XXXVIINEWS FOR JEAN
The second meeting between the Ranger brothers was much more embarrassing than cordial. Each at sight of the other recalled their last encounter. They shook hands hesitatingly, and after an awkward pause sat down together on the front porch of the primitive hotel.
Joseph, who had been awaiting the arrival of his wife and the Captain for a couple of days, was displeased because his Wahnetta had not been within call from the moment of his advent, as long habit had led him to expect. That she met him now with the air of a friend and an equal, and after a pleasant greeting on her part discreetly left the brothers to themselves while she went in quest of her babies, was a display of good breeding and motherly solicitude which Joseph Ranger would have commended in any woman not his wife. But his will had so long been her only law that her greeting, in connection with his embarrassment at meeting his brother, put him in a very unamiable frame of mind.
“I concluded that you had gone back on your agreement, John,” he growled, after a painful silence.
“Oh, did you? Since when have you made a new record for punctuality, Joe?”
“Since the arrival of the last courier at the trading-post, who brought me your letter.”
“What did you think of my proposition?”
“I accepted it at once, or I would not have been here. Who is Wahnetta going out driving with, I wonder?”
“I called the cab for a drive with the children a little before you came, sir,” said the nurse.
“Oh!”
“You ought to be very proud of your wife, Joe.”
“I am beginning to be. Yet you never can tell what the Indian nature will attempt. She seems to be all right when she lives with white people, but she’d lapse at once into barbarism again if she got a chance. They all do it. It is in the blood.”
“She doesn’t seems to want that sort of a chance, Joe.”
“An Indian is like a wild coyote, John.”
“But you have caught a tame one, Joe. She is above the average, even of white women. Give her the chance she craves. Stand by her like a gentleman. She is as thoroughly civilized as any of us.”
“Did you see her at the trading-post last summer?”
“No; but why do you ask?”
“Because you would have beheld her in her native element. You may capture and tame a coyote, but when you turn him loose among his natural environments, you can’t distinguish him in a short time from the wildest wolf of the pack.”
“That being the case, there is strong need for keeping your wife in her adopted home, among your own people.”
John was thawing toward his brother at a rapid rate; and Joseph, the erring but encouraged and repenting brother, felt a pang of remorse as he arose to welcome his wife and children upon their return from their drive, resolving in his heart that he would never again allow himself to regret the vows he had taken upon himself in his early manhood.
The paper was awaiting the Captain at his table the next morning, with the announcement that the sailing of the ocean steamer was to be delayed for a couple of days on account of an accident to her propeller.
“Then we’ll have time for a spin out to the Ranch of the Whispering Firs, eh, Joe?” he asked, as his brother, accompanied by Wahnetta, who was resplendent in a crimson cashmere robe, over which her blackmantilla was carelessly thrown, took his seat at his elbow at breakfast.
“I thought I’d like to take a spin through this embryo city,” was the quiet response.
“But I want you to see the lay of the land. I’m hoping to make you a partner in the ranch and sawmill business. You won’t want to buy a pig in a poke.”
A visit to Joseph’s sons and daughters at school was first in order. Then a carriage was called, and the entire party was conducted around and over stumps, logs, and devious primitive roadways to the heights.
“Why anybody wants to go to the Old World for scenery, when he can enjoy such a prospect as this right at his very door, is one of the mysteries of modern existence,” said Wahnetta. “Away to the north by east of us, in the home of my people, there is a land so different from this that it might be a part of another planet, yet it is passing beautiful. Directly to the north is the traditional Whulge, or Puget Sound, where the enemies of my people live, who, like my own, are dying out. This mighty land is a giant baby; wait half a century, and she will be a full-grown giantess.”
It was three o’clock when they returned to the hotel, but a fresh team from the one livery stable the metropolis of Oregon Territory was able to boast was placed at the disposal of the brothers, who spanned a distance of thirty miles in three hours. A light rain had fallen in the early morning, and the face of Nature was as pure as ether. Resplendent green abounded in the valley, lighted here and there by gleams of the gliding Willamette, on whose silvery current little white steamers were seen at intervals, flitting to and fro like swans. In many spots in the valley, and everywhere on the mountain-sides, stood rows on rows of forest firs, and beyond these, coming frequently into view as the road wound in and out among the trees, arose the snow-crowned monarch of the Cascades, majestic Mount Hood, whose slowly dying glaciersdischarged their silt into the milk-white waters of the Sandy.
“What do you think of it all?” asked the elder brother, after a long silence, in which each had been feasting his eyes upon the beauty of the scene and filling his lungs with the exhilarating air.
“I’m thinking of the glories that await the later comers into this beautiful land, after the pioneers have worn their bodies out in their struggles with the native wilderness. I’ve been shutting my eyes and seeing coal mines, iron mines, gold mines, oil mines, silver mines, farms, fisheries, mills, factories, orchards, gardens, everything! I’ve lived in Utah and witnessed the marvels of irrigation there; but God does the irrigating in this country, and He does it well.”
“Did you see the fishes that swarmed in the Sandy, Joe?”
“Yes; and I’ve seen salmon and sturgeon struggling up the Columbia, so thick in the current that they looked like Illinois saw-logs. I think I know how Moses felt when he had
“‘Climbed to Pisgah’s top,And viewed the landscape o’er.’”
“‘Climbed to Pisgah’s top,And viewed the landscape o’er.’”
“‘Climbed to Pisgah’s top,And viewed the landscape o’er.’”
“‘Climbed to Pisgah’s top,
And viewed the landscape o’er.’”
“Wait till we reach the Ranch of the Whispering Firs. Then you will see something worthy of all your rhapsodies. There!” cried the Captain, as they sighted the broad and slightly sloping plateau on which his new log house was built.
In front of it stood a towering fir-tree, like an ever-vigilant sentinel; and behind it rose gigantic colonnades of evergreen forests. Foaming waters surged and leaped through a ragged gulch; and tangled thickets of hazel, alder, dogwood, and elder crowded the luxurious growth of ferns that struggled for the mastery. “There!” he repeated, “what do you think now?”
“That I’d like to transport the entire family of Rangers,root and branch, to the Ranch of the Whispering Firs. Suppose we take your old sawmill off Lije’s hands and remove the whole thing to Oregon, John? It would be a good way to relieve him of his elephant.”
“The machinery is old and old-fashioned, Joe. We’d better buy everything new, and the best of its kind.”
“I was merely thinking of relieving Lije; that’s all.”
As they made the last turn leading to the house, they were accosted impatiently by the Captain’s junior partner.
“At this rate, you won’t git started to the States afore Christmas, Cap’n.”
“This is my brother Joseph, Mr. Jackman. And this, Joseph, is my partner, Mr. Jackman.”
The two men glared at each other for a moment in silence. Jackman was the first to speak,—
“Well, I’m dummed!”
“How came you to be known as Jackman? You posed as Hankins in Utah.”
“An’ you was Joe Addicks, pard. Better not tell tales out o’ school. That’s a game two can play at.”
“There are no tales to tell on my part. I am masquerading no more. Can you say as much?”
“I’m just a-beginnin’, as it were.”
“How in the name of Fate did you come across that chap, John?” asked Joseph, as they alighted from the buggy.
“He has taken a donation claim on the mountain-side which includes the water-power for our mill site. At least, he says it does. Burns and I haven’t had time to survey it yet.”
“Better go slow with that fellow, John.”
“What do you know about him, Joe?”
“Nothing; only he’s been a noted crook and jail-breaker.”
“Jean is to be our book-keeper. She’s been disappointed over that Green River affair. Do you know what became of Ashleigh?”
“I left him at my station in charge of my business. He’s as honest as the day. But, by the way, why didn’t Jean answer the letter he sent out in care of your Happy Jack?”
“She received no letter. But what about Le-Le? Did he marry her?”
“Did Ashleigh marry Le-Le? What a question! Who said he did?”
“Jackman.”
“Jean must know of all this. Will you break it to her, Joe?”
Night had come; and the autumn rains were gently enwrapping the Ranch of the Whispering Firs in a sheet of mist when Joseph Ranger sought Jean in her little schoolroom for a private conversation.
The flickering light of a single kerosene lamp emitted a characteristic odor. A rough table supported the lamp; and on a three-legged stool sat the schoolma’am, trying to bring order out of the chaos of a score or more of papers left by the children.
“Ah!” she said, arising. “Come in, Uncle Joe. You won’t find our crude beginnings very inviting, but we mustn’t despise the day of small things.”
“You’re making a good beginning, Jean. But I have not come to talk about your school. I have brought you some tidings from Mr. Ashleigh.”
Jean turned pale and would have fallen if her uncle had not caught her in his arms.
“Here is a note which he gave me just as I was leaving for the West.”
Jean retained her composure by a supreme effort of the will.
“You were my dream,” the letter began; “I trusted and loved you as I can never trust and love another. And the end is to be your marriage with a fellow you call Happy Jack! Oh, Jean, my bonnie Jean! Why haveyou been so fickle and so rash? I sent you a letter and a ring. It was my great-great-grandmother’s ring, and a hereditary talisman. The messenger was one Harry Hankins, a borderer and scout, who was going to Oregon City. No, Jean; I did not marry Le-Le, but I did secure her ransom, and I should before now have been on my way to you, but was awaiting your letter. Good-bye, and may God guard and keep you! Think of me as your heartbroken friend and lover.”
“I never received one single word from him,” said Jean; “and I never saw or heard of Harry Hankins.”
“Oh, yes, you did, Jean. He is none other than your father’s partner.”
“How can I reach Mr. Ashleigh with a letter? It must be sent at once.”
“That will be impossible, Jean; there will be no courier going out for a month yet. But we will take a letter to Portland, and leave it in care of Wahnetta. She will see that it is forwarded at the first opportunity.”
Busily the work went forward. But Happy Jack was nowhere to be seen, and the brothers were compelled to take their departure without making the business settlement with him which they so much desired.
“Never mind! We’ll freeze him out, or scare him out, if he shows up here again,” said the Captain, as he and his brother turned their faces Portland-ward.