"Then you've been in these mountains before?" asked Brydges; but the old frontiersman refused to take the bait and rambled on in his reverie.
"What a view! Th' vera kingdom of earth at y'r feet! The river wimplin'—wimplin'—wimplin' wi' a silver laugh over the stones, an' the light violet as a Scotch lass's eye! An' the green fields of alfalfa—Have y' ever noticed how th' light above the alfalfa turns purple? An' y'r Rim Rocks roasted fire red by the heat. 'Tis the same view A've gazed on many a time when A was young." He drew a deep sigh of the longing that only the passing frontiersman knows. "'Tis like if the Devil came tempting to-day, 't would be such a place as this! Many's the time He came to us in them old days, lawless days! 'Tis different to-day. He'd not bait men savage naked now. The kingdoms of the earth, he'd offer—wealth an' success—wealth an' success—the fetish o' sons o' men to-day. 'Twould not be simple cards for drink y'd play! Bigger stakes—bigger stakes, boys! He'd bait men's souls wi' bigger stakes! If I were young I'd take his bet an' play for the biggest stakes outside o' Hell—"
"Hey? What is that?" queried Brydges; and he winked at Wayland. "We'd been talking of a bunco game when you came up."
"Y' had, had you?" The old frontiersman measured Brydges through and through. "Well, judging from y'r brass an' the up-and-coming kind of it, A'm thinking y'r stakes would be pea-nuts under little shells! 'Tis bigger stakes I'd play for if I had m' life to live over—"
"What?" asked Wayland curiously.
Mr. Bat Brydges was revising his inventory of the old "duffer." Wayland was laughing openly. The old man had become oblivious of both, with a triangling of sharply intersected lines between his brows and tense compression of the lips—
"The—fate—o'—this—land," he ripped out in hammer raps, "the fate of this land, boys, with all time lookin' on since ever Time began! Y're the fiery furnace of all the world's hopes and fears, of all earth's people, of all poets' dreams; an' God only knows what a mess o' slag y're turning out! Y'r muck rakers are belching y'r failures to the four corners of earth! Justice perverted! Courts in fee to the highest bidder! More murders—murders in this fresh new clean land than all the stew pots o' filth the old nations have brewed in a thousand years; and murders unpunished! Y'r Government—the great world experiment—is it the wull o' the people, or the wull of a gilded clique o' tricksters?"
The old man stretched out his hands above the Valley. "What are ye doing with y'r freedom, the freedom that the children o' light prayed for and fought for and died for? When there's one law for the rich and another for the poor, when ye have to bribe y'r own self-elected rulers to do y'r wull, where is y'r freedom different from the freedom in France before the Revolution? Is it not written 'my house shall be for all nations; but ye have made it a den of thieves?' Ye have what all the nations of the earth have bled for, what prophets have prayed for, and patriots died for; and all the world is looking on asking, sneering, scoffing, saying ye pervert the Ark o' the Covenant of God, saying lawlessness stalks under y'r banners, saying y' wrest the judgment to the highest bidder, aye to the supreme fountain head o' y'r courts! The fate o' this land, boys! Them's the stakes I'd play for, if I had lusty blows to spare. I'd up—I'd up—I'd strip me naked of every back-thought and expediency and self-interest and hold-back! I'd hurl the lie—in the teeth—of a scoffing world—I'd show all nations o' time that the people, the plain common good people, can keep the law sound as the Ark o' the Covenant of God; and—and—I'd hurl y'r traitor leaders—y'r Judas Iscariots huckstering the land's good for paltry silver—I'd hurl y'r grafters an' y'r heelers an' y'r bosses an' y'r strumpet justices, who sell a verdict like a harlot, I'd hurl them to the bottom of Hell! An' may Hell be both deep and hot—old fashioned extra for the pack of them!"
He shook his trembling fist at the vacuous air. "Fight—right—might! I'd paint the words in letters o' blood till they awakened this land like the fiery cross of old! I'd fight—fight—fight till they had to kill every man o' my kind before I'd down! Before I'd see y'r law outraged, y'r courts perverted, y'r justice bartered and hawked and peddled from huckster to trickster, from heeler to headman, from blackmailer to high judge—but A didna mean to break loose. Y'r fair scene stirred m' blood; and A'm an old man; and A love the land. A was born West. A'm none of y'r immigration boomsters who goes in a Pullman car, then tells the world all about—Now, which way to y'r Missionary Williams?"
Bat flushed; but he did not laugh. Oddly enough, he forgot the feature-story. Wayland rose and came forward and involuntarily held out his hand.
"I wish you'd stay for the night," he said. "A good many of us feel the way you do; but like you, we're all up in air. Sawing the air doesn't saw wood. A good many of us are in the fight right now; but, unless we get somewhere, we're going to feel as if we were carving wind mills. Suppose you put up here for the night? Besides, it's pretty late to go down. Trail switches sharply—"
The old frontiersman heard absently.
"An old man's broodings," he ruminated.
"I'd call 'em D. T.'s," muttered Brydges.
"Don't fear for my bones on the trail." He came back from his reverie as from a journey. "A'm the old breed that doesn't break. 'Tis you young brittle fellows all bred to pace and speed and style needs look to y'r goin's. Which way do A turn at the foot of the Ridge? One—two—three—A see four lights. Which is the Mission?"
"If you insist on leaving, Sir, there is an Indian woman here going down to the MacDonald ranch—"
"MacDonald, did you say?"
"The next place along the River is the Mission. Here, Calamity, show this stranger which way to go, will you?"
But Calamity had already bolted for the Ridge trail.
"Stranger? She doesn't look to me exactly like a stranger. Looks precious like one of our Saskatchewan half-breeds! Haven't A seen you before, my good woman? A'm Jack Matthews, who carried the mail for the Company at the Big House; by an' by contractor, then by the Grace o' God missionary to the Cree! Haven't A seen you, girl? Was it '85 at the Agency House when Wandering Spirit—"
"Non sabe," snapped Calamity, setting off down the trail at a run paced to keep the reverend traveller behind till she reached the last loop. Drawing her shawl over her face, she paused with her back to the frontiersman. To the left blinked the lights of the sheep ranch house and the Mission, to the right the cow-boy camp and the dead glare of the white buildings belonging to the Senator.
"Viola! dat vay!" The woman deliberately pointed to the cow-boy camp; then vanished in the darkness.
"Mighty quick wench! A have seen you before, my sly minx, and A'll see you some more," he said staring after the fading form.
Then he headed his mare for the cow-boy camp below the cliff. Half a dozen men lounged round a smudge fire. The old man paused to sort out the scene; the box of a gramaphone laid out for a card table, a bottle of whiskey in the centre, two empty bottles with candles stuck in the necks for lights, a dull smudge fire, four rough fellows sprawling on the ground, one with corduroy velveteen trousers, an old white pack horse nosing windward of the smoke; one figure with sheepskin chaps to his waist, thumbs in his belt, standing erect with back to the trail; and face in light, a shaven face with a strong jaw and oily geniality, a corpulent form in a white vest, putting a pocket book in a breast pocket.
The old frontiersman took hold of his mare's bridle.
"'Tis hardly what you'd look for in a Missionary outfit, Bessie."
"You'll leave for the South at once?"
The question commanded. The old frontiersman listened.
"Hoof express, Sir," promised the sheep-skin leggings.
"And mind you I know nothing about it, Jim. I'm not to be told. I take care of you without you knowing about it. Iexpect youto take care of us—" the white waist coat became at once impressive and anxious.
"That's all right, Colonel. I understand! We'll crowd 'em to beat Hell; and they'll go it blind. If it's coming dark, they'll shut their eyes and go over blind. I defy Sheriff Flood, himself, if he's standing on the spot to make a case—"
"You need have no fear of Sheriff Floodeverbeing on the spot.He'll be busy under his bed that night; but look out for these Federalpuppy-boy Forest Ranger fellows! Finish up off the confounded NationalRange. Finish up before they reach the National Range."
"And the Mexican herders?" asked the sheep skin chaps with a flourish of his band above the fire that showed the flash of a diamond on the little finger.
The white vest spread deprecating hands.
"That's your business, Jim! Make a clean sweep of the herd; but see that no harm comes to the boy."
The old frontiersman headed his broncho silently back on the trail.
"Night birds hatching snake eggs. A'm really between two minds to go back and crack their addled heads."
"Did you notice anything?" demanded Brydges, as the old stranger went down the Ridge trail. "She knows English as well as you do; and she is a French breed. Why did she put on to be Mexican? What did she sneak for? Whole thing cussed queer. What do you make of it? Matthews? Matthews? I recall that name. Fellow by that name wrote our paper to know if any Canadian settlers had come here! Say, Wayland, the old man pricked up his ears at MacDonald's name—spoke of Rebellion Days."
"Oh, shut it off, Bat! What in the world has a travelling half-cracked ranting old evangelist to do with the MacDonald family? He'll land on the Mission for a week or two free like the rest of 'em! He'll likely preach Hell-fire to Indians, who'll not know a word of what he says till Mr. Williams gives him a call to move on—"
"All the same," retorted Bat, disappearing inside the cabin.
Wayland passed a bad night, the worst he had known on the Holy Cross, contending with what comes to all lives, and to many lives many times.
The Ranger had absorbed the average amount of Sunday school pabulum that floats round in the mental atmosphere of all youth, that, if you keep on doing right and doing it hard, things will turn out all right in the end. Well, he told himself bluntly, hehadbeen doing right and doing it hard, just as hundreds of the Land Office field men and Land Office attorneys had been doing right in their vain endeavour to stop public loot;—and things had turned out all wrong. What did his four years' fight stand for, anyway? Marking time, that was all. Nothing accomplished except the wasting of four years of his own life; and, while that may be small enough in the sum total of things, where a thousand seeds go to waste for one that bears fruit, it is overwhelmingly big to the individual man. If he had been the one and only failure of the Civil Service workers, he could have accused himself and taken the Senator's advice to "chuck" the fool-theory of men in public service fighting for right; but he was only one of a multitude of men, paid public money to prevent the looting of public property; whose work was blocked, non-suited, pigeon-holed, bluffed, hampered, or, worst of all, carried up to investigating committees whose sole purpose was to conceal and wear the public out with interminable wrangles over technicalities that were irrelevant.
Better men than he had fought doggedly only to be downed. There was the Land Office man in Oregon dismissed for the slip of a wrong entry in his field book because he had quite unintentionally unearthed the frauds of a member of the land-loot ring who happened to be a congressman. There was the Federal attorney hounded from his home city because he prosecuted bribe-givers and objected to being shot while on duty in the court room. There was that other Federal Law man, shot at the shaft of a coal mine stolen from public lands. There was the Army Engineer demoted from his life work because he fought for a free harbor for a great city and offended the railroad fighting to keep that harbor closed. There were the two Forest Service men dismissed for giving facts to the public. Then, there was the Alaska Case—Wayland laughed; and the laugh was a little bitter. Surely the crowning farce of all: that had gone up easily to investigation with a blare of trumpets and a flare of news headlines. That was the easiest of all.
It made good politics, yet—it was so involved in technicalities, while it offered a bit of by-play to the gallery, that there had never from the first, even for the fraction of an instant, been the faintest hope of anything but confusion emerging from the investigation; but it played into the game without hurting anybody. If they had really wanted to investigate, why didn't they take a case in which there were no technicalities of law, the looted red-lands of California, for instance; or the half-million of timber openly stolen each year for a certain smelting ring; or the two thousand acres of coal where Smelter City itself was built; or the shooting of the Federal Law Officer down at that other coal mine? These cases involved no "twilight zone" of dispute as to law, in which the "system" and the "ring" could hide. Every Government man knew the evidence was plain and complete in these cases: yet they were pigeon-holed, let lapse for the Statute of Limitations to bar action. Why?
Wayland sat down on the slab seat, and the personal reasons came trooping against his resolutions like the scouts of an oncoming host.
To begin with, he could make more money outside the Service. The Government men were paid less than foreign ditch-diggers; but then, which of the men remained in the Service for money? He ran his mind over half a dozen fellows in the Agricultural Department who had increased the nation's wealth by hundreds of millions a year. They were working at salaries less than a Wall Street Junior clerk or office girl. The question of salary didn't come in as an argument. That could be dismissed. But there was the bitter fact, he was accomplishing absolutely nothing by continuing the struggle, nothing more than a woman yoked to a Silenus hoping to reform him when he daily grew worse under her eyes. The Government had blocked him. The party had blocked him. What was the pith of it all, anyway?Should those who had the power be given the legal right to take what they cared to seize? It was the same old question that had split every country up into revolution. And closest of all, keenest of all arguments, the new influence that had come into his life, possessing it, obsessing it. He might put her out of his thoughts as a possibility. That would not dull the edge of his own hunger. By staying on he barred all possibility of ultimate happiness, perhaps her happiness: yet, if he abandoned the fight for right, he would be unworthy of her. Sooner or later she would know, and, though she might remain mute, was she the one to make semblance of what she did not feel? If the light died from her eye, it would die from his life. He was not a Silenus to guzzle hog-like over husks when the life had gone. Besides—Wayland laughed aloud—the idea of her nature permitting a Silenus near enough to breathe the same atmosphere that she breathed was inconceivable. There was one chance—one chance only—Get the issue before the People, squarely, fairly, openly before the People; awaken the People; mass the law of the snow flake to the mighty rush of the avalanche; let the People know, force the People to pronounce the verdict. Wayland thought of Bat inside the cabin—, and laughed bitterly. He rose and began pacing the edge of the Ridge. There he was, back in the old hopeless circle.
Her touch had wrapped him in a vision world; but across the clearness of the vision now somehow obtruded the quiet cynicism, the genial scoff of the Senator's arguments, leaving fierce physical unrest and confused cross-currents of desire. A mist seemed to blurr all life. The hemlocks no longer chanted riotous gladness. There was a dirge to-night of futility, monotonous age-old eons of useless effort, the useless fall of the forest giant to the dry rot of slug and insect. It was as if Wayland's spirit stood back and listened to the conflicting contentions of two other men, the one who wanted to breast the stream and the one who wanted to go with the current; one full of blind, red-blood courage, the other full of cold white-corpuscled argument; one a zealous sportsman playing the game for the game's zest, the other a quitter because he foresaw no gain.
Not a doubt of it; it was a doleful business, this being stuck half-way up between heaven and earth cut off from everything but renunciation.Why, was he doing it? What was to be gained? It would have surprised Wayland if he had disentangled out of his own weltering thoughts the fact that he had never weighedgainas an argument before Moyese talked. He had never known the coward's fear of loss. What was it they had said to him? 'Blocked at every turn,'—'Has your boasted Federal Government taken any action?'—'This is the Service you are loyal to,'—'Who of the public gives one damn for right or wrong?' Had it really come to that? Was that the seat of the trouble? Did the public care? 'Go lean frying fat for posterity?' All those voices strident, scoffing; then, part of the night's voiceless voices, that other undertone—'Nothing accomplished without somebody fighting a losing battle,'—'What so heroic about a fighter more or less going down beaten?' It was nothing heroic at all unless you happened to be the fighter. And what was the sense of accepting a challenge to a losing battle? 'I want a man who can fight like the Devil.' Well, that was what the whole world wanted—always had needed and wanted; and he and hundreds of other Government fellows were applicants for just such a fighting job. What was it that comical old sermonizing duffer had ranted about? Oh, yes! If the Devil (of course, there wasn't a Devil), if the Devil came tempting to-day 'twould be such a place as this.' 'Etches, he would proffer as of old,' 'the biggest gamble of all,' 'play for the biggest stake outside of Hell,' 'The Fate . . . of the Land . . . with all Time looking on . . . since ever Time began,' 'all the World looking on . . . asking . . . keep sacred as the Covenant of God . . . The stakes I'd play for . . . if I were young . . . I'd up . . . I'd up . . . I'd up . . . stripped naked of very hold-back . . . I'd hurl the lie in the teeth of a scoffing world. I'd hurl y'r traitor leaders huckstering the land's good for silver. . . . Fight . . . right . . . might . . . I'd paint the words in letters of blood till they awakened the land. . . . I'd fight . . . fight . . . fight till they had to kill every man of my kind before I'd down . . .'
The old man had been like the storm wind of the mountains hurling off the dead leaves of thought. Wayland paused in his pacing. The opal peak emerged from pearl gray cloud wrack; a silver cross, translucent, unreal, luminous, a thing of dreams winged with silver light beneath a solitary star, eternal as God. And the night wind through the pines, that had sounded so doleful but a moment before, became the jubilant clicking of countless castanets, the castanets of the long pine needles, sounding a triumphant chant to the touch of invisible hands.
Wayland stopped pacing. He almost stopped thinking. The consciousness, the realizing sense of her presence, of her touch, of a something more than her touch, of her being enveloping his in some ethereal fire, went over the Ranger in fiercely tender flood tides; this time, not in tumultuous confused desire, but in waves of strength, in visions from which the mists had vanished, daring that laughed with gladness over life. There were no longer two Waylands in conflict, with one sneering and looking on. "A house divided against itself shall fall." There was only one, with the blood of mothers in his veins, whelmed by a consciousness that reached back far as the consciousness of the race. Somehow, his simple manhood, the inheritance in his blood of men and women, who had loved, fused the conflict of his nature to a singleness of purpose and won peace now.
What he said was: "Come on, my friend, the enemy! I'm right here on the job; nailed, you bet, long as she does it! Just to come alive is worth being crucified."
"Hullo," bawled a towsled head through the cabin window. "Aren't you going to turn in? It's exactly twelve o'clock! Darn it all! Don't make a sleep-walking Lady Macbeth tragedy out of it! Chuck the bally thing and come on down to the Valley! Why do you waste your life pretending you are Providence steering the whole earth? Chuck it, Dickie! If you were in town, I'd give you a cocktail! Got anything up here?"
Wayland went to sleep to dream one of those dreams that envelop day with rain-bow mist. He dreamed that the amethyst gates of the sun had swung ajar flooding life with countless charioteers each carrying a golden spear, and as they advanced over the clouds to earth, all the little purple heather bells that had hung their heads during the night to keep out the dew, all the waxy chalices of the winter-greens pale and faint with passion, all the bells nodding to the wind, began ringing—ringing ten thousand golden bells; and the painter's brush, multicolored dazzling knee-deep in the Alpine meadows, flaunted countless torches of carmine flame to welcome back the day. Then, suddenly, it wasn't a sound of bells at all. It was her voice, her voice with the golden note and the liquid break that came when he had surprised Love in her eyes; and it wasn't the warmth of the Sun's fan-shaped shafts at all; it was the warmth of her lips in the face of the picture she had promised—the face above "the Warrior." When he awakened, a sprig of everlasting that he had stuck in the band of his Alpine hat had blown across his face.
Watch a snow flake as it falls! Gentle is too rough a word for the motion. It floats, a crystal cob-web shot with the glint of sun-jewels; tangible but melting to your touch, evanescent and translucent as light; conceived of the wind that bloweth where it listeth and the gossamer clouds of a vague somewhere.
Waveringly, noiselessly, so noiselessly it comes that you do not catch the rustling flutter with your ear, but with a sixth sense of motion. And it transforms, bewitches, beautifies what it touches. I suppose if such an evanescent thing were told that it and it alone had been the age-old, time-immemorial sculptor of the granite rocks; that it and it alone—to paraphrase the words of the scientists—had rolled away the door from the sepulchers of the eternal rocks and turned a planet into a sensate earth pulsing with growth—I suppose if a snow flake were told such heresy, it would die of its own amaze.
This,aproposof nothing in particular, unless you happen to understand from the catagory of your own experiences.
It was her first love-letter; and, because she did not know she was writing a love-letter she wrote out of the fulness of an overflowing heart. Also the hour was the precise hour when consciousness of her presence had gone over Wayland in flood tides of fierce tenderness. That may have been a mere coincidence. I set it down because such coincidences daily touch life.
Here is the letter.
Twelve O'clock.
Are you a 'vision fugitive,' O Ranger Man? Do you know that I have seen you less than ten times and really known you less than a month? Is it a dream? What happened? I did not mean to do it. I did not want it. I did not ask it. Why has it come? You said 'best gifts came unasked; perhaps, they also go unsent!' This one can never go, Dick. I've been weaving it in and out for three whole hours, (no, notthinking, Ithinkof other people,) weaving it in and out of every strand of me. I know now I have been waiting for it a billion years; ages and ages ago when you and I were cave people or desert runners like the 20,000 B. C. skeleton in the British Museum; and in the shuffle of atoms, we got apart. We shall never stray again; for I have locked last night in my heart. Yesterday I could look up at the Mountain, and what I saw was the snow cross, cold and far away. To-night I look up. The Mountain is still there but not the same—what I feel is—you; and you are not far away. I am warm with happiness, delirious when I let myselfstopthinking.
I have tried to sleep but cannot. Your old Mountain has been talking again. I can see the Cross here from my window and the lone star above the peak; and I know that you see too. If I touched the telephone, I might speak to you; but I can write more frankly than I'd ever have courage to speak, and I must say it. It is all tumult. I do not understand, but Hope is strumming her strings—I hear them every time the wind comes down from the Ridge. Here is the Watts' 'Happy Warrior,' and Dick—listen—I didn't mean it as a token when I offered to send it up. I meant it as a rallying cry; but now that you take it as a token, I can't say that it isn't; only I really didn't mean to push you over the edge of things as I did. I didn't mean to go over the edge myself. If I had heard Senator Moyese talk, I couldn't have been so childish and ignorant. It was like urging you to jump a precipice and break your neck. I know now what the fight means. It isn't just the Valley. It's the Nation. I hadn't any right to let my (here a word was crossed and blotted) feeling shove you over. Yet if you jump yourself, I'll not pull a gossamer thread to draw back. I haven't any right.
You know how it has always been with me—whisked away to the convent at Quebec when I was four, sent to that New York finishing school to get what Father called 'world-sense knocked into my religion.' Well, they were knocks all right. Then England and Switzerland and my Father's orders to come back, and how lonely and apart he always seems. I don't understand. What did Moyese mean to-night when he spoke of 'bow-and-arrow aristocracy'? Will you believe me that is the first I have ever heard of it? Who is Calamity? Will you tell me if you know? Why are we so apart from all the people of the Valley? What is a 'squaw man'? When I think, I am afraid for having let you become so interwoven. I did not mean to. It is wholly my fault. The thoughts I hardly knew myself must have been weaving up into this. They often do. Father and Mr. Williams leave at daybreak for the Upper Pass. I did not mean to write so much, but our old Mountain has come from under a cloud. Anyway, I had to explain, no, I mean write. Explanations never do explain; but here's the picture of 'The Warrior.'
"E. MacD."
Going to the French window of her bedroom, Eleanor called down to old Calamity's room below. To her surprise, the half-breed woman on the instant poked her head above the balcony railing of the basement quarters.
"Going to the Ridge to-morrow, Calamity?"
"Oui, Mademoiselle, surement," pattered Calamity softly in that Cree patois which is neither French nor Indian.
"Then, take this up to Mr. Wayland, please!"
As she withdrew to her room, Eleanor became conscious that she could not remember a day since she had come back to the Valley when the Cree half-breed had not been within call or sight. The girl suddenly pressed both hands to her eyes. What had Moyese meant?
Once among the pillows, she fell into the life-bathing sleep of the great mountain ozone-world. Was it a dream; or had Calamity come stealing through the French window to stand at the foot of her bed? Waking to a burst of sunlight across her face, Eleanor could not tell in the least whether the memory of the half-breed woman standing in the shadows were dream or reality. The sun was coming over the Rim Rocks in a fan-shaped shield of spear shafts; and every single shaft wafted down thoughts that refused to lie quiet. Shafts that have a trick of turning your heart into a target can't be shut out by armor proof.
Daylight restored her poise. Her first instinct was to recall the letter; but Calamity had already set off for the Ridge. The thought hardly took form, but the shadow haunted her. If It were true, he would surely never let her work round the ranch houses of the Valley. Breakfast passed as usual, alone in the big raftered dining room after the ranch hands had gone, the lame German cook for the camp wagons hobbling in and out with the dishes. Stage had passed long since and the mail lay at her place, where the German had spread a white square above the oilcloth of the long bench table; but letters and papers remained unopened.
Perhaps, after all, those midnight thoughts had been morbid as midnight thoughts often are. It might be that the Valley was apart from them, not they apart from the Valley. Who were the neighbors from whom her father stood aside? There was the Senator in the white house across the River. Well, the Senator spent the most of his time in Smelter City forty miles away, and in Washington. Then, there were the Williams of the Mission House with their only boy and eighty or a hundred Indian children; gentlefolk keeping up the amenities of refined life, spreading the contagion of beautiful example like an irrigation plot widening slowly over arid sage brush. Surely her father was held in esteem by them; and they stood for all that was best in the Valley. Below the ranch houses came what was known as "the English Colony," a scattering of young bachelors playing at ranching, whose rendezvous was the pretty Swiss chalet known as "the Rookery," where a wonderful little young-old lady with red wig and hectic flush dispensed lavish hospitality and canned music and old port behind the eminent respectability of a stool-pigeon in the person of a card-loving husband. The lady's husband called himself "colonel." The Valley called him one of those "no-good Englishmen"; but the Valley may have been mistaken; for even to the ranch house had come tales of outraged honor in the person of the "no-good husband" bursting in on games of cards with wild charges which only the payment of big money could suppress—suppress you understand, purely for the sake of the lady: outraged honor could accept no atonement. Then the lady would flit for the winter to those beauty doctors of Paris and New York, who operate on wrinkles and lay up muniments for fresh campaigns; and the "colonel" would betake himself to resorts where balm is accorded wounded honour; while loose-mouthed, simple-eyed young fellows went East for the winter lighter as to purse, wiser as to the ways of paying for pleasure. Altogether, it was not surprising her father kept apart from "the English Colony," Eleanor reflected. She passed out to the piazza spanning all sides of the ranch house.
It was a sun-bathed, sun-kissed, sun-fused world. The River flowed liquid silver jubilant and singing. The morning mists rolled up primrose spangled with jewels, while over all lay such light as hypnotized the senses into a sort of dazzled dream world. Ashes of roses! There were no ashes here. It was the rose, itself; a world veiled in gold mist, wind-blown, flame-fired of joy, little cressets of fire edging every ridge. The sheep browsing in the Valley, the fleece-clouds herding mid the winds of the upper peaks, you hardly knew which shone whiter. The burnished mountain with its silver cross and wings of light, opal about the peaks, melting in fading lines about the base, with the middle distances lost in gashed purple shadows, might have been a thing of airy fancy. So might the dark forested Ridge where the evergreens stood sentinels among wisps of cloud. And everywhere, all pervasive, sifting through the shadows of silvered pine needles and trembling poplars, permeated the cinnamon smell of the barky forest world, resinous of balsam, spicy with the tang of life.
She could see the mountain streams where they laughed down the Ridge in wind-tattered spray. With the glass, too, she could see a little blue wreath of man-made smoke curling up from the evergreens; and waves of happiness, absurd warm glowing happiness, broke over her, the sheer gladness of being alive. Whatever sinister thing kept her father apart, it was here she belonged—she knew it now—to the great spacious life-stimulating West; to the world resinous with imprisoned sunbeams; not to the lands of sky shut out by twenty story roofs and pea-soup fogs and sickly anaemic views of life. Life was good. She drank of it and called it good as in creation's prime.
Once she called Central up on the telephone. Central answered that the Ridge line had been cut. Such duties as men's hands could not do round ranch houses, she finished in a dream, turning with a touch the house into a home; flowers for the middle of the big table, dishes pitchforked down replaced in order, corner cobwebs speared with a duster on a broom, Navajo rugs uncurled and squared, stale cooking expelled from littered shelves, flies pursued to the last ditch, breaks in the mosquito wire round the piazza tacked up, heaps of mended socks and overalls sent out to the bunk house for the ranch hands, milk cans buried—it had always been one of the absurdities she was going to reform, that people used canned milk in a cow country; but, unfortunately, the obstacle to that reform was that cows could not be milked on horseback.
After mid-day meal, she ensconced herself in a steamer chair on the piazza facing the mountain; but her book lay face downward. It was a book on coniferous trees. She had thought the Valley monotonous when she had first come back. Now she knew it never remained the same for two whole hours. The dazzling white of morning had given place to the yellow glow of afternoon. The River that had flowed quicksilver now swept seaward pure amber rilled with gold. The fleece clouds herded by wandering winds had massed to towering cumulus where the sheet lightnings played; and the Mountain where the silver snow-cross had glistened in the morning seemed to have changed perspective, to have retreated and withdrawn to a weird upper world. You no longer saw the wind-blown cataracts. Purpling shadows, palpable sabling mournful ghost-forms, folded and wrapped the Ridge with here and there shafts of slant light, yellow as bars of gold. You could no longer hear the rampant roar of streams disimprisoned from snow by mid-day sun. With the slant light came the sibilant hush, the quiet tangible.
She reclined very still in the steamer chair. Life and love and mystery wrapped her round, the great reverie of the race, the ecstasy of devotees that sent to death and crusade in the Middle Ages, the lovelight of life brooding warm and radiant. She no longer saw the shining pageant of sunlight on the argent fields of an infinite universe; the sparks and spangles of light in silver cataracts; a world veiled in gold mist, flame-fired of joy, little cressets of rose edging every sky-line. She was possessed, obsessed, bathed, enveloped in a flame of new life. If she thought at all, 'twas in the symbol of the old Apostle, "in Him we live and move and have our being." She recalled that God had been defined in the consciousness of the race as Love. Deep draughts of new existence whelmed her. No longer life coursed somnolent through unconscious veins. Life ran riotous of gladness tingling to a living joy so poignant it became pain. Was it fool-joy born of swifter pulse and time-old inheritance in the flesh? Was it the rhapsody of self-hypnotism, which ancients would have called vision? Of such dreams does creation spring full born and enfleshed. Of such dreams does heroism laugh at death. Of such dreams does life invest the daily round with rain-bow mist, with the spectrum gamut of all the colors that blend to the pure white light of daily life. As a lense splits up light, so love had brought out the hidden colors of existence, of eternity; as she dreamed, eternity itself seemed short.
Then came the restlessness that had shaken Wayland on the Ridge the night before, the fire that tests the vessel; and whether the life go to pieces depend on whether the vessel be both strong and clean. Yet she was not afraid. She remembered their talk the night before of the snow flake falling to the same law as the avalanche; and was she not also a part of the Great Law?
She knew he could not be free till six. She must not go up to the Ridge. Last night, she had gone heedlessly. She could never go so again. Then, she realized why the Missionary's wife had linked her fate with Williams'—a frail bit of china putting itself to the coarse uses of earthenware—washing, scrubbing, sandpapering three generations of morals and bodies to make an ideal real. It was Wayland who had first described Mrs. Williams in that metaphor: "a piece of Bisque or Dresden," he had said, "and what those lousy Indians need is a wooden wash tub with lots of soft soap." Then, she wanted to see Mrs. Williams, to study her with this new knowledge.
A picket fence in imitation of a home in the East ran round the Mission House. Pitiful attempts at gardening lined the gravel entrance, periwinkle dried up in the blazing Western sun, sickly scented geraniums that shrivelled to the night frost, altheas that did better but refused to bloom. "They don't transplant East to West, any better than they do West to East. Better follow the Senator's advice and domesticate our Western ones." Then, the whimsical thought came perhaps that was what her father had done with her.
The drone of a man's voice from the Mission Parlor surprised her; forMr. Williams had gone off with her father to the Upper Pass.
"Here is Miss Eleanor, herself! We were just speaking about you,Eleanor! This is an old friend of your father's, Mr. Matthews fromSaskatchewan!"
A little woman in gray drew Eleanor inside the Mission Parlor, a little woman with a white transparent skin trenched by lines of care, but somehow, when you looked twice, they were lines of beauty chiseled by time. She was garbed in gray and her hair was almost white, but, from the first time Eleanor had looked at her hands, the girl wanted to kiss and cover them with her own—they were such beautifully kept hands but so gnarled and misshapen with toil. There had been only one child; but there were eighty Indian children in the Mission School. Had the love dream paid toll for such toil—Eleanor had asked herself when first she had seen the Missionary's wife. Now she knew that, whether the love dream paid toll or not, love would do and was doing the same thing time without end and everywhere.
Then, she became aware of the massive form of a man topped by an enormous head of white hair rising in links and hinges from a chair in the corner till his figure towered above the little woman.
"So this—is Eleanor—MacDonald? Well, well, well!"
He was shaking hands at each word. "A knew your grandfather well. Many's the time we have raced the dogtrains down MacKenzie River an' the canoes down the Saskatchewan! 'Twas your grandfather set the bagpipes skirling when Governor Simpson used to come galloping down the Columbia in the forties with his paddlers splitting the wind, a dark fearsome man, child, but a brave one, tho' his heart was hard as his hand, and his hand was iron—Bras de Fer, Arm of Iron, the Indians called him; for his left hand, he lost in a duel; and his false hand was a true hand of iron metal that made many a lazy voyageur bite the dust. Bless me, but you are a MacDonald to your dainty feet—" holding her off from him at arm's length. "Eyes true to pedigree, and the curly hair, and the short upper lip, the only one of all the MacDonalds that's kept the race type. 'Tis good to see you! A'm right glad to see you! A'm gladder than you know-"
Eleanor did not wait for any second thought. "And did you know my mother's people, too?"
The old man sat back in his corner. "No, A cannot say A did! A had left the Company an' was building railway bridges in the Rockies when your father left Canada."
She felt the hot flush mount.
"Such an absurd thing, Eleanor," Mrs. Williams was explaining. "Mr. Matthews came by the Holy Cross last night. Mr. Wayland told Calamity to show him which way to turn; and she sent him the wrong way, to the cow-boy camp, you know! He had to sleep out all night at our very door. Such a shame! That put him so late that he missed Mr. Williams. You know they have gone to the Upper Pass and can't possibly be back for weeks—excuse me, some of my school people seem to want me," and she flitted from the room. To Eleanor, her life seemed a constant flitting at the beck of bootless duties, nagging duties that only an expert time keeper of Heaven could credit.
"Yes! Sent me a mile along the road in the wrong direction—into a nest of mid-night birds. A nice bunch o' beauties, too, hatching some Devil plot to ruin the poor sheepmen! A man in a white vest was there, who by the same token didn't belong; tho' A'm no so sure he was any better than his company. They didn't seeme! A didna' just speak tothem, but A heard them plain enough,—'leave for the South at once;' and 'crowd 'em to beat Hell,' and 'send 'em over without a push' an' 'see that no harm comes to the boy'—Eh, why, what is the matter?"
Eleanor had sprung forward with white lips.
"It's Fordie! He's taking the sheep to the Rim Rocks with the Mexican herders. Don't frighten his mother! It may not be too late! He may not have reached the Rim—"
"Let's telephone that Ranger fellow?"
Then, it all dawned on her, the deadly, suave, incredibly malicious pre-planned thing!
"The wires had been cut since morning," she said.
They did not tell the boy's mother.
The German cook hitched the fastest bronchos to the yellow buckboard with the front wheel brake; and, the old frontiersman flourishing the reins, they had whisked off for the Ridge trail before Mrs. Williams could return to the Mission Parlor.
"The Ranger will be able to tell whether the sheep have passed down theRidge," she explained.
The old man caught the light on her face as she spoke the name. It was like the flash in the dark that betrays a diamond, or the scintilla of light through the leaves that tells of an Alpine lake; but he made no comment except to the ponies.
"Go it, little ones! Make time! Split the wind! Show y'r heels! Tear the air to tatters! there!" And he whirled the whip with the skill of all the old Adam stirring within him, while the buckboard went forward with a bounce.
"We can't take the wagon up yon Ridge trail—"
"No, but I can climb straight up and not mind the switch back, if you'll wait."
He muttered some commonplace about "true Westerner;" and, springing out, she had gone scrambling up the slope avoiding delay of the zig-zag by climbing almost straight.
Quizzically, the old man gazed after her; the first hundred feet were easy, a mossed slope with padded foot-hold. Then came steep ground slippery with pine needles; but the mountain laurel and ground juniper gave hand grip; and she swung herself up past the third tier of the switch back where the Ridge arose a rock face and trees with two notches and one blaze marked the lower bounds of the National Forests. Here he saw her run along the bridle trail marked by one notch and one blaze: then, she was swinging over moraine slopes to the fifth bench of the trail. There she disappeared round a jut of rock—he remembered a mountain spring trickled out at this place bridged by spruce poles. Then he noticed that the cumulous clouds which had been flashing sheet lightning all afternoon, were massing and darkening and lowering closer over the Valley, with zig-zag jags of live fire down to the ground and sounds more like the crack of a whip or splinter of wood than thunder. The cliff swallows dipped almost to the grass; and the flowers were hanging their heads in miniature umbrellas. All the trembling poplars and cotton-woods seemed to be furled waiting. Then, the lower side of the slate clouds frayed in the edge of a sweepy garment to sheets and fringes of rain. A little tremor ran through the leaves. The horses laid back their ears.
"We'll get it," said the old man tightening the reins.
She had paused for breath round the buttress of a gray crag when she noticed the churn of yeasty blackness blotting out the Valley and felt the hushed heat of the air. A jack rabbit went whipping past at long bounds. The last rasp of a jay's scold jangled out from the trees. Then, she heard from the hushed Valley, the low flute trill of a blue bird's love song. Ever afterwards, either of those bird notes, the scurl of the jay or the golden melody of the blue warbler, brought her joyous, terrible thoughts, too keen to the very quick of being for either words or tears; for a horseman had turned the crag leading his broncho. It was the Ranger in his sage green Service suit wearing a sprig of everlasting in his Alpine hat.
"Why, I've been trying to get you by telephone all day," he said, "but the wires are cut—"
In the light of the sudden strength on his face, she forgot the brooding storm, the impending horror.
"Has Fordie brought the sheep down?"
"Yes, ages ago; he passed at noon with the whole bunch, fifteen thousand of 'em, strung along the trail from the top of the Ridge to the bottom. Don't you see how they skinned every branch? That's why the cattlemen hate 'em! Ford will be on the Rim Mesas now. Why; anything wrong?"
She did not remember till afterwards how it was she had met both his hands with her own as she repeated the old frontiersman's report. She knew, if time stopped and storm split the welkin, it would be all the same. She felt the heat hush come up from the Valley, felt the quivering pause of the waiting air, the noiseless flutter of the foliage, the awed quiet, then the exquisite tingling pain of her own being,—
"Eleanor, look at me! Look in my eyes! Look up at me—"
She felt the rush of her being to meet and blend and fuse in the flame of his love. Then, she looked up. His eyes drank hers in one poised moment of delirious recognition, of tempestuous tenderness. The world swam out of ken. All but the fluted melody of the blue bird; and she knew they must always sound together, the trill and the rasp, the blue bird and the jay, the true and the false, love and its counterfeit.
"We go into this fight together," he said very quietly, "And forever!" He placed the sprig of everlasting in her hand. "You can count me on the firing line."
Then he had thrown the reins over his broncho's neck, headed the horse back up the Ridge and was slithering down the steep slope giving her hand-hold as of steel-springs. So short was the interval, it could not be measured in time. Yet it had rivetted eternity. She saw the rolling clouds of ink writhing up the Valley turning everything to blackness: yet she did not know it. The little flutter of air changed to whiplashes and puffs of wind that curled the black hair forward over her unhatted face in a frame. Wayland looked at her and felt his masterdom going to those same winds; for the pace had painted her ivory cheeks, not rose color, but the deep flame of the wild flower. Some day, perhaps,—no matter; he set his teeth and screwed the whipcord muscles taut; for the moraine stones had begun to roll, and there was a zig-zag flash of lightning that sent fire balls sizzling over the rock. He braced her to the leap down the steep sliding moraine, and felt the frenzy of joy from her touch.
"There! We took the jump together! You didn't push me over the edge of things," he said, as their feet touched the pine needle slope.
This time, the lightning came with a ripping splintering rocking echo.
"It's like Love and Life racing in the picture," she laughed back and they bounded into the buckboard, Wayland standing braced behind the seat, "to stop her kiting down the hill if we break loose," he said; she, forward with the driver, feet braced to the iron foot-rest, hands holding the seat-guard. Then, the brim of his felt hat flapping, the bronchos' ears laid back, necks craned out, the old man whirling the whip, they were off for the Rim Rocks. The breaking storm, the whipping winds, the wild pace, the rush of the fringed rain, seemed a part of the furious exaltation breaking the bounds of her own consciousness.
"Cross the ford, Sir," shouted the Ranger bending forward, "it's shorter than the bridge;" and her hair tossed in his face as the buckboard splashed into the River and bounced up the far side with hind wheels swaying.
"Are y' all right, there?" called the old driver over his shoulder.
"Stay with it," yelled Wayland, "straight ahead where the road cuts theRim Rocks."
"We're splitting the air all right," shouted the old man. "Ye mind y' talked of sawing air. Split it, man, an' y'll get somewhere."
Up a hummock, down a ravine, over a fallen log with a hurdle jump that threatened to break the buckboard's back.
"Are ye there yet?" called the old man.
"Split the wind, Sir," shouted Wayland; and the rig went rattling up the red earth road of the Rim Rocks not a wheel's width from the edge.
"We're leaving the storm behind; look back," she said.
Up the Valley swept the rains in a wall of whipped spray jagged by the zig-zag streaks of lightning.
"Hold on till we turn the next switch back," warned the Ranger. The buckboard wheeled a point as he spoke and the bronchos floundered to a fagged trot. They saw it coming: the rain wall, frayed at the edge to a fringe, the wind lashing their faces, the red rocks of the battlements jutting through the cloud wrack spectral and ominous. A toothed edge of rock above, then a belt of cloud cut by the darting wings of the countless swallows.
The trees of the Ridge across the Valley seemed to bend and snap. There was a funnelling roar, sucking up earth and air, trees and brushwood; whips and lashes and splintering crashes of rain and wind and jagged light-lines; the bronchos cowering against the inner wall of the trail. Then the funnelling wind tore the pinnacled rock tops clear of the billowing mist.
"There goes your hat, Sir," cried Wayland as the black felt went sailing down the precipice.
"What's that!" demanded the old man, springing from the seat and pointing upward with his whip.
Over the edge of the sky line, on the rimmed red battlements, jumping, jumping, jumping; as sheep jump at shearing time from the hot center to the cool outside, or over the backs of one another in winter cold, when the outer line jumps to the huddled center; came the herd in a gray woolly shapeless whirling mass! Shouts, cries, shrill bleatings, storm muffled bang, bang and thud of guns! Just for an instant, emerged from the mist on the skyline of the battlements the figure of a man in sheep-skin chaps, a riderless white horse, shadows of other men, the sheep in a living torrent pouring over into the nothingness of mist; then a boy, a little boy, riding hatless, craning far forward over the neck of his pinto pony, shouting, waving, screaming, trying to head the sheep back from the precipice edge!
"The dastard coward, blackguard Hell-hatched hounds!" roared the old man, shaking his impotent fist. Then he funnelled his hands and shouted the lad's name.
It happened in the twinkling of an eye. The man in the sheep-skin-chaps clubbed his rifle at the galloping pony. The pinto reared, flung back, pitched over the edge of the Rim Rocks. Then the cloud blot, earth and air sponged into the wet blur of a washed slate, shrieking furies of peltering rain, a roar of the hurricane wind, a blinding flash, the air torn to tatters! The cloud burst hurled down in sheets, the red clay road runnelling flood torrents. Wayland had caught her under shelter of the rock wall. The old man hurtled to the heads of the shivering bronchos, gripping both bridles. A splintering crash that rocketted from crag to crag and rumbled below their feet; and the thing was over quick as it had come. The funnelling whirl of clouds eddied over the Pass behind the Holy Cross Mountain; the opal peak radiant and dazzling above the Valley; the air a burst of yellow sunlight quivering in the smoking rain mist; the red battlement rocks above dripping and bare; and somewhere a song sparrow trilling to the tinkle of the subsiding waters. A roil of cloud rolled from below.
The sound came first, smothered and pain-piercing; then the old frontiersman had uttered something between a curse and a groan. She sprang from shelter and looked over the edge. Jumbled at the foot of the pinnacled red rocks heaved a writhing mass, a weltering maimed horror. On the outer edge, arms under head, face to sky, tossed backwards, lay the body of the boy beside the pinto pony, the neck of the horse broken under in the fall, the child pitched beyond the mass by the double turn of his falling horse.
For a moment none of the three uttered a word. She was trembling so that she could not speak. There were tears in the old man's eyes. To Wayland's face had come a look. It was like the blue flash of a pistol shot. The pupils of his eyes had focussed to pin points of fire. He moistened his lips.
"May Hell be both deep and hot!" he said.
It was the cry of the primal man beneath all the culture of the schools that disprove Hell; the cry of human red-blooded manhood against all the white-corpuscled sickly sentimentality that ever sacrifices innocence on the altar of guilt.
While the Law marked time, the swift feet of crime had not paused nor slackened pace. While the Law argued, learnedly, disputatiously, with the handing up and the handing down of inane decisions, Crime scored; and Who or What tallied? The men round the fire the night before in the cow-camp, the men of "the bunco game" had stacked cards and played trump; but unfortunately, they had jumbled the white-vested fighter's orders about the boy. The cattlemen had taken care of themselves after a code not honored by the law of nations.
Also, they had gone into the fight together: the one who saw the right but did not understand the fight; the one who understood the fight but sometimes lost his vision of the right; and the one who saw in the fight for right, not the quarrel of a Valley, or a Faction, or a Ring, but the saving of the Nation, the repudiation of a world lie, the welding of right and might into an eternal harmony.
For years, Eleanor could not let herself remember the details of that night. We like to persuade ourselves that by some miraculous chance, some trickery of fate, good may come in a vague somehow out of evil; contrary to the proofs from the beginning of time that good fruit never yet grew from evil seed. The girl was too honest for such fetish faith. She could not turn up the whites of her eyes in a pious resignation that it had been the will of God evil should triumph. So she shut out the details of the horror from mind's memory and set her teeth, knowing well that when lewd horrors triumph it is not because the God of the Universe is a fool but because the powers for right have not fought valiant as the powers for evil.
She remembered the Ranger had tossed a revolver to the old frontiersman and Matthews had gone tearing up the slippery clay of the Mesa road ripping out oaths of his unregenerate days that he would have "the scoundrels' scalps if he had to tear them off with his own hands." Somehow, Wayland had headed the draggled horses round on the narrow Rim Rock trail.
"Go down and break the news to his mother. I'll get the body," he had said; and she had driven the buckboard down with her foot on the wheel brake. Not a soul appeared around the Senator's place as she passed the white square of fenced buildings. All the mosquito doors were hooked. Everything looked deserted; branding irons lying in disorder round the k'raal. The River had swollen too turbulent for fording and she had crossed the white bridge—she remembered she had crossed at a gallop contrary to the little notice tacked on the board railing. Then, the horses steaming from rain had stopped in front of the Mission gate and Mrs. Williams had come out "wondering about Fordie in the storm." With her back to the waiting mother, Eleanor had spent an unconscionable time tying the ponies, trying to control her own trembling lips and threshing round for some way to tell the untenable. She remembered the roil of the raging waters, the floating star blossoms on the muddy swirl, the light sifting in beaten rain dust through the silver pine needles, the curve and dip of the joyous swallows. Then, she had followed the little white haired lady into the Mission Parlor.
Almost hysterically, that saying of an old profane writer came to mind, "God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb;" and all her inner being was shouting in rebellion "Does He, Does He?" Then she shut the door. She knew very well how she ought to have broken the news with the pious platitudes that everything is for the best, with the whitewashed lies that every damnable tragedy is a blessing in disguise, that every devil-dance of fool circumstance is beneficent design, that disease is really health in a mask and sin a joke, a misnomer, that crime is really a trump card up Deity's sleeve to play down some wonderful trick of good; but—was it the Indian strain in her blood back many generations? She could not mouthe the hollow mockery of such sophistries in the presence of Death.
"Eleanor—what is it? Why do your eyes look so strange?"
The little woman clasped both the girl's hands and gazed questioningly up in her face. At the same moment, she began to tremble. She tried to ask and faltered; a tremor pulsed in the upper lip. Then the grand-daughter of the man of the iron hand had gathered the little white haired lady in her arms as if to ward the blow.
"The outlaws drove Fordie over the Rim Rocks with the herd," she said.
"Is he dead? Is he dead?"
The little woman had drawn her body up its full height.
Eleanor tried to answer. The words would not come from her lips. She nodded. There again she had to shut the door of memory; for, when we break the news, it isn't the news we break; it's the news breaks us.
After what seemed an interminable quiet, Mrs. Williams was asking through dry tearless sobs:
"What does it all mean? Have we not given our whole lives to God? How could this thing happen—to an innocent child? There isn't any justice or right in this whole world."
"We mustnotbe quiescent any more, Mrs. Williams. We must fight. We have such a habit of letting things go, and things let go—go wrong. It isn't God's fault at all: it's us—us humans: it's our fault. Every one of us ought to have been ready to die to prevent crime; and we've been letting things go. We mustn't be quiescent any more. We must fight wrongs and evils. And much more;" the girl in tears, the little woman fevered, red-eyed, gazing with glazed look into dark spaces, kneading her clasped hands together. Once the door opened and the shawled head of the old half-breed woman poked in.
"Ford?" Calamity asked.
"Go 'way, Calamity," whispered Eleanor.
She saw the little woman rise slowly.
"He is murdered," Mrs. Williams said, "he is murdered just as truly as if Moyese had cut his throat with his own hand." It was not for months after, that Eleanor recalled the look on Calamity's face as the Indian woman heard those frenzied words. Then Mrs. Williams broke in uncontrollable sobbing. "Leave me! Go out—all of you. Leave me alone!"
Eleanor shut the door and led the dazed Indian children from the outer hall. In the Library, opposite the Mission Parlor, she found old Calamity sitting on the floor with the shawl over her head. The half-breed woman sat peering through the shawl as Eleanor lighted the hanging lamp. No Indian will mention the name of the dead. She fastened her eyes on Eleanor, snakily, sinister, never shifting her glance.
"What is it, Calamity?"
"Is dat true? Senator man he keel heem—keel leetle boy?" she asked slowly.
Eleanor thought a moment.
"Yes, it is entirely true," she said, never heeding the import of her words to the superstitious mind of the Indian woman.
A little hiss of breath came from the crouching form. She rose, drew the shawl round her head and at the door, turned.
"Dey take mine," she said, "and now dey keel heem, an' white man, he yappy—yappy—yappy; not do—not do any t'ing! He send for Mount' P'lice, mabee no do anyt'ing unless Indian man . . . he keel." The little hiss of breath again and a cunning mad look in the eyes.
"Go 'way Calamity! Go home to our ranch house!"
By and by, came Wayland. She knew why he had come after dark, carrying the slender body against his shoulder. A white handkerchief had been thrown over the face; and she saw that he held the arms tightly to hide the fact that both had been broken in the fall. The rains had matted the curly hair and brought a strange rose glow to the cheeks. There again—Eleanor had to shut the doors of memory; for they had carried him in together. The wind was not tempered to the shorn lamb; and it is the living, not the dead, who beat against the Portals of Death.
They kept watch together, she and Wayland, in the Library across from the closed door of the Mission. Parlor, black-eyed Indian urchins peeping furtively from the head of the stairs till bells rang lights out. Then silence fell, stabbed by the creak of floor, the swing of door, the click and rustle of the cotton wood leaves outside.
There was a slight patter of rain-drip from the eaves somewhere. A gate swung to the wind; and, from across the hall, they could hear the driven footsteps pacing up and down the parlor. Then, the drip,—drip,—was broken by longer blanks, and stopped. The cotton wood leaves ceased to rustle and flutter. Only the twang of the night hawk's wing hummed through the stillness; and the distracted tread no longer paced the Mission Parlor. When Eleanor came back from across the hall, she shut the Library door softly.
"She is praying," she said.
Wayland had been extemporizing a morris chair into a lounge with his Service coat for a pillow. He threw a navajo rug across. Then, he faced her. The look of masterdom had both hardened and softened. She did not know that the hunger-light of her own face hardened that hardness; and she gazed through the darkened window to hide her tears. He stood beside her with his arms folded. A convulsive shudder shook her frame. Wayland tightened his folded arms. Sympathy is so easy. The sense of her nearness, of her trust, of the warm living fire of her love was pushing him not over the precipice but into the battle, out beyond the firing line. What did one man matter in this big fight anyway? They heard the sibilant hush of the River flood-tide; and the warm June dark enveloped them as in a caress. They could see the sheet lightning glimmer on the bank of cumulous clouds behind the Holy Cross. The humming night-hawk, up in the indigo of mid-heaven, uttered a lonely, far, fading call, as of life in flight; and a rustle of wind, faint as the brushing of moth wings, passed whispering into silence.
"You don't really think death is the end of all, do you?" she asked.
Wayland could not answer. If she had looked, she would have seen his face white and his eyes shining with a strange new light. He drew back a little in the dark of the window casement, with his hand on the sill. It touched hers and closed over it. Then, somewhere from the dark came a night-sound heard only in June, the broken dream-trill of a bird in its sleep. When she spoke, her voice was low, keyed as the dream-voice from the dark.
"Where did the spray of flowers you gave me come from?"
"Sprig I'd stuck in my hat band."
"Was that all? Didn't you mean to tell me more?"
"It's a pearl everlasting blossom," answered Wayland.
She waited. He heard the slow ticking of his own watch.
"I was dreaming of your face," he blundered out, "and when I wakened, the thing had blown down on—the hammock." It was a clumsy subterfuge; and he knew that her thought meeting his half-way divined his dream.
The wind passed whispering into silence. He felt the quiver of the pine needles outside, trembling to the touch of wind and night. The sense of her nearness, of her trust, of the warm living fire of her love swept over him unstemmed; and, when she turned and looked in his eyes, he caught her in his arms and held her there with a fierce tenderness, her face thrown back, the veins of her throat pulsing to the touch of wind and night, her lips parted, her lashes hiding her eyes.
"Tell me that you are mine," he whispered.
She did not answer for a moment. Then she lifted her eyes. He drank their light as a thirsty man might drink waters of life. Neither spoke. The rustling wind passed whispering. The June dark enveloped them in the warm caress of the night. By the dim flare of the library lamp he saw her lips trembling.
"Tell me," he commanded.
"Do I need to tell you?"
"Yes, yes! I must have a seal of memory for the dark future," and his tongue poured forth such utterances as he had not dreamed men could use but in prayer. "I must know from your own lips."
He felt the tremor, felt the two hands rise to frame his face, felt the catch and take of breath, heard the broken notes of gold.
"Then, take it," she said.
He bent over her lips in an exquisite torture that could neither give nor take enough till she struggled to free herself, when he crushed her the closer, and kissed the closed eyes and the forehead and the hair and the pulsing throat. Then he opened his arms.
She sank on the morris chair and hid her face in her hands. They neither of them spoke nor heard very much but the pounding of their own hearts. Wayland gazed out in the dark at the shiny flood-tides of the river. She had not meant—she had meant always to be free; she had not meant to mingle her life currents in the destiny of others.
The door opened suddenly. It was old Calamity, red-shawled and stooping.
"Missa Vellam say not for vait no longer, Mademoiselle! She aw' right.She say t'ank you now for to go home!"
Eleanor rose with a shuddering sigh
"Come then, Calamity," she said.
Wayland walked with her to the ranch house, the old half-breed woman pattering behind. The gray dawn-light lay on the river mistily. At the gate, she turned.
"Has Mr. Matthews come back yet, Calamity?"
Calamity gave a vigorous shake of her head.
"I am going up to the Rim Rocks at once to see what's become of him. Go on in, Calamity; I want to speak to Miss MacDonald! Forgive me," he pleaded. "I had no right. I have no right to anything till I have cleaned up this damnable hell-work. I must not leave duty till I have fought this thing out; and I must not drag you in; but I wanted—" he paused; "I couldn't help it."
She trembled, but she took refuge in neither the subterfuge nor the pretence of the Eastern woman.
"It was yours," she said.
Wayland's eyes flashed their gratitude. "It's so God-blessed beautiful, Eleanor; it's so wonderfully beautiful I mustn't spoil it with my man hands! I couldn't believe it true without the memory you've given me; but you must keep me in line! Now that I have that memory in my heart I'll drink it, and hike for the firing line! My place isn't here; you must never let me break my resolution again."
"I never will," interrupted Eleanor.
"We've got to fight this thing to the last ditch! If the innocent may be done to death by our law makers; if murder can be planned and carried out unpunished; there's an end to our democracy! Last year it was a little school teacher strangled down in the Desert; nobody punished, because that would have interfered with a voting gang on election day. This year, it's Fordie.If these crimes had been committed under a monarchy, the people would have tanned the hide of the king into boot leather! Last year it was the little school teacher. This year it's Fordie. Tomorrow, it may be any man, woman or child in the Valley. If they'd keep their crimes among their own kind, there would be some excuse for this let-alone policy; but when freedom to do what a man likes means freedom to push crime into your life and mine, freedom to deprive others of freedom, it's time the Nation jumped on somebody! We've got to fight this damnable thing to the last ditch, Eleanor!"