But for all that the outlaws seemed hard pressed, they succeeded in keeping ahead. The velvet dark of the night in the arroyo had given place to a sickly saffron dawn. Where the cut-way widened and lost itself in an alkali sink, the hoof prints of the fugitives' horses led out again to the open country of gray torrid earth dotted by sage brush and greasewood. The yellow sky met the ochre panting earth in a tremulous heat mist of wavering purple; and against that sky line, a swirl of dust marked the receding figures of the riders.
"There they go, Wayland! It's a case of who lasts out now! If we can only keep pushing them ahead, this heat wull do the rest."
The old man shaded his eyes as he gazed across the desert dawn.
"Queer way y'r mountains here keep shiftin' an' mufflin' an' meltin' their lines! They're here one minute about a mile away, then as you look, they've a trick of movin' back! That dust against the sky line is about ten miles off as A make it in this high rare air; an' they're goin' mighty slow! We've played 'em out."
"Yes; but they have played us out! Let us get off and have breakfast. If that small wren coming out of the cactus could speak, it might tell us where to find water."
They had camped one noon hour at a Desert pool beneath a cottonwood, where the putrid carcass of a dead ox polluted air and water. The Ranger whittled the cottonwood branches for a small chip fire, and he boiled enough water to fill the skin bag for the next day's travel; but a high wind was blowing, restless, nagging, gusty, pelting ash dust in their eyes, and not to lose the trail, they had pressed on through the sweltering heat of mid-day. Wayland's muscles had begun to feel hardened to the dryness of knotted whip cords. His skin had bronzed swarthy as an Indian's. He was beginning to rejoice in the vast spacious relentless Desert with its fierce struggle of life against death; the cactus, the greasewood, the brittle sage brush, all matching themselves against the heat-death. Was there a thing, beast or bush, not armed with the fangs of protection and onslaught? Wayland looked at his leather coat. It had been jagged to tatters by thorn and spine. Silent, too; the struggle was silent and insidious and crafty as death. Who could guess where the water-pools lay beneath the dry gravel beds; or why the cactus fortified its storage of moisture in bristling spear points; the greasewood and pinon with thorns and resin; the sage brush with a dull gray varnish that imprisoned evaporation? The very crust above the earth of ash and silt conspired to hide the trail of wolf and cougar; and wolf and cougar, wren and condor, masked in colors that hid their presence. Twice Wayland had almost stumbled on a wolf sitting motionless, gray as the ash, watching the horsemen pass; pass where? Was it down the Long Trail where the tracks all point one way? Yet the fierceness, the craft, the relentless cruelty of the silent struggle matched his own mood. He felt the stimulus of the high dry sun-fused tireless air. He began to understand why the Desert prophets of the East, who camped on sand plains rimmed round and round by an unbroken sky line, had been the first of the human race to grasp the idea of the Oneness of God. And was it not the Desert prophets, who had preached a God relentless as he was merciful; and the retribution that was fire? Well, Wayland ruminated, who should say that they were wrong? If the God who created the Desert, was the God of life; but there, his thought had been broken by coming on the withered carcass beside the yellow pool.
"They can't keep going on in this heat! We'll run 'em down if we can only keep going," Wayland had said; as they set out again in the blistering wind; but to his dying day, he will never forget the traverse of the Desert in that mid-day sun. To his dying day he will never see the spectrum colors of white light split by a prism, or the spectrum colors of a child's soap bubble, without living over the tortures of that afternoon, for the air, whipped to dust by the hurricane wind, acted as a prism splitting the white flame of light to lurid reds and oranges and yellows and violets.
Now, on this second morning before the stars had faded to the orange sunrise coming up through the lavender air in a half fan, the heat had thrown riders and horses in a sweltering sweat; and the nagging wind had begun driving ash dust in eyes and skin like pepper on a raw sore. Matthews' ruddy face had turned livid; his blood-shot eyes were dark ringed. The horses travelled with heads hung low. Spite of the sun, it was a cloudy sky, but whether rain clouds or dust clouds, they could not tell. Towards noon, they could see against the purple mountains the red tinged clouds fraying out to a fringe that swept the sky.
"A thought it never rained in the Desert in summer, Wayland?"
"It doesn't."
"What's that ahead?"
"Rain; but if you look again, you'll see it doesn't reach the sky line!It's sucked up and evaporated before it hits the dust. . . ."
Towards the middle of the afternoon, the horses were resting in the shade of a reddish butte. Both men had dismounted. Wayland did not notice what was happening till he glanced where the blue shadow of the rock met the wavering glare of the sand. The old man had stooped to one knee and had twice laved his hand down to the wavering margin of blue light and bluer shadows.
"Fooled you again, did it?' asked the Ranger, throwing the saddle from his own pony, strapping the cased rifle to his shoulder and carrying the hatchet in the crook of his elbow.
"Better let me give you a drink from the water bag; it's hot and stale; but it will keep you from seeing water at your feet till we find another spring."
The old man drank from the neck of the water bag and wiped his mouth with his hand.
"Queer effect y'r heat has on a North man, Wayland! D' y' know whatA'd be doing if A let myself?"
"Drinking those blue shadows again?"
"No, sir, A'd be babbling and babbling about the sea! A fall asleep as we ride; an' when A wake from a doze, 'tisn't the sea of sand, 'tis the sea o' water that's about me! The yellow sea o' York Fort up Hudson Bay way where A took the boats from Saskatchewan."
Wayland helped him to mount.
"Aren't y' goin' to ride y'rself?"
"No," answered Wayland. "I'm going to keep one horse fresh. Best this one to-day: then we'll change off and rest yours to-morrow. Those fellows can't go any faster than we do. This heat will beat them out if we can't. I'll make those blackguards glad to drink horse-blood."
Then, they moved forward again, Wayland leading on foot, the little pack mule to the rear, both horses stumbling clumsily, raising clouds of dust; breathing hard, with heaving flanks.
That night, they halted in broken country . . . more red buttes; hummocks of red; silt crust trenched by the crumbly cutways of spring freshets; sand hills billowing to a brick red sky, where the sun hung a dull blaze. There were tracks of the fleeing drovers having paused for a rest in the same place. It was a pebble bottom hot and dry. Wayland scooped under with his Service axe and an ooze of clay water seeped slowly up forming a brackish pool. He had to hold the little mule back from fighting the horses for that water. When the animals had drunk, he filled the water bag with the settlings. Towards three in the morning, the soft velvet pansy blue Desert dark broke to a sulphur mist. Wayland saddled horses and mule and wakened the old frontiersman.
"Eh, where's this?" He came to himself heavily. "Wayland, is this hell-broth of a sulphur stew doin' me? Has y'r Desert got me, Wayland?"
"No, sir, when the Desert gets you, it gets you raving mad with fever. Chains won't hold you! This soggy sleep is all right. Long as you sleep, you'll keep your head!"
All the same, the Ranger noticed that the old man ate scarcely any breakfast. For those people who think that the Ranger's life consists of an easy all day jog-trot, it would be well to set down exactly of what that breakfast consisted. It consisted of slap jacks made with water sediment. Both men were afraid to draw on the water from the skin bag for tea.
They passed dead pools that day, places where Desert travellers had stuck up posts to mark a spring; but where the Service axe failed to find water below the saline crust. Then, Wayland knew why the sulphur dust drift moved so slowly against the horizon. The outlawshad notfound water. Horses and men were fagging. A velveteen coat had been thrown aside to lighten weight; from the dust markings one horse seemed to have fallen; and the load had been lightened still more by casting off half sacks of flour and some canvas tenting; but the tracks of the lame horse picking the soft places along the trail showed drops of blood. Had it cut itself on the glassy lava rocks; or was it the hoof? A little farther ahead, the same horse had fallen again to its knees, rolling over headlong; and the other tracks doubled back confusedly where the riders had come to help.
The Ranger smiled, though the yellow heat danced in blood clots before his blistered vision. He had had to put the old frontiersman back on his horse three times. The stirrup was wrong; or the saddle was slipping; or . . . what alarmed Wayland was each time he had stopped, the old man was stooping as if to follow the wavering outline of invisible water. Then, when the Ranger tried to count how many days they had been out, he found he couldn't. He had lost track: the days had slipped into nights and the nights into days; and he suddenly realized that his head pounded like a steel derrick; that the crackling of the dry sage brush leaves snapped something strung and irritable in his own nerves. There was no longer a drowsy hum in his ears. It was a wild rushing.
Once, the horses shuffled to a dead stop. Wayland looked up from the dancing sand at his feet. He rubbed his eyes and looked again.
"I keep thinking I see a white horse lagging behind that dust drift. What puzzles me is whether they are trying toget outof the Desert orloseus in it. While we are seeing them, you can bet they are seeing us! There hasn't been a yard for a mile back, where the hoof tracks weren't bloody. They'll lose a horse if they keep on to-day: then, they'll be without a packer; but if they are plumb up against it, why don't they face round and fight? They are three to our two? They could hide behind any of these sand rolls and pot us crossing the sinks; but if they are not at the end of their tether, why don't they hustle and get out of sight? If they aren't played out, they could outride us in half a day."
The old man was shading his eyes and gazing across the sun glare. Wayland noticed that he was steadying himself in the saddle by the pummel.
"Is my eye playing me tricks, Wayland; or do A see something stuck on yon bush along the way? First glance, it looks like the leaf of a note book. Keep looking, it might be a tent a couple of miles away. That used to happen when we were buildin' bridges in the Rockies. Surveyors crossing upper snows would stick up a message in neck of a ginger ale bottle: then, when we'd come along with the line men after trampin' the snow for hours, we'd mistake the thing for a man with a white hat till we almost tumbled over the bottle. Is it the Desert playin' me tricks, Wayland; or do A see something? Look, . . . where that bit of brush grows against the lava rock there."
Wayland's glance ran along the trail; and for an instant, the writhing sun glare played the same trick with his own vision. Something a dirty white quivered above the black lava table like the loose canvas top of a tented wagon. The Ranger side-stepped the trail for a different angle of refraction. The object blurred, then reappeared, a leaf from a note book not thirty yards away. Wayland went quickly forward. He was aware as he walked that the shrivelled earth heaved and sank so that he had the sensation of staggering. It was a dirty leaf from a note book fouled by the Desert winds and lodged in the sage brush. Then, he looked twice. It was not lodged. It was stuck down in the branches secure against the wind. The ranger pulled the thing off. The under side showed tobacco stains. On the upper were scrawled in heavy pencil;By. 20 ml du est if yu don't cath upp hit itt est flagg midnite frate carrie yu mine sitty.
"Railway twenty miles due East," translated Wayland. "That is probably true. I think there is a branch line runs a hundred miles in to Mine City. If you don't catch up, hit it East, flag the midnight freight, she'll carry you to Mine City. Well? What do you make of it? Did they leave it; or did some body else? If it had been there long, the wind would have torn it to tatters."
"Let me see it." The old man turned it over in his hand. "Evidently left to direct the man back in the Pass; they don't believe he's dead."
The Ranger took it back and read it over. "If they're lagging back for the missing man, why didn't they leave a message sooner? Trail doesn't fork here. Why did they leave word here?"
"There really is a railway somewhere here, Wayland?"
"There must be if one knew where to find it."
Matthews smiled. "Then, A take it this is a gentle hint to go off and lose ourselves trying to find it."
Wayland's eyes rested on the slow-moving dust cloud against the horizon.
"Then it is a case of who lasts out!" He looked at his white haired companion. "But there's no call for you to riskyourlife on the last lap of the race. It's not your job. It means another day; perhaps, two. If you'd take my horse, it's fresher, and the water bag, you could ride out to the railroad to-night. Those fellows are not good for many miles more unless they hit a spring. Let me go on alone, sir."
"Alone?" The old man's face flushed furious, livid. . . . "Git epp!"
Up a sand bluff, heaving to the heat waves; down a slither of ash dust; then, across the petrified black lava roll; down to a saline sink, white and blistering to the sight; over a silt bank crumbly as flour; and on and yet on; across the dusty sage-smelling parched plain . . . they moved; always following the tracks; tracks confused and doubling back as if the hind horse lagged; with blood drip and shuffling dragging hoofs; always keeping the dust whirl of the fore horizon in view; on and on, but speaking scarcely at all!
The Ranger again had that curious sensation of the earth slipping away from his foot steps. He had thrown away his leather coat early in the morning. Now be found himself tearing off the loose red tie round the flannel collar of the Service suit; and he pulled himself sharply together recognizing the fevered instinct to strip off all hampering clothing. It was as much a heat-death symptom as sleep forbodes frost death. He did not walk in a daze as the old man rode, half numbness, half drowse. He walked with a throb—throb—throb in his temples like the fall of water. He wanted to run; to strip himself as an athlete for a race; and all the time, he kept walking as if the heaving earth went writhing away from each step.
"Don't y' think ye better open that pack, an' get a drink for y'rself, my boy?"
Wayland was pausing in the shadow of a sand butte, and the old man had ridden up.
"Want it for yourself?"
"Not a drop."
"Better keep it for the horses, then; if we can keep them going to the next spring, they'll carry us out. Anything the matter with me that you ask that?"
"Oh no; A thought A saw you wave y'r arms."
The Ranger looked at the elder man. He was riding leaning forward heavily; and the dust had trenched deep fatigue lines in the hollow beneath his eyes and from the nostrils to the mouth. Wayland didn't retort that the frontiersman's speech had sounded guttural and muffled. He was not sure it wasnotthe fault of his own ears.
They worked slowly to the crest of the sand roll, zig-zagging to break the steepness. An ash-colored shadow skulked along the tracks of the outlaw trail. The little mule gave a squealing hind kick. The shadow looked back: it was a coyote, scenting the tracks of the drovers' lame horse. It went loping over the sand a blurr of gray.
"Curious thing that, Wayland! Notice the antics of the mule? Always see that in a range bred beast, centuries of ham stringing."
The Ranger did not answer. The sand was no longer heaving in waves. It was running, sliding like the glossy surface of the sea. The throb of his temples, the slide of the sand, the lakes of light, light and crystal pools, that ran away as you came up, all brought visions of water. The dust cloud on the sky line dipped and disappeared behind a ridge of rolling sand.
There was the drowsy swash of saddle leather and the padded chug of dragging feet and the hum, the hypnotic hum, of the heat that drowsed from delirium to sleep.
"I think," said Wayland, "this seems a pretty good jumping-off place for a rest."
The afternoon was waning. They were under shelter of a sand bank from the wind and sun.
"A think, Wayland, this is nearly my jumping off place altogether."
Matthews spoke feebly. On pretense of steadying the fagged broncho, the Ranger helped him to dismount. Then, Wayland unsaddled and drew the water bag from the pack trees. He handed it over to the old man. Matthews pushed it aside: "Keep it for yourself to-morrow. If y' find no spring, y'll need the water to-morrow; but A'll take y'r flask of brandy if y' don't mind?"
"That's a fool thing to take in the heat, sir."
"'Tis if y' intend to live, Wayland; but A'm at the end of this Trail. A'd like a bit strength t' tell y' a thing or two before . . . as we rest! Don't waste any water on flap jacks."
The mule lay rolling in the sage brush. The two horses stood with lowered heads chacking on the bit and pawing. Wayland saw the brandy flush mount to the purplish pallor of the old man's face.
"Wayland, this ismyjumping off place! A'm at the end of the Track. The Trail where the tracks all point one way. 'Tis na' sensible y'r hangin' back for me! If y'll take the fresh horse an' go on alone, y'll get out! If the railroad is only thirty miles due East, y' can make that. We'll rest a bit here, then after sundown we'll ride on; an' in the dark A'll drop back. If it hurts y' t' think of it, A'll head my horse due East for the railroad! Y'll go on, Wayland! Y'll not turn back for me!"
It took the Ranger a moment to realize what the old frontiersman was trying to say. "I think you'd better take another drink of that brandy," he said. "It seems to me a fool thing to let a good man die for the sake of catching three outlaw blackguards."
"'Tis not for the sake o' three blackguards!" The words came out with a rap. "'Tis to vindicate justice, 'tis to uphold law, an' till every good citizen is willin' to lay down his life hounding outrage to th' very covert o' Hell, t' die protectin' law an' justice an' innocence an' right, y'r Nation wull be ruled by paltroons an' cowards an' white-vested blackguards! Go; go on; go on to the end till ye fall and rot! If th' Devil takes to the open an' the saints take to cover, whose goin' t' fight the battle for right? The Armageddon o' y'r Nation? 'Tis easy t' be a good citizen when the bands are playin' an' the cannon roarin'. 'Tis harder in times o' peace to fight the battle o' the lone man! These outlaws, these blackguards, these cut throats, they're only the tools of the Man Higher Up! Get them, then go on for the Man Higher Up! Leave me, when A drop back in the dark to-night; if A'm in my senses, A'll shout a bravo and give y' a wave! Y'r the Man on the Job, the Nation's job! 'Tis not by bludgeons and bayonets, 'tis by ballots and brains y'll fight this battle out; and fight y' must or y'r freedom will go the way o' the old world despotisms down in a welter. A wish y'd go to the top o' the bank and have a look ahead."
An absurd sense of power, of resolution from despair, of will to do—suddenly swept over the Ranger. He forgot his fatigue. Months afterwards, a fellow student who had become a professor in psychology explained to him that it was a case of consciousness dipping suddenly down to the sublimal reservoirs of unconscious strength that lie in humanity; but then, Wayland had left two factors of explanation untold: first, that the dying trumpet call of the old warrior missionary had opened the doors of consciousness to that night on the Ridge of the Holy Cross; second, that the setting sun tinging all the buttes and hummocks and plains with rose flame somehow tinctured his being with consciousness of her, consciousness of the life drafts he had taken from her lips that night of the Death Watch.
He went across to the pack trees. Picking up the cross trees and blankets, he laid them on the ground as a pillow.
"If you will rest here, sir, I'll go above and have a look."
From the top of the sand bank, the Ranger looked down to see the old man lying with his face to the sky, his head pillowed on the saddle blankets, sound asleep. He looked across the Desert. The sun had sunk behind the azure strip of the mountain sky line. The billows of lava, black and glazed, the ashy silt pink-tinged to the sun-glow, the heaving orange sands . . . lay palpitating infinite almost with a oneness that was of God. Wayland was not given to prayers. Perhaps, like all men of action, he tried to make his life a prayer. Somehow, something within him prayed wordlessly now . . . not for exceptional advantage in the game of life, not for remission of the laws of Nature, not for miracle, but for aptitude to play the game according to rules. His wordless prayer did not end in an "amen." It ended in a little hard laugh. As though Right were such a simple business as just personally being good! or an insurance policy against damnation and guarantee for salvation! What was it the old man had said? Your right must be made into might . . . that was the game of life: the saving of the Nation: the good old-fashioned square deal no matter which party cut the cards. Right made Might, Might made Right; that was what the Nation wanted!
Then, it came again, the touch, the consciousness, the will to power, to do, to fight and overcome. He rose and looked across the Desert. A puff of dust, a swirl and eddy of riders, resolved itself through the terra cotta mist to the forms of three men going over the crest of the sand roll against the red sun-wrack of the sky line; three figures far apart, riding slowly, crawling against the face of the distant sky; one man in advance bent over his pummel; a second rider with a pack horse in tow pulling and dragging on the halter rope, the pack horse white and lame, stopping at every step, the man crunched, huddling fore done, down in his saddle; then dragging far to the rear, just cresting the sky line as the other two disappeared, swaying from side to side, a ragged wreck lying almost forward on his horse's neck; was he being deserted?
Wayland uttered a jubilant low whistle and tumbled down the sand bank to his camp kit.
The wind was at lull and the velvet air palpitating as a human pulse. The after-glow lay on the orange sands cresting all the ridges with cressets of flame. Wayland was riding bare backed.
"When we sight them, I want you to drop back, sir! The Desert's got them. They haven't the resistance of dead fish left. If we cut across this sink, as I make it, we'll save a couple of miles and almost meet them on the other side of the next ridge."
When Wayland had wakened the old frontiersman, he had babbled inconsequently about the sea. Mixing brandy with the last of the sediment water, Wayland got him into the saddle. There were queer splotches of blood under the skin on the backs of his hands; but when the brandy relieved his fatigue, he stopped babbling of the sea and spoke coherently.
"Y' mind the man, whose wife died in the Desert, Wayland?"
His horse stumbled. The Ranger snatched at the bridle and jerked it up.
"Yes," said Wayland.
"Vera noble of the woman; 'tis all right onherrecord, Wayland; but what do y' think o' th' man?"
"But in this case, the man took her in to save her life."
"A wasn't thinking ofhiscase," answered the other bluntly. "A was thinking ofyours."
The horse stumbled again. This time, the Ranger kept hold of the bridle rein.
"A didna' just mean t' tell y', Wayland; but A want y' t' know before A drop back. A saw it in her eyes, Wayland, yon night she went up the Ridge trail, and oh, man, A was loth to speak: she would cheer y' on in y'r work, A thought, perhaps—perhaps, the Lord might be playin' an ace card an' A'd no be trumpin' my partner's tricks; but 'tisn't so; Wayland, 'tisn't so! This Desert hell proves me wrong. She isna for y', man; no man can ask a woman to come into a fight that may mean this! It's a man's job, Wayland; an' the man who would drag a woman into the sufferin' of it isn't worthy of her . . . isn't the man to do the job. Oh yes, A know, a woman's love is ready to jump in the fire an' all that. Hoh! The man's love that'll let her is poor stuff, Wayland, base metal, kind o' love to burn all away to dross an' ashes when the fires come! Her's will come out pure gold thro' it all, but man alive, Wayland, think o' her when she finds his as dross; an' if he lets her sacrifice hers for his, 'tis dross!"
Wayland grew suddenly hot all over. He could not bring himself to name her, much less indulge in the cheap confessional of tawdry loose held affection. He had heard men discuss their love affairs: men who could discuss them hadn't any; theirs was the sense reflex of the frog that kicks when you tickle its nerve-end. He rode on unspeaking.
"Y'll be tellin' y'rself 'tis too sacred to mouthe—with an old fellow like me. All right! We'll say it istoosacred; but that minds me of a Cree rascal on my Reserve, an old medicine man, always talkin' of his sacred medicine bag; well, one day when he was good an' far away, good an' plenty drunk, A took a peep into his medicine bag; there was nothin' inside but a little snake that hissed; an' him beatin' the big drum! Hoh! sacred?
"Y'll be tellin' me y'r passion vows are stronger than life or death? Hoh! Y'd be a poor man if love wasn't stronger than death without any vows and big drum! Y'll be tellin' me y've warned her not t' link her life up wi' y'rs, to help y' resist an' all that; well, while y'r playin' y'r high and mighty self-sacrifice, did y'r manhood melt in the love light o' her eyes?"
Wayland jerked his horse roughly to a dead stop. "Mr. Matthews, for what reason are you saying all this?"
"A'll tell y' that too! A've come for her, Wayland. A've come to take her back to her people. Y' don't understand, her father is a MacDonald of the Lovatt clan—came out with Wolfe's regiment in 1759."
"In 1759?" repeated Wayland. "I heard her father say that very year."
"Yes, and a dark doursome race they are. Lovatt: Fraser MacDonald was his name; fought under Wolfe and joined the up country furhunters. When he came back from his hunting one year, he found his wife had eloped with an officer of the regiment; so he took to the north woods an' married an Indian girl and his son was the man o' the iron arm, the piper for little Sir George in the thirties, who blew the bag pipes up Saskatchewan and over the mountains and down the Columbia and all round them lakes where y'r Holy Cross Forest is. They were a' dark fearsome men in their loves and hates. This man married late in life, he had two sons, Angus of Prince Albert an' your Donald here. He never saw his father alive. The Lovatt estates have been restored by law; but the line is bred out, down to a little old lady whose waitin' me up at my Mission on Saskatchewan. She came huntin' heirs. Angus had married an Indian woman; he'll never go back, nor his sons. They're livin' under a tent to-day. What would they do wi' a castle and liveried servants and tenants an' things? Donald, y'r sheep king man, married a white girl. Some time after '85 she left him for the part he took in the Rebellion. She died after the child's birth; and the father claimed the daughter. He's known they'd have to come for his daughter some day, spite of his part in the Rebellion; and that was no such shameful thing as y' might think, if y've lived long enough in the West, t' understand! He has educated the daughter for the place. As A guess, she knows nothing of it, doesn't know who her mother was, or why her father had to leave Canada. A guessed that much when y'r Indian woman sent me the wrong road from the Ridge trail, that night! She doesn't even know who that Indian woman is."
"You came—for her?" repeated Wayland slowly. The night on the Ridge came back to him! Calamity's fear when the old frontiersman arrived; Bat's threat to expose something; Eleanor's perturbed letter; the father's half furtive defiant existence. He was too proud to ask more than the other cared to tell, too loyal to pry into any part of her life that she could not willingly share with him. He sat gazing into the mystic afterglow of the Desert, a flame of fire over a lake of light. It was as the old man had said, he had asked her to strengthen his resolution; and he drank in the love light of her eyes as he asked. He had vowed himself to a life apart and then his humanity, his weakness, his need had sealed the vow of renunciation in the fires that forged eternally their beings into one. But this, this was the Hand from Outside on which we never reckon and which always comes; the Destiny Thing which Man's Will denies, wrenching the forging asunder. Was it right for him to risk their lives farther in the Desert now; it affected her life now; and that was exactly what his common sense had foreseen: the fighter must fight alone. Love might send forth; but love must not be suffered to draw back.
"Why do you tell me all this?"
The old man moistened his lips before speaking. "If A don't go out, Wayland, A want y' t' see that her father's told, that she's taken back. When A saw the love light in her face come out like stars and her breath break when A spoke of you as a Ranger fellow, when A saw that, A thought, no matter what A thought. If y' married her, d' y' think y' could go off on the firing line; d' y' think y' would if y' knew y'd left her in danger? They'd strike at you through her, Wayland . . . it would be the end of free fightin'. A ask no promise. 'Tis enough A've told y'. Drive on!"
They moved slowly up the sand ridge, the Ranger a little ahead, oblivious of the livid blue of the old man's lips and the drag on the bridle rope till a quick jerk ripped the line from his loose hold; and he glanced back to see the other's horse stagger, flounder up again, waver and sink with a sucking groan. Wayland sprang just in time to catch the old frontiersman. He tore the saddle from the fallen broncho and cinched it on his own horse. Then he lifted Matthews, protesting, to the fresh mount, "till we reach the next rest place," he said, tying the halter rope of the pack mule to the saddle pommel. "Go on, I'll come."
Wayland waited till the horse and mule passed over the crest of the sand bank; then, he took out his revolver. A shudder ran through the fallen horse. The Ranger's hand trembled. He stroked its neck. "Poor devil; it's none of your affair either. I wonder how the God of the game will square it with the dumb brutes?"
He ran his left hand down the white face of the broncho. It hobbled as if to stagger up, and sank back dumb, faithful, trying to the end, one fore knee bent to rise, the neck outstretched. Wayland's right hand went swiftly close between eye and ear. He shot, in quick succession, three times, his hand fumbling, his sight turned aside.
Neither spoke as they advanced down the other side of the sand ridge, the Ranger steadying himself with a hand to the mule's neck. The bank dipped to a white alkali pit where the light lay in dead pools, gray in the twilight, quivering with heat, layers of blue air above ashes of death. For the second time that day, the sand colored thing skulked across the trail. Wayland took hold of both bridles and led down, the old man wakening as from a stupor. The alkali pit lay perhaps a mile distant, gray and fading in the red light.
"Wayland, is that water?"
"Where? I can't see it."
"There, at the foot of the hill."
"With trees up side down? No, sir! It may be mirage of water miles away, carried by the rays of this twilight; but if you can see it and the horses can't smell it, you can bet on a false pool!"
But the little mule had jerked free with a low squeal.
"A tell you, Wayland, there is water;" and he began babbling again inconsequently of the sea, running his words together incoherent, half delirious.
"Go on and see, then! I'll follow! If there's water, look out for the drovers."
Wayland let go his hold of the bridle. Horse and mule shot down the sand bank. He saw them shoulder neck and neck along the white alkali bottom, then break to a gallop, the old man hanging to the pommel; then all disappeared round the end of the bank. Wayland slithered down the sand slope and dashed to the top of the next hill breathless. Below lay the glister of water, real water and no mirage, glassy, gray and sinister. The Ranger uttered a yell; then paused in his head-long descent.
The pony had plunged in belly deep; the mule had lowered its head; the old man was kneeling at the brink. Wayland saw him lave the water up with his hand: then throw it violently back. All at once, the grip of life snapped. Matthews was lying motionless on the sand. The horse was chocking its head up and down; the mule was stamping angrily with fore feet roiling the pool bottom. It had been one of the salt sinks that lie in the depressions of the Desert.
Wayland poured the last very driblets of water sediments from the skin bag. This, he forced past the old man's lips. Then he drew the unconscious form back on the saddle blankets, loosened the neck of the shirt, laved the temples and wrists with the salt water, tore strips of canvas from the tent square, wet that and laid it on the old man's forehead. He ran his hand inside the shirt and felt the heart. It was still beating, beating furiously, with faint flutterings, then accessions of fresh fury. The lips were black and swollen. The eyes were sunken; and the veins stood out in deadly clear purplish reticulation with splotches of transfused blood under the shrivelled skin of the hands. Then, he raised the old white head from the pack trees,—brave old warrior for right going down the Trail where the Tracks All Point One Way—, and somehow got a mouthful of brandy past the clinched teeth. The breath came fast and faint like the heart beats. Once, the eyes opened; but they were glazed and unseeing. Wayland laid the old head on the pillowed pack trees, fitting rest for frontiersman of the wilderness; then he stood up to think! A terrible passion of tenderness, of question, of defiance to God, rushed through his thoughts. The animals take their tragedies dumb and uncomplaining. Man alone has not learned the futility of shouting impotent reproaches at a brazen sky.
The Ranger unsaddled the pony. Then he tethered the mule and broncho by separate ropes to the boulders. He placed the brandy flask by the old man's right hand. He thought a moment. Then he laid the loaded rifle close to the same hand.
The eyes were still staring wide open unseeing. The purple lips began babbling wordless words, words of the sea, words that ran into one another inarticulate. Wayland stooped and took the left hand in his own palm. It was cold and heavy, a thing detached from life; and the purple swollen lips were still babbling in inarticulate whispers. Should he leave him to die there alone; or go forth to seek; seek what?
The Ranger stooped and pressed his lips to the blood-blotched back of the faithful shrivelled old hand. He did not shed a tear. We weep only when we are half hurt.
Wayland seized the Service axe and uncased his own rifle. Then in words that were not worshipful, not bending his knees, but standing with his hat off, he uttered what may have been a prayer, or may have been blasphemy. I leave you to judge: "By God, if there is a God, why doesn't He waken up? If there is a God, doesHestand for right? Is there such a thing as Right; or is Right the dream of fools? I want to know! If there is a God, I want God to speak out clear and plain, right now, in plain facts, so I can understand, and not so blamed long ago that a plain fellow can't make out what's the right thing to do."
It was one thing to pray under the rose-colored windows of a college chapel, and another thing to pray under the yellow, brazen Desert sky. There was only the dreadful Desert silence, with the rattle from the laboured breathing of the unconscious man. If there was no God, then the fight for Right was the futility of fools: Right was only the Right of the strong to prey upon the weak, till the weak became in turn strong enough to prey; and that meant anarchy. If Right was right as two and two make four in Heaven or Hell, thenwherewas the God from whom Right, laws of Right emanated, guiding the unwise as laws of gravity guide the stars?
He didn't know that he had been staggering from physical weakness as he climbed the ridge of sand. There was the fresh horse.One of themmight escape in a night by riding it to death. Then, there was the possibility of the railroad being within reach. One of them might go out to the railroad,but not both. The old frontiersman had passed the point of being able to ride; and a very few hours would probably witness the end of his life. He could tie the old man to the fresh horse, but the slow pace that would be necessary would sacrifice both their lives. There was another possibility: the fresh man on the fresh horse. That way out did not enter Wayland's mind; but he did ask himselfwhythe outlaws had not come down to the false pool. Why had they gone on? They were as near the end of their tether as he was of his.
Then he became suddenly conscious that he had eaten almost nothing for twenty-four hours and that the quivering air darkening to night rolled above the yellow sands in a way not caused by heat. Was it saddle wear or exhaustion that he stumbled as he walked? He looked at the silver strip of mountains above the westering sky. A fore-shortening haze swam into his sight. There was the mountain flecked with silver. Then it had gone into a milky black and pools, pools of water, fringed by the pines of the North, hung in the blue haze of mid-air, fore-shortening, shifting like a blurred sieve into the silver strip of mountain and milky blot, then back again, pools of crystal water, cool mountain lakes, this time with the trees up side down and figures among the trees. He knew by the trees being up side down, though he was dreaming of laughing as he drank and drank, that it must be a mirage! Then he came to himself wondering how in the world he was sitting on the sand bank. And why hadn't he kept the tea leaves to put on his eyes in case of heat inflammation? Then, it tripped almost under his feet, you understandhedid not trip, he had struck at it with his Service axe—the wolf thing tracking the red stain of the outlaws' trail along the base of the sand bank out across the ash colored silt sands. He watched it pausing, where the wind had eddied the dust in serpentine lines over the tracks, sniffing the air, loping across the break, and on out again at a run, nose down to earth: a blot against the sky; the burned out sulphur sky above an earth of embers and ashes. Was it a mirage; or was he going delirious; or had he fallen asleep to dream her face framed in the blur of the purpling haze, receding from him, drawing him with the shine of the stars in her eyes, drawing him with the warmth of their first passion kiss on her lips? He would rise from his grave, and follow her from death, if she wove such spells, whether of dreams or delirium or mirage! The Ranger found himself stumbling across the baked silt and lava rocks, stripped of his hat and his boots, stripped like a marathon runner, vaguely conscious that he ought to have kept those tea leaves for that burn in his eyes, that the silver strip of the mountain was there just ahead; now a crystal pool of the cool mountain lake in mid air; now her face had vanished into the blue haze. Suddenly, winged things flappered up with raucous protest. The coyote had skulked over the edge of the lava dip; not the burnt-oil earth-scorched Desert smell, but the shrivelled putridity of flesh smote and nauseated his senses. The white pack horse of the outlaw drovers lay dead across the trail at his feet, a pool of clotted blood darkening the ashy sand. Its throat had been cut. . . .
The Ranger drew off, rubbed his eyes and looked again. The crumbly silt had been trampled all round the dead horse. So they, too, were dying of thirst on the Desert. Which way to follow now? There were the hoof prints across the open level; but forking from the main trail was another track: that of a man dragged or dragging or crawling forward on his hands and knees. Had they deserted the third man; or had the third man dropped back from them to cut his horse's throat? The Ranger laughed aloud, a harsh cracked laugh; he knew he was delirious. The Lord had played an ace and he wouldn't trump His trick by going after the trail of the man who had crawled away to die. There was a Deity of retribution at least, whether God or demon: he had vowed he would make those blackguards drink horse blood!
If he hounded along the trail, perhaps he might overhaul the other two. Then, then if he did perish in the Desert, he would not have perished for naught! It was then, the earth performed the acrobatic feat of heaving up, and he fell! This time, he knew he had fallen. It was no trip. He was down and out and done for; and he knew it. He rose to his knees steadying himself on his Service axe. Then, it came again, the silver strip of mountain on the sky line with the cool lakes and the blue haze, and her face, the face in the Watts' picture of "the Happy Warrior," weaving the spell, receding from him, drawing him with the love light in her eyes and the passion kiss on her lips, beckoning, beckoning; he would rise and follow her from the dead if she beckoned with that light in her eyes. She was recedingnotalong the trail of the fleeing Desert runners, but down the dragged track of the body that had crawled to the foot of a sand bank. Wayland never knew whether he staggered or crept down the trail of the dragged body away from the hoof prints of the drovers' horses across the alkali sink; but between him and the silver strip of mountain on the far skyline, above the yellow sand so hot to his palms, beckoned her face, the love light in her eyes, weaving the spell. Then the coyote had bounded into the air, and the red-combed Desert condors, the scavengers of an outcast world, rose from their quarry; and Wayland, fevered, delirious, laughing, crying, kneeled over the body of a man lying on his face with his bloody hand clutched in death grip round an upright post driven into the alkali bottoms, a post with a drinking cup hung on the notched crotch, the Desert sign of a water spring beneath the drifted sands.
Wayland pushed the body aside. The man's face was red-smeared. He was dead. Wayland had to unlock the clutched fingers from the post. Somewhere, from the submerged consciousness of forgotten college lore came memory that the water table lay ten feet deep beneath the Desert silt. The Ranger slid down the sand drift and was chopping, hacking, digging, into the side of the bank, thanking God; Godwason the job after all; scooping the sand drift out with his naked hand, burrowing at the earth as the animals of the wilderness-struggle tear in maddened thirst for the hidden life beneath the sand death. He heard the suck and gurgle of the water, not the joyous silver laugh of Northern springs, but the sullen coming of water compelled; and his lips were at the sand; drinking, drinking, drinking. Then, he suddenly remembered her face. He looked up. Gone the silver strip of shining mountain; gone the mirage of the crystal pool; darkness, velvet pansy darkness of the Desert night; and an earth bat winged past his face. Even as he drank he felt the puff and whirl of the wind rising; he laughed. He felt the cool water trickle and settle and pool in the sand hole. Then he laved his temples and wrists, and laughed softly, and called a low long tremulous call; that foolish Saxon word he had told her to look up in the dictionary.
The wind might blow great guns, and wipe out the fugitive trail. He would go no farther. The wind would attend to the other two men. He had found water: he had found life. God had played the trick; and he had not trumped the ace; four of the six outlaws dead, and the last two hastening to the alkali death across the Desert sands. He drank again, this time from the cup, sip by sip, slowly, then in deep draughts of God-given waters.
He didn't thank God in so many words, or in testimony to pass muster at a prayer meeting; but he paused twice on his way back to the saline sink to say: "He's on the job. You bet He's on the job!" He spent the rest of the week nursing the old frontiersman back to life.
The Senator sat in his office with his hat on the back of his head and a U. S. Geological Survey map spread out on the desk in front of him. Bat stood sleepily at attention on the other side of the desk with his hat in his hand. It was a sweltering July afternoon in Smelter City, the air athrob with the derricks and the trucks and the cranes and the pulleys and the steam hoists and the cable car tramway run up and down the face of Coal Hill by natural gravitation. The light was dusky yellow from the smelter smoke; and loafers round the transcontinental railroad station across the street chose the shady side of the building, where they sat swinging their legs from the platform and aiming tobacco juice with regularity and precision in the exact centre of the gray dusty road.
The Senator wore a pair of pince nez glasses. He looked up over the top of them through the yellow sun-light of the open street door.
"Declare, Brydges, the damned rascals are too lazy to brush the flies off," he observed of the brigade of loafers across the street.
Bat threw a glance over his shoulder at the coterie of loafers, and brought his drowsy tortoise-shell glance back to the map lying before the Senator.
"I guess the flies won't bother 'em long as they vote right, Mr.Senator."
Moyese was slowly turning and turning the thick stub of a crayon pencil between his thumb and fore finger. Bat knew that trick of absent-minded motion always presaged senatorial sermonizing, just as the soft laugh down in the crinkles of the white vest forewarned danger. ("When I see the tummy wrinkles coming, I always feel like telling the other fellow to get the button off his fencing sword—You betthatmeans business," Bat often confided to the newseditor.)
"Brydges, this country is rapidly lining up two opposing sides: fighting lines, too, by George! MobocracyversusPlutocracy! I'm only a cog in the wheel, myself, a mere marker for the big counters, my boy; but if I have to put up with the tyranny of one or t'other, I'm damned if I don't prefer the tyranny of the rich to the tyranny of the poor, any day!Why, is any man poor in this country, Brydges? Because he's a damned incompetent unfit swinish hog, too lazy to plant and hoe his own row; so he gets the husks of the corn while the competent man gets the cob—the cob with the corn on, you bet, number one, Silver King, Hard, seventy cents a bushel! If I have to put up with one or t'other, I'm damned if I don't prefer the tyranny of knowledge to the tyranny of ignorance! One butters your bread, anyway, and sometimes puts some jam on with the butter. The other snivels and whines and begs a crust from the other fellow's table, and snaps at the hand that gives him the crust, and spends the time in self-pity that he should spend in work! Look at that row of free-born American citizens, kings in disguise, Brydges! Not a damned man of them ever did a stroke of honest work in his life except on election day, when we line 'em up; and damn it, aren't we right, to line 'em up? What kind of rule are you going to get from that kind of rulership if some one doesn't jump in and group it and direct it; yes, by George, andcompelit to keep in line and vote right, just as a general licks his recruits in shape on pain of court martial? Think any battle would ever be won, Brydges, if the commanding officer hadn't the power of a despot? He makes mistakes. Of course, he makes mistakes! So do we! But we're keeping those damned rascals in line for the good of the country; and so, I say, the plutocrats who are being cursed from one end of the country to the other to-day, are playing the same part in modern life as the big war chiefs of the Middle Ages. They are marshalling the forces; leading the advance; conquering the countries with commerce that the old war chiefs used to conquer with arms; building up, constructing, amassing, concentrating in trust and combine all the scattered abilities of men, who would be powerless individually; and we use our tools, that parcel of beauties out there, same as the old war chiefs used their blackguard mercenaries! It's cheaper for us to buy 'em than be bossed by 'em, a darn sight cheaper, Brydges; for us to swing 'em into a bunch and control 'em than be blackmailed by 'em, Brydges! If every penny grafter didn't hold up the corporation, every damned little squirt of a county supervisor and road contractor and town councilman, if they didn't hold the corporation up for blackmail way the highwaymen of old used to hold up the lone traveller, if they didn't hold us up for blackmail, Brydges, it wouldn't be necessary for us to man that gang across the way on voting day!
"Freedom, pah!" The Senator had stopped swirling the stub pencil. He reached forward to a jar of roses on his desk. "Equality? Pah! Dream of fools, Brydges! Doesn't exist! Never did exist! Never can exist! Know how we develop Silver King Corn that gives ninety bushels to the acre instead of old thirty bushel yield?"
Bat had sat down, still sleepily watchful through the tortoise-shell eyes, but a bit wilted in the heat. Some of the men swinging corduroy and blue jean legs from the station platform evidently perpetrated a pleasantry; for there was a loud guffaw, and a shower of tobacco wads into the middle of the road.
"Know how we get high grade corn, high grade rose like this American Beauty: in fact, high grade anything? Well, I'll tell you. It's the same process that brings out high grade men. You go into a field of corn. You pick out best specimens. You keep that for seed, special care, special fine ground, special careful cultivation. You let the others go, feed 'em to the hogs, understand, Bat? It's the same with the roses, and the same with men; and now where's your fine theory of all men equal?"
As Bat did not care to remind the Senator that his own career from the ghetto up contradicted all this fine philosophy, he left the question unanswered.
Moyese pushed the glasses up on his nose and returned to the map.
"How many homesteaders did you succeed in nabbing out of that last train-load?"
"About a hundred, Senator! I've got the list of 'em here . . . haven't counted, but think it will tally up about a hundred."
"What are they, Germans?"
"No, Swedes."
Moyese laughed. "Thrifty beggars will job round and earn double while they're operating for us! Got good big families, Bat?"
It was the turn of the handy man to laugh. "I filed one fellow and eight kids for one hundred and sixty acres each."
"You didn't contract to pay each of the little olive branches three-hundred?"
"Lord, no! If the dad sits tight till we prove up entry, he's to get three-hundred! No fear of his blabbing. He can't speak a word of English; and when I told the woman, through the interpreter that we pay their fare out and each of the kids would get a five, why, she kissed my hand and slobbered gratitude all over me."
"Wayland won't be quite so grateful for that bunch."
"Oh, I didn't file that batch in the N. F. You bet, that's a little too obvious! I put 'em in the Pass, lower end of the Pass, not by a damn sight, I didn't put 'em in the N. F.! I thought Smelter people wanted us to secure that Pass for a dam; and I bunched 'em all in just above the Sheriff's place!"
"That's good! The Sheriff proves up this year; and if you get this bunch in behind, that corks the Pass up pretty effectually! Where are the bounds of the Forest there?"
Bat drew his fore-finger along the map. "Along the red line, here: just to the trail through the canyon."
"Good: now what about the timber claim along the Gully? That's in the Forests, Brydges. I want to force a contest on that; the Swede fellow has cut the logs under his permit; but I'd like to make that doubly sure before we go to trial. If we can get a double cinch on that, we'll knock the claim of the Forestry Department to keep homesteaders out into a cocked hat."
Bat's sleepy eyes emitted sparks and his good natured smile widened to an open grin.
"The Swede happened to use a U. S. Forest hatchet when he cut those logs," he said. "I told him to be sure and stamp the butt end of each log U. S., duly inspected," he said.
Moyese dropped the map and the pencil and his heavy hand with a thud on the desk and laughed noiselessly down into the creases of his fat double chin and into the wrinkling rotundity of his white vest.
"And to cinch it," continued Brydges, "as the fellow's permit didn't cover the Gully, I got some blanket railway scrip for an Irishman, O'Finnigan, Shanty Town, and planked it on the Gully. You see, Senator, by law the settlerscango in on the National Forests wherever it has been surveyed and declared agricultural land; but they can't go in and get title till it is surveyed and passed. But you can plaster the railway scripwhere it is unsurveyed. That's the little joker somebody tucked in when the scrip railway act was passed. I guess by the time they have red-taped and trapesed round and wrangled those two tangles of title out, the logs will be safe down the River; and I guess that will about see the finish of Wayland before the coal cases come up—"
"That's it, Brydges." Moyese had lowered his voice. "What about Wayland? Have you found out anything? Where the devil is he? He isn't on his patrol! He hasn't been at the Ridge for three weeks. He hasn't been at the Ridge since I left for Washington. If we could prove how he's been using Government time," he paused to reflect. "Thatmight be shortest way out! Did you find out anything at the MacDonald Ranch?"
Bat threw a precautionary glance over his shoulder towards the door opening on the street. Then he rose, walked across the office, shut the door, came back and drawing his chair close to the desk opposite the Senator, sat down astride with his feet tucked back one round each hind leg.
"Yes, I did; and no again, I didn't! It's just as it may strike you! As a news man, I knowhowthis kind of yarn would be taken by the public."
"Oh, come on with it, Brydges!" Moyese had pushed back and was holding the edge of the desk with his hands. Mr. Bat Brydges recognized that while the creases of good-nature crinkled at the chin, the jaws and the hands had locked.
"Your newsman got this despatch from Mine City: you see it's pretty vague: 'bodies of two men found forty miles from branch of P. & O. Line, thought to be drovers overcome by heat and thirst.' I wired for more particulars; but the railway hands had shovelled the bodies under."
"Brydges," interrupted Moyese sharply, "I'm going to tell you something; and you put it in your pipe and smoke it; and don't waste time running off on false clues. You leave that to women and sissies—to the she-male man! Now listen,a man can't lose himself in the Desert: He can't lose himself in the Wilderness. If he's a damphool, he can get lost, but he can't lose himself, he can't hide in the wilderness, not ever! He can lose himself in a city in one week. He could drop out of sight right here in Smelter City; but he can't go into the wilds and not come out again and people not know it. Somebody sees him go in, and somebody doesn't see him come out; and there you are! It's the same in the wilds as at the North Pole: you can't cook up a fake. Man who goes into the wilds is a marked man till he comes out. Every man, who meets him, takes a turn round to look at him; and he's going to keep looking till the fellow comes out. Now, you take this case. Wayland had on his Service Badge. If he had been one of those two, the fact would have been flashed right down to Washington. Now tell me facts, not rumors; exactly what did you find out?"
When his chief began in that dictatorial fashion, Bat let his facts go in a running fire:
"Well, Flood saw him with his own eyes going up the Pass with that old Canadian duffer the morning, the morning," Bat paused, manifestly unable to specify which morning.
"Yes, the morningafter," added the soft, even voice of Moyese. "And the snow slide filled the Pass up to the neck, forty-eight hours later. Yes, I know; but Wayland was too good a mountain man to be caught by a slide."
"I told Flood to get out and examine that slide, anyway! He said 'twasn't any use, this hot weather would clean it up in a couple of weeks. He was going up the Pass when I left for the Valley yesterday."
"What did you find out at the Ridge?"
"That's where the milk is in this cocoanut," answered Bat. "He hasn't passed one nightatthe Ridge since the night we were all up! You rememberwhowas at the Cabin, night we went up? Well, keep that in mind; when I went across to MacDonald's Ranch to express your regret over this accident, found old man wasn't home. He's expected back from the Upper Pass by train this week: seems he has been arranging new grazing ground for another herd up there. You know how MacDonald house is laid out? Big room as you enter; then a sort of back sitting room for," Bat smiled queerly, a smile that said nothing, yet subterraneously conveyed out to daylight one of those under currents of thought that flows only in the dark, "for the lady. Well, sir, chill blasts of North Pole were tropical zephyrs compared to what I got from that MacDonald gurl."
"I thought her name was Miss MacDonald," suggested the Senator, softly.He had lowered his chin and was looking over his eye glasses at Brydges.
"Hold on, Mr. Senator! I am coming to that! Her father has been away a month. I found out from Calamity and the road gang that Wayland hasn't been at the Cabin since that night I was there; and Gee Whittiker," Brydges laughed sleepily, the same smile that said nothing but came up from the subterranean under current, "hewasa bear with a sore head that night; spent most of the night prancing the Ridge. Well, a fellow can't exactly stand on one leg and then on t'other all through a call. She didn't ask me to sit down. Said her father was coming home by Smelter City and you could have the pleasure of conveying your sympathy personally: kept standing herself all the time; kept looking from me to the door. Well, sir, while she was lookingthroughthe door behind me, I was lookingthroughthe door behind her." And as Bat said it, he looked away. "Wayland's Range coat was hanging in that inner room."
Bat smiled slowly and sleepily; then openly grinned as who should say "now the catisout"; but when he turned to Moyese, his chief had whirled in the swing chair and was sitting with hands clasped under his hat, and the back of his head towards Brydges.
A glossy smile had come over Bat's face that is not good to see on man, woman, child or beast; and it is the same kind of smile on all four, not laughter, nor light, not definite enough to be malicious, nor pointed enough to be self accusatory, nor direct enough to be challenged and repudiated; a smile untellably familiar—a Satyr-faced thought looking through a veil, somehow sinuously suggestive, saying nothing at all, yet conveying the physical sensation of pus from an ulcerous thing; and strangely enough, there are blow-fly natures that prefer pus to nectar.
If Brydges had not been so absorbed in the jocularity of his own sensations, he would have observed that his chief remained singularly silent.
"Oh, I don't suppose he's there all this time." Bat rushed to the defence of the absent, (Heaven bless such defenders). "That old Canadian duffer, who seems to have hitched up with him on the Rim Rocks accident, your ranch foreman saw 'em pass together at noon; tried to telephone 'Herald,' but I chokedthatoff; that old fellow once wrote our paper to know about Canadian settlers here. He recognized Calamity and talked about old North West Rebellion days. It's my theory he's here about something that's been hushed up! Like dad, like daughter," Bat pronounced.
"It's my theory when MacDonald comes back from the Upper Pass, Wayland and the old fellow will turn up about the same time. Haven't been able to learn what it is; but I'll bet dollars to doughnuts, they are all absent on the same trail. If we let go a broadside, they'll have to come out with the truth to shut us off; and there is where we are going to get him; see? I've got another theory, too."
"What's that?" asked the Senator, without turning.
"It is, if he sees we're going to involve her, he'll quit."
Moyese didn't answer. He rose from his chair and walked to a rear window, where he stood looking out. Did he credit what he had heard? Was it a recital of facts, or a distortion of facts through a tainted mind? Did Brydges, himself, believe what he had tried to convey? Or was his job to obtain certain results at any cost: and was this part of the cost? Ask yourself that of the tainted news you read every day. Ask why those who recognize the lie do not brand it as such; why those who are uncertain do not verify before they repeat and credit; and you will probably have some clue to the little melodrama of dishonor enacted in the office of a legal luminary at Smelter City that sweltering hot July day. When you come to observe it, Bat's recital contained nothing that might not have been posted in eminent respectability on a church warden's door. Like fresh fruit passed through a mouldy cellar, the facts came from the medium of the narrator with the unclean contagion of cellar mould. The next narrator would not pass on the facts. He would pass on the cellar rot.
"If we served up those two stories together hot," emphasized Bat, "we'd about cut the throat of any opposition to our interests in the Valley? He'd quit! I'll bet before he'd see her involved, he'd jump his job!"
When the Senator turned his face to the handy man, he was very sober.He stood looking over the tops of his glasses boring into Bat's face.
"It's a pity," he said.
"Yes, it's too bad: one hates to have one's faith in human nature all balled out this way; but you never know what kind of a fact you're going ping up against where a woman is concerned." Something in the Senator's look stopped Bat mid-way.
"Brydges, I thought I told you never to meddle with the damphool who makes excuses for what he's going to do. Never do anything, unless you have some end worth while in view; then, if it's worth while, do it, damn it, and don't waste time excusing the means! Now, I'll have nothing to do with this; mind that, Brydges. You do it off your own responsibility. If MacDonald were one of our party, I wouldn't make use of it, if it were ten times over and over true. You'll have to be very careful how you use that, at all! It's effective. I don't deny it's very effective; but it's a pity! If you use that at all, you'll have to use it so it's not libelous."
"Libelous?" burst out the handy man wakening up suddenly, scratching his tousled head and trying to make head or tail of orders that said 'do it' and 'don't do it' in one breath. "I can write it without a name so every man in the State will know who it is: give it as a joke; fetch in Calamity as the mother of the whole mess; the call of the blood, you know; reversion to type! They'll have to prove that the intent was malice before they can get a judgment. They'll have to come out with the truth before they can prove libel. It isn't libelous if it's done as a joke without malice."
Moyese had flung himself down in his chair with a blow of his clenched fist on the desk, when the opening of the office door stopped the oath of disgust on his lips; and Eleanor MacDonald stood framed in the yellow light shining in from the hot street. For a moment, the transition from sun to shade blinded her. Then, she saw who was with the Senator. Brydges sprang up waiting to return her recognition. She made no sign. She walked over where he was standing. The Senator had half risen from his desk. Was it the spirit of the ancestral Indian in her eyes; or of the Man with the Iron Hand? Brydges' oily gloss went to tallow under her look. Moyese knew looks that drilled; and Brydges himself could bore behind for motives; but this look was not a drill: it was a Search Light; and the handy man—well, perhaps, it was the heat—the handy man suddenly wilted.
"You can go, Brydges," ordered Moyese.
"All right! See you again about that, Senator!" Brydges grabbed up the loose notes from the desk and bolted, banging the door behind him.
The Senator's face seemed at once to age and trench with lines. He motioned her to the vacated chair and remained bending forward over his desk till she had seated herself. Then, he sat down, suddenly remembered his hat, and laid it off. If she had sunk forward on the desk weeping; if she had made a sign of appeal; he would have gone round and caressed her and petted her and told her she muststopWayland. His whole manhood went out to comfort her, to stand between her and what? . . . Was it the drive of those wheels of which he was a cog? But when she looked across the desk, the eyes had no appeal, the Search Light had turned on him.
"You must excuse me if you heard what I was saying, when you came in, Miss Eleanor; but it was a G— doggon lie! I had been angered: I had been angered very much; and that's a bad thing on a hot day." He was slipping back to the usual suavity.