It was all over, the inquest, the coroner's finding, the reading of the will, the revelation of the real errand on which the old frontiersman had come from Saskatchewan. The parting of the ways had come to her, as it comes to us all. The death of her father had shut the door on opportunity in the Valley; and the little old lady, waiting for Matthews up in Prince Albert, Canada, to take her back to the inheritance of her father's family in Scotland, opened elsewhere another door of opportunity. As one door had swung shut, another had swung open. Were we creatures of circumstances, as the fatalists declared; or could we master and bend circumstances to human will? Was her feeling of rebellion but the kicking of ructious heels against the closed door of fate? Would time teach the futility of barking one's shins in such fashion? Eleanor sat in the parlor of the suite of rooms reserved by the Williams and herself. The Williams and Matthews had gone out for the evening to some women's club meeting on missions. Eleanor's nerves were too tension-strung for people to-night. They had read her father's will that afternoon. The quiet man doing the duty next and making no professions had left her secure against want; and after the lawyer who read the will had gone, the Williams went out, and Matthews had drawn his chair near to hers and told her the same story of her father's people that he had told Wayland in the Desert.
"They were a' dark fearsome men," he had said, telling her of the first Fraser-MacDonald who fought with Wolfe at Quebec, and the Man of the Iron Hand. "They were a' dark fearsome men; but of stainless honor, child! Not a man of them left a bar sinister on th' scutcheon! Even the man who married th' squaw, had a priest tie th' knot so that children would come stainless t' life; but they were dark fearsome men, undyin' in their hates an' unhappy in their loves. Y'r own mother's people turned against y'r father for th' part he took in th' Rebellion."
"Don't you think," asked Eleanor, "it's time one of the race broke the spell of unhappy love?"
"Aye, child! 'Tis why A'd take y' back t' th' little old lady waitin' in Prince Albert, an' put y' in y'r own place in th' halls o' Scotland? D' y' know there's been none o' y'r race direct t' occupy th' manor since th' first Frazer fled from th' Jacobite Rebellion to French Canada? 'Twas part o' his stubborn spirit that he fought for the Nation that had cast him out."
"Oh, I'm not interested in the Jacobites and Wolfe and things of the past," interrupted Eleanor. "I want to live my life full in the present."
"Aye; an' 'tis because y're a Fraser-MacDonald of the Lovatt clan that ye want t' live a full present! If you were an upstart new-rich, my dear, y'd be sellin' y'r soul t' th' Devil an' y'r body t' some leprous kite with ulcerous weddin' kisses for the privilege o' claimin' this inheritance that's yours! There's a male decendant o' some collateral line on th' place adjoinin' yours. Man alive, he's had th' pick o' every pork packer's an' brewer's daughter; but he's waitin' th' little lady who's his aunt t' come back from Prince Albert—"
He knew the minute he had spoken that he had struck a false note.Eleanor jumped from her chair.
"Oh, bother the little lady at Prince Albert. Leave me, please! I want to think—"
He withdrew as far as the door. "Would y' like me to see y'r lawyer man 'bout puttin' th' ranch lands o' th' Upper Pass on th' market, an' settlin' up th' estate?"
"No," answered Eleanor. "I'm not going to sell any of my father's estate."
And when Matthews withdrew to join the Williams at the missionary meeting, she burst into tears.
She went across to the window wondering about Wayland. She had not seen him since early morning, before breakfast, when he called at the sitting room door to arrange their return up the Valley next day. The Williams and Matthews would go up in the buckboard. Would she ride back up the hog's back trail with him? He would hire horses and riding togs now if she would say? Yes, he knew it would be steep up grade; but then, they could go it slow; he laughed as he said that. You see the hog's back trail was fifteen miles shorter than the Valley road and they could afford to go it slow; in fact,very slow.
"Come on in," urged Eleanor, throwing open the parlor door. "TheWilliams are not up, yet!"
"That's why I came! No, I'll not come in: not much! I'm keeping resolutions!"
She had not understood the wistfulness beneath his forced gayety untilMatthews told her all that afternoon.
"It will be our last ride: you'll come, won't you?" asked Wayland.
She had promised. Then, she had spent a most miserable morning. Why was it to be thelastride? She had not cared to go out. Though the papers had suppressed all details of the cowardly assassination, the glare of publicity had been focussed too keenly on her for comfort by that explosion of the old frontiersman in the court room. She had remained in all morning watching the motley crowds of a frontier town surge past the hotel windows down the dusty hot main street, with its medley of fine brick blocks, and poor shacks, and saloons, and false fronts—little unpainted restaurants and cigar stands and gambling places of one-story, with a false timber wall running up a couple of stories.
"United States of the World," the old frontiersman had called this country. Surely that was the true name of the wonderful new country that had defied all traditions and mingled in her making the races from every corner of the world! An immigrant train had come in. Eleanor lifted the parlor window, and looked, and listened. Jap and Chinese and Hindoo—strikingly tall fellows with turbaned head gear; negro and West Indians and Malay; German and Russian and Poles and Assyrians. In half an hour, she did not hear one word of pure English, or what could be called American. Oh, it was good to be alive in this wonderful new world under these wonderful new conditions working out the age-old problem of right and wrong that had defied solution since time began! She did not mind the crudity. And if I am to be frank, she did not mind the rudity. It was not a boiled shirt-front, kid-glove world. In fact, at that moment she saw her hero stage driver shooting out tobacco squids at the innocent granolithic, which showed no target because so many other contributors had preceded the stage driver. In fact, it was not a world for a lady with a train, though Eleanor saw some trollopy immigrant "ladies" emerging from a big tent on a back lot decked with tawdry lace and sporting trains in inverse proportions to the sufficiency of their "h's." Nor was it a perfumed world. She could smell the reek of the whiskey saloons all down the street—eleven of them, there were in a succession of twelve buildings; and the twelfth building, if Eleanor had known it, was a gambling joint of the Chinese variety that had iron shutters and iron doors and signs up for "Gentlemen Only." Let us hope, dear reader, that "gentlemen only" entered behind the dark of those iron doors! She could not help wondering had the old day passed forever in the West. Was a new day not dawning? What was to become of all these incoming people? Could the cattle barons and the sheep kings and the land rings fence them off the vast, broad, idle acres forever?
Yet this was the world where her father had come penniless, a refugee from miscarried justice, and had won out. It was the world where he had been shot down by some miserable, criminal assassin, who, it was more than likely, had mistaken him for Wayland. It was Wayland's world, a world in the making. Well had Matthews designated it—The United States of the World! More Jews than in Palestine; more Germans than in Berlin; more Italians than in Rome; more Russians than in St. Petersburg; more Canadians than in any four Canadian cities combined; more descendants of the British than in the British Isles—the United States of the World in the Making! Was it any wonder crime was rampant; and Democracy rocked to the shock of collision and miscalculation and inexperience; and Righteousness became a tacking to progress, not a straight line, like the zig-zag of the ship making headway all the time, but tacking back and forward to wind and current? It was good to be alive and take part in the making of the United States of the World!
She had had breakfast and luncheon in her apartments. At mid-day, she saw Wayland coming along the thronged main street. At every step, some man stopped him to shake hands; and groups turned and gazed after him as he passed, and spat their approval or disapproval with great emphasis at the mottled pavement. Below the window, a big Swede grabbed his two shoulders with the grip of a steam crane.
"Say, you Vaylan', huh?" he asked. "Say, you a' right! You ever need yob, Vaylan', you 'ply our union! Huh?" and he laughed, and went on; and the tears welled to Eleanor's eyes.
Then came the lawyer to read the will; and after the lawyer's departure, Matthews had told her how she concerned his errand down from the North; and when the door closed on Matthews, she burst into tears.
She saw the street lights come twinkling out, and she did not turn on the light of the sitting room chandelier. Did he love her at all; or if he did, did he know what this waiting all day meant to a woman? Then, it came to her in a flash, his wistful look in the morning behind the forced gayety, his reference to the last ride, to keeping resolutions. Was that resolution for the sake of his work at all; or for her? Of course, Matthews had told him in the Desert; and with the thought, the weight that had oppressed her rolled from her heart. She jumped from her chair and uttered a low cry of happy laughter.
"Oh, I'll soon make short work of that resolution," she vowed.
Alas and alas! Samson straining his manhood for strength to shore up a resolution, and here was a sharpening of scissors to shear him well!
There was a knock on the door. She thought it the waiter coming up with a late dinner and had called "come in," when the door opened, and in the glare of light from the hall way stood the news editor, embarrassed and hesitating.
"Please come in." She pressed the electric button, shook hands with him and shut the door. His air was at once apologetic and glad, but all the bitterness and anger seemed to have gone. He stood holding his soft felt hat in his hand and looking through his glasses, very steadily and kindly, Eleanor thought.
"Won't you sit down?"
"We newspaper chaps should pretty nearly apologize for coming into your presence, Miss MacDonald," he began. "I've wanted to tell you how we fellows all regret that. I hope you know that kind of thing doesn't come from inside the office. It comes from influences outside."
He had seated himself shading his eyes from the light with his hand, an old trick of his compositor days, and still looked at her in the same friendly way.
"Ever hear of the Down-East daily that black-guarded one of our greatest presidents the very day he died? I've often wondered if the public realized when that item appeared that not an editor on the staff knew it was coming out, that when two of the editors read it, they cried and went to pieces right there and then before their men for very shame! Item had been sent straight to the composing room just before the forms were locked up, by man who owned the paper. President had refused him some public concession. Such things sometimes happen to lesser folks than presidents."
"Were you so kind as to come here to say all this to me?" asked Eleanor.
"No, Miss MacDonald, I wasn't!" He blushed furiously, like a boy caught in the act culpable. "Fact is, I'm keen to see Wayland, been such a crush of men round him all day, haven't been able to get in a word with him."
It was her turn to blush furiously.
"I didn't want him to go off up the Valley before I could get hold of him. I wanted to have a shake with him. We're in the same boat now, Miss MacDonald."
"I don't the very least bit in the world understand what you are saying."
The news editor laughed and laid his hat on the onyx centre table beneath the electric lights.
"Why, we're both fired," he said.
"Fired?" repeated Eleanor.
This time he laughed aloud: "I don't mean fired out of a gun," he explained. "We're fired out of our job. I knew after the inquest, I'd get the sack," he went on, making light of it, "but the wire didn't come till this morning."
There were a lot of things the news editor didn't tell Eleanor just here; and I beg of you, dear reader, to remember these things when you execrate the press; for they happen every day to plain fellows, some of them profane fellows, who make no professions and blow no trumpet. When the news editor walked out of the office that morning, he owned, besides the Smelter City lots, which were mortgaged to the hilt, and six "kiddies," who had to be fed, precisely the five dollar bill in his pocket, the clothes on his back and the duster coat that he carried out on his arm. It was a mere detail, of course; but it was one of the details he didn't tell Eleanor. When he had gone home and told his wife, she had asked, "For Heaven's sake, Joe, what ever will we do, run a fruit stand; or peddle milk?" Joe had answered the distracted question with a lighter hearted laugh than she had heard for many a day. Then he had gone off to catch Wayland.
But Eleanor did not know all this. Her quick wit grasped one salient fact. You think, perhaps, it was that Wayland had been dismissed? It wasn't.
"You mean that you have lost your position because of the evidence you gave for us?"
Then the news editor did what he always told his underlings not to do and to do—"Never lie; but if you have to, lie like a gentleman."
"Not at all, Miss MacDonald! I got fired because I told the truth! If I had given evidence that was simply in your favor, I'd deserve to be fired; but it was only a matter of somebody letting in a little honest daylight. I told Wayland at the time that I'd cooked my dough! Funny enough, the wire that came firing me this morning was immediately followed by a wire from Washington announcing that he has been dismissed for taking three weeks' absence without leave. We got it in the neck together, Miss MacDonald, and I thought maybe Wayland would be game enough to have a—a—a shake with me over it."
"Yes, a shake," smiled Eleanor. "I'd like to mix it for you!"
The news editor suddenly lost all shyness, burst out laughing, leaned forward and shook hands.
"Don't know whether you know it or not," he went on, "but about a month ago one of those d—I beg your pardon, Miss MacDonald, Down-East scribblerettes, that come out to see the West from a Pullman car window and put things right, passed through here. Somebody got him and filled him up pretty full with a lot of lies about Wayland—"
"You mean Brydges gave him the facts?" asked Eleanor.
"Well, maybe, Brydges may have had him out in the forty horse power car! He sent a lot of awful rot East! That wasn't the worst of it. You'd think the Eastern fellows would know the difference between a maverick and a long-horn! He's been going round to the Eastern editors giving them doped stuff, lies dated out here written right down in New York! They've been hammering the Forest Service for the last month! I'll bet that dough-head never put a foot in National Forests once while he was West: rot about running off settlers, and shutting down mines, and hampering lumbering operations, and low down personal stuff! Anyway, between lies and dope, they've got Wayland! He's fired! I've been trying to get hold of him all day. Your old man's phrase, 'United States of the World,' kind of caught on with the crowd: they've kind of wakened up! Funny thing, the way that happens to a crowd! Your professional wind-jammer can orate till he busts his head, he never knows it has happened till the crowd has got away from him! Been a crush of men round Wayland all day, by G—, I beg your pardon—but if he isn't drowned, 'twon't be their fault! They are talking of putting him up as a candidate."
"As a what?" exclaimed Eleanor.
"Run for Congress," explained the news man.
She had gone quickly forward to the window, righting a shade to hide the flood of joy that surged up to her face.
"Excuse me—Mr.——? But I don't know your name?"
"My name? Oh, my name is—Legion," said the news editor dryly.
"Well, what was it you said the other day," she had mustered courage to turn and face him again, "what was it you said the other day about a moneyed man backing an independent paper through this fight? Don't you remember, after the inquest, Mr. Legion?"
He uttered a shout of laughter, and she understood and laughed too.
"Oh, the independent paper is floundering on the edge of failure. They'll have to swing in line with the side that pays them best at election time. One could buy up their debts now for a few thousand dollars, perhaps not twenty thousand. Another fifty or so would swing her off on an independent tack. There's been a great awakening. The people have their ears down to the ground for the coming change, Miss MacDonald; and the politicians don't know it! If we could swing her off well, she'd be a paying concern in a year; then the politicians could be d—I beg your pardon, the special interests could go to the Devil! That's what I wanted to talk about to Wayland. He's the winning horse! We haven't either of us got anything left to lose but some frayed convictions, and by God," (this time, he did not notice he had said it), "we'd invest 'em in an independent for all we're worth! I'm hot; and I've an idea Wayland isn't just at milk and water temperature; and the public isn't; and we'd have them! We'd force the other crowd to yell at the top of their voices for reform inside of six months. There's a lot about that Rim Rocks affair even the owners of the sheep don't know; but why in the Devil am I telling all this to a woman?"
She had drawn her chair up to the table where he sat.
"Because, I suppose, the woman wants to know. In case, you don't see Wayland, do you mind giving me the exact figures about that independent paper? We are all to go home together to-morrow. Let us put the figures down. I can tell him the rest when the others are not about; and do you know, I think I have heard him speak of some one who might back this kind of scheme?"
Oh, crafty woman! Do you think the kindly eyes behind those strongly focussed glasses did not bore in behind your guarded words? Just once did she interrupt his quick run of explanations.
"Is your idea to run an altogetherstaidjournal, or a yellow one?" she asked.
He was plainly taken aback. He laid down his pencil.
"If you were a man, I could explain that easier!"
"Because, I'm done with the kind of goodness that's pickled and put away in a self-sealer where it won't spoil like old-fashioned jam for company," she said.
The news editor's eyes opened very wide, indeed! She had said "I'm done" quite as unconsciously as he had let slip words inadmissable in polite converse.
"It isn't piety done up in homoeopathic pills the world wants," she went on.
"No, it's punch," he broke in; "and what's the use of dickering with a little two-for-a-cent high-brow, superior, exclusive, self-righteous rag of a daily that will reach only a handful of sissy people? Democracy is here; and it's here for keeps, the rule of the many good or bad; and it's as your old parson said in the court room, it'sgoing to be the United States of the World. What's the use of issuing a rag sheet that will preach to a little parlorful of sissies and high-brows? You've got to get the crowd, and to educate 'em up to self-government, to pelt 'em to a pulp with facts! You've got to get 'em if you take them by the scruff of the neck, Miss MacDonald! While the churches and the teachers and the preachers sit back self-superior and self-sufficient, Miss MacDonald, where's the crowd? They're out in the street! You've got to get 'em! You've got to get the facts before 'em! People curse the yellow journals! All right! But they reach an audience of a million a day; every one of them; and your self-superior journals don't touch ten-thousand! Miss MacDonald, which is having the telling influence, for good or evil? Which is getting the crowd? Oh, I know they publish pictures of pugilists' big toes and base ball pitchers' thumbs the size of a half page; but if I could ram a moral truth or a hard fact down the fool-public's throat on the very next page by advertising it with a pugilist's big toe, I'd do it—you bet! I'd take a leaf out of the Devil's note book and go him one better! You ask whether I'd publish a yellow journal? Miss MacDonald, if I could get the facts of exactly what is going on in this country before the public, I wouldn't publish 'em yellow! I'd publish truth bloody red!"
When the Williams and Matthews came in from the missionary meeting, Eleanor was standing under the centre light leaning against the table with her back to the door.
"Feeling better, dear?" asked Mrs. Williams.
"So much better that I'm going to bed to sleep every minute for the first night for a week."
"Surely," cried Williams clapping his hands. "A MacDonald never had nerves."
Matthews was trying to read her face as she shook hands saying good-night.
"No," she answered his look, shaking her head, "I must decide for myself, Mr. Matthews."
The three stood talking in the room she had left.
"Do you think we ought to have told her?" asked Mrs. Williams solicitously.
"No! Leave Wayland t' tell her himself t'morrow! A make no doubt that buckboard won't hold five people! Is it six o'clock we set out? A'm longin' for m' own wee uns!"
"One thing," declared Williams, throwing himself on a chair, "ifWayland runs, I'm going to stump it for him! We've got to get busy,Matthews! The old order changeth! We've got to keep up with theprocession!"
If you had not known her utter conservatism as to all things pertaining to women, you could not appreciate the response of the missionary's wife. (She was an ultra-anti-suffragette.)
"I am sure, my dear," she cried, "I know a couple of hundred people on our summer circuit in the Upper Pass that I could make vote right."
"Wayland, for a man who's had his head cut off, you look uncommon joyous, tho' you're a bit white about the chops."
"Had a shave," answered Wayland dryly.
The yellow buckboard was rattling over the pressed brick pavement of Smelter City towards the suburbs. Williams was in the front seat with Matthews, who was driving. Eleanor and Mrs. Williams were in the second seat, with Wayland standing behind as he had stood that night going up to the Rim Rocks. Behind trotted two range ponies with empty saddles.
"I thought, perhaps, you'd prefer driving out beyond the suburbs," he had explained. "There's a good trail up to the hog's back opposite theBrulé."
They watched her leap down from the buckboard and mount the saddle, a little awkward at first whether to put the right knee fore or aft, from her Eastern training to a side saddle; and side saddles in the range country are rare as low neck gowns and tuxedo coats; but once she had caught the far stirrup, riding was riding. She had the pace, and the two figures loped off up the burn for the hill known as theBrulé, Wayland turning and waving his hat.
"Now the Lord have mercy on your soul, Williams. This ride will settle it; an' A'm not darin' t' hope which way it goes! A 'm not keen to go back empty-handed with yon little old lady payin' m' expenses heavy an' generous; but yet—but yet—"
"Yet what?" asked Mrs. Williams, leaning forward between the two men.
"Th' great joy comes only once; an' when it cam' t' me, A put a handspike thro' it, an' kept it."
He had come to her that morning with a look on his face that she had not dreamed a human face could wear. She wondered if all men crucified for right won such joy. And he did not tread earth. He trod air. Eleanor could not trust her eyes to meet his. She felt their light burning to the centre of her soul. What was it? Was it renunciation? The thought turned her faint. Her determination to break his resolution seemed the cheap obtrusion of egotism on the great mission of a devoted life. Then, going up the hog's back trail along the rim of the Ridge, they were facing the Holy Cross Mountain. The glint of the morning sun on the far snows shone like diamonds, a tiared jeweled thing poised in mid-heaven like a crown held by invisible hands; the base of the lower mountain outlines melting and losing edge in the purple shadows; the crown only, shining diademed, winged with opal light.
"Look Dick," she said pointing with her riding crop, "do you remember the night on the Ridge? Do you remember about the snow flakes massing to the avalanche? It has—hasn't it? The Nation has wakened up."
Wayland looked ahead. He couldn't answer. 'Remember the night on the Ridge?' He had a lump in his throat and an ache at his heart from never letting himself remember it. By that strange perversity, which we all know in ourselves, he couldn't talk. The hundred and one things he had wanted to ask, died on his lips in a dumbness of gladness. Of course, you, dear reader, on the return of a husband or wife (prospective or present), on the sudden appearance of friend or kith have never been similarly affected. You didn't forget the questions you had meant to ask till thousands of miles again separated you.
It was good to leave the Valley road and go into seclusion and shelter on the Forest trail; for a hurricane September wind was blowing, the kind of Western wind that the Eastern woman with a big hat thinks is possessed by ten thousand devils; the kind of wind that the Eastern office man with sensitive eyes curses with tears that are not grief; the kind of wind that makes the Westerner put screw nails inhishat and look out for the fire guard round wheat, stock and timber.
Such a different home-going he had planned from this visitation of dumb devils that obsessed them both! He used to dream at night in the Desert of the day, perhaps, coming when they should set out together adventuring a life joy in the Forests;hisForests; when he would show her the golden cottonwoods and the pale birches nursing the pineries to strong maturity; and the fire blisters on the firs; and the sugar blisters on the sugar pines; and the rain of green-gray tempered light from the under side of the funereal hemlocks; and the park like glades of the wonderfully straight and serried soldier ranks of the engleman spruce and the lodge-pole pines; and the larches yellow as gold dust to the touch of the alchemist autumn. He wanted to bring out his violin some day with her and see if they could catch the exact tone and pitch of the pines, when they began harping those age-old melodies of Pan: they were harping them to-day in the high wind; he was sure it was the same as the bass undertone of a big orchestra. Had she ever noticed the way the seeds came fluffing out of the cinnamon cones and the asters and the golden rod and the fire flower in September, for all the world like fairies sailing pixie parachutes? People said that autumn was sad, it presaged death! Did it? A Forester did not see it so; he saw the triumphal procession of the years lighted to its consummation by the flaming torches of ten thousand golden twinkling gay, recklessly gay flowers and trees—the cottonwood and the poplar and the larch, the cone flower and the golden rod and the aster! But to-day, he could not say a word. They were no longerhisForests. He had been cast out from his life work—the continuity of a National Life Work broken—because he had dared to interfere with the petty plans of peanut politicians and public plunderers.
"It is level here! Let us gallop out of this bare burn to the shelter of the evergreens," she said. "I don't mind wind, but I'd just as soon get under cover where it couldn't lash us so."
And the horses came chugging and breathing hard up on the sheltered trail below the evergreens. She reined her horse to the slowest of walks.
"Did you see the news editor before you left town?" she asked.
"Yes, he came over to my hotel last night about twelve o'clock. He had the biggest fool-scheme you ever heard of my running for Congress and buying a paper to boost out the Ring and all that! Thunder, I don't want to run! I've no ax to grind! I prefer to stay a free lance in the fighting ranks!"
"And do you think the fellows, who want to run and have an ax to grind, do best for the Nation?" asked Eleanor. "Why wouldn't you run if the people demanded it?"
"There is the plain brutal fact that it takes money," explained Wayland. "I haven't the ambition; and I have less money. I haven't more than will set me up on some little one-horse irrigation farm. Oh, I know some fool had been filling him up about my having rich friends East, who would put up money for this campaign and finance a new kind of newspaper for the Valley! I'd like to knock the fool's head off who told him that! It's all a lie! Of course, I knew lots of moneyed chaps at Yale; but thunderation, I'd have to want public office a good deal harder than I do to go round cap in hand! Why, Eleanor, a fellow who would do that wouldn't be worth shucks to represent the people."
"Did you tell him that?" asked Eleanor.
"Yes and more! I told him he was clean plumb fool-crazy! Why, Eleanor, when that fellow was fired out of his job yesterday morning, he hadn't ten dollars ahead in the world! I'm not a bank, myself; but then I haven't a wife and kiddies. Do you know, Eleanor, that fellow had more pluck than I would have had under the same circumstances? I couldn't let the results of this kind of a fight come down on a woman."
"What did he say when you told him he was crazy?"
"Oh, went locoed clean out of his head, kicked my hat off the bed post, took out a fiver, said, 'Wayland, that's my last! I'll bet it a hundred odd you do the very thing I'm outlining tonight.'"
"It was a safe bet," said Eleanor. "He had come to see me before he went to you! I was the person, who told him you had a friend, who would put up the money. I didn't tell him who the friend was; for it happens to be myself. No: you needn't blow up, Dick; or drop dead of apoplexy! He didn't come to tell me, or ask a woman's money! He had come hunting you; and I pumped it out of him. He's a brick not to mention my name to you. I like that in a man; and I am going to do it, Dick; and you needn't blow up with rage! You can swear if it would relieve pressure; but I am going to do it! I am going to do it at once! Don't you see what a cowardly foolish thing it would be of you to give up and slink into a hole just because you're defeated? It's just what you said would happen that night on the Ridge. Don't you remember, you said it was bound to be a losing fight; and I said it didn't matter a bit if a man were crucified long as the cause won out? Well, you sent me the note saying you had set out on the Trail and would never quit till you got the Man Higher Up. How are you going to get the Man Higher Up if you don't go right after him in the House and the Senate? They've crucified you; and it's going to be the making of you. Men don't destroy an opponent unless they fear him! If he's a fool, they give him rope enough to hang himself; but if they fear him, they slander him and blacken him and misrepresent him and try to destroy him! Well, they've done all that to you and tried to destroy you; and instead of destroying you, they've only made the people call on you for a leader! Don't you see what a cowardly thing it would be to slink away now because you are defeated? Why, that's the very time a man can't afford to quit, and still call himself a man. No, don't try to stop me! I lay awake all last night thinking it out! They'll not have a chance to call you a woman-made man! I'll place a certain amount with my lawyer for Mr. Williams. You know my father always helped the Mission School more or less; and a woman is supposed to be soft on Missions. Mr. Williams will loan it to the news editor. Only, I may as well tell you, Dick, you are not going to be allowed to stop now! You wrote me that a person couldn't stab certain things to life and then expect them to lie quiet as if nothing had happened. That cuts both ways. Men are pretty good egotists; but I wonder if you ever thought what that means with me, with the people you have prodded up to resent the Ring in the Valley here. Do you know Dick, if you would quit now, I'd despise myself for ever having loved you."
Wayland could not answer. His eyes had filled. He rode with his hand on the pommel of the saddle. Her words had fallen like whiplashes. It was true. You could not cut out and disconnect with life. He had dreamed of this last ride as a sort of mid-heaven ecstasy; and behold, instead of love's dream, the lifting kick to a limp spine. If only one's friends would oftener give us that lifting kick instead of the softening sympathy! If only they would brace our back bone instead of our wish bone!
Then, she turned to him with a sudden tenderness: "What a beast I am to speak so to you when you've just had the blow of public dismissal on top of five years' continuous grilling," and he saw that the flame in her cheeks, in her eyes, was not anger but a gust of passionate love.
"I can't thank you Eleanor," he said. "This is beyond thanks."
"And your old editor man was so funny about it," she went on. "You know Dick, I think he had really come round to the hotel to have a consolation drink with you; and he almost let it out; but just at the last moment he changed the word and said he'd come 'to shake' with you on being dismissed together."
"When do you leave?" asked Wayland dully.
"I don't leave! I haven't the slightest intention of ever leaving this Valley! Why, Dick, would you have me exchange this splendid big free new life where men and women do things, for a parish existence—working slippers for a curate and talking dress, Dick—dress like the Colonel's wife, and chronicling what Shakespeare calls 'small beer'? I don't intend ever to leave the Valley! Tennyson sung of 'the federation of the world,' Dick! You and I are seeing it in the making! Think of the fun of my staying and seeing it and having a finger in the making, just a little quiet finger that nobody knows about but you and me! United States of the World, Dick; and you are going after the Man Higher Up just as you went after those blackguards into the Desert." She laughed joyously, joyous as a child, swinging out her arms to the sweep of the roaring Forest wind. "Don't look shocked. I'll not stay on alone at the Ranch House for the Rookery to talk about! I'll insist on the foreman marrying an aged house keeper for me; or I'll move over to the Mission School; or—Oh, I'll plan out something; but I am not going to leave the West."
Wayland suddenly wheeled his horse across her way and faced her. "So you've been trouncing the hide off my back for an hour or more to make me believe all this doesn't mean renunciation? They splashed their filthy hogwash on your skirts to foil me; andthatwas nothing! The fight was to go on just the same. I was not to stop because of any injury that came to you. Then, they assassinated your father; and you know as well as I do he was shot down by that drunken Shanty Town sot in mistake for me; but the fight is to go on just the same.That, too, is nothing if the cause be won. Now, you take a slice of your fortune and slam it into the cause, backing me; and you renounce everything that gives meaning to life for a woman, pretending that renunciation is a privilege—"
"It is," interrupted Eleanor, "if it weaves the thing worth while into the warp and woof of your life so it can never be anything but a part of you! Turn your broncho round here and ride along side of me. Look at our Mountain ahead! It isn't a Cross: it's a Crown! Do you think I'm going to push a crown away from myself for the sake of having a lot of flunkeys in a land I don't know bending themselves in their middle at me all my life?" She laughed joyously, flinging her arms wide to the drive and toss of the rolling wind tunneling up the trail on their backs. She had pulled off her hat and the wind tossed forward her hair in a frame of curls round an enamel miniature that always haunted Wayland. "I love it," she said, "the harder it blows, the harder I want to ride! You remember that night coming down the Ridge in the storm? It was like Love and Life! And smell the air, Dick! It has all the sunbeams of the summer imprisoned, done up in balsam fir and balm of gilead and spices! Exchangethislife in the open, here, in the very thick of things doing, for that ancient tapestry plush upholstery blue-book existence?"
"I can't ask you, Eleanor! I haven't a thing on earth to offer but a broken reputation and a lot of plans in the ditch! I ought never to have let you know I loved you! I ought never to have let you care for me! You know what you think and you know what I think of a man who lets a woman give all. He isn't worthy of her. You know you have never been out of my thoughts day or night since I met you, dear! I couldn't have come through that Desert thing alive without you; and I'll hold you in my heart every day of my life till I die." He had taken off his hat and kicked the stirrups free and was riding with loose rein.
When a man tells a woman that he is down and out financially and dare not ask her to marry him, do you think there is an end of it, dear reader? Do you think a Silenus would hesitate and stickle and scruple over a point of honor; though some of us have seen Silenus blunder into a paradise which he promptly transformed into a sty? And do you think the descendant of the Man of the Iron Hand thought anything less of her lover for refusing to accept renunciation as his right? If Wayland could have trusted himself to look at her, he would have seen that she was riding with a whimsical smile. They came to a bend in the upward climbing trail that overlooked the Valley and faced the opal shining peak.
"There goes the buckboard," remarked Wayland.
"Dick," she said, "I'll write my lawyer about placing the loan in the bank at once. You need not lose any time."
"But, I can't take that, Eleanor! I haven't any security on earth to offer you."
"Oh, yes you have! I've thought all that out, too. You have the very best security I ever want."
"What?" asked Wayland incredulously. "Do you mean you trust to my honesty? Good intentions aren't usually a banking proposition—"
"You will do as security," she said.
Was it the old mountain talking again; or was it the break in her voice? Their eyes met. He had slipped from his horse.
"Don't," she cried averting her eyes with a tremor in her voice. "I couldn't bear This to be of Self! If I were a man, you'd shake hands with me and call it a bargain. Look Dick! We're in the light of the Cross! Shake hands with me! Is it a bargain?"
His hands closed over both of hers. There were tears in his eyes. He did not break out with any of the wild terms that had clamored and clamored for utterance these weeks past. He did not say any of the things that men and women say at such times in books and plays. They paused so, she on horseback, he standing at her side, on the crest of the Ridge gazing down on the Valley in the light of the Cross.
"So my old Mountain is talking to you, too?" she said. "Do you remember, Dick?"
"It's so God-blessed beautiful, Eleanor," he answered. "I can't thank you! If I lived a thousand years, I couldn't live out my thanks. I could only put up a bluff of trying."
"Dick the nth," she laughed whimsically, "Dick the nth for the UnitedStates of the World."
Suddenly he looked up at her. The lashes did not veil quick enough. He caught the veil wide open. He had thought he knew before. Now, he knew that he had but touched the outer margin of her love, of the wealth of her nature, of the reach and grasp of her spirit. She felt the grip of the strong hands closed over hers.
"Mine alder-liefest," he whispered in the old clean unused phrase.
"Is it a bargain?"
"Bargain?" repeated Wayland.
Then, they both laughed. She had him at such an obvious disadvantage. I do not intend to tell how far the afternoon shadows had stretched out when Eleanor exclaimed with a jump; "Dick: the buckboard is out of sight." I do not think either of them as lovers of horses ever offered adequate reason for having ridden their bronchos such a hard pace up grade the last ten miles that the ponies came down the Ridge to the Valley road a lather of sweat.
"You are sure," he had asked as they came out of the evergreens, "that you'll never regret?"
"Mr. Matthews intended to leave to-morrow, Dick. Do you think you could persuade him to stay over a day?"
It was Mrs. Williams who sensed something unusual as the ponies came down one of the by-paths from the Ridge.
"My dear, look at their faces! I do believe it has!" Then to Eleanor,"Will you come in the rig? Are you tired?"
"I think I shall," said Eleanor.
"You've ridden y'r nags uncommon hard, Wayland," observed Matthews.
Eleanor had ascended to the back seat. Wayland had tied the bridle rein of her horse to the rear and was riding abreast of the front seat.
"I wish you could make it convenient to put off your departure for a day or two," began Wayland, very red.
"Eh? What's that?" cried Matthews; and when he looked to the back seat Eleanor and the little gray haired lady in plain back mourning bonnet were going on as fool-women will, and Williams was risking a fall out leaning over the seat shaking hands with Wayland. Somebody was flourishing a red cotton handkerchief; two for ten cents, they sell them in Smelter City. It was Williams who put a check to what Eleanor called a 'loadful of idiots.' "The wind is blowing towards the snow," he said; "but I don't like that column of smoke rising from the Homestead slope in this high gale. That Irish sot went home roaring drunk by the stage yesterday. What will you bet the fire didn't start in the timber slash?"
Wayland gave only one look. "It isn't my job any more," he said, "butI can't stand seeingthat."
He was off at a gallop. They saw the sparks strike from the stones as he turned up the Ridge Trail.
A week had passed. The fire had been put out with little damage except from O'Finnigan's timber slash to the lake beneath the upper snows. A new Ranger was in charge. As for O'Finnigan, like Calamity, he had dropped as completely from the Valley's knowledge as if the earth had swallowed him. The Valley, in fact, had given small thought to the mad squaw or the drunken Irishman. The Valley had had other things to talk about. There was the coming fall campaign, and Wayland's name as reform candidate, and Wayland's quiet marriage to the daughter of the dead sheep king. Eleanor and Wayland had gone round through the Pass to the Lake Behind the Peak, where he had dreamed what form of triangulation thoughts must take from the star in the water to the star on the other side of the Holy Cross; where the little waves lipped and lisped and laved the reeds; where they two could drink and drink unseen of the joy of the waters of life before the opening of the political battle.
"Make him tell y' of all that happened in th' Pass when A was with him," Matthews had called as they rode away up the narrowing trail to the jubilant shouting of the canyon waters, the little mule leading the pack ponies.
Mrs. Williams stood on the upper piazza of the Mission School waving and waving. The cottonwoods were raining down showers of gold; and the pines were clicking their gypsy tambourines; and the golden torches of countless yellow autumn flowers lighted the triumphal procession of the year to its consummation. Against the opal crown of the Holy Cross Mountain, the yellowed larches tossed flaming torches to the very sky.
"They seem to be riding away to a world of dreams," said the little lady in black.
Mr. Bat Brydges and Senator Moyese walked slowly and reflectively past the Range Cabin towards the charred burn and timber slash of O'Finnigan's abandoned homestead.
"It's that damned rant the old fellow let off in the court room," saidBrydges.
"Rant doesn't win elections, Brydges! It has to be fought out! Sooner we accept the challenge and put 'em to bed for good, the better! Money talks, Brydges!"
"But that's just it, Senator! Moneydoestalk; and some body's money has talked when the Independent sold out to Joe!"
"Fool and his money soon parted, Brydges! Only, in this case, I've a suspicion it's aHer! Never fear a known enemy, Brydges! It's the unknown factors you want to look out for! F'r instance, there is this sot of a drunken Shanty Town Irishman? What's become of him? Did he burn himself, when he set fire to the slash?"
They had paused opposite that fallen giant which bridged the Gully where Wayland had laid the saplings to cross to the Rim Rocks.
"That's a fine one; the fire didn't bring that one down! Been cheesy heart wood! Wonder who placed the saplings for a bridge? Think I'll cross and go down to the ranch by the Rim Rocks, Brydges!"
"Then, excuse me, Mr. Senator! I go backthisway! Napoleon had aversion to mice! I've an aversion to wire walking."
He saw Moyese, hands in pockets, stroll along the great log bridging the Gully. Mid-way, he paused as if in contempt of Brydges' timidity. "Bark gives a little," he said, pressing his whole weight up and down flexibly.
"I wish you wouldn't do that, Senator," called Brydges. "Trunk looks to me as if the fire had run through the punk!"
Even as he spoke, he saw it happen, Calamity glide on the far end of the log, utter a maniacal laugh, throw her shawl to the winds and bound forward.
"Go back, you she-devil! Look out, Senator! That log won't stand the weight of two—"
There was the flash of a knife in her hand. Moyese had jumped from the stabbing onslaught—when he lost his balance: the tree crunched, bent, doubled like a jack knife, and plunged in a swirl of smoke and dust to the bottom of the Gully. It had been burnt through to the green mossed outer bark. When Brydges looked fearfully over the bank, the Indian woman had crushed below the log; and Moyese lay very still, his face to the sky, his left hand in his pocket, his right hand thrown out as if to ward a blow, gashed and bloody, whether from rock or knife cut, one could not tell.
I do not intend to repeat the "Smelter City Herald's" flare head announcement of "the deplorable and tragical accident that cut short one of the most promising political careers in the United States." "Senator Moyese had long been accustomed to search the mountains in autumn for seeds and roots of specimen flowers for his herbarium, of which he had made a hobby. That reckless disregard of danger for which he was famous, etc., etc." You'll find the salient features of it all in "Who's Who." Pad that out with Mr. Bat Brydges' imagination and devotion; and you will have an idea of the sorrow that convulsed the "Smelter City Herald."
The opposition paper opined "He would hardly have retained the confidence of the Valley had he lived;" and the "Independent"—our old friend, the news editor—paid him the straight out from the shoulder compliment, "that he had died as he had lived, an uncompromising game fighter to the end."
What became of Mr. Bat Brydges? Bless you, my friend, do you need to ask? He is shouting for Reform as loudly as his kind always shout when the tide turns. What became of the scandal story? What becomes of any scandal story? What becomes of the skunk's contribution to the gayety of nations?—Buried in the memory of decent folks, long ago and forgotten: in the memory of indecent folk, still hauled forth and repeated and fondled under the tongue.