104CHAPTER VIIA MIDNIGHT EXTRA
Dr. Slavens sat on the edge of his cot, counting his money. He hadn’t a great deal, so the job was not long. When he finished he tucked it all away in his instrument-case except the few coins which he retained in his palm.It would not last much longer, thought he. A turn would have to be made soon, or he must hunt a job on the railroad or a ranch. Walker had talked a lot about having Dr. Slavens come in on the new sheep venture with him, on the supposition, of course, that the physician had money. Walker had told him also a great deal about men who had started in that country as herders, “running a band of sheep” on shares, receiving so much of the increase of the flock year by year. Many of the richest sheepmen in that country had started that way only a few years before, so Walker and others said.Perhaps, thought Dr. Slavens, there might be a chance to hook up with Walker under such an arrangement, put his whole life into it, and learn the business from the ground up. He could be doing that while Agnes was making her home on her claim, perhaps somewhere near–a few hundred miles–and if he could see a gleam at the farther end of the undertaking105after a season he could ask her to wait. That was the best that he could see in the prospect just then, he reflected as he sat there with his useless instrument-case between his feet and the residue of the day’s expenses in his hand.Agnes had gone into the section of the tent sacred to the women; he supposed that she was going to bed, for it was nearly eleven o’clock. Strong and Horace were asleep in their bunks, for they were to take the early stage for Meander in the morning. Walker and William Bentley and Sergeant Schaefer were out.The little spark of hope had begun to glow under Slavens’ breath. Perhaps Walker and sheep were the solution of his life’s muddle. He would find Walker before the young man took somebody else in with him, expose the true state of his finances, and see whether Walker would entertain a proposal to give him a band of sheep on shares.Like every man who is trying to do something that he isn’t fitted to, because he has failed of his hopes and expectations in the occupation dearest to his heart, Slavens heated up like a tin stove under the trashy fuel of every vagrant scheme that blew into his brain.Sheep was all that he could see now. Already he had projected ahead until he saw himself the complacent owner of vast herds; saw the miles of his ranches; saw the wool of his flocks being trampled into the long sacks in his own shearing-sheds. And all the time his impotent instrument-case shone darkly in the light of106his candle, lying there between his feet at the edge of the canvas bed.With a sigh he came back from his long flight into the future, and took up his instrument-case with caressing hand. Placing it on his knees, he opened it and lifted the glittering instruments fondly.Of course, if hecouldmake it go at his profession that would be the thing. It would be better than all the sheep on Wyoming’s dusty hills. A little surgery somewhere, with its enameled table and white fittings, and automobiles coming and going all day, and Agnes to look in at evening––. Yes, thatwouldbe the thing.Perhaps sheep for a few years would help to that end. Even five years would leave him right in the middle stretch of life, with all his vigor and all the benefit of experience. Sheep looked like the solution indeed. Sothinking, he blew out his candle and went out to look for Walker.At the door of the tent he stopped, thinking again of Agnes, and of the moonlight on her face as they stood by the riverside, trembling again when the weight of the temptation which had assailed him in that moment swept over him in a heart-lifting memory. Perhaps Agnes condemned him for refusing the opportunity of her lips. For when a woman expects to be kissed, and is cheated in that expectation, it leaves her in censorious mood. But scorn of an hour would be easier borne than regret of years.107So he reflected, and shook his head solemnly at the thought. He passed into the shadows along the deserted street, going toward the sounds which rose from beneath the lights beyond.Comanche appeared livelier than ever as he passed along its thronged streets. Those who were to leave as soon as they could get a train were making a last reckless night of it; the gamblers were busy at their various games.The doctor passed the tent where Hun Shanklin had been stationed with his crescent table. Shanklin was gone, and another was in his place with an army-game board, or chuck-a-luck, doing well with the minnows in the receding sea. Wondering what had become of Shanklin, he turned to go down a dark little street which was a quick cut to the back entrance of the big gambling-tent, where he expected to find Walker and go into the matter of sheep.Even at that moment the lights were bright in the office ofThe Chieftain. The editor was there, his green coat wide open, exposing his egg-spattered shirt-front to all who stopped to look, and making a prodigious show of excitement at the imposing-stone, where the form of the last extra of the day lay under his nervous hand.The printer was there also, his hair standing straight where he had roached it back out of his eyes with inky fingers, setting type for all he was worth. In a little while those on the street heard the familiar bark of the108little gasoline engine, and hundreds of them gathered to inquire into the cause of this late activity.“Running off an extra,” said Editor Mong. A great, an important piece of news had just reached the office ofThe Chieftain, and in a few minutes an extra would be on the streets, with the secret at the disposal of every man who had two bits in his pants. Those were the identical words of that advance-guard of civilization and refinement, Mr. J. Walter Mong.It was midnight when the circulator ofThe Chieftain–engaged for that important day only–burst out of the tent with an armful of papers, crying them in a voice that would have been red if voices had been colored in Comanche, it was so scorched from coming out of the tract which carried liquor to his reservoir.“Ho-o-o!Git a extree! Git a extree! All about the mistake in the winner of Number One! Git a extree!Ho-o-o-o!”People caught their breaths and stopped to lean and listen. Mistake in the winner of Number One? What was that? The parched voice was plain enough in that statement:“Mistake in the winner of Number One.”A crowd hundreds deep quickly surrounded the vender of extras, and another crowd assembled in front of the office, where Editor Mong stood with a pile of papers at his hand, changing them into money almost as fast as that miracle is performed by the presses of the United States Treasury.109Walker and William Bentley bored through the throng and bought a paper. Standing under the light at a saloon door, they read the exciting news. Editor Mong had cleared a place for it, without regard to the beginning or the ending of anything else on the page, in the form which had carried his last extra of the day. There the announcement stood in bold type, two columns wide, under an exclamatoryEXTRA!William Bentley read aloud:Owing to a mistake in transmitting the news by telephone, the name of the winner of Claim Number One in today’s land-drawing at Meander was omitted. The list of winners published heretofore inThe Chieftainis correct, with the single exception that each of them moves along one number. Number One, as announced, becomes Number Two, and so on down the list.The editor regrets this error, which was due entirely to the excitement and confusion in the office at Meander, and takes this earliest opportunity of rectifying it.The editor also desires to announce thatThe Chieftainwill appear no longer as a daily paper. Beginning with next Monday it will be issued as a four-page, five-column weekly, containing all the state, national, and foreign news. Price three dollars a year in advance. The editor thanks you for your loyal support and patronage.The winner of Claim Number One is Dr. Warren Slavens, of Kansas City, Missouri. Axel Peterson, first announced as the winner, drew Number Two.Editor Mong had followed the tradition of the rural school of journalism in leaving the most important feature of his news for the last line.110“Well!” said the toolmaker. “So our doctor is the winner! But it’s a marvel that the editor didn’t turn the paper over to say so. I never saw such a botch at writing news!”He did not know, any more than any of the thousands who read that ingenuous announcement, that Editor Mong was working his graft overtime. They did not know that he had entered into a conspiracy to deceive them before the drawing began, the clerk in charge of the stage-office and the one telephone of the place being in on the swindle.Mong knew that the Meander stage would leave for Comanche at eight in the morning, or two hours before the drawing began. It was the only means, exclusive of the telephone, by which news could travel that day between the two places, and as it could carry no news of the drawing his scheme was secure.Mong had feared that his extras might not move with the desired celerity during the entire day–in which expectation he was agreeably deceived–so he deliberately withheld the name of the winner of Number One, substituting for it in his first extra the name of the winner of Number Two. He believed that every person in Comanche would rush out of bed with two bits in hand for the extra making the correction, and his guess was good.Walker and Bentley hurried back to the Hotel Metropole to find that Sergeant Schaefer had arrived ahead of them with the news. They were all up in111picturesquedéshabillé, Horace with a blanket around him like a bald-headed brave, his bare feet showing beneath it. The camp was in a state of pleasurable excitement; but Dr. Slavens was not there to share it, nor to receive the congratulations which all were ready to offer with true sincerity.“I wonder where he is?” questioned Horace a little impatiently.He did not like to forego the ceremony, but he wanted to get back to bed, for a man’s legs soon begin to feel chilly in that mountain wind.“He left here not very long ago,” said Agnes; “perhaps not more than an hour. I was just preparing to go to bed.”“It’s a fine thing for him,” commented Sergeant Schaefer. “He can relinquish as soon as he gets his papers for ten or twelve thousand dollars. I understand the railroad’s willing to pay that.”“It’s nice and comfortable to have a millionaire in our midst,” said June. “Mother, you’d better set your cap for him.”“June Reed!” rebuked her mother sharply above the laughter which the proposal provoked.But under the hand of the night the widow blushed warmly, and with a little stirring of the treasured leaves of romance in her breast. Shehadthought of trying for the doctor, for she was only forty-seven, and hope lives in the female heart much longer than any such trifling term.112They sat and talked over the change this belated news would make in the doctor’s fortunes, and the men smoked their pipes, and the miller’s wife suggested tea. But nobody wanted to kindle a fire, so she shivered a little and went off to bed.The night wore on, Comanche howling and fiddling as it never had howled and fiddled before. One by one the doctor’s friends tired of waiting for him and went to bed. Walker, William Bentley, and Agnes were the last of the guard; the hour was two o’clock in the morning.“I believe you’d just as well go to bed, Miss Horton,” suggested Bentley, “and save the pleasure of congratulating him until tomorrow. I can’t understand why he doesn’t come back.”“I didn’t know it was so late,” she excused, rising to act on his plainly sensible view of it.“Walker and I will skirmish around and see if we can find him,” said Bentley. “It’s more than likely that he’s run across some old friend and is sitting talking somewhere. You’ve no notion how time slips by in such a meeting.”“And perhaps he doesn’t know of his good fortune yet,” she suggested.“Oh, it’s all over town long ago,” Walker put in. “He knows all about it by this time.”“But it isn’t like him to keep away deliberately and shun sharing such good news with his friends,” she objected.113“Not at all like him,” agreed Bentley; “and that’s what’s worrying me.”She watched them away until the gloom hid them; then went to her compartment in the tent, shut off from the others like it by gaily flowered calico, such as is used to cover the bed-comforts of the snoring proletariat. It was so thin that the light of a candle within revealed all to one without, or would have done so readily, if there had been any bold person on the pry.There she drew the blanket of her cot about her and sat in the dark awaiting the return of Bentley and Walker. There was no sleep in her eyes, for her mind was full of tumult and foreboding and dread lest something had befallen Dr. Slavens in the pitfalls of that gray city, the true terrors and viciousness of which she could only surmise.Bentley and Walker went their way in silence until they came to the lights. There was no thinning of the crowds yet, for the news in the midnight extra had given everybody a fresh excuse for celebrating, if not on their own accounts, then on account of their friends. Had not every holder of a number been set back one faint mark behind the line of his hopes?Very well. It was not a thing to laugh over, certainly, but it was not to be mended by groans. So, if men might neither groan nor laugh, they could drink. And liquor was becoming cheaper in Comanche. It was the last big night; it was a wake.114“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Walker, “I don’t think we’d better look for him too hard, for if we found him he wouldn’t be in any shape to take back there by now.”“You mean he’s celebrating his good luck?” asked Bentley.“Sure,” Walker replied. “Any man would. But I don’t see what he wanted to go off and souse up alone for when he might have had good company.”“I think you’ve guessed wrong, Walker,” said Bentley. “I never knew him to take a drink; I don’t believe he’d celebrate in that way.”Even if he had bowled up, protested Walker, there was no harm in it. Any man might do it, he might do it himself; in fact, he was pretty sure that hewould do it, under such happy conditions, although he believed a man ought to have a friend or two along on such occasions.From place to place they threaded their way through the throng, which ran in back-currents and cross-currents, leaving behind it upon the bars and gaming-tables an alluvium of gold. Dr. Slavens was not at any of the tables; he was not reeling against any of the bars; nor was he to be seen anywhere in the sea of faces, mottled with shadows under the smoky lights.“Walker, I’m worried,” Bentley confessed as they stood outside the last and lowest place of diversion that remained to be visited in the town.“I tell you, it flies up and hits a man that way,” protested115Walker. “Sheep-herders go that way all of a sudden after a year or two without a taste of booze, sometimes. He’ll turn up in a day or two, kind of mussed up and ashamed; but we’ll show him that it’s expected of a gentleman in this country once in a while, and make him feel at home.”“Yes, of course,” Bentley agreed, his mind not on the young man’s chatter nor his own reply. “Well, let’s run through this hole and have it over with.”Inside the door four dusty troopers, on detached duty from the military post beyond Meander, sat playing cards. As they appeared to be fairly sober, Walker approached them with inquiries.No, they hadn’t seen Dr. Slavens. Why? What had he done? Who wanted him?Explanations followed.“Well,” said a sergeant with service-stripes on his sleeve and a broad, blue scar across his cheek, “if I’d ’a’ drawed Number One you bet you wouldn’t have to be out lookin’ for me. I’d be up on the highest point in Comanche handin’ out drinks to all my friends. Ain’t seen him, pardner. He ain’t come in here in the last two hours, for we’ve been right here at this table longer than that.”They passed on, to look upon the drunken, noisy dance in progress beyond the canvas partition.“Not here,” said Walker. “But say! There’s a man over there that I know.”Bentley looked in that direction.116“The one dancing with the big woman in red,” directed Walker.Bentley had only a glance at Walker’s friend, for the young man pulled his arm and hurried him out. Outside Walker seemed to breathe easier.“I’ll tell you,” he explained. “It’s this way: I didn’t suppose he’d want to be seen in there by anybody that knew him. You see, he’s the Governor’s son.”“Oh, I see,” said Bentley.“So if we happen to run across him tomorrow you’ll not mention it, will you?”“I’ll not be advertising it that I was in there in very big letters,” Bentley assured him.“A man does that kind of a thing once in a while,” said Walker. “It bears out what I was saying about the doctor. No matter how steady a man is, it flies up and hits him that way once in a while.”“Maybe you’re right,” yielded Bentley. “I think we’d just as well go to bed.”“Just as well,” Walker agreed.The chill of morning was in the air. As they went back the crowds had thinned to dregs, and the lights in many tents were out.“She thinks a lot of him, doesn’t she?” observed Walker reflectively.“Who?” asked Bentley, turning so quickly that it seemed as if he started.“Miss Horton,” Walker replied. “And there’s class to that girl, I’m here to tell you!”117Agnes, in the darkness of her compartment, strained forward to catch the sound of the doctor’s voice when she heard them enter, and when she knew that he was not there a feeling which was half resentment, half accusation, rose within her. Was she to be disappointed in him at last? Had he no more strength in the happy light of his new fortune than to go out and “celebrate,” as she had heard the sergeant confidentially charging to Horace, like any low fellow in the sweating throng?But this thought she put away from her with humiliation and self-reproach, knowing, after the first flash of vexation, that it was unjust. Her fears rose towering and immense again; in the silence of the graying morning she shivered, drawing her cold feet up into the cot to listen and wait.Walker and Bentley had gone quietly to bed, and in the stillness around her there was an invitation to sleep. But for her there was no sleep in all that night’s allotment.The roof of the tent toward the east grew transparent against the sky. Soon the yellow gleam of the new sun struck it, giving her a sudden warm moment of hope.It is that way with us. When our dear one lies dying; when we have struggled through a night hideous with the phantoms of ruin and disgrace, then the dawn comes, and the sun. We lift our seamed faces to the bright sky and hope again. For if there is still harmony in the heavens, how can the discord of the earth118overwhelm us? So we comfort our hearts, foolishly exalting our troubles to the plane of the eternal consonance.The sun stood “the height of a lance” when Agnes slipped quietly to the door of the tent. Over the gray desert lands a smoky mist lay low. Comanche, stirring from its dreams, was lighting its fires. Here passed one, the dregs of sleep upon him, shoulders bent, pail in hand, feet clinging heavily to the road, making toward the hydrant where the green oats sprang in the fecund soil. There, among the horses in the lot across the way, another growled hoarsely as he served the crowding animals their hay.Agnes looked over the sagging tent-roofs with their protruding stovepipes and wondered what would be revealed if all were swept suddenly away. She wondered what fears besides her own they covered, silent in the pure light of day. For Comanche was a place of secrets and deceits.She laid a fire in the tin stove and put the kettle on to boil. Horace Bentley and Milo Strong were stirring within the tent, making ready for the stage, which departed for Meander at eight.Mrs. Mann, the miller’s wife, came out softly, the mark of the comb in her hair, where it had become damp at the temples during her ablution. She looked about her swiftly as she stood a moment in the door, very trim and handsome in her close-fitting black dress, with a virginal touch of white collar and a coral pin.119Agnes was bending over a bed of coals, which she was raking down to the front of the stove for the toast–a trick taught the ladies of the camp by Sergeant Schaefer–and did not seem to hear her.“Dr. Slavens hasn’t come back?” Mrs. Mann whispered, coming over softly to Agnes’ side.Agnes shook her head, turning her face a moment from the coals.“I heard you get up,” said Mrs. Mann, “and I hurried to join you. I know just how you feel!”With that the romantic little lady put an arm around Agnes’ neck and gave her a hurried kiss, for Horace was in the door. A tear which sprang suddenly leaped down Agnes’ face and hissed upon the coals before the girl could take her handkerchief from her sweater-pocket and stop its wilful dash. Under the pretext of shielding her face from the glow she dried those which might have followed it into the fire, and turned to Horace with a nod and smile.What was there, she asked herself, to be sitting there crying over, like a rough-knuckled housewife whose man has stayed out all night in his cups? If he wanted to stay away that way, let him stay! And then she recalled his hand fumbling at the inner pocket of his coat, and the picture post-card which he had handed her at the riverside.Still, it wasn’t a matter to cry about–not yet at least. She would permit no more disloyal thoughts. There was some grave trouble at the bottom of Dr.120Slavens’ absence, and she declared to herself that she would turn Comanche over, like a stone in the meadow of which the philosopher wrote, and bare all its creeping secrets to the healthy sun, but that she would find him and clear away the unjust suspicions which she knew were growing ranker in that little colony hour by hour.They all gathered to bid Sergeant Schaefer good-bye, for he was to rejoin them no more. June pressed upon him a paper-bag of fudge, which she had prepared the day before as a surprise against this event. The sergeant stowed it away in the side pocket of his coat, blushing a great deal when he accepted it.There was a little sadness in their hearts at seeing the soldier go, for it foretold the dissolution of the pleasant party. And the gloom of Dr. Slavens’ absence was heavy over certain of them also, even though Sergeant Schaefer tried to make a joke of it the very last thing he said. They watched the warrior away toward the station, where the engine of his train was even then sending up its smoke. In a little while Horace and Milo followed him to take the stage.There came a moment after the men had departed when Agnes and William Bentley found themselves alone, the width of the trestle-supported table between them. She looked across at him with no attempt to veil the anxiety which had taken seat in her eyes. William Bentley nodded and smiled in his gentle, understanding way.121“Something has happened to him,” she whispered, easing in the words the pent alarm of her breast.“But we’ll find him,” he comforted her. “Comanche can’t hide a man as big as Dr. Slavens very long.”“He’ll have to be in Meander day after tomorrow to file on his claim,” she said. “If we can’t find him in time, he’ll lose it.”
Dr. Slavens sat on the edge of his cot, counting his money. He hadn’t a great deal, so the job was not long. When he finished he tucked it all away in his instrument-case except the few coins which he retained in his palm.
It would not last much longer, thought he. A turn would have to be made soon, or he must hunt a job on the railroad or a ranch. Walker had talked a lot about having Dr. Slavens come in on the new sheep venture with him, on the supposition, of course, that the physician had money. Walker had told him also a great deal about men who had started in that country as herders, “running a band of sheep” on shares, receiving so much of the increase of the flock year by year. Many of the richest sheepmen in that country had started that way only a few years before, so Walker and others said.
Perhaps, thought Dr. Slavens, there might be a chance to hook up with Walker under such an arrangement, put his whole life into it, and learn the business from the ground up. He could be doing that while Agnes was making her home on her claim, perhaps somewhere near–a few hundred miles–and if he could see a gleam at the farther end of the undertaking105after a season he could ask her to wait. That was the best that he could see in the prospect just then, he reflected as he sat there with his useless instrument-case between his feet and the residue of the day’s expenses in his hand.
Agnes had gone into the section of the tent sacred to the women; he supposed that she was going to bed, for it was nearly eleven o’clock. Strong and Horace were asleep in their bunks, for they were to take the early stage for Meander in the morning. Walker and William Bentley and Sergeant Schaefer were out.
The little spark of hope had begun to glow under Slavens’ breath. Perhaps Walker and sheep were the solution of his life’s muddle. He would find Walker before the young man took somebody else in with him, expose the true state of his finances, and see whether Walker would entertain a proposal to give him a band of sheep on shares.
Like every man who is trying to do something that he isn’t fitted to, because he has failed of his hopes and expectations in the occupation dearest to his heart, Slavens heated up like a tin stove under the trashy fuel of every vagrant scheme that blew into his brain.
Sheep was all that he could see now. Already he had projected ahead until he saw himself the complacent owner of vast herds; saw the miles of his ranches; saw the wool of his flocks being trampled into the long sacks in his own shearing-sheds. And all the time his impotent instrument-case shone darkly in the light of106his candle, lying there between his feet at the edge of the canvas bed.
With a sigh he came back from his long flight into the future, and took up his instrument-case with caressing hand. Placing it on his knees, he opened it and lifted the glittering instruments fondly.
Of course, if hecouldmake it go at his profession that would be the thing. It would be better than all the sheep on Wyoming’s dusty hills. A little surgery somewhere, with its enameled table and white fittings, and automobiles coming and going all day, and Agnes to look in at evening––. Yes, thatwouldbe the thing.
Perhaps sheep for a few years would help to that end. Even five years would leave him right in the middle stretch of life, with all his vigor and all the benefit of experience. Sheep looked like the solution indeed. Sothinking, he blew out his candle and went out to look for Walker.
At the door of the tent he stopped, thinking again of Agnes, and of the moonlight on her face as they stood by the riverside, trembling again when the weight of the temptation which had assailed him in that moment swept over him in a heart-lifting memory. Perhaps Agnes condemned him for refusing the opportunity of her lips. For when a woman expects to be kissed, and is cheated in that expectation, it leaves her in censorious mood. But scorn of an hour would be easier borne than regret of years.107
So he reflected, and shook his head solemnly at the thought. He passed into the shadows along the deserted street, going toward the sounds which rose from beneath the lights beyond.
Comanche appeared livelier than ever as he passed along its thronged streets. Those who were to leave as soon as they could get a train were making a last reckless night of it; the gamblers were busy at their various games.
The doctor passed the tent where Hun Shanklin had been stationed with his crescent table. Shanklin was gone, and another was in his place with an army-game board, or chuck-a-luck, doing well with the minnows in the receding sea. Wondering what had become of Shanklin, he turned to go down a dark little street which was a quick cut to the back entrance of the big gambling-tent, where he expected to find Walker and go into the matter of sheep.
Even at that moment the lights were bright in the office ofThe Chieftain. The editor was there, his green coat wide open, exposing his egg-spattered shirt-front to all who stopped to look, and making a prodigious show of excitement at the imposing-stone, where the form of the last extra of the day lay under his nervous hand.
The printer was there also, his hair standing straight where he had roached it back out of his eyes with inky fingers, setting type for all he was worth. In a little while those on the street heard the familiar bark of the108little gasoline engine, and hundreds of them gathered to inquire into the cause of this late activity.
“Running off an extra,” said Editor Mong. A great, an important piece of news had just reached the office ofThe Chieftain, and in a few minutes an extra would be on the streets, with the secret at the disposal of every man who had two bits in his pants. Those were the identical words of that advance-guard of civilization and refinement, Mr. J. Walter Mong.
It was midnight when the circulator ofThe Chieftain–engaged for that important day only–burst out of the tent with an armful of papers, crying them in a voice that would have been red if voices had been colored in Comanche, it was so scorched from coming out of the tract which carried liquor to his reservoir.
“Ho-o-o!Git a extree! Git a extree! All about the mistake in the winner of Number One! Git a extree!Ho-o-o-o!”
People caught their breaths and stopped to lean and listen. Mistake in the winner of Number One? What was that? The parched voice was plain enough in that statement:
“Mistake in the winner of Number One.”
A crowd hundreds deep quickly surrounded the vender of extras, and another crowd assembled in front of the office, where Editor Mong stood with a pile of papers at his hand, changing them into money almost as fast as that miracle is performed by the presses of the United States Treasury.109
Walker and William Bentley bored through the throng and bought a paper. Standing under the light at a saloon door, they read the exciting news. Editor Mong had cleared a place for it, without regard to the beginning or the ending of anything else on the page, in the form which had carried his last extra of the day. There the announcement stood in bold type, two columns wide, under an exclamatory
EXTRA!
William Bentley read aloud:
Owing to a mistake in transmitting the news by telephone, the name of the winner of Claim Number One in today’s land-drawing at Meander was omitted. The list of winners published heretofore inThe Chieftainis correct, with the single exception that each of them moves along one number. Number One, as announced, becomes Number Two, and so on down the list.The editor regrets this error, which was due entirely to the excitement and confusion in the office at Meander, and takes this earliest opportunity of rectifying it.The editor also desires to announce thatThe Chieftainwill appear no longer as a daily paper. Beginning with next Monday it will be issued as a four-page, five-column weekly, containing all the state, national, and foreign news. Price three dollars a year in advance. The editor thanks you for your loyal support and patronage.The winner of Claim Number One is Dr. Warren Slavens, of Kansas City, Missouri. Axel Peterson, first announced as the winner, drew Number Two.
Owing to a mistake in transmitting the news by telephone, the name of the winner of Claim Number One in today’s land-drawing at Meander was omitted. The list of winners published heretofore inThe Chieftainis correct, with the single exception that each of them moves along one number. Number One, as announced, becomes Number Two, and so on down the list.
The editor regrets this error, which was due entirely to the excitement and confusion in the office at Meander, and takes this earliest opportunity of rectifying it.
The editor also desires to announce thatThe Chieftainwill appear no longer as a daily paper. Beginning with next Monday it will be issued as a four-page, five-column weekly, containing all the state, national, and foreign news. Price three dollars a year in advance. The editor thanks you for your loyal support and patronage.
The winner of Claim Number One is Dr. Warren Slavens, of Kansas City, Missouri. Axel Peterson, first announced as the winner, drew Number Two.
Editor Mong had followed the tradition of the rural school of journalism in leaving the most important feature of his news for the last line.110
“Well!” said the toolmaker. “So our doctor is the winner! But it’s a marvel that the editor didn’t turn the paper over to say so. I never saw such a botch at writing news!”
He did not know, any more than any of the thousands who read that ingenuous announcement, that Editor Mong was working his graft overtime. They did not know that he had entered into a conspiracy to deceive them before the drawing began, the clerk in charge of the stage-office and the one telephone of the place being in on the swindle.
Mong knew that the Meander stage would leave for Comanche at eight in the morning, or two hours before the drawing began. It was the only means, exclusive of the telephone, by which news could travel that day between the two places, and as it could carry no news of the drawing his scheme was secure.
Mong had feared that his extras might not move with the desired celerity during the entire day–in which expectation he was agreeably deceived–so he deliberately withheld the name of the winner of Number One, substituting for it in his first extra the name of the winner of Number Two. He believed that every person in Comanche would rush out of bed with two bits in hand for the extra making the correction, and his guess was good.
Walker and Bentley hurried back to the Hotel Metropole to find that Sergeant Schaefer had arrived ahead of them with the news. They were all up in111picturesquedéshabillé, Horace with a blanket around him like a bald-headed brave, his bare feet showing beneath it. The camp was in a state of pleasurable excitement; but Dr. Slavens was not there to share it, nor to receive the congratulations which all were ready to offer with true sincerity.
“I wonder where he is?” questioned Horace a little impatiently.
He did not like to forego the ceremony, but he wanted to get back to bed, for a man’s legs soon begin to feel chilly in that mountain wind.
“He left here not very long ago,” said Agnes; “perhaps not more than an hour. I was just preparing to go to bed.”
“It’s a fine thing for him,” commented Sergeant Schaefer. “He can relinquish as soon as he gets his papers for ten or twelve thousand dollars. I understand the railroad’s willing to pay that.”
“It’s nice and comfortable to have a millionaire in our midst,” said June. “Mother, you’d better set your cap for him.”
“June Reed!” rebuked her mother sharply above the laughter which the proposal provoked.
But under the hand of the night the widow blushed warmly, and with a little stirring of the treasured leaves of romance in her breast. Shehadthought of trying for the doctor, for she was only forty-seven, and hope lives in the female heart much longer than any such trifling term.112
They sat and talked over the change this belated news would make in the doctor’s fortunes, and the men smoked their pipes, and the miller’s wife suggested tea. But nobody wanted to kindle a fire, so she shivered a little and went off to bed.
The night wore on, Comanche howling and fiddling as it never had howled and fiddled before. One by one the doctor’s friends tired of waiting for him and went to bed. Walker, William Bentley, and Agnes were the last of the guard; the hour was two o’clock in the morning.
“I believe you’d just as well go to bed, Miss Horton,” suggested Bentley, “and save the pleasure of congratulating him until tomorrow. I can’t understand why he doesn’t come back.”
“I didn’t know it was so late,” she excused, rising to act on his plainly sensible view of it.
“Walker and I will skirmish around and see if we can find him,” said Bentley. “It’s more than likely that he’s run across some old friend and is sitting talking somewhere. You’ve no notion how time slips by in such a meeting.”
“And perhaps he doesn’t know of his good fortune yet,” she suggested.
“Oh, it’s all over town long ago,” Walker put in. “He knows all about it by this time.”
“But it isn’t like him to keep away deliberately and shun sharing such good news with his friends,” she objected.113
“Not at all like him,” agreed Bentley; “and that’s what’s worrying me.”
She watched them away until the gloom hid them; then went to her compartment in the tent, shut off from the others like it by gaily flowered calico, such as is used to cover the bed-comforts of the snoring proletariat. It was so thin that the light of a candle within revealed all to one without, or would have done so readily, if there had been any bold person on the pry.
There she drew the blanket of her cot about her and sat in the dark awaiting the return of Bentley and Walker. There was no sleep in her eyes, for her mind was full of tumult and foreboding and dread lest something had befallen Dr. Slavens in the pitfalls of that gray city, the true terrors and viciousness of which she could only surmise.
Bentley and Walker went their way in silence until they came to the lights. There was no thinning of the crowds yet, for the news in the midnight extra had given everybody a fresh excuse for celebrating, if not on their own accounts, then on account of their friends. Had not every holder of a number been set back one faint mark behind the line of his hopes?
Very well. It was not a thing to laugh over, certainly, but it was not to be mended by groans. So, if men might neither groan nor laugh, they could drink. And liquor was becoming cheaper in Comanche. It was the last big night; it was a wake.114
“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Walker, “I don’t think we’d better look for him too hard, for if we found him he wouldn’t be in any shape to take back there by now.”
“You mean he’s celebrating his good luck?” asked Bentley.
“Sure,” Walker replied. “Any man would. But I don’t see what he wanted to go off and souse up alone for when he might have had good company.”
“I think you’ve guessed wrong, Walker,” said Bentley. “I never knew him to take a drink; I don’t believe he’d celebrate in that way.”
Even if he had bowled up, protested Walker, there was no harm in it. Any man might do it, he might do it himself; in fact, he was pretty sure that hewould do it, under such happy conditions, although he believed a man ought to have a friend or two along on such occasions.
From place to place they threaded their way through the throng, which ran in back-currents and cross-currents, leaving behind it upon the bars and gaming-tables an alluvium of gold. Dr. Slavens was not at any of the tables; he was not reeling against any of the bars; nor was he to be seen anywhere in the sea of faces, mottled with shadows under the smoky lights.
“Walker, I’m worried,” Bentley confessed as they stood outside the last and lowest place of diversion that remained to be visited in the town.
“I tell you, it flies up and hits a man that way,” protested115Walker. “Sheep-herders go that way all of a sudden after a year or two without a taste of booze, sometimes. He’ll turn up in a day or two, kind of mussed up and ashamed; but we’ll show him that it’s expected of a gentleman in this country once in a while, and make him feel at home.”
“Yes, of course,” Bentley agreed, his mind not on the young man’s chatter nor his own reply. “Well, let’s run through this hole and have it over with.”
Inside the door four dusty troopers, on detached duty from the military post beyond Meander, sat playing cards. As they appeared to be fairly sober, Walker approached them with inquiries.
No, they hadn’t seen Dr. Slavens. Why? What had he done? Who wanted him?
Explanations followed.
“Well,” said a sergeant with service-stripes on his sleeve and a broad, blue scar across his cheek, “if I’d ’a’ drawed Number One you bet you wouldn’t have to be out lookin’ for me. I’d be up on the highest point in Comanche handin’ out drinks to all my friends. Ain’t seen him, pardner. He ain’t come in here in the last two hours, for we’ve been right here at this table longer than that.”
They passed on, to look upon the drunken, noisy dance in progress beyond the canvas partition.
“Not here,” said Walker. “But say! There’s a man over there that I know.”
Bentley looked in that direction.116
“The one dancing with the big woman in red,” directed Walker.
Bentley had only a glance at Walker’s friend, for the young man pulled his arm and hurried him out. Outside Walker seemed to breathe easier.
“I’ll tell you,” he explained. “It’s this way: I didn’t suppose he’d want to be seen in there by anybody that knew him. You see, he’s the Governor’s son.”
“Oh, I see,” said Bentley.
“So if we happen to run across him tomorrow you’ll not mention it, will you?”
“I’ll not be advertising it that I was in there in very big letters,” Bentley assured him.
“A man does that kind of a thing once in a while,” said Walker. “It bears out what I was saying about the doctor. No matter how steady a man is, it flies up and hits him that way once in a while.”
“Maybe you’re right,” yielded Bentley. “I think we’d just as well go to bed.”
“Just as well,” Walker agreed.
The chill of morning was in the air. As they went back the crowds had thinned to dregs, and the lights in many tents were out.
“She thinks a lot of him, doesn’t she?” observed Walker reflectively.
“Who?” asked Bentley, turning so quickly that it seemed as if he started.
“Miss Horton,” Walker replied. “And there’s class to that girl, I’m here to tell you!”117
Agnes, in the darkness of her compartment, strained forward to catch the sound of the doctor’s voice when she heard them enter, and when she knew that he was not there a feeling which was half resentment, half accusation, rose within her. Was she to be disappointed in him at last? Had he no more strength in the happy light of his new fortune than to go out and “celebrate,” as she had heard the sergeant confidentially charging to Horace, like any low fellow in the sweating throng?
But this thought she put away from her with humiliation and self-reproach, knowing, after the first flash of vexation, that it was unjust. Her fears rose towering and immense again; in the silence of the graying morning she shivered, drawing her cold feet up into the cot to listen and wait.
Walker and Bentley had gone quietly to bed, and in the stillness around her there was an invitation to sleep. But for her there was no sleep in all that night’s allotment.
The roof of the tent toward the east grew transparent against the sky. Soon the yellow gleam of the new sun struck it, giving her a sudden warm moment of hope.
It is that way with us. When our dear one lies dying; when we have struggled through a night hideous with the phantoms of ruin and disgrace, then the dawn comes, and the sun. We lift our seamed faces to the bright sky and hope again. For if there is still harmony in the heavens, how can the discord of the earth118overwhelm us? So we comfort our hearts, foolishly exalting our troubles to the plane of the eternal consonance.
The sun stood “the height of a lance” when Agnes slipped quietly to the door of the tent. Over the gray desert lands a smoky mist lay low. Comanche, stirring from its dreams, was lighting its fires. Here passed one, the dregs of sleep upon him, shoulders bent, pail in hand, feet clinging heavily to the road, making toward the hydrant where the green oats sprang in the fecund soil. There, among the horses in the lot across the way, another growled hoarsely as he served the crowding animals their hay.
Agnes looked over the sagging tent-roofs with their protruding stovepipes and wondered what would be revealed if all were swept suddenly away. She wondered what fears besides her own they covered, silent in the pure light of day. For Comanche was a place of secrets and deceits.
She laid a fire in the tin stove and put the kettle on to boil. Horace Bentley and Milo Strong were stirring within the tent, making ready for the stage, which departed for Meander at eight.
Mrs. Mann, the miller’s wife, came out softly, the mark of the comb in her hair, where it had become damp at the temples during her ablution. She looked about her swiftly as she stood a moment in the door, very trim and handsome in her close-fitting black dress, with a virginal touch of white collar and a coral pin.119
Agnes was bending over a bed of coals, which she was raking down to the front of the stove for the toast–a trick taught the ladies of the camp by Sergeant Schaefer–and did not seem to hear her.
“Dr. Slavens hasn’t come back?” Mrs. Mann whispered, coming over softly to Agnes’ side.
Agnes shook her head, turning her face a moment from the coals.
“I heard you get up,” said Mrs. Mann, “and I hurried to join you. I know just how you feel!”
With that the romantic little lady put an arm around Agnes’ neck and gave her a hurried kiss, for Horace was in the door. A tear which sprang suddenly leaped down Agnes’ face and hissed upon the coals before the girl could take her handkerchief from her sweater-pocket and stop its wilful dash. Under the pretext of shielding her face from the glow she dried those which might have followed it into the fire, and turned to Horace with a nod and smile.
What was there, she asked herself, to be sitting there crying over, like a rough-knuckled housewife whose man has stayed out all night in his cups? If he wanted to stay away that way, let him stay! And then she recalled his hand fumbling at the inner pocket of his coat, and the picture post-card which he had handed her at the riverside.
Still, it wasn’t a matter to cry about–not yet at least. She would permit no more disloyal thoughts. There was some grave trouble at the bottom of Dr.120Slavens’ absence, and she declared to herself that she would turn Comanche over, like a stone in the meadow of which the philosopher wrote, and bare all its creeping secrets to the healthy sun, but that she would find him and clear away the unjust suspicions which she knew were growing ranker in that little colony hour by hour.
They all gathered to bid Sergeant Schaefer good-bye, for he was to rejoin them no more. June pressed upon him a paper-bag of fudge, which she had prepared the day before as a surprise against this event. The sergeant stowed it away in the side pocket of his coat, blushing a great deal when he accepted it.
There was a little sadness in their hearts at seeing the soldier go, for it foretold the dissolution of the pleasant party. And the gloom of Dr. Slavens’ absence was heavy over certain of them also, even though Sergeant Schaefer tried to make a joke of it the very last thing he said. They watched the warrior away toward the station, where the engine of his train was even then sending up its smoke. In a little while Horace and Milo followed him to take the stage.
There came a moment after the men had departed when Agnes and William Bentley found themselves alone, the width of the trestle-supported table between them. She looked across at him with no attempt to veil the anxiety which had taken seat in her eyes. William Bentley nodded and smiled in his gentle, understanding way.121
“Something has happened to him,” she whispered, easing in the words the pent alarm of her breast.
“But we’ll find him,” he comforted her. “Comanche can’t hide a man as big as Dr. Slavens very long.”
“He’ll have to be in Meander day after tomorrow to file on his claim,” she said. “If we can’t find him in time, he’ll lose it.”
122CHAPTER VIIITHE GOVERNOR’S SON
After a conference with Walker in the middle of the morning, Bentley decided that it would be well to wait until afternoon before beginning anew their search for the doctor. In case he had been called in his professional capacity–for people were being born in Comanche, as elsewhere–it would be exceedingly embarrassing to him to have the authorities lay hands on him as an estray.“But his instrument-case is under his cot in the tent,” persisted Agnes, who was for immediate action.“He may have had an emergency call out of the crowd,” explained Bentley.In spite of his faith in the doctor, he was beginning to lean toward Walker’s view of it. Slavens was big enough to take care of himself, and experienced enough to keep his fingers out of other people’s porridge. Besides that, there had to be a motive behind crime, and he knew of none in the doctor’s case. He was not the kind of man that the sluggers and holdups of the place practiced upon, sober and straight as he always had been. Then it must be, argued Bentley, that the doctor had his own reason for remaining away. His unexpected luck might have unbalanced him and set him off on a celebration such as was common in such cases.123“Very well,” agreed Agnes. “I’ll wait until noon, and then I’m going to the police.”Being a regularly incorporated city, Comanche had its police force. There were four patrolmen parading about in dustydéshabilléwith prominent firearms appended, and a chief who presided over them in a little box-house, where he might be seen with his coat off and a diamond in the front of his white shirt, smoking cigars all day, his heels on the window-sill.As Dr. Slavens had not appeared at the time designated as her limit by Agnes, Bentley went with her to the chief’s office to place the matter before him. It was well that they did not go there for sympathy, and unfortunate that they expected help. The chief received them with disdainful aloofness which amounted almost to contempt. He seemed to regard their appeal to him for the elucidation of the doctor’s mystery as an affront.The chief was a short man, who vainly believed that he could sustain his trousers in dignified position about his hipless body with a belt. The result of this misplaced confidence was a gap between waistcoat and pantaloons, in which his white shirt appeared like a zebra’s stripe.He was a much-bedizened and garnitured man, for all that he lacked a coat to hang his ornaments upon. Stones of doubtful value and unmistakable size ornamented the rings upon his stocky fingers, and dangled in an elaborate “charm” upon the chain of his watch.124The only name they ever addressed him by in Comanche other than his official title was Ten-Gallon. Whether this had its origin in his capacity, or his similarity of build to a keg, is not known, but he accepted it with complacency and answered to it with pride.Ten-Gallon was the chief guardian of the interests of the gamblers’ trust of Comanche, which was responsible for his elevation to office–for even the office itself–and which contributed the fund out of which his salary came. It is a curious anomaly of civilization, everywhere under the flag which stretched its stripes in the wind above the little land-office at Comanche, that law-breaking thrives most prosperously under the protection of law.Gambling in itself had not been prohibited by statute at that time in Wyoming, though its most profitable side diversions–such as dropping paralyzing poisons in a man’s drink, snatching his money and clearing out with it, cracking him on the head with a leaden billet, or standing him up at the point of a pistol and rifling him–were, as now, discountenanced under the laws.But what profit is there in gambling if the hangers-on, the cappers, the steerers, and the snatchers of crumbs in all cannot find protection under the flag and its institutions? That was what the gamblers’ trust of Comanche wanted to know. In order to insure it they had the city incorporated, and put in a good, limber-wristed bartender as chief of police.125It was to that dignitary that Dr. Slavens’ friends had come with their appeal for assistance. There was discouragement in the very air that surrounded the chief, and in the indifference with which he heard their report. He looked at Agnes with the slinking familiarity of a man who knows but one kind of woman, and judges the world of women thereby. She colored under the insult of his eyes, and Bentley, even-tempered and slow to wrath as he was, felt himself firing to fighting pitch.“Well,” said the chief, turning from them presently with a long gape, terminating in a ructatious sigh, “I’ll shake out all the drunks in the calaboose this afternoon, and if your friend’s among ’em I’ll send him on over to you. No harm could happen to him here in Comanche. He’d be as safe here, night or day, as he would be playin’ tennis in the back yard at home.”The chief mentioned that game with scorn and curling of the lip. Then he gazed out of the window vacuously, as if he had forgotten them, his mashed cigar smoking foully between his gemmed fingers.Bentley looked at Agnes in amazed indignation. When he squared off as if to read his mind to the chief she checked him, and laid her hand on his arm with a compelling pressure toward the door.“That man’s as crooked as the river over there!” he exclaimed when they had regained the sunlight outside the smoke-polluted office.“That’s plain,” she agreed; “and it doesn’t mitigate my fears for the doctor’s safety in the least.”126“Walker and I were wrong in our opinion; something has happened to Slavens,” said Bentley.“Your opinion?” she questioned.“Well, I should say Walker’s rather,” he corrected. “I only concurred weakly along toward the end. Walker has held out all the time that Slavens went out to hold a celebration all by himself.”“No; he didn’t do that,” said she calmly. “I thought so for a little while this morning, too. But I know he didn’t. Do you suppose––”She stopped, as if considering something too extravagant to utter.“Suppose?” he repeated.“He talked a good deal about going into the cañon to clear up the mystery of that newspaperman and earn the reward,” said she.Bentley shook his head.“He’d hardly start at night and without preparation.”“He seemed to be a man of peculiar moods. If it came over him suddenly and strongly in an hour of depression he might even go to that desperate length. He believed the difficulties of the cañon were largely exaggerated, anyhow. Once he told me that he would undertake to go through it with nothing more than a pair of moccasins and a lantern. It was his theory that a man would need the moccasins for clinging to the rocks.”“It’s a queer notion,” said Bentley reflectively.127“Do you think––” she began, halting her words again and looking at him with distended eyes.“There’s no telling what a man might do when desperate and despondent,” he answered. “But I don’t believe he’d go without leaving some word, or at least making some disposition of his property in writing, in case he never returned. We’ll open his bags and see what we can find.”They hurried forward to carry out this intention.The doctor’s baggage consisted of his battered suitcase and the black bag which contained his instruments. Neither was locked, but neither contained any word to explain where he had gone, nor to give support to the belief that he had intended going anywhere.Walker, whom Bentley and Agnes rejoined at the camp, sat pondering the information supplied by the girl concerning the doctor’s designs on the cañon.“I’ll tell you,” he declared at length, as if talking to himself, “that man had the nerve to tackle it!”Agnes looked at him, her face quickening.“What do you know about him?” she asked.“I know,” said Walker mysteriously, with no intention of bringing his own indiscretions up for the censure of June and her severe mother, “that he had courage enough to tackle anything. I’ve seen proof of that right here in Comanche, and I want to tell you people that doctor wasn’t any man’s coward.”“Thank you for saying that,” blurted Agnes, wholly unintentionally, a glow of pride on her cheeks.128Mrs. Reed and June looked at her, the widow with a severe opening of her mouth, out of which no sound came; June with a smile behind her hand.Walker shook his head.“He had the courage,” said he, “but he had too much sense to try to go through that cañon. No white man ever went in there and came out alive. And even if the doctor had wanted to go he wouldn’t have started at night.”“I don’t know that it would make much difference,” said Agnes. “It’s always night in that terrible cañon.”“And that’s so, too,” Walker agreed. “I think I’ll go over there and take a look around.”“Do you mind if Mr. Bentley and I go with you?” Agnes asked.“I was going to suggest it,” Walker replied, looking longingly at June.June asked permission with her eyes; Mrs. Reed nodded, having overcome her fears of Walker, owing to the substantial credentials which he was able to show. Mrs. Mann put on her hat and slipped her black bag a bit farther up her arm, and stood ready in a moment to join the expedition. Mrs. Reed was to remain alone in camp to watch things, for they had been warned that morning by the hotel people against a band of visiting Indians, who picked up anything and everything that was not anchored at least at one end.129It was late in the afternoon; the sun was low when they reached the river. There wasn’t anything to be made out of the footprints there. The mouth of the cañon had been visited by a great many tourists, some of whom had ventured within a little way to bring out stones for mementos of their daring days of fearsome adventures in the West.The party stood looking into the mouth of the narrow slit between the high-towering walls. Down there it was already dark; the eye could pierce the gloom but a little way.“There are places in there where the sun never shines, even for a second a day,” Walker declared. “And that water goes through there with power enough in it to grind a man’s bones against the rocks. There must be a fall of more than a thousand feet.”“I don’t believe he went in there,” said Agnes with finality, after standing as if trance-bound for a long time, gazing after the foam-white river as it roared into the echoing depths.“No,” Walker agreed. “He had too much sense for that.”They were all cheered and lightened by this conclusion. A daylight study of the terrors of the place was sufficient to convince anybody that a man would have to be driven to desperate lengths before he would venture for the dubious reward or narrow notoriety to be gained by following that wild river through its dark way.130“I camped over at the other side one summer,” Walker told them as they turned away to go back to Comanche, “and I used to pick up things that had come through–boards and things that people had dropped in over at Meander. It pounds things up, I tell you!”“Did you ever pick up any gold on the other side?” asked June.“I never found a trace of any,” said Walker. “I think that’s all a sheep-herder’s yarn.”They saw one of the police force in conversation with Mrs. Reed in front of the tent as they drew near, and hastened forward in the hope that he had brought news of the missing man. Mrs. Reed received them with shocked expression, and a gesture of the hands denoting hopelessness for the salvation of the world.“It’s scandalous!” she declared.The policeman, a carpenterly looking man full of sandy hairs, stood by, grinning.“What is it, Mother?” asked June.“I’ll not repeat what he says,” announced Mrs. Reed. “I will–not–repeat–it!”They turned to the officer, who wore his tarnished badge–evidently bought after long service in a pawn-shop at Cheyenne–pinned to his suspender at a point where he could turn his eye down on it whenever the longing, or a desire to feed upon the pride of his official importance, overcame him.“I was tellin’ her that the chief sent me over to say that your friend, the doctor, was seen last night at131half-past two in the mornin’, jagged up so tight he took two steps back’ards for every one he went ahead. The chief told me to tell you he was layin’ under a tent somewhere, and that he’d be as safe as a calf in a barn. I hope that’s what you wanted to know.”The policeman turned and went his dusty way after delivering his message from the chief, the wagon-spoke which he carried at the end of a thong twirling at his wrist.Walker looked around with a little flash of triumph in his eyes, for a man likes to be vindicated in his opinion, even at the expense of his friends’ honor. But the gust of pain and disappointment which he saw sweep over Agnes’ face set him back with a sudden wrench.“Say,” said he with an assumption of indignation which he did not altogether feel, “I don’t believe that!”“Nor I,” declared Bentley, with no need of assuming a part to say it. “I heard a man describing a crook the other day. He said the fellow was so crooked that if you were to shoot him in the top of the head the bullet would make seven holes in his body before it hit the ground. That’s the kind of a man that chief is.”“Well, it’s scandalous!” declared Mrs. Reed. “Even it he comes back, his conduct is simply disgusting, and I’ll never permit him to address a word to my daughter again!”132Agnes had drawn a little apart from them. She had no heart to come to Dr. Slavens’ defense, although she knew that the charge was calumnious. But it furnished her a sudden and new train of thought. What interest had the chief of police in circulating such a report? Was the motive for Dr. Slavens’ disappearance behind that insidious attempt to discredit him, and fasten a character upon him wholly foreign to his own?It was a matter worth looking into. Had Dr. Slavens incurred, somehow, the disfavor of the vicious element which was the backbone of the place? And had he paid the penalty of such temerity, perhaps with his life?Thinking over the futility of a further appeal to the authorities there, and wondering where she could turn for honest assistance beyond William Bentley, who could do no more than herself, Agnes walked away from the camp a short distance, retracing the way they had come.“Of all the deluded, deceived creatures!” said Mrs. Reed.“Hush-sh-sh!” said the miller’s wife.It was almost sunset when Agnes, overtaking her thoughts, halted with a start to find that she had gone half the distance back to the river. Hoping that they would not be waiting supper on her account, she turned and hurried back.Meanwhile, at camp there had been a little running-up133of excitement, occasioned by the arrival of the Governor’s son, who came on a commission from his mother and sister, bearing a note of invitation to Mrs. Reed, her sister, Mrs. Mann, and June Reed.Jerry Boyle–for that was the name of the Governor’s son–was greatly surprised to find his friend, Joe Walker, in the camp. But that only made it easier for him, he declared, seeing that Walker could vouch for him and put him on unquestionable terms at once.“Just as if it were necessary!” exclaimed Mrs. Reed, glowing with pleasure. “And you the brother of my daughter’s dearest friend!”Jerry Boyle seemed older by ten years than Walker. He was a tall man, with a little forward bend to him that gave him an awkward cast. He was dark-skinned and big-nosed, with black eyebrows which met at its bridge and appeared to threaten an invasion of that structure. Little sensitive, expressive ripples ran over his face as he talked, and that was all the time. For Boyle was as voluble as a political press-agent.Bentley recognized him, even before he was introduced, as the man whom Walker had pointed out in the dance-house the night before. He said nothing about that, but he smiled to himself when he recalled Walker’s anxiety to leave the place. It was a sort of guilty honor, he thought, such as that which was anciently supposed to stand between thieves.As Agnes approached, Boyle was in the middle of a story of his experiences in Comanche during the days134of its infancy. Mrs. Reed, busy about the stove, had grown so deeply interested that she stood with a lamb chop in her hand poised above the frying-pan, her face all smiles. Boyle was seated on a low box, and some of the others were standing around him, hiding him from Agnes, who stopped near the stove on catching the sound of the new voice. Mrs. Reed nodded reassuringly.“It’s the Governor’s son,” said she.Boyle caught sight of Agnes at that moment and jumped to his feet. Walker turned to introduce him.“No need,” said Boyle, striding forward to their great amazement, his hand outstretched. “Miss Gates and I are old friends.”Agnes drew back with a frightened, shrinking start, her face very white.“I beg your pardon, sir!” she protested with some little show of indignation.“This is Miss Horton,” said Walker, coming to her rescue with considerable presence. “She’s one of us.”Boyle stammered, staring in amazement.“I apologize to Miss Horton,” said he with something like an insolent emphasis upon the name. “The resemblance is remarkable, believe me!”Agnes inclined her head in cold acknowledgment, as if afraid to trust her tongue, and passed on into the tent. Boyle stared after her, and a feeling that there was something out of tune seemed to fall upon the party waiting there for supper in the red sunset.135Boyle forgot the rest of his story, and the others forgot to ask him to resume it. He repeated something about remarkable resemblances, and seemed to have fallen into a period of abstraction, from which he roused himself presently with a short, grunting laugh.“I must be gettin’ on,” said he, arising and taking his cowboy hat from the table, where it lay among the plates–to the great satisfaction and delight of Mrs. Mann, who believed that she had met a real westerner at last.“Oh, stay for supper!” pleaded June.“You’ll get enough of me when you come out to the ranch,” he laughed, giving her cheek a brotherly pinch.While Mrs. Reed would have resented such familiarity with June’s cheek on the part of Mr. Walker, or even Mr. Bentley, she took it as an act of condescension and compliment on the part of the Governor’s son, and smiled.Walker went off down the street with Boyle, to speed him on his way. The Governor’s son was to send out to the ranch, some forty miles distant, for a conveyance to carry Mrs. Reed and her party thither. It was to be there early on the morning of the second day from that time, that being, for that country, only an easy day’s drive for a double team to a democrat wagon.There was an uncomfortable air of uneasiness and constraint upon them during supper and afterward, a period usually filled with banter and chatter, and shrill laughter from June. They were not able to get clear136of the suspicion raised by Boyle’s apparent recognition of Agnes and her denial that she was Miss Gates. The two older women especially seemed to believe that Agnes had been guilty of some serious misdemeanor in her past.“Hewasn’tmistaken in her identity,” whispered Mrs. Reed to Mrs. Mann when Agnes went in for a wrap as the chill of night began to settle.Mrs. Mann, charitable and romantic as she was in her mild way, shook her head sadly.“I’m afraid he wasn’t,” said she.“I’m sorry that I can’t take June away from here tomorrow,” lamented Mrs. Reed. “There’s something hidden in that woman’s life!”Agnes had come out silently, as anyone must have come over that velvet-soft earth, which much trampling only made the softer. In the gloom she stood just behind Mrs. Reed. That pure-minded lady did not know that she was there, and was unable to see the rolling warning in her sister’s eyes.“Would you mind walking over to the stage-office with me, Mr. Bentley?” asked Agnes. “I want to engage passage to Meander for tomorrow.”On the way to the stage-office they talked matters over between them. Her purpose in going to Meander was, primarily, to enlist the sheriff of the county in the search for Dr. Slavens, and, remotely, to be there when her day came for filing on a piece of land.“I made up my mind to do it after we came back137from the cañon,” she explained. “There’s nothing more to be hoped for here. That story the police told us only strengthens my belief that a crime has been committed, and in my opinion that chief knows all about it, too.”She said nothing of Boyle and the start that his salutation had given her. Whatever Bentley thought of that incident he kept to himself. But there was one thing in connection with Boyle’s visit which he felt that she should know.“The Governor’s son told Walker that he saw the doctor late last night in about the same condition as that policeman described,” he said. “It came up when Walker asked Boyle to keep an eye open and let us know if he happened to run across him.”“Well, in spite of the high authority, I don’t believe it,” said she with undisturbed conviction.For a little while Bentley walked on beside her in silence. When he spoke there was the softness of reverence in his voice.“If I had the faith of a good woman in such measure as that,” said he, “I’d think I was next door to heaven!”“It is the being who inspires faith that is more admirable than the faith itself, it seems to me,” she rejoined. “Faith has lived in many a guilty heart–faith in somebody, something.”“Yes,” he agreed gently. And then, after a little while: “Yes.”138“Will you be returning to the East soon?” she asked.“I’ve been thinking some of going on to Meander to get a fuller impression of this country and see how the boy is getting on,” he replied.“Then go with me,” she invited.“I wondered if you had faith enough in me to ask me,” he laughed.There was an extra stage out the next morning, owing to the movement toward Meander of people who must file on their claims within the next ten days. Smith was to drive it. He was in the office when they arrived.“I think I’ll assume the responsibility of taking the doctor’s two bags with me,” said Bentley.She agreed that there was little use in leaving them behind. Walker was to go to his ranch the next day; the others would break camp the following morning. There would be nobody to leave his possessions in charge of, except the hotel-keeper, who had a notoriously short memory, and who was very likely to forget all about it, even if the doctor ever returned.Bentley made arrangements for the transportation of that much excess baggage, therefore. The cost was reminiscent of freight charges in the days of the Santa Fé Trail.“We’ll leave word for him at the hotel-office,” said he.As they came out of the stage-office a man was mounting a horse before the stable door, a group of139stage employees around him. He galloped off with a flourish. The man who had caparisoned his horse stood looking after him as he disappeared in the night.“That feller’s in a hurry–he couldn’t wait for the stage in the morning,” said Smith. “He’s ridin’ relay to Meander tonight on our horses, and he’ll be there long before we start. He’s the Governor’s son.”
After a conference with Walker in the middle of the morning, Bentley decided that it would be well to wait until afternoon before beginning anew their search for the doctor. In case he had been called in his professional capacity–for people were being born in Comanche, as elsewhere–it would be exceedingly embarrassing to him to have the authorities lay hands on him as an estray.
“But his instrument-case is under his cot in the tent,” persisted Agnes, who was for immediate action.
“He may have had an emergency call out of the crowd,” explained Bentley.
In spite of his faith in the doctor, he was beginning to lean toward Walker’s view of it. Slavens was big enough to take care of himself, and experienced enough to keep his fingers out of other people’s porridge. Besides that, there had to be a motive behind crime, and he knew of none in the doctor’s case. He was not the kind of man that the sluggers and holdups of the place practiced upon, sober and straight as he always had been. Then it must be, argued Bentley, that the doctor had his own reason for remaining away. His unexpected luck might have unbalanced him and set him off on a celebration such as was common in such cases.123
“Very well,” agreed Agnes. “I’ll wait until noon, and then I’m going to the police.”
Being a regularly incorporated city, Comanche had its police force. There were four patrolmen parading about in dustydéshabilléwith prominent firearms appended, and a chief who presided over them in a little box-house, where he might be seen with his coat off and a diamond in the front of his white shirt, smoking cigars all day, his heels on the window-sill.
As Dr. Slavens had not appeared at the time designated as her limit by Agnes, Bentley went with her to the chief’s office to place the matter before him. It was well that they did not go there for sympathy, and unfortunate that they expected help. The chief received them with disdainful aloofness which amounted almost to contempt. He seemed to regard their appeal to him for the elucidation of the doctor’s mystery as an affront.
The chief was a short man, who vainly believed that he could sustain his trousers in dignified position about his hipless body with a belt. The result of this misplaced confidence was a gap between waistcoat and pantaloons, in which his white shirt appeared like a zebra’s stripe.
He was a much-bedizened and garnitured man, for all that he lacked a coat to hang his ornaments upon. Stones of doubtful value and unmistakable size ornamented the rings upon his stocky fingers, and dangled in an elaborate “charm” upon the chain of his watch.124The only name they ever addressed him by in Comanche other than his official title was Ten-Gallon. Whether this had its origin in his capacity, or his similarity of build to a keg, is not known, but he accepted it with complacency and answered to it with pride.
Ten-Gallon was the chief guardian of the interests of the gamblers’ trust of Comanche, which was responsible for his elevation to office–for even the office itself–and which contributed the fund out of which his salary came. It is a curious anomaly of civilization, everywhere under the flag which stretched its stripes in the wind above the little land-office at Comanche, that law-breaking thrives most prosperously under the protection of law.
Gambling in itself had not been prohibited by statute at that time in Wyoming, though its most profitable side diversions–such as dropping paralyzing poisons in a man’s drink, snatching his money and clearing out with it, cracking him on the head with a leaden billet, or standing him up at the point of a pistol and rifling him–were, as now, discountenanced under the laws.
But what profit is there in gambling if the hangers-on, the cappers, the steerers, and the snatchers of crumbs in all cannot find protection under the flag and its institutions? That was what the gamblers’ trust of Comanche wanted to know. In order to insure it they had the city incorporated, and put in a good, limber-wristed bartender as chief of police.125
It was to that dignitary that Dr. Slavens’ friends had come with their appeal for assistance. There was discouragement in the very air that surrounded the chief, and in the indifference with which he heard their report. He looked at Agnes with the slinking familiarity of a man who knows but one kind of woman, and judges the world of women thereby. She colored under the insult of his eyes, and Bentley, even-tempered and slow to wrath as he was, felt himself firing to fighting pitch.
“Well,” said the chief, turning from them presently with a long gape, terminating in a ructatious sigh, “I’ll shake out all the drunks in the calaboose this afternoon, and if your friend’s among ’em I’ll send him on over to you. No harm could happen to him here in Comanche. He’d be as safe here, night or day, as he would be playin’ tennis in the back yard at home.”
The chief mentioned that game with scorn and curling of the lip. Then he gazed out of the window vacuously, as if he had forgotten them, his mashed cigar smoking foully between his gemmed fingers.
Bentley looked at Agnes in amazed indignation. When he squared off as if to read his mind to the chief she checked him, and laid her hand on his arm with a compelling pressure toward the door.
“That man’s as crooked as the river over there!” he exclaimed when they had regained the sunlight outside the smoke-polluted office.
“That’s plain,” she agreed; “and it doesn’t mitigate my fears for the doctor’s safety in the least.”126
“Walker and I were wrong in our opinion; something has happened to Slavens,” said Bentley.
“Your opinion?” she questioned.
“Well, I should say Walker’s rather,” he corrected. “I only concurred weakly along toward the end. Walker has held out all the time that Slavens went out to hold a celebration all by himself.”
“No; he didn’t do that,” said she calmly. “I thought so for a little while this morning, too. But I know he didn’t. Do you suppose––”
She stopped, as if considering something too extravagant to utter.
“Suppose?” he repeated.
“He talked a good deal about going into the cañon to clear up the mystery of that newspaperman and earn the reward,” said she.
Bentley shook his head.
“He’d hardly start at night and without preparation.”
“He seemed to be a man of peculiar moods. If it came over him suddenly and strongly in an hour of depression he might even go to that desperate length. He believed the difficulties of the cañon were largely exaggerated, anyhow. Once he told me that he would undertake to go through it with nothing more than a pair of moccasins and a lantern. It was his theory that a man would need the moccasins for clinging to the rocks.”
“It’s a queer notion,” said Bentley reflectively.127
“Do you think––” she began, halting her words again and looking at him with distended eyes.
“There’s no telling what a man might do when desperate and despondent,” he answered. “But I don’t believe he’d go without leaving some word, or at least making some disposition of his property in writing, in case he never returned. We’ll open his bags and see what we can find.”
They hurried forward to carry out this intention.
The doctor’s baggage consisted of his battered suitcase and the black bag which contained his instruments. Neither was locked, but neither contained any word to explain where he had gone, nor to give support to the belief that he had intended going anywhere.
Walker, whom Bentley and Agnes rejoined at the camp, sat pondering the information supplied by the girl concerning the doctor’s designs on the cañon.
“I’ll tell you,” he declared at length, as if talking to himself, “that man had the nerve to tackle it!”
Agnes looked at him, her face quickening.
“What do you know about him?” she asked.
“I know,” said Walker mysteriously, with no intention of bringing his own indiscretions up for the censure of June and her severe mother, “that he had courage enough to tackle anything. I’ve seen proof of that right here in Comanche, and I want to tell you people that doctor wasn’t any man’s coward.”
“Thank you for saying that,” blurted Agnes, wholly unintentionally, a glow of pride on her cheeks.128
Mrs. Reed and June looked at her, the widow with a severe opening of her mouth, out of which no sound came; June with a smile behind her hand.
Walker shook his head.
“He had the courage,” said he, “but he had too much sense to try to go through that cañon. No white man ever went in there and came out alive. And even if the doctor had wanted to go he wouldn’t have started at night.”
“I don’t know that it would make much difference,” said Agnes. “It’s always night in that terrible cañon.”
“And that’s so, too,” Walker agreed. “I think I’ll go over there and take a look around.”
“Do you mind if Mr. Bentley and I go with you?” Agnes asked.
“I was going to suggest it,” Walker replied, looking longingly at June.
June asked permission with her eyes; Mrs. Reed nodded, having overcome her fears of Walker, owing to the substantial credentials which he was able to show. Mrs. Mann put on her hat and slipped her black bag a bit farther up her arm, and stood ready in a moment to join the expedition. Mrs. Reed was to remain alone in camp to watch things, for they had been warned that morning by the hotel people against a band of visiting Indians, who picked up anything and everything that was not anchored at least at one end.129
It was late in the afternoon; the sun was low when they reached the river. There wasn’t anything to be made out of the footprints there. The mouth of the cañon had been visited by a great many tourists, some of whom had ventured within a little way to bring out stones for mementos of their daring days of fearsome adventures in the West.
The party stood looking into the mouth of the narrow slit between the high-towering walls. Down there it was already dark; the eye could pierce the gloom but a little way.
“There are places in there where the sun never shines, even for a second a day,” Walker declared. “And that water goes through there with power enough in it to grind a man’s bones against the rocks. There must be a fall of more than a thousand feet.”
“I don’t believe he went in there,” said Agnes with finality, after standing as if trance-bound for a long time, gazing after the foam-white river as it roared into the echoing depths.
“No,” Walker agreed. “He had too much sense for that.”
They were all cheered and lightened by this conclusion. A daylight study of the terrors of the place was sufficient to convince anybody that a man would have to be driven to desperate lengths before he would venture for the dubious reward or narrow notoriety to be gained by following that wild river through its dark way.130
“I camped over at the other side one summer,” Walker told them as they turned away to go back to Comanche, “and I used to pick up things that had come through–boards and things that people had dropped in over at Meander. It pounds things up, I tell you!”
“Did you ever pick up any gold on the other side?” asked June.
“I never found a trace of any,” said Walker. “I think that’s all a sheep-herder’s yarn.”
They saw one of the police force in conversation with Mrs. Reed in front of the tent as they drew near, and hastened forward in the hope that he had brought news of the missing man. Mrs. Reed received them with shocked expression, and a gesture of the hands denoting hopelessness for the salvation of the world.
“It’s scandalous!” she declared.
The policeman, a carpenterly looking man full of sandy hairs, stood by, grinning.
“What is it, Mother?” asked June.
“I’ll not repeat what he says,” announced Mrs. Reed. “I will–not–repeat–it!”
They turned to the officer, who wore his tarnished badge–evidently bought after long service in a pawn-shop at Cheyenne–pinned to his suspender at a point where he could turn his eye down on it whenever the longing, or a desire to feed upon the pride of his official importance, overcame him.
“I was tellin’ her that the chief sent me over to say that your friend, the doctor, was seen last night at131half-past two in the mornin’, jagged up so tight he took two steps back’ards for every one he went ahead. The chief told me to tell you he was layin’ under a tent somewhere, and that he’d be as safe as a calf in a barn. I hope that’s what you wanted to know.”
The policeman turned and went his dusty way after delivering his message from the chief, the wagon-spoke which he carried at the end of a thong twirling at his wrist.
Walker looked around with a little flash of triumph in his eyes, for a man likes to be vindicated in his opinion, even at the expense of his friends’ honor. But the gust of pain and disappointment which he saw sweep over Agnes’ face set him back with a sudden wrench.
“Say,” said he with an assumption of indignation which he did not altogether feel, “I don’t believe that!”
“Nor I,” declared Bentley, with no need of assuming a part to say it. “I heard a man describing a crook the other day. He said the fellow was so crooked that if you were to shoot him in the top of the head the bullet would make seven holes in his body before it hit the ground. That’s the kind of a man that chief is.”
“Well, it’s scandalous!” declared Mrs. Reed. “Even it he comes back, his conduct is simply disgusting, and I’ll never permit him to address a word to my daughter again!”132
Agnes had drawn a little apart from them. She had no heart to come to Dr. Slavens’ defense, although she knew that the charge was calumnious. But it furnished her a sudden and new train of thought. What interest had the chief of police in circulating such a report? Was the motive for Dr. Slavens’ disappearance behind that insidious attempt to discredit him, and fasten a character upon him wholly foreign to his own?
It was a matter worth looking into. Had Dr. Slavens incurred, somehow, the disfavor of the vicious element which was the backbone of the place? And had he paid the penalty of such temerity, perhaps with his life?
Thinking over the futility of a further appeal to the authorities there, and wondering where she could turn for honest assistance beyond William Bentley, who could do no more than herself, Agnes walked away from the camp a short distance, retracing the way they had come.
“Of all the deluded, deceived creatures!” said Mrs. Reed.
“Hush-sh-sh!” said the miller’s wife.
It was almost sunset when Agnes, overtaking her thoughts, halted with a start to find that she had gone half the distance back to the river. Hoping that they would not be waiting supper on her account, she turned and hurried back.
Meanwhile, at camp there had been a little running-up133of excitement, occasioned by the arrival of the Governor’s son, who came on a commission from his mother and sister, bearing a note of invitation to Mrs. Reed, her sister, Mrs. Mann, and June Reed.
Jerry Boyle–for that was the name of the Governor’s son–was greatly surprised to find his friend, Joe Walker, in the camp. But that only made it easier for him, he declared, seeing that Walker could vouch for him and put him on unquestionable terms at once.
“Just as if it were necessary!” exclaimed Mrs. Reed, glowing with pleasure. “And you the brother of my daughter’s dearest friend!”
Jerry Boyle seemed older by ten years than Walker. He was a tall man, with a little forward bend to him that gave him an awkward cast. He was dark-skinned and big-nosed, with black eyebrows which met at its bridge and appeared to threaten an invasion of that structure. Little sensitive, expressive ripples ran over his face as he talked, and that was all the time. For Boyle was as voluble as a political press-agent.
Bentley recognized him, even before he was introduced, as the man whom Walker had pointed out in the dance-house the night before. He said nothing about that, but he smiled to himself when he recalled Walker’s anxiety to leave the place. It was a sort of guilty honor, he thought, such as that which was anciently supposed to stand between thieves.
As Agnes approached, Boyle was in the middle of a story of his experiences in Comanche during the days134of its infancy. Mrs. Reed, busy about the stove, had grown so deeply interested that she stood with a lamb chop in her hand poised above the frying-pan, her face all smiles. Boyle was seated on a low box, and some of the others were standing around him, hiding him from Agnes, who stopped near the stove on catching the sound of the new voice. Mrs. Reed nodded reassuringly.
“It’s the Governor’s son,” said she.
Boyle caught sight of Agnes at that moment and jumped to his feet. Walker turned to introduce him.
“No need,” said Boyle, striding forward to their great amazement, his hand outstretched. “Miss Gates and I are old friends.”
Agnes drew back with a frightened, shrinking start, her face very white.
“I beg your pardon, sir!” she protested with some little show of indignation.
“This is Miss Horton,” said Walker, coming to her rescue with considerable presence. “She’s one of us.”
Boyle stammered, staring in amazement.
“I apologize to Miss Horton,” said he with something like an insolent emphasis upon the name. “The resemblance is remarkable, believe me!”
Agnes inclined her head in cold acknowledgment, as if afraid to trust her tongue, and passed on into the tent. Boyle stared after her, and a feeling that there was something out of tune seemed to fall upon the party waiting there for supper in the red sunset.135
Boyle forgot the rest of his story, and the others forgot to ask him to resume it. He repeated something about remarkable resemblances, and seemed to have fallen into a period of abstraction, from which he roused himself presently with a short, grunting laugh.
“I must be gettin’ on,” said he, arising and taking his cowboy hat from the table, where it lay among the plates–to the great satisfaction and delight of Mrs. Mann, who believed that she had met a real westerner at last.
“Oh, stay for supper!” pleaded June.
“You’ll get enough of me when you come out to the ranch,” he laughed, giving her cheek a brotherly pinch.
While Mrs. Reed would have resented such familiarity with June’s cheek on the part of Mr. Walker, or even Mr. Bentley, she took it as an act of condescension and compliment on the part of the Governor’s son, and smiled.
Walker went off down the street with Boyle, to speed him on his way. The Governor’s son was to send out to the ranch, some forty miles distant, for a conveyance to carry Mrs. Reed and her party thither. It was to be there early on the morning of the second day from that time, that being, for that country, only an easy day’s drive for a double team to a democrat wagon.
There was an uncomfortable air of uneasiness and constraint upon them during supper and afterward, a period usually filled with banter and chatter, and shrill laughter from June. They were not able to get clear136of the suspicion raised by Boyle’s apparent recognition of Agnes and her denial that she was Miss Gates. The two older women especially seemed to believe that Agnes had been guilty of some serious misdemeanor in her past.
“Hewasn’tmistaken in her identity,” whispered Mrs. Reed to Mrs. Mann when Agnes went in for a wrap as the chill of night began to settle.
Mrs. Mann, charitable and romantic as she was in her mild way, shook her head sadly.
“I’m afraid he wasn’t,” said she.
“I’m sorry that I can’t take June away from here tomorrow,” lamented Mrs. Reed. “There’s something hidden in that woman’s life!”
Agnes had come out silently, as anyone must have come over that velvet-soft earth, which much trampling only made the softer. In the gloom she stood just behind Mrs. Reed. That pure-minded lady did not know that she was there, and was unable to see the rolling warning in her sister’s eyes.
“Would you mind walking over to the stage-office with me, Mr. Bentley?” asked Agnes. “I want to engage passage to Meander for tomorrow.”
On the way to the stage-office they talked matters over between them. Her purpose in going to Meander was, primarily, to enlist the sheriff of the county in the search for Dr. Slavens, and, remotely, to be there when her day came for filing on a piece of land.
“I made up my mind to do it after we came back137from the cañon,” she explained. “There’s nothing more to be hoped for here. That story the police told us only strengthens my belief that a crime has been committed, and in my opinion that chief knows all about it, too.”
She said nothing of Boyle and the start that his salutation had given her. Whatever Bentley thought of that incident he kept to himself. But there was one thing in connection with Boyle’s visit which he felt that she should know.
“The Governor’s son told Walker that he saw the doctor late last night in about the same condition as that policeman described,” he said. “It came up when Walker asked Boyle to keep an eye open and let us know if he happened to run across him.”
“Well, in spite of the high authority, I don’t believe it,” said she with undisturbed conviction.
For a little while Bentley walked on beside her in silence. When he spoke there was the softness of reverence in his voice.
“If I had the faith of a good woman in such measure as that,” said he, “I’d think I was next door to heaven!”
“It is the being who inspires faith that is more admirable than the faith itself, it seems to me,” she rejoined. “Faith has lived in many a guilty heart–faith in somebody, something.”
“Yes,” he agreed gently. And then, after a little while: “Yes.”138
“Will you be returning to the East soon?” she asked.
“I’ve been thinking some of going on to Meander to get a fuller impression of this country and see how the boy is getting on,” he replied.
“Then go with me,” she invited.
“I wondered if you had faith enough in me to ask me,” he laughed.
There was an extra stage out the next morning, owing to the movement toward Meander of people who must file on their claims within the next ten days. Smith was to drive it. He was in the office when they arrived.
“I think I’ll assume the responsibility of taking the doctor’s two bags with me,” said Bentley.
She agreed that there was little use in leaving them behind. Walker was to go to his ranch the next day; the others would break camp the following morning. There would be nobody to leave his possessions in charge of, except the hotel-keeper, who had a notoriously short memory, and who was very likely to forget all about it, even if the doctor ever returned.
Bentley made arrangements for the transportation of that much excess baggage, therefore. The cost was reminiscent of freight charges in the days of the Santa Fé Trail.
“We’ll leave word for him at the hotel-office,” said he.
As they came out of the stage-office a man was mounting a horse before the stable door, a group of139stage employees around him. He galloped off with a flourish. The man who had caparisoned his horse stood looking after him as he disappeared in the night.
“That feller’s in a hurry–he couldn’t wait for the stage in the morning,” said Smith. “He’s ridin’ relay to Meander tonight on our horses, and he’ll be there long before we start. He’s the Governor’s son.”