VITHE PROSPECTOR
In the old mining days out West the law of the survival of the fittest held good, and he who survived had to be very fit indeed. There were a number of ways of not surviving. One of them was to die. And there were a number of ways of being very fit; such as holding an accurate gun or an even temper, being blessed with industry or a vital-tearing ambition, knowing the game thoroughly or understanding the great American expedient of bluff. In any case the man who survived must see his end clearly through that end's means. Whether it were gold, poker, or life, he must cling to his purpose with a bulldog tenacity that no amount of distraction could loosen. Otherwise, as has been said, he died, or begged, or robbed, or became a tramp, or committed the suicide of horse-stealing, or just plain drifted back East broken—a shameful thing.
Why Peter lived on was patent enough toanyone. He was harmless, good-natured, and, in the estimation of hard-hewn men, just "queer" enough to be a little pathetic. Anyone who had once caught a fair look at his narrow, hatchet face with the surprised blue eyes and the loose-falling, sparse light hair; or had enjoyed his sweet, rare smile as he deprecatingly answered a remark before effacing himself; or had chanced on the fortune of asking him for some trifling favour to meet his eager and pleased rendering of it: none of these hypothetical individuals, and that meant about everyone who came in contact with Peter at all, could have imagined anybody, let alone themselves, harming a hair of his head. But how he continued to be a prospector remained a puzzle. The life is hard, full of privations, sown with difficulties, clamant for technical knowledge, exacting of physical strength, dependent on shrewdness and knowledge of the world. Peter had none of these, not even in the smallest degree. There was also, of course, the instinct. This Peter did possess. He could follow his leads of crumbling brown rock with that marvellous intuitive knowledge which is so important an element in the equipment of your true prospector. But it is only an element. By all the rules of the game Peter should havefailed long since, should have "cashed in and quit" some five years back; and still he grubbed away cheerfully at divers mountains and many ranges. He had not succeeded; still, he had not failed.
Three times had he made his "strike." On the first of these three occasions he had gone in with two San Francisco men to develop the property. The San Francisco men had persuaded him to form a stock company of certain capitalisation. In two deals they had "frozen out" Peter completely, and reorganised on a basis which is paying them good dividends. Returning overwhelmed with sophistries and "explanations" from his expostulatory interview, Peter decided he knew more about quartz leads than about business and the disgorging of gains, so he went over into Idaho to try again. There he found the famous Antelope Gap lode. This time he determined to sell outright and have nothing more to do with the matter after the transfer of the property. He drew up the deeds, received a small amount down, and took notes for the balance. When the notes came due he could not collect them. The mine had been resold to third parties. Peter had no money to contest the affair; and probably would not have done so if hehad. He knew too little—or too much—of law; but the instinct was his, so he moved one State farther east to Montana for his third trial. This resulted in the Eagle Ridge. And for the third time he was swindled by a persuasive man and a lying one-sided contract.
A sordid, silly enough little tale, is it not? but that is why men wondered at Peter's survival, marvelled at the recuperative force that made possible his fourth attempt, speculated with a certain awe over that cheerful disposition which had earned him, even in his adversity, the sobriquet of Happy Peter.
All of these phenomena, had they but known it, resulted from one simple cause. Peter's mental retrospect for a considerable space would have conjured up nothing but a succession of grand sweeps of mountains, singing pines, rare western skies, and the simplicity of a frontiersman's log-cabin; and yet to his inner vision over the border of that space lay a very different scene. It was the scene he saw the oftenest. Oftenest? he saw it always; across the mountains, through the pines, beyond the skies. As time went on, the vision simplified itself to Peter, as visions will. It came to have two phases, two elements, which visited him always together.
One of these was a house; the other a girl. The house was low, white-painted, with green blinds and a broad stoop. Its front yard was fragrant with lilacs, noisy with crickets, fluttering with butterflies of sulphur yellow. About it lay a stony, barren farm, but lovely with the glamour of home. The girl was not pretty, as we know girls; but she had straight steady eyes, a wide brow, smooth matronly bands of hair, and a wholesome, homely New England character, sweet, yet with a tang to give it a flavour, like the apples on the tree near the old-fashioned, long-armed well. Peter could gain no competence from the stony farm, no consent from the girl. It was to win both that he had come West.
In those days, around the western curve of the earth, every outlook borrowed the tints of sunset. Nothing but the length of the journey stood between a man and his fortune.
"I love you dearly, Peter," she had said, both hands on his shoulders, "and I do not care for the money. But I have seen too much of it here—too much of the unhappiness that comes from debt, from poverty. Misery does not love the company of those it loves. Go make your fortune, Peter, bravely, and come back to me."
"I will," replied Peter, soberly. "I will, God help me. But it may be long. I don't know; I have not the knack; I am stupid about people, about men."
She smiled, and leaned over to kiss his eyes. "People love you, Peter," she said, simply. "I love you, and I will wait. If it were fifty years, you will find me here ready when you come."
Peter knew this to be true. And so to the unpeopled rooms of the little old Vermont farmhouse Peter's gentle thoughts ever swarmed, like homing bees. In his vision of it the lilac-bush outside the window always smelled of spring; she always sat there beside the open sash, waiting—for him. What wonder that he survived when so many others went down? What wonder that he persevered? What wonder that his patient soul, comparing the eternity of love's happiness with the paltry years of love's waiting, saw nothing in the condition of affairs to ruffle its peaceful serenity? And yet to most the time would have seemed very, very long. Men may blunder against rich pockets or leads and wealthy say farewell to a day which they greeted as the poorest of the poor. So may men win fortunes on a turn of the wheat market. But the one is no more prospecting than the other is business.True prospecting has only the normal percentage of uncertainties, the usual alloy of luck to brighten its toil with the hope of the unexpected. A man must know his business to succeed. A bit of rock, a twist of ledge, a dip of country, an abundance or an absence of dikes—these and many others are the symbols with which the prospector builds the formula that spells gold. And after the formula is made, it must be proved. It is the proving that bends the back, tries the patience, strains to the utmost the man's inborn Instinct of the Metal. For that is the work of the steel and the fire, the water and the power of explosion. Until the proof is done to the Q.E.D., the man must draw for inspiration on his stock of faith. In the morning he sharpens his drills at a forge. In the afternoon he may, by the grace of labour, his Master, have accomplished a little round hole in the rock, which, being filled with powder and fired, will tear loose into a larger hole with débris. The débris must be removed by pick and shovel. After the hole has been sufficiently deepened, the débris must be loaded into a bucket, which must then be hauled to the surface of the ground and emptied. How long do you calculate the man will require to dig in this manner, fifty, a hundred feet? Howlong to sink one or two such shafts on each and every claim he has staked? How long to excavate the numerous lateral tunnels which the Proof demands?
And besides this, from time to time the shaft must be elaborately timbered in order to prevent its caving in and burying work and workman together—a tedious job, requiring the skill alike of a woodsman, a carpenter, a sailor, and a joiner. The man must make his trips to town for supplies. He must cook his meals. He must meet his fellows occasionally, or lose the power of speech. The years slip by rapidly. He numbers his days by what he has accomplished; and it is little. He measures time by his trips to camp; and they are few. It is no small thing to make three discoveries—and lose them. It is a greater thing to find courage for a fourth attempt.
After the Eagle Ridge fiasco, Peter, as cheerful as ever, journeyed over into Wyoming to try his luck once more. He moved up into the hills, spent a month in looking about him, narrowed his localities to one gulch, and built himself a log cabin in which to live. Then he made his general survey. He went on foot up every gulch, even every little transverse wrinkle that lay tributary to his valley, to the shallow top of it filled withloose stones; he followed the sky-line of every ridge which bordered and limited these gulches; he seized frequent opportunities of making long diagonals down the slopes. Nothing escaped him. In time he knew the general appearance of every bit of drift or outcrop in his district. Then he sat down in his cabin and carefully considered the probabilities. If they had not happened to please him, he would have repeated the whole wearisome process in another valley; but as in this case they did, he proceeded to take the next step. In other words, he went over the same ground again with a sampling-pick and a bundle of canvas bags. Where his theories or experience advised, he broke off quantities of rock from the ledges, which he crushed and mixed in the half of an old blanket; dividing, and recrushing again and again, until an "average" was obtained in small compass. The "average" he took home, where he dumped it into a heavy iron mortar, over which he had suspended a pestle from a springy sapling. By alternately pulling down and letting up on the sapling he crushed the quartz fragments with the pestle into fine red and white sand. The sand he "panned out" for indications of free gold.
The ledges whose averages thus showed thecolour, he marked on his map with a cross. Some leads which did not so exhibit gold, but whose other indications he considered promising, he exploited still further, penetrating to a layer below the surface by means of a charge or so of powder. Or perhaps he even spent several weeks in making an irregular hole like a well, from which he carried the broken rock in bags, climbing up a notched tree. Then he selected more samples. This is hard work.
Thus Peter came to know his country, and when he knew it thoroughly, when he had made all his numerous speculations as to horses, blowouts, and slips—then, and not until then, did he stake out his claims; then, and not until then, did he consider himself ready tobeginwork.
He might be quite wrong in his calculations. In that case, it was all to do over again somewhere else. He had had this happen. Every prospector has. The claims which Peter selected were four in number. He started in without delay on the proof. Foot by foot the shafts descended through the red, the white, vein matter. One by one the spider arms of the tunnels felt out into the innermost crevices of the lode. Little by little Peter's table of statistics filled; here a pocket, there a streak, yon a clear ten feet oflow-grade ore. The days, the months, even the years slipped by. Summers came and went with a flurry of thunder-showers that gathered about Harney, spread abroad in long bands of blackness, broke in a deluge of rain and hail and passed out to dissipate in the hot air of the prairies. Autumns, clear-eyed and sweet-breathed, faded wanly in the smoke of their forest fires. Winters sidled by with constant threat of arctic weather which somehow never came; powdering the hills with their snow; making bitter cold the shadows, and warm the silver-like sun. Another spring was at hand. Like all the rest, it coquetted with the season as a young girl with her lover; smiling with the brightness of a western sun; frowning with the fierceness of a sudden snow-squall, strangely out of place in contrast to the greenery of the mountain "parks"; creeping slowly up the gullies from the prairie in staccato notes of bursting buds; at last lifting its many voices in the old swelling song of delight over the birth of new loves and new desires among its creatures.
Like all the rest, did I say? No, not quite. To Peter this particular spring was a rare thing of beauty. Its gilding was a little brighter, its colours a little fresher, its skies a little deeper,its songs rang a little truer than ever the gilding or colours or skies or songs of any spring he had ever known. For he was satisfied. Steadily the value of the property had proved itself. One clear, cold day he collected all his drills and picks and sledges and brought them back to camp, where he stacked them behind the door. It was his way of signing Q.E.D. to the proof.
The doubtful spot on theJim Crowwas not a blow-out, but a "horse." He had penetrated below it. The mines were rich beyond his dreams. Yet he sat there at his noon meal as cheerful, as unexcited, as content as ever. When one has waited so long, impatience sleeps soundly, arouses with the sluggishness of unbelief itself. Outside he saw the sun, for the first time in weeks, and heard the pines singing their endless song. Inside, his fire sparkled and crackled; his kettle purred like a fireside cat. Peter was tired; tired, but content. The dream was very near to him.
When he had finished his meal he got up and examined himself in his little square mirror. Then he did so again. Then he walked heavily back to his table and sat down and buried his face in his hands. When he had looked the first time he had seen a gray hair. When he had lookedthe second time he had discovered that there were many. With a sudden pang Peter realised that he was getting to be an old man. He took a picture from a pocket-case and looked at that. Was she getting to be an old woman?
It was fearful what a difference that little thought suddenly made. A moment ago he had had the eternities before him. Now there was not an instant to be wasted. Every minute, every second even, that he sat there gazing at the faded old picture in his hand was so much lost to him and to its original. Not God himself could bring it and its possibilities back to him. Until now he had looked about him upon Youth; he must henceforth look back to it—back to the things which might have been, but could never be—and each pulse-beat carried him inevitably farther from even the retrospective simulacrum of their joys. He and she could never begin young now. They must take up life cold in the moulds, ready fashioned. The delight of influencing each other's development was denied such as they; instead, they must find each other out, must throw a thousand strands of loving-kindness to span the gap which the patient years had sundered between them, a gap which should never have widened at all. Again that remorselesshurry of the moments! Each one of them made the cast across longer, increased the need for loving-kindness, demanded anew, for the mere pitiful commonplace task of understanding each other—which any mother and her child find so trivially easy—the power of affection which each would have liked to shower on the other undictated except by the desires of their hearts. Peter called up the image of himself as he had been when he had left the East, and set it remorselessly by the side of that present image in the mirror. Then he looked at the portrait. Could the years have changed her as much? If so, he would hardly know her!
Those miserable years of waiting! He had not minded them before, but now they were horrible. In the retrospect the ceaseless drudgery of rock and pick and drill loomed larger than the truth of it; his patience, at the time so spontaneous a result of his disposition, seemed that of a man clinging desperately to a rope, able to hang on only by the concentration of every ounce of his will. Peter felt himself clutching the rope so hard that he could think of nothing, absolutely nothing, else. He proved a great necessity of letting go.
And for her, these years? What had theymeant? By the internal combustion which had so suddenly lighted up the dark corners of his being, he saw with almost clairvoyant distinctness how it must have been. He saw her growing older, as he had grown older, but in the dull apathy of monotony. She had none of this great filling Labour wherewith to drug herself into day-dreams of a future. The seasons as they passed showed her the same faces, growing ever a little more jaded, as dancers in the light of dawn. Perhaps she had ceased counting them? No, he knew better than that. But the pity of it! washing, scrubbing, mending; mending, scrubbing, washing to the time of an invalid's complaints. To-day she was doing as she had done yesterday; to-morrow she would do the same. To-morrow?
"No, by God!" cried Peter, starting to his feet. "There shall be no more to-morrow!"
He took from the shelf over the window a number of pieces of quartz, which he stuffed into the pockets of a pair of saddle-bags lying near the door. In the corral was Jenny, a sleek, fat mare. He saddled Jenny and departed with the saddle-bags, leaving the door of his cabin open to the first comer, as is the hospitable Western way.
At Beaver Dam he spread the chunks of rockout on the bar of the principal saloon and invited inspection. He did not think to find a purchaser among the inhabitants of Beaver Dam, but he knew that the tidings of his discoveries would arouse interest and attract other prospectors to the locality of his claims. In this manner his property would come prominently on the market.
The discoveries certainly were accorded attention enough. Peter was well known. Men were perfectly sure of his veracity and his mining instinct. If Peter said there existed a good lode of the stuff he exhibited to them, that settled it.
"Hum," said a man named Squint-eye Dobs, after examining a bit of the transparent crystal through which small kernels of yellow metal shone. Then he laid down the specimen, and walked quietly out the door without further comment. He had gone to get his outfit ready.
To others, not so prompt of action, Peter explained at length, always in that hesitating, diffident voice of his.
"I have my claims all staked," said he; "you boys can come up and hook onto what's left. There's plenty left. I ain't saying it's as good as mine; still, it's pretty good. I think it'll make a camp."
"Make a camp!" shouted Cheyenne Harry. "I should think it would! If there's any more like that up country you can sell a 'tater-patch if it lays anywheres near the district!"
"Well, I must be goin', boys," said Peter, sidling toward the door; "and I 'spect I'll see some of you boys up there?"
The boys did not care to commit themselves as to that before each other, but they were all mentally locating the ingredients of their prospecting outfits.
"Have a drink, Happy, on me," hospitably suggested the proprietor.
Peter slowly returned to the bar.
"Here's luck to the new claim, Happy," said the proprietor; "and here's hoping the sharps doesn't make all there is on her."
The men laughed, but not ill-naturedly. They all knew Peter, as has been said.
Peter turned again to the door.
"You'll have a reg'lar cyclone up thar by to-morrow!" called a joker after him; "look out fer us! There'll be an unholy mob on hand, and they'll try to do you, sure!"
Peter stopped short, looked at the speaker, and went out hurriedly.
The next morning the men came into hisgulch. He heard them even before he had left his bunk—theclink, creak, creak! of their wagons. By the time he had finished breakfast the side-hills were covered with them. From his window he could catch glimpses of them through the straight pines as patches of red, or flashes of light reflected from polished metal. In the cañon was the gleam of fires; in the air the smell of wood-smoke and of bacon broiling; among the still bare bushes and saplings the shine of white lean-tops; horses fed eagerly on the young grasses and the browse of trees, raising their heads as the creak of wheels farther down the draw told of yet new-comers. The boom was under way.
Peter knew that the tidings of the discovery would spread. To-morrow a new town would deserve a place on the map. Men would come to the town, men with money, men anxious to invest. With them Peter would treat. There was to be no chance of a careless bargain this time. He would take no chances. And yet he had thought that before.
Peter began to forestall difficulties in his mind. The former experience suggested many, but he drew from the same source their remedies. It was the great unknown that terrified him. Inspite of his years, in spite of his gray hairs, in spite of his memories of those former failures, he had to confess to himself that he knew nothing, absolutely nothing of sharpers and their methods. They could not fleece him again in precisely the way they had done so before; but how could he guess at the tricks they had in reserve? Eight years out of a man's life ought surely to teach him caution as thoroughly as twelve. Yet he walked into the Eagle Ridge trap as confidently as he had into the Antelope Gap. He had made it twelve years. What was to prevent his making it sixteen? There is no fear like that of the absolutely unknown. You cannot forestall that; you must depend upon your own self-confidence. Self-confidence was just what Peter did not possess.
Then in a flash he saw what he should have done. It was all so ridiculously simple—a mere question of division of labour. He, Peter, knew prospecting, but did not understand business. Back in his old Vermont home were a dozen honest men who knew business, but understood nothing of prospecting. Nothing would have been easier than to have combined these qualities and lacks. If Peter had returned quietly to his people, concealing his discoveries from the men ofBeaver Dam, he could have returned in three weeks' time equipped for his negotiations. Now it was too late. The minute his back was turned they would jump his claims. Peter's mind worked slowly. If he had felt himself less driven by the sight of those gray hairs, he might have come in time to another idea—that of wiring or writing East for a partner, pending whose arrival he could merely hold possession of the claims. As it was, the terror and misgiving, having obtained entry, rapidly usurped the dominion of his thoughts. He could see nothing before him but the inevitable and dread bargaining with unknown powers of dishonesty, nothing behind him but the mistake of starting the "boom."
As the morning wore away he went out into the hills to look about him. The men were all busily enough engaged in chipping out the shallow troughs of their "discoveries," piling supporting rocks about their corner and side stakes, or tacking up laboriously composed mining "notices." They paid scant attention to the man who passed them a hundred yards away. Peter visited his own four claims. On one he found a small group anxiously examining the indications of the lead. He did not join it. The parting words flung after him at the saloon came tohis mind. "Look out for us! There'll be an unholy mob on hand, and they'll try to do you, sure."
Peter cooked himself a noon meal, but he did not eat much of it. Instead, he sat quite still and stared with wide, blind eyes at the wavering mists of steam that arose from the various hot dishes. From time to time he got up with apparent purpose, which, however, left him before he had taken two steps, so that his movement speedily became aimless, and he sat down again. Late in the afternoon he went the rounds of his claims again, but saw nothing unusual. He did not take the trouble to cook supper. During the evening some men looked in for a moment or so, but went away, because the cabin was empty. Peter was at the moment of their visit walking back and forth, back and forth, away up high there on the top of the ridge, in a little cleared flat space next the stars. When he came to the end, he whirled sharp on his heels. It was six paces one way and five the other. He counted the steps consciously, until the mental process became mechanical. Then the count went on steadily behind his other thoughts—five, six; five, six; five, six; over and over again, like that. About ten o'clock he ceased opening and shutting hishands and began to scream, at first under his breath, then louder in the over tone, then with the full strength of his lungs. A mountain lion on another slope answered him. He stretched his arms up over his head, every muscle tense, and screamed. And then, without appreciable transition, he sank to the rock and hid his face. For the moment the nerve tension had relaxed.
The clear western stars, like fine silver powder, seemed to glimmer in some light stronger than their own, as dust-motes in the sun. A breeze from the prairie rested its light, invisible hands on the man's bent head. Certain homely night-sounds, such as the tree-toads and crickets and the cries of the poor wills, stole here and there through the pine-aisles like living creatures on the wing. A faint, sweet odour of the woods came with them. Peter arose, and drew a deep breath, and went to his cabin. The peace of nature had for the moment become his own.
But then, in the darkness of his low bunk, the old doubts, the old terrors returned. They perched there above him and compelled him to look at them until his eyes were hot and red. "Do, do, do!" said they, until Peter arose, and there, in the chill of dawn, he walked the threemiles necessary for the inspection of his claims. Everything was as it should be. The men in the gulch were not yet awake. From theJim Crowa drowsy porcupine trundled away bristling.
This could not go on. It would be weeks before he could hope even to open his negotiations. Peter cooked himself an elaborate breakfast—and drank half a cup of coffee. Then he sat, as he had the day before, staring straight in front of him, seeing nothing. After a time he placed the girl's picture and the square mirror side by side on the table and looked at them intently.
He rose, kicking his chair over backward, and went out to his claims once more.
The men in the gulch had awakened. Most of them had finished the more imperative demands of location the day before, so now they were more at leisure to satisfy their curiosity and their love of comment by inspecting the original discovery to which all this stampede was due. As a consequence Peter found a great gathering on theJim Crow. Some of the men were examining chunks of ore, others were preparing to descend the shafts, still others were engaged idly in reading the location-notice tacked against a stub pine. One of the latter, the same individualwho had joked Peter in the saloon, caught sight of the prospector as he approached.
"Hullo, Happy!" he called, pointing at the weather-beaten notice. "What do you call this?" He winked at the rest. The history of Peter's losses was well known.
"What?" asked Peter, strangely.
"You ain't got this readin' right. She says 'fifteen hundred feet'; the law says she ought t' read 'fifteen hundredlinearfeet.' Your claim is n.g. I'm goin' t' jump her on you."
The statement was ridiculous; everybody knew it, and prepared to laugh, loud-mouthed.
Peter, without a word, shot the speaker through the heart. Men said at his trial that it was the most brutal and unprovoked murder they had ever known.
VIITHE GIRL IN RED
"It isn'tthatI object to," protested the Easterner, leaning forward from the rough log wall to give emphasis to his words, "for I believe in everyone having his fun his own way. If you're going in for orgies, why, have 'emgoodorgies, and be done with it. But my kick's on letting these innocent young girls who are just out for the fun—it's awful!"
"It's hell!" assented the Westerner, cheerfully.
"Now, look at that pretty creature over there——"
The young miner followed his companion's gaze through the garishly lit crowd. Then, as though in doubt as to whether he had seen correctly, he tried it again.
"Which do you mean?" he asked, puzzled.
"The one in red. Now, she——"
The Westerner snorted irrepressibly.
"What's the matter with you?" inquired the Easterner, looking on him with suspicious eyes.
The other choked his laugh in the middle, and instantly assumed an expression of intense solemnity. It was as though a candle had blown out in the wind.
"Beg pardon. Nothing," he asserted with brevity of enunciation. "Go on."
The girl in red was standing tiptoe on a bench under one of the big lanterns. She was holding her little palm slantwise over the chimney, and by blowing against it was trying to put out the lamp. Her face was very serious and flushed. Occasionally the lamp would flare up a little, and she would snatch her hand away with a pretty gesture of dismay as the uprising flame would threaten to scorch it. A group of interested men surrounded and applauded her. Two on the outside stood off the proprietor of the dance-hall. The proprietor was objecting.
"Well, then, just look at that girl, I say," the Easterner went on. "She's as pretty and fresh and innocent as a mountain flower. She's having the time of her young life, and she just thinks it means a good time and nothing else. Some day she'll find out it means a lot else. I tell you, it's awful!"
The Westerner surveyed his friend's flushed face with silent amusement. The girl finally succeeded in blowing the light out, and everybody yelled.
"Same old fellow you were in college, aren't you, Bert?" he said, affectionately; "succouring the distressed and borrowing other people's troubles. What can you do?"
"Do, do! What can any man do? Take her out of this! appeal to her better nature!"
Bert started impulsively forward to where the girl—with assistance—was preparing to jump from the bench. The miner caught his sleeve in alarm.
"Hold on, don't make a row! Wait a minute!" he begged; "she isn't worth it! There, now listen," as the other sank back expectantly to his former position. His bantering manner returned. "You and the windmills," he breathed, in relief. "I'll just shatter your ideals a few to pay for that scare. You shall now hear a fact or so concerning that pretty, innocent girl—I forget your other adjective. In the first place, she isn't in the mountain-flower business a little bit. Her name is Anne Bingham, but she is more popularly known as Bismarck Anne, chiefly because of all the camps of our belovedterritory Bismarck is the only one she hasn't visited. Therefore, it is concluded she must have come from there."
"Bismarck Anne!" repeated the Easterner, wonderingly. "She isn't the one——"
"The very same. She's about as bad as they make 'em, and I don't believe she misses a pay-day dance a year. She's all right, now; but you want to come back a little later. Anne will be drunk—gloriously drunk—and very joyful. I will say that for her. She has all the fun there is in it while it lasts."
"Whew!" whistled the Easterner, in dazed repulsion, looking with interest on the girl's animated face.
"Oh, what do you care!" responded the miner, carelessly. "She has her fun."
Bismarck Anne jumped into the nearest man's arms, was kissed, bestowed a slap, and flitted away down the room. She deftly stole the accordion from beneath the tall look-out stool on which a musician sat and ran, evolving strange noises from the instrument, and scampering in and out among the benches, pursued by its owner. The men all laughed heartily, and tried to trip up the pursuer. The women laughed hollow laughs, to show they were not jealous of thesensation she was creating. Finally she ran into the proprietor, just turning from relighting the big lamp. The proprietor, being angry, rescued the accordion roughly; whereupon Anne pouted and cast appealing glances on her friends. The friends responded to a man. The proprietor set up the drinks.
The music started up again. Miners darted here and there toward the gaudily dressed women, and, seizing them about the waist, held them close to their sides, as a claim of proprietorship before the whole world. Perspiring masters of ceremonies, self-constituted and drunk, rushed back and forth, trying to put a semblance of the quadrilateral into the various sets. Everybody shuffled feet impatiently.
The dance began with a swirl of noise and hilarious confusion. Bismarck Anne added to the hilarity. She was having a high old time; why shouldn't she? She had had three glasses of forty-rod, and was blessed by nature with a lively disposition and an insignificant bump of reverence. Moreover, she was healthy of body, red of blood, and reckless of consequences. Pleasure appealed to her; the stir of action, the delight of the flow of high spirits, thrilled through every fibre of her being. She had no beliefs,as far as she knew. If she could have told of them, they would have proved simple in the extreme—that life comes to those who live out their possibilities, and not to those who deny them. And Anne had many possibilities, and was living them fast. She felt almost physically the beat of pleasure in the atmosphere about her, and from it she reacted to a still higher pitch. She had drunk three glasses, and her head was not strong. Her feet moved easily, and she was very certain of her movements. She had become just hazy enough in her mental processes to have attained that happy indifference to what is likely to happen in the immediate future, and that equally happy disregard of consequences which the virtuous never experience. Impressions reduced themselves to their lowest terms—movement and noise. The room was full of rapidly revolving figures. The racket was incessant, and women's laughter rose shrill above it, like wind above a storm. Anne moved amid it all as the controller of its destinies, and wherever she went seemed to her to be the one stable point in the kaleidoscopic changes. Men danced with her, but they were meaningless men. One begged her to dance with him, but Anne stopped to watch a youth blowing brutishly from puffedcheeks, so the man cursed and left her for another girl. Beyond the puffing youth lights were dancing, green and red. Anne paused and looked at them gravely.
The people, the room, the sounds seemed to her to come and go in great bursts. Between these bursts Anne knew nothing except that she was happy; above all else she was happy. As incidents men kissed her and she drank; but these things were not essentially different from the lights and the bursts of consciousness. Anne began to take everything for granted.
After a time Anne paused again to look gravely at strange lights. But this time they seemed not to be red or green, but to be of orange, in long, fiery flashes, like ribbons thrown suddenly out and as suddenly withdrawn. The noise stopped, and was succeeded by a buzzing. For a moment the girl's blurred vision saw clearly the room, all still, except for a man huddled in one corner, and on the floor a slowly gathering pool of red. Someone thrust her out of the door with others, and she began to step aimlessly, uncertainly, along the broad street.
She felt dimly the difference between the hot air of the dance-hall and the warm air out of doors. The great hills and the stars and thesilhouetted houses came and went in visions, just as had the people and the noise inside the hall. The idea of walking came to her, and occupied her mind to the exclusion of everything else, and she set about it with great intentness. How far she went and in what direction did not seem to matter. When she moved she was happy; when she stopped she was miserable. So she wandered on in the way she knew, and yet did not know, out of the broad streets of the town, through a wide cleft in the hills, up a long grassy valley that wound slowly and mounted gradually, following the brawl of the stream, until at last she found herself in a little fern-grown dell at the entrance of Iron Creek Pass. She pushed her fingers through her fallen hair, and idly over the shimmering stuff of her gown. Far above her she saw waveringly the stars. Finally the idea of sleep came to her, just as the idea of walking had come to her before. She sank to her knees, hesitated a moment, and then, with the sigh of a tired child, she pillowed her head on her soft round arm and closed her eyes.
The poor-wills ceased their plaintive cries. A few smaller birds chirped drowsily. Back ofthe eastern hills the stars became a little dimmer, and the soft night breeze, which had been steadily blowing through the darkened hours, sank quietly to sleep. The subtle magic of nature began to sketch in the picture of day, throwing objects forward from the dull background, taking them bodily out of the blackness, as though creating them anew. Fresh life stirred through everything. The vault of heaven seemed full of it, and all the ravines and by-ways caught up its overflow in a grand chorus of praise to the new-whitening morning.
The woman stirred drowsily and arose, throwing back her heavy hair from her face. The flush of sleep still dyed her cheek a rich crimson, which came and went slowly in the light of the young sun, vying in depth now with the silk of her gown, now with the still deeper tones of a mountain red-bird which splattered into rainbow tints the waters of the brook. She caught the sound of the stream, and went to it. The red-bird retreated circumspectly, silently. She knelt at the banks and splashed the icy water over her face and throat, another red-bird, another wild thing pulsing and palpitating with life. Then she arose to the full height of her splendid body and looked abroad.
The morning swept through her like a river and left her clean. In the eye of nature and before the presence of nature's innumerable creatures she stood as innocent as they. She had entered into noisome places, but so had the marsh-hawk poising grandly on motionless wing there above. She had scrambled in the mire, and she was ruffled and draggled and besmirched; so likewise had been the silent flame-bird in the thicket, but he had washed clean his plumes and was now singing the universal hymn from the nearest bush-top. The woman drew her lungs full of the morning. She stretched slowly, lazily, her muscles one by one, and stood taller and freer for the act. The debauch of the last night, the debauches of other and worse nights, the acid-like corrosion of that vulgarity which is more subtle than sin even, all these things faded into a past that was dead and gone and buried forever. The present alone was important, and the present brought her, innocent, before an innocent nature. As she stood there dewy-eyed, wistful, glowing, with loosened hair, the grasses clinging to her, and the dew, she looked like a wide-eyed child-angel newly come to earth. To her the morning was great and broad, like a dream to be dreamed and awakened from, something unreal and evanescentwhich would go. Her heart unfolded to its influence, and she felt within her that tenderness for the beautiful which is nearest akin to holy tears.
As she stood thus, musing, it seemed natural that a human figure should enter and become part of the dream. It seemed natural that it should be a man, and young; that he should be handsome and bold. It seemed natural that he should rein in his horse at the sight of her. So inevitable was it all, so much in keeping with the soft sky, the brooding shadow of the mountain, the squirrel noises, and the day, that she stood there motionless, making no sign, looking up at him with parted lips, saying nothing. He was only a fraction, a small fraction, of all the rest. His fine brown eyes, the curl of his long hair, the bronze of his features mattered no more to her than the play of the sunlight on Harney.
Then he spurred his horse forward, and something in her seemed to snap. From the dream-present the woman was thrust roughly back into her past. The sunlight faded away before her eyes, oozing from the air in drop after drop of golden splendour, the songs of the birds died, the murmuring of the brook became an angry brawl that accused the world of wickedness. Themorning fled. From a distance, far away, farther than Harney, farther than the sky, the stranger's brown eyes looked pityingly. Her sin was no longer animal. It had touched her soul. Instead of an incident it had become a condition which hemmed her in, from which she could not escape. Suddenly she saw the difference. She dwelt in darkness; he, with his clear soul, dwelt in light. She threw herself face downward on the earth, weeping and clutching the grass in the agony of her sin.
Then a new sound smote the air. She sat upright and listened.
Around the bend she heard a high-pitched voice declaiming in measured tones.
"'Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and Thy dominion endureth throughout all generations,'" the voice chanted.
"'The Lord upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth all that he bowed down.'"
The speaker strode in sight. He was one of the old-fashioned itinerant preachers occasionally seen in the Hills, filled with fanatic enthusiasm, journeying from place to place on foot, exhorting by the fear of hell fire rather than by the hope of heaven's bliss, half-crazy, half-inspired, wholly in earnest. His form was gaunt. Hewas clad in a shiny black coat buttoned closely, and his shoes showed dusty and huge beneath his carefully turned-up trousers. A beaver of ancient pattern was pushed far back from his narrow forehead, and from beneath it flashed vividly his fierce hawk-eyes. Over his shoulder, suspended from a cane, was a carpet-bag. He stepped eagerly forward with an immense excess of nervous force that carried him rapidly on. Nothing more out of place could be imagined than this comical figure against the simplicity of the hills. Yet for that very reason he was the more grateful to the woman's perturbed soul. She listened eagerly for his next words.
He strode fiercely across the stones of the little ford, declaiming with energy, with triumph:
"'The eyes of all wait upon Thee, and Thou givest them their meat in due season.
"'Thou openest Thine hand, and satisfieth the desire of every living thing.
"'The Lord is righteous in all His ways, and holy in all His works.
"'The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon Him, to all that call upon Him in truth.
"'He will fulfil the desire of all that fear Him: He also will hear their cry and save them.'"
Anne saw but two things plainly in all the world—the clear-eyed stranger like a god; this fiery old man who spoke words containing strange, though vague, intimations of comfort. From the agony of her soul but one thought leaped forth—to make the comfort real, to find out how to raise herself from her sin, to become worthy of the goodness which she had that morning for the first time clearly seen. She sprang forward and seized the preacher's arm. Interrupted in his ecstasy, he rolled his eyes down on her but half comprehending.
"How? How?" she gasped. "Help me! What must I do?"
She held out her empty hands with a gesture of appeal. The old man's mind still burned with the fever of his fanatical inspiration. He hardly saw her, and did not understand all the import of her words. He looked at her vacantly, and caught sight of her outstretched hands.
"'And to work with your hands as we command you,'" he quoted vaguely, then shook himself free of her detaining grasp and marched grandly on, rolling out the mighty syllables of the psalms.
"To work with my hands; to work with myhands," the woman repeated looking at her outspread palms. "Yes, that is it!" she said, slowly.
Anne Bingham washed dishes at the Prairie Dog Hotel for a week. The first day was one of visions; the second one of irksomeness; the third one of wearisome monotony. The first was as long as it takes to pass from one shore to the other of the great dream-sea; the second was an age; the third an eternity. The first was rose-hued; the second was dull; the third was filled with the grayness that blurs activity turned to mechanical action.
And on the eighth day occurred the monthly pay-day dance of the Last Chance mine. All the men were drunk, all the women were drunker, but drunkest of all was the undoubted favourite of the company, Bismarck Anne. Two men standing by the door saw nothing remarkable about that—it had happened the last week. But in that time Bismarck Anne had had her chance, she had eaten of the fruit of the Tree, and so now was in mortal sin.
THE END
THE McCLURE PRESS, NEW YORK