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The transcontinental express had made up lost time and came roaring in just as the stage rattled up to the platform. MacDonald and Williams stepped off the observation car. Eleanor shook hands.
"You know about the sheep?" she asked.
"Yes, we have your letter," answered MacDonald. "That's why we stayed so long buying grazing ground in the Upper Pass."
"Here, boy." He bought an evening paper; and helped Eleanor inside the stage. Then he mounted to the top with Williams. There were only three other occupants in the stage, the lady of the lavender silks, the gold teeth, and a workman, sodden drunk and drowsy, in the upper corner. The lady of the lavender silks had a complexion that looked as if it had been dipped in a fountain of perennial youth. She was leaning over the evening paper which the undertaker plumes had evidently shown her. The heat had not improved Eleanor's stiff linen collar and the dust had certainly not added to the style of her kakhi motor coat. It was not until afterwards she remembered how both the heads flew apart from the evening paper the moment she entered the stage.
"Have you had a pleasant day shopping, my dear?" It was the lavender silk with the hard mouth actually breaking in a smile. It was the "my dear" that struck Eleanor's ear as odd. The manner said plainly as words could say "You weren't before; but you are now."
"Oh, it was rather hot," answered Eleanor quietly.
"Y're on the wrong soide. Y're in the sun. If y'll sit over b'side off me, my dear gurl—"
Eleanor nearly exploded. 'Girl' was the limit: 'lady' would have been worse; 'woman' was good enough for her; but, 'gurl.' It was the manner, the proprietary manner, you are one of us now: what had happened? She did not answer. She raised her eye lashes and looked the speaker over from the undertaker's plumes and the gold teeth and the ash colored V of skin to the clock-work stockings and high heeled slippers. Then, the stage was stopping violently and her father appeared on the rear steps at the door. She had never seen him look so. His eyes were blazing. It was not until afterwards she remembered how the lavender silks had crushed the evening paper all up and sat upon it.
"There is a little girl up on the seat with the driver. You'll find it pleasanter there going up the Valley."
She remembered afterwards, while her father gave her a hand up the front wheel, a voice inside the stage exclaimed: "Say, thought they wuz goin' to be fireworks. If Dan'd read that in th' paper 'bout me, he'd a gone on awful."
"Oh, no, he's a thoroughbred all right, if it is part Indian."
Then her father and Williams had gone down inside the stage; and she was left with the driver and a diminutive little bit of humanity, that looked as if it had escaped from one of the rag shops of Shanty Town. She wore a tawdry thing on her head with bright carmine ostrich plumes that had lost their curl in the rain. A red plush cape was round her shoulders; and Eleanor could hardly believe her eyes—she had not seen them since she went through the East End of London—they were copper toed boots.
"M' name is Meestress Leezie O'Finnigan. What's y'rs?" demanded the little old face.
Eleanor didn't answer. She was trying to think what had changed the driver's friendly manner. He had neither greeted her nor proffered the reins. And now, oh, philosopher of the human heart, for each of us is a philosopher inside, answer me: why did the driver, who was a bit of a hero, and the lavender silk, who was an adventuress, and the gold teeth, who was a slattern, neither pure nor simple, why did each and all eagerly believe the evil, so vague it had not been stated, written by an unknown blackmailer, in the face of the reputation of purity sitting beside them?
"M' father uz down inside," continued the child. "He's sleep. We're goin' t' live on th' Ridge. D' y' know what a Ridge iz? We're goin' t' be waal-thy—m' father says so. He says we won't have a thing t' do but sit toight an' whuttle un' sput, un' whuttle un' sput fur three years, then the com'ny wull huv t' pay us what he asks. He says they think they'll pay him off fur three hun'red; but he says he knows, he does; un' he's goin' t' hold 'em up fur half. Unless they give him half he'll tell—"
"What?" asked Eleanor, suddenly wakening up to the meaning of the chatter. "What is your father?"
"He's trunk jes' now," said the child. Then she reached her face up to Eleanor's confidentially. The little teeth were very unclean and the breath was very garlicky, indeed. "He's goin' t' be a dummy," she whispered with a gurgle of childish glee, "un' he says he'll easily hold 'em up for twenty thousand without doin' a thing fur five years but whuttle un' sput."
"A dummy? Oh," said Eleanor.
Even the driver relaxed enough to flick the tandem grays with his whip and permit a twisted smile to play round the tobacco wad in his cheek.
They ate their late supper in the Ranch House by lamp light, her father scarcely uttering a word, the evening paper still sticking out of his coat pocket.
"I know this sheep affair has been a horrible, hideous loss," she said. "Is that what's worrying you, father?"
MacDonald shoved back from the table.
"Pah, that's nothing," he said.
He stood waiting till the German cook had removed the dishes. Then he drew the paper from his pocket.
"There's something here I'm sorry you'll have to know," he said. "You won't understand how low the meaning of most of it is; but I'm sorry they hit you to try and hurt me."
He threw himself down in a big leather chair. She took the paper mechanically and sat on the arm of the chair to read. She read slowly and deliberately to the end. Then she re-read both columns; and the paper fell from her hands. She did not know it, but the same suppressed fury was blazing in her face as she had seen on his at the stage door.
"So that is what was doing when I went to the Senator's office this afternoon to plead with him that things could not go on in the old plundering way. That is what his man's visit meant here the other day to express sympathy with you for the loss of the sheep? Now I understand what the loafers at the station meant, and the driver's unfriendliness, and those unclean women; and to think they framed it all out of that innocent coat. You know, father, Mr. Wayland had carried Fordie down from the Rim Rocks. We carried the body in together."
"Where is Wayland?" asked MacDonald; and she poured out the full story of all that had happened. I hope, gentle reader, you will please to observe that if the father had viewed the facts of that recital through the same tainted mind as Mr. Bat Brydges, a breach would have occurred that neither time nor regret could have bridged. I confess when I see breaches occur that wrench lives and break hearts through love harboring suspicion, I don't think the love is very much worth the name. You can't both have your plant grow, and keep tearing up the roots to see if they are growing. You can't both throw mud in a spring and drink out of a well of love undefiled. If love grows by what it feeds on, so does suspicion. He did not once look up questioningly to her eyes. Instead, he reached up and took hold of her hand. For the first time in their lives, father and daughter came together.
"But there is one thing you are mistaken about, father. They did not hit me, to hurt you. They hit me, to stop Dick Wayland."
"Why, what difference can you make to Wayland?"
She hid her face on his shoulder.
"I love him," she said.
When the German cook came in with the washed dishes, father and daughter still sat in the big arm chair; and you may depend on it, that flunky carried out to the ranch hands, guzzling over the evening paper in the bunk house, a proper report of a heart broken father and a repentant daughter; for when we look out on the world, do we see the world at all; or do we see the shadows of our own inner souls cast out on the passing things of life?
CHAPTER XX
A FAITH WORKABLE FOR MEN ON THE JOB
"The point is," said Wayland, "though, we have driven out this nest of beauties, we have no guarantee another nest won't take their place; and so we're not much farther ahead than before, with the chances I'll be called down for exceeding my duties."
"And y'll keep on bein' where y' were before till y' get the Man Higher Up," interrupted Matthews.
They had camped among the red firs where the Desert crossed the State Line and merged from cut rocks to broken timber. It was seven weeks since they had set out from the Upper Mesas of the Rim Rocks, four weeks since they had left the saline pool. Man and beast, fagged to the point of utter exhaustion, retraced steps slower than fresh hunters on an untried trail. Also, going down, they had followed hard wherever fugitives led. Coming back, they struck across to the Western Desert road, and travelled from belt to belt of the irrigation farms, with their orange-green cottonwood groves and bluish-green alfalfa fields and little match box houses stuck out of sight among peach orchards. The parched-earth, burnt-oil smell gave place to the minty odor of hay in wind rows, with the cool water tang of the big irrigation ditch flowing liquid gold in the yellow August light. One evening, Matthews looked back to the looming heat waving and writhing above the orange sands beneath a sky of lilac and topaz round a sunset flowing from a dull red ball of fire. Far ahead, the edges of forested mountain cut the heat haze with opal winged light above what might have been peaks or clouds.
"'Tis beautiful, Wayland, y'r lone Desert world; but man alive, it's sad! Y' call some the Painted Desert, don't ye? 'Tis like a painted woman, Wayland, vera beautiful, vera fair to look on an' allurin', but a' out o' perspective; an' Wayland, the painted woman is always a bit lonely in the bottom o' her soul spite o' harsh laugh. So is the Desert wi' its harsh silence. Those as like to be shrivelled up wi' thirst, may have it! A'm a plain man!"
Then one morning, the opal swimming above the smoke haze of the North shone,—was it the shape of a cross?
"Wayland, man, look!"
The old frontiersman had taken off his hat.
"Man alive, open y'r throat an' let out a yell."
"I'm too busy drinking in the air," answered Wayland.
And they both laughed. The mule and the broncho stood pointing their ears forward. Wayland's mare, which he had bought at one of the irrigation farms, lifted up her neck and whinnied. It was at that irrigation farm operated by a retired newspaper man from Chicago—they had got a reading of the first newspaper seen since leaving the Valley and learned that the bodies of the two remaining fugitive outlaws had been found by the railway navvies. Wayland thoughtfully removed his Forest Service medallion. Men do not question each other over much in the West. They had passed on unquestioning and unquestioned, Wayland a disguised figure in his new ready-to-wear kakhi, not a sign of the Forest Service about them, but the green felt hat still worn by the old preacher, and the hatchets fastened to the saddles.
"How many Holy Cross Mountains have y' in the West, Wayland?"
"Three that I know of."
"That's ours, isn't it?"
"Yes, it's ours: the old priests and explorers scattered the name round pretty thick in the old days."
"How far do you make it?"
"About a hundred miles, perhaps more!"
"Been a pilot to the priests and explorers for centuries?"
"I guess so, sir."
"Wayland, may it be so t' th' Nation, now! Y've got a wilderness an' a Red Sea an' a Dead Sea an' a devilish dirty lot o' travellin' to do on th' way t' y'r promised land; an' A'm thinkin', man, y've wasted a lot o' time on the trail worshippin' th' calf; an' God knows who is y'r Moses."
They camped that night among the evergreens with red fir branches for beds, the first beds they had known for seven weeks, with the needled end pointing in and the branch end out, "unless y' want t' sleep on stumps," the old preacher had admonished the bed maker. And during the night, the wind sprang up shaking all the pixie tambourines in the pines and the hemlocks, and setting the poplars and cottonwoods clapping their hands. A spurt of moisture hit the old man's face.
"Man alive, but is that rain?" he asked. Wayland laughed. "Only a drop from a broken pine needle; but rain would taste good, wouldn't it?"
"D' y' smell it? Smell hard! It's like cloves."
Wayland laughed. He had had all these sensations of coming back from South to North before.
The next night, they camped beside a chorus of waterfalls, joyous, gurgling, laughing silver water, not the sullen silent blood red streams of the Desert that flow without a sound but the plunk of the soft bank corroding and falling in. They could not talk. They lay in quiet, listening to the tinkle and trill and treble of the silver flow over the stones; to the little waves lipping and lisping and lapping through the grasses; and when the moon came up, every rill showed a silver light. Wayland was thinking,—need I tell what he was thinking? Was he thinking at all; or was he drinking, drinking, drinking life from a fountain of memory immanent as present consciousness? He tossed restlessly. He sat up with his face in his hands. When he turned, the old man had risen and was stripping.
"A'm goin' t' find a pool an' go in, Wayland. Dry farmin' may be good for crops; but this dry bath business o' y'r Desert,—'tis not for a North man. Better come along! If A can find it to my neck, y'll need a cant hook to get me out 'fore daylight!"
They had come back from their plunge and were spreading the slickers above the fir branches for bed, when Matthews began to talk in a low dreamy voice, more as a man thinking out loud than one uttering a confessional. It was the first word of religion the Ranger had heard him utter. Wayland had really come to wonder when the old preacher prayed. When he came to know him better, he realized that a good man may pray standing on his feet, or striding to duty, readily as on prone knees.
"'Tis like the water o' life, Wayland! Men laugh at that phrase to-day! Oh, A know vera well, we've no time for an old or a new dispensation nowdays. We're too busy wi' the golden calf, an' the painted woman, an' th' market place, an' th' den o' thieves; an' when th' vision faileth, the people perish! 'Ye shall have a just balance an' a just ephah'; 'an' take away y'r offerings an' y'r burnt offerings an y'r gifts, saith the Lord of Hosts.' Ram that down the throat of y'r church-buildin' thieves, an' y'r bribe-givin' pirates, who steal a billion out o' th' Nation's pocket, then take out an insurance policy against a Hell, they're no so sure doesn't exist, by givin' back a million t' th' people they've plundered! Tell me y'r old dispensation's past? A could preach a sermon from th' oldest book in the Bible w'ud burn up Fifth Avenue an' have y'r churches sendin' in a call for the p'lice t' cart me away t' a lunatic asylum! Ah, yes, A know they'll tell y' A'm not learned an' don't know Hebrew! No; but A know th' language o' th' man on the street; an A know life; an' A know God; an' A know how to putt righteousness in the end o' my doubled fist; which is what th' world is wantin'. Y'r learned men, what are they do in' for th' man on the street? 'Darkening counsel without knowledge,' while the people go gropin' in the dark for light.
"Y' wonder how a man, who was a whiskey smuggler an' a gambler an' a contractor, who could skin the Devil, comes to be a preacher, Wayland; a missionary t' th' Cree?"
"Yes, I have wondered, sometimes," confessed Wayland. "I could not just reconcile you with the poverty-stricken, down-in-the-mouth—"
"Don't say 'poverty-stricken', Wayland! A'm . . . rich. A've never known want! God has taken care of me since A put it squarely up to Him! A've my wife! A've my children! A've my ranch; an' my ranch pays for the school! A've never known want! Why, man, thirty dollars a year is more than A need for m' clothes! A'm rich! What wud A be doin' goin' among a lot o' kiddie boys t' study Hebrew when A know the language o' the man on the street; an' A know God? 'Twas the bishop's idea t' have me come t' College at forty years o' age an' potter t' A-B-C an' white collar an' clerics buttoned up the back an' a' the rest." The old frontiersman laughed. "Poh! What for wud A waste m' years doin' that? A'd wasted forty servin' the Devil. A'd no more years t' waste. A must be up, up, up an' doin', Wayland, the way y'r up an' doin', for the Nation. A'd earned m' livin' when A served th' Devil! A would earn m' livin' when A served God; an' as A spoke th' Cree, A tackled them first; an' now we're buildin' our hospital.
"How did it happen, y' ask?" The old frontiersman sat down on a log. "God knows! A don't! A can no more tell y', Wayland, what happened t' me, than y' cud tell a man what comin' off th' Desert an' bathin' in a cool mountain stream was like; no more than y' cud tell what happened t' y', when y' first looked in her eyes an' read, love! God, man, it was love! That's what happened t' me! A all of a sudden got t' see what life meant when ye bathed in love. God looked into m' eyes, Wayland, that was it! An' all th' dirt o' me shrivelled up an' th' mud in m' manhood, way yours did when y' looked in her eyes! A needed washin', Wayland, that was it, an' then A saw Him on the Cross as y' see that—yon Cross there in the sky. 'Sense o' sin!' Man alive, A'd never heard them words till that night."
"What night?" asked Wayland, quietly.
"Oh, 'twas a hot night, Wayland, my boy; an' hot for more reasons than one. Th' tin horns an' the plugs an' the toots had come up t' our construction camp, an' of a Monday mornin' after Sunday's spree, y' cud count fifty dead navvies, Chinks an' Japs an' dagoes, washed down th' river after gamblers' fights an' chucked up in the sands o' Kickin' Horse! Well, a lot o' big fellows o' th' railway company had come thro' that day on the first train. There was Strathcona, who was plain Donald Smith in them days, an' Van Horn, who was manager, an' Ross, who was contractor! A'd been workin' m' crews on the high span bridge, there,—y' don't know,—well no matter, 'tis the highest in the Rockies an' dangerous from a curve! A didn't want that train load o' directors to risk crossin': wasn't safe! M' crew hadn't one main girder placed; but Ross was a headstrong dour man; an' Smith—Smith wud a' sent a train thro' Hell in them days to prove that railway could be built. Full lickety smash their train came onto that bridge o' mine off the sharp curve: the dagoes went yellow as cheese wi' fear, th' Chinks chattered in their jaws, an' the Japs: well the Japs hung on to the girder an' the cranes. A saw th' bridge heave an' swerve, an' th' girder went smashin' to th' bottom o' yon creek bed so far below y' could scarcely see the water; Ross was ridin' wi' th' engineer. Ross kept his head, ordered them to throw throttle open. All that saved that train load o' directors was th' train got across before th' weight smashed thro'; way a quick skater can cross thin ice. Man alive, but A was mad, riskin' m' crew o' two hundred workmen for a train load o' rash directors! Th' train stopped! A dashed up! Ross opened out, his throttle was full open: so was mine; an' th' steam an' smoke escapin' from yon big mogul,—well, Wayland, them was my unregenerate days! A may as well confess, Wayland, A gave him back all he'd given with sulphur thrown in extra; till Donald Smith poked his head out o' th' private car callin', 'Go on, Ross! Go on, what are you delayin' for?' Well, then, three of us contractors and th' company doctor was summoned to th' coast next week. We were all so mad at the fool rashness, we had our resignations in our pockets. They had our pay checks ready; but when they saw all four of us had our resignations written, well, everybody took a cool breath; an' A think mebbee th' wise little man o' that private car sent across something to help us wash away bitter memories! Anyway, 'twas a hot night, Wayland! Y' couldn't drink one of the four under th' table; an' we had cashed our checks at the pay car! A was playin' wi' th' doctor for partner! Mebbee, it was that little night cap from the private car, mebbee, well, in an hour or two, three month's wages for four men was in the middle o' that table; an' mebbee th' loafers in that saloon didn't sit up! Mebbee, somebody from that private car didn't saunter in t' look us four fools over! Wayland man, we won it all, th' doctor an' me! Th' other two wanted to play on their watches, they wud a' pawned th' clothes off their backs; but we wouldn't let them! We gave 'em back enough to grub stake 'em back to their job! Then some one says, th' vera words: A can hear them yet, 'Let's go across an' hear those damned evangelists: there's a white faced whiskers, an' a little clean shaved jumpin' jack skippin' all over the backs o' the church seats pretendin' he's Henry Ward Beecher an' sayin' in a fog horn voice, 'I like that.' Let's go an' raise Hell.
"Wayland, man, we went across! 'Twas all true, there was the white faced fat man; an' there was the little clean chopped chap jumpin' all over the backs o' th' seats; an' there was a lot o' snivellin' Saints in Israel, women that cry an' sissie men that get converted an' converted at every meetin'! Man, Wayland, A'd like to dump th' job lot o' such folks out in a cesspool! They do religion more harm than the Devil! They're about as like what fightin' Christians ought to be as a spit wad's like a bullet! Well, we went in with a whoop; but God wasn't out for the sissies that night, Wayland: he was out with a gun for red blood men! He got us, Wayland! That's all! 'Twasn't the poor puny preachers, perhaps 'twas th' music: th' fat one cud sing, but when we came out the doctor was cryin'; poor fellow he killed himself in D. T.'s later; an' A was all plugged up wi' cold in m' head blowin' m' nose! 'Boys,' says I, 'here's where I get off. Here's y'r money back. A've put up a pretty good fight for the Devil so far an' A've earned m' way! Now, A'm goin' t' fight for God an' earn m' way!' They didn't want to take the money back. They didn't believe it. A finished my job on the railroad, then A slummed it in th' cities, this was when the bishop tried to turn me school boy at forty, an' to dig in y'r graveyard o' theology; that was before m' brother was bishop and why, A hiked for Indians, Wayland! A know the Cree tongue, an' A know the need o' decency in th' tepees, an' A know the trick o' puttin' Christianity into th' end o' m' fist on white blackguards! An' that's all."
"Is that all?" repeated Wayland; and he gave the old frontiersman the same kind of a look, Matthews had given him that day going up the face of the Pass precipice.
"Yes, that's all there was to it; an' A could no more tell y' what happened, Wayland, than y' could tell a man what happened when y' jumped in that pool an' got washed clean! Better try it, Wayland!"
They sat late listening to the gurgle and trill and tinkle of the water slipping over the stones. Neither man said anything more, nor mouthed, nor kneeled, nor amened, nor did save as men among men do and say: but somehow Wayland had never felt so sure of the God, who was Love and whose Love washed men clean, being, as he told himself, 'on the job.' It may not have been religion; and it may not have been theology; but I think it was the workable conviction that many a fighting man incorporates into his life. Perhaps, it was what Christians call Belief, only we have so slimed that good word over with hypocrisy that it's hard for fighting working men among men, women among women, people on the job, to mine down to the exact business sense of those old religious terms. 'Slimed with hypocrisy?' Yes, good friends, 'slimed with hypocrisy.' Have you not known men and women, legions of them, who shouted their fire-proof Belief, Belief, Belief, their fire-insurance Belief that was to roof them from rain of fire and act as an umbrella against the results of their own misdeeds; who underscored their Bibles, and prayed long and loud, and proclaimed themselves right, when every day, every act of every day, every leastermost act of very hour, shouted blasphemous denial of what so ever is lovely and pure and unselfish and Christlike; whose influence damned and injured and blighted every life it touched? You must not blame business men and women for wanting a workable faith, a faith that will deliver the goods on the job.
CHAPTER XXI
THE HAPPY AND TRIUMPHANT HOME-COMING
They were up before sunrise following along a rock trail against the face of a mountain through the morning mists, when they turned a sharp crag and came suddenly on one of those flower slopes bevelled out of the forests by snow or ice. The slant sunlight met their faces, and the mists were lifting in a curtain, with a riffle of wind that ran through the grasses like the ripple of waves to the touch of unseen feet. The slope lay literally a field of gold, spikes and umbels of gold—the gold of yellow midsummer light dyed in the asters and sunflowers and great flowered gaillardias and golden rod, with an odor of dried grasses or mint or cloves.
"By George," cried Wayland, "you'd not believe it! Only seven weeks; look!"
Matthews looked but apparently did not see.
"Don't you see? It's the place where the snow slide slumped down!"
"But where in the name o' conscience is all yon snow; and where's th' bodies, Wayland?"
"Washed down to the bottom of the Lake Behind the Peak by this time; or you may find a great rock pile at the foot of the slope."
"A'm thinkin' they'll lie quiet till the crack o' doom, Wayland; but, but do y' no' see a tent back in yon larches across th' slide, man, where the thing knocked us both sprawlin'?"
"By George, yes, I do! Wonder if they're homesteading this next? It's off the N. F."
They put their ponies to an easy lope across the slope and came on a tepee tent with the flap laced tight and no sign of life, but a horse lazily floundering up beside a large fallen log, an empty whiskey bottle on the log, and a man's boot leg protruding from beneath the tent skirt.
"A'm wonderin' if there's a leg in that boot, Wayland."
"It's the sheriff's horse," said Wayland.
"It is, is it? And this is off y'r Forest Range; an' y'r not responsible for what A may be tempted to do?"
The old frontiersman literally avalanched off his broncho and made a dash at the tent flap, frapping it loudly with the flat of his hand.
"Here you—anybody inside?"
No response came from the owner of the leg.
"Here you, waken up." Matthews caught hold of the leg and pulled and pulled. There was a splutter of snorts, and, 'what in Hell's,' and the fat girth of an apple-shaped body ripped the tent pegging free and came out under the tepee skirt followed by another leg, and two oozy hands flabbily clawing at the grass roots to stop the unusual exit. One hand held a flat flask and the air became flavored with the second-hand fumes of a whiskey cask. The sheriff rolled over after the manner of apple-shaped bodies and sat up on the end of his spine rubbing his eyes. Then, he recollected the dignity of his office and got groggily to his feet, steadying himself by clutches at the tent flap. Then, he emitted a hiccough. "'Scuse m'," he said thickly. "I'm not well, thas ish not really well! Will one of y' pleash gimme a drink o' water? I been chasin' those damn-cow-boy-outlawsh seven weeks sclean 'cross Shate Sline, I'm dead beat out. Thas you, ain't it Wayland? Kindsh o' you both come after me! Saw y' pash tha' day y' called t' door! Wife tol' me to hide—not risk m' life, women 're all thas way; skeary; skeary. Well, I bin out ever shince y' pashed! I nearly got 'em, too! I caught 'em right in here day after shnow slide had 'em cornered! Gosh, bullets was pretty thick fur about half-an-hour; bu' I cud'nt chross Shtate Line." Something in the old frontiersman's widening eyes and glowering brows stopped the flow of valor; and Sheriff Flood dragged his exhausted virtue across to the log with some difficulty as to knees and elbows, got himself turned round and seated.
"Y' been out huntin' them seven weeks?"
"Yes, seven weeks!" His articulation had cleared a little. "Please gimme m' gun, Wayland!"
"Y' saw them? Y're sure y' saw them?"
"Saw them?" Sheriff Flood laughed in a thin little squeaking laugh. "Gosh A'mighty, I—I fought—them single handed for a whole half day; I think I got one! Least ways, there's a powerful smell som'pin dead comin' up below the Pass Trail. It's too steep to go down to see. I wish I knew."
"Ye wish ye knew? Ye do—do you? 'Tis a wish bone instead of a back bone the likes of you have; and it was too steep to see?" Matthews megaphoned a laugh that echoed loud and long and scornful from the rocks. "I saw a man who was no sheriff climb both up an' down that place too steep for the likes o' you to see; and he climbed to do more than see! 'Twas half an hour y' fought them th' first version? Now 'tis raised to half a day. A'm thinkin' y' be applyin' to th' pension bureau for a hero's triflin' remembrance! Hoh! An' y' saw us pass did y'? An' y'r frowsy dyed-haired slattern wife told us y' were away? An' 't will be a week y' fought 'em when y' tell it again; an' y' been huntin' them seven weeks lyin' sodden drunk in y'r tent wi' a whiskey keg from th' cellar o' y'r white-vested friend? Hoh?"
He caught the flabby body by the collar, spinning the dignity of the law round face down prone upon the log. "A'll not take my fist t' y' as A wud t' a Man! Ye dastard, drunken, poltroon, coward, whiskey sodden lout an' scum o' filth, an'," each word was emphasized by the thud of the empty whiskey bottle wielded as a flail.
"Look out, sir," warned Wayland, rolling from his horse in laughter, "you'll hurt something, with that bottle."
"Hurt something? N' danger on this wad of fat an' laziness an' lies." (Thud . . . thump . . . and a double tattoo.) He threw the instrument of castigation aside and spinning the hulk of flesh and sprawling legs erect, began applying the sole of his boot. "A'll no take m' fist t' y' as A wud t' a Man! A'll treat y' as A wud a dirty broth of a brat of a boy with the flat o' my hand an' sole leather; y' scum, y' runt, y' hoggish swinish whiskey soak o' bacon an' fat! 'Tis th' likes o' you are the curse o' this country, y' horse-thief sheriff, y' bribe-takin' blackguard guardian o' justice an' right! y' coward not doin' th' crime y' self, but shieldin' them that do."
The sheriff had uttered a splutter of filthy expletives at the first blow, then a yell; now he was bellowing aloud, chattering with terror, screaming to be, "let go, let go! I never done you no harm. I'll have y'r life for this."
"Y' will, will y'? Did y' ask for a drink? Wayland, wait for m' here!"
The Ranger saw the white-haired frontiersman seize one sprawling leg and the shirt front of the struggling limp thing in his hands. He heard him plunging down through the tangle of windfall and brush. There was a bellowing howl and a splash; and Wayland being altogether human flesh and blood doubled up on the ground with laughter.
"That'll cool him," remarked Matthews coming back very red of face and sober, "an' it's not deep enough to drown."
He tore open the tent flap and rolled out a small keg. There was a sound of dregs still rinsing round inside. They could hear the bellows from the brook. The majesty of the law had evidently crawled out on the far side.
"He's the kind o' brave man will slap children, an' call a boy a calf, an' bully timid women, an' knock down little Chinks and dagoes! Oh, A know his kind o' thunder-barrel bravery, that makes the more noise the emptier and bigger it is—they're thick as louse ticks under the slimy side of a dirty board in this world, Wayland; an' they're thick in the girth an' thicker in the skull." Matthews had taken one of the Forest axes from the saddle. He left the whiskey keg in kindling wood.
"He's camped dead beat on the State line, all right, Wayland," said the irate old frontiersman as they mounted their ponies. "He'll have at least some scars to prove his story, but A'm no thinkin' he'll boast round showin' them marks o' glory! 'Tis some satisfaction for my thirst back in the Desert."
"I thought it was about here, on our way out, that a law-loving Briton, I know, gave me a sermon about exceeding law, taking the law in our own hands?"
"Hoh!" said the old man.
And the Sheriff's tent was not the only one seen on the way back to the Ridge. Where the Pass widened to the Valley above the Sheriff's homestead, they came on a huge miner's tent boarded half way up as for winter residence, with eight tow-headed half-clad urchins thumb in mouth staring out from the open mosquito wire door. There was a smell of onions and frying pork.
"What! a homestead, here, Wayland? D' y'r homesteaders farm on th' perpendicular, or the level; an' what will they grow on these rocks?"
The Ranger had reined in his pony and was running his glance up the precipice face for the posts marking the bounds.
"What do they grow? Water-power, I guess! I'm looking for the lines. The fellow has his posts in for a wire fence; he couldn't get a hundred and sixty acres on the level; and the posts run up the face, by George he's blanketed a cool square mile, mostly on the up and down."
"Your territory, Wayland?"
The Ranger had turned looking back up the Pass.
"The trail marks the lower bounds of the N. F., but this fellow's line runs clear up above the trail. If you bunch this fellow's claim with the Sheriff's, they've got forty miles of the Pass corked up: no way to bring the timber above down but by the River; and they've got the River; and if possession is nine points in the law, they've got our Forest road besides. We'll have to give that fellow warning and if he doesn't move, break his fence down."
"Gutt dae." A big burly Swede came forward from the miner's tent.
"Are you one of the new settlers?" asked Wayland.
"Yaw! A gott pig—varm! Tra—vor—years mak' pig money liffin' y'ere! Mae voman, Ae send her vork citie; Ae build mae house y're!"
"All these children yours?"
"Yaw!" The man smiled bigly, incredulous that any one could doubt.
"Have you filed for a homestead for each of them?"
"Yaw!" The man smiled more pleased than ever, indicating the numerous olive branches by a wave of his hand. "Gott gutt pig varm! Pat, Pat Prydges . . . he sae he pay mae voman, one-huntred; mae, two huntred; mae chil'en . . ." he smiled again, bigly and blandly, "mabbee, five, ten. Yaw—?"
"One hundred and sixty acres each: twelve hundred acres for the kids, not one of age, a quarter section to the man!" Then turning back from Matthews to the foreign settler.
"You've got a thundering big farm?"
"Yaw! Ae mak' a pig yob of itt!"
"By George, I should think you do make a big job of it! This is the way those two-thousand acres of coal lands were swiped! Are you the fellow I gave a permit to cut timber up on the Ridge? What did you change your homestead for?"
The Swede stood smiling showing all his white teeth and wrinkling his nose and absorbing the meaning of the Ranger's questions into his skull.
"Pat did utt," he said.
"Who? Oh, Bat!" He looked at Matthews. "Do you mind riding back over the Pass trail; so we can go to the Ridge by the Gully, the way the outlaws escaped? I want to see where this fellow's upper lines run."
They rode back in silence almost all the way, coming up to the top shoulder of the precipice where the outlaws had come tumbling down on Matthews' hiding place a few weeks before. Wayland followed the lines of the newly planted posts, where the wire had not yet been strung.
"There is not the slightest doubt," he burst out, "this has been done to force a test case! Well, they'll get it."
"Wayland, is there no way of letting the public know what is going on? A bet the people of this State don't know!"
"It's against the rule to give out information any more," answered Wayland.
"Man alive—is this Russia? Y' mind me of Indians in the conjurors' tent: they tie the medicine man hand and foot and throw him into a tent; and he's t' make the tent shake. Only the devil-Indians can do it. They tie y' hand an' foot, then they expect y' to serve the Nation."
"No," corrected Wayland, "they tie us hand and foot to keep us from serving the Nation."
And the Swede's tent was not the only one they saw, as the reader well knows. Coming along the Gully on the Ridge crest, Wayland looked for the pile of illegally-taken saw logs. They were gone. There was nothing left but a timber skid, and the dry slash and a pile of saw dust emitting the odor of imprisoned fragrance in the afternoon heat; but a few yards back from the pile of saw dust stood a tepee tent with the flap hooked up; and in the opening, a wide-eyed diminutive child with a very old face and a very small frame, that looked for all the world to Wayland like a clothes rack in a pawn shop covered with colored rags.
"Waz ye wantin' me faather?"
As the reader is aware this little person never lacked speech.
"H's away! H's gone t' th' citie for th' throuble that's comin' on about th' mine, y' onderstand? He's wan o' th' men t' be on hand if there's throuble."
"Are you one of the new settlers'?"
"Yes, sor! M' name's Meestress Leezie O'Finnigan! We're come upp t' live three years, mebba four, m' faather says we may fool 'em on less than five; an' we're goin' to be wal-thy, an' we won't hev' a thing t' do but sit toight an' whuttle an' sput an'," it was the same story, she had told Eleanor.
"What trouble in the mines?" asked Wayland.
"In the coal mines, sor! There's a gen'leman come from Waashington, an' soon as the Ranger's been found, there's been goin's on, sor, bad goin's ons, soon as th' Ranger's back, their expectin' throuble; un' m' faather's gone down for to be there, he saz."
"Well?" said Wayland, as they rode on towards the Cabin.
"They've been busy, Wayland! They've been busy, man! You're in the thick of it! More power t' y'r elbow! We've got the first licks in on th' sheriff's carcass."
"And six dead men to the good," added Wayland dryly, "only I guess they don't go into the reports, they are missing!"
As they approached the Cabin, a young man in gray flannels and sailor hat sat up in the hammock, looked twice at Wayland, got up and came forward.
"Are you Wayland?" he asked, with a contemptuous glance at the Ranger's disguised suit.
"That's my name."
The young fellow handed him a letter stamped from the head department at Washington. It stated that the bearer was a Federal attorney sent out to investigate the Smelter City Coal Claims and any other matters bearing on the contests of the Holy Cross. The letter was couched—Wayland thought—with peculiar frigidity, as though he and not the coal claimants were the guilty party to an undecided contest. Then he glanced back at the bearer: an incredibly young and inexperienced youth—not more than twenty-two or three, barely out of a law school.
"Glad to see you, sir," said Wayland, "Been waiting long?"
The young fellow gave him a side wise look.
"About a week."
"I'm sorry to have delayed you; but one of the most important cases we have ever had called me away. I had intended to go down to Washington and explain the whole situation."
The young man smiled very faintly, and was it, contemptuously? "A good deal needs explaining," he remarked.
"I hope you made yourself at home in the Cabin?"
"On the contrary, I'm with Moyese! I have arranged to have the coal cases examined this week. The claimants declare the coal is not worth a farthing, and this case is seriously disturbing the title to the land where the Smelter stands."
"You're a geologist, of course?" asked Wayland innocently.
"No, I'm from the law department. We considered this more a case of legality of title than coal values. The Company has kindly consented to let us examine the mine this week."
"Kindly consented? By George, I like that condescending kindness from pirates and thieves!"
"But there are two sides to this question, Mr. Ranger: what good does coal do locked up in the earth? The country wants coal developed."
"Exactly," answered Wayland, "and not stolen and locked up in a great trust and rings that jack the prices sky-high! The law was passed to keep these pirates from stealing coal with dummies, to let the individual who hadn't money to hire dummies go in and develop. If you'll walk along the Ridge here, you'll see another of the contested cases. The forests are open to homesteading wherever the land is agricultural; but you can hardly call land agricultural that's a sheer drop of 1,000 feet, though the big trees growing on it would each build a house of six rooms. If you'll walk along, you'll see where the 'dummy' business has begun the same game as in the Bitter Boot."
The young bureaucrat turned short on his heel and strolled down the Ridge Trail, with an air that only a bureaucrat, a very young bureaucrat, and a very cheap one could possibly wear.
"Well, A 'm—A 'm d—danged."
Wayland burst out laughing.
"Do you suppose that little kindergarten ass thought he had come and caught me off duty?"
The old man stood dumfounded. It was such a happy and triumphant home-coming for a Man on the Job, who had risked his life for seven successive weeks solely in the cause of Right. Matthews slammed his hat on the ground, and stamped upon it, and clenched his teeth to keep in the words that seemed to want to hiss out.
"Man alive. A'd like t' spank him!"
Wayland laughed.
"I guess he's staying with our white-vested friend," he said, as he pulled the saddles off the animals and gave them a slap heading down to the drinking trough; but when he turned, Calamity stood in the door of the Cabin holding out a letter. He forgot to greet her; for the handwriting was Eleanor's. He tore the envelope open devouring the words in his eagerness; then his face clouded.
"What in thunder does it all mean? Listen.
'Dear Dick: I don't know when you will come home, but as soon as you do, you will learn of something abominable that has been published. I'm going to send Calamity up with this every day so she will be sure to catch you first thing.' ("It's dated three weeks ago," interjected Wayland.) 'They have struck at you through me. Don't mind, Dick. They did it to make you stop. You will not stop, will you? It didn't hurt me.' (Oh, brave beautiful liar! Does the Angel Gabriel take note of such lies by women; and which side of the account does he put them on?) 'Father says a fact is a hard nut to crack. You're not to take any notice of this attack on me. You're not to flinch from the fight for my sake or deflect a hair's breadth on my account. You know what you said. Things have gone so far that crime is invading decent lives. Well, it has invaded yours and mine; and you're not to slack one jot. Dick, I command it. I command it in the name of that seal I gave you.'
'E. MacD.'"
"What in thunder does it all mean?" reiterated Wayland.
"What seal is that she speaks of? A'm thinkin' if you'll read that pile of mail in there on the table, you'll find out."
"Any ansher?" asked Calamity softly, by which, you may guess, dear reader, that an Indian woman has a heart under her ribs as well as you.
"Wait," said Wayland.
He tore a sheet from his field book. This is what he wrote:
I shall obey you implicitly, my Alder Liefest. I don't know what it is yet; but I'll not let it make any difference in the fight no matter what it is. I have thought of that seal every day and night since I left you, and all day and all night; and I couldn't have pulled through this trip if I hadn't had that well of memory to drink from. You saved my life, tho' you don't know it. Matthews will tell you: and you saved his too.
Dick. (nth.)
P. S. There's a funny little kid up here, been left by her father in one of the settlers' tents. She's the most pitiable little object I ever saw. I think her father is a drunken tough from Shanty Town. She oughtn't to be left up here alone near such a baby-eater as I am. I wish you'd come up and see about her. If you don't come alone, get Mrs. Williams, or my friend, Matthews.
Calamity went on down the Ridge and Wayland plunged at his mail. On the very top of the pile lay a newspaper in a folder marked with red "Important." Before the pole cat begins operations, he chooses his target. For myself, I think discretion is better than valor in such a case, and you would do well to retreat and let the little genus Mephitis Mephitica infect the air for his own benefit; but Wayland did not know what was coming and tore the paper open and read. Then he flung it from him and stood looking with blazing eyes at the thing on the floor.
"Read it," he said.
The old frontiersman got his glasses laboriously out of the case and began to read. The sun was behind the Holy Cross, and he stood in the door to get the light on the paper. When he had finished and looked round, he saw Wayland sitting crunched forward with his face in his hands.
"Wayland, man," he slapped him twice on the shoulder, "look up, look up at that picture on the wall above y'r bed."
Wayland took his hands from his eyes. The Alpine glow struck through the doorway against the picture on the wall, the picture she had had Calamity bring down surreptitiously and had sent back framed, the picture of the face above the Warrior.
"Man alive, why w'd y' care for the devil's dirt and skunk stench and snake venom, when y' have, when y' have That? She's a—a trump! She's a thoroughbred! Man, y'd know she had th' blood o' Scottish kings and queens in her veins. Y'll no go down to-night, Wayland, when y'r all undone! 'Twould hurt her. A intended tellin' her to-night why A came; but A'll not now! A'll not now! She must not run from this scandal. She must face it down before she goes, but A'll go an' see her father an' come back an' tell y'. Cheer up man! 'Tis part o'the fight."
And for the only time in the struggle, Wayland let go; or rather—his manhood got from under leash. You can be stoical all right when you get the blow. It's another thing to be stoical when the blow hits what you love. When the curtain-drop fell on Moyese, it fell on a man pounding the desk, kicking furniture, eating up the telephone, turning the air blue. It fell on the Ranger sitting crunched in his chair gazing through misty eyes at a picture painted by an artist, who was an idealist. Was he down and out? Was Right the sport of fools?
CHAPTER XXII
A DOWNY-LIPPED YOUTH IN GRAY FLANNELS
I suppose it was owing to the fact that she was woman and he was man that she spent that first night of the home-coming in dumb hurt wonder that he had not come immediately to her; and that he passed the night in restless fevered fury, knowing well that you cannot both control fire and fan it, fuse metals molten and expect them not to forge, keep a resolution and break it. She had listened eagerly to the old frontiersman's account of the adventures on the trail, up the Pass precipice, crossing the snow slide and in the desert, where the Ranger had refused to save his own life by abandoning his companion; and the narrative lost nothing in Matthews' recital with his Scottish-Canadian R's rolling out sonorous and strong, where he was moved to admiration or anger. The sheep rancher sat silent through the stirring story with only an occasional glint of fire from his black eyes gazing aimlessly at the floor.
"'Cast your bread upon the waters and after many days it shall return to you again.' 'Minds me of what A saw you do for this woman you call Calamity, in our old Rebellion Days."
Eleanor was sitting on the arm of her father's leather chair. The sheepman glanced up warningly, but Matthews was going ahead full steam.
"We're both older than we were in those days, MacDonald, older an' wiser, an' for m'self, A should add, a good bit steadier! You, y' were always a sober-faced secret lad, MacDonald; an' till yon day in front o' th' Agency house, A don't think, A hardly think, we men knew what a devil was in y'! A can see y' yet as y' kicked th' gun out o' yon blackguard's hand an' let him take the load o' buckshot square between th' shoulders! 'Twas a handsome thing o' you to take th' poor buddy in an' give her a shelter! How does she come to call herself Calamity?"
MacDonald's foot came down on the floor with a clamp, and he rose. "She didn't. 'Twas the miners in the Black Hills. She used to bring in so many hard-luck chaps, shot up by the Sioux, bring 'em in on her shoulders from the hills to the camp, that the boys got to calling her Calamity. She had lost her good looks, and—" MacDonald shot a glance of warning in the direction of his daughter—"and the same old story, I guess; she was off the market! One of my trips to the mining camps up state, I found her in a mess of rags picking crusts out of the garbage barrels along a back lane! I brought her back with me. Gave her a week's soak in the bath house—" he paused as if reflecting, "and that it seems was foundation enough for the hog-wash that appeared in one of the papers here. Suppose we take a walk as we discuss old days; they were pretty wild days for discussion before a girl, who didn't know her dad before she was born."
And Eleanor went out on the Ranch House piazza off her room, while the two frontiersmen strolled down the river. How different her outlook on life was from two months before when reference to Calamity had called up mingled fury and horror. Now that she understood, anything in this Western Country might be possible, and understandable, and explainable. She had his hurried pencil note where she could feel it, under her locket; only the locket was outside above; and the fly leaf of that field book was inside next. "Dick (nth)," he had signed himself; and he had not come down. She could see the dark shadowy Ridge from her piazza chair, and hear the subdued laughter and lipping of the waters, and he was there—not a half hour's walk away—and he had not come. There was a full moon. She could see its silver sheen on the River, on the tremulous poplar leaves, sifting through the pine needles and in opal wings round the far luminous cross of snow on the mountain. The night hawks and the swallows dipped and darted and cut the air with humming wings; and once the wire gate squeaked to some one entering. Eleanor sprang up with her heart beating so that she could not speak; but it was only a white hatted youth in light gray flannels asking Calamity at the basement door "when MacDonald would be back." Did Eleanor imagine it; or did the citified young person in the gray flannels with the red necktie look up towards her hesitatingly, with the suggestion of an ingratiating smile in the pale blue eyes, a suggestion which she could not define but which somehow infuriated her? Poor pale anaemic youth! He was not used to having his waiting smiles met by the blaze of red fury that flashed to her eyes.
"Calamity, if that person wants anything, tell him to go out to the bunkhouse and see the foreman."
Then, she sank back in her chair both glad and sorry in one breath that Wayland had not been there. She shut her eyes to drink again of the memories that had sustained her all these weeks; and felt the lift and fall of the note his hand had written, pulsing to the rhythm of her breathing; but the memories failed her. Memories were for absence; and he was here; and he had not come. If only he would come now, how she would greet him, holding him unflinchingly to his resolution, of course, and of course; but as a kind of second thought in the back of her head, the under motive beneath all the clamor of light upper notes, she knew to the inmost core of her being that she was wishing he would come now because her father was out and she was alone and could greet him as flesh and spirit, heart and mind, cried out to greet him; to touch him; to spend themselves upon him in a fierce proud abandon of love and gladness; to give and take, and give and take again, till, till—what? Was this the way to keep him standing strong to his resolutions?
And shall we blame her? Does the beautiful thing we call life spring from postulates and rules and mathematics; or from the spirit's altar fires? And I confess I never see the thing we call vice but I wonder did it not spring from the burning of the refuse heap, which poor humans have mistaken for altar fires?
She heard her father come in late, slamming the mosquito door behind him, and pass across the dark living room to his own chamber without saying good night. Once, she thought she saw a white sailor hat through the cottonwood hovering along the road. Then, as she looked, the white sailor seemed accompanied by a panama; and she crept into her room with fevered hands and heavy heart, snacking the mosquito door behind her. There was the companion bang of a door being hooked below, old Calamity keeping watch as usual and only turning in, when she heard Eleanor going to bed. Eleanor waited till all was quiet. Then, she drew the burlap portiere across the mosquito door, and lighted her candle, and began writing,—writing what? Was it some dildo of oriental song she had read in Europe; was it the burden of some Indian chant stirring vaguely in her unconscious blood; or was it but the simple love cry of primitive Woman, of that woman who wandered round about the streets of Jerusalem calling her lover? "My flesh cries out to touch you, my beloved," she wrote; "my hands are hungry to touch you, and my spirit is hungrier than my hands. When you were absent, I drank of memories; but now, you are back, the shadow waters have gone; I must have the living. If I could see you but once, I know this wild longing would lie down and be quiet." She stopped writing. Would it? Would it lie down and be quiet with just a look? A look would be a deep drink of living waters, she knew that; but would it, would it lie down and be quiet? She didn't intend ever to stop loving him. As long as she loved him, and stayed where love could grow by what it fed on, would it lie quiet? Was this keeping him strong to his resolution?
She tore the paper to tiny atoms and burned the scraps bit by bit on her metal paper knife above the candle. Then, she blew out the candle and drew his soiled field-book leaf from her breast. She fell asleep with her head on her arm, and her lips pressed to that fool-thing he had signed at the bottom of his note, "Dick (the nth)," whatever that meant.
There was no mistaking it next morning at breakfast. She felt strung and upset; and her father looked at her strangely; and Matthews was so keen on covering the general embarrassment that he aimed too far in the other direction, rattling off such a fusilade of Western stories that they sounded hollow. She forgot her own confusion studying the two men. How stooped her father looked! He looked, what was it? Like a man who has waited a long time for something to come, and when it has come, found himself too sad to seize it. His eyes looked as if he had not slept; and Eleanor now observed that the frontiersman's sun-burned nose had a suspicious shine at the end. If she had not been undone from her own bad night, she would have helped their efforts to cover embarrassment; but now a horrible thought came; a thought born of the low innuendo in the scandal story; and the thought finished her. She felt her self-control going and rose and fled round the end of the table to her room. The old frontiersman stopped mid-way in his story of the brats of Blackfoot boys stealing every stitch of his clothing one day he was bathing in Lower Saskatchewan. Her father jumped to his feet and threw out one arm to stop her. That finished Eleanor. He had never done such a thing before. The only time he had ever shown affection was that night when she had read the scandal in the paper and he had reached up his hand and taken hers. Now, he held her in his arms, bowed, broken, unspeaking. The tears came in a rain. She did not hide her face after the manner of tenderly nurtured shrinking women. She faced him with wide open lashes and brimming eyes and burning defiance.
"Father, you don't doubt me, too, do you?"
"Doubt you? My God no, child! It's only I never knew how much I loved you till I realized I might have to part with you."
How strange and non-understanding and non-understandable these men creatures were! Eleanor looked at him; and looked at him. Then she threw her arms round his neck and kissed the dark sad silent face with a frightened tender fervor; and do not laugh, dear reader; for it is only on the stage that the graceful altogether elegant curtain-drop comes; but the old frontiersman had somehow got himself outside the screen door, and immediately on that kiss came through the mosquito wire such a thunder clap of pulpit artillery as is the peculiar prerogative of some large gentlemen when they blow their nose. MacDonald and Eleanor both burst out laughing; and Eleanor noticed it was a large red cotton one, two for ten they sold in Smelter City.
And all the while, Wayland sat crunched in the chair of the Cabin, gazing and gazing at the face in the picture above "the Happy Warrior," till the light faded from the Holy Cross and the moon beams struck aslant the timbered floor, and Calamity's shadow stood in the doorway with a basket on her arm.
"Meesis Villiam send up y' supper," she said.
Wayland ate mechanically. He did not know that he was bursting out with angry words all through the meal.
"To think, they'd stoop, they'd dare to splash their filth and hog-wash on her skirts, to hurt me? Well, they've got me, Calamity? They've got me, old girl! But they've got me in a way they don't expect! You Indians knew the courts were a fraud and lie. They'd have cleared this kind of blackguardism up with a knife. Well—so will I; but it will be another kind of knife. You can't out-Herod a skunk; but you can bury it, Calamity, eh, old girl? We'll bury 'em so deep next election, they'll never see daylight: then we'll pile this pack of exposure on 'em so high they'll never get up again. We're out for scalps, Calamity! No more fighting in the open, eh? We'll spring it on 'em the way you Indians put a knife in a man's back."
"Iss it Moy-eese, heem keel little boy?" asked Calamity softly.
Something in the soft hiss of the words made the Ranger turn. There was a mad look in the glint of the black eyes, and the hands were kneading nervously in and out of the palms.
"Yes, damn him, it is Moyese, who is at the bottom of all this deviltry; but don't you worry, Calamity! We're going to get his scalp!"
He paced the Ridge half the night planning his campaign. He would go first thing in the morning and get that child's story of the mine and the "dummy" entryman. Then, he would get that Swede's affidavit before the thick-tow-head realized what he was after. Then, he would get a trained geologist for the examination of the mine, not that flannelled kindergartner, stuck full of bureaucratic self importance as he was of ignorance. Then, he would surprise them by doing absolutely nothing till election time, then "plunk" it all on them through the opposition paper, and stand back, and take his dismissal! Oh, his midnight thoughts raced, as yours and mine have raced, when we have been struck by sorrow, or blackmail, or motiveless malice! He could not make sure of it; but once as he paced near the Ridge trail he thought he saw . . . was it a form in flannels accompanied by a figure resembling Bat's sauntering slowly down to the Valley?
When Wayland dwelt a moment on what such a conjunction of observers might mean, his thoughts jumped. Could Brydges have done it? Back in the Cabin, the face in the picture seemed sentient and shining in the gloom. It was an absurd notion, of course; for the picture was a shadowy thing in dark sepia; and there was no light but the silver reflection of the moon from the Holy Cross. The Holy Cross,—what was it she had said? Nothing worth while ever won without someone being crucified? How absurdly small, how remotely contemptibly impossible, the scandal thing seemed anyway, as though a skunk could obstruct the avalanche of the massed snow flakes by sending up his malodorous stench across the path of the Law! And he loved her and he had her love, and he had known the highest blessedness of life, and nothing could take the consciousness of it from him! Wayland went to sleep dreaming fool-things about the face in the picture. Of course, you never dreamed them, sleeping or waking. At break of day, he picked a sprig of mountain flower, and did certain things to that framed picture, and rode away to his day's work.
"Let's go up and see that little runt of an Irish lassie," Matthews had suggested in the afternoon; and they were leisurely climbing the Ridge Trail, the old frontiersman yarning and yarning of the dear good old days; Eleanor thinking her own thoughts. They met a downy-lipped youth in gray flannels and Mr. Bat Brydges wearing a panama hat and an "Oh-I-know-it-all" air. Both dabbed at their hats to the old man; but Matthews saw them not till they had passed when he stopped and turned with a look over his shoulder and a grunt. Eleanor had not learned yet what had happened to the Sheriff; but somehow the old frontiersman's look gave her a satisfaction. Where a crag jutted out from the face of the Ridge and some spruce saplings spanned a spring trickling down from the rocks, Matthews stopped. This was the place! Old rascal! How did he know? Has age ever been young? Eleanor did not know that he was looking at her, did not know that her face was wrapped in mystery and light. Suddenly he placed both hands on her shoulder.
"Eleanor, y'r a magnificent woman! Y' don't mind me callin' y' a woman?"
It was his highest compliment.
"Y're braver than my wife; an' she's the bravest o' them a'! D' y' know that my wife came half way round the world t' marry me an' go penniless to th' Indian Reserve? D' y' know when she found the Indians sick, d' y' know she went East an' took a full four years' medical course t' be able to attend them? D' y' know she goes all over the Reserve day an' night an' for three hundred miles among th' settlers to attend th' sick? But duty with us is easy. We're rich. Duty brought us together! Duty's goin' t' push y' apart; an' y're not complainin'."
Eleanor could not answer. What was there to say? They went on up the Ridge Trail, Matthews still talking to let her think her own thoughts. There was the story of the last great buffalo hunt at Battleford; of his first buffalo hunt when he had broken away from the other hunters in his early boyhood days and the buffalo bull had got him down in a crack of the earth under its feet. And there was the story of his first Synod Meeting, "when A came all wild an' woolley out o' the West! My five brithers were there; they were a' preachers! One is the bishop! Oh, A guess they were on needles an' pins for fear o' what A'd do! A'd been in the West so long, A didn't know enough not to go shirtsleeves down the streets o' Montreal! Well, been a hot day! 'Twas an evenin' meetin'! All the missionaries to th' Indians were givin' experiences. One got up an' he wanted th' dear sisters to raise a little money to build a fence; a fence, y' understand? An' another got up an' wanted th' dear sisters t' have a sewin' bee, gossip buzz, A call 'em, to raise a little money for the Lord t' build a school. Losh! A stood it long as A could! Then A jumped up! 'Twas a hot night, an' A'd ripped off m' coat! A'm no sure my collar hadn't slumped t' a jelly, too! Says I, 'If y'r reverences will excuse a plain Western man speakin' plain Western speech, A want t' say A don't like t' hear strong well able-bodied men whinin' an' beggin' th' dear sisters t' help them.' Says I, 'If th' brothers will just peel off their coats an' build their own fences, they'll find the Lord 'ull help them without any whinin' an' beggin'! Peel off y' coats, an' y'r dude duds,' says I, 'an' go t' work, an' don't insult God Almighty an' disgust the women folk wi' that milk-sop bottle-baby rubber-ring talk.'"
"What did the meeting say?" asked Eleanor, surprised out of herself.
"Oh, A dunno that they said much at all! They kind o' stomped, tho'."
CHAPTER XXIII
IT AIN'T THE TRUTH I'M TELLIN' YOU: IT'S ONLY WHAT I'VE HEERD
They were opposite the Cabin. Now, by all the tricks of stage-craft and story-craft, the Ranger should have been standing posed in the doorway; but he wasn't. So different is fact from fiction—so much harder, always; so brutally inconsiderate of our desires; so much more surprisingly beautiful than we can desire. The door stood open and empty.
"Wait! A want to leave a note," said Matthews.
"May I look in and see what bachelor confusion is like?" asked Eleanor.
She wanted to see if he had noticed the framed picture. Noticed—bless you? The thing hung skugee on its nail; and there was a sprig of mountain everlasting stuck in the wire; and Eleanor would really have liked to see whether the glass above that picture were blurred. She leaned over the couch examining it while Matthews wrote a note; and she went hurriedly out of the door hot of face and happy.
The old man's note read: We're going along to the Ridge to see that little Irish runt. If you chance back, will you happen along to see the old man. I'll keep her till six.
"It ain't the truth I'm tellin' y': it's ownly what I've heerd."
Meestress Lizzie O'Finnigan stood in the opening of the tent flap, a lonely little face, a lonely little figure in her tawdry rags, a lonely little soul in the great lone Forest, like a little mite lost in the big universe, Eleanor thought. She was telling them about the "Throuble expected at th' moine; an' faather bein' on hand t' take a fist; an' th' gen'leman from Waashin'ton waitin' for the Ranger man t' come back; an' th' goin's on raported in the paphers. Ah, h' waz a baad man, wuz the Ranger, faather said."
"Do you read the paper, little one?" broke in Matthews.
"Nut the print, sor, but I do th' pitchers; an' th' murthers; an' thim's all pitchered out plain so I can read! Faather sez he wun't have his independence proposed upon; if th' don't give him twinty thousan' fur settin' toight here, he'll peach; but about th' mine, th' Ranger man iz expected t' make throuble, an' faather iz all powerful quick with his fist, sor, 'specially when he's in drink; an' he's t' be on hand. It ain't th' truth I'm tellin' y', sor; it's ownly what I've heerd."
"And if you sit tight here for five years, you are going to be wealthy?" asked Eleanor, taking her by the hand and leading her out to the woods.
The unwonted act almost startled the little face. She looked up at Eleanor questioningly. "Y's, mam, waal-thy," she said. "Faather sez when we're waal-thy, he'll be a gen'leman an' Oil be a loidy."
"All you need, to be a lady, or a gentleman is, to be wealthy? Is that it?" asked the old frontiersman laughing.
"Yes, sor," said the child solemnly, "Faather wull shure be a gen'leman."
"Do you like living here?" asked Eleanor.
"No, mam, I don't think much of it! In Smelter City, there wuz curcuses; an' elephants on all the bills of fare; an' loidies dancin' on th'r heads! Faather sez if I keep on dancin' as foine as I do now, mebbie I'll be able t' dance on m' head; but I wouldn't like to dance without any skeerts, wud y'?"
"No, A wouldn't," answered the preacher quickly; and Eleanor laughed.
It was all so ludicrously pathetic. They asked her if she would not like to come down with them to the Indian School; and she looked wistfully and did not answer. Oh, God of Little Children, where are You? Are the Lambs outside the fold not Yours also?
When they pointed out the creatures of the woods to her, they found she did not know a squirrel from a chipmunk; and she pronounced the merry chattering "odjus." When a cat bird came tittering on his tail, squeaking out every imaginary note of gladness and the frontiersman explained that this fellow sang only after his family had been raised whereas the other birds sang before, she said he "wazn't as interestin' as th' elephants on the bill o' fare."
"Let's see! There's three trails here about!" Matthews was cogitating with his gaze on Eleanor. "There's the one across to the Upper Mesas; an' there's one back behind over th' shoulder of the Holy Cross down to the Lake Behind the Peak; an' there ought to be one between, runnin' up to the snows! Think y'r good for climbin' over this windfall while A carry this little puss on m' shoulder? Steer for the snow ahead! Don't mind my laggin' back! Go on ahead an' wait for us! A'm goin' t' see if A can't mine down to some gold beneath th' slime o' th' slums! It's not in the course o' nature that any child should be blind t' this world, Miss Eleanor, if A can open th' doors for her! Go ahead; an' if y' find a good sittin' down place, just rest quiet an' wait for us an' don't worry if we're long comin'! If A can't make her love God's big play ground, A'm no preacher!"
Eleanor laughed. Her last mining down to veins of gold had not been a particular success. She looked back at the two; the massive thewed frontiersman with the shock of white hair and ruddy cheeks and almost boyish eyes; the little tawdry bundle of rags on his shoulder, with the black hollow eyes full of nameless fear and nameless knowledge, and the little old hard mouth with a dreadful tense sadness about the droop. She heard the big genial voice with the roll of Scotch-Canadian drawling out its r's, and the child's thin "Yes, Sor, m' Faather;" then the child burst into a joyous laugh. Eleanor wondered what he could have said to elicit that laugh. When she glanced back, the old frontiersman had Lizzie standing on his outstretched hand holding to a branch overhead peering in a deserted hawk's nest. Even as Eleanor looked, the little future acrobat went scrabbling up into the tree with another joyous laugh.
Then, with that spirit of the child, which possesses us all when we give ourselves to the genii of the woods, Eleanor was following the long lanes of light between the giant spruces—the long lanes of light that lead on and on and on, ahead of you; out over the edge of the world into the realms of dreams and holiday and joy, where there is no Greed, and there is no Lust, and there is no nagging Care, and there is no Motiveless Malice spoiling things. She looked up. The gray green moss hung festooned from branch to branch; and the light sifted down a tempered rain of gold; and all the shiny evergreens shook gypsy castanets of joy to the riffling wind. She listened. The voices behind had faded away; and the air was vibrant of voiceless voices, of pixy tambourines beating the silence. There was a hush, the sibilant hush of waters rushing down from the far snows of the Holy Cross; and a flutter—the flutter of all the little leaves clapping their hands; and a big voiceless voice of solemn undertone—the diapason of the pines harping the age-old melodies to the touch of the wind's invisible hands, melodies of the soul of the sea in the heart of the tree, of strength and power and eternity. As she listened, she could fancy some vast oratorio voicing the themes of humanity and the universe and God.
Then all the little people of the woods came peeping through the greenery surveying her, weighing her, examining her, testing her spirit of good or ill. A little squirrel went scampering up one huge tree trunk and down another, just a pace ahead, scouting for the other pixies of the woods, till with a scurr-r-r and chitter—chipper—ee, he whisked back in his tracks. "She's all right, people," he said. Then a whisky jack flitted from branch to branch of the under brush—always just a step ahead, not saying as much as was his custom, but peeking a deal with head cocked from side to side. "No," said Eleanor, "I have no camp crumbs: you go back." The little red crested cross bill twittered in front of her from spray to spray of the purple fire weed and fern fronds; then, concluded that she was only a part of this out door world, anyway, and went back about his business on the trail behind. Two or three times, there was a vague rustle in the leaves that she couldn't localize—water ouzel in moss covert, or hawk babies in hiding, or—or what? She couldn't descry. Then, suddenly, with a hiss—ss and swear plain as a bird could swear, a little male grouse came sprinting down the trail to stop her, ruff up, tail spread to a fan, wings down, screaming at her in bad words "to stop! to stop! or he'd pick her eyes out!" Eleanor naturally stopped. There was a rustle and a flump; and a mother grouse whirred up with her brood—a dozen of them Eleanor counted, was it a second family? babies just in feather, clumsy and heavy of wing; and the little man ducked to hiding among the dead leaves. Eleanor peered everywhere. There was not the glint of an eye to betray hiding. She laughed and looked back for Matthews and his little pupil. A turn of the lane shut off all view; and again, she had that curious sensation of a vague movement back among the evergreens. She glanced forward. The light was shut off by a huge pile of windfall giant tree on tree, moss grown, with cypress and alder shoots from the great, broad dead trunks, a pile the height of a house. Passage round the ends of the up-rooted trunks led back through the brushwood. Eleanor stepped to the lowest trunk and began climbing over the pile by ascending first one trunk, then back up another. Almost on the top, she paused. It was that same vague rustling movement, too noiseless to be a noise, too evanescent for a sound. She parted the screen of shrubbery growing from the prone trunks and peered forward.
The same lanes of gold-sifted light leading over the edge of the world through the aisled evergreens, but at the end a glint as of emerald, the sheen of water with the metal glister of green enamel, water marbled like onyx or malachite, with the reflection of a snow cross and dun gray shadows—shadows of deer standing motionless at the opening of the aisled trees—come out from the forest at sundown to their drinking place. Lane of light? It had been a lane of delight; and that was what all life might be but for the Satyr shadows lurking along the trail. There were two or three little fawns, just turning from ash coat to ochre gray, nuzzling and wasting the water; and one of the year old deer had turned its head and was sniffing the air looking back, a poetry of motionless motion, all senses poised. Eleanor held her breath. If only the other two would come: yet she had put back her hand to warn them if they should come; and stood so, looking and listening. She remembered afterwards by the nodding of the blue bells she had known that the wind was away from the deer to her. There was a quick step on the lowest log. She stretched back her hand to signal quiet. The quick noiseless step came up the logs like a stair—winged feet. She turned to see what effect this fairy scene would have on the little denizen of the slums.
It wasn't the frontiersman at all. It was the Ranger; and she had let the screen of branches spring back with a snap; and the deer had leaped in mid-air, vanishing phantoms; and her hands had met his half way; and his eyes were shining with a light that blinded her presence of mind. Then, he had drawn her to himself; and afterwards, when she had tried to live it over again, she realized that she had lost count.
Shall we let the curtain drop, dear reader? For you must remember you are looking upon two sensible young people, who have resolved to keep each other strong to their resolutions. He had planned exactly how he would conduct himself when this meeting came; guarded, very guarded, so guarded she must know he was keeping a grip for both. And she had known exactly what she would do when he came: she would be frank, perfectly frank and open; for had they not both taken the resolution? And when she came to herself, it was as that night at the Death Watch—her face thrown back and he was kissing the pulsing veins of her throat, saying in a voice between a breath and a whisper—"When one has ached in the Desert for seven weeks, one is pretty thirsty."
"Let me go, dear! This wild happiness is a kind of madness."
"Give me all you have for me in but one more!" He bent over her face; when he released her, she was faint.
He offered her hand-hold down over the tree trunks to the lake; and when their feet touched solid earth again, took a grip of the situation to relieve her embarrassment and began talking furiously of the Desert ride and the dream face that had twice saved his life. Eleanor stopped stock still.
"Why, that was my dream," she explained; and their hands met half way and before she had finished telling, it had happened all over again.
They were standing on the margin of the lake. The sun was behind the peak, and the wine glow lay on the snow cross, and the topaz gate was ajar again to the new infinite life, and I think they were both a little bit afraid. An old world poet has said something about fools rushing in where angels fear to tread. The mountaineer expresses the same thought in his own more picturesque and I think more poetic vernacular, certainly it is a vernacular next to life rather than books. It is an axiom that "only the most blatant tenderfoot, the most tumble-footed greenhorn, will monkey on the edge of a precipice."
The marbled water shadows deepened to fire in the Alpine after glow; and the little waves of the lake came lipping and lisping and laving at their feet.
"There is no use trying to tell about it or talk it out," burst out Wayland.
"Don't," said Eleanor. "Mr. Matthews told us much last night: and I'll dig the rest out of him the next time I see him."
"I'm not talking of the Desert. I'm talking of you. It's so God-blessed beautiful, Eleanor! I used to think and think in the Desert what this would be like; and it's so much more beautiful than one could hope or guess. Don't you think there must be something in God and Heaven and all that? Love is so much more beautiful than a fellow could possibly think?"
"Don't you think they'll be wondering about us?" asked Eleanor.
"Pooh, no! Matthews told me to come on here and find you! He's just back there a little way."
"Did he plan this?"
"Course! How do you suppose I knew where to find you? You see now why I must not see you, if we are to keep our resolutions?"
"Yes, I see! Let us go back."
It was on the lake side of the logs that Wayland paused.
"I don't think they could see through those logs?" he said.
Eleanor burst into a peal of laughter and ascended the fallen trunks as if they had been stairs.
They came on the other two sitting squat in the middle of the trail; and if the windfall had been opaque, one of the two wore an expression on his face as if he had guessed. He was tossing a handful of little pebbles up from his palm and catching them on the backs of his knuckles.
"We didn't make much o' the woods an' birds," he remarked with a twisted smile, "but man alive, we can play jacks!"
Don't smile, self superior reader! It takes some little time to manufacture a snow slide out of snow flakes; and it may be the law that it also takes some little time to manufacture a soul out of slime.
Passing the Cabin, they again encountered a downy-lipped youth in gray flannels accompanied by a fat gentleman with tortoise-shell eyes and a tallow smile; but the jaunty dimples of the fat man, the supercilious lift of the gray flannel's eyebrow—froze mid-way at sight of Meestress Leezie O'Finnigan, who bowed to Bat with the gravity of a mother superior.
"It ain't the truth I'm tellin' y'": Lizzie was loquaciously going over the story for the twentieth time, "It ain't the truth I'm tellin' y', y' onderstand; it's ownly what I've heerd."
The Ranger dropped out of the group at the Cabin.
Bat stood bellicosely scowling at the three figures receding down the Ridge Trail.
"What in Hell is that old parson doing with that Shanty Town kid? He'd better keep his oar out of this."
"It's a free country," said Wayland dryly. "Can I do anything for you?"
"We came up to notify you that the mine will be examined to-morrow," announced the downy lips.
CHAPTER XXIV
I AM UNCLE SAM
"So they would examine the mine to-morrow? So they had sprung the examination of the coal veins before he could obtain a Government Geologist, and the coal would be pronounced worthless, as the coal involved in the Alaska cases was pronounced worthless by another kindergartner when that contest was impending. Then, they would argue and consider and send up briefs and send down decisions on the value of the coal till the statutory time had expired and the law of limitations would bar suit for restitution. Meanwhile, Smelter City Coking Company were using half-a-million tons a year, and sending away as much again; but on the word of an ignorant bureaucratic cub, the coal was to be worthless and the brazen steal of public property to be sanctioned by law. How much mineral land had been stolen in the very same way in the last ten years, first homesteaded by 'the dummy' foreigner, then for five, ten, one-hundred, two-hundred at most three-hundred dollars a quarter section on false affidavit as to entry, length of residence, age of homesteader, turned over to the Ring, whose sworn valuation of the coal ran from $20,000 to $40,000 an acre?" Personally, Wayland, as he thought it over, knew of fifty-thousand acres of coal so stolen in Colorado and as much again in Wyoming; not to mention three-hundred-thousand acres of gold and silver lands looted in the South-West.
And the looters were the party shouting at the top of their voices about "vested rights" and "attacks on property" and "demagoguery producing national hysteria." Where was the respect due "the vested rights" belonging to Uncle Sam? What about the piracy and plunder of the property belonging to Uncle Sam? Why was it valor to throw a burglar looting your house out by the neck, and "hysteria" to go after a burglar looting Uncle Sam?
Wayland had once asked Bat Brydges these questions. Bat had looked pained at the Ranger's obtuseness.
"Wayland," he had exclaimed, "who is Uncle Sam? I am Uncle Sam! You are Uncle Sam! We are all Uncle Sam! That's the beauty of democracy! This property you are howling about is yours and mine; and when we go in and develop it, we are only taking what is our own."
"What about the fellow who isn't in on a share?"
"Share? Quit talking Socialism," Bat had commanded with a grand gesture, leaving Wayland wondering who were the real Socialists in the Nation.
It came to him as he watched the panama hat and the white sailor going down the Ridge Trail that you can't argufy national problems; nor compromise on them; nor enter on any treaty of peace but the peace that is a victory. Brydges was Uncle Sam; and he thought one way. The Ranger was Uncle Sam; and he thought another way. One was fighting for the vested rights of the few. The other was fighting for the vested rights of the many. It would have to be fought out, the fight would have to come; and this coal case, like the Range War, was one of the preliminary skirmishes to the Great National Contest. Would the people, who were paying fifty cents, a dollar, a dollar-and-a-half extra for every ton of coal bought, because the coal areas were being brought under the domination of one Ring, understand and waken up and rally to the fight? Or was it as Moyese had declared with the most open and genial cynicism that "the public did not give one damn"?
The Ranger crossed over to the telephone and called up the MacDonald Ranch.
"That you, Mr. MacDonald? Matthews back yet? Oh, gone across to the Mission School? No, nothing wrong: better not pay any attention to the little Irish kid's babble of trouble at the mine! They'd hardly dare that! Yes, I know they did on the Rim Rocks; but that was daring only you and Williams: this would be daring the great Government of the greatest Nation in the world! Oh, that doesn't bother me! The point is—they haven't given me time to get a Government expert up here; and this fellow is evidently a toady for Moyese. I want an extra witness on the quality of that coal: want a witness to prove it's being used and shipped and sold. Oh, no, not both of you, one will do, either you or Matthews! All right; will you go down by the early stage? Better not go down with me! I'm going to set out now; ride down the Forest Service trail, camp in the woods and expect to reach Smelter City about ten in the morning. If you leave by the six o'clock morning stage, that will be plenty of time. All right, either one of you! Much obliged! Good-by!"
An hour from the time Eleanor had left him, the Ranger was on his horse. He did not go down the Ridge Trail. He followed the National Forest Trail along the edge of the Ridge away from the Holy Cross Peak, down the forested back of a long foot-hill sloping and flanking the Valley almost to Smelter City. Locally, the sloping hill was known as "a hog's back"; and it was where the hog's back poked its nose into the Valley far below, that the tangle had occurred between the Forest Service and the Smelter Ring. Mining was permitted in the National Forests, of course; but the mining areas must be obtained according to law, and paid for, and operated individually, not homesteaded by the "dummies," then turned into a consolidated ring of coal owners. What made this violation of law more flagrant than usual was the fact that these homesteaded coal lands lay at an angle of almost ninety degrees in a sheer wall; and it was an impossibility for any homesteader ever to have put in residence on them. Homestead entry, term of residence, proof and title, all exhibited fraud on the face of the records; and there wasn't a man in the Government Service who did not know that. What unseen hand had juggled entries, title and proof through? The homesteaders had sold out long ago for a song, some for as little as ten dollars a hundred and sixty acres. The Ring had possession; and as every man in the Land Service knew, the Government had pigeon-holed all recommendations for legal action to compel restitution. Would the wheels of justice rest inert? Would the presiding deity of justice be so blind, if some poor man, a poor man, who was also Uncle Sam, stole a ton of coal from the Ring operating these mines? Why was it possible to steal ninety-million dollars' worth of coal from the people, and not permissible for one of the people to steal one ton of coal from the Ring? These were the questions Wayland asked himself as he rode down the hog's back for Smelter City.
The trail down the hog's back sloped gradually and cut fifteen miles off the distance to Smelter City by the Valley Road. It was "the show" trail of all the National Forests. When supervisors came to inspect, or visitors from the East who wanted to give accounts of having roughed it without losing an hour of sleep or carrying any scars of stump beds, or when Congressional committees came from Washington for a champagne junket to report on all they hadn't seen—Wayland always conducted them down the hog's back trail that ran along the backbone of the Holy Cross lower slope. He had built the trail, himself; much of it, with his own hands; cut in the side of the forest mould and rock with an outer log as guard rail; wide enough for two horses abreast and zig-zagging enough to break the descent into a gradual drop and afford new vistas at each turn, of the Valley below, of the Mesas above the Rim Rocks across, and of the River looping and sweeping down to Smelter City.
He used to dream, as he rode down the bridle path, of the day coming when all the vast domain of National Forests would be like that trail; not a stick of underbrush or slash as big as your finger; not a stump above eighteen inches high; all the scaled logs piled neat as card board boxes; open park below the resinous cinnamon-smelling lodge-pole line and englemann spruce, hardly a branch lower on the trees than the height of a man; and such a rain of tempered light from the clicking pine needles and whorled spruces as might have come through the rose window of a cathedral. A "show" picture of a properly conducted National Forest has gone through all the magazines and newspapers—It represents the piles of cordwood clean as piles of pencils, the trees standing park-like with vistas and glades and opens beneath the tall pinery. Wayland knew in his own heart that his Forest was better than that "show" picture. No pictures could tell of the pine seedlings stolen from a squirrel cache scattered on the snows; the delicate young pinery coming up among a protecting nursery of birch and poplar and cottonwood. No picture could show "the dead tops" cut out; the "cheesy" rotten heartwood burning on an altar of sacrifice to the deity of the forest; the markings on "the dead tops" and ripe trees and trees with broken top "leaders" for the lumberman to come and harvest. No picture could give the jolly song of the cross-cut saw, the musical ripping of the oiled blade through the huge logs, the odor of the imprisoned sunbeams and flowers from the rain of the yellow saw-dust. No picture could possibly tell you the life story of yon big tree, the warrior of the woods who had beaten down all competitors and enemies and wore his purple cones like the tasseled honor badges of a soldier, with pendulous moving, plumy arms: yet to the eye of the Forester, the life history was there, in the fluted grooved columnar bark, in the knot scars where branches had been discarded to send the main trunk towering above its fellows for light and air, in the wood rings, where a branch had broken and fallen away in the struggle. Why, this noble fellow had been a straggling sapling a thousand years before the birth of Christ! Before Darius led his conquering hosts from realm to realm, or ever Caesar knew life, or Christopher Columbus framed mast and spar to discover America, this sun-crowned monarch had over-topped his fellows, and met the challenge of the blasts of heaven, and drunk of the wines of the dews of an immortal youth, and dieted on the ambrosial ether of gods, and sent his seedling offspring sailing ten thousand airy seas with the wind for master pilot and never a craft but the gypsy parachute of a seed with wings shaken out from the cones purpling to the autumn heat!
Air ships? Had the modern world gone mad over air ships? This fellow had been sending out whole navies of air ships for thousands of years; seeding the mighty mountains; fighting all rivals; travelling on the wings of the wind, and if consumed by fire, then, like the phoenix springing to new life from the ashes, sending forth fresh armadas from the pendant purplish cinnamon-scented cones split open by the heat and so releasing fresh winged seeds!
Wayland used to dream, as he rode down the hog's back trail, of the day coming when all the National Forests would be a great park, the people's playground, yielding bigger annual harvest in ripe lumber than the wheat fields or the corn; yielding income for the State and health for the Nation. Germany did it. Why couldn't America? Why not, indeed; except that she had not exterminated her pirates of the public weal, her freebooters of the wilderness, her slippery fingered pick-pockets, who shouted "I am Uncle Sam," while they picked Uncle Sam's pockets?
Riding down the hog's back, you first left the larches and the junipers below the snow line, the junipers beginning to show their berries, the larches yellowing and shedding their golden shower to the approach of autumn. Then, a turn of the trail; and you were among the hemlocks, funereal and sombre in the distance, wonderfully lightened when you were below them by the sage-green moss and the pale silver blue lining on the under side of the leaves. Another turn or two, there came the feathery sugar pine and the Douglas spruce—the monarchs of the North-Western Forests—plume decked warriors carrying a glint of spears with the scars of a thousand years and a thousand victories in the wrinkled bark, with cones like tassels, and whorls like banners. You could count these whorls, or the scars of the whorls; and you had their years; and the bluish green shade was restful as the repose of age. The smell of them, it was like incense; incense to the deity of the woods; and when the wind blew, every old evergreen harped the age-old melodies of Pan. And, oh, yes, there were warriors scarred from the fight, fellows with corky arms and mottled streaks where the lightning had struck and splintered. Only the cheesy-hearted, the warriors with maggots and grubs manufacturing punk out of heart-wood, for all the world like humans infected by evil thoughts, only the hollow hearted came down to earth with a crash in the fray.
Another turn, you were among the lodge-pole pines and englemann spruce—pure park, Wayland always thought, the delight of a Forester's heart; warm human open park places where you kept looking for deer though you knew there weren't any. In riding down the backbone of the Ridge, Wayland always planned to camp under the lodge pole pines; it was so cool, so rain-proof and sun-proof, with an almost certainty of a mountain stream somewhere near, and if you had eyes to see, a game trail down to the stream. To-night, he went on down to the Brule, a cross section of the mountain swept by fire years before the Forest Service had taken hold in the days when millmen had been permitted to take out windfall and burn free, and all a millman had to do to become a millionaire in free lumber was set the incendiary fire going to create windfall. In his own district, Wayland knew two men who had become rich in that way; but of course, that was long ago. The Forest men had cleared out the windfall and burn; and now, the deity of the woods, Nature, was at work! By the moonlight, the Ranger could see the pale chalky peach-bloom boles of the ghost birches, and the satiny poplars and cottonwoods, turning gold to the approaching autumn but going down gay, twinkling, laughing fellows to the year's death, actually clapping their hands, shaking with glee, sending leaves down in a rain of gold, which, it is to be hoped, the pixies picked up, the pixies sailing the air in feather parachutes of flower and cone seed! Wayland could see these airy ships between him and the silver moonlight, dropping seeds—seeds—seeds; seeds of fire flower and golden rod and hoary evergreen; shooting them out in tiny catapults; sending them up in dandelion fluff and sky rockets; catching and skimming the wind in airy canoes; tilting the winged sails to a whiff and sailing, sailing, dropping the seeds of life for a thousand years! And beneath the birches with the hundred eyes looking out from the chalky faced bark, and the poplars laughing and shaking with glee, and the cottonwoods showering down a rain of gold in their death; stood the little pines seeded by the wind, nursed by the shade of the quick growing trees. Who would be living and loving and fighting and hating and winning and losing when these little fellows rose to toss and flaunt their victory in the face of the sky? Was that the meaning of life after all, the strength and thew, the valor and might of the fight up? Then, it was not such a bad way with the Nation. The Nation would be the better for this fight. Certain, it was, the better side would win. Would it be the few like the sugar pine towering over its fellows; or the many like the lodge pole pine and englemann spruce standing in serried ranks of equal valor and power?
And if you think he could take that ride without wishing to the "nth" degree that she could be with him to share the joy, then, I assure you, you don't know to what music those gay, twinkling, trembling gold leaves above the Brule were beating time all night to the whisper of the wind and rustle of the pixy parachutes sailing mid-air.
CHAPTER XXV
THE QUESTION IS—WHICH UNCLE SAM?
Before, it had been a race-reverie; a waiting, puzzled and uncertain for the ways of life. Now, it was the joy of life, the fulfilment for which life had been created and waited expectant; and whether the ways were any plainer in the new light, there was no room for wonder in the fulness of joy. Eleanor was glad the little bundle of tawdry loquacity toddling between them kept up a constant stream of idle boastings on the road to the Mission House, about being "waal-thy" and "Faather shure bein' a gen'leman when they were waal-thy" and "herself as foine as eny loidy in th' land," and more and more of the same, all the way down the Ridge Trail; which was not so fatuous as it sounded, when it voiced the convictions of a great many more people than the little unwashed garlicky Shanty Town dancer. Eleanor wondered if the same arguments applied to the culture of horses and pigs and potatoes—size instead of sort, fulness of stomach not quality of head, area of possession not area of service. |
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