CHAPTER XIITHE OTHER MAN

188CHAPTER XIITHE OTHER MAN

Dr. Slavens stood at the door of the parlor to meet her as she came toward him, a little tremor of weakness in her limbs, a subconscious confession of mastery which the active feminine mind might have denied with blushing show of indignation.The clothiers of Meander had fitted Slavens out with a very good serge suit. Tan oxfords replaced his old battered shoes. A physician had dressed the cut on his forehead, where adhesive plaster, neatly holding gauze over the cut, took away the aspect of grimness and gravity which the bloody bandage of the morning had imparted. For all his hard fight, he was quite a freshened-up man; but there was a questioning hesitation in his manner as he offered his hand.Her greeting removed whatever doubt that William Bentley’s assurance of her fidelity might have left. She took his hand between both her own and held it so a little while, looking into his eyes without the reservation of suspicion or distrust.“We believed you’d come in time all along,” said she.“You believed it,” he replied softly, not the faintest light of a smile on his serious face; “and I cannot weigh my gratitude in words. There is an explanation to be189made, and I have saved it for you. I’m a beast to think of food just now, perhaps, but I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday evening.”“You can tell me afterward, if you wish,” she said.Through the meal they talked of the others, of who had come to Meander, who had gone home; of June and her mother and the miller’s wife. Nothing was said of the cause of his absence nor of his spectacular arrival just in the second remaining to him to save his chance.“I noticed a road running up toward the mountain,” said he when they had finished. “Shall we walk up that way?”Out past the little cultivated gardens, where stunted corn was growing in the futile hope that it might come to ear, they followed the road which led into the mountain gorge. A rod-wide stream came plunging down beside the way, bursting its current upon a thousand stones here and there, falling into green pools in which the trout that breasted its roaring torrent might find a place to pant.Here, in an acre of valley, some remnant of glacier had melted after its slow-plowing progress of ten million years. The smooth, round stones which it had dropped when it vanished in the sun lay there as thickly strewn as seeds from a gigantic poppy-boll. And then, as the gorge-wedge narrowed, there were great, polished boulders, like up-peeping skulls, and riven ledges against which Indian hunters had made their fires in the190old days. And on the tipping land of the mountainside, and the little strips where soil lodged between the rocks, the quaking-asp grew thick and tall.There in a little nook among the trees, where trampling tourists had eaten their luncheon upon a flat stone and left the bags and pickle-bottles behind them, they sat down. At that altitude the sunshine of an afternoon in late August was welcome. A man whipping the stream for trout caught his tackle in some low branches not ten feet from where they sat, and swore as he disentangled it. He passed on without seeing them.“That goes to illustrate how near a man may be to something, and not know it,” said the doctor, a smile quickening his grave face for a moment. “This time yesterday I was kicking over the rubbish where a gambling-tent had stood in Comanche, in the hope of finding a dime.”He stopped, looked away down the soft-tinted gorge as if wrapped in reminiscent thought. She caught her breath quickly, turning to him with a little start and gazing at his set face, upon which a new, strange somberness had fallen in those unaccounted days.“Did you find it?” she asked.“No, I didn’t,” he answered, coming out of his dream. “At that hour I knew nothing about having drawn the first number, and I didn’t know that I was the lucky man until past midnight. I had just a running jump at the chance then, and I took it.”191“And you won!” she cried, admiration in her eyes.“I hope so,” said he, gazing earnestly into her face.Her eyes would not stand; they retreated, and a rush of blood spread over her cheeks like the reserve of an army covering its withdrawal from the field.“I feel like I had just begun to live,” he declared.“I didn’t see you arrive this morning,” she told him, “for I turned and went away from the land-office when they opened the window. I couldn’t stand it to see that man Peterson take what belonged to you.”He looked at her curiously.“But you don’t ask me where I was those two days,” said he.“You’ll tell me–if you want me to know,” she smiled.“When I returned to the Hotel Metropole, even more ragged and discreditable-appearing than I was when you saw me this morning,” he resumed, “the proprietor’s wife asked me where I’d been. I told her I had been on a trip to hell, and the farther that experience is behind me the stronger my conviction that I defined it right.“When I left you that night after we came back from the river, I went out to look for young Walker, all blazing up, in my old-time way of grabbing at things like a bullfrog at a piece of flannel, over what you had said about a man not always having the sense and the courage to take hold of his chances when they presented.192“Walker had talked to me about going in with him on his sheep-ranch, under the impression, I suppose, that I had money to invest. Well, I hadn’t any, as you know, but I got the notion that Walker might set me up with a flock of sheep, like they do in this country, to take care of on shares. I had recovered entirely from my disappointment in failing to draw a claim, as I thought, knowing nothing about the mistake in telephoning the names over.“I used to be quick to get over things that were based on hope that way,” he smiled, turning to her for a second and scarcely noting how she leaned forward to listen. “Just then I was all sheep. I had it planned out ten years ahead in that twenty minutes. When a man never has had anything to speculate in but dreams he’s terribly extravagant of them, you know. I was recklessly so.“Well, I was going along with my head in the clouds, and I made a short cut to go in the back way of the biggest gambling-tent, where I thought Walker might be watching the games. Right there the machinery of my recollection jumps a space. Something hit me, and a volcano burst before my eyes.”“Oh, I knew it! I knew it!” she cried, poignant anguish in her wailing voice. “I told that chief of police that; I told him that very thing!”“Did you go to that brute?” he asked, clutching her almost roughly by the wrist.“William Bentley and I,” she nodded. “The chief193wouldn’t help. He told us that you were in no danger in Comanche.”“What else?” he asked.“Go on with the story,” said she.“Yes. I came back to semiconsciousness with that floating sensation which men had described to me, but which I never experienced before, and heard voices, and felt light on my closed eyes, which I hadn’t the power to open. But the first thing that I was conscious of, even before the voices and the light, was the smell of whisky-barrels.“Nothing smells like a whisky-barrel. It’s neither whisky nor barrel, but whisky-barrel. Once you have smelled it you never forget. I used to pass a distillery warehouse on my way to school twice a day, and the smell of whisky-barrels was part of my early education; so I knew.“From the noise of voices and the smell of the barrels I judged that I must be behind the stage of the variety-theater tent, where they kept the stock of whisky for the bar. In a little while I was able to pick up the identity of one of the voices. The other one–there were two of them near me–belonged to a man I didn’t know. You have heard us speak, when we were back in camp, of Hun Shanklin, the gambler?”She nodded, her face white, her lips parted, her breath hanging between them as by a thread.“It was his voice that I heard; I was coming stronger every second. I made out that they were talking of194my undesirable presence in that community. Shanklin owed me a grudge on account of a push that I gave his table one night when he was robbing a young fool with more money than brains by his downright crooked game. That shove laid the old rascal’s scheme bare and kept him out of several thousand dollars that night.“I supposed until last night that his sole object in assaulting me in the dark was to pay off this score; but there was another and more important side to it than that. Shanklin and the fellow with him, whoever it was, knew that I was the winner of Number One, and they wanted me out of the way.“I’m not clear yet in my mind just why; but they must have had some inside information ahead of others in Comanche that I, and not Peterson, was the lucky man, as reported first. For that extra wasn’t out then.”“It was all a swindle, the extra,” she hastened to explain. “That editor knew all the time who Number One was. He held your name back just so he might sell a lot more papers. We found out about it after we came here.”“Of course Shanklin was in with him some way. They’re all crooks,” the doctor commented.“Perhaps the other man was that wicked chief of police,” said she. “I wouldn’t consider him above it.”“Nor I,” Slavens admitted. “But I don’t know; I never heard him speak. I thought I heard that other voice this morning here in Meander, but I’m not sure. I’ll be listening. I must get on with my yarn, and I195warn you now that I’m going to tax your credulity and try your confidence before I’m through.“I lay there gathering strength while they talked about putting me away, like a man who had been choked. I couldn’t see them when I opened my eyes, for they were back of me somewhere, moving the barrels and boxes around. There was a lantern standing on the ground near my head, and the thought came to me that if I could knock it over and put it out I might make a stagger for the outside and get clear of them. So I upset it.“The thing didn’t go out. It lay on its side, burning away the same as ever, but the move I had made tipped it off to them that I wasn’t all in. I heard Shanklin swearing as he came toward me, and I picked up what strength I had, intending to make a fight for it. I wasn’t as brisk as I believed myself to be, unluckily, and I had only made it to my knees when they piled on to me from behind. I suppose one of them hit me with a board or something. There’s a welt back there on my head, but it don’t amount to anything.”“The cowards!” she breathed, panting in indignation.“I wish we could find a name in some language that would describe them,” said he; “I’ve not been able to satisfy myself with anything that English offers. No matter. The next thing that I knew I was being drenched with icy water. It was splashing over my head and running down my face, and the restorative196qualities of it has not been overrated by young ladies who write stories about fainting beauties for the magazines, I can hereby testify. It brought me around speedily, although I was almost deaf on account of a roaring, which I attributed to the return circulation in my battered head, and sickened by an undulating, swirling motion by which I seemed to be carried along.“I felt myself cramped, knees against my chin, and struggled to adjust my position more comfortably. I couldn’t move anything but my hands, and exploration with them quickly showed me that I was in a box, rather tight on sides and bottom–one of those tongue-and-groove cases such as they ship dry goods in–with the top rather open, as if it had been nailed up with scraps. The water was splashing through it and drenching me, and I knew in a flash, as well as if they had told me what they were going to do, what they had done. They had carted me to the river and thrown me in.”“The cañon! The cañon!” said she, shuddering and covering her face with her hands. “Oh, that terrible water–that awful place!”“But I am here, sitting beside you, with the sun, which I never hoped to see again, shining on my face,” he smiled, stroking her hair comfortingly, as one might assuage the terror of a child.Agnes lifted her head in wondering admiration.“You can speak of it calmly!” she wondered, “and you went through it, while it gives me a chill of fear197even to think about it! Did you–come to shore before you entered the cañon?”“No; I went through it from end to end. I don’t know how far the river carried me in that box. It seemed miles. But the cañon is only two miles long, they say. The box floated upright mainly, being pretty well balanced by my weight in the bottom, but at times it was submerged and caught against rocks, where the current held it and the water poured in until I thought I should be drowned that way.“I was working to break the boards off the top, and did get one off, when the whole thing went to pieces against a rock. I was rolled and beaten and smashed about a good bit just then. Arms were useless. The current was so powerful that I couldn’t make a swimming-stroke. My chief recollection of those few troubled moments is of my arms being stretched out above my head, as if they were roped there with the weight of my body swinging on them. I supposed that was my finish.”“But you went through!” she whispered, touching him softly on the arm as if to recall him from the memory of that despairing time.“I came up against a rock like a dead fish,” said he, “my head above water, luckily. The current pinned me there and held me from slipping down. That saved me, for I hadn’t strength to catch hold. The pressure almost finished me, but a few gasps cleared my lungs of water, and that helped some.198“There is no need for me to pretend that I know how I got on that rock, for I don’t know. A man loses the conscious relation with life in such a poignant crisis. He does heroic things, and overcomes tremendous odds, fighting to save what the Almighty has lent him for a little while. But I got on that rock. I lay there with just as little life in me as could kindle and warm under the ashes again. I might have perished of the chill of that place if it hadn’t been that the rock was a big one, big enough for me to tramp up and down a few feet and warm myself when I was able.“I don’t know how far along the cañon I was, or how long it was after day broke over the world outside before the gray light sifted down to me. It revealed to me the fact that my rock of refuge was about midway of the stream, which was peculiarly free of obstructions just there. It seemed to me that the hand of Providence must have dashed me against it, and from that gleam I gathered the conviction that it was not ordained for me to perish there. I could not see daylight out of either end of the cañon, for its walls are winding, and of course I had nothing but a guess as to how far I had come.“There was no foothold in the cliffs on either hand that I could see, and the pounding of that heavy volume of water down the fall of the cañon seemed to make the cliffs tremble. I had to get ashore against the cliff-side, somehow, if I ever intended to get out, and I intended to get out, no two ways about it. I might drown199if I plunged in, but I might not. And I was certain to starve if I stuck to the rock. So I took off my coat, which the river had spared me, and let myself down from the lower end of the rock. I had that rolling and thrashing experience all over again, still not quite so bad, for there was daylight to cheer me every time my head got clear of the water.“There’s no use pulling the story out. I made it. I landed, and I found that I could work my way along the side of the cliff and over the fallen masses by the waterside. It wasn’t so bad after that.“My hope was that I might find a place where a breach in the cliff would offer me escape that way, but there was none. The strip of sky that I could see looked no wider than my hand. I saw the light at the mouth of the cañon when it was beginning to fall dusk in there. I suppose it was along the middle of the afternoon.”“We were over there about then,” said she, “thinking you might have gone in to try for that reward. If we only had known!”“You could have come over to the other end with a blanket,” said he, touching her hand in a little communicative expression of thankfulness for her interest. “There is a little gravelly strand bordering the river at that end. After its wild plunge it comes out quite docile, and not half so noisy as it goes in. I reached that strip of easy going just as it was growing too dark for safe groping over the rocks, and when I got there my legs bent like hot candles.200“I crawled the rest of the way; when I got out I must have been a sight to see. I know that I almost frightened out of his remaining wits a sheep-herder who was watering his flock. He didn’t believe that I came through the cañon; he didn’t believe anything I said, not even when I told him that I was cold and hungry.”“The unfeeling beast!”“Oh, no; he was just about an average man. He had a camp close by, and let me warm and dry myself by his fire; gave me some coffee and food when he saw that I wasn’t going to hurt him, but I don’t believe he shut an eye that entire night. He was so anxious to get rid of me in the morning that he gave me an old hat and coat, and that was the rig I wore when I returned to Comanche.”“The hotel-keeper gave you the message that we left?” she asked.“He was surly and ungracious, said he didn’t know where you were. I was of the opinion that you had turned my baggage over to him, and that he found it convenient to forget all about it.”“We brought it here–it’s in my room now; and we told him when we left where we were going, Mr. Bentley and I.”“Well, what little money I had was in my instrument-case,” said he. “So I was up against it right. I knew there was no use in lodging a complaint against Shanklin, for I had no proof against him, and never201could convince a jury that I was in my right mind if I should tell my story in court. So I let that pass.”“It was a miraculous deliverance from death!” Agnes exclaimed, taking her breath freely again. Tears mounted to her eyes as she measured Dr. Slavens’ rugged frame as if with a new interest in beholding a common pattern which had withstood so much.He told her of meeting Mackenzie, and of finding the lost die; of the raid they had made by means of it on Shanklin’s money; of his discovery of the midnight extra in the pockets of the gambler’s coat.“So there you have it all,” said he, smiling in embarrassment as if the relation of so much about himself seemed inexcusable. “Anyway, all of the first part of the story. The rest is all on dry land, and not interesting at all.”“But you hadn’t had time to look over the land; you didn’t know the good locations from the worthless,” said she. “How did you pick out the claim you filed on?”“Well, there’s a little more of the story, it seems, after all. There was a plot between Shanklin and another to file Peterson on a certain tract and then buy him out, I suppose.”He told her of the telegram signed “Jerry,” and of Shanklin’s reply.“So I concluded,” he said, “that if the land described by their numbers was valuable to them it would be valuable to me. That my guess was good, I had202proof when I filed. The chap who was piloting Peterson up to the window, and who I suspect was the ‘Jerry’ of the message, wanted to know where I got the figures. He wasn’t a bit nice about it, either.”A swift pallor overspread Agnes Horton’s face; a look of fright stood in her eyes.“Was he a tall man, dark, with heavy eyebrows?” she inquired, waiting his answer with parted lips.“That fits him,” said he. “Do you know him?”“It’s Jerry Boyle, the Governor’s son. He is Walker’s friend; Walker brought him to camp the day after you disappeared. He had an invitation for Mrs. Reed and her party from his mother–you know they had been expecting it. And he said–he said––”“He said––”“That is, he told Walker that he saw you–drunkat two o’clock that morning.”“Hum-m,” rumbled the doctor, running his hands through his hair. “Hum-m! I thought I knew that voice!”He got to his feet in his agitation. Agnes rose quickly, placing her hand on his arm.“Was he the other man?” she asked.“Well, it’s a serious charge to lay against the Governor’s son,” he replied, “but I’m afraid he was the other man.”There was such a look of consternation in her face that he sought to calm her.203“He’s not likely to go any further with it, though,” Slavens added.“Oh, you don’t know him. You don’t know him!” Agnes protested earnestly.He searched her face with a quick glance.“Do you?” he asked, calmly.“There is something bad in his face–something hiding, it seems to me,” she said, without show of conscious evasion.“I’ll call him, no matter what move he makes,” Slavens declared, looking speculatively across the gorge. “Look how high the sun is up the wall over yonder. I think we’d better be going back.”“Oh, I’ve kept you too long,” she cried in self-reproach. “And to think you were in the saddle all night.”“Yes; I lost the trail and rode a good many miles out of the way,” said he. “But for that I’d have been on hand an hour sooner.”“Well, you were in time, anyway.”“And I’ve drawn blindly,” he laughed. “I’ve got a piece of land marked ‘Grazing,’ on the chart. It may be worth a fortune, and it may be worth twenty cents an acre. But I’m going to see it through. When are you going to file?”“My number comes on the fifth day, but lapses may bring me in line tomorrow,” she answered. “Smith, the stage-driver, knows of a piece adjoining the one he has selected for himself, if nobody ‘beats him to it,’204as he says. He has given me the numbers, and I’m going to take his word for it. About half of it can be irrigated, and it fronts on the river. The rest is on the hills.”“I hope you may get it. Smith ought to know what’s good in this country and what isn’t. When you have it you’ll lead on the water and plant the rose?”“And plant the rose,” she repeated softly.“Don’t you think,” he asked, taking her hand tenderly as she walked by his side, “that you’d better let me do the rough work for you now?”“You are too generous, and too trusting in one unknown,” she faltered.The beat of hoofs around the sharp turn in the road where it led out into the valley in which Meander lay, fell sharp and sudden on their ears. There the way was close-hemmed with great boulders, among which it turned and wound, and they scarcely had time to find a standing-place between two riven shoulders of stone when the horseman swept around the turn at a gallop.He rode crouching in his saddle as if to reach forward and seize some fleeing object of pursuit, holding his animal in such slack control that he surely must have ridden them down if they had not given him the entire way. His hat was blown back from his dark face, which bore a scowl, and his lips were moving as if he muttered as he rode. Abreast of the pair he saw them where they stood, and touched his hat in salute.205In the dust that he left behind they resumed their way. Dr. Slavens had drawn Agnes Horton’s hand through his arm; he felt that it was cold and trembling. He looked at her, perplexity in his kind eyes.“That’s the man who stood with Peterson at the head of the line,” he said.“Yes; Jerry Boyle,” she whispered, looking behind her fearfully. “Let’s hurry on! I’m afraid,” she added with the ineffectiveness of dissimulation, “that I’ve kept you from your sleep too long. Together with your awful experience and that long ride, you must be shattered for the want of rest.”“Yet I could stand up under a good deal more,” he rejoined, his thoughts trailing Jerry Boyle up the shadowy gorge. “But I was asking you, before that fellow broke in––”She raised her hand appealingly.“Don’t, please. Please–not now!”

Dr. Slavens stood at the door of the parlor to meet her as she came toward him, a little tremor of weakness in her limbs, a subconscious confession of mastery which the active feminine mind might have denied with blushing show of indignation.

The clothiers of Meander had fitted Slavens out with a very good serge suit. Tan oxfords replaced his old battered shoes. A physician had dressed the cut on his forehead, where adhesive plaster, neatly holding gauze over the cut, took away the aspect of grimness and gravity which the bloody bandage of the morning had imparted. For all his hard fight, he was quite a freshened-up man; but there was a questioning hesitation in his manner as he offered his hand.

Her greeting removed whatever doubt that William Bentley’s assurance of her fidelity might have left. She took his hand between both her own and held it so a little while, looking into his eyes without the reservation of suspicion or distrust.

“We believed you’d come in time all along,” said she.

“You believed it,” he replied softly, not the faintest light of a smile on his serious face; “and I cannot weigh my gratitude in words. There is an explanation to be189made, and I have saved it for you. I’m a beast to think of food just now, perhaps, but I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday evening.”

“You can tell me afterward, if you wish,” she said.

Through the meal they talked of the others, of who had come to Meander, who had gone home; of June and her mother and the miller’s wife. Nothing was said of the cause of his absence nor of his spectacular arrival just in the second remaining to him to save his chance.

“I noticed a road running up toward the mountain,” said he when they had finished. “Shall we walk up that way?”

Out past the little cultivated gardens, where stunted corn was growing in the futile hope that it might come to ear, they followed the road which led into the mountain gorge. A rod-wide stream came plunging down beside the way, bursting its current upon a thousand stones here and there, falling into green pools in which the trout that breasted its roaring torrent might find a place to pant.

Here, in an acre of valley, some remnant of glacier had melted after its slow-plowing progress of ten million years. The smooth, round stones which it had dropped when it vanished in the sun lay there as thickly strewn as seeds from a gigantic poppy-boll. And then, as the gorge-wedge narrowed, there were great, polished boulders, like up-peeping skulls, and riven ledges against which Indian hunters had made their fires in the190old days. And on the tipping land of the mountainside, and the little strips where soil lodged between the rocks, the quaking-asp grew thick and tall.

There in a little nook among the trees, where trampling tourists had eaten their luncheon upon a flat stone and left the bags and pickle-bottles behind them, they sat down. At that altitude the sunshine of an afternoon in late August was welcome. A man whipping the stream for trout caught his tackle in some low branches not ten feet from where they sat, and swore as he disentangled it. He passed on without seeing them.

“That goes to illustrate how near a man may be to something, and not know it,” said the doctor, a smile quickening his grave face for a moment. “This time yesterday I was kicking over the rubbish where a gambling-tent had stood in Comanche, in the hope of finding a dime.”

He stopped, looked away down the soft-tinted gorge as if wrapped in reminiscent thought. She caught her breath quickly, turning to him with a little start and gazing at his set face, upon which a new, strange somberness had fallen in those unaccounted days.

“Did you find it?” she asked.

“No, I didn’t,” he answered, coming out of his dream. “At that hour I knew nothing about having drawn the first number, and I didn’t know that I was the lucky man until past midnight. I had just a running jump at the chance then, and I took it.”191

“And you won!” she cried, admiration in her eyes.

“I hope so,” said he, gazing earnestly into her face.

Her eyes would not stand; they retreated, and a rush of blood spread over her cheeks like the reserve of an army covering its withdrawal from the field.

“I feel like I had just begun to live,” he declared.

“I didn’t see you arrive this morning,” she told him, “for I turned and went away from the land-office when they opened the window. I couldn’t stand it to see that man Peterson take what belonged to you.”

He looked at her curiously.

“But you don’t ask me where I was those two days,” said he.

“You’ll tell me–if you want me to know,” she smiled.

“When I returned to the Hotel Metropole, even more ragged and discreditable-appearing than I was when you saw me this morning,” he resumed, “the proprietor’s wife asked me where I’d been. I told her I had been on a trip to hell, and the farther that experience is behind me the stronger my conviction that I defined it right.

“When I left you that night after we came back from the river, I went out to look for young Walker, all blazing up, in my old-time way of grabbing at things like a bullfrog at a piece of flannel, over what you had said about a man not always having the sense and the courage to take hold of his chances when they presented.192

“Walker had talked to me about going in with him on his sheep-ranch, under the impression, I suppose, that I had money to invest. Well, I hadn’t any, as you know, but I got the notion that Walker might set me up with a flock of sheep, like they do in this country, to take care of on shares. I had recovered entirely from my disappointment in failing to draw a claim, as I thought, knowing nothing about the mistake in telephoning the names over.

“I used to be quick to get over things that were based on hope that way,” he smiled, turning to her for a second and scarcely noting how she leaned forward to listen. “Just then I was all sheep. I had it planned out ten years ahead in that twenty minutes. When a man never has had anything to speculate in but dreams he’s terribly extravagant of them, you know. I was recklessly so.

“Well, I was going along with my head in the clouds, and I made a short cut to go in the back way of the biggest gambling-tent, where I thought Walker might be watching the games. Right there the machinery of my recollection jumps a space. Something hit me, and a volcano burst before my eyes.”

“Oh, I knew it! I knew it!” she cried, poignant anguish in her wailing voice. “I told that chief of police that; I told him that very thing!”

“Did you go to that brute?” he asked, clutching her almost roughly by the wrist.

“William Bentley and I,” she nodded. “The chief193wouldn’t help. He told us that you were in no danger in Comanche.”

“What else?” he asked.

“Go on with the story,” said she.

“Yes. I came back to semiconsciousness with that floating sensation which men had described to me, but which I never experienced before, and heard voices, and felt light on my closed eyes, which I hadn’t the power to open. But the first thing that I was conscious of, even before the voices and the light, was the smell of whisky-barrels.

“Nothing smells like a whisky-barrel. It’s neither whisky nor barrel, but whisky-barrel. Once you have smelled it you never forget. I used to pass a distillery warehouse on my way to school twice a day, and the smell of whisky-barrels was part of my early education; so I knew.

“From the noise of voices and the smell of the barrels I judged that I must be behind the stage of the variety-theater tent, where they kept the stock of whisky for the bar. In a little while I was able to pick up the identity of one of the voices. The other one–there were two of them near me–belonged to a man I didn’t know. You have heard us speak, when we were back in camp, of Hun Shanklin, the gambler?”

She nodded, her face white, her lips parted, her breath hanging between them as by a thread.

“It was his voice that I heard; I was coming stronger every second. I made out that they were talking of194my undesirable presence in that community. Shanklin owed me a grudge on account of a push that I gave his table one night when he was robbing a young fool with more money than brains by his downright crooked game. That shove laid the old rascal’s scheme bare and kept him out of several thousand dollars that night.

“I supposed until last night that his sole object in assaulting me in the dark was to pay off this score; but there was another and more important side to it than that. Shanklin and the fellow with him, whoever it was, knew that I was the winner of Number One, and they wanted me out of the way.

“I’m not clear yet in my mind just why; but they must have had some inside information ahead of others in Comanche that I, and not Peterson, was the lucky man, as reported first. For that extra wasn’t out then.”

“It was all a swindle, the extra,” she hastened to explain. “That editor knew all the time who Number One was. He held your name back just so he might sell a lot more papers. We found out about it after we came here.”

“Of course Shanklin was in with him some way. They’re all crooks,” the doctor commented.

“Perhaps the other man was that wicked chief of police,” said she. “I wouldn’t consider him above it.”

“Nor I,” Slavens admitted. “But I don’t know; I never heard him speak. I thought I heard that other voice this morning here in Meander, but I’m not sure. I’ll be listening. I must get on with my yarn, and I195warn you now that I’m going to tax your credulity and try your confidence before I’m through.

“I lay there gathering strength while they talked about putting me away, like a man who had been choked. I couldn’t see them when I opened my eyes, for they were back of me somewhere, moving the barrels and boxes around. There was a lantern standing on the ground near my head, and the thought came to me that if I could knock it over and put it out I might make a stagger for the outside and get clear of them. So I upset it.

“The thing didn’t go out. It lay on its side, burning away the same as ever, but the move I had made tipped it off to them that I wasn’t all in. I heard Shanklin swearing as he came toward me, and I picked up what strength I had, intending to make a fight for it. I wasn’t as brisk as I believed myself to be, unluckily, and I had only made it to my knees when they piled on to me from behind. I suppose one of them hit me with a board or something. There’s a welt back there on my head, but it don’t amount to anything.”

“The cowards!” she breathed, panting in indignation.

“I wish we could find a name in some language that would describe them,” said he; “I’ve not been able to satisfy myself with anything that English offers. No matter. The next thing that I knew I was being drenched with icy water. It was splashing over my head and running down my face, and the restorative196qualities of it has not been overrated by young ladies who write stories about fainting beauties for the magazines, I can hereby testify. It brought me around speedily, although I was almost deaf on account of a roaring, which I attributed to the return circulation in my battered head, and sickened by an undulating, swirling motion by which I seemed to be carried along.

“I felt myself cramped, knees against my chin, and struggled to adjust my position more comfortably. I couldn’t move anything but my hands, and exploration with them quickly showed me that I was in a box, rather tight on sides and bottom–one of those tongue-and-groove cases such as they ship dry goods in–with the top rather open, as if it had been nailed up with scraps. The water was splashing through it and drenching me, and I knew in a flash, as well as if they had told me what they were going to do, what they had done. They had carted me to the river and thrown me in.”

“The cañon! The cañon!” said she, shuddering and covering her face with her hands. “Oh, that terrible water–that awful place!”

“But I am here, sitting beside you, with the sun, which I never hoped to see again, shining on my face,” he smiled, stroking her hair comfortingly, as one might assuage the terror of a child.

Agnes lifted her head in wondering admiration.

“You can speak of it calmly!” she wondered, “and you went through it, while it gives me a chill of fear197even to think about it! Did you–come to shore before you entered the cañon?”

“No; I went through it from end to end. I don’t know how far the river carried me in that box. It seemed miles. But the cañon is only two miles long, they say. The box floated upright mainly, being pretty well balanced by my weight in the bottom, but at times it was submerged and caught against rocks, where the current held it and the water poured in until I thought I should be drowned that way.

“I was working to break the boards off the top, and did get one off, when the whole thing went to pieces against a rock. I was rolled and beaten and smashed about a good bit just then. Arms were useless. The current was so powerful that I couldn’t make a swimming-stroke. My chief recollection of those few troubled moments is of my arms being stretched out above my head, as if they were roped there with the weight of my body swinging on them. I supposed that was my finish.”

“But you went through!” she whispered, touching him softly on the arm as if to recall him from the memory of that despairing time.

“I came up against a rock like a dead fish,” said he, “my head above water, luckily. The current pinned me there and held me from slipping down. That saved me, for I hadn’t strength to catch hold. The pressure almost finished me, but a few gasps cleared my lungs of water, and that helped some.198

“There is no need for me to pretend that I know how I got on that rock, for I don’t know. A man loses the conscious relation with life in such a poignant crisis. He does heroic things, and overcomes tremendous odds, fighting to save what the Almighty has lent him for a little while. But I got on that rock. I lay there with just as little life in me as could kindle and warm under the ashes again. I might have perished of the chill of that place if it hadn’t been that the rock was a big one, big enough for me to tramp up and down a few feet and warm myself when I was able.

“I don’t know how far along the cañon I was, or how long it was after day broke over the world outside before the gray light sifted down to me. It revealed to me the fact that my rock of refuge was about midway of the stream, which was peculiarly free of obstructions just there. It seemed to me that the hand of Providence must have dashed me against it, and from that gleam I gathered the conviction that it was not ordained for me to perish there. I could not see daylight out of either end of the cañon, for its walls are winding, and of course I had nothing but a guess as to how far I had come.

“There was no foothold in the cliffs on either hand that I could see, and the pounding of that heavy volume of water down the fall of the cañon seemed to make the cliffs tremble. I had to get ashore against the cliff-side, somehow, if I ever intended to get out, and I intended to get out, no two ways about it. I might drown199if I plunged in, but I might not. And I was certain to starve if I stuck to the rock. So I took off my coat, which the river had spared me, and let myself down from the lower end of the rock. I had that rolling and thrashing experience all over again, still not quite so bad, for there was daylight to cheer me every time my head got clear of the water.

“There’s no use pulling the story out. I made it. I landed, and I found that I could work my way along the side of the cliff and over the fallen masses by the waterside. It wasn’t so bad after that.

“My hope was that I might find a place where a breach in the cliff would offer me escape that way, but there was none. The strip of sky that I could see looked no wider than my hand. I saw the light at the mouth of the cañon when it was beginning to fall dusk in there. I suppose it was along the middle of the afternoon.”

“We were over there about then,” said she, “thinking you might have gone in to try for that reward. If we only had known!”

“You could have come over to the other end with a blanket,” said he, touching her hand in a little communicative expression of thankfulness for her interest. “There is a little gravelly strand bordering the river at that end. After its wild plunge it comes out quite docile, and not half so noisy as it goes in. I reached that strip of easy going just as it was growing too dark for safe groping over the rocks, and when I got there my legs bent like hot candles.200

“I crawled the rest of the way; when I got out I must have been a sight to see. I know that I almost frightened out of his remaining wits a sheep-herder who was watering his flock. He didn’t believe that I came through the cañon; he didn’t believe anything I said, not even when I told him that I was cold and hungry.”

“The unfeeling beast!”

“Oh, no; he was just about an average man. He had a camp close by, and let me warm and dry myself by his fire; gave me some coffee and food when he saw that I wasn’t going to hurt him, but I don’t believe he shut an eye that entire night. He was so anxious to get rid of me in the morning that he gave me an old hat and coat, and that was the rig I wore when I returned to Comanche.”

“The hotel-keeper gave you the message that we left?” she asked.

“He was surly and ungracious, said he didn’t know where you were. I was of the opinion that you had turned my baggage over to him, and that he found it convenient to forget all about it.”

“We brought it here–it’s in my room now; and we told him when we left where we were going, Mr. Bentley and I.”

“Well, what little money I had was in my instrument-case,” said he. “So I was up against it right. I knew there was no use in lodging a complaint against Shanklin, for I had no proof against him, and never201could convince a jury that I was in my right mind if I should tell my story in court. So I let that pass.”

“It was a miraculous deliverance from death!” Agnes exclaimed, taking her breath freely again. Tears mounted to her eyes as she measured Dr. Slavens’ rugged frame as if with a new interest in beholding a common pattern which had withstood so much.

He told her of meeting Mackenzie, and of finding the lost die; of the raid they had made by means of it on Shanklin’s money; of his discovery of the midnight extra in the pockets of the gambler’s coat.

“So there you have it all,” said he, smiling in embarrassment as if the relation of so much about himself seemed inexcusable. “Anyway, all of the first part of the story. The rest is all on dry land, and not interesting at all.”

“But you hadn’t had time to look over the land; you didn’t know the good locations from the worthless,” said she. “How did you pick out the claim you filed on?”

“Well, there’s a little more of the story, it seems, after all. There was a plot between Shanklin and another to file Peterson on a certain tract and then buy him out, I suppose.”

He told her of the telegram signed “Jerry,” and of Shanklin’s reply.

“So I concluded,” he said, “that if the land described by their numbers was valuable to them it would be valuable to me. That my guess was good, I had202proof when I filed. The chap who was piloting Peterson up to the window, and who I suspect was the ‘Jerry’ of the message, wanted to know where I got the figures. He wasn’t a bit nice about it, either.”

A swift pallor overspread Agnes Horton’s face; a look of fright stood in her eyes.

“Was he a tall man, dark, with heavy eyebrows?” she inquired, waiting his answer with parted lips.

“That fits him,” said he. “Do you know him?”

“It’s Jerry Boyle, the Governor’s son. He is Walker’s friend; Walker brought him to camp the day after you disappeared. He had an invitation for Mrs. Reed and her party from his mother–you know they had been expecting it. And he said–he said––”

“He said––”

“That is, he told Walker that he saw you–drunkat two o’clock that morning.”

“Hum-m,” rumbled the doctor, running his hands through his hair. “Hum-m! I thought I knew that voice!”

He got to his feet in his agitation. Agnes rose quickly, placing her hand on his arm.

“Was he the other man?” she asked.

“Well, it’s a serious charge to lay against the Governor’s son,” he replied, “but I’m afraid he was the other man.”

There was such a look of consternation in her face that he sought to calm her.203

“He’s not likely to go any further with it, though,” Slavens added.

“Oh, you don’t know him. You don’t know him!” Agnes protested earnestly.

He searched her face with a quick glance.

“Do you?” he asked, calmly.

“There is something bad in his face–something hiding, it seems to me,” she said, without show of conscious evasion.

“I’ll call him, no matter what move he makes,” Slavens declared, looking speculatively across the gorge. “Look how high the sun is up the wall over yonder. I think we’d better be going back.”

“Oh, I’ve kept you too long,” she cried in self-reproach. “And to think you were in the saddle all night.”

“Yes; I lost the trail and rode a good many miles out of the way,” said he. “But for that I’d have been on hand an hour sooner.”

“Well, you were in time, anyway.”

“And I’ve drawn blindly,” he laughed. “I’ve got a piece of land marked ‘Grazing,’ on the chart. It may be worth a fortune, and it may be worth twenty cents an acre. But I’m going to see it through. When are you going to file?”

“My number comes on the fifth day, but lapses may bring me in line tomorrow,” she answered. “Smith, the stage-driver, knows of a piece adjoining the one he has selected for himself, if nobody ‘beats him to it,’204as he says. He has given me the numbers, and I’m going to take his word for it. About half of it can be irrigated, and it fronts on the river. The rest is on the hills.”

“I hope you may get it. Smith ought to know what’s good in this country and what isn’t. When you have it you’ll lead on the water and plant the rose?”

“And plant the rose,” she repeated softly.

“Don’t you think,” he asked, taking her hand tenderly as she walked by his side, “that you’d better let me do the rough work for you now?”

“You are too generous, and too trusting in one unknown,” she faltered.

The beat of hoofs around the sharp turn in the road where it led out into the valley in which Meander lay, fell sharp and sudden on their ears. There the way was close-hemmed with great boulders, among which it turned and wound, and they scarcely had time to find a standing-place between two riven shoulders of stone when the horseman swept around the turn at a gallop.

He rode crouching in his saddle as if to reach forward and seize some fleeing object of pursuit, holding his animal in such slack control that he surely must have ridden them down if they had not given him the entire way. His hat was blown back from his dark face, which bore a scowl, and his lips were moving as if he muttered as he rode. Abreast of the pair he saw them where they stood, and touched his hat in salute.205

In the dust that he left behind they resumed their way. Dr. Slavens had drawn Agnes Horton’s hand through his arm; he felt that it was cold and trembling. He looked at her, perplexity in his kind eyes.

“That’s the man who stood with Peterson at the head of the line,” he said.

“Yes; Jerry Boyle,” she whispered, looking behind her fearfully. “Let’s hurry on! I’m afraid,” she added with the ineffectiveness of dissimulation, “that I’ve kept you from your sleep too long. Together with your awful experience and that long ride, you must be shattered for the want of rest.”

“Yet I could stand up under a good deal more,” he rejoined, his thoughts trailing Jerry Boyle up the shadowy gorge. “But I was asking you, before that fellow broke in––”

She raised her hand appealingly.

“Don’t, please. Please–not now!”

206CHAPTER XIIISENTIMENT AND NAILS

Vast changes had come over the face of that land in a few days. Every quarter-section within reach of water for domestic uses had its tent or its dugout in the hillside or its hastily built cabin of planks. Where miles of unpeopled desert had stretched lonely and gray a week before, the smoke of three thousand fires rose up each morning now, proclaiming a new domain in the kingdom of husbandry.On the different levels of that rugged country, men and women had planted their tent-poles and their hopes. Unacquainted with its rigors, they were unappalled by the hardships, which lay ahead of them, dimly understood. For that early autumn weather was benignant, and the sun was mellow on the hills.Speculation had not turned out as profitable as those who had come to practice it had expected. Outside of the anxiety of Jerry Boyle and others to get possession of the apparently worthless piece of land upon which Dr. Slavens had filed, there were no offers for the relinquishment of homesteads. That being the case, a great many holders of low numbers failed to file. They wanted, not homes, but something without much endeavor, with little investment and no sweat. So they had passed on to prey upon the thrifty somewhere207else, leaving the land to those whose hearts were hungry for it because itwasland, with the wide horizon of freedom around it, and a place to make home.And these turned themselves to bravely leveling with road-scrapers and teams the hummocks where the sagebrush grew, bringing in surveyors to strike the level for them in the river-shore, plotting ditches to carry the water to their fields. Many of them would falter before the fight was done; many would lose heart in the face of such great odds before the green blessing of alfalfa should rise out of the sullen ground.Many a widow was there, whose heart was buried in a grave back East, and many a gray man, making his first independent start. Always the West has held up its promise of freedom to men, and the hope of it has led them farther than the hope of gold.About midway between Meander and Comanche, Agnes Horton was located on the land which Smith had selected for her. Smith had retired from driving the stage and had established a sort of commercial center on his homestead, where he had a store for supplying the settlers’ needs. He also had gone into the business of contracting to clear lands of sagebrush and level them for irrigation, having had a large experience in that work in other parts of the state.Agnes had pitched her tent on the river-bank, in a pleasant spot where there was plenty of grazing for her horse. Just across her line, and only a few hundred yards up-stream, a family was encamped, putting208up a permanent home, making a reckless inroad among the cottonwoods which grew along the river on their land. Across the stream, which was fordable there, a young man and his younger wife, with the saddle-marks of the city on them, had their white nest. Agnes could hear the bride singing early in the morning, when the sun came up and poured its melted gold over that hopeful scene, with never a cloud before its face.Twenty miles farther along, toward Comanche, Dr. Slavens had pitched his tent among the rocks on the high, barren piece of land which he had selected blindly, guided by Hun Shanklin’s figures. He was not a little surprised, and at the same time cheered and encouraged, to find, when he came to locating it, that it was the spot where they had seen Shanklin and another horseman on the afternoon of their stage excursion, when the two had been taken by Smith as men of evil intent, and the doctor had been called to the box to handle the lines.His neighbors in the rich valley below him regarded him with doubt of his balance, and that was a current suspicion up and down the river among those who did not know the story. But the politicians in Meander, and those who were on hand before the filing began, who knew how Jerry Boyle had nursed Axel Peterson, and how he had dropped the Scandinavian when the stranger rode up unexpectedly and filed on Number One, believed that the doctor had held inside information, and that his claim was worth millions.But if the quarter-section contained anything of209value, there was no evidence of it that Dr. Slavens could find. It was about the crudest and most unfinished piece of earth that he ever had seen outside the Buckhorn Cañon. It looked as if the materials for making something on a tremendous pattern had been assembled there, thrown down promiscuously, and abandoned.Ledges of red rock, which seemed as if fires had scorched them for ages, stood edgewise in the troubled earth, their seamed faces toward the sky. It was as if nature had put down that job temporarily, to hurry off and finish the river, or the hills beyond the river, and never had found time to come back. Tumbled fragments of stone, huge as houses, showing kinship with nothing in their surroundings, stood here thickly in a little cup between the seared hills, and balanced there upon the sides of buttes among the streaks of blue shale.A little grass grew here and there in carpet-size splotches, now yellow and dry, while that in the valley was at its best. Spiked plants, which looked tropical, and which were as green during the rigors of winter as during the doubtful blessings of summer, stood on the slopes, their thousand bayonets guarding against trespass where only pressing necessity could drive a human foot. Sheep-sage, which grew low upon the ground, and unostentatious and dun, was found here, where no flocks came to graze; this was the one life-giving thing which sprang from that blasted spot.210The lowest elevation on the doctor’s claim was several hundred feet above the river, from which he hauled the water which he drank and used for culinary purposes. If there was wealth in the land and rocks, nature had masked it very well indeed. The pick and the hammer revealed nothing; long hours of prying and exploring yielded no gleam of metal to confirm his fast-shrinking belief that he had pitched on something good.His only comfort in those first days was the thought of the money which he had taken from Shanklin, with the aid of the gambler’s own honest little die. That cash was now safe in the bank at Meander. There was enough of it, everything else failing, to take him–and somebody–back to his own place when she was ready to go; enough to do that and get the automobile, take the world on its vain side, and pull success away from it. He was able for it now; no doubt of his ability to climb over any obstacle whatever remained after his wrestling match with the river in the Buckhorn Cañon. There was no job ahead of him that he could even imagine, as big as that.Nobody had come forward to make him an offer for his place. Jerry Boyle had not appeared, nothing had been seen of the man who accosted him at the window the morning he filed. Although he had remained in Meander two days after that event, nobody had approached him in regard to the land which so many had seemed anxious to get before it came into211his ownership. Boyle he had not seen since the evening Dr. Slavens and Agnes met him in the gorge riding in such anxious haste.Perhaps the value of the claim, if value lay in it, was the secret of a few, and those few had joined forces to starve out his courage and hope. If nobody came forward with a voluntary offer for the land, it never would be worth proving up on and paying the government the price asked for it. All over that country there was better land to be had without cost.As the days slipped past and nobody appeared with ten thousand dollars bulging his pockets, Slavens began to talk to himself among the solitudes of his desert. He called himself a foremost example of stupidity and thick-headedness for not giving ear to the man who wanted to talk business the day he filed on that outcast corner of the earth. Then, growing stubborn, he would determine to pay the government the purchase price, clean up on it at once, and take title to it. Then, if ithadthe stuff in it, they might come around with some sort of offer in time.No matter; he would stick to it himself until winter. That always was his final conclusion, influenced, perhaps, by a hope that the roughness of winter would speedily convince “somebody” that roses and dreams of roses belonged to the summer. He would have nothing more to pay on the homestead for a year. And much could happen in a year, in a day; even an hour.212Slavens had a good tent in a sheltered place, which he believed he could make comfortable for winter, and he meant to send for some books. Meantime, he had tobacco to smoke and a rifle to practice with, and prospects ahead, no matter which way the cat might jump.The doctor’s target practice was a strong contributing force to the general belief among his neighbors that he was deranged. They said he imagined that he was repelling invaders from his claim, which would be valuable, maybe, to a man who wanted to start a rattlesnake farm. But Slavens had a motive, more weighty than the pastime that this seemingly idle pursuit afforded. There was a time of settlement ahead between him and Jerry Boyle for the part the Governor’s son had borne in his assault. When the day for that adjustment came, Slavens intended to seek it.Concerning Shanklin, he was in a degree satisfied with what he had done. The loss of that much money, he believed, was a greater drain on the old crook than a gallon of blood. Slavens felt that it hurt Shanklin in the gambler’s one sensitive spot. There was a great deal owing to him yet from that man, in spite of what he had forced Shanklin to pay, and he meant to collect the balance before he left that state.So the rifle practice went ahead, day by day, supplemented by a turn now and then with Hun Shanklin’s old black pistol, which Mackenzie had turned over to Slavens as part of his lawful spoil.While Dr. Slavens banged away among his rocks,213not knowing whether he was a victim of his own impetuosity or the peculiarly favored son of fortune, Agnes Horton, in her tent beside the river, was undergoing an adjustment of vision which was assisting her to see startlingly things exactly as they were. The enchantment of distance had fallen away. When she came to grips with the land, then its wild unfriendliness was revealed, and the magnitude of the task ahead of her was made discouragingly plain.All over her cultivable strip of land which lay between the river and the hills, the gray sage grew in clumps, each cluster anchoring the soil around it in a little mound. Through many years the earth had blown and sifted around the sapless shrubs until they seemed buried to the ears, and hopeless of ever getting out again, but living on their gray life in a gray world, waiting for the best.All of this ground must be leveled before it could receive the benefits of irrigation, and the surprising thing to her was how much wood the land yielded during this operation. Each little sagebrush had at least twenty times as much timber under the earth as it had above, and each thick, tough root was a retarding and vexatious obstacle in the way of scraper and plow. Smith said it was sometimes necessary in that country to move three acres of land in order to make one.But Smith was enthusiastically for it. He kept asserting that it paid, and pointed to the small bit of agricultural land that there was in the whole expanse of that214reservation, for an example, to prove his point. There was room for other industries, such as mining and grazing, but the man who could grow food and forage for the others was the one who would take down the money from the hook. That was Smith’s contention.He told Agnes that she could lift enough water with a wheel in the river to irrigate a garden and more, but there was no need of putting in the wheel until spring. The rains of that season would bring up the seed, and while it was making the most of the moisture in the ground she could be setting her wheel.“A person’s got to plan ahead in this country,” said Smith. “You must know to a skinned knuckle just what you’ll need a year, or five years, ahead here, if you ever make it go worth havin’. It ain’t like it is back where you come from. There you can go it more or less hit-or-miss, and hit about as often as you miss. Here you’ve got to know.”Smith was moving to organize the settlers along the river into a company to put in a canal which would water all their land, the chief capital to be elbow-grease; the work to be done that fall and winter. Smith was indeed the head and inspiration of all enterprise in that new place. People to whom that country was strange, and that included nearly all of them, looked to him for advice, and regarded with admiration and wonder his aptness in answering everything.Agnes was doubtful of the future, in spite of her big,215brave talk to Dr. Slavens in the days before the drawing. Now that she had the land, and a better piece of it than she had hoped for, considering her high number, she felt weakly unfit to take it in hand and break it to the condition of docility in which it would tolerate fruit-trees, vines, and roses.It cheered her considerably, and renewed her faith in her sex, to see some of the women out with their teams, preparing their land for the seeding next spring. More than one of them had no man to lean on, and no money to hire one to take the rough edge off for her. In that respect Agnes contrasted her easier situation with theirs. She had the means, slender as they might be, indeed, to employ somebody to do the work in the field. But the roses she reserved for her own hands, putting them aside as one conceals a poem which one has written, or a hope of which he is afraid.In the first few days of her residence on her land, Agnes experienced all the changes of mercurial rising and falling of spirits, plans, dreams. Some days she saddled her horse, which she had bought under the doctor’s guidance at Meander, and rode, singing, over the hills, exalted by the wild beauty of nature entirely unadorned. There was not yet a house in the whole of what had been the Indian Reservation, and there never had been one which could be properly called such.Here was a country, bigger than any one of several of the far eastern states, as yet unchanged by the art of man. The vastness of it, and the liberty, would lay216hold of her at such times with rude power, making her feel herself a part of it, as old a part of it as its level-topped buttes and ramparts of riven stone.Then again it frightened her, giving her a feeling such as she remembered once when she found herself alone in a boat upon a great lake, with the shore left far behind and none in sight beyond the misty horizon. She seemed small then, and inadequate for the rough struggle that lay ahead.Smith noted this, and read the symptoms like a doctor.“You’ve got to keep your nerve,” he advised, bluntly kind, “and not let the lonesomeness git a hold on you, Miss Horton.”“The lonesomeness?” she echoed. It seemed a strange-sounding phrase.“It’s a disease,” Smith proceeded, “and I suppose you git it anywhere; but you git it harder here. I’ve seen men take it, and turn gray and lose their minds, runnin’ sheep. After you once git over it you’re broke. You wouldn’t leave this country for a purty on a chain.”“I hope I’ll not get it,” she laughed. “How do people act when they take the lonesomeness?”“Well, some acts one way and some acts another,” said Smith. “Some mopes and run holler-eyed, and some kicks and complains and talk about ‘God’s country’ till it makes you sick. Just like this wasn’t as much God’s country as any place you can name! It’s all His’n when you come down to the p’int, I reckon.217But how a woman acts when she takes it I can’t so much say for I never knew but one that had it. She up and killed a man.”“Oh, that was terrible! Did she lose her mind?”“Well, I don’t know but you could say she did. You see she married a sheepman. He brought her out here from Omaha, and left her up there on the side of the mountain in a little log cabin above Meander while he went off foolin’ around with them sheep, the way them fellers does. I tell you when you git sheep on the brain you don’t eat at home more than once in three months. You live around in a sheep-wagon, cuttin’ tails off of lambs, and all such fool things as that.”“Why, do they cut the poor things’ tails off?” she asked, getting the notion that Smith was having a little fun at her expense.“They all do it,” he informed her, “to keep the sand and burrs out of ’em. If they let ’em.grow long they git so heavy with sand it makes ’em.poor to pack ’em. they say, I don’t know myself; I’m not a sheepman.”“But why did she shoot a man? Because he cut off lambs’ tails?”“No, she didn’t,” said Smith. “She went out of her head. The feller she shot was a storekeeper’s son down in Meander, and he got to ridin’ up there to talk to her and cheer her up. The lonesomeness it had such a hold on her, thinkin’ about Omaha and houses, and pie-annos playin’ in every one of ’em, that she up and run off with that feller when he promised to take her218back there. They started to cut across to the U.P. in a wagon–more than a hundred miles. That night she come to her head when he got too fresh, and she had to shoot him to make him behave.”“Her husband should have been shot, it seems to me, for leaving her that way,” Agnes said.“A man orto stick to his wife in this country, specially if she’s new to it and not broke,” said Smith; “and if I had one, ma’am, I’dstickto her.”Smith looked at her as he said this, with conviction and deep earnestness in his eyes.“I’m sure you would,” she agreed.“And I’d be kind to her,” he declared.“There’s no need to tell me that,” she assured him. “You’re kind to everybody.”“And if she didn’t like the name,” Smith went on significantly, “I’d have it changed!”“I’m sure she’d like it–she’d be very ungrateful if she didn’t,” Agnes replied, somewhat amused by his earnestness, but afraid to show it. “I’m going to order lumber for my house in a day or two.”Smith switched from sentiment to business in a flash.“Let me sell you the nails,” he requested. “I can give ’em to you as cheap as you can git ’em in Meander.”

Vast changes had come over the face of that land in a few days. Every quarter-section within reach of water for domestic uses had its tent or its dugout in the hillside or its hastily built cabin of planks. Where miles of unpeopled desert had stretched lonely and gray a week before, the smoke of three thousand fires rose up each morning now, proclaiming a new domain in the kingdom of husbandry.

On the different levels of that rugged country, men and women had planted their tent-poles and their hopes. Unacquainted with its rigors, they were unappalled by the hardships, which lay ahead of them, dimly understood. For that early autumn weather was benignant, and the sun was mellow on the hills.

Speculation had not turned out as profitable as those who had come to practice it had expected. Outside of the anxiety of Jerry Boyle and others to get possession of the apparently worthless piece of land upon which Dr. Slavens had filed, there were no offers for the relinquishment of homesteads. That being the case, a great many holders of low numbers failed to file. They wanted, not homes, but something without much endeavor, with little investment and no sweat. So they had passed on to prey upon the thrifty somewhere207else, leaving the land to those whose hearts were hungry for it because itwasland, with the wide horizon of freedom around it, and a place to make home.

And these turned themselves to bravely leveling with road-scrapers and teams the hummocks where the sagebrush grew, bringing in surveyors to strike the level for them in the river-shore, plotting ditches to carry the water to their fields. Many of them would falter before the fight was done; many would lose heart in the face of such great odds before the green blessing of alfalfa should rise out of the sullen ground.

Many a widow was there, whose heart was buried in a grave back East, and many a gray man, making his first independent start. Always the West has held up its promise of freedom to men, and the hope of it has led them farther than the hope of gold.

About midway between Meander and Comanche, Agnes Horton was located on the land which Smith had selected for her. Smith had retired from driving the stage and had established a sort of commercial center on his homestead, where he had a store for supplying the settlers’ needs. He also had gone into the business of contracting to clear lands of sagebrush and level them for irrigation, having had a large experience in that work in other parts of the state.

Agnes had pitched her tent on the river-bank, in a pleasant spot where there was plenty of grazing for her horse. Just across her line, and only a few hundred yards up-stream, a family was encamped, putting208up a permanent home, making a reckless inroad among the cottonwoods which grew along the river on their land. Across the stream, which was fordable there, a young man and his younger wife, with the saddle-marks of the city on them, had their white nest. Agnes could hear the bride singing early in the morning, when the sun came up and poured its melted gold over that hopeful scene, with never a cloud before its face.

Twenty miles farther along, toward Comanche, Dr. Slavens had pitched his tent among the rocks on the high, barren piece of land which he had selected blindly, guided by Hun Shanklin’s figures. He was not a little surprised, and at the same time cheered and encouraged, to find, when he came to locating it, that it was the spot where they had seen Shanklin and another horseman on the afternoon of their stage excursion, when the two had been taken by Smith as men of evil intent, and the doctor had been called to the box to handle the lines.

His neighbors in the rich valley below him regarded him with doubt of his balance, and that was a current suspicion up and down the river among those who did not know the story. But the politicians in Meander, and those who were on hand before the filing began, who knew how Jerry Boyle had nursed Axel Peterson, and how he had dropped the Scandinavian when the stranger rode up unexpectedly and filed on Number One, believed that the doctor had held inside information, and that his claim was worth millions.

But if the quarter-section contained anything of209value, there was no evidence of it that Dr. Slavens could find. It was about the crudest and most unfinished piece of earth that he ever had seen outside the Buckhorn Cañon. It looked as if the materials for making something on a tremendous pattern had been assembled there, thrown down promiscuously, and abandoned.

Ledges of red rock, which seemed as if fires had scorched them for ages, stood edgewise in the troubled earth, their seamed faces toward the sky. It was as if nature had put down that job temporarily, to hurry off and finish the river, or the hills beyond the river, and never had found time to come back. Tumbled fragments of stone, huge as houses, showing kinship with nothing in their surroundings, stood here thickly in a little cup between the seared hills, and balanced there upon the sides of buttes among the streaks of blue shale.

A little grass grew here and there in carpet-size splotches, now yellow and dry, while that in the valley was at its best. Spiked plants, which looked tropical, and which were as green during the rigors of winter as during the doubtful blessings of summer, stood on the slopes, their thousand bayonets guarding against trespass where only pressing necessity could drive a human foot. Sheep-sage, which grew low upon the ground, and unostentatious and dun, was found here, where no flocks came to graze; this was the one life-giving thing which sprang from that blasted spot.210

The lowest elevation on the doctor’s claim was several hundred feet above the river, from which he hauled the water which he drank and used for culinary purposes. If there was wealth in the land and rocks, nature had masked it very well indeed. The pick and the hammer revealed nothing; long hours of prying and exploring yielded no gleam of metal to confirm his fast-shrinking belief that he had pitched on something good.

His only comfort in those first days was the thought of the money which he had taken from Shanklin, with the aid of the gambler’s own honest little die. That cash was now safe in the bank at Meander. There was enough of it, everything else failing, to take him–and somebody–back to his own place when she was ready to go; enough to do that and get the automobile, take the world on its vain side, and pull success away from it. He was able for it now; no doubt of his ability to climb over any obstacle whatever remained after his wrestling match with the river in the Buckhorn Cañon. There was no job ahead of him that he could even imagine, as big as that.

Nobody had come forward to make him an offer for his place. Jerry Boyle had not appeared, nothing had been seen of the man who accosted him at the window the morning he filed. Although he had remained in Meander two days after that event, nobody had approached him in regard to the land which so many had seemed anxious to get before it came into211his ownership. Boyle he had not seen since the evening Dr. Slavens and Agnes met him in the gorge riding in such anxious haste.

Perhaps the value of the claim, if value lay in it, was the secret of a few, and those few had joined forces to starve out his courage and hope. If nobody came forward with a voluntary offer for the land, it never would be worth proving up on and paying the government the price asked for it. All over that country there was better land to be had without cost.

As the days slipped past and nobody appeared with ten thousand dollars bulging his pockets, Slavens began to talk to himself among the solitudes of his desert. He called himself a foremost example of stupidity and thick-headedness for not giving ear to the man who wanted to talk business the day he filed on that outcast corner of the earth. Then, growing stubborn, he would determine to pay the government the purchase price, clean up on it at once, and take title to it. Then, if ithadthe stuff in it, they might come around with some sort of offer in time.

No matter; he would stick to it himself until winter. That always was his final conclusion, influenced, perhaps, by a hope that the roughness of winter would speedily convince “somebody” that roses and dreams of roses belonged to the summer. He would have nothing more to pay on the homestead for a year. And much could happen in a year, in a day; even an hour.212

Slavens had a good tent in a sheltered place, which he believed he could make comfortable for winter, and he meant to send for some books. Meantime, he had tobacco to smoke and a rifle to practice with, and prospects ahead, no matter which way the cat might jump.

The doctor’s target practice was a strong contributing force to the general belief among his neighbors that he was deranged. They said he imagined that he was repelling invaders from his claim, which would be valuable, maybe, to a man who wanted to start a rattlesnake farm. But Slavens had a motive, more weighty than the pastime that this seemingly idle pursuit afforded. There was a time of settlement ahead between him and Jerry Boyle for the part the Governor’s son had borne in his assault. When the day for that adjustment came, Slavens intended to seek it.

Concerning Shanklin, he was in a degree satisfied with what he had done. The loss of that much money, he believed, was a greater drain on the old crook than a gallon of blood. Slavens felt that it hurt Shanklin in the gambler’s one sensitive spot. There was a great deal owing to him yet from that man, in spite of what he had forced Shanklin to pay, and he meant to collect the balance before he left that state.

So the rifle practice went ahead, day by day, supplemented by a turn now and then with Hun Shanklin’s old black pistol, which Mackenzie had turned over to Slavens as part of his lawful spoil.

While Dr. Slavens banged away among his rocks,213not knowing whether he was a victim of his own impetuosity or the peculiarly favored son of fortune, Agnes Horton, in her tent beside the river, was undergoing an adjustment of vision which was assisting her to see startlingly things exactly as they were. The enchantment of distance had fallen away. When she came to grips with the land, then its wild unfriendliness was revealed, and the magnitude of the task ahead of her was made discouragingly plain.

All over her cultivable strip of land which lay between the river and the hills, the gray sage grew in clumps, each cluster anchoring the soil around it in a little mound. Through many years the earth had blown and sifted around the sapless shrubs until they seemed buried to the ears, and hopeless of ever getting out again, but living on their gray life in a gray world, waiting for the best.

All of this ground must be leveled before it could receive the benefits of irrigation, and the surprising thing to her was how much wood the land yielded during this operation. Each little sagebrush had at least twenty times as much timber under the earth as it had above, and each thick, tough root was a retarding and vexatious obstacle in the way of scraper and plow. Smith said it was sometimes necessary in that country to move three acres of land in order to make one.

But Smith was enthusiastically for it. He kept asserting that it paid, and pointed to the small bit of agricultural land that there was in the whole expanse of that214reservation, for an example, to prove his point. There was room for other industries, such as mining and grazing, but the man who could grow food and forage for the others was the one who would take down the money from the hook. That was Smith’s contention.

He told Agnes that she could lift enough water with a wheel in the river to irrigate a garden and more, but there was no need of putting in the wheel until spring. The rains of that season would bring up the seed, and while it was making the most of the moisture in the ground she could be setting her wheel.

“A person’s got to plan ahead in this country,” said Smith. “You must know to a skinned knuckle just what you’ll need a year, or five years, ahead here, if you ever make it go worth havin’. It ain’t like it is back where you come from. There you can go it more or less hit-or-miss, and hit about as often as you miss. Here you’ve got to know.”

Smith was moving to organize the settlers along the river into a company to put in a canal which would water all their land, the chief capital to be elbow-grease; the work to be done that fall and winter. Smith was indeed the head and inspiration of all enterprise in that new place. People to whom that country was strange, and that included nearly all of them, looked to him for advice, and regarded with admiration and wonder his aptness in answering everything.

Agnes was doubtful of the future, in spite of her big,215brave talk to Dr. Slavens in the days before the drawing. Now that she had the land, and a better piece of it than she had hoped for, considering her high number, she felt weakly unfit to take it in hand and break it to the condition of docility in which it would tolerate fruit-trees, vines, and roses.

It cheered her considerably, and renewed her faith in her sex, to see some of the women out with their teams, preparing their land for the seeding next spring. More than one of them had no man to lean on, and no money to hire one to take the rough edge off for her. In that respect Agnes contrasted her easier situation with theirs. She had the means, slender as they might be, indeed, to employ somebody to do the work in the field. But the roses she reserved for her own hands, putting them aside as one conceals a poem which one has written, or a hope of which he is afraid.

In the first few days of her residence on her land, Agnes experienced all the changes of mercurial rising and falling of spirits, plans, dreams. Some days she saddled her horse, which she had bought under the doctor’s guidance at Meander, and rode, singing, over the hills, exalted by the wild beauty of nature entirely unadorned. There was not yet a house in the whole of what had been the Indian Reservation, and there never had been one which could be properly called such.

Here was a country, bigger than any one of several of the far eastern states, as yet unchanged by the art of man. The vastness of it, and the liberty, would lay216hold of her at such times with rude power, making her feel herself a part of it, as old a part of it as its level-topped buttes and ramparts of riven stone.

Then again it frightened her, giving her a feeling such as she remembered once when she found herself alone in a boat upon a great lake, with the shore left far behind and none in sight beyond the misty horizon. She seemed small then, and inadequate for the rough struggle that lay ahead.

Smith noted this, and read the symptoms like a doctor.

“You’ve got to keep your nerve,” he advised, bluntly kind, “and not let the lonesomeness git a hold on you, Miss Horton.”

“The lonesomeness?” she echoed. It seemed a strange-sounding phrase.

“It’s a disease,” Smith proceeded, “and I suppose you git it anywhere; but you git it harder here. I’ve seen men take it, and turn gray and lose their minds, runnin’ sheep. After you once git over it you’re broke. You wouldn’t leave this country for a purty on a chain.”

“I hope I’ll not get it,” she laughed. “How do people act when they take the lonesomeness?”

“Well, some acts one way and some acts another,” said Smith. “Some mopes and run holler-eyed, and some kicks and complains and talk about ‘God’s country’ till it makes you sick. Just like this wasn’t as much God’s country as any place you can name! It’s all His’n when you come down to the p’int, I reckon.217But how a woman acts when she takes it I can’t so much say for I never knew but one that had it. She up and killed a man.”

“Oh, that was terrible! Did she lose her mind?”

“Well, I don’t know but you could say she did. You see she married a sheepman. He brought her out here from Omaha, and left her up there on the side of the mountain in a little log cabin above Meander while he went off foolin’ around with them sheep, the way them fellers does. I tell you when you git sheep on the brain you don’t eat at home more than once in three months. You live around in a sheep-wagon, cuttin’ tails off of lambs, and all such fool things as that.”

“Why, do they cut the poor things’ tails off?” she asked, getting the notion that Smith was having a little fun at her expense.

“They all do it,” he informed her, “to keep the sand and burrs out of ’em. If they let ’em.grow long they git so heavy with sand it makes ’em.poor to pack ’em. they say, I don’t know myself; I’m not a sheepman.”

“But why did she shoot a man? Because he cut off lambs’ tails?”

“No, she didn’t,” said Smith. “She went out of her head. The feller she shot was a storekeeper’s son down in Meander, and he got to ridin’ up there to talk to her and cheer her up. The lonesomeness it had such a hold on her, thinkin’ about Omaha and houses, and pie-annos playin’ in every one of ’em, that she up and run off with that feller when he promised to take her218back there. They started to cut across to the U.P. in a wagon–more than a hundred miles. That night she come to her head when he got too fresh, and she had to shoot him to make him behave.”

“Her husband should have been shot, it seems to me, for leaving her that way,” Agnes said.

“A man orto stick to his wife in this country, specially if she’s new to it and not broke,” said Smith; “and if I had one, ma’am, I’dstickto her.”

Smith looked at her as he said this, with conviction and deep earnestness in his eyes.

“I’m sure you would,” she agreed.

“And I’d be kind to her,” he declared.

“There’s no need to tell me that,” she assured him. “You’re kind to everybody.”

“And if she didn’t like the name,” Smith went on significantly, “I’d have it changed!”

“I’m sure she’d like it–she’d be very ungrateful if she didn’t,” Agnes replied, somewhat amused by his earnestness, but afraid to show it. “I’m going to order lumber for my house in a day or two.”

Smith switched from sentiment to business in a flash.

“Let me sell you the nails,” he requested. “I can give ’em to you as cheap as you can git ’em in Meander.”

219CHAPTER XIV“LIKE A WOLF”

Agnes had been on her homestead almost a week. She was making a brave “stagger,” as Smith described all amateurish efforts, toward cutting up some dry cottonwood limbs into stove-lengths before her tent on the afternoon that Jerry Boyle rode across the ford.While she had not forgotten him, she had begun to hope that he had gone back to Comanche, and his sudden appearance there gave her an unpleasant shock. He drew up near her with a friendly word, and dismounted with a cowboy swing to his long body and legs.“Well, Agnes, you dodged me in Meander,” said he. “You’ve located quite a piece up the river and off the stage-road, haven’t you?”“But not far enough, it seems,” she answered, a little weariness in her voice, as of one who turns unwillingly to face at last something which has been put away for an evil day.“No need for us to take up old quarrels, Agnes,” he chided with a show of gentleness.“I don’t want to quarrel with you, Jerry; I never did quarrel with you,” she disclaimed.“‘Misunderstandings’ would be a better word then, I suppose,” he corrected. “But you could have220knocked me over with a feather when you repudiated me over there at Comanche that day. I suppose I should have known that you were under an alias before I made that break, but I didn’t know it, Agnes, believeme.”“How could you?” she said, irritably. “That was nothing; let it rest. But you understand that it was for the sake of others that the alias was–and is–used; not for my own.”“Of course, Agnes. But what do you want to be wasting yourself on this rough country for? There are more suitable places in Wyoming for you than this lonesome spot. What’s the object, anyhow?”“I am building here the City of Refuge,” said she, “and its solitude will be its walls.”“Ready for the time whenhecomes back, I suppose?”She nodded assent slowly, as if grudging him that share of the knowledge of her inner life.“Poor old kid, you’ve got a job ahead of you!” he commiserated.A resentful flush crept into her face, but she turned aside, gathering her sticks as if to hide her displeasure. Boyle laughed.“Pardon the familiarity–‘vulgar familiarity’ you used to call it–Agnes. But ‘what’s bred in the bone,’ you know.”“It doesn’t matter so much when there’s no one else around, but it’s awkward before people.”221“You wouldn’t marry me on account of my tongue!” said he with sour reminiscence.“It wasn’t so much that, Jerry,” she chided, “and you know it perfectly well.”“Oh, well, if a man does take a drink now and then––” he discounted.“But many drinks, and frequently, are quite different,” she reproved.“We’ll not fuss about it.”“Far from it,” she agreed.“I didn’t come down to open old matters, although I suppose you thought that was my intention when you dodged me and stuck so close to that tin-horn doctor up at Meander.”“It’s comforting to know you haven’t come for–that,” said she, ignoring his coarse reference to Slavens.“No; things change a good deal in four years’ time, even sentiment–and names.”“But it wouldn’t be asking too much to expect you to respect some of the changes?”“I don’t suppose,” he mused, “that many people around here care whether a man’s name is the one he goes by, or whether it’s the one he gets his mail under at the post-office at Comanche. That’s generally believed to be a man’s own business. Of course, he might carry it too far, but that’s his own lookout.”“Are you on your way to Comanche?” she asked.Boyle motioned her to the trunk of the cottonwood whose branches she had been chopping into fuel, with222graceful and unspoken invitation to sit down and hear the tale of his projected adventures.“I’ve been wearing a pair of these high-heeled boots the past few days for the first time since I rode the range,” he explained, “and they make my ankles tired when I stand around.”He seated himself beside her on the fallen log.“No, I’m not going to Comanche,” said he. “I came down here to see you. They gave me the worst horse in the stable at Meander, and he’ll never be able to carry me back there without a long rest. I’ll have to make camp by the river.”She glanced at his horse, on the saddle of which hung, cowboy fashion, a bag of grub which also contained a frying-pan and coffeepot, she knew, from having seen many outfits like it in the stores at Comanche. A blanket was rolled behind the high cantle. As for the horse, it seemed as fresh and likely as if it had come three miles instead of thirty. She believed from that evidence that Jerry’s talk about being forced to make camp was all contrived. He had come prepared for a stay.“I got into the habit of carrying those traps around with me when I was a kid,” he explained, following her eyes, “and you couldn’t drive me two miles away from a hotel without them. They come in handy, too, in a pinch like this, I’m here to tell you.”“It’s something like a wise man taking his coat, I suppose.”223“Now you’ve got it,” commended Boyle.“But Smith, who used to drive the stage, could have fixed you up all right,” she told him. “He’s got a tent to lodge travelers in down by his new store. You must have seen it as you passed?”“Yes; and there’s another crook!” said Boyle with plain feeling on the matter. “But I didn’t come down here to see Smith or anybody else but you. It’s business.”He looked at her with severity in his dark face, as if to show her that all thoughts of tenderness and sentiment had gone out of his mind.“I’m listening,” said she.“There’s a man down here a few miles spreadin’ himself around on a piece of property that belongs to me,” declared Boyle, “and I want you to help me get him off.”She looked at him in amazement.“I don’t understand what you mean,” said she.“Slavens.”“Dr. Slavens? Why, he’s on his own homestead, which he filed upon regularly. I can’t see what you mean by saying it belongs to you.”“I mean that he stole the description of that land at the point of a gun, that’s what I mean. It belongs to me; I paid money for it; and I’m here to take possession.”“You’ve got your information wrong,” she denied indignantly. “Dr. Slavens didn’t steal the description.224More than that, he could make it pretty uncomfortable for certain people if he should bring charges of assault and intended murder against them, Mr. Jerry Boyle!”“Oh, cut out that high-handshake stuff, Miss Agnes Horton-Gates, or Gates-Horton, and come down to brass tacks! The time was when you could walk up and down over me like a piece of hall carpet, and I’d lie there and smile. That day’s gone by. I’ve got wool on me now like a bellwether, and I’m shaggy at the flanks like a wolf. I can be as mean as a wolf, too, when the time comes. You can’t walk up and down over me any more!”“Nobody wants to walk up and down over you!” she protested. “But if you want to put Dr. Slavens off that homestead, go and do it. You’ll not draw me into any of your schemes and murderous plots, and you’ll find Dr. Slavens very well able to take care of himself, too!”“Oh, sure he can!” scoffed Boyle. “You didn’t seem to think so the time you turned Comanche inside out hunting him, when he was layin’ drunk under a tent. I don’t know what kind of a yarn he put up when he came back to you, but I’ve got the goods on that quack, I’ll give you to understand!”Boyle was dropping his polish, which was only a superficial coating at the best. In the bone he was a cowboy, belonging to the type of those who, during the rustlers’ war, hired themselves out at five dollars a day, and five dollars a head for every man they could kill.225Boyle himself had been a stripling in those days, and the roughness of his training among a tribe of as desperate and unwashed villains as ever disgraced the earth underlay his fair exterior, like collar-welts on a horse which has been long at pasture.“I’m not under obligations to keep anybody’s secrets in this country when it comes to that,” Boyle reminded her.“It couldn’t be expected of you,” she sighed.“You’re close to that feller,” he pursued, “and he’s as soft as cheese on you. All right; pool your troubles and go on off together for all I care, but before you turn another wheel you’ll put the crowbar under that man that’ll lift him off of that land; savvy? Well, that’s what you’ll do!”“You can spread it all up and down the river that I’m living here under an assumed name, and you may tell them anything else–all that is true–that you think you ought to tell, just as soon as you want to begin,” she said, rising and moving away from him in scorn. “I’ll not help you; I couldn’t help you if I would.”Boyle got up, his face in a scowl, and as she retreated toward her tent, followed her in his peggy, forward-tilting cowboy walk.“Say,” he hailed, unveiling at once all the rudeness of his character, “come back here a minute and take your medicine!”She paused while he came up.226“Jerry,” said Agnes gently, turning upon him eyes full of sadness and lost hope, “get on your horse and go away. Don’t force me to think worse of you than I have thought. Go away, Jerry; go away!”Boyle’s face was flushed, and his naturally pop-eyed expression was greatly aggravated by his anger. It seemed that his eyes were straining to leap out, and had forced themselves forward until the whites showed beyond the lids.“Yes, that Slavens is one of these men that’d eat hot rocks for the woman he loves,” he sneered. “Well, it’s up to him to show how far he’ll go for you.”“It’s unworthy of even you, Jerry, to talk like that,” she reproved. “As far as I know, I am nothing more to Dr. Slavens than any other friend. If you want his claim, why don’t you go down there and buy it, as you were ready to buy it from Peterson if you could have filed him on it?”“Because I can get it cheaper,” said Boyle. “I’ll not give him ten cents for it. It’s your job to go and tell him that I want him to go over to Meander and pay up on that land, and I’ll furnish the money for it, but before he pays he must sign a relinquishment to me.”“I’ll not do it!” she declared.“If you won’t lead, I’ll have to try spurs, and I don’t like to do that, Agnes, for the sake of old days.”“Forget the old days.”“I’ll go you,” said he.227“There’s nothing that you can tell these people about me that will lower me much in their estimation. None of them, except Smith, knows me very well, anyhow. I don’t care so much for their opinion, for I’m not here to please them.”Boyle placed his hand on her shoulder and looked gravely into her face.“But if I was to show proof to the land commissioner that you’d got possession of a homestead here through fraud and perjury, then where would you land?” he asked.“It isn’t true!” she cried, fear rising within her and driving away the color of courage which to that moment had flown in her face.“It is true, Agnes,” he protested. “You registered under the name of Agnes Horton and made affidavit that it was your lawful name; you entered this land under the same name, and took title to it in the preliminaries, and that’s fraud and perjury, if I know anything about the definition of either term.”“Do you mean to tell me, Jerry,” she faltered, “that I’d have to go to prison if Dr. Slavens wouldn’t consent to save me by giving up his claim to you?”“Well, the disgrace of it would amount to about the same, even if a jury refused to send you up,” said he brutally, grinning a little over the sight of her consternation. “You’d be indicted, you see, by the Federal grand jury, and arrested by the United States marshal, and locked up. Then you’d be tried, and your picture228would be put in the papers, and the devil would be to pay all around. You’d lose your homestead anyhow, and your right to ever take another. Then where would the City of Refuge be?”“But you wouldn’t do it,” she appealed, placing her hand on his arm, looking into his face beseechingly, the sudden weight of her trouble making her look old. “You wouldn’t do it, Jerry, would you?”“Wouldn’t I?” he mocked disdainfully. “Well, you watch me!”“It’s a cowardly way to use an advantage over a woman!”“Never mind,” grinned Boyle. “I’ll take care of that. If that tin-horn doctor wants to toe the line and do what I say to keep you out of a Federal pen, then let him step lively. If he does it, then you can stay here in peace as long as you live, for anything I’ll ever say or do. You’ll be Agnes Horton to me as long as my tongue’s in workin’ order, and I’ll never know any more about where you came from or what passed before in your history than Smith down there.”Agnes stood with her head drooping, as if the blackmailer’s words had taken away the last shoring prop of her ambition and hope. After a while she raised her white, pained face.“And if I refuse to draw the doctor into this to save myself?” she asked.“Then I guess you’ll have to suffer, old kid!” said he.229Boyle saw the little tremor which ran over her shoulders like a chill, and smiled when he read it as the outward signal of inward terror. He had no doubt in the world that she would lay hold of his alternative to save herself and her plans for others, as quickly as he, coward at heart, would sacrifice a friend for his own comfort or gain.Yet Agnes had no thought in that moment of sacrificing Dr. Slavens and his prospects, which the unmasking of Boyle’s hand now proved to be valuable, to save herself. There must be some other way, she thought, and a few hours to turn it in her mind, and reflect and plan, might show her the road to her deliverance. She did not doubt that the penalty for what she had done would be as heavy as Boyle threatened.“So it’s up to you, handle first,” exulted Boyle, breaking her reflections. “I’ll ride off down the river a little piece and go into camp, and tomorrow evening I’ll come up for your answer from Slavens. It’s about twenty miles from here to his claim, and you can make it there and back easy if you’ll start early in the morning. So it’s all up to you, and the quicker the sooner, as the man said.”With that, Boyle rode away. According to her newly formed habit, Agnes gathered her wood and made a fire in the little stove outside her tent, for the day was wasting and the shadow of the western hills was reaching across the valley.Life had lost its buoyancy for her in that past230unprofitable hour. It lay around her now like a thing collapsed, which she lacked the warm breath to restore. Still, the evening was as serene as past evenings; the caress of the wind was as soft as any of the south’s slow breathings of other days. For it is in the heart that men make and dismantle their paradises, and from the heart that the fountain springs which lends its color to every prospect that lies beyond.Boyle’s dust had not settled before Smith came by, jangling a road-scraper behind his team. He was coming from his labor of leveling a claim, skip one, up the river. He drew up, his big red face as refulgent as the setting sun, a smile on it which dust seemed only to soften and sweat to illumine. He had a hearty word for her, noting the depression of her spirit.After passing the commonplaces, a ceremony which must be done with Smith whether one met him twice or twenty times a day, he waved his hand down the river in the direction that Boyle had gone.“Feller come past here a little while ago?” he asked, knowing very well that Boyle had left but a few minutes before.“He has just gone,” she told him.“Jerry Boyle,” nodded Smith; “the Governor’s son. He ain’t got no use for me, and I tell you, if I had a woman around the place––”Smith hung up his voice there as if something had crossed his mind. He stood looking down the valley in a speculative way.231“Yes?” she inquired, respectfully recalling him.“Yes,” repeated Smith. “If I had a woman around the house I’d take a shot at that feller as quick as I would at a lobo-wolf!”Smith jangled on, his scraper making toadish hops and tortoise-like tips and amblings over the inequalities in the way. She looked after him, a new light shining from her eyes, a new passion stirring her bosom, where his words had fallen like a spark upon tinder.So that was the estimation in which men held Jerry Boyle–men like Smith, who moved along the lower levels of life and smoothed over the rough places for others to pass by and by! It must be but the reflection of thought in higher planes–“If I had a woman around the place!” Such then was the predatory reputation of Jerry Boyle, who was capable of dishonorable acts in more directions than one, whose very presence was a taint.And he would ride back there tomorrow evening, perhaps after the sun had set, perhaps after darkness had fallen, to receive the answer to his dishonorable proposal that she sacrifice her friend to save herself from his spite, and the consequences of her own misguided act.“If I had a woman around the place!”The spark in the tinder was spreading, warming, warming, glowing into a fierce, hot flame. Like a wolf–like a wolf–Smith would take a shot at him–like a wolf! Smith had compared him to a wolf; had said232he could be as mean as a wolf–and if there was a woman around the place!She went into the tent, the blood rising hot to her temples, beating, singing in her ears. The revolver which she had brought with her on the doctor’s advice hung at the head of her cot. With it strapped around her she went back to her stove, which she fed with a wild vigor, exulting in seeing the flames pour out of the pipe and the thin sides grow red.“Like a wolf–like a wolf!”The words pounded in her mind, leaped through her circulation like quickening fire.“Like a wolf–if there was a woman around the house––”And a man like that was coming back, perhaps when the darkness had let down over that still valley, expecting her to say that she had killed the hope of her dearest friend to shield herself from his smirched and guilty hand!

Agnes had been on her homestead almost a week. She was making a brave “stagger,” as Smith described all amateurish efforts, toward cutting up some dry cottonwood limbs into stove-lengths before her tent on the afternoon that Jerry Boyle rode across the ford.

While she had not forgotten him, she had begun to hope that he had gone back to Comanche, and his sudden appearance there gave her an unpleasant shock. He drew up near her with a friendly word, and dismounted with a cowboy swing to his long body and legs.

“Well, Agnes, you dodged me in Meander,” said he. “You’ve located quite a piece up the river and off the stage-road, haven’t you?”

“But not far enough, it seems,” she answered, a little weariness in her voice, as of one who turns unwillingly to face at last something which has been put away for an evil day.

“No need for us to take up old quarrels, Agnes,” he chided with a show of gentleness.

“I don’t want to quarrel with you, Jerry; I never did quarrel with you,” she disclaimed.

“‘Misunderstandings’ would be a better word then, I suppose,” he corrected. “But you could have220knocked me over with a feather when you repudiated me over there at Comanche that day. I suppose I should have known that you were under an alias before I made that break, but I didn’t know it, Agnes, believeme.”

“How could you?” she said, irritably. “That was nothing; let it rest. But you understand that it was for the sake of others that the alias was–and is–used; not for my own.”

“Of course, Agnes. But what do you want to be wasting yourself on this rough country for? There are more suitable places in Wyoming for you than this lonesome spot. What’s the object, anyhow?”

“I am building here the City of Refuge,” said she, “and its solitude will be its walls.”

“Ready for the time whenhecomes back, I suppose?”

She nodded assent slowly, as if grudging him that share of the knowledge of her inner life.

“Poor old kid, you’ve got a job ahead of you!” he commiserated.

A resentful flush crept into her face, but she turned aside, gathering her sticks as if to hide her displeasure. Boyle laughed.

“Pardon the familiarity–‘vulgar familiarity’ you used to call it–Agnes. But ‘what’s bred in the bone,’ you know.”

“It doesn’t matter so much when there’s no one else around, but it’s awkward before people.”221

“You wouldn’t marry me on account of my tongue!” said he with sour reminiscence.

“It wasn’t so much that, Jerry,” she chided, “and you know it perfectly well.”

“Oh, well, if a man does take a drink now and then––” he discounted.

“But many drinks, and frequently, are quite different,” she reproved.

“We’ll not fuss about it.”

“Far from it,” she agreed.

“I didn’t come down to open old matters, although I suppose you thought that was my intention when you dodged me and stuck so close to that tin-horn doctor up at Meander.”

“It’s comforting to know you haven’t come for–that,” said she, ignoring his coarse reference to Slavens.

“No; things change a good deal in four years’ time, even sentiment–and names.”

“But it wouldn’t be asking too much to expect you to respect some of the changes?”

“I don’t suppose,” he mused, “that many people around here care whether a man’s name is the one he goes by, or whether it’s the one he gets his mail under at the post-office at Comanche. That’s generally believed to be a man’s own business. Of course, he might carry it too far, but that’s his own lookout.”

“Are you on your way to Comanche?” she asked.

Boyle motioned her to the trunk of the cottonwood whose branches she had been chopping into fuel, with222graceful and unspoken invitation to sit down and hear the tale of his projected adventures.

“I’ve been wearing a pair of these high-heeled boots the past few days for the first time since I rode the range,” he explained, “and they make my ankles tired when I stand around.”

He seated himself beside her on the fallen log.

“No, I’m not going to Comanche,” said he. “I came down here to see you. They gave me the worst horse in the stable at Meander, and he’ll never be able to carry me back there without a long rest. I’ll have to make camp by the river.”

She glanced at his horse, on the saddle of which hung, cowboy fashion, a bag of grub which also contained a frying-pan and coffeepot, she knew, from having seen many outfits like it in the stores at Comanche. A blanket was rolled behind the high cantle. As for the horse, it seemed as fresh and likely as if it had come three miles instead of thirty. She believed from that evidence that Jerry’s talk about being forced to make camp was all contrived. He had come prepared for a stay.

“I got into the habit of carrying those traps around with me when I was a kid,” he explained, following her eyes, “and you couldn’t drive me two miles away from a hotel without them. They come in handy, too, in a pinch like this, I’m here to tell you.”

“It’s something like a wise man taking his coat, I suppose.”223

“Now you’ve got it,” commended Boyle.

“But Smith, who used to drive the stage, could have fixed you up all right,” she told him. “He’s got a tent to lodge travelers in down by his new store. You must have seen it as you passed?”

“Yes; and there’s another crook!” said Boyle with plain feeling on the matter. “But I didn’t come down here to see Smith or anybody else but you. It’s business.”

He looked at her with severity in his dark face, as if to show her that all thoughts of tenderness and sentiment had gone out of his mind.

“I’m listening,” said she.

“There’s a man down here a few miles spreadin’ himself around on a piece of property that belongs to me,” declared Boyle, “and I want you to help me get him off.”

She looked at him in amazement.

“I don’t understand what you mean,” said she.

“Slavens.”

“Dr. Slavens? Why, he’s on his own homestead, which he filed upon regularly. I can’t see what you mean by saying it belongs to you.”

“I mean that he stole the description of that land at the point of a gun, that’s what I mean. It belongs to me; I paid money for it; and I’m here to take possession.”

“You’ve got your information wrong,” she denied indignantly. “Dr. Slavens didn’t steal the description.224More than that, he could make it pretty uncomfortable for certain people if he should bring charges of assault and intended murder against them, Mr. Jerry Boyle!”

“Oh, cut out that high-handshake stuff, Miss Agnes Horton-Gates, or Gates-Horton, and come down to brass tacks! The time was when you could walk up and down over me like a piece of hall carpet, and I’d lie there and smile. That day’s gone by. I’ve got wool on me now like a bellwether, and I’m shaggy at the flanks like a wolf. I can be as mean as a wolf, too, when the time comes. You can’t walk up and down over me any more!”

“Nobody wants to walk up and down over you!” she protested. “But if you want to put Dr. Slavens off that homestead, go and do it. You’ll not draw me into any of your schemes and murderous plots, and you’ll find Dr. Slavens very well able to take care of himself, too!”

“Oh, sure he can!” scoffed Boyle. “You didn’t seem to think so the time you turned Comanche inside out hunting him, when he was layin’ drunk under a tent. I don’t know what kind of a yarn he put up when he came back to you, but I’ve got the goods on that quack, I’ll give you to understand!”

Boyle was dropping his polish, which was only a superficial coating at the best. In the bone he was a cowboy, belonging to the type of those who, during the rustlers’ war, hired themselves out at five dollars a day, and five dollars a head for every man they could kill.225Boyle himself had been a stripling in those days, and the roughness of his training among a tribe of as desperate and unwashed villains as ever disgraced the earth underlay his fair exterior, like collar-welts on a horse which has been long at pasture.

“I’m not under obligations to keep anybody’s secrets in this country when it comes to that,” Boyle reminded her.

“It couldn’t be expected of you,” she sighed.

“You’re close to that feller,” he pursued, “and he’s as soft as cheese on you. All right; pool your troubles and go on off together for all I care, but before you turn another wheel you’ll put the crowbar under that man that’ll lift him off of that land; savvy? Well, that’s what you’ll do!”

“You can spread it all up and down the river that I’m living here under an assumed name, and you may tell them anything else–all that is true–that you think you ought to tell, just as soon as you want to begin,” she said, rising and moving away from him in scorn. “I’ll not help you; I couldn’t help you if I would.”

Boyle got up, his face in a scowl, and as she retreated toward her tent, followed her in his peggy, forward-tilting cowboy walk.

“Say,” he hailed, unveiling at once all the rudeness of his character, “come back here a minute and take your medicine!”

She paused while he came up.226

“Jerry,” said Agnes gently, turning upon him eyes full of sadness and lost hope, “get on your horse and go away. Don’t force me to think worse of you than I have thought. Go away, Jerry; go away!”

Boyle’s face was flushed, and his naturally pop-eyed expression was greatly aggravated by his anger. It seemed that his eyes were straining to leap out, and had forced themselves forward until the whites showed beyond the lids.

“Yes, that Slavens is one of these men that’d eat hot rocks for the woman he loves,” he sneered. “Well, it’s up to him to show how far he’ll go for you.”

“It’s unworthy of even you, Jerry, to talk like that,” she reproved. “As far as I know, I am nothing more to Dr. Slavens than any other friend. If you want his claim, why don’t you go down there and buy it, as you were ready to buy it from Peterson if you could have filed him on it?”

“Because I can get it cheaper,” said Boyle. “I’ll not give him ten cents for it. It’s your job to go and tell him that I want him to go over to Meander and pay up on that land, and I’ll furnish the money for it, but before he pays he must sign a relinquishment to me.”

“I’ll not do it!” she declared.

“If you won’t lead, I’ll have to try spurs, and I don’t like to do that, Agnes, for the sake of old days.”

“Forget the old days.”

“I’ll go you,” said he.227

“There’s nothing that you can tell these people about me that will lower me much in their estimation. None of them, except Smith, knows me very well, anyhow. I don’t care so much for their opinion, for I’m not here to please them.”

Boyle placed his hand on her shoulder and looked gravely into her face.

“But if I was to show proof to the land commissioner that you’d got possession of a homestead here through fraud and perjury, then where would you land?” he asked.

“It isn’t true!” she cried, fear rising within her and driving away the color of courage which to that moment had flown in her face.

“It is true, Agnes,” he protested. “You registered under the name of Agnes Horton and made affidavit that it was your lawful name; you entered this land under the same name, and took title to it in the preliminaries, and that’s fraud and perjury, if I know anything about the definition of either term.”

“Do you mean to tell me, Jerry,” she faltered, “that I’d have to go to prison if Dr. Slavens wouldn’t consent to save me by giving up his claim to you?”

“Well, the disgrace of it would amount to about the same, even if a jury refused to send you up,” said he brutally, grinning a little over the sight of her consternation. “You’d be indicted, you see, by the Federal grand jury, and arrested by the United States marshal, and locked up. Then you’d be tried, and your picture228would be put in the papers, and the devil would be to pay all around. You’d lose your homestead anyhow, and your right to ever take another. Then where would the City of Refuge be?”

“But you wouldn’t do it,” she appealed, placing her hand on his arm, looking into his face beseechingly, the sudden weight of her trouble making her look old. “You wouldn’t do it, Jerry, would you?”

“Wouldn’t I?” he mocked disdainfully. “Well, you watch me!”

“It’s a cowardly way to use an advantage over a woman!”

“Never mind,” grinned Boyle. “I’ll take care of that. If that tin-horn doctor wants to toe the line and do what I say to keep you out of a Federal pen, then let him step lively. If he does it, then you can stay here in peace as long as you live, for anything I’ll ever say or do. You’ll be Agnes Horton to me as long as my tongue’s in workin’ order, and I’ll never know any more about where you came from or what passed before in your history than Smith down there.”

Agnes stood with her head drooping, as if the blackmailer’s words had taken away the last shoring prop of her ambition and hope. After a while she raised her white, pained face.

“And if I refuse to draw the doctor into this to save myself?” she asked.

“Then I guess you’ll have to suffer, old kid!” said he.229

Boyle saw the little tremor which ran over her shoulders like a chill, and smiled when he read it as the outward signal of inward terror. He had no doubt in the world that she would lay hold of his alternative to save herself and her plans for others, as quickly as he, coward at heart, would sacrifice a friend for his own comfort or gain.

Yet Agnes had no thought in that moment of sacrificing Dr. Slavens and his prospects, which the unmasking of Boyle’s hand now proved to be valuable, to save herself. There must be some other way, she thought, and a few hours to turn it in her mind, and reflect and plan, might show her the road to her deliverance. She did not doubt that the penalty for what she had done would be as heavy as Boyle threatened.

“So it’s up to you, handle first,” exulted Boyle, breaking her reflections. “I’ll ride off down the river a little piece and go into camp, and tomorrow evening I’ll come up for your answer from Slavens. It’s about twenty miles from here to his claim, and you can make it there and back easy if you’ll start early in the morning. So it’s all up to you, and the quicker the sooner, as the man said.”

With that, Boyle rode away. According to her newly formed habit, Agnes gathered her wood and made a fire in the little stove outside her tent, for the day was wasting and the shadow of the western hills was reaching across the valley.

Life had lost its buoyancy for her in that past230unprofitable hour. It lay around her now like a thing collapsed, which she lacked the warm breath to restore. Still, the evening was as serene as past evenings; the caress of the wind was as soft as any of the south’s slow breathings of other days. For it is in the heart that men make and dismantle their paradises, and from the heart that the fountain springs which lends its color to every prospect that lies beyond.

Boyle’s dust had not settled before Smith came by, jangling a road-scraper behind his team. He was coming from his labor of leveling a claim, skip one, up the river. He drew up, his big red face as refulgent as the setting sun, a smile on it which dust seemed only to soften and sweat to illumine. He had a hearty word for her, noting the depression of her spirit.

After passing the commonplaces, a ceremony which must be done with Smith whether one met him twice or twenty times a day, he waved his hand down the river in the direction that Boyle had gone.

“Feller come past here a little while ago?” he asked, knowing very well that Boyle had left but a few minutes before.

“He has just gone,” she told him.

“Jerry Boyle,” nodded Smith; “the Governor’s son. He ain’t got no use for me, and I tell you, if I had a woman around the place––”

Smith hung up his voice there as if something had crossed his mind. He stood looking down the valley in a speculative way.231

“Yes?” she inquired, respectfully recalling him.

“Yes,” repeated Smith. “If I had a woman around the house I’d take a shot at that feller as quick as I would at a lobo-wolf!”

Smith jangled on, his scraper making toadish hops and tortoise-like tips and amblings over the inequalities in the way. She looked after him, a new light shining from her eyes, a new passion stirring her bosom, where his words had fallen like a spark upon tinder.

So that was the estimation in which men held Jerry Boyle–men like Smith, who moved along the lower levels of life and smoothed over the rough places for others to pass by and by! It must be but the reflection of thought in higher planes–“If I had a woman around the place!” Such then was the predatory reputation of Jerry Boyle, who was capable of dishonorable acts in more directions than one, whose very presence was a taint.

And he would ride back there tomorrow evening, perhaps after the sun had set, perhaps after darkness had fallen, to receive the answer to his dishonorable proposal that she sacrifice her friend to save herself from his spite, and the consequences of her own misguided act.

“If I had a woman around the place!”

The spark in the tinder was spreading, warming, warming, glowing into a fierce, hot flame. Like a wolf–like a wolf–Smith would take a shot at him–like a wolf! Smith had compared him to a wolf; had said232he could be as mean as a wolf–and if there was a woman around the place!

She went into the tent, the blood rising hot to her temples, beating, singing in her ears. The revolver which she had brought with her on the doctor’s advice hung at the head of her cot. With it strapped around her she went back to her stove, which she fed with a wild vigor, exulting in seeing the flames pour out of the pipe and the thin sides grow red.

“Like a wolf–like a wolf!”

The words pounded in her mind, leaped through her circulation like quickening fire.

“Like a wolf–if there was a woman around the house––”

And a man like that was coming back, perhaps when the darkness had let down over that still valley, expecting her to say that she had killed the hope of her dearest friend to shield herself from his smirched and guilty hand!

Back to IndexNext