The next day the invalid was not as well as usual and Mrs. Jim spent half her time running up and down stairs. Inches came in in the course of the day and offered her sixty cents for her "Horn of Plenty," and she thought with a pang how fast it was going up. The thought haunted her all day long, but she could not leave Jim to take any steps toward retrieving her opportunity, and after that first visit Inches did not come in again. She took out her big check once or twice in the course of the day and looked at it resentfully; and as she brooded upon the matter, it was borne in upon her with peculiar force that she had made a fatal blunder in exchanging her "chances" for that fixed, inexpansive sum. Had it not been cowardly in her to yield so easily? Supposing Dayton himself had lacked courage at the critical moment; where would his four-in-hand have been to-day? She was sure that no timid speculator had ever made a fortune; on the contrary, she had often heard it said that a flash of courage at the right moment was the very essence of success in speculation. She remembered the expression "essence of success."
"THEY LOOKED OUT AT THE PEAK.""THEY LOOKED OUT AT THE PEAK."
By the time evening came the fever of speculation was high in her veins, and urged on by her own brooding fancies, uncontradicted from without, unexposed to the light of day, she did an incredible thing.
As she drew forth her writing materials in order to put her new and startling resolution into execution, she paused and looked about the familiar little shop with a feeling of estrangement. There was an incongruity between the boldness of the thing she was about to do, and the hard and fast limitations of her lot, which the sight of those humble properties brought sharply home to her. The first pen she took up was stiff and scratchy; the sound of it was like a challenge to the outer world to come and pass judgment upon her. She flung the pen to one side in nervous trepidation, and then she searched until she found one that was soft and pliable, and went whispering over the paper like a fellow-conspirator.
This was what she wrote:
"Dear Mr. Dayton,"I want to go into the 'Horn of Plenty' again, and I can't get away to attend to it. I enclose your check, and one of my own for $400. Please buy me what the money will bring. They say it isn't a swindle, and any way I want some. You said to come to you, andthat was the same as saying you'd do it, if I asked you to. I don't care what you pay; get what you can for the money."Yours truly,"M. Bixby."
"Dear Mr. Dayton,
"I want to go into the 'Horn of Plenty' again, and I can't get away to attend to it. I enclose your check, and one of my own for $400. Please buy me what the money will bring. They say it isn't a swindle, and any way I want some. You said to come to you, andthat was the same as saying you'd do it, if I asked you to. I don't care what you pay; get what you can for the money.
"Yours truly,"M. Bixby."
Another morning found Jim so ill that they sent for the doctor. On the same day Inches came in and offered seventy-five cents for the stock. Marietta had not told him that it was sold and she did not propose to do so. In the afternoon the price had "jumped" to ninety cents, but by that time she was too anxious about Jim to care.
For five weeks the "Art Emporium" was closed, and in that time the face of the world had changed for Marietta. She realized the change when she came downstairs and opened the shop again. It was impossible to feel that life was restored to its old basis. There was a change too in her, which was patent to the most casual observer. It was, indeed, a very wan and thin Marietta that at last came forward to meet her customers; her eyes looked alarmingly big, and though nothing could disturb the pose of the beautiful head, there was a droop in the figure, that betokened bodily and mental exhaustion.
A good many customers came in to makeEaster purchases,—for the following Sunday was Easter,—and many others to inquire for Jim. As the old, familiar life began to reassert itself, as she began to feel at home again in the old, accustomed surroundings, her mind recurred, in a half-dazed way, to her speculation. She did not herself know much about it, for Dayton had never sent her her certificate. Probably he had come with it when the shop was closed. She supposed she must be too tired to have much courage; that must be why her heart sank at the thought of what she had done. She was sitting by the work-table, her head in her hands, pondering dully. At the sound of the shop-bell she looked up, mechanically, and saw Inches coming in.
"Good morning, Mrs. Jim," he said. "How's your husband?"
"Jim's better, thank you," she replied, and the sound of her own confident words dispelled the clouds.
Inches looked at her narrowly, and then he began pulling the ears of a mounted fox-skin that was lying on the counter, as he remarked casually: "Hope you got rid of your 'H. O. P.' in time."
"In time?" she asked. "In time? What do you mean?"
"Why, before they closed down. You sold out, I hope?"
There was a sudden catch in her breath.
"Yes, I sold out some time ago."
"Glad of that," he declared, with very evident relief, suddenly losing interest in the fox's ears. Inches had none of Dayton's prejudices in regard to woman's "sphere," but he was none the less rejoiced to know that this particular woman, with the tired-looking eyes, had not "got hurt," as he would have put it.
"It's been a bad business all round," he went on, waxing confidential as he was prone to do. "Why, I knew a man that bought twenty thousand shares at a dollar-ten three weeks ago, just before she closed down, and he's never had the sand to sell."
"What could he get to-day?" Marietta asked. Her voice sounded in her ears strange and far away.
"Well, I don't know. I was offered some at six cents, but I don't know anybody that wants it."
Marietta's throat felt parched and dry, and now there was a singing in her ears; but she gave no outward sign.
"Pretty hard on some folks," she remarked.
"I should say so!"
There was a din in her ears all that afternoon, which was perhaps a fortunate circumstance, for it shut out all possibility of thought. It was not until night came that the din stopped, and her brain became clear again,—cruelly, pitilessly clear.
Deep into the night she lay awake tormenting herself with figures. How hideous, how intolerable they were! They passed and repassed in her brain in the uncompromising search-light of conscience, like malicious, mouthing imps. They were her debts and losses, they stood for disgrace and penury, they menaced the very foundation of her life and happiness.
Doubtless the man who had put many thousands into the "Horn of Plenty," and had lacked the "sand" to sell, would have wondered greatly that a fellow-creature should be suffering agony on account of a few hundred dollars. Yet he, in his keenest pang of disappointment, knew nothing whatever of the awful word "ruin"; while Marietta, staring up into the darkness, was getting that lesson by heart.
The town-clock striking three seemed to pierce her consciousness and relieve the strain. She wished the sofa she was lying upon were not so hard and narrow; perhaps if she weremore comfortable she might be able to sleep, and then, in the morning, she might see light. Of course there was light, somewhere, if she could only find it; but who ever found the light, lying on a hard sofa, in pitchy darkness? Perhaps if she were to get up and move about things would seem less intolerable. And with the mere thought of action the tired frame relaxed, the straining eyes were sealed with sleep, the curtain of unconsciousness had fallen upon the troubled stage of her mind.
And when, at dawn, Jim opened frightened eyes, and struggled with a terrible oppression to speak her name, Marietta was still sleeping profoundly.
"Etta!" he gasped. "O, Etta!"
And Marietta heard the whispered name, and thrusting out her hands, as if to tear away a physical bond, broke through the torpor that possessed her, and stood upon her feet. She staggered, white and trembling, to Jim's bedside, and there, in the faint light, she saw that he was dying.
"Etta, Etta," he whispered, "I want you!"
She sank upon her knees beside him, but the hand she folded in her own was already lifeless.
Slowly the light increased in that dingy garret, until the sun shone full upon the face of the Peak, fronting the single window of the chamber in uncompassionate splendor. Occasional sounds of traffic came up from the street below; the day had begun. And still Marietta knelt beside the bed, clasping the hand she loved, with a passionate purpose to prolong the mere moment of possession that was all that was left her now, all it was worth being alive for. He wanted her, he wanted her,—and oh, the years and years that he must wait for her, in that strange, lonely, far-away heaven!
"Jim, Jim," she muttered from time to time, with a dry gasp in her throat, that almost choked her; "Jim, O Jim!"
By-and-by, when the sun was high in the heavens, and all the world was abroad, she got upon her feet, and went about the strange new business that death puts upon the broken-hearted.
The day after the funeral was the third of April, and Marietta knew that all her April bills were lying in the letterbox, the silent menace which had seemed so terrible to her the other day. Well,—that at least was nothing to her now. So much her heart-break haddone for her, that all the lesson of ruin she had conned through those horrible black hours, when Jim was dying and she did not know it,—that lesson at least had lost its meaning. Ruin could not hurt Jim now, and she?—she might even find distraction in it,—find relief.
She went down into the dimly lighted shop, where the shades were closely drawn in the door and in the broad show-window. In that strange midday twilight, she gathered up her mail, and then she seated herself in her old place behind the counter, and began the examination of it.
There were all the bills, just as she had anticipated; bills for food and bills for medicine; bills for all those useless odds and ends which made up her stock in trade, which she and Jim had been so proud of a few years ago when they first came to Springtown. She wrote out the various sums in a long column, just to look at them all together, and to feel how little harm they could do her; and in the midst of the dull, lifeless work, she came upon a letter which did not look like a bill. As she drew it from the envelope, two slips of paper fell out of it, two slips of paper which she picked up and read, with but a dazed, bewildered attention. They were the checks she had sent toDayton a month ago; his own check for $250; hers for $400.
Marietta, in her humble joys and sorrows, had never known the irony of Fate, and hence she could not understand about those checks. The meaning of the letter was blurred as she read it. It was from Dayton. He could not know that Jim was dead, for he said nothing of it. But if there was any one who did not know that Jim was dead, could it be true? Her heart gave a wild leap, and she half rose to her feet. What if she were to run up those stairs, quickly, breathlessly? Oh, what then?
But the stillness of the closed shop, the strange half-light that came through the drawn shades, her own black dress, recalled her from that swift and cruel hope, and again she set herself to read the letter.
The words all seemed straight enough, if she could only make sense of them. He had but just read her letter, being returned that morning from the East. The letter had come the day he left town, and thinking that it was a receipted bill, he had locked it up, unopened, in his desk. He feared that Mrs. Jim had been anxious about the matter, and he hastened to relieve her mind. While he apologized for hisown carelessness, he congratulated her upon her escape.
"He congratulates me, he congratulates me!" she whispered hoarsely; "O my God!"
She did not yet comprehend the letter nor the checks which had fluttered to the floor. It was only the last sentence that she took note of, because of its jarring sense.
Suddenly the meaning of it all broke upon her. Those were her checks! Ruin had evaded her! She could not prove upon it her loyalty to Jim, her loyalty to grief. Fate had shipwrecked her, and now it was decreed that the sun should shine and the sea subside in smiling peace. It was more than she could bear. She flung the letter from her, and, stooping, she picked up the checks and crushed them in her clenched hands. How dared they come back to mock at her! How dared Fate take her all, and toss her what she did not value! How dared—Heaven? Was it Heaven she was defying? Ah! she must not lose her soul, Heaven knew she would not lose her soul—for Jim's sake!
She opened her clenched hands and smoothed out the checks, patiently, meekly; and then she went on with the bills, a strange calm inher mind, different from the calm of the last three days.
And then, for the first time, it struck her that the bills were all made out to Jim.
James Bixby,toHiram Rogers, Dr.toJames Wilkins, Dr.toFields&Lyman, Dr.
It was his name that would have been disgraced, not hers; his memory would have been stained. She turned white with terror of the danger past.
After a while she put the bills aside, and drew out her folios of pressed flowers. It seemed a hundred years since she had worked upon them. How exquisite they were, those delicate ghosts of flowers;—the regal columbine, the graceful gilia, coreopsis gleaming golden, anemones, pale and soft. How they kept their loveliness when life was past! They were only flower memories, but how fair they were, and how lasting! No frost to blight them, no winds to tear their silken petals any more! Well might they outlast the hand that pressed them!
And soon Marietta found herself doing the old, accustomed work with all the old skill, andwith a new grace and delicacy of touch. And when the friends in her old home which she had left for Jim's sake, urged her to come back to them, she answered, no;—she would rather stay in Colorado and do her flower-books;—adding, in a hand that scrawled more than usual with the effort for composure:
"They are my consolation."
XI.A STROKE IN THE GAME.
The mining boom was off, and Springtown was feeling the reaction as severely as so sanguine and sunny a little place was capable of doing. To one who had witnessed, a year or more previous, the rising of the tide of speculation, whose tossing crest had flung its glittering drops upon the loftiest and firmest rocks of the business community, the streets of the little Rocky Mountain town had something the aspect of the shore at low tide. Such a witness was Harry Wakefield, if, indeed, a man may be said to have "witnessed" a commotion which has swept him off his feet and whirled him about like a piece of driftwood. It was, to be sure, quite in the character of a piece of driftwood that Wakefield had let himself be drawn into the whirlpool, and he could not escape the feeling that, tossed as he was,high and dry upon the shore, he was getting quite as good as he deserved.
"Yes, I'm busted!" he remarked to his friend Chittenden, the stock-broker, as the two men paused before the office-door of the latter. "It was the Race-Horse that finished me up. No, thanks, I won't come in. A burnt child dreads the fire!"
"We're all cool enough now-a-days," Chittenden replied, shrugging his shoulders. "Couldn't get up a blaze to heat a flat-iron!" and he passed in to the office, with the air of a man whose occupation is gone.
As Wakefield turned down the street, his eye fell upon a stock-board across the way, a board upon which had once been jotted down from day to day, a record of his varying fortunes. He remembered how, a few months ago, that same board showed white with Lame Gulch quotations. He reflected that, while the price set against each stock had made but a modest showing, running from ten cents up into the second dollar, a man of sense,—supposing such a phenomenon to have weathered the "boom,"—would have been impressed with the fact that the valuation thus placed upon the infant camp aggregated something like twenty millions of dollars. The absurdity ofthe whole thing struck Wakefield with added force, as he read the solitary announcement which now graced the board,—namely:
"To exchange: 1000 Race-Horse for a bull-terrier pup."
"To exchange: 1000 Race-Horse for a bull-terrier pup."
"Kind o' funny; ain't it?" said a voice close beside him.
It was Dicky Simmons, a youth of seedy aspect, but a cheerful countenance, who had come up with him, and was engaged in the perusal of the same announcement.
"Hullo, Simmons! Where do you hail from?"
"From Barnaby's ranch. I'm trying my hand at agriculture until this thing's blown over!"
"Think it's going to?"
"Oh, yes! When the tide's dead low it's sure to turn!" and the old hopeful look glistened in the boy's face.
"That's the case in Nature," Wakefield objected. "Nature hadn't anything to do with the boom. It was contrary to all the laws."
"Oh, I guess Nature has a hand in most things," Dicky replied with cheerful assurance. "Anyhow she's made a big deal up at LameGulch, and those of us who've got the sand to hold on will find that she's in the management."
"Think so?"
"Sure of it!"
"Hope you're right. Anyhow, though, I'd try the old girl on agriculture for a while, if I were you. How's Barnaby doing, by the way?"
"Holding on by the skin of his teeth."
"What's wrong there?"
"Can't collect;" was the laconic reply.
The two companions in adversity were walking toward the post-office, moved, perhaps, by the subtle attraction which that institution exercises over the man who is "down on his luck." There was no mail due, yet they turned, with one accord, in at the door, and repaired to their respective boxes. As Wakefield looked up from the inspection of his empty one, he saw Simmons, with an open letter or circular in his hand. Catching Wakefield's eye he laughed.
"Well?" Wakefield queried.
"You know, Wake," said Dicky, in a confidential tone. "The thing's too funny to be serious. Here's the Trailing Arbutus (you're not in that, I believe), capitalization a millionand a half shares, calls a meeting of stockholders to consider how to raise money to get the mine out of the hands of a receiver. Now, guess how much money they want!"
"How much?"
"Five hundred dollars!Five hundred dollars on a million and a half shares! I say, Wake, they couldn't be funnier if they tried!"
Agreeable as Dicky's company usually was, Wakefield was glad when the boy hailed the Barnaby milk-cart, and betook himself and his insistent brightness under its canvas shelter. The white covered wagon went rattling out of town, and Wakefield, somewhat to his surprise, found himself striding after it.
"Anyhow, he's hit it off better than I have," he said to himself; and as he perceived how rapidly the cart was disappearing, he had a sense of being distanced, and he involuntarily quickened his pace.
The street he was following was one that he strongly approved of, because it had the originality to cut diagonally across the rectangular plan of the town. The houses on either hand were small and unpretentious, but tidy little homesteads, and he did not like to think of the mortgages with which, according to Chittenden,the "boom" had weighted more than one modest roof. In the strong sense of general disaster which he was struggling under, those mortgages seemed almost visible to the eye. He was glad when he had left the town behind him, and was marching on between stretches of uncultivated prairie and bare reddish hillocks. They, at least, stood for what they were,—and see, how the wildflowers had thrust themselves up through the harsh gritty sand; that great tract of yellow vetches, for instance, that had brought up out of the earth a glory of gold that might well put all Lame Gulch to the blush! Over yonder stood the Range, not beautiful, in the uncompromising noon light, but strong and steadfast, with an almost moral vigor in its outlines.
He had lost sight of the milk-cart altogether, and was plodding on, simply because there seemed to be nothing better to do with himself. He presently came opposite a low, conical hill which he recognized as "Mt. Washington,"—a hill whose elevation above sea-level was said to be precisely that of New England's loftiest peak. Wakefield reflected that he was never likely to reach that classic altitude with less exertion than to-day, and that on the whole it would be rather pleasantthan otherwise to find himself at that particular height. There was a barbed-wire fence intervening, and it pleased him to take it "on the fly." He had undoubtedly been going down-hill of late, but his legs, at least, had held their own, he assured himself, with some satisfaction, as he alighted, right side up, within the enclosure. He thought, with a whimsical turn, of Pheidippides, the youth who used his legs to such good purpose; who "ran like fire,"—shouted, "Rejoice, we conquer!"—then "died in the shout for his meed." How simple life once was, according to Browning and the rest! What a muddle it was to-day, according to Harry Wakefield! And all because a girl had refused him! He had been trying all along not to think of Dorothy Ray, but by the time he had reached the summit of the hill,—that little round of red sand, where only a single yellow cactus had had the courage to precede him,—he knew that his hour of reckoning had come. He had gambled, yes; but it was for her sake he had gambled; he had lost, yes, but it was she he had lost.
He flung himself down on the bare red hilltop, and with his chin in his hands, gazed across irrigated meadows and parched foothillsto the grim slope of the mountains. And stretched there, with his elbows digging into the sandy soil, his mind bracing itself against the everlasting hills, he let the past draw near.
There was an atmosphere about that past, a play of light and shadow, a mist of poetry and romance, that made the Colorado landscape in the searching noon light seem typical of the life he had led there:—a crude, prosaic,metallicsort of life. And after the first shrinking from the past, his mind began to feel deliciously at home in it.
How he had loved Dorothy Ray! How the thought of her had pervaded his life, as the sunshine pervades a landscape! Yet not like the sunshine; for sunshine is fructifying, and his life had been singularly fruitless. There was no shirking the truth, that the year he had spent reading law in her father's office, the year he had discovered that his old friend and playmate was the girl of his choice, had been a wasted year. In all that did not directly concern her he had dawdled, and Dorothy knew and resented it.
He remembered how, on one occasion, she had openly preferred Aleck Dorr to himself; Aleck Dorr, with his ugly face and boorishmanners, who was cutting a dash with a newly acquired fortune.
"Dorothy," Wakefield asked abruptly, the next time he got speech of her,—it was at the Assembly and she had only vouchsafed him two dances,—"Dorothy, what do you like about that boor?"
"In the first place he isn't a boor," she answered. "He's as gentlemanlike as possible."
"Supposing he is, then! That's a recommendation most of us possess."
She gave him a scrutinizing, almost wistful look. How dear she was, standing there in the brilliant gas-light, fresh and natural in her ball-dress and sparkling jewels as she had been when her hair hung down in a big braid over her gingham frock.
"You gentlemanlike? That's something you could never be, Harry,—because you are a gentleman. But that's all you are," she added, with a sudden impatience that checked his rising elation.
"I don't see that there was any call for snubbing," he retorted angrily. He was often angry with Dorothy; that was part of the old good-fellowship he had used to value so much, but which seemed so insufficient now.
"Snubbing? I thought I made you a very pretty compliment," she answered, with a little caressing tone that he found illogically comforting.
"You haven't told me why you like this gentlemanlike boor," he persisted.
"I should think anybody might see that! I like him because he amounts to something; because he has made a fortune, if you insist. It takes amanto do that!"
Upon which, before Wakefield had succeeded in framing a suitable retort, Dorr came up, with a ponderous joke, and claimed a promised waltz.
Well! Dorr need not be in such thundering spirits! He had no chance with her at any rate!
And only a few months later it turned out that he, Harry Wakefield, had as little chance as Dorr.
At this point in his reflections Wakefield's elbows began to feel rough and gritty. He turned himself round and sat with his back to the mountains, looking eastward, his hands clasping one knee. He was glad the prairie was broken up into mounds and hillocks over there, and had not the look of the sea that it took on from some points of view. There wasa group of pines off to the left; he had been too preoccupied to observe them as he came along the road,—strangely enough too, for a group of trees is an unusual sight out on the prairie. What a lot of trees there were in the East though, and how wofully he had come to grief among them up there on the North Shore! Only a year ago it had happened, only a year ago, in the fragrant New England June! His married sister had had Dorothy and himself visiting her at the same time. Well, Fanny had done her best for him, though it was no good. He wondered, in passing, how it happened that a fellow could come to care more for anybody else than for a sister like Fanny!
He had found Dorothy sitting in perfect idleness under a big pine-tree that lovely June morning. There were robins hopping about the lawn; the voices of his sister's children came, shrill and sweet, calling to one another as they dug in the garden by the house. The tide was coming in; he could hear it break against the rocks over yonder, while the far stretches of sea glimmered softly in the sunshine. Dorothy looked so sweet and beneficent as she sat under the big pine-tree in the summer sunshine, that all his misgivings vanished.Before he knew what he was about he had "asked her."
And here the little drama was blurred and muffled in his memory. He wondered, as he clasped his knees and studied the tops of the pine-trees, how he had put the question; whether he had perhaps put it wrong. He could not recall a word he had said; but her words in reply fell as distinct on his ear, as the note of the meadow-lark, down there by the roadside. How the note of the meadow-lark shot a thrill through the thin Colorado air,—informed with a soul the dazzling day! How cruelly sweet Dorothy's voice had been, as she said:
"No, Harry, I couldn't!"
It had made him so angry that he hardly knew how deep his hurt was.
"You have no right to say no!" he had heard himself say.
He could not remember whether that was immediately, or after an interval of discussion. She had stood up and turned away, not deigning to reply. And then the memory of that talk at the ball had struck him like a blow.
"Wait, Dorothy! You must wait!" he had cried, aware that his imperative words clutched her like a detaining hand. Then,while his breath came fast, almost chokingly, he had said: "Tell me, Dorothy, is it because you don't call mea manthat you won't have me?"
The angry challenge in his voice hardened her.
"I don't know anything about how much of a man you are, Harry Wakefield," she had declared, with freezing indifference. "I only know you are not the man for me."
That had been practically the end of it. They had got through the day very creditably he believed, and the next morning they had departed on their several ways.
Wakefield had read law like mad for a week, and then he had started for Colorado. He had a favorite cousin out there whose husband was making a fortune in Lame Gulch stocks, and he thought that even prosaic fortune-hunting in a new world would be better than the gnawing chagrin that monopolized things in the old. Better be active than passive, on any terms. By the time he was well on his westward way, the sting of that refusal had yielded somewhat, and he began to take courage again. Perhaps when he had made a fortune! "It takes a man to do that," she had said. Well, he had four times the money to start withthat Dick Dayton had had, and look, what chances there were!
Once fairly launched in the stirring, out-of-door Colorado life, his spirits had so far recovered their tone that he could afford to be magnanimous. Accordingly he wrote the following letter to Dorothy:
"Dear Dorothy,"You were right; I wasn't half good enough for you. No fellow is, as far as that goes! Don't you let them fool you on that score! It makes me mad when I think about it. You always knew the worst of me, but you don't really know the first thing about any other man. I'm coming back next year to try again. Do give me the chance, Dorothy! Remember, I don't tell you you could make anything you like of me—that's the rubbish the rest will talk. I'm going to make something of myself first! And if I don't do it in a year, I am ready to work seven years,—or seventy,—or seventy-seven years; if you'll only have me in the end! That would have to be in Heaven, though, wouldn't it? Well, it would come to the same thing in the end! It would be Heaven for me, wherever it was!"
"Dear Dorothy,
"You were right; I wasn't half good enough for you. No fellow is, as far as that goes! Don't you let them fool you on that score! It makes me mad when I think about it. You always knew the worst of me, but you don't really know the first thing about any other man. I'm coming back next year to try again. Do give me the chance, Dorothy! Remember, I don't tell you you could make anything you like of me—that's the rubbish the rest will talk. I'm going to make something of myself first! And if I don't do it in a year, I am ready to work seven years,—or seventy,—or seventy-seven years; if you'll only have me in the end! That would have to be in Heaven, though, wouldn't it? Well, it would come to the same thing in the end! It would be Heaven for me, wherever it was!"
Wakefield had the habit of saying to Dorothy whatever came into his head; and so he had written his letter without any thought of effect. But the answer he got was so carefully worded that he could make nothing of it. Atthe end of three non-committal pages she wrote:
"I ought not to wish you good luck, for Papa says if you have it it will be your ruin. I did not suppose that circumstances could ruin anybody,—anybody that had any backbone, I mean. But I do wish you good luck all the same, and if you're the kind of person to be ruined by it, why, I'm sorry for you!"
"I ought not to wish you good luck, for Papa says if you have it it will be your ruin. I did not suppose that circumstances could ruin anybody,—anybody that had any backbone, I mean. But I do wish you good luck all the same, and if you're the kind of person to be ruined by it, why, I'm sorry for you!"
There was something in that letter, non-committal as it was, that gave Wakefield the impression that a correspondence would be no furtherance to his interests. He did not write again, and he only knew, from his sister Fanny, that Dorothy was a greater favorite than ever that season; a fact from which he could gather little encouragement. He had flung himself like a piece of driftwood into the whirl of speculation; he had lost more thousands than he cared to think about, the bulk of his patrimony in fact, and his last chance was gone of making the fortune that was to have been the winning of Dorothy. "It takes a man to do that!" she had said.
Well, that was the end of it! As far as he was concerned, Dorothy Ray had ceased to exist; the past had ceased to exist, the pleasant past, with its deceitful mists and bewildering sunbeams. Things out here werecrude, but they were real! He got on his feet and turned about once more. Between Mt. Washington and the range was a fertile ranch; broad fields of vivid alfalfa, big barns, pastures dotted with cattle; a line of light-green cottonwoods ran along the borders of the creek. What was that about the wilderness blossoming like the rose? He turned again and looked toward the barren hillocks. Even they, dead and inhospitable as they appeared at a little distance, afforded nourishment for cactus and painter's-brush, prickly poppy and hardy vetches. Dorothy Ray might do as she pleased,—his fortune might go where it would! That need not be the end of all things. Life, to be sure, might seem a little like a game of chess after the loss of the Queen! Pretty tough work it was likely to be to save the game, but none the less worth while for all that. He wondered what his next move would be,—and meanwhile, before recommencing the game, why not seize the most obvious outlet for his newly roused energies, by tearing down the hill at a break-neck gallop and clearing the wire fence at a bound!
"Took you for a jack-rabbit!" said a gruff voice close at hand, as he landed on his two feet by the dusty roadside.
"Not a bad thing to be," Wakefield panted, falling in step with the speaker, who was walking toward the town at a brisk pace.
"Not unless the dogs are round," the stranger demurred.
"Dogs! A jack-rabbit would never know how game he was, if it wasn't for the dogs!"
"Any on your track?" asked the man with a grin. "Looked like it when you come walluping down the mounting!"
"A whole pack of them," Wakefield answered. "Didn't you see anything of them?"
"Can't say I did."
"You're not so smart as you look, then;" and they went jogging on like comrades of a year's standing.
The new acquaintance appeared to be a man of sixty or thereabouts. A crowbar and shovel which he carried over his shoulder seemed a part of his rough laborer's costume. He had a shrewd, good sort of face, and a Yankee twang to his speech.
"You carry those things as easy as a walking-stick," Wakefield observed, ready to reciprocate in point of compliments. "What do you use them for?"
"Ben mendin' the bit o'codderoydown yonder," was the answer.
"Is that your trade?"
"No, not partic'larly. I make a trade of most anything I kin work at. Happened to be out of a job last week, so I took up with this."
"Got through with it?"
"Yes; stopped off to-day. Got done just in time. They start in on the road next week, 'n they've took me on."
"What road's that?"
"The new branch in."
"Oh! In to Lame Gulch. I heard they were going to start in on that."
"Yes; the 'Rocky Mounting' are doin' it. They say there'll be trains runnin' in from the Divide inside of six months."
Wakefield looked sceptical; he had heard that sort of talk before.
"Do you like railroad work?" he asked.
"Not so well's this. I like my own job better, only 'taint sostayin'. Might 've had another month's work, on the road to the cañon over there; but that would ha' ben the end on 't. So I'm goin' to throw up that job this afternoon."
"What's wanted on the cañon road?"
"Wal, it wants widenin', an' it wants bracin' up here 'n there, 'n there's a power of big stuns to be weeded out. A reel purtyjob it's goin' to be, too, in there by the runnin' water, among thefars'n the birds 'n the squirrels."
"I suppose you could hardly have managed that all by yourself?"
"Oh, yes! It's an easy job."
"And you think you could have done it with just your two hands and a shovel and a crowbar?"
"Wal, yes,—'n a pinch o' powder now and then, 'n somethin' to drill a hole with,—an' a little nat'ral gumption."
Wakefield liked the sound of it all uncommonly well. For a man who had come to a rough place in his own road,—a jumping-off place he had once thought it might prove to be,—would it not be rather a pleasant thing, to smooth off a road for the general public? It would be a stroke in the game, at least, and that was his main concern just now. Such a good, downright, genuine sort of work too! He had an idea that if he could once get his grip on a crowbar, and feel a big rock come off its bottom at his instigation, he should have a stirring of self-respect. After all, of all that he had lost, that was perhaps the most important thing to get back.
Just as he had arrived at this sensible conclusion his companion came to a halt.
"Here's my shanty; where's yours?" he asked.
"Haven't got any!"
"I'd ask you in if we wasn't packin' up to go."
"Does your wife go with you?"
"Why, nat'rally!"
"Say," Wakefield queried, as the man turned in at the gate. "How did you go to work to get that job up in the cañon?"
"Went to 'Bijah Lang, the street-commissioner."
"You haven't got any friend who would like you to pass the job over to him?"
"No."
"Think I could do it?"
"Wal, yes,—if you've got the gumption! Your arms and legs 'pear to be all right! Ever see any work of the kind?"
"Yes; I used to watch them on the road up Bear Mountain, at Lame Gulch."
"Know how to drill a hole in a rock?"
"Learned that when I was a boy."
"Know the difference betweenjointpowder and the black stuff?"
"Yes; though I never handled giant powder myself."
"Wal, don't be too free with it, that's all.And, say!" he called, as Wakefield in his turn made as if to go. "Look's like as though you'd got somethin' up to Lame Gulch. Wal, you hold on to it, that's all!"
"You believe in Lame Gulch, then?"
"Lame Gulch is all right. It's chockfull of stuff, now I tell ye! Only folks thought they was goin' to fish it out with a rod 'n line."
"Then you really think there 's something in it?"
"Somethin' in it? I tell ye, it's chockfull o' stuff! Only folks have got it into their heads that the one thing in this world they kin git without workin' for it, isgold! If that was so, what would it be wuth? Less than pig-iron! I tell ye, there ain't nothin' in this world that's to be got without workin' for it, 'n the more work it takes, the more it's wuth! 'N the reason gold's wuth more 'n most things, is because it takes more work 'n most things; more diggin' 'n more calc'latin'. Why!" he went on, waxing more and more emphatic. "Ef diggin' gold wa' n't no harder 'n mendin' roads, 't wouldn'tpayany better,—now I tell ye!"
"Perhaps you're right," Wakefield admitted, "but that's not what we're brought up to think."
"That's what my boys was brought up to think, 'n they're actin' accordin'."
"Have you got some boys up at Lame Gulch?"
"Yes, four on 'em. 'N I've got a claim up there too, 'n they're workin' it."
"Why don't you go up and work your claim yourself?" asked Wakefield.
A humorous twinkle came into the man's eyes.
"Wal, now I tell ye!" and his voice dropped to a confidential level. "Railroadin'pays better, so far!"
"Do your boys get a living out of the mine?"
"Not yet, not yet. But they're skilled miners. 'N when they git hard up, a couple on 'em put in a month's work for some skalliwag 'company' or other, 'n so they keep agoin'. The three married ones ain't up there at all."
"So you've got seven sons?"
"Yes; seven boys, all told. We lost a girl," he added, with an indefinable change in his voice. "Her name was Loretty."
With that, Loretty's father passed up the path and disappeared within the house.
"Nice old chap," Wakefield thought, as hewalked on, past the little houses with the presumable mortgages on them. "Nice of him to go on caring for Loretty after he had lost her."
He wondered whether, after all, he had better make such a point of forgetting about Dorothy! Up there on the red hilltop, hobnobbing with the yellow cactus, he had resolved never to think of her again; but down here among human habitations, fresh from the good human intercourse of the last ten minutes, he did not feel so sure about it. He thought that, on the whole, it might be as well to decide that question later. Meanwhile, here was the street-commissioner's door, and here was a decision that must be come to on the spot.
Harry Wakefield always looked back upon the day when he first pried a big rock off its base, as a turning-point in his career; a move that put the game in his own hands. The sensation was different from what he had anticipated. He had fancied that he was about to engage in a single-handed struggle, but no sooner had his grip closed upon the crowbar, no sooner had he felt the mass of rock yield to its pressure, than he found that he was not working single-handed. On the contrary, he had the feeling of having got right down among the forces of nature and of finding them ranged onhis side. It was gravitation that gave the rock its weight, but, look there! how some other law, which he did not know the name of, dwelt in the resisting strength of the iron, worked in the action of his muscles. His legs trembled, as he braced himself to the effort; the veins of his neck throbbed hard; but the muscles of his arms and chest held firm as the crowbar they guided, and slowly, reluctantly, sullenly, the rock went over on its side. He dropped the crowbar from his stiffening grasp and drew himself up, flinging his shoulders back and panting deep and strong.
It was between six and seven o'clock in the morning, a radiant June morning, which seemed alive with pleasant things. As he stood with his head thrown back, taking a good draught of the delicious mountain air, a bluebird shot, like a bit of the sky, in and out among the solemn pines and delicate aspens. He looked down on the tangle of blossoming vines and bushes that latticed the borders of the brook, which came dashing down from the cañon, still rioting on its way. The water would soon have another cause for clamor, in the big stone that had so long cumbered the road. He should presently have the fun of rolling it over the bank and seeing it settle with a splash in the bed of the stream where it belonged by rights. After that there was a fallen tree to be tackled, a couple of rods farther on, and then he should take a rest with his shovel and fill in some holes near by.