CHAPTER IIILOOKING UP AN ANCESTOR
But Mr. Osborne was not as quick to give his consent as Roy predicted. As the boy and his father rode home that evening, Mr. Osborne found many reasons why he did not wish his son to go to Utah to “take a chance of dying of thirst on some desert, or of being scalped by Indians,” as he expressed it. He did not urge very strongly the risk to Roy in skimming over mountains, plains and canyons in an aeroplane. Mr. Osborne being the maker of the airship and having business faith in it, he had to confine his arguments to other reasons.
“The principal reason you’re afraid,” urged Roy, with a laugh, “is that you’ve never been west of Pittsburg. You don’t know any more about Utah than—than—”
“Than you do,” interrupted his father. “Just you wait until you tell your mother.”
The Osbornes lived on the far side of Newark in an attractive suburban house with a yard big enough to include a large flower garden. It was early evening when Mr. Osborne and Royreached home, and Mrs. Osborne was busy cutting flowers. Roy, waving his straw hat, sprang across the lawn to open up the question at once.
“Mother,” he exclaimed impulsively, “I’ve got a chance to get a good job operating the new aeroplane.”
“So soon?” replied Mrs. Osborne, with a smile. “I supposed you’d have to have a lot of experience before you could do that.”
“Oh, I can do it—now—I know enough. I ain’t afraid of that. But the job’s a long way from here. I’ve got to go to Utah.”
“Utah!” exclaimed his mother, wrinkling her brows. “Why that’s away out west. It’s further than Chicago, isn’t it?”
“A thousand miles,” responded Roy on a guess, and with a smile.
“Yes, certainly,” added Mrs. Osborne. “I know. Just beyond the Rocky Mountains. Utah—Salt Lake City. It’s where the Mormons live.”
“Right,” exclaimed Roy, laughing. “Do you care if I go?—I want to very much.”
“That’s where my Uncle Willard Banks went.”
Roy, who had taken the basket of flowers from his mother’s arm, stopped short.
“I didn’t know that,” he began. “I didn’t know you had an uncle out there. Is he alive?”
His mother shook her head.
“I don’t know,” she answered. “I don’t even remember him. He was my father’s only brother, and when father came east from Illinois—before he married—my Uncle Willard went west. He was a Mormon,” Mrs. Osborne added. “Or, I think he was.”
“And he went out to Utah to live with the Mormons?” asked Roy, with increasing interest, forgetting for the moment, his real mission with his mother.
“I don’t remember just why he went,” explained his mother. “I don’t believe I’ve thought of him for years. He sent father his picture. He used to write to father, too. He must be dead now.”
“Perhaps I can find him,” suggested Roy, coming back to the subject.
Mrs. Osborne looked at him a few moments and then walked ahead to the front porch where Mr. Osborne, at ease in a large swinging seat, was apparently awaiting his wife and son. As Roy and his mother reached the porch, Mrs. Osborne exclaimed:
“What does your father say?”
“He says I’ll starve to death or die of thirst or be scalped by the Indians.”
“Mercy me,” exclaimed Mrs. Osborne, sinking into a porch chair. “Are there wild Indians out there yet? I thought the last of the Indians were in the Wild West shows?”
Roy and his father laughed.
“See?” exclaimed Mr. Osborne. “Your mother don’t want you to go either.”
Mrs. Osborne looked up in surprise.
“I hadn’t said so,” she exclaimed, with a smile. “I want to hear all about it, first.”
Roy told her everything. She sat and listened with all a mother’s interest. When he had finished, she turned to her husband.
“What do you think, George?”
Mr. Osborne shook his head negatively.
“Why?” asked his wife.
“It’s too risky—” began Mr. Osborne.
“You mean the aeroplane?” interrupted Mrs. Osborne.
“No,” replied her husband slowly. “Of course, there are safer things than manipulating a flying machine, but I guess the kid could manage that.”
“What other risk do you mean?” persisted Roy’s mother.
“Do you want him to go into the wildest country in America? Why, this man Cook told Mr. Atkinson that there are canyons a mile deep, alkali deserts that’d turn water into steam, only no water ever touches ’em, and Indians that haven’t even seen a white man. Do you think that’s the place to send a child?”
Roy drew himself up. His mother patted his brown muscular hand as it rested on the arm of her chair, and looked up at the boy and smiled.
“Are you afraid?” she asked with a laugh.
“It’s father,” answered Roy. “He’s the one that’s scared.”
Mrs. Osborne’s face turned sober.
“I suppose you’ll think it strange, George, but those things don’t alarm me—as much as some other risks.”
“They don’t?” exclaimed Mr. Osborne, slapping his knee. “Well, I can’t imagine anything worse.”
“I can,” said Mrs. Osborne in a low voice. Then she added:
“When Dick took his examination for Annapolis, it seemed to me as if he were going away never to come back. Now that he is a lieutenant in the navy and in the West Indies, I knowthat between bursting guns at target practice, exploding boilers, accidents in manoeuvres or the yellow fever, he runs more risk every day than Roy is likely to find in the west.”
“I hadn’t just thought of it that way,” answered Mr. Osborne, a little crestfallen.
“And then Phil completed his course in electricity and went into Mr. Edison’s shops. I’d rather have him lost in a desert than working among those chemicals and electric generators.”
Roy looked at his father with a half smile.
“Then you are willing for me to go?” he exclaimed, putting his arm affectionately around his mother’s shoulders.
“That’s for your father to say, finally,” Mrs. Osborne answered after a few moments’ silence. “But I shan’t interfere. This seems to be a time when results that are worth while only come with great efforts or great risks. If it is a good chance, my fears mustn’t keep you back.”
That settled it. Before supper was over, Mr. Osborne gave in. It was agreed that Roy was to accept the offer.
The boy was off at once for the city to secure some guide book or history relating to Utah.That night, despite the heat, long after his parents had retired, the jubilant youngster sat propped up in bed, drinking in facts and statistics relating to the land he was to visit.
Like all boys, Roy had had his dream of wild Indians, of cowboy life, of horses and the endless plains. But as he grew older, the intense practicality of life in the busy city had, in great part, driven these fancies from his mind. Now he discovered that the longing for the mysteries of the far west had not gone out of his heart.
From his father Roy had learned that he would probably go to the little town of Dolores in southwestern Colorado, the nearest railroad point to his destination in Utah. Dolores was in the mountains and, on a map he had secured, Roy traced his route into the valleys and out across the deserts toward Bluff, a hundred miles or more further west.
It was all desert, to be sure, but the very barrenness of the map thrilled the boy. The canyons, the isolated mountains, the desolate plains, fascinated the eager lad. He was not courting danger—he was too practical for that—but to be thrown into a region where he must depend upon his own ingenuity was joy supreme for Roy.
“I never even hoped for anything so great,” said the boy sleepily to himself, “but, now that I have the chance, I’ll make the most of it. I may have to come back to Newark in a few months and settle down to common things, but I’ll make all I can of my opportunity. I’m not aching to fight Indians, and I’m not anxious to get lost in the desert, but I would like to get close enough to the wilderness to know what it means. I’m tired of machinery and coal smoke and trolley gongs.”
It is doubtful if Roy would have been so enthusiastic if he had known the adventures he was to fall into so soon. He got close enough to both Indians and the waterless wastes to understand just what they meant.
“I wonder,” he mused as he dropped off to sleep, “if I’ll meet my mother’s uncle—what’s his name?”
And, hazily trying to think of his Utah relative, the Mormon Willard Banks, Roy fell asleep. Strangely enough, in that sleep, among dreams of bottomless canyons and white arid plains, whereon spectral Indians danced like thistledown, another figure appeared always to the sleeping lad—a featureless face with immense flowing whiskers and wearing an enormousblack hat. The constant figure beckoned Roy on in his dreams like a ghost—the spirit of his great uncle, Willard Banks, long since lost to his family in the far away land of Brigham Young.
Roy’s brain was so full of all the wonders to come that, when he awoke in the morning, he was dazed for a few moments. His dreams had run together until he seemed almost feverish. While he was trying to straighten them out, his mother stole into his room.
“Mother,” exclaimed the boy, with a laugh, “do you reckon your Mormon uncle is alive now?”
“Banks is his name,” said his mother reprovingly, “Mr. Willard Banks. Why?”
“Well, I got him in my head. He’s got whiskers a yard long, and a hat big as a tub. I dreamt about him all night.”
“He was older than father by five or six years,” answered Mrs. Osborne, thinking. “And if father were alive, he would be eighty-two years old. No,” she added, shaking her head, “my Uncle Willard is probably dead.”
Roy sprang out of bed and made ready for his morning plunge. His mother was alreadyransacking his dresser for clothes needing repairs.
“What do you mean by having your great uncle in your head?” she asked suddenly.
“I don’t know,” answered Roy catching up his bath robe. “Only, I’ve been dreamin’ of him all night. I guess I read too much about Utah last night. I had a regular nightmare. And all the time this big whiskered, big hatted man went in and out through every other dream. I’d like to know more about him.”
Roy suddenly laughed outright. The “Genealogy of the Banks Family!” Neither had thought of that. Even before Roy was dressed, Mrs. Osborne had hurried downstairs, secured the almost forgotten volume of family history, and together, sitting on the edge of the bed, mother and son turned to the page devoted to their Mormon relative. This is what they read:
“Willard R. Banks, farmer and cattle dealer, Parowan, Iron County, Utah. Born December 20, 1822, in Muskingum County, Ohio. Removed to Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1848. Married Martha Brower October 5, 1849. Became a disciple of Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, and, in 1852, made a missionary trip to Scotland and Wales. In 1853 was one of the regentsof the University of Deseret in Salt Lake City. Member of a committee to prepare a separate language for Mormons in hope of creating an independent literature. Assisted in constructing the Deseret Alphabet of thirty-two characters. In 1862, an elder of the Mormon Church and later banished by Brigham Young with others on unknown charges. Lived for several years at Parowan, Utah. Thought to be dead.”
“Willard R. Banks, farmer and cattle dealer, Parowan, Iron County, Utah. Born December 20, 1822, in Muskingum County, Ohio. Removed to Nauvoo, Illinois, in 1848. Married Martha Brower October 5, 1849. Became a disciple of Joseph Smith, the Mormon prophet, and, in 1852, made a missionary trip to Scotland and Wales. In 1853 was one of the regentsof the University of Deseret in Salt Lake City. Member of a committee to prepare a separate language for Mormons in hope of creating an independent literature. Assisted in constructing the Deseret Alphabet of thirty-two characters. In 1862, an elder of the Mormon Church and later banished by Brigham Young with others on unknown charges. Lived for several years at Parowan, Utah. Thought to be dead.”