a bounce. At the half-way landing, he paused.

"Say," he yelled up, "you can use the same old cartoon; 'Keep Off the Grass,' you know."

"Eh?—right," crossly from the front room.

"And say?"

The news-man came out and leaned over the upper railing.

"Don't forget to take that tonic for your nerves."

The news-man told Bat to go any where he pleased; but it was all in the day's work with Mr. Bat Brydges. He didn't go. The handy man went straight across to the paper in opposition. The news-man went back to the front room and stood thinking. He didn't curse Bat nor emit fumes of the sulphurous place to which he had invited Brydges. He was contemplating what he called his "kids"; and he was figuring the next payment due on the Smelter City lots in which he had been speculating. Evidently, these were the news-man's tonic; for he at once did what he described as "bucking it" and called down the speaking tube for the press man to put on the old cartoon.

The opposition paper required more finesse on the part of the handy man. Bat strolled as if it were a matter of habit into the telegraph editor's room, where he lolled back in one of the two empty chairs. It was still early and the wires were silent. Bat laid one cigar at the editor's place and took a fresh one for himself.

"Hullo, Bat," bubbled the telegraph man, dashing from the composing room in his shirt sleeves, "We've just been having a yell of an argument about the elements of success." He seated himself and whipped out a match to light the cigar. Bat was clicking his cigar case open and shut. This editor was all nerves too. Nerves seemed to go with the job; but these nerves were not jangled. He leaned back in his swing chair with one boot against the desk. "What makes a man successful, anyway? It isn't ability. Your news-man across the way could buy our office out with brains; but gee whitaker, he's worse than a dose of bitters! Now take your Senator, he hasn't either the education or the brains of lots of our cub reporters, here!" He paused nibbling his cigar end. "Yet, he's successful. We aren't, except in a sort of doggon-hack-horse way. You're next to the old man, Bat, what do you say makes him successful?"

Bat clicked the cigar case shut and put it in his pocket.

"Two things: he's a specialist; he delivers the goods no other man can deliver; and he doesn't fool any time away by bucking into a buzz saw, fighting windmills and that sort of thing, way you fellows 'agin the Government' do."

The telegraph man removed his cigar.

"What do you mean by 'delivers the goods no other man can deliver'? Do you mean the pork barrel?"

"No," said Bat, "I don't, though the pork barrel is a d—ee—d essential part of the game. Here's what I mean; when you came to this Valley, there was nothing doing. We had mines; but we hadn't a smelter! Well, Senator got the coking coal for a smelting site and the big developers came in. Other men couldn't, wouldn't or didn't dare to do it! He did it. He delivered the goods and got the big fellows interested."

"He stole 'em, those coal lands. He jugged 'em thro' Land Office records with false entries." The telegraph man had lowered his voice.

"We don't call 'em stolen when it's been the making of the Valley."

"No, because the Smelter is a sacred cow mustn't be touched for the sake of the grease."

"Then, there was nothing doing in lumber; big fellows wouldn't come in and develop. Well, Moyese got 'em the timber tracts for a song. Other men couldn't, wouldn't or didn't dare. He delivered the goods—"

"The courage of the highwayman," commented the wire editor with a puff.

"We don't call it that when it helps the Valley," corrected the handy man.

"No, it's another sacred bovine; mustn't be touched for fear of the axle grease. See? I've got a list of 'em—public lands, through freights, water power, smelter, lumber deals," the telegraph man opened his table drawer and held out a scrawled list. "If you call that delivering the goods, I call it filling the barrel. What's the other factor for success?"

"Not bucking into a buzz saw. The world is mostly made of barkers and builders. You fellows spend all the time barking. Then you wonder there's nothing to show in the way of a building."

The telegraph wires began to click and the girl operator came in with some tissue sheets.

"Fight in Frisco—that goes," commented the telegraph editor dashing in the "ands" and "buts" and the punctuation. He stuck the slip on the printer's hook. "Wedding in Newport—"

"That goes," laughed the handy man, "There's no sacred cow about that."

The telegraph man wrote headings for the dispatches and stuck them on the hook for the printer's boy.

"Speaking of sacred cows, it isn't exactly cows, but it's in the stock line all right—what do you know about that business last night up on Rim Rocks? Stage driver has been blazing it all round town—"

"Stage driver's a liar," emphatically declared Brydges.

"Been trying to get the news for an hour; the wires are cut. Can't get 'em by phone. Think I'll send a man up to-night with a photographer."

"Oh, I wouldn't," drawled Bat sleepily. "It isn't worth it. I've just come down. Whole row's over. You can't get a dub in the Valley to open his mouth. Same old gag we've used for the last ten years, 'heavily armed band of masked men,' 'scene like a butcher's shambles,' and that guy of a sheriff 'scouring the hills for the miscreants.' I'll bet he's under his bed scared blue."

"Who did it?"

"Same old gang of outside grazers, drovers who skipped the State line. I succeeded in getting their names after a good deal of trouble."

"You did, did you? Then give us a stick about it, will you? Date it special at the Rim Rocks! Trouble is, if I do send a man up, business office will kick at the expense account; for there's nothing in it; and that kind of news hurts the Valley."

So Mr. Bat Brydges wrote forty lines of two paragraphs in which he warned the public that this sort of thing had to stop; the West would not stand for interference from outside cattlemen who were trying to wrest the range away from local grazers. There followed the names of six men concerned in the Rim Rock fray. Whose names they were, neither Bat nor anyone else knew. Also Mr. Sheriff Flood was not described as "a guy" nor pictured as reposing under his bed. He might have been a walking arsenal of defence for the Valley. According to Mr. Bat Brydges, Sheriff Flood was busy on the case and had wired the authorities of the adjoining States to be on the look out for the guilty parties. There followed a description of the guilty parties photographed accurately from Mr. Bat Brydges's retina.

The third newspaper office was the least easy for the handy man's tactics. The editor was an independent of the fiery order. Bat avoided the editor and tackled a young reporter at the noon hour.

"What do you say to a spin in the 40 h. p. to-night?" he asked.

"What's on?"

The youth was reading an ink-smudged galley proof.

Bat sat down on the desk where he could read over the other's shoulder. The proof reeked of "gore" and "shambles" and "heavily armed masked men" and rifle shots thick as hail stones with a sheriff careening over the Mesas at break neck speed slathered with zeal for law.

"What reforms are you jollying along now?" asked Bat.

"We'll jolly you fellows when this comes out."

"I've always said if I were his Satanic Majesty and wished to defeat the goody-goodies, I wouldn't bother fighting 'em! I'd take an afternoon nap and let them buck themselves by their lies and bickerings."

The youth ran his eye down the galley proof.

"Who filled you up with this dope?" Brydges lowered his voice to an altogether amused and very confidential key.

"What's the matter with it?"

"Matter? There's nothing right about it."

"Goes all the same. Got snap! It's good stuff."

"Stuffing, you mean," corrected the handy man. "Say, where ever did you get it? Talk of stuff? Somebody has mistaken you for a spring chicken."

"Got it straight. It's all right! Fellow from the English colony—"

"English Colony? Those Rookeries—Mother Carey's chickens. Do you know what that Rookery gang is? A lot of gambling toughs, remittance doughheads—"

"That doesn't spoil a ripping good story! I'm going to wire a column to Chicago."

"No, you're not," contradicted Brydges. "That kind of thing hurts the State more than ten thousand dollars will advertise it. You go over your advertising columns my boy—"

"All right! It's up to you?"

Bat whistled and swung the galley proofs between his knees.

"Doesn't matter what you say out here. Everybody knows your rag sheet will contradict to-morrow what you say to-day in headings red and long as a lead pencil. You'll contradict in a little hidden paragraph tucked away among the ads., and I guess we know which are the ads. out here; but, if you want any more dope on inside stuff, don't you send that East! You have applied for a job on our paper twice. If you want one, don't you send that East! What do they pay you, anyway?"

The youth paused to estimate; and youth's hopes are ever high.

"That's worth a hundred to me!"

"No, you don't! They pay you six and ten and sometimes two, but it's worth a hundred if you keep it out, nice crisp little bills, my boy. Call for you to-night at five; but don't you play that story up."

It was then and there Bat showed himself a past master. He sauntered out of the office humming.

"Say, Brydges," called the youth, "what's wrong with this account, anyway?"

"All wrong," reiterated Brydges stepping back. "Wasn't a man lost his life. Wasn't a man on the Range at the time, only a kid got in the way of a stampede! Here, I'll give it to you straight! I've just come down from the Valley! You tell what happened down in Mesa and Garfield counties ten years ago, and up in Wyoming last spring! Give it to the other States. Don't give your own State a black eye! Come on out and have something with me, and I'll fix you up as we feed."

So when the Independent's fiery columns came out with red scare heads and gory recital full of reference to "something rotten in the State of Denmark" and "damnable rascality," there was only one emasculated innocuous column given to the local event, but seven columns were steeped with the bloody details of sheep massacres and stock raids and Range Wars in other states in "the good old gun-toting days."

Bat's last act that day was to send a telegram care of the East-bound Limited to Senator Moyese. It read, "All local papers out highly gratulatory references your efforts to punish guilty parties."



CHAPTER XI

SETTING OUT ON THE LONG TRAIL

In the half light of mist and dawn, the Ranger ascended the Ridge trail.

Life was at flood-tide. Thought focussed to one point of consciousness set on fire of its own rays. He walked as one unseeing, unhearing, hardened to singleness of purpose, heedless of the steepness of the climb, of his blood leaping like a mountain cataract, of his muscles moving with the ease of piston rods; heedless of all but the warmth of the glow enveloping his outer body from the flame burning within.

He did not follow the zig-zag Ridge trail but clambered straight up the face of the slope, following pretty much the short cut-off they had taken the night before. He came to the crag where the spruce logs spanned the tinkling water course. There was a gossamer scarf of cloud hanging among the mosses of the trees. The peak came out opal fire above belts of clouds. The sage-green moss spanning the spruces turned to a jewel-dropped thing in a sun-bathed rain-washed world of flawless clouds and jubilant waters. He drew a deep breath. The air was tonic of imprisoned sunlight and resinous healing. Was each day's birth the dawn to new being?

It was here he had met her the night before. Waves of consciousness, tender delirious consciousness, flooded and surprised him. He had asked for a seal of memory. He knew now it would never be a memory: it would be consciousness, ever-living, ever present; a compulsion not to be controlled because it was not his own; and never to be quenched because it burned within. If he had been a weakling, the seal would have been a seal to self; but because an elemental war for right was winnowing the self out of him, he knew it was a seal to service.

Day-dawn marked the creation of a new world; and That had opened the doors for him to a life that no telling could have revealed. Would it be the same with the Nation? Would this struggle open the doors to a new life; or would the powers that stood for law and right go on marking time inside the firing line, while the powers that stood for wrong and outrage held their course rampant, unchecked; straining the law not to protect right but to extend wrong; perverting the courts; stealing where they chose to steal; killing where they chose to kill; deluging the land with anarchy by sweeping away law, just as surely as the removal of the sluice gates would set loose flood waters?

He ascended the rest of the dripping Ridge trail in a swing that was almost a run.

Below the Ranger cabin on the Homestead Slope stood the large oblong canvas bunk house of the road gang employed by the Forest Service.

"Hi—fellows," shouted Wayland, shaking the tent flap. "All hands up!" And he ordered the foreman to send the road gang to skin and burn and bury what lay at the foot of the battlements. As the Rim Rocks lay a few feet outside the bounds of the National Forests, it will be seen that Wayland had stopped marking time behind the law and gone out beyond the firing line. If it isn't clear to you how the Ranger was exceeding the authority of the law, then read the Senator's speeches about "the Forest and Land Service men going outside their jurisdiction employing Government men to do work which was not Government Service at all."

The Ranger saddled his own broncho for himself and a horse belonging to one of his assistants for the old frontiersman, who must be some where on the upper Mesas. To each saddle he fastened a Service hatchet and a cased rifle. Then, he caught one of the mules of the road gang for the pack saddle. Going inside the cabin, he furbished together such provisions as his biscuit box shelves afforded, a sack containing half a ham, a quarter bag of flour, one tin of canned beans, a tobacco pouch filled with tea, another pouch with sugar on one side of the dividing leather and salt in the other. Then, he cinched a couple of cow-boy slickers over the pack saddle, and, in place of the green Service coat which he had left at the Mission, donned a leather jacket, took a last look to see if a water-proof match case were in the inside pocket, ran back to the cabin for a half-flask of brandy, and an extra hat, and with the other horse and the pack mule in front, he mounted his pony and set out for the Rim Rocks. It will be seen this was not the equipment of a man who intended to remain marking time.

Just for a second, he pondered which path to follow. It would take an hour to go down the Ridge trail, cross the Valley and ascend the terra-cotta road of the Rim Rocks. Couldn't he jump his horses over the gully that cut between the Holy Cross and the Upper Mesa? He headed his horse into the tangle of hemlock and larch, the mule trotting ahead snatching bites of dogwood and willow from the edge of the dripping trail, the Ranger riding as Westerners ride, glued to the leather, guiding by the loose neck rein instead of the bit, with a wave of his hand to keep the little mule in line.

A turn to the left through a thicket of devil's club brought him where the Ridge overlooked the River. Wayland reined up sharply. A pile of logs scaled and marked with the U. S. stamp lay where the slightest topple would send them over a natural chute into the River. He had not scaled those logs: neither had his assistants. There was no record of them on the books. Of course, he had heard the chop and slash at the settlers' cabins, but homesteaders don't farm on the edge of a vertical precipice unless they are a lumber company; and logs tossed over that precipice to the River were destined for only one market, Smelter City. Then he remembered giving a permit to a Swede settler of the Homestead Slope to take out windfall and dead tops for a little portable gasoline engine; but the permit didn't cover this area.

"Having stopped stealing half a million from the Bitter Boot, they've started their dummies in here." He looked at the gashed timber-slash as a thrifty man looks at wantonness and waste; it was a gaping wound in the forest side, old and young trees alike hacked down, the stumps of the big trees, not eighteen inches low as the regulations provided, but three and four and five feet high of waste to rot and gather fungus, the biggest of the giant spruce cut from a scaffolding nine feet from the ground, leaving wasted lumber enough to build a house.

"This was done when I was away on my last long patrol," reflected Wayland. The slash of brushwood and wasted tops lay higher than his horse's head. "A fine fire-trap for the fall drought," thought Wayland angrily. "One spark in that tinder pile in a high wind; and there would be no forests left on Holy Cross."

What did it mean, this open defiance, not of himself, (he was a mere cog in the big wheel; so was the entire Forest Service,) this open defiance of law; this open theft of Government property? Connected with the outrage of the Range War, and the Senator's advice for him to stop suing for restitution of the two-thousand acres of coal lands, and the handy-man's urgent arguments for him "to chuck the fight and come down to the Valley," the Ranger knew well enough what the pile of stolen logs stamped with a counterfeit Government hatchet meant; stamped, of course, by some poor ignorant dummy foreigner. The Ring were setting their hired tools on to the fight. And far away in the East—yes it was the East's business to see what went on in the West—were myriads of wage-earners forced to pay exorbitantly for coal and wood and lumber and house rent because of this wanton waste; this seizing fraudulently by the few of the property belonging to the many. If they had thrown down the challenge, assuredly he was taking it up! What would the people do about it, he wondered, when they came to know? Would any power on earth waken the people up to do something, and stop talking? A Roman ruler had fiddled while his imperial city burned. What was the many-headed ruler of the great republic doing, while enemies burned and cut and slashed and wasted in wantonness the property of the public for the enrichment of the Ring?

The Ranger touched his horse to a gallop and jumped all three animals through the criss-cross of wind-fall and slash, coming out on the edge of the rock chasm that cut the Upper Mesas off from the Holy Cross. The gully crumbled on the near side and shelved on the far, twenty feet deep and fifty wide, altogether not very jumpable, the Ranger thought. He zig-zagged in and out among the larches along the margin of the rock cut-way, noting "dead tops" ripe for the axe, pines where the squirrels had cached cone seed at the root, spruce logs gone to punk with alien seedlings coming up from the dead trunk, yellow ant-eaten wood-rot ripped open by some bear hunting the white eggs; noting, above all, the wonderful flame of the painter's brush, spikes with the tints of the rainbow, like Indian arrows dipped in blood, knee-deep, multi-colored, fiery, dyed in the very essence of sunglow, humming with bees and alive with butterflies, lives of a summer in the aeon of ages that the snow flakes had taken manufacturing soil out of granite, silt out of snow.

"The little snow flake gets there all right," reflected Wayland. "It takes time; but she carves out her little snow flake job all the same, and the rocks go down before her! Guess if we follow the law, we're hitched up with the stars all right."

He reined up and caught at a pine bough. A sight to hold the eye of any forester held his; the enormous trunk of a fallen giant, a dozen dwarfs growing from its punk, spanned the gully. Wayland slid off his horse. The great trunk lay destitute of lesser branches to the tip on the far side of the chasm like great characters that discard mannerisms.

The Ranger struck his Service axe into the trunk. The bark held firm, though he heard the ring of the dry-rot at the heart that had brought the old giant crashing down to become food for the scrubs and pigmies of the forest. Wayland picked out two spindly birches. Quick strokes brought them down. Walking out on the dead trunk, he threw a birch on each side as a guard rail, affording fence, not protection, to the wavering faith of a shy horse, "all a feeling of security to steady a giddy head," he reflected. He led the little pack mule; and the bronchos followed. A moment later, he was galloping through the larches and low juniper that fringed the Mesas above the Rim Rock trail, the mule huff-huffing to the fore snatching mouthfuls on the run. Then, with a lope, Wayland's broncho leaped out on the bare sage-grown Mesas, the mule with ears pointed, nose high, heading straight for the white canvas-top of a tented wagon.

For a moment, the light blinded Wayland's sight; for the sun had come up in an orange fan; and the sky was not blue: it shone the dazzling silver of mercury. Against the high rarefied air came in view the figure of a man, grotesquely exaggerated, head and shoulders first, then body, riding a heavy horse, saddleless, hatless, coatless, white of hair, heels pressed to his horse's flanks, bent far over the animal's neck as Indians ride, galloping for the Rim Rock trail, or a second jump from the battlements.

Wayland stood up in his stirrups and with hands trumpeted uttered a yell. The rider jerked his horse to a rear flounder, waved frantically, then split the air—

"Glory be to the powers—but—A'm glad to see you! A've headed them off from the South trail. We've got them, Wayland, the low dastard scoundrels! We've got them trapped like rats in a trap! They're in the Pass if you've a man in the Valley with spirit enough to get out with a gun!" He stopped for breath as the two horses floundered together.

"We haven't," answered Wayland.

"They jumped the gully! Man alive, y' ought t' seen them jump the gully! A slammed them right down into the bottom of it. A would to God 't had been to the bottomless pit. The same gentry A saw that night under your Ridge, saving his High Mightiness. The evil fellow wi' the sheep hide leggings, an' the one armed blackguard in the cow-boy slicker, an' the corduroy dandy wi' the red tie, an' four more of them same card-sharp gentry. A rode 'long the top of y'r gully an' poured six bullets after 'em! Man alive! A heard the fellow in the yellow slicker yell bloody murder when A fired! A'm hopin'—God forgive me—A've nipped him in the other arm an' brought him winged t' th' throne o' Grace! They followed the gully bed behind y'r Mountain, the white horse same as yon night under y'r Ridge, limpin', the one armed man rockin' in the saddle an' spittin' out blasphemous filth for th' others to wait. A've kept guard all night, yellin' an' howlin' like a vigilantee, knowin' they're not the gentry to run into the arms of them good old-time neck-tie com'tees; an' not dreamin' A hadn't another cartridge to my name!" The old man swabbed the sweat from his brow.

"A left m' coat and togs back at yon chuck wagon!" Wayland noticed he was riding stocking soled.

"I have an extra hat for you here." Wayland tossed the soft felt from the pocket of his leather coat.

"Oh, A saw 'em plain enough; same ill-lookin' six that y'r hell-kite laws hatch on a bad frontier! Make no mistake. Yon white vest is at the bottom o' this deviltry! Who is he, Wayland?"

Wayland related the visit of a white-vest to his Ridge cabin; and they trotted forward towards a sheep wagon.

"How did y' come up here?" asked the old frontiersman.

"Where did you get that horse?" retorted the Ranger.

"One of the chuck wagons' teams—"

"Herders all right?" asked Wayland. He knew what the answer must be; the same answer that had been disgracing the West these twenty years.

The old man jerked his horse to a dead stop, drew himself erect and looked straight at the Ranger.

"Wayland, man, is this Russia—or Hell? Is there another country in the world calls itself civilized would allow four herder men to be burned to death? Does the country know what is doing? Do you know what happened? Do you know that last wagon is left there only because the rains put out the fire? Y'll find the iron tires of the other wagons with skeletons of men chained to the wheels. A came up just as they were settin' aboot firin' the second wagon. They'd ripped all the flour bags open and loosed the horses. This one, A caught full pelther down the trail."

The old man shook his head.

They trotted their horses across the Mesas in silence towards the glaring white canvas wagon. Broken harness, half-burned spokes, the charred hub of a wheel, snapped whiffle-trees, the white dust of scattered flour littered the ground. A brown scorch of flame up the back of the tent above the remaining wagon marked where the rains had extinguished the fire. A smouldering ill-smelling ash heap told the fate of the other wagons.

"Hell-devilish work, hell-devilish work! Th' beasts of the field couldna' conceive such baseness, Wayland! 'Tis the work o' devils spawned by harpies! They say there is no devil to-day! Hoh!" The old man puffed the heresy from his pursed lips. "The beasts don't prey on their own 'cepting the rats that starve; but, man, there's no explanation of his self-destruction 'cepting the old fashioned one, Wayland. 'He was possessed by a devil.'"

The Ranger had dismounted and was prodding the ash-heap with his heavy boot sole. Then, he gave the embers a smart flap with his whip. The blackened hub of a wheel went circling out. Suddenly, Wayland turned away his face, white and nauseated, hardened to resolution granite as the rocks. Eyeless sockets of a skeleton face protruded from the ashes; and on the ground were stains which the rains had not washed out. It was then Wayland noticed the bloody thumb marks round the canvas front of the wagon seat where the driver had been dragged down.

For a little time neither man spoke. But, was it not the natural ending of brutality unleashed of law; of crime left alone by the good?

"To mutilate thousands of sheep was damnable enough," said Wayland; "but—this?"

The old frontiersman had picked up coat and boots flung aside the night before. He stood holding by his horse's mane looking down. "And this is a white man's land," he said. "To this have y' prostituted freedom bought by th' blood of saints an' martyrs? Not in th' heat o' passion, but for filthy gain, has a free people come to this? The heads o' kings fell on the bloody block for less crime in days not so soft spoken as these. Is y'r freedom, freedom to right or to wrong? Is it to send y'r Nation smash over the precipice? Wayland, is this Democracy?"

The Ranger did not answer for a moment.

"No," he said quietly, "it isn't Democracy any more than your Robber Barons were Monarchy! Don't you make that mistake; this is Anarchy, the Anarchy of unrestrained greed! You fought it in your plundering Scotch Robber Barons long ago! We have to fight it to-day in our plundering plutocrats!"



CHAPTER XII

THE MAJESTY OF THE LAW VEILS ITSELF

"Do you mean me to believe," the old frontiersman drew himself up to the full height of British superiority to everything outside the island of its own circumscribed knowledge, "do you mean me to believe that if any of these poor herders had escaped as witnesses, we'd not have been able to send these blackguard murderers to the gallows?"

The Ranger had signalled for some of the road gang to ascend from below the battlements to keep guard till the coroner could come. The little pack mule to the fore, Wayland and Matthews were picking the way slowly down the terra cotta trail of the Rim Rocks.

"It does not make the slightest difference in the world what you or I believe, Sir! The facts are unless you could offer a witness money enough to take him out the United States and to keep him for the rest of his life, he would develop a good-forgetter, or else the same old gag—'been blind folded,' 'didn't see,' and so on, and on, and on; you can't blame them! I'll bet if every one of the herders had escaped instead of festering there in the ash heap, they'd all be legging it out of the country far and fast as they could go."

The little mule came to a stand at a bend in the switch back; and the old evangelist sat ruminating silently on his broncho.

"Y' have a sheriff?"

Wayland laughed.

"He's like the Indian flies; a no-see-him. He'll ride over the hills for weeks and if he tumbles over the top of his prisoner, he can't find his man!"

The old Britisher looked doubtfully at Wayland, as much as to say, "I don't believe you."

"You're no temptin' me to take the law into our own hands?"

Again Wayland laughed.

"My dear sir, you don't understand! I don't want to drag you into this at all! For ten years, the powers that stand for law in this country have been marking time behind the firing line; while the other fellow got away with the goods. They have been marking time while Crime scored, and what you call the Devil kept tally."

The old man nodded his head approvingly.

"That's all true!"

"You ask me if I intend to break the law? No, Sir, I do not; but I do intend to carry the law out beyond the firing line. The thief strains the law to get away with the goods; I am going to strain the law to get them back. The murderer strains the law to protect his damned useless neck; I'm going to strain the law to break his neck. Unless," he added, "I break my own neck doing it."

The old man had drawn down his brows. "A don't just like the sound of it; what's your plan?"

"To go out with a gun till I get them; the way your own Mounted Police do up in Canada! I'm going to quit monkeying with technicalities in the twilight zone . . . and go out . . . after the man."

The old Britisher sat thinking: "Wayland, if A was managing this thing, first thing A'd do would be blow such a blast on your local press, the authorities would have to sit up, then—A'd go after your sheriff if A had to tackle the coward by the scruff of his scurvy neck, A'd make him ashamed . . . not . . . to act."

"All right, Sir! Manage this thing . . . manage it just as you would behind your hide-bound British laws! We'll pass the Senator's ranch in ten minutes. You can telephone down to 'The Smelter City Herald.' I'll get something ready to eat while you telephone. Then, we'll go right along to the sheriff."

They kicked their ponies lightly into a trot and came to the Senator's k'raal before the noon hour. Two or three of the ranch hands loitered casually out to the road. All were in blue over-alls and shirt sleeves but one; and he was in knickerbockers.

"That's the foreman, ask him!"

"'Twould oblige me t' have the use of your telephone?"

The man in the knickerbockers tilted his hat at a rakish angle, stuck a tooth-pick in the corner of his mouth, put his thumbs in his jacket arm holes, shot Wayland a quick look of questioning, grinned at the old man and nodded towards a white pergola standing apart from the veranda of the ranch house.

"Find it there," he indicated, "drop a nickel—then, ring!"

"Did you see that look?" gritted the old Britisher between his teeth, as the fellow sauntered away with elaborate indifference.

"Yes, but looks don't go with a jury."

"Neck-tie was effective with the likes of him in my day!"

For the third time, Wayland uttered the same sardonic laugh. What was happening to the old Britisher to change his point of view?

"I'll go on down to the River and prepare grub."

What Wayland was thinking, he did not say; but what was passing in the brain of the law-loving old Britisher that the rakish tilt of the hat, the insolent angle of the tooth-pick, the spread of a man's thumbs and feet—could break through hide-bound respect for law and elicit reference to the court of the old-time neck-tie?

At the River, the Ranger loosened the saddle girths and put a small kettle to boil above a fire of cottonwood chips and grass. Then he took out his note book and wrote the note to Eleanor which he gave to one of the road gang for Calamity. The note said: "We are setting out on the Long Trail . . . the Long Trail this Nation will have to travel before Democracy arrives . . . the trail of the Man behind the Thing . . . the Man Higher Up." How did the Ranger know what was going on up at the telephone in the pergola, where British respect for law was at one end of the wire and the handy man of the Valley at the other?

There was no bitterness in the quizzical smile with which he awaited the old man's return; for as he lay back on the ground watching the fire burn up, the letter brought again, not memory, but consciousness of that seal to service, he wondered half vaguely could she know, could she realize, did a woman ever realize what her love meant to a man. She could surely never have given such full draughts of life, of wondrous new revealing consciousness, unless they were drinking together from the same perennial, ever-new, ever-surprising spring! . . . He did not hear the footsteps till the old man spoke—

"A somehow—didna' seem—to get—them clear! They answered; then—they didna' answer! Smelter City Herald—ye said? 'Twas strange—'twas vera strange—A got an answer plain asking my name—then central said 'ring off! ring off! can't get them, wire out of order'!"