Extracted from the Saturday Evening Post, Philadelphia; serialized Aug 13 – Sept 3, 1910; pp. 3-5, (parts of) 30-32, etc. Illustrated by N. C. Wyeth A novella.
Kennedy, Riding Bareback and Sidewise
The Line of Least Resistance
By EUGENE MANLOVE RHODES
ILLUSTRATED BY N. C. WYETH
I
THE world to an end shall come in eighteen hundred and eighty-one." Lamentably accurate as to horseless carriages and other doleful prophecies Mother Shipton was yet not infallible. The year passed with no such annoying event; the periled ant-hill world continued frantically ant-busy with vital affairs, which now are forgotten or as frantically undone.
In 1881, Garfield was assassinated. In New York City, "Crazy Luke," persistent in a Hudson River Tunnel hallucination, became a nuisance to harassed capital and was properly sent to the insane asylum. Infant damnation was abolished at Cincinnati. Washington was deep in the A, B, C, D of a new navy, planning the Atlanta, Boston, Chicago and Dolphin, monsters of three thousand tons.
Kansas and Nebraska were mortgaged, emitting—profanity was wicked, exhausted and unsatisfactory—weird, harebrained heresies, now orthodox. These fanatic dissatisfactions were to become Grange Societies, Populism, and, by a particularly subtle and insidious system—a consistent series of crushing defeats—to disconcert and capture one and both of Populism's successful antagonists, and so depart, having made two Populist parties grow where none grew before. Singularly enough, that son of York—at that time affording much quiet amusement to the old hands at Albany—who was to lead this wintry discontent to blooming summer, or, at least, to ride before it—was now devoting his few odd moments to refuting the heresies he was to enforce so strenuously, and to exposing the fallacies of his own later career. It is gratifying to know that our ethical and political standards are permanent and absolute at last, after centuries of change and foggy confusion.
For the rest, the Eastern question and colossal Russia engrossed an agitated Europe. The Japanese were becoming known as a bright little people, really quite intelligent; in revolving Mexico, Gonzales was President per Dictator Diaz; in South Africa, one Paul Kruger was experimentally playing cat's-cradle with the British Lion's tail.
In 1881 New Mexico expected statehood forthwith; the Lincoln County War was dying down; Pat Garrett had successfully killed Billy the Kid; Governor Lew Wallace had written Ben-Hur in the Adobe Palace, undistracted; the Santa Fe Railroad was completed to El Paso; Dundee and other towns without a past were simultaneously enjoying the present and a heavily discounted future.
Why, in '81-'83, Dundee in the desert counted her sons by more joyous hundreds than ever by scores in her subsequent drowsy quarter-century as a cowtown; why some of these hundreds wore silk hats unreproved, some clave to cleft sombreros and some held by skull-cap and duster; why the incumbents of such diverging gear dwelt millennially together, with no unseemly contention for the lion's part; why Dundee boasted two general stores of amazing efficiency where whatsoever thing demanded was mysteriously produced at once; why there was a one-story adobe hotel of vast acreage, forever crowded with affluent transients; why there were rival stage-lines to the Black Range country, sixty miles westward, with a service of a daily six-horse coach either way, not to mention the frequent extras; why the railroad had hastily surveyed a "feeder" for that same Black Range clientage, to be built at once to flourishing Chloride, Fairview, Grafton and Hermosa; why, pending such building, the sidetracks of Dundee were crowded with cars—freight, ore and private; why, night and day, the freight depot was blockaded by waiting freight out fits—ten to twenty horses or mules or oxen, an enormous wagon strong enough for anything in the way of boilers or machinery that could possibly be loaded upon it, and one or more smaller "trail wagons," constituting an outfit; why, in short, gold eagles were then more prevalent in Dundee than were dimes thereafter—all these things may require some explanation.
You would certainly have demanded such explanation, later revisiting the pale glimpses of Dundee; when the long, white tent-streets had folded and vanished in the night, Arabian fashion; when the wooden buildings had been torn down and moved to tributary ranches; when the larger and more capable of the amazing general stores had providentially burned—its provident and capable owner, with the insurance money, flitting to the Cœur d'Aléne country; when the other store and the hotel—both of uninflammable adobe—were partly occupied as headquarters of warring cattle companies. The square stakes of the Black Range branch line remained, a commentary on departed glories. They are there yet. Good wood, in that dry, pure air, does not rot or "powder post" as in some more favored sections. Through the long, pleasant evenings, Dundee, reclining on tarpaulined beds in its vasty starlit sleeping quarters, was prone to wax reminiscent as to that golden age; mournfully proud, like Mr. Kipling's Mulvaney, "Oi wuz a corpr'l wanst. Oi've been rayjooced—but Oi wuz a corpr'l wanst." At such times Dundee fondly recurred to the survey stakes, as Private Mulvaney to those brief, vanished chevrons.
Let us return to our millennial muttons.
Boston built the Santa Fe Railroad, with the brains and money so characteristic of her. Incidentally, she rebuilt frequently such jerkwater part of it as bordered upon the Rio Grande del Norte—sometimes reasonably called Rio Bravo—until, after the ninth consecutive encore, she surmised that those rude, unlettered persons who had aforetime made early casual mention of the Grande, or Bravo, as a fickle and migratory stream, had meant thereby no idle persiflage, but a friendly, unofficial warning. Convinced by the facts, Boston made a late, literal and lateral movement of track and right-of-way—two hundred miles of it. But this is a detail. As said above, Boston built the Santa Fe, and then ventured forth in private cars to view the investment.
The why of what next befell is insufficiently explained. "The lands of the sun expand the soul"—los paises del sol dilaten el alma. This dicho of our Latin neighbors seems the likeliest solution. Perhaps the taintless air was heavy and the glamour of incredible vast horizons stirred the blood. Or, perhaps, it was a sympathetic spiritual strike, incited by bodily freedom from wonted shackles, climatic, sartorial and conventional. Be that as it may, this is the indecorous thing that chanced. Skull-cap coquettishly aslant, with a chuckle, hilarious but not maudlin, staid and thrifty Boston clapped hand to pocket and proceeded to gamble, joyously, deeply, freeheartedly. Not with cards—dear me, no! With mines—gold, silver, copper and things.
To hold a claim, ten feet of assessment work must be done each year, for which payment was had at a flat rate of ten dollars the foot. That was a good time and place; two languid men could thus attain a hundred dollars in from four to six days, according to the rock encountered and the degree of languor exhibited. Energetic folk and Welshmen did it in half the time.
Boston was not blind, but this newly-acquired, careless prodigality thrilled the Bostonian veins with morbid pleasure. A good round price, certainly, said Boston with an airy shrug, also a late acquisition. But, after all, why shouldn't these poor fellows have their bit for such hard toil, where one perspired so freely and soiled one's clothes so very much? It was dangerous too. One might walk into the shaft, or neglect to absent oneself when one set off a blast.
Promising "mines" did "gophering" or development work by contract at the same liberal rate. The heterogeneous population walked with a jaunty and springy swagger—that non-equestrian part of it not engaged in stock-raising. It did not, at this date, drink to excess. It was more amusing to keep sober. It seldom gambled—it wasn't exciting enough. It preserved an invincible good nature. What was there to quarrel about? It took no thought for the morrow. Why should it? New Mexico was roughly, say, four hundred miles square. That was one hundred and sixty thousand square miles—call it one hundred and fifty thousand. In a square mile there were thirty and seven-eighths mining claims, each fifteen hundred by six hundred feet—make it thirty even. Four and a half million claims in New Mexico alone, each calling for a hundred dollars in assessment work every year!—four hundred and fifty million dollars—not counting steady "producers" and development work, or the not infrequent sales at fancy prices. Lump it all at that—cut it in half—two hundred and fifty million dollars a year at the least! Smooth and unperplexed faces were worn; eyes jolly, twinkling, heedless; smiling mouths. Ay de mi! Never were such times since Paris of the Bubble!
Such was the optimistic arithmetic. To be rigidly impartial, the party of the second part calculated as artlessly. And here is a curious thing. Long after those golden days this bit of learned legal phraseology clings persistently to the speech of all who go down into the earth in buckets. He with whom the Southwest has dealings connected with the animal or vegetable kingdom, or prepared foods, is a man. But if the deal is as to things metalliferous the absent, be he "the foe, the victim, or the fond ally," loses all personal nomenclature and pronominal rights, and is mysteriously referred to, irrespective of person, number, gender and "the party."
A similar relic obtains as to the mine itself. It is not now so called unless it is a "producer." When on the market for sale, lease or bond or seeking capital for development work, it is invariably spoken of as "a proposition." With proverbial beginners' luck, Boston made a few notable winnings. Gleeful letters went forth to favored cities on Boston's calling list; the skull-cap took on a tilt positively rakish, and Boston made new bets on the layout.
There are rumors of cold decks, slipped cuts and similar malign devices. If such there were they but accelerated the inevitable end. Ten dollars a foot from the grass-roots down would have done the business, unaided by art. There came a day when Boston went back with a headache—expense money wired.
The bereaved residue, thus cruelly deprived of sustenance, for the most part resumed wrinkles and human traits; became thirsty, acquisitive and quarrelsome, with respective tendencies toward D. T., train robbery and homicide; and so drifted away before the swelling tide of keen-eyed and long-legged Texans, the cowmen who were for a space to inherit the land.
There was a minority, both of those that drifted and of those that lodged, who kept sweet and sound, loyal and sunny and kind and gay to the end; who, like the Jolly Old School master, were "sure of happiness, living or dead." Nameless here, save for a few, that pulsing, great-hearted, generous life gives warmth and color to every mellow memory of those far-off dreamy days; their friendly ghosts flit dimly to and fro on shadowy errands; not on the firing-line, but a sure reserve in need; in Dundee, or what place they were, their strength a refuge, covert from the storm, shelter from mighty winds, the shadow of a great rock in a weary land.
II
IT is most irregular for a cañon to run due north into a river flowing due south, but Mescal does just that, the enormous mass of Caballo Mountain barring it from other access to the Rio Grande. Precisely at this junction the river is forced to a reluctant westering, and gnaws persistently at the western base of the Caballos with intent presently to undermine their foundations. In this design it will doubtless be successful; these sandy waters cut like a chisel. You see, there is a grudge of some standing. These—literally—upstart Caballos were one day upheaved directly in the river's chosen course, with resultant bitterness.
Mescal rises in the bewildered tangle of low sandstone foot hills between the Caballo and that northern prong of the great Chihuahuan Desert, named of the maps the Jornada del Muerto, and locally known as the Jornada.
To say that Mescal flowed due north, however, would be doubly inaccurate. Its course so meandered, wound, twisted, turned, looped, curlicued, doubled and twined, and generally boxed the compass forward and back, that cautious mention of its mouth as being north of its source was as far as a reputable person would care to commit himself. Secondly, save for springs near its mouth, no water flows in it. Here is a roaring muddy torrent after a rainstorm, but not for long. As Neighbor Jones put it: "Mescal would be steep as the steeple on a church-house if 'twasn't so crooked. Good gramagrass on them hills, just alongin' to be minted into gold pieces—only, cattle get so plumb dizzy going down to the river for water they never get back."
Now, near the head of Mescal, Hiram Yoast and Don Kennedy espied by chance a clump of tender greenery—a wild grapevine, small but thrifty. This, in the arid lands, cannot live unless the roots reach to living water. Hiram made camp with saddle blankets and both canteens, while Kennedy rode post haste after supplies. Ownership of water, in the desert, is wealth, culture and social distinction.
Hiram Yoast Was Deeply in Love With Life
Hiram Yoast was deeply in love with life, sunny, lighthearted, given to cheerful self-delight. In that fresh and fragrant hour, dearest of all the clean, bright, desert day—the cool silence between dawn and sunrise—he sat tailor-wise before the fire. His unlined boyish face was illuminated by a saintly smile of conscious virtue; such bright approval as Little Jack Horner proclaimed during a memorable event. The occasions were in no way dissimilar: the night before they had struck water at eighteen feet.
A cottontail, daintily nibbling in the bushes, caught a glint of the firelight. Decidedly this must be investigated. Noiseless, he hopped into the open and sat down shyly, black eyes blinking and ears pinkily aquiver; to flee terrified as Hiram raised his voice in a cheerful little matin song:
Ducks in the millpond, cows in the clover,
Pocket full o' money and six hits over!
In one hand he held the branding iron from his saddle, a small rod bent to a sort of shepherd's crook. The other hand held an iron fork with which he turned the venison in a merrily spluttering pan. This done, he lifted off the bubbling coffee-pot and poured in water from a canteen to settle it.
Next he hooked his crook in the rimmed lid of the iron bakeoven, raised it and made inspection. The baking-powder biscuits were light and flaky, and not brown enough. He tilted the lid to let the dying coals slide off, placed it on the hottest place in the fire, whistling a merry tune the while. With his useful crook he raked out the live embers and set the bake oven over them, flipped fresh coals on the now heated top and replaced it on the oven.
The camp—uncomplicated to a degree—was made on a shelf in the hillside, well out of the arroyo. Under a thick-topped cedar a few blankets were spread on a tarp, which in turn was pulled up over the blankets. The bed was now in some disarray, exposing cartridge belts and pistol belts under the war sacks that served for heading. Saddles and other gear hung from the branches, beyond the reach of prowling coyote or an occasional salt-hungry cow.
The fire was built against a big out-cropping boulder that served as a strong-room. On its top were the leather-bound canvas pack-sacks, their collapsed condition revealing the nearly exhausted commissariat—dwindled sacks of flour, salt, sugar and coffee, a slab of breakfast bacon, a few tins of canned goods; a new pack-saddle with breeching, breast straps and broad pack-cinch; and symmetrical rows of empty tins, bearing mute witness to Hiram's methodical housewifery.
Beside the boulder were two five-gallon kegs, a large canteen with a two-inch strap, smaller ones for saddle use. Each day they watered their horses at Mescal Spring, five crooked miles away, and packed back water for the household.
A clatter broke the stillness. A quail whistled shrill alarm, then whirred through the air in bullet flight. Two loose horses soberly topped the hill, their rawhide hobbles buttoned around their necks; then Kennedy, riding bareback and sidewise, swinging an empty canvas nosebag against the fat sides of Doubting Thomas, the pack-horse.
Kennedy was taller than Hiram, stronger-thewed, a dozen years older. His strong, rough-hewn face had yet a careless, flashing charm of self-reliance, force, alert poise, more pleasing than mere beauty; but in its underlying lines of sternness and resolution it was the face of a man who has passed many Rubicons. Privately, Hiram considered Kennedy quite the finest little piece of work produced to date, but carefully concealed this boyish idolatry from its object. His elation grew to think that henceforth this was to be his pardner; he whistled more blithely than ever. Pray observe that "pardner" is not at all the same word or thing as the purely commercial term "partner."
The horse-wrangler slid off easily, apportioned the scanty remnant of corn to the three nosebags, and slipped them on the three nuzzling heads. The munching horses, eyes half closed luxuriously, stood with noses pointing to a common center, untied and contented.
"Was they far?"
"They were headed for Winter's Flat. Had to track 'em. Jug in the lead. The old skunk wants to go back to Palomas." Kennedy performed his simple ablutions. Holding a cup between his teeth, he poured water on his hands; holding it between his knees, he filled his cupped hands for facial purposes.
"Br-reakfas' now ready in the dining-cyar!" announced Hiram in sonorous satisfaction. "Bring the dishes, Don. And the cow. And the sugar." Knives and forks were of iron; the battered plates, cups, spoons and the cow were tin.
"Been down to the well yet, Hiram?"
"Puesto que si! Eight feet of water! Me, I'm most might undiscontented. D'yuh reckon we'd better pipe it out or get a windmill?"
"Windmill first. Pipe-line, poco tiempo, bimeby, day after mañana. It'll be a big job. This mine, miner, minus dream is due to play out before long. Then we can hire some one to do the ditch on reasonable terms. Pass the meat. It'll cost us a heap of money even then—but it'll be worth a dollar a year for every head of stock it'll water. Next thing to ownin' a mint, water is."
"Mañana just suits my style of beauty," said Hiram. "I don't mind work that I can do ahorseback, but I don't noways yearn, long, hone or hanker to make any personal excavation in the solid rock twelve or fifteen feet deep and three hundred yards long. That's too much like old manual labor. Look at me now! Look at my hands—and these brogans—and these overalls! Marse Hi shaves his face and crawls into his nice little corduroys before we hit the trail. Just think, Don—this noon we'll sit down to eggs and chili and real cream of the cow!"
Don put his plate down and looked at his pardner solicitously. "Who is it this time—Milly or the widow? Blue overalls, Mr. Yoast, are by long odds the most fashionable garments worn. They're always in style. Don't turn up your nose at 'em. Many an honest heart On reflection, the honest heart beats under the ragged coat."
Marse Hi ignored this frivolous banter. He turned a brisk and businesslike eye to Timber Mountain. The summit glowed warm and golden. Day was upon them.
"There's no use packin' in our plunder. Let's just pile all of it upon the rock, pack-saddle and all, and pull the tarp over it. We've got to buy a harness and wagon and bring out our windmill and truck. Say, we nearly forgot one thing. We got to locate the well as a millsite. Can't lay no preemption papers or homestead in a country all shot full o' mineral. Can you write out a location notice?"
"Notice is hereby given that we, the undersigned citizens of the United States, having complied with the United States Statutes and the local rules and regulations, do hereby locate this spring and five acres of non-mineral land adjoining for a millsite in connection with the Baby Mine," quoted Don in glib singsong. "Sure! I can do it."
"Seems plumb foolish, don't it?" said Hiram meditatively. "Looks like the well was notice enough that some one had got here first. Man ain't likely to think a well just happened, is he, now? But I suppose we have to. That's the way they all do."
"Hiram," said Don severely, "do you realize that you are proposing a barefaced fraud? The law strictly forbids using millsites for agricultural purposes—and a steer is that precise purpose. Far be it from me to have lot or part in any evasion of the law. You tidy up the camp, Bridget, dear, and I'll write off a notice that we can sign in good faith."
It did not take him long. This is what he handed to Hiram:
NOTICE OF LOCATION
Notice is hereby given that the undersigned, being sound of mind, wind and limb, do hereby locate, to have and to hold till death do us part, this well and three million acres or more of the surrounding land, together with all land adjoining the same, for a cowsite in connection with the Free Range, under the terms of the Winchester Act of 1873: the same to be known, until we can think of something better, as the Bright Alfalfaretta Cowsite, or the Mystery of the Twin Calves.
This cowsite is permanently situate in Mescal Cañon, about halfway between the Pacific Ocean on the west and the Gulf of Mexico on the south east, and on a direct line from the North Star to the Equator, and is more particularly described as follows—to wit, namely, viz.: About six feet west, or in a westerly direction, from this monument of stones and place of beginning, hence about eighteen feet down or in a downerly direction, to the bottom of the well, the place of ending.
All persons purposing to jump or contest this claim are requested to leave with their location papers written instructions as to disposition of remains. If shipment is desired express charges will be prepaid from sale of effects, if sufficient; otherwise net proceeds of such sale will be packed with contestant and the whole forwarded C.O.D. to the given address. Should burial be preferred parties are requested to prepare their own graves, as labor is very distasteful to the undersigned and our hands are blistered already. Good, easy digging over the first ridge to the right, looking down the draw, where the drainage is away from the well. You will find a large rock there, standing on its lower end in a nice place, on which is chiseled—on the rock and not on the nice place—this epitaph:
Sacred to the Memory of
alias
Born
Died
of Lead Poisoning
"Consider his ways and be wise"
Please fill in blanks and dig there. Bring back the picks, but you might as well leave the shovels.
Grub and bedding on the big boulder. Help yourselves. Please feed the cat. You will find smoking, a deck of cards and some old magazines in the war sacks. Wash the dishes and leave everything as found. Hiram is painfully neat.
A copy of this will be filed with the Recording Angel.
Done in the dark of the moon and near the end of the last quarter of venison, on this twenty-first or twenty-second day of May, 1882. Hiram says it is the eighteenth.
Yours sincerely,
( Donald Kennedy.
Locators (
(
Hiram's face, usually so legible, became preternaturally expressionless as he read this extraordinary document. He sedately penciled his signature. "That ought to hold 'em a while. We will now make this well a ranch by watering our horses, as an agricultural purpose."
"That rawhide bucket's punched full of holes from hauling up rocks," objected Don.
For answer, Hiram began loosening the hoops of a keg, with design to remove one end. Seeing what he was about Don took the saddle ropes and led the horses to the well. Hiram followed with the keg.
On the dump lay hammer, drills, picks and shovels. Turning in forked cedar uprights, spiked to the cedar curb, was a cedar windlass, axe-grooved, with a roughly trimmed natural crook for handle; the pack-rope served as a windlass rope. Cutting off a length of this, Hiram made cunning adjustment of half-hitches below and above the swell of the improvised bucket, and tied the loose ends together for a handle.
Horses watered, Kennedy built into a monument of loose stones the tin can containing his remarkable location papers. Hiram unreeled and coiled the windlass rope, now needed for tying up the bed. This done, he looked thoughtfully into the well. "Don't you reckon we'd better cut some poles and cover this up? Something might come along and fall in."
"Oh, I guess not," said Kennedy.
Even as he spoke, his spur caught in a tangle of grapevine, he stumbled sprawlingly, made futile clutch at the windlass post, and shot down into the water, head first, gasping. He bobbed up choking and spluttering, found a precarious hand-hold on the rocky sides, and looked up. Hiram, still holding the neatly coiled rope, was seated on the curb in profound and silent meditation, his legs dangling idly in the well. His elbow was on his knee and his chin rested on his hand; he regarded Kennedy with grave interest. Kennedy opened his mouth, but could not find the fitting word. Hiram clicked his heels gently together, pushed his hat back, cocked his eye at the sun and, ignoring the interruption, continued in a pleasant drawl:
"It won't take us long. I'll cut 'em if you'll drag 'em." His round-eyed, innocent gaze wandered to the near hillside. "I see some good ones over there a couple of hundred yards."
"Throw down that rope!"
Hiram recalled himself with a start and peered again into the cool depths. After a moment's contemplation he nodded brightly as one well pleased at his own quickness in grasping the situation.
"Sure!" he said mildly—and dropped the coil.
Kennedy bobbed under again. He came up choking and gurgling, having indignantly tried to talk under water, and began an incoherent endeavor to express his views in several different and inadequate ways at once. After some emotional discussion Hiram caught a glimpse of his true meaning.
"Oh, I see! You want me to let one end of a rope down there and keep the other end up here? Yes, yes! And to pull you up? I'll get a rope off one of the horses and fix you in a jiffy."
But when he had Kennedy halfway up, Hiram stopped and sat down on the windlass handle. "I see now what your idea was!" he said thoughtfully. "You can't fool Rosie! You're always guying me because I like to be as neat as the law allows. All the same, you "
The rope was violently agitated. Kennedy was coming up hand-over-hand. He was nearly to the top. "Here, I'll give you a hand," said Hiram kindly, and rose to help him. The windlass spun wildly. … When Kennedy reappeared above the water, clutching the rope, the look of disappointment and astonishment was still on Hiram's face; his helping hands were still extended.
"Hiram, you're a fool!" said Kennedy in an agonized whisper, when he could get his breath.
Hiram seemed struck with this and sat down to consider it. "Possibly. … Probably," he admitted. "But never mind that. Tell me honestly now if you didn't do this just so you'd have to change your clothes?"
"That was my motive, certainly," said Kennedy. "But I didn't think that you'd catch on." His teeth were chattering.
"Sorter wanted an excuse to spruce up?" prompted Hiram.
"That's it exactly," said Kennedy meekly. "I'm really very dressy."
"So'm I," said Hiram. "'When I go out to promenade I look so fine and gay, I have to take the dogs along to keep the girls away'."
"Hiram," said Don persuasively, "don't you think we'd better get our horse-ride over before it gets too hot?"
"Sure you don't want to punch my silly head?" suggested Hiram.
"Me? Oh, no!" said Don, horrified at this idea. "Not for worlds. Whatever put such a thought in your mind, Hiram?"
"Sure?"
"Sure. Cross my heart and hope to die!"
So Hiram pulled him up.
III
THE well was covered, the sprucing-up accomplished, the bed rolled and tied, the outfit piled upon the boulder in a canvas-topped pyramid and weighted down with small rocks; and the two friends, arrayed in the best their war sacks afforded, paced soberly on their way, with Doubting Thomas in tow. They threaded the low, winding hills and ridges, and came to the broad level on the plain by the dead crater of Nine Mile. Caballo Mountain, which had bulked large and dominant in the narrowed horizon of the foothills, was now a detail in the mighty expanse of desert crossed and rimmed by crowding ranges, some wave-edged, some keen-angled, knife-sharp. White Dundee gleamed to the northeast, tiny sails on a gray sea.
They were not to reach Dundee so soon. A bunch of antelope tempted them westward. They loosed the led horse and left him to his own devices, knowing that he would go to town for water, and made a wide detour to try for a shot under cover of a friendly ridge. This, too, was not to be. On their way they spied a far-off bunch of wild cattle making for broken country, gave chase, and so, far to riverward, plucked therefrom a ripe maverick.
While the iron was heating they proceeded to the selection of a brand—as yet they had adopted neither brand nor cattle. F A T was discussed and rejected. "Every time anybody tells a man to kill a fat beef he'll go and get one of ours, just for a joke," said Hiram. "It's too temptin'. K Y would be the very thing, if that Aleman outfit didn't already give it. Why not try I O U?"
"And sometimes W and X?" suggested Don; further pointing out that this could be too readily modified to read 700 or TOM. They finally decided to inclose it in a box—| I O U |
This was an auspicious beginning, but Hiram was not satisfied. "We're down pretty well toward the ferry," said he as his newly labeled property plunged madly away. "Le's go over through the breaks to McRae Creek and see if we can't get us another one. We got a home now, all right, but it don't seem hardly proper to call one measly, brockle-faced heifer a herd."
"Just as you say," assented Kennedy. "I'm thirsty any way, and McRae's the nearest water. D'you suppose we'll ever learn to carry our canteens? We ought to, following the line of least resistance the way we do. The place we start for has precious little to do with where we land at night. You keep down this ridge, Marse Hi, and I'll bear to the left and go down the draw. That way we'll get 'em going and coming."
"These long-horns ain't so snaky as them in Lower Mescal," observed Hiram.
"The Mescal cattle are really pretty wild, all right," agreed Don, doing up his rope. "But I've figured out an easy way to get 'em. Just wait till they go to water and catch 'em backing out! Well, so long!"
He trotted away. Hiram rode slowly down the backbone, humming a gay and lilting saddle song:
Over the hills and down to the water,
Some old man's goin' to lose his daughter!
But he did not "jump" any stock. Cattle were scarce on the Jornada side of the rim. There were only three outfits of less than a thousand head each—the K I M, the K Y, and Touissant's H B T. The "wild bunch" was mainly composed of spirited strays from the west side.
From a bend in the deep cañon to his left a saddled horse burst suddenly and vanished suddenly round the next curve. As he passed at top speed Hiram had barely time to note that it was a side-saddle. He dug Blackie with the spurs. "That horse'l1 be winded at the rate he's going and Don'll drop the twine on him," he thought. "Me to see who's hurt."
Sure-footed Blackie fell away down the steep slope in a cloud of dust. Striking the trail of the runaway in the broad valley of McRae Creek, Hiram followed the back track at a gallop; the shod feet had gashed deeply in the loose, sandy soil.
He was speeding by, intent on the "sign," when a voice reached him, soft, melodious and startlingly near. It said in a mocking drawl:
"Do You Happen to be Looking for Me?"
"Do you happen to be looking for me?"
Close above him on the steep hillside sat a culpably well-favored young woman in a black riding-habit, leaning at ease and smiling at her rescuer in frank amusement. Blackie scrambled up the hill; Hiram swung down, hat in hand.
"You're not hurt, Miss Mallory?"
"Not a bit," said the young woman with the utmost composure. "Did you see my horse? I got down to gather these"—indicating a small heap of agate pebbles—"and very stupidly forgot to drop the reins. So he ran away. Then I came up here to watch him, saw you coming and waited for you. And, if you please, how do you know that I am Miss Mallory?"
"Yes, I saw your horse drifting up the cañon," said Hiram. "But he seemed to be goin' somewhere and I was afraid whoever you were was in trouble, so I came along."
"I should say you did!" said the girl admiringly. "How can you ride that way? Aren't you afraid you'll break your neck, or ruin your horse at the least? General Putnam's famous ride was nothing to that. But you didn't tell me how you knew my name?"
"Shucks!" said Hiram disdainfully. "That ain't nothin'! You ought to see the boys after a wild bunch in the brush. Ride? Why, the steeper it is the faster they go! They'd lose old Isr'l so quick he couldn't follow their dust. Hurt? Naw! Men nor horses either. We're used to it. That's our game. Isn't there any one with you?"
At the disapproval of his tone the young lady tossed her head with spirit. "Oh, you men think we mustn't go anywhere alone! But I didn't really mean to come so far. First I went to the lake and then to see the prairie-dog town."
"Lots o' them agates there," said Hiram, shrewdly designing to divert his questioner from a certain yet unanswered query. At this the girl contracted her brows to a slight frown, which might have been displeasure, but was really an intent effort to recall that same sidetracked query. Hiram thought this frown fascinating. She had frank, steady eyes, warm and big and brown, a piquant nose, a mouth humorous, expressive and capable, rather large than otherwise, but eminently provocative and alluring.
She wrinkled her nose resentfully. Evidently she did not approve of masculine dictation. "Thank you, I saw them. And then I rode up the pipeline to the reservoir on top of the hill. Then I thought I would go back a different way and see some new country. Why shouldn't I?"
Hiram almost cast a significant look at that quarter whence we came, checked himself, and turned his gaze admiringly to the blue zenith, resolutely compressing his lips in most provoking fashion.
"Don't say it!" warned Miss Mallory; then inconsistently abandoned this position and took to the defense. "Anyway, all I had to do was to walk over to the pumphouse and wait for the stage. But you haven't answered my question. How do you know what my name is?"
"I guess your people would be pretty uneasy before the stage came. But I can easy see how you came to drift so far," said Hiram tolerantly. "It's natural. As Don, my pardner, is always saying, you follow the line of least resistance. We—I did the same thing. I'm supposed to be in Dundee town right this very now—yes, and long before now. But then, I'm a man."
But Miss Mallory was not to be taunted into retort. "Will you kindly tell me how you know my name?" she said in ominously slow and measured tones.
There was no evading this. "I saw you when you went to Hot Springs with Kim Ki Rogers. So I asked him."
"When I went to Hot Springs? Why-y!" Miss Mallory's admirable composure was not proof against this implied candor. Swift, dainty rose-color fluttered on her rounded cheek. "But, dear me, there were ten of us!"
"I didn't see the others," Hiram explained. It was outrageous. But she forgave him. To forgive is admirable. It is rather a feminine quality. A ruddier and stronger tide swept to her brow. Then the brown eyes crinkled to warm mirth; dimpling adorably, she broke forth into frank, full-throated laughter. "That was very nice of you," she declared, dabbing at her brimming eyes with a dainty kerchief.
"Well, you wanted to know," said Hiram, unabashed, "and I told you. Now, hadn't we better be going? Blackie's plumb gentle, and I'll rig you up a stirrup with my gun strap."
Miss Mallory regarded him curiously and seemed about to give way to fresh outburst of mirth. "But what a shame for you to walk so far!" she said hesitatingly. "And what will become of my horse?"
"Oh, we'll get him on the fall roundup," said Hiram lightly. Whereat they both laughed.
"I don't see how you can walk at all in those absurd high-heeled boots," she said in deeply sympathetic tones. "You'll turn your ankles. I don't understand why you wear them."
"Yes, that's always the way," grumbled the pedestrian. "Folks seem to think we wear boots for looks. We got to have 'em. When we rope horses afoot we dig the heels in the ground, else we couldn't hold 'em. And when we ride wild horses—look at this stirrup!" He held the stirrup up for examination. "If it wasn't for the 'silly heels' our feet'd go through the stirrups and we'd be wasted. If we made the stirrups smaller we'd never get our feet in 'em at all with a horse whirlin' and plungin' and buckin' seven ways for Sunday while we was tryin' to get on. And if they was smaller our feet'd hang every time a horse fell with us, wild or gentle, and we'd be mashed or dragged to death regular once every day. No, sir-ee! Can't run cattle at all without high heels."
"That reminds me," said Miss Mallory with a dazzling smile, "that I know your name, too. You're Mr. Yoast—Mr. Hiram Yoast. I saw you riding a wild horse across the track the other day. So I asked who you were. I didn't see the man with you!"
"Huh! Wild horse! That horse wasn't wild. Just skittish. That was my pardner, Don Kennedy. Talk about ridin'! You ought to just see him ride. I tell you, there's one man that's strictly on the job any place you put him. When he don't get what he goes after there's no use sendin' any one else! He's got brains, too, Don has—and schoolin'."
"Dear me!" quoth Miss Mallory. "Is—is he in town now?"
"No-o. But he'll be in soon."
"When did you see him last?"
Hiram recurred to his evasive tactics. "You ain't at all like what I expected you would be," he said, looking up in open admiration. "I don't understand it. First, your wanting to go back the other way. And you're as friendly—why, you're just like folks! Boston people are supposed to be sorter stand-offish. Like they was—well, someway
"Made of finer clay?" suggested Miss Mallory. "Oh, they are! Decidedly! But then, you see, I'm from Omaha. Omaha girls are not made of clay at all, but 'sugar and spice and everything nice'."
"But Kim Ki said"
"Guardy—my guardian is a New Yorker. But that's not quite Boston. But we're forgetting. When did you see Mr. Kennedy last?"
"Well, you see," said the wretched Hiram in a last desperate attempt to change the subject, "we were out in the hills so long we lost track of the day of the month. Someway we got from two to four days apart in our reckoning. So when I thought it was the tenth or twelfth Don was sure it was the thirteenth or fourteenth."
"And yet you didn't strike me as being at all a backward young man," mused Miss Mallory. "You ought to cut notches in a stick, like Robinson Crusoe."
"I will!" said Hiram promptly. "Beginning from today!" At this impertinence Miss Mallory frowned again. It was time to let this resourceful young man know that he could not have matters at all his own way. Casting about for an advantageous attack, she noted her companion's agonized limp.
"Your poor feet must pain you dreadfully. I declare, it's too bad," she purred deceitfully.
Hiram heroically ceased to limp. "Oh, that's all right," he declared stoutly, rejoiced to have diverted this direct and persevering young person from further chronological research. "We'll soon be up to the head of the draw where we can see town, and, as English says, then-we-shan't-be-long."
"There! That's one of the things I wanted to ask you!" said the girl in the jubilant tones of one who recalls a fugitive topic of interest. "How am I to know the difference between an arroyo, a cañon, a ravine, a draw and a creek bed?"
"Why—let's see. A creek bed is gravelly, and there may or may not be gravel in any of the others. Then a cañon is a big arroyo, an arroyo's a small cañon, a ravine—I'm not sure, but I think a ravine is a gulch, and a gulch is a steep-sided ravine, and a draw is not so steep—gentle slopes, more like a valley. The head of a cañon is generally a draw till it begins to get rough. But really, we use the words higgledy-piggledy."
"Thank you. I see!" said the girl thoughtfully. "And a divide? Why, of course, it's the higher land dividing any two watercourses, whatever they are called. Mr. Yoast, don't you think we ought to go to the divide between this—draw"—she hesitated, with a questioning look aslant, to see if she had used the right word. Hiram nodded encouragingly—"between this draw and the next one south, and wave your friend to come on with my horse?"
At this swift and unexpected onslaught the disconcerted Mr. Yoast sat down abruptly on a forked soapweed and looked at her in wide-eyed reproach. With sighing caution he took his ankle in his hand and solicitously worked it to and fro, bending his head to listen intently. "Suffering humanity! hear it creak!" he murmured, and gently put it down. "I'll have to send 'em to a cheer-up-odist.
"I'm sure your feet have been punished enough," said Miss Mallory sympathetically. "After all, it wasn't their fault. If it was your deceitful tongue that was being blistered, now" She set her red lips to a straight, stern line, but there was a traitorous quiver at the corners.
Hiram raised his downcast eyes. "I didn't deceive you" he began.
"Indeed you did not!" said Miss Mallory, dimpling. "But you tried to! I saw him when he dodged back behind the hill. He must be a very discreet person."
"I mean, I didn't tell you any—whoppers."
"Lies," said Miss Mallory vindictively. "No, you didn't. And you were just as careful not to tell the truth. You squirmed." She leveled an accusing finger and wrinkled her nose in derision. "Shame-y, shame-y! How you did squirm!"
Hiram squirmed again, most unhappily. He broke a flower stalk from the soapweed and trimmed it with his knife. "But I suppose I'll have to forgive you—the compliment was so obviously sincere. You do compliments very nicely, Mr. Yoast. It bespeaks long practice."
"It don't!" said this exasperated and goaded young man rudely. "You're the first girl I ever"
"Walked for? Oh, I can believe that," she said maliciously. "But the first one was a—whopper. Of course you saw the others."
"I didn't!"
"Mr. Yoast, it is very rude to contradict."
Mr. Yoast might well have made the plea that the contradicted statement was a question in all but form, but cleverly did no such untactful thing. He was—unprofessionally—singularly honest and wise.
"But I didn't—not really see 'em. Of course, I knew they were there, but there isn't one I'd know again if I met her in the big middle of the road."
"Women are so credulous!" she mocked. "But I'd dearly love to believe that if I could." She sighed hypocritically, not ill pleased for all that. "What are you making of that stick, Mr. Yoast?"
Hiram had shaped and rounded the head of the soapweed stalk and, at this query, he cut a deep, emphatic notch almost through the thickest part of it and got to his feet with groaning alacrity. "All ready! Let's hobble along and find Don. This, Miss Mallory, is my combined cane and calendar."
Miss Mallory blushed furiously at the significant notch.
"Oh, you silly boy!" she said. "Do get along with you!"
Hiram's dancing eyes looked the obvious and blissful retort: "Oh, you dear old lady!" But he did not say it. After all, it was not necessary.
IV
THE clean, resinous scent of new lumber was in the air. It came from every quarter—from paintless wooden buildings blistering in the unclouded sun; from woodwork of adobes; from canvas streets yet whitely unbeaten by any storm, redolent of rough boarded floors and walls, of pine frames and tables and bunks; from aromatic curls of fresh, sweet shavings, wind-lodged by bush and shrub and fence wall.
No grass yet grew over the newly laid pipe-line from the pumphouse at Muerto Spring. The water-tank was new, the railroad buildings were new, and newly painted to an opprobrious, economical hue that might almost be called a hue and cry—a nameless raw and offensive color, popularly held to be composed of iron-rust, brickdust and blood. The railroad itself was new; the ties—save where resin simmered and stewed at knot or gash—were bright and unfaded, the barrow pits bare and brown, the rails shimmering away to a blinding dazzle toward the sun.
The stages were gone—men of affairs were about; from beyond the powder-house came the incessant crackling of rifles, where transient Dundee beguiled the passing hour at target practice. On the broad, shady porch of the Dundee House, foregathered a group so habitual of late that Polk Armstrong, moved by some vague Wordsworthian memory, had twitched his elderly thumb at them and murmured: "We are seven."
Miss Mallory, Don and Hiram you know in part. First, of the remainder, four, note now Mr. Breese, promoter and ex-broker, of tubercular tendencies, uncle and guardian to Miss Lena Mallory—to Dundee and to us important in the latter capacity as explaining her sojournings. Of Mr. Breese, himself, it may be said that he came to cough and remained to prey; finding here a rich field for his breaking and promoting proclivities. In passing, be it added that he stood more than a chance of becoming the preyed upon in turn; the preyee, so to speak. For him, for any other like him, a danger lies constantly in wait, of gradually believing his own spontaneous and glowing eloquence.
Such insidious credulity was now creeping upon Breese; he was in a fair way to become his own next victim. In this infatuation he was abetted by horny-handed and otherwise scaly parties having mines vendible of which they desired to become dispossessed. It is not death alone that loves a shining mark.
He was an immaculate, smooth-faced, fragile little man, with silvery, silken hair, a pearly skin and birdlike claws of brittle appearance—all which lent themselves readily to the prevalent supposition that he was made of glass. Glacial of manner and brusque of speech, it was half by mistake that his name became Freeze upon the popular tongue.
To Miss Lena he was "Guardy," and to his wife he was simply "Father," as she was "Mother" to him. This wistful usage in a childless old couple was not without pathos, if only any had noticed it. But no one did; Lena being used to it, which comes to exactly the same thing. Unless, indeed, it were Don Kennedy, who noticed most things.
"Mother"—otherwise "Aunt Polly"—was a dear, dim-eyed old lady of vague chameleon mental characteristics and consolatory exterior, who played pinochle earnestly with "Father," oblivious to passing decades, and lent a desultory decorum to the diversions of Miss Mallory.
The last two of this group of seven were Dolly, his daughter, and the Professor himself—to adopt his own order of precedence. Dorothy was fifteen, blue-eyed, delicious and doubly spoiled for that her mother was dead and herself poor of health. The Professor—Lathrop Ormsby Otis—whatever his other virtues, was unquestionably a good father to his motherless girl. Because of her failing health he had, at forty-three, given up his chair in a well-known New York college and abandoned a career in which he had won no small distinction, notwithstanding his comparative youth, to seek a more genial clime and there devote himself to Dorothy's welfare.
An archæologist by avocation, this had brought him to New Mexico rather than elsewhere; coming last to Dundee en route for certain famous cliff-dwellings—or, rather, cave-dwellings—on the Gila. The cave-dwellings were still there; but having met Mr. Breese, as explained above, the Professor loitered in Dundee. We cannot blame him. It was a long and tiresome journey to the mines; the veranda was cool and pleasant; Don and Hiram were sufficiently prehistoric in their mental and ethical attitudes to quiet any twinges of the archæological conscience. Slim Dorothy, day by day, grew merry, sun-brown and strong; acquiring at the same time an amazing out-of-doors vocabulary and an outdoor manner verging on the hoydenish. She was learning to ride; the Professor accompanied her—and Miss Mallory—on thrilling voyages of discovery. Those cave-dwellers were all dead, anyhow, and the Professor felt suddenly very much alive; unearthing, in the attic lumber-room of memory, the dusty monograph of a famous literary doctor, who—at forty—had resolutely maintained that a man was at the prime and vigor of life between forty and forty-five; later revising this opinion to make fifty the meridional year. The Professor recalled this monograph with interest and pleasure, finding it logical, brilliant and convincing; more so, indeed, than it had seemed at first reading.
The firm of Yoast and Kennedy might well have been otherwise engaged. There was much to be done "fixing up" their ranch with windmill, watering troughs and corrals; even—should the whim so seize them—with a house. They had, indeed, taken out their windmill and pump in the fourth day of the new era as recorded in Hiram's calendar, but, in a sudden access of incompetence, had decided to get an experienced man to put it up, and had returned to the veranda two weeks since, where they patiently waited for an experienced man to broach to them the subject of windmills.
The dim, unheeded panorama of the far-off, jostling world passed on and left them to the deep life of the hour, lotus-eaters in "a land where all things always seemed the same"; smiling days, languorous, dreamy, delicious; nights of moon-magic, witchery of throbbing song, the luminous arch of stars.
It will occur to you that the situation called for a chaperonage less theoretical than Aunt Polly's. The privileges of that time and place will fully cover appearances. For the reality, Miss Lena was an eminently capable person, of foresight, prudence and skill. With unfailing vigilance she vigorously put down attempts to overstep the strict lines of friendliness by either the Professor or Kennedy. But she was a kind and thoroughly good-hearted girl, and so only suppressed them alternately. Being herself mature and twenty she was less severe with Hiram, who was barely twenty-two, and whom she, therefore, regarded merely as an amusing boy—a thing equally dissatisfactory to Hiram and to his elders.
"Will some one please tell me why these apparently otherwise intelligent people find such unfailing delight in rifle practice, to the exclusion of all other interests?" asked Miss Mallory. "One would think it would pall in time."
"Why, that's dead easy!" said Hiram. "They were born in captivity, and gettin' out o' their cages has gone to their heads."
"Exactly! In their more civilized communities," said Don, "their activities in this line have been so restricted by step-paternal legislation that when a gentleman observed a skunk in his henhouse he had to call in legal advice. Then, if no especial act of the legislature was required, and if the skunk remained on the premises beyond the expiration of the closed season, the henman, having first duly served notice of trespass on the offender, and having affixed proper revenue stamps to his gun and to each cartridge, displaying his license so folded that the notarial seal shall be plainly visible, calls upon the skunk, in the presence of a properly appointed inspector or commissioner, or his deputy, demanding that he, the said skunk, do now show his license to kill fowl, ducks, geese and other feathered domestic poultry. And if said skunk cannot show such license, or refuses to show such license, the featherless biped shall call upon him, the said skunk, to desist; and if said skunk does not then desist he may then be shot in accordance with the provisions of this act, entitled an act to amend an act entitled an act"
The Professor was a bit of a poet. All this while his eyes were dreamily following the contours of Moongate Pass, studying the deep-shadowed wrinkles distinct against the morning sun, and shaping in imagination the hinted misty valleys beyond; so negligent of his duty. For while their conversational procedure was informal, it was tacitly under stood that when either Otis or Kennedy declared himself upon any proposition the other would forthwith uphold the contrary with life, fortune and sacred honor.
Up rose Dolly, his daughter, then and stood before Kennedy with minatory finger and flashing eyes. "Now you're making fun of my daddy again! You make me feel bad!"
"Dolly!" groaned the Professor. "Do you wish us to understand that your sense of touch is imperfect or that you are conscious of being morally depraved? 'Daddy,' too! What would your Uncle Thomas say?"
"Oh, you know very well what I mean!" cried this unrepentant and degenerate damsel. Evidently the opinions of Uncle Thomas carried no weight. "You know very well what El Señor Don means too. Why don't you squash him?" She stamped a vehement little foot for emphasis and winked shamelessly at Miss Mallory. Dolly, as she herself coarsely put it, "egged on" the combatants with cheerful impartiality. When, as now, either was too indolent to take up the challenge it was her part, as a sort of intellectual toreador, to "poke 'em up." Such was her own reprehensible phrase.
For Father and Mother Breese, their communication was confined, with rare exceptions, to ejaculatory remarks of "Dis!" "Pinochle!" "Kings eighty!" and the like. But they lent a listening ear, except at critical moments of the game, and rewarded a neat stroke with laughter and applause. Lena and Hiram, lightly skirmishing, kept for most part aloof from the main affray, but occasionally swooped down, some times on opposing sides, sometimes as allies, to rescue the discomfited or to add to his discomfiture, exactly as pleased their whim. It was also Lena's care to see that the buttons were kept on the foils, and to strike them up if one were lost in the warm play.
The Professor reluctantly abandoned the Moongate. "Very well, I'll meet you on the bloody sands," he said to Kennedy. His eyes were twinkling; he had a wholesome sense of humor that went far to soften and ameliorate his many virtues. "Our game laws frequently overstep the mark. Admitted. But is that not far better than your extreme1? The frontiersman openly violates what few and liberal game laws he has, with the natural consequence that all game will soon be exterminated."
"You wouldn't let a deer actually butt you, would you Professor?" queried Hiram in grieved astonishment.
"There's your frontiersman! To him, breaking the law varies between a downright duty and a good joke!" The Professor was aroused; his refined, scholarly face glowed with animation.
Don sprang to the defense: "Of all the fantastic sentimentality the world has ever known, this howl about the vanished game of a continent is the silliest and sloppiest. To hear them mourn you'd think 'twas a national calamity that good farms had replaced the buffalo, and pitiful beyond belief that Ohio and Kentucky were not still the undisturbed haunt of black bear and deer and turkey. They are fighting evolution. I expect to hear next of an act protecting angleworms from the depredations of the plow."
"And that brings up my pet story," said Lena. "In Nebraska, politics is a contest between the Missouri River cities and the rest of the state. Once Omaha, being in power, passed stringently protective game laws that bore heavily on the farmers, leaving them helpless to protect their crops"
"If they obeyed the silly law," suggested Hiram.
"If they obeyed the silly law—which they didn't. In retaliation the farmers banded together and posted their farms with trespass notices to keep off the city sportsmen during the open season. Then they elected a majority in the next legislature, and to put on a finishing touch they passed a bill to forbid hunting on the roadside. But they worded it carelessly, with this disastrous result:
"'Hereafter it shall he unlawful to shoot or fire off any gun upon any public road or highway in the State of Nebraska except for the purpose of killing some wild and dangerous beast or an officer in discharge of his duty'!"
"Such a bill has features that should make it popular here," observed the Professor grimly, as the laughter died. Then he returned to the assault with renewed vigor. "My dear Mr. Kennedy, we are so far apart on this matter that I do not think we are talking about the same thing. Laws are often ill-advised, but a good citizen will obey a law even while hoping and working for its repeal."
"I thought you were a Daughter of the American Revolution," said Hiram spitefully, when the Professor stopped talking.
"Then they were poor citizens who fought at Lexington and Concord?" seconded Lena.
Thus hard beset by three, the Professor fell back. "A great war for a great principle is not the same thing as reckless regard of any law that does not meet your approval, leading inevitably to contempt for all laws," he protested. "And we were speaking of specific law or laws regulating the slaughter of game."
"What is wrong for the individual is wrong for any aggregation of individuals; and what is right for many is right for one," said Don oracularly. "But let us come back to the specific law, by all means. Our grandads in convention found a principle at stake in those very laws. So much so that when they looked over the Constitution to see what bets they'd missed, the second oversight corrected was this: 'The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed'."
"There you go again, at the old trick of mutilating the text," said the Professor indignantly. "'A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state'—you took pains to leave that out."
"Yes, I know that many learned jurists construe the passage to mean that the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall be infringed, but the right of the people to keep and bear gold lace shall not be infringed. But such is not my reading of the amendment. I make it: 'The right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.' Only that and nothing more. As for the clause which you charge me with willfully omitting, I didn't remember it. It was merely explanatory; it told why they did what they did; but what they did is entirely in the part I gave. If you don't believe it, try your clause alone and see what sort of an amendment it makes. 'A well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state' Incomplete, isn't it? The sense is all in the other part of it."
"They meant that training of militia companies should never be prohibited," said the Professor doggedly. "Not that bearing of arms by individuals should not be regulated."
"They meant that history had taught them that disarmament had always been a preliminary to oppression. They meant liberty and not license," retorted Don. "They were quite right. Tell us honestly—how would you like the job of oppressing New Mexico?"
The Professor laughed, passing his hand through his lightly frosted hair."I shouldn't care to undertake to oppress it or to repress it, either. Kindly remember that President Hayes was obliged to declare martial law here during your Lincoln County War."
"Martial law! Just for a little disturbance between cowmen and cattlemen! That was a short-sighted policy, anyway," said Don with some arrogance. "It was seriously proposed to leave a strip six miles wide between Lincoln County and Donna Ana for a No Man's Land where gentlemen of diverging views might adjust their differences with no expense to the taxpayers. Had this long-headed arrangement been carried out there would have been no need for martial law, and the war might have been going on yet!"
But the Professor would not be laughed aside. "Think of the carnival of bloodshed the territory has just gone through! Think how many murders are committed by men who are good citizens in the main, simply because they bear arms ready to hand in the moment of anger! How you can be so obtuse as to defend the practice of carrying deadly weapons, in the face of such glaring evidence, is beyond me. Mr. Kennedy, it grieves me to have a man of your unusual intelligence express such views."
"On the contrary, how a man of your usual intelligence can be so singularly obtuse is beyond me!" said Don, sighing mournfully. "Kindly remember that the necessity for martial law existed before it was declared. So citizens, good in the main, when they buckle on their forty-some-odds, declare a little martial law on their own account. We carry the law of the land at the saddle-horn, as the saying goes. The bad citizen packs a gun anyway and the good one ought to have an even break. It won't work, Professor. There are many good reasons to urge on your side—notably the appeal to arms just because they're handy. But there's no argument for or against a man carrying a gun that won't apply with equal force to a nation building a navy. A navy does other things besides fighting. A nation with a navy may be more likely to go to war than if it had none, but it is also less likely to be wronged or to be the subject of attempted wrong. There are crimes besides violence; and the violent man or the warlike nation does not submit to them. I might agree that it would be better if a man didn't pack a gun and a nation didn't tote a navy, but I'll never believe one is right and the other wrong."
"On the other hand"
"Let me interrupt you, Professor. I will freely admit the undeniable truth of much that you urge. But in that little phrase 'on the other hand' you have admitted all I care for—that there is something to be said on both sides. That is precisely what most of your people never do. They hear one side of all these subjects reiterated, uncontradicted, till they repeat their views in a reverent chant, as if they were axioms, self-evident, needing only authoritative statement to put down all opposition. So when you admit that there is really some thing well founded in our views there is no more to be said. We knew that your views were worth while."
"But the preponderance of opinion—observe that I say opinion, not fact—is against you."
"I think not," said Don. "This is only a detail of the two general tendencies, to be law-ridden or lawless—in which tug-of-war you and I are pulling opposite ways. That we are pretty evenly matched is amply proved, since we neither have tyranny on the one hand nor Rob Roy's simple little plan on the other."
"I dare say you are right. The truth always lies somewhere between the two extremes," agreed Otis amicably. "But it will be hard to cite an instance of our erroneous legality to offset the recent glaring excesses here in the Southwest."
"Easiest thing there is! Only, I shouldn't have 'named it'—as Hiram says—without this invitation," rejoined Kennedy. "There's the Salem Witchcraft"
But this was a subject on which the Professor was sensitive. His finely-chiseled features hardened to a frown. "That was generations ago," he said. "The world has progressed since then. You have to go back some time to match your out rages."
"You miss my point, Professor. You repudiate all that as a shameful crime. But you don't look at it as I do. My indignation is for the law-abiding state of mind of the men who let these things be done, unresisted, to their nearest and dearest. Think of it, Hiram! They meekly let Martha and Priscilla be done to death on this monstrous accusation without ever pulling trigger! Witches deserved death—some one told them so—'twas the law! That don't go here. John is that lawless and violent that if the whole United States Navy should come bounding and skipping o'er the lily-white lea on any such pious errand he'd go down after his hardware and give 'em a small touch of high life, law or no law." Don could use English on occasion, having been expelled from the University of Virginia; but to conceal his emotions he generally fell back on flippant colloquialism.
Otis ran his hand through his hair in some perplexity. "It was an unhappy madness on both the people and magistrates for which they should not be judged too harshly."
"One stiff-necked desperado with a bell-mouthed blunder buss and a half a pint o' slugs would 'a' sent 'em home sane and happy," rejoined Kennedy, answering the mental attitude behind the words. "I've voted for 'magistrates' myself before now. I always remember who made him a magistrate—I myself, that excellent man. And to sum it all up, I—nor yet any possible number of Is—cannot delegate to our deputy any power we do not have ourselves. This helps me to keep my reverence for their infallibility within bounds, even when they are sanest. And the spectacle of a magistrate barking mad and frothing at the mouth does not excite me to unreflecting obedience—especially where Mattie's concerned. No, sir! Just one pig-headed, upstanding he-man who revered the workings of his own contumacious mind more than he did the voice of authority would have stopped the whole black business cheap—for maybe a magistrate or so."
The Professor was privately impressed, but not in the least convinced. And he did not at all relish this unexpected turn of the ox-goring. "It is small wonder that Mr. Kennedy and I seldom agree," he said rather stiffly. "We stand on different viewpoints with our eyes rigidly fixed in opposite directions. The sectional feeling here is so strong"
"Sectional feeling! Oh, shade of Great-Uncle Paul Revere!" cried Don wrathfully. "The measure of our antagonism is the superiority you affect—no, no, that isn't the word. The superiority you feel. I would cast no doubt on your sincerity. Of course we resent it. If we didn't resent it that would be proof that we deserved it. But how about your sectionalism? Look once: New York bickers at Boston, and both pick on Philadelphia, and all three consider themselves hardy explorers when they venture past a line drawn in any direction from Washington! Think of the treatment you gave Edgar Allan Poe, and consider how you'd have sainted him and burned incense and punk before his image if he'd only dwelt together in peace and unity at Concord! Why, that isn't even sectionalism—that's quarter-sectionalism. You people come out here and go hurrahing industriously about, ruthlessly plucking beams from our eyes like a steam stump-puller on a new farm, and if we so much as twist the corner of a silk handkerchief to go after one tweenty-weenty little mote in your northeast eye, you have the infernal impudence to accuse us of sectionalism!"
The Professor led the roar of laughter that restored the usual good humor.
"But, Mr. Kennedy, you people out here really are different in every way," said Breese. "And you'll own that it's only natural for us to think the ways to which we are accustomed are right."
"There are fewer vital differences than you suppose," said Don. "Perhaps the most important is that your people, when not rich, are poor and needy, while we're only poor. We're not even that while this mining foolishness keeps up. But it can't last. Then your rigorous climate makes providence, foresight and industry compulsory, while we never allow business to interfere with our pleasure. They call this 'the mañana country.' It's a misnomer. More than in any other corner of the nation, we live in and for today. We have learned nothing from the past and we care nothing for the future. I'm inclined to think that, aside from these two points—in both of which I grant that the distinction is in your favor—we are very much of a muchness. Those two points alone make you immeasurably our superiors in material progress except in the matter of public buildings. There we are your superiors—we have no poorhouses! You beat us on another count: our manners lack the pose of Vere de Vere. But, morally, I believe men are divided, there as here, along the same lines—brute, bully, bounder, blackguard, knave, fool, cad, snob, prig, bore, sham, dupe and true man."
"Well" gasped Lena. "I must say! What chance has a poor woman of picking the true man from that lot? That's even worse than the old classification of rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief!"
"Poor woman, you completely misunderstand me. I didn't say men were classified that way. I said they were divided that way. The proportions differ—that's all. And, pardon me—there is a venerable myth to the effect that the poor men are supposed to do the guessing." (As you will observe, Don was not free from the masculine weakness for satirizing the effeminacy of woman.) He turned to Otis. "My belief is that we show a higher percentage of the brute and bully than you do, and that you run correspondingly more to sham and dupe. Otherwise the assay is about the same."
What scathing retort the Professor might have made to this blasphemy was checked by an interruption.
V
IT was Mrs. Vane of the fixed, benevolent smile, a fellow-guest of good intent. With a hasty nod to the veranda she hurried by to intercept an unwary person at the gate: Mr. Uncle Jimmy Collins, a somewhat reconstructed Confederate. At her greeting he swept off his hat with an air.
Casting an apprehensive glance at the unconscious Jimmy Junior, working across the way, Mrs. Vane lowered her voice to an agitated whisper, with tragic and rhythmic underscoring of words: "Oh, Mr. Collins! I hate to mention it—but do you know your Jimmy gambles?"
The veranda listened shamelessly; even the pinochle was suspended. The query visibly staggered the old soldier. He mopped his forehead and disconsolately studied the lining of his hat. "Gambles? Dear me, dear me! Jimmy! I've tried to teach him better'n that, ma'am. Are you sure?"
"Oh, yes! Why, I saw him myself! He was playing with a Mexican boy on the freight depot platform in broad daylight! They had the money in front of them!"
"Dear me, dear me!" said the old gentleman again, in great distress. A puzzled look came to his eyes. "I am surprised. Whose—whose money was it?" he faltered.
"Whose money?" echoed the beaming lady. "Why—his, I suppose."
The veteran gave a sigh of relief. "Oh-h! I thought maybe it was yours! Good-mawnin', madam!" He clapped on his hat with bow and flourish and went stumping on his wooden-legged way with a new and jaunty erectness of bearing, leaving good Mrs. Vane to retreat, red with mortification, and the veranda redder still with smothered merriment.
"Splendid, splendid!" gasped Lena. "I wouldn't have missed that!" She turned to the Professor. "Now don't disapprove and spoil it, you rigid moralist. It's too good."
"Do you expect me to approve?" The Professor was struggling, with indifferent results, to repress a refractory grin to austere, steel-trap lines.
"You do!" she defied him. "Else, why do you laugh? Gossip makes more trouble than gambling."
"There'll be more to this!" prophesied Hiram, dolefully wagging his head. "The old man'll lead Jimmy behind the barn, pullin' a strap between his fingers. 'Jimmy,' he'll say, 'this hurts you worse than it does me'!"
"Oh, I like it here!" declared Lena. "The men are so direct and straightforward. Even in their open wrong-doing there is a childlike simplicity, a lack of all intent to conceal, that goes far to condone their offenses. Yesterday I went over to the store. They were playing that extraordinary game—I can't remember the name of it—where they all throw up coins and the one that falls nearest a crack in the floor takes all the rest"
"Crack-Loo," said Don reminiscently. "Crack-Loo can be made singularly unremunerative at times."
"There! You see!" said Lena with the triumphant feminine faculty of conveying a meaning entirely foreign to the words. "They were just like that. They moved back, but kept quietly on at their game, evidently unconscious of any impropriety. I'll tell you what it's like," she cried, with that eagerness we all use to hunt down a luckless simile. "It's like the tents they live in, with the doors wide open, revealing their domestic economy with unshrinking candor to the passer-by. No skeleton in the closet there."
"Would it not be more accurate to say there is no closet for the skeleton?" asked Kennedy. "I will cheerfully admit, however, that any of them possessing a skeleton are quite capable of providing a cozy bunk and an easy chair for it."
"I must not have understood you correctly, Miss Mallory," said the Professor. "Not to be ashamed of what you do is surely not quite the same thing as not to do that of which you should be ashamed."
"That's not a fair statement at all," said Don. "I appeal to Miss Mallory if she meant any such thing. If a man scorns to conceal his acts he may do naughty-naughty things—yes, indeedy. But when he comes to something"
"'Here we go round the mulberry bush'!" said Miss Mallory rudely, describing swift circles with a shapely hand. "Miss Mallory is quite capable of knowing what she means without having two great clumsy men explain it to her. As a matter of fact, I mean exactly what the old lady in the story did: 'My son, never do anything you need be ashamed of and then you need never be ashamed of anything you do!'"
"Oh, well," said Hiram, "we've got one big advantage over your closed-and-double-locked-door system. We're not afraid of being exposed and so we never commit one crime to conceal another."
"In other words, our sins and crimes are chosen, not forced upon us," supplemented Kennedy.
The Professor shook his head. "It works both ways. The fear of exposure would deter a timid soul like mine from many a delightful sin which a—a"
"Hardened ruffian?"
"Thank you—which a hardened ruffian like you or Mr. Kennedy would enjoy without hesitation."
"'How he would take his pleasure once'," quoted Kennedy, sotto voce.
Otis eyed him sharply. "A cowman who quotes Browning—and quotes so very much to the point—is properly the object of suspicion."
"Bless your soul," said the object of suspicion, evading the more serious charge, "I'm not a cowman. I'm only a cattleman."
"I plainly see," said Lena, "that you won't be happy till some one asks you to explain. Very well, Mr. Johnson; will you kindly tell us the difference between a cowman and a cattleman?"
"A cattleman owns cattle. A cowman is one who understands the business and yet learns something new about it every day. A cowman may work for wages or he may own cattle. But he'll never do anything else and he'll never know anything else. To be just, he knows that one thing so much better than other men know any one thing that he is easily equal to any superiors. And he is scrupulously, almost absurdly, honest about inanimate things—a specialist, you see. Now I own cattle, but I have been some time farmer, lumber man, telegraph operator and railroader. Hiram was a cowman at seven and will be that at seventy."
"How may the uninitiated tell them apart?" asked Otis.
"It's hard to do. The only sure way is to keep tally of their herds. If the rate of increase is over one hundred per cent per annum the owner is a cowman. But there are indications that help. The cowman names a brand where the other gives the owner's name. I speak of Bowman and Hutchinson, The California Company, Hardcastle and Mitford; Hiram says the K Y outfit, the John Cross, the H A M."
"The John Cross?" echoed Dolly. "What's that?"
"The California Company's brand. The Las Palomas people. I used to have my frugal earnings invested in John Cross stock. But I sold out because they're to get in trouble about taking up homesteads."
"Why do they call it John Cross?" Dolly wanted to know.
"Well, you see, some of the original big stockholders were Canadians and they always called the outfit after the old Hudson Bay Company."
"But why did you call the Hudson Bay Company that?" persisted Dolly. Don shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands, palms down.
"Now you've got me. I'm from the South."
"Kind Heaven be thanked, you are out of your depth for once. I was beginning to fear you were omniscient." Miss Mallory settled back in her chair with cozy feline satisfaction, cuddled her chin in her rosy palm, dimpled with deliberate, cold-blooded insolence and eyed Mr. Kennedy with a broad and speculative smile. "Ah! I see at last why it is always the Western man and the Eastern girl who fall in love—in the novels. It's so they can have something to talk about. It's hardly fair for the girl either. He tells her hundreds of things she doesn't know, though they are everyday commonplaces to him. So the poor girl naturally thinks he's wonderful."
"I See at Last Why It is Always the Western Man and the Eastern Girl Who Fall in Love—in the Novels"
"If that is the tradition, Miss Mallory," Don hinted, "you will find me"
Miss Mallory disrespectfully wrinkled her saucy nose at him. "I was speaking of novels, not of real people. But I don't hold with novels at all. Their victims expect more than the workaday world can give."
Here an opportune interruption arose across the way. The blacksmith shop and the stage stables were built, for reasons unknown and unimaginable, directly fronting the hotel. Here the K I M hay outfit, destined now for the wide reaches of grama below Fra Christobal, was busily making ready for the road; filling water-barrels and loading supplies. Bishop was tying the rake to "trail" the hay-rigging. Young Jimmy Collins lay on his back under an old mowing machine, industriously tightening nuts; and Pappy Sickles, Canadian, was hitching his team to the other mower, fire-new and gaudy with blue and red.
Now came hastily Kim Ki Rogers, his employer, the great man of Dundee—postmaster, owner of store, hotel, Kim stage-line and the K I M brand—a beefy, bull-necked, red-faced man, now irate, blustering and loud.
"What you hitchin' up to that machine for, you dodderin' old idiot?" he bawled. "Bishop's goin' to have that."
Pappy threw a fleeting, cursory glance over his shoulder as he bent over to hook a trace. "You promised it to me," he observed mildly. "I'd as lief be an idjit as a natchel-born liar."
Kim Ki grew redder than ever; without more ado he made a vicious pass at Pappy's grizzled head. But Pappy ducked nimbly. Thud—thud! His fists landed solidly on Kim Ki's portly sides. Rogers rushed, swinging furiously; Pappy ducked, lunged, clasped him in a fond embrace, threw him heavily. His left forearm was pressed squarely on the postmagisterial throat, backed by Pappy's gray head, thus snugly protected by the bend of the arm; and Pappy's free hand hammered lustily at his employer's ear.
The veranda, save Don and Hiram, rose in some excitement but, noting such agitation to be unshared, sat down again. The loading went on undisturbed; the cook stowed dishes in the chuckbox; young Jimmy plied his wrench assiduously. English Jerry, chambermaid to the Kim stables, sat tranquil on the wagon-tongue and smoked a peaceful cob pipe; Pres Lewis, blacksmith, leaned in the shop door, cast a loitering glance at the proceedings, stroked his silky-brown Jovian beard and turned a grave, weather-wise eye to contemplation of a stray cloud over Cuchillo Negro. Jerry rose, tapped his pipe, yawned, stretched himself and shambled back to the stables.
Matters Were Going Ill With Red-faced Kim Ki
Meantime, matters were going ill with red-faced Kim Ki. Vainly he heaved and strained to dislodge his wiry and wily adversary; Pappy clung like a leach. During the struggle his arm had got under Kim Ki's neck, and for a little they were nose to nose, eye to eye, in ludicrous likeness to a pair of game cocks. But Pappy now had his head again, tucked safely away in the bent arm, and his good right, when it could free itself from desperately clutching fingers, thumped vigorously away in deliberate little short-arm jabs.
The luckless magnate rolled his eye at the blacksmith, only to find that worthy engrossed with meteorological observation. He creditably grasped the humor of the situation. "Pres," he gasped, "take this old man off'n me: I don't want to hurt him.
Thus appealed to, Pres thrust his hands in his pockets and leisurely sauntered out. "Pappy," he said dispassionately, "Kim's afraid you'll bruise up your hand. Reckon you hadn't better stop? Dinner'l1 be ready presently, anyhow."
"Do I git the machine?" Pappy's gray beard was doubled over his own mouth and the demand came in muffled tones.
"Sure you do!"
"Leggo my shirt, then—you're tearin' it plumb off'n me." Rogers rose and felt his damaged face with tentative finger tip. Then he waved his hand in airy, comprehensive gesture. "All you boys go over and have one on me," he said briskly. "Pappy, I'm goin' to make you foreman of this here outfit. You satisfied to work under him, Bish?"
"Sure I am. It's a bore to be boss, anyhow."
"Don't forget the grindstone," admonished Kim Ki. "Well, I got to go. Come on, Pappy, let's us wash up."
Pappy tucked in his shirt and they toddled amiably away. The veranda manifested a lively disposition to demand an encore. However, it was refused. With airy salute of waved hand and bow and smile Rogers and his coadjutor passed on and left them laughing.
"And such is life in the Far West!" said the Professor, and wiped away a tear. "Homeward the well-regulated militia plods its weary way. 'Tis time for—ah—dinner."
"Music this evenin'," said Hiram gloatingly.
The Professor arched his brows. "Meaning—tonight? Or this afternoon?"
"Meaning this evening," said Don. "'And the evening and the morning were the first day!' Evening is any time after the sun begins to decline."
Miss Mallory rapped her chair arm sharply. "Children! Tut—fie-for-shame! Upon my word, I believe this perpetual wrangle is entirely over names and not about facts at all."
Don rose and bowed congratulation. "Miss Mallory, you have made the one profound and philosophical remark of the day. We have no quarrel. It is, as you say, a mere difference in names."
But Dolly's thoughts lingered in Eden. "I wonder how long Adam and Eve lived in the garden before their eviction? It doesn't say. Oh, I do hope there was a full moon."
"Oh, well," said Hiram disparagingly, "what if there was? Grandma didn't have no mandolin, anyhow!" He spoke with deep conviction, mindful of what late time he, himself, home-going heedless, had stumbled on the stars.
••••••
Knowing that Miss Mallory's hands were beautiful, you will not now be surprised to hear of her mandolin. She played it more than well; she had a flexible voice of exquisite tint and timbre, soft, tender, caressing, meaningful. Hiram could tell you every word of every half-sad, haunting song, just as Hiram remembers every hour of those hours, so many, so few. But he will not tell you. … What songs? You remember, successful sir—and you—and you, madam—some certain songs—or, perhaps, but one—that stir your listless blood to a lilting tide, that set all your quivering nerves a-tingle with ghostly messages? The faintest bar or phrase of it, the lightest echo of its wandering notes, thrills you to the finger-tips. Then you raise your heavy chin; your furtive, watchful face changes for the moment to the uplifted, dauntless face that was yours ere we became—wise. … Heigh ho! No more on Ajalon the moon stands still and trembles at our will. … Your wife, sir—or your husband, madam—does not care for these songs. It may even be—so strange we are—that you do not yourself know why a strain so simple moves you as no mightiest lord of song can ever do. Think a little. You remember now? That is what Lena Mallory sang.
VI
EVENTS of this weltering world are fully accounted for by so many clashing theories advanced by thinkers and others that the discreet story-teller takes refuge in an abandoned fiction, the Firm of the Fates, a myth no more believed: which, therefore, cannot possibly offend the most vehement and tenacious adherent of any, and may be considered a convenient algebraic symbol for what Fact you favor—Providence, Evolution, Destiny, blind Chance or the chemical reaction of atoms, exactly as you choose.
So, still they snip and spin on high Olympus—Young Clotho, diligent Lachesis, sad Atropos; rather busier than of old, the world having proved astonishingly larger than was expected—for the warnings of sage Malthus had passed all unheeded. But, on the whole, they are pretty well content for all that, since to them was assigned no care of abysmal world-dust hordes of crowding suns and satellites that skip and gambol and whisk and whirl in the opener spaces beyond the narrow bound where imagination ends and infinity begins to be—quite unrestrained and unregulated of Grecian Fates or their ingenious Greek designers.
Great fellows, those same old Greek designers! Clothed in mystery and majesty of poetic thought, their guess is impressive still. Yet we daily jostle elbows with the very body of their guess, and find it prosaic enough—unless, indeed, it concerns ourselves. You may know the modern mediators be tween Fates and men by the scrip or pouch they bear for mandates. Many wear a neat gray uniform, black-braided, brass-buttoned. When next you meet such messenger, turn and look and mark him what he is. Think that in every leathern pouch of all those leathern pouches he brings decrees—love and loss, joy and sorrow and ruin and wrong, name and fame, gain and grief and shame and death.
Of the many such missives handled on a certain June day by the Dundee agency of the Fates—Kim Ki was postmaster, but Deputy Rowe did the work—were two bearing upon this chronicle. Both were unsigned; one was outward bound. Adam Sleiter wrote the last. Sleiter, reputed the sometime terror of Cerillos, Golden and Placer, was now about to transfer the Legal Tender mine to Breese, in exchange for much valuable money—in which crowning feat Sleiter took an artistic pride. Why Sleiter wrote this letter, why he discreetly withheld his signature, will now be declared.
Jim Gales saloon was also, as a sideline, a sort of literary clearing-house. To an unused "Senate" table in the poolroom men brought papers from "home": New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco; Atlanta, Nashville, Louisville, St. Louis and New Orleans; London, Quebec, Berlin; taking at will what others caught their eye, or skimming them over there. Here Kennedy, with an errand for Sleiter's ear in fitting time, loitered—reading, listening to chatting idlers.
Sleiter was one of these idlers—rubicond, flame-bearded; teller of broad, short stories; brawler and bully, boisterous, boastful, obstreperous. The traits were natural and not acquired; he was, if anything, more disagreeable half sober than quarter sober—his minimum and maximum of sobriety. Like the man famed for even temper, who was always mad, Sleiter was always objectionable. It was thought that his arrogant and overbearing manner was a great help in the sale of mines. Investors reasoned that such offensive and gratuitous rudeness in the vendor betokened a consciousness of wares of worth, on the principle that a good mine needs no gush.
As it neared noon the crowd melted away to culinary cares. There were but few left when Kennedy laid down his paper and stopped Sleiter as he was passing the table.
"I wanted to speak to you about Breese," he said in an undertone.
"Well, who's hinderin' you? Talk's cheap! You ain't tongue-tied, be ye?" Sleiter's thick, insolent lip rolled up, exposing jagged and discolored fangs.
"Not so loud, Mr. Sleiter," said Don in the same even tones he had used before. "I wanted to see if you wouldn't let up on selling Breese the Legal Tender. On his wife's account, if for nothing else. She's an old lady. Come, Sleiter, you've got plenty of money. I wish"
Sleiter had dropped his jaw, aghast. "You wish!" he thundered. "You wish! You whippersnapper, what the do I care what you wish? Mind your own business!"
"That wasn't exactly what I meant to say," said Don apologetically. "I didn't word it just right. Especially, I didn't intend to say 'I wish'." One bystander—he was a miner newly here from Arizona—snickered at this. But Jim Gale nudged him with a look so meaning that he reconsidered his hilarity.
Leaving blanks for idle words is unsatisfactory in any case. The reader of scant vocabulary is more impressed by the implied word than if it had been spelled out. In reporting Mr. Sleiter's remarks, such a course would recall the celebrated omission of the title rôle from the play. A paraphrase is better, with permission. Smiting the table with his brawny fist, Mr. Sleiter gave, as his candid, raving and roaring opinion, that Kennedy was an officious meddler, sentenced by his Creator to pass the eons of eternity in a region noted for an insalubrious climate; the speaker being rather inclined to hasten Kennedy's departure thither, and, in fact, offering to do so for the smallest copper coin issued by the Federal Government. As to Breese, he recounted his physical, mental and moral infirmities at some length, and, after advancing an improbable genealogical surmise, affirmed, as a final and clinching venture of abuse, that Breese was one of more exceeding unworth than the speaker himself. The last flight may be given verbatim. Why he omitted the profanity is unknown. Perhaps he thought manner could add nothing to the matter of the charge; perhaps he was secretly uneasy that Don betrayed neither alarm nor anger.
"Yah! Don't you talk to me about Freeze! Think o' the money, saved up a dollar or two at a time, that he's wheedled from them folks back yonder—nesters and millhands and shopkeepers and sich. He jiggles and joggles and projects around playin' ducks and drakes with their money with no chance for action on it, just so's some of it can stick to his fingers. What'd I ever do as bad as that? When I go after 'em all they're out is just what I get. He's a dirty thief, a swindler, a thimble-rigger—that's what Freeze is! Anybody's got a right to his money that's smart enough to get it. And darn him, I'll try to get it all!"
"I dare say what you say of Breese and the investors is true enough in the main," said Don mildly. "In fact, I know it is. But we miss the point. What I meant to say, instead of 'wish,' is this: I'm not giving reasons; I'm giving you instructions, to which you will please listen attentively. You call that trade off!"
"Instructions! Call off" Sleiter spluttered in the violence of his wrath.
"Such is my desire. Don't sell Breese that mine or any mine."
"A bad man, ain't you?" snarled Sleiter. Curious eyes were upon him. "A killer, you are? I heard you was. A fire-eater and a fighter?"
"You never heard me say so. As a matter of fact, I share the views of homicide so ably expressed by Mr. Bobby Burns. But for myself, if I really wanted to know whether a man would fight or not, I'd not ask him. … I'd try him!"
So still! … The shadow of death circled by. No other man stirred a finger, but waited motionless, breathless. Eye to eye, these two fronted across the table. Don did not rise from his chair. The bully's cheek, splotched and mottled dirty red and white, faded at last to an ashy gray; a faint qualm gripped, sinking, at his stomach.
"I ain't" Sleiter paused to wet his lips. "You see I ain't got no gun."
"I see you haven't. But I came prepared for that too. I intend to get this matter settled." Kennedy's hand slipped under his coat and threw a revolver on the table; the butt slid almost to Sleiter's hand. "Take that one!"
"Take That One!"
The desperado was poised on the balls of his feet, one leg advanced, one hand thrown back, balanced, crouching, all but clutching at the gun. The split second would be his! … Eye to eye; but Kennedy's eye was mocking, certain, dominant; before its arrogant pride Sleiter's glance flickered, flinched and fell. An icy hand clutched at his very heart; his nerveless knees gave under his weight in actual physical weakness. … He turned and crept away, followed by sneering glances; a man mastered, broken, shamed and outcast.
••••••
"Don," said Gale confidentially, when the shocked and whispering remnant had followed the deposed ruler, "you're a fool. You're nine different and distinct kinds of fool! Have a drink. He mighty nigh took you up on your little sporting proposition."
"I didn't think he'd stand the pressure," said Don carelessly.
"He'd 'a' beat you to it if he hadn't weakened. You couldn't possibly 'a' got at your other gun first." Gale set out bottle and glass.
"My other gun?" echoed Kennedy, puzzled. "I didn't have any other gun."
Gale put a restraining hand on the bottle, took it off, clubbed it, cast a slow, filmy, calculating glance at Kennedy's head, then at the bottle, back to Kennedy and back to the bottle again, apparently engrossed with some abstruse comparative estimate. At last he sighed, shoved the bottle on a shelf. He unlocked a small cabinet from which he took another bottle, smaller and sealed, which he placed on the bar with a corkscrew, offering no explanation.
Now, this is what Sleiter wrote:
"Mr. Jack Leonard,
"Weatherford, Texas.
"Dear Sir and Friend: I seen a man a while back that told me about your brother Willy and Will Jones beeing killed at Abilene. The man who done it is here now leastways the name is the same Don Kennedy and it is like his impidence not to change it I guess he is a hard one.
"Now if you don't want to tackle him yourself I don't blame you. This man sayd he was there and him and Kennedy pulled out afterward they was old aquantence but Kennedy was overbearing he wouldn't go and see if this was the man he was afrade he sayd your brother and Will Jones they begun it first but you can cinch Kennedy all the same he can't prove it by any one else but him. And if this is the same Kennedy this man says the man who killed your brother can be cinched to for robbing the T P at Sweetwater two years ago. Maybe he wasn't in with them but the train robers stayed hiden in his house at Nolan that night and the next day and was seen there by good citizens Joe and Charley Hanson and Lou Fite they seen them and others the train robbers was pusht clost and had to scatter the man says he was scared and hid his share under Kennedy's fireplace he thinks it is there yet Kennedy did not know it was there I think you could get the scared man to confess right if you seen him and had Kennedy behind the bars he is afrade of Kennedy. If you come out here and get him I will see you and let you know so no more now from a friend."
The other letter came the same day, addressed to Miss Lena Mallory, City, in a printed backhand palpably disguised. Within were these unsigned verses in the same laborious back hand:
A Ballade of White Fingers
Her fingers stray along the frets,
Her fingers wander o'er the strings;
A little while my heart forgets
Its griefs and cares and petty stings;
The chorded cadence throbs and sings,
Forgot are folly, wrong and sin,
And earth seems made for happier things—
When Lena plays her mandolin.
Her fingers glide along the frets,
Her fingers dance upon the strings …
Behind the outpost lone vedettes
A stern and stubborn phalanx swings
To mend the day's disasterings:
High over turmoil, dust and din
The clarion call of Honor rings—
She plays upon her mandolin.
Her fingers dream upon the frets;
They mourn along the wailing strings.
From night's far-arching parapets
The dim wraith of my dead youth wings,
Thrills through the trembling dusk and clings,
Sobbing, about my feet. … Come in!
Dear guest and ghost! … Such answer brings
The magic of her mandolin.
Prince, at the Gates of Paradise,
I fear I scarce shall enter in,
If, still without, with luring eyes,
She plays upon her mandolin.
The sigh followed the smile as Lena read; the swift red dyed her cheek. Her liking for Professor Otis was sincere. She gave warm appreciation to his unexaggerated good qualities. He was vigorous, prudent, successful, seated well above the salt, yet with no drop of snobbish blood—honorable, kindly, generous and just. She admired him, she liked him very much indeed, as a friend, but—she mused for a long time at this inconsistent conclusion. At last, after another reading and, perhaps, another sigh, she laid the verses away in an inconsistent little bamboo box—which might have been a casket but was really a retired tea-basket—with the flint arrow head the Professor had found at the ferry, the yucca blossom he had pressed for her, and other little archæological tokens he had brought her. The bamboo box itself had been his gift
VII
BUT a week before the desert had been seared and bare, brown and dull gray. Now green life crept up from the roots of the gray grama. The first July rains were over and all the clean-washed world lay glistening in the sun, fresh and sweet and pure. Blue-black, wave-edged, clear against the fathomless turquoise sky, far, radiant ranges rimmed out the mesas east and west; the nearer ranges, saw-toothed and broken, gleamed white from bare wet rocks, sparkled where quartz and crystal and mica shone. From the terraced ridge where they rode Don pointed out to Lena Mallory a dim silhouette far to the southwest, on the remotest verge of the broad expanse—a faint, low outline, the mountain that marks the meeting corners of four states.
The mystery and charm of tremendous distances thralled her, the splendor of nearer lights. Everywhere they glittered and sparkled, these warm reflected lights, spangles on the desert's new robe of delicate gray-green; white light thrown back in varying tints from cliffs of limestone, lava, granite, basalt, syenite, porphyry, obsidian; from red sandhills, from leprous bare blotches on the wide plains, from weather-beaten yellowish benches, from pebbles of ruddy-glinting burnished agate on the low slopes, from the white town itself, from the near new quarry, from "gyp" cuts, chalk-white and glaring, where the railroad plunged recklessly from level to lower level, from gleaming tins of abandoned construction camps, from glittering steel of rails, from white, wind-swept roads. Scattered along the central valley of the Jornada, a flashing quick silver chain of new-born shallow lakes lay along the shining flats of sacaton, lake after dazzling lake, till the broad valley bent behind low, lonely hills and was lost beyond their purple cones and pyramids.
But were these lights all indeed of land or sea? If, as is said upon authority, a jest's prosperity lies in the listening ear, it is like that some or much of this bewildering beauty lay in the beholder's eyes. The air was heavy with fragrance of flower and shrub and trampled herb. Lena Mallory flung her arm wide in joyous exaltation; her eye kindled with delight. In such hour and place and mood was reared the stone where "lies buried the soul of the licentiate Lucius." The line gives an added charm to the green pleasant Spanish hill; ages ago, the brain that shaped it, the hand that graved it, are alike crumbled to dust. Old pagan earth-lover, how are your deeds and daring and hopes, your loves and hates and wars and works and sins, lost now in the trackless dark! Yet this one idle fancy outlives them and thee and the forgotten king who was then great—lives and will live while warm flesh glows with the pride of life, while water flows to the sea, and grass grows green to the rain, and young blood thrills to its mate.
The ride had been long; they were on the homeward way, following the long mesquit-grass benches below Fra Christobal. Don had beguiled the hour with tales of Apache warriors: Victoria, Juh and Nana. Then, to her questioning, he had explained at some length the theory and practice of "working" cattle on the free range. Under theory his discourse treated of the drive, the round-up, the night-guard, the wranglers, "floating," "moonshining" and range-riding. He purposely omitted mention of life "on the trail." For a herd was just before them; Lena was to have a notable chance to observe that phase at first hand. Under practice he made clear the cause and effect of mavericking, "sleepering," "changelings" and yet subtler assimilative methods in vogue—called of the wise by the prudent, non-commital term, conveyance—quoting, as summary of the ethics involved, that excellent and pithy apothegm of the short-grass countries: "Never steal cattle; but if you must—then keep what you steal!"
"But it's a great business, all the same. Railroads and fortunes are built on the difference between steer and steak. Let's turn down this tip. I saw a passing herd from up in the foothills. I'll show you a glimpse of the old cattle-trail days before the railroads, when steers went to market afoot."
The old Santa Fe trail, here paralleling the railway, lay below them, skirting the base of the bench. The herd was strung out and scattered, barely grazing toward Dundee; the sleepy herders lounged sidewise in their saddles. "They go as slowly as they can, just so they reach a watering place," said Don. "Tomorrow night they'll stay at McRae and next day they'll cross the river."
"And they stand watch every night?"
"Guard. Yes—every night. They ride around 'em and sing to 'em. That's where Hiram learned those thirteen thousand little jingles he sings, and why he has one pat for every occasion. Now, if you imagine the herds all big, and all steers, and twenty—thirty—rip-roaring, white-eyed, long-legged unlicked cowboys, instead of Paw and the boys, brother George and Mandy's man and Uncle Bill, like this family outfit, you'll imagine what the trail was like.
In front of the cattle, just below the watchers, crept two covered wagons driven by sunbonneted women. Water-barrels were ironed to the sides of one, and a chuckbox showed behind; chicken-coops were slung on the other.
This latter fact was amusing to Lena. "Look at that, will you? That's where they got the name of prairie schooners, is it?" was her comment. "Those chicken-coops, like boats hanging from a ship's davits."
"Speaking of affidavits," said Don gravely, "they let those chickens out when they camp, and whenever the horses are harnessed the chickens come in on a keen jump, flop over on their backs and stick their feet up so the kids can put 'em in the coops. Yes they do! They're used to it. That's Mandy driving the chicken-wagon."
A girl rode a diminutive pony beside the wagons; from under the white sides children's faces peered curiously at the new land. Behind fed a bunch of saddle-horses attended by a shock-headed, whistling boy; a bunch of silky white Angoras browsed through the bushes in charge of a vigilant collie. A similar outfit, several miles ahead, was dropping down the valley to Dundee Lake. Seeing this, Lena looked behind.
"Why! There's another herd following this one!"
The leaders were just coming in sight to northward, creeping over One Tree Hill.
"Yes, they'll be thick now for a while. You see they couldn't cross the Jornada and the White Sands Desert, beyond the San Andrés, till the rains filled the water-holes," Don explained. "Now there'll be a regular string of 'em, one after another. Texas got too crowded for 'em a while back, so they drifted up the Pecos and followed the branches west till they struck the desert. That stopped 'em. Too much trouble to cross with the herds. But more of 'em kept coming till they piled up three deep all the way from the Pecos to White Mountain. That's what brought on the Lincoln County War. They didn't observe what they were doing. They don't now. Overstocked and eaten out, and didn't know how to get away. Now they've found out how to do it and they're all drifting across to eat out the Gila. When they clean that up they'll have another war and go back to the Pecos."
"Why don't some of them settle here?" said Lena. They had started on; the horses were picking their way down the steep sides of the bench.
"They're not the settling kind. They just stop a while for grass. For another thing, the Rio Grande is already overstocked with cattle and Mexicans. And they don't like Mexicans."
"I don't mean the Rio Grande Valley, I mean the Jornada. And I think you're prejudiced against the Mexicans yourself."
"Me?" Don tapped his breast with an astonished forefinger. "Me? Me prejudiced? Why, I lived for two years right by a place where there was close to a hundred of 'em, and wished there were more of 'em every day. That was at the John Cross headquarters—just below the Palomas graveyard."
"Don—Mr. Kennedy!"
"Don."
"I should think you'd be ashamed!"
"I don't see why. I think it's a nice name. I used to have a dog named Don. Huh, Donnie! Huh, Don! Come, doggie! Good doggie!"
"I do not mean ashamed of your name!" The girl left a withering pause between each word. "I mean ashamed of your cynical speech."
For better evasion of this, the cynic spaced his words in the same deliberate, exasperating fashion.
"Lena—Miss Mallory—the Tejanos can't keep their stuff on the Jornada. The lakes dry up."
"They can dig wells."
"Not on horseback! Running water is what they are looking for. Running down hill, you understand. What they really would like to find is running water, and a little house already built, corrals and garden and henhouse and a little orchard and a woodpile. Then, while they were asleep, the cattle might grow and water flow. Dig wells, did you say? They cannot dig; to dig they are ashamed."
"You seem to be in the objective mood as a regular thing. With all your wing shots at flying follies, it surprises me that you do not sometimes have a crack at the South," said the girl with dainty malice. "You rather slight that quarter, it strikes me. First the Easterner doesn't suit you, then the native bears your scorns, and now you flaunt the man from the Lone Star State."
"I knew a man once—knew him very well—who got himself gloriously licked for making just such another statement as that. He had been off holidaying. When he got back he found a Texas friend at the ranch. 'Well,' says the Texas man, '’d you see any dances when you was romancin' around?' And the other says before he thought just how it'd sound: 'Oh, yes. I went to three—an American dance, a Mexican dance and a Texas dance!' So the Texas licked him."
"But you must admit that you're hard to please," insisted the girl. "If these Texans go to Arizona they certainly won't crowd you—I believe that is the phrase you cowmen use when any one settles within a day's ride of you? So you ought to be glad. You're going to stay here, are you not?"
"I told you I knew that man well. I am that man," said Don. "When a man is easily displeased with others it is a sure sign that he is not pleased with himself. Let's gallop on ahead before we cross over. They've got the cattle strung out nicely now and going just so. If we go too close to the leaders it's liable to turn 'em."
But when they were past the cattle and turned down on the new road beside the railroad track, the girl repeated her unanswered question. They were wise ancients who made gifts of goods to the sea in the hour of prosperity, that they might so placate the envious gods.
"I suppose you expect to stay here? Hiram tells me your well will make a fine ranch."
Kennedy reined up his horse and pointed eagerly. "Look there, Miss Mallory! Do you see that sugar-loaf peak in the San Andrés—in the Moongate? No, not that one. Here, let me sight you. Ride up a step or two—a little farther—there! Now look straight beyond this telegraph pole and over the top of that big soapweed. Do you see it? All covered with cedar—cone-shaped—sticking up right in the middle of Moongate Pass?"
"Do You See It—Sticking Up
Right in the Middle of Moongate Pass"
"I see it, yes," said the girl. "Why?"
"That was there when I first came here!"
By these time-honored elusive tactics Dundee still seeks to change the venue for avoidance of inopportune questioning. But if it is not already clear that this young woman was possessed of a—of an intelligence inquiring, alert, persevering, direct of purpose, not to be swerved aside or parried by quibble, wile, equivocation, question-begging or any such pal try device, it is now expressly stated.
Logic-choppers are masculine; the feminine mind is concerned not with how it proceeds, but solely with where it triumphantly arrives. She turned to him; their eyes met in an electric shock; their words clashed like swords.
"You're going away."
"Yes."
"When?"
"Now."
"Why?"
There was no answer; his face was turned away. "Why?" she challenged.
"Why?" he repeated bitterly. For a moment she shrank before the leaping light of his eyes. In such flaming moment the lightning cleaves the midnight, leaving a blacker dark. He set himself with a visible effort. His hand tightened on the bridle, the swift pulses of his throat beat evenly again; his eyes were old and sad and stern, fixed on the long horizon. His face was set to a high look of renunciation, resolute with a measureless pride such as no taker of cities ever wore. "Because I am not fit to ride by your side. Because the curse of Reuben is upon me; unstable as water. Because I am unworthy of friendship or trust." After the first moment of weakness his voice was controlled, steady, dull and low.
She put out her startled hand to touch his, but he drew it away. In the same steady, lifeless voice he answered the unspoken question. "Yes—there is blood upon it. If that were all! That was in fair fight. I scarcely regret that; my shame is not for that. It is for the years of evil living, for all my wild and undisciplined youth, for all my reckless, wasted manhood, for all my wrecked and wasted life. It is but a pitiful weakness that I am now here."
Her face was pale, her forehead knitted in its old trick of concentrated intent to an odd, wistful frown; her voice trembled a little with its compassion and with its sorrow.
"You are young. Life is before you. If the past is so ill—it can be retrieved."
His lips twisted to a mirthless smile. "So the poets say. If living were like scribbling, now! If we could go over our lives, revise to a happier turn, erase the hateful error, change and shape and interline, prune out the blunders, cross out the shabby phrase, the futile line, supply the wiser word, the nobler thought, copy the clean, amended record in a fair round hand! Not so! Crude and tawdry, blotted and stained and soiled, the shameful record stands!"
"Is it so blotted then—so stained?"
"Blotted with tears—foul with sin."
"Then—write again! Overwrite it—make it a palimpsest! Make the new line brave and strong and high! Let who will trace out the fading, feebler text beneath and wonder, with each dim-deciphered phrase, each weak, ignoble word, to see how greatly a brave man learns from past mistakes!"
Her pale face was defiant, confident, exalted; in every word rang courage and pride and unfaltering faith. "Perhaps," he said, and under his breath—"It is like you!" He hardly dared look at her; all the tingling blood leaped and surged and thrilled at the call. "Perhaps. But for today" The word drooped to a long silence. "If I have paused one hair's breadth this side of utter dishonor, my best-wisher could say no more than that." A thought came to him of Hiram, his friend, of clean and wholesome youth.
"Today—to stay here longer would be to cross that hair breadth. … Oh, it was madness, madness! I should have gone before."
"You should have gone before!" She said it simply and bravely and unashamed.
They said no more then. White Dundee lay before them, desolate and lone, under a brazen sky. Oh, poor licentiate Lucius, how shallow was thy trust!
The horses walked with drooping heads—slowly, slowly—shuffling up little dust about their feet. The town was very near.
"So this is—goodby?"
"It is best."
"It means, God be with you!" said the girl. "Then—goodby!"
"Goodby!" he said hoarsely, and again "Goodby," they whispered at her door. And so he left her with no other parting word, though he had that to say for which the angel Israfil had stilled the chorded lute-strings of his heart to listen reverently.
He rode slowly away, with no backward look, dwindled to a black speck against the sun, faded at last in a red, blinding glare.
That night she sat alone in her darkening room and crooned old twilight songs, with fitful accompaniment of slow minor chords, weird and faint and low—old songs of lovers dead, or to die:
O, ken ye nae my heart was sair
As I laid the mold on his yellow hair—
The chord changed; her rich voice rose on a fuller note:
Here the dream is ended; here the road to Day
Kiss me for my kindness and let me go my way!
The mandolin sobbed on alone. Then:
O, Brignal banks are fresh and fair
And Greta woods are green
And I'd rather rove with Edmund there—
The chords crashed to bitter silence; in the dusk her arms fell forward on the table and her proud head crumpled over and hid in the bent arms.
••••••
Louie Kaylor, the big blond sheriff, rode in after sundown and made diligent, quiet inquiry of a select few as to the whereabouts of Don Kennedy. No one knew. Wherefore, about nine of the clock, he went to Kim Ki's store to make direct demand of Hiram Yoast, sedulously avoided up to this time, but watched by Kaylor's new deputy, a tall stranger lately named Smith.
Hiram was seated upon the counter entertaining the crowd and apparently in high feather. The sheriff waited politely until Hiram finished that chapter of his memoirs with which he was engrossed. Then he said:
"Can I speak with you a minute, Mr. Yoast?"
Hiram considered, biting an auburning mustache as an aid to reflection. "We-ll—yes, I guess so!" he said good-naturedly. The sheriff stiffened.
"I am looking for Don Kennedy. I have a warrant for his arrest. I want you to tell me where your new well is. It is thought that Kennedy is there."
"Well, well!" said Hiram, assiduously rolling a cigarette; "what's Don went and gone and done now?"
Kaylor had also a warrant to arrest Kennedy on a charge of murder. But, judging from what he had heard about the killing of Leonard and Jones, he thought this might be properly kept to himself. If the reputed circumstances of the killing were known to any one—as they probably would be—the charge would make sympathizers for Kennedy. Leonard and Jones had been bad actors, and the bruit ran that Kennedy had but barely saved his own life from wanton assault. So he said:
"He is charged with train robbery."
"Dear me! Did he—did he get much?" asked Hiram, with polite interest. There was that in the query, an undercurrent of insolence and scarcely-veiled hostility below the patronizing kindness, at which the sheriff writhed in spirit.
"Where is your new well?" he repeated.
"Now, now, Louie," Hiram expostulated; "you don't want me to go projecting out there this late at night. He can likely prove a lullaby by this time." Lest you think Hiram unfeeling, be it here hastily explained that one of the men questioned by the sheriff had not proved worthy of his confidence. Young Jimmy Collins, a Mercury chosen as being a boy and hence least liable to suspicion, had brought Hiram a discreet warning word that his friend was wanted and himself close-watched; and old Jimmy Collins, being for his wooden leg the most unlikely messenger in Dundee, had driven northward toward the hay camp—with a saddle covered up in his wagon bed. Once out of town he had saddled one mule and circled back to the southwest—and was now an hour on his way to pass the word to Don. So this sheriff-baiting of Hiram's, as causing delay, was advisable as well as mildly amusing.
Kaylor himself was not amused. "I think that will be about enough foolishness from you, Hiram. Now you answer my question. Where is this new well of yours?"
Hiram removed his hat and scratched his head. "I'm not sure that I remember exactly." Then he brightened. "But I'll tell you what I'll do. I'll give you the description just as it reads in our location notice." Which he accordingly did, to the great edification of the interested assembly.
"I warn you against bucking the law, you stubborn, stiff-necked" Kaylor hesitated, his outraged feelings as a private man struggling with official etiquette.
"Dolt, fool, ass, idiot, knave, imbecile, incendiary, assassin, procrastinator? That's what Don calls me while he's thinking up something to say."
The sheriff regarded him sourly. "That's a slick tongue you've got there. Look out it don't get you in trouble. I'm going to keep an eye on you this night."
Hiram raised his brows and twitched his nose thoughtfully. "But can you arrest me for just being Don's friend? You got the papers for that?"
"No; but I can get out some other kind of papers if it's necessary—don't you doubt that a minute!"
The eyebrows went still higher. "Goin' to turn state's evidence, Louie?"
The sheriff ignored the taunt, but a subdued titter ran around the circle. "I'll tell you what I'll do, right now. You may consider yourself summoned on my posse."
"I've just bought a piece of land," said Hiram mildly, "and five yoke of oxen and a wife, and I'd like to be excused." Dorothy had been a-missionarying, you see.
Kaylor stared. He was a good sheriff, but weak on parables. "You'll serve on my posse tonight, Mr. Yoast. That's the word with the bark on it."
Mr. Yoast slid off the counter. "Oh, well, have it your own way. Ride or walk?"
The sheriff permitted himself a thin smile. "You might lose your way in the hills. So we'll not go tonight. You just sleep with me and help me resist Don if he tries to break in and give up. Come over to the restaurant with me now. I've not had supper yet."
Hiram, with a parting wink, managed an offensive official strut of conscious brief authority as he fell in step between Kaylor and the silent, alleged Smith. As the door closed behind them he trolled a merry stave:
Oh, will you leave your home,
And will you leave your baby,
And will you leave your own true love,
For to go with Black Jack Davy?
"Say, Sheriff, does your county feed its posse? I got no money on me.
"I'll feed you myself, you derned old fool," said Kaylor, rather pleased to find Hiram so tractable. He had got around a delicate situation with his legal fiction. So much Hiram sensed from his tones.
They lined up at the counter of the Nip and Tuck, hooking their heels in the rounds of the high stools.
"Well, gents, what'll it be?" inquired Nip, who was waiter at this hour.
The others gave their orders. But Hiram leaned his elbows on the counter and deliberated, surveying the displayed eatables on the shelves with discontent. "You may bring me the head of John the Baptist," he growled, "and charge it!" Some of the broadcasting had evidently fallen on good ground.
VIII
Kennedy Had the Girl in the Saddle Before Him, Shielded by His Body
THE sheriff was right; men were not lacking who knew of the Abilene tragedy. Within the week Dundee was divided into hostile camps. Kennedy's adherents were headed by Pres Lewis, Horsethief Fisher and Springtime Morgan. Their theory was plausible if not convincing. The methods used for abatement of Mr. Sleiter, they argued, were proof that Kennedy was one who fought fair. Such being the case, the episode was disposed of, according to their simple creed. As to the less venial charge of train robbery, they persistently regarded it as trumped up. Even men do not depend upon logic, once their unwordable intuitions are aroused.
The law has always stanch upholders, congenital or conscientious. Also, the T P, the Wells-Fargo and the state had offered large rewards. The Wells-Fargo had their own trouble-men on the spot; Smith-Leonard had money and friends. The chase was untiring—and fruitless. Many thought Kennedy was over the border.
He was not. His course may be explained, indeed, but with scant hope that explanation will make it clear to the law-abiding. Such a one would have surrendered to stand trial; to such, flight is confession of guilt. But the desert fosters, along with disputable qualities, a species of eleutheromania. The instinct of the desert-bred is hostile to law. To jail he is resolutely averse; on any attempt to entice or induce him thither he seeks the high places of the hills as surely as water seeks its level. With him this hiding-out is a matter of personal dignity and has nothing to do with guilt or innocence. The law-abiding then term him an outlaw, and he in turn describes the law-abiding as "halter-broke"—a mutual misjudging based upon insufficient premises.
So well is this state of affairs understood on the frontier and so generally is it sympathized with, that lawbreaker or fleer, resorting to lonely ranches for shelter, gives casual lighthearted explanation to a perfect stranger that he is "on the dodge," "running with the wild bunch," or "watering at night." Under such circumstances it is permissible, if imprudent, for the paragon of strangers to submit under protest, or even to decline to harbor the fugitive—permitted, that is, in the sense that he will forfeit no standing, though he may lose many friends by such indiscreet course. After protest at the time you are free for such action as you please. But, once having willingly sheltered the dodger, it is not the thing to have lot or part against him. You may and do extend your hospitality to his pursuers, but your lips are sealed; it is not correct to look unusually or suspiciously wise. So the wheel of negation swings full circle; this no-law is itself become a law, better served than most; having, perhaps, some faint apprehensive smatter of the Golden Rule. It is not known that such confidence has been violated—an absurd custom, not indefensible. Its injuries to society at large are obvious, its advantages to the individual at large undeniable—but the effect on the hostly character is worthy of consideration. The habit of unshrinking loyalty may be formed in a questionable cause, yet to do service in a good one. Among men—ladies will not understand this—clean honor is not always consistent with ill deeds. But it keeps faith, spoken or implied.
Kennedy, more than most, prided himself upon being a rational creature, observant of why he willed the thing he did. But he was really, like the rest of us, the creature of use and habit. On the warning of Uncle Jimmy he took to the hills, as his wild clan was wont to take to the heather, with as little exercise of pure reason as ever duckling waddled to water withal.
Had Smith-Leonard's denunciation been but a day later, Kennedy would have been on his expiatory way Arizonaward. Now, he would not go. Fight and surrender were alike distasteful.
Where the sheer, red hills buttress the pedestal of Timber Mountain there is a small, shallow cave. The two friends had found it; Hiram had named it in his note as meeting place and despite of watching foes, twice in the ten days had contrived to keep risky tryst, bringing tidings, comfort, aid and abetment. The robbery charge was a "frame-up"; Leonard had a man drilled to a confession certain to convict; it would be better for Don to leave. Hiram had but barely seen Lena; she was drooping and pale. She and Breese had gone to Silver City and were soon expected to come back after Aunt Polly. The Professor and Dorothy, too, were to go before long to California. Dolly stoutly refused to credit the charge against Don; the Professor gave him the doubt's benefit. The Professor was not looking well himself. No more was Hiram. But he did not tell Don.
He brought a spyglass, cartridges, supplies, which latter Kennedy stored in the cave—now known as Kennedy's Kitchen—slipping down at night to get them as required; his crooked path followed the rockier spaces where Noche, his horse, left no sign. For himself, he kept the topmost ridges—the western slopes in the morning, the eastern by afternoon, avoiding only the skyline; watching his enemies thread the bewildered and intricate maze of tangled hills. Once Leonard passed along the hillside, a short rifle shot below, circling for "sign." But Kennedy's precautions had been thorough, and he was left undisturbed. There were shallow surface tanks which held water for a few days after a rain. When these failed he went by night to the great tanks in the deeps of Palomas Gap.
The sheriff had snooped around and ascertained that Uncle Jimmy, leaving Dundee the night Hiram served on the posse, had reached his hay camp at daylight the next morning—a record-breaking trip for four miles—with one mule saltily sweat-marked and played out, while the other was miraculously fresh. By unwarranted and illogical inference the sheriff had taken this as an affront to both himself personally and the law's majesty. Against Uncle Jimmy, who was his own man, he had no recourse. But Kim Ki publicly dispensed with the services of Jimmy, Junior—with a private hint to "wait till the clouds rolled by, Jimmy," after which atmospheric readjustment he might be put to work again.
If Otis lingered in Dundee it was by no means to wait until Lena returned for Aunt Polly. Not at all. There was rich trove of buried pottery and such trinkets to be had for the digging in Palomas Gap, immemorial camp ground of Indians by reason of the tanks. The Professor had really intended to take this matter up all summer.
So he hired Uncle Jimmy's team with young Jimmy for driver and cook, and, with Dolly, set out for Palomas Gap forthwith, taking grumbling old Quinlan along as digger-in-chief. That they planned to come back to Dundee the day before Lena from Silver City was merely a coincidence.
The Professor was not unaware of why Jimmy, Junior, was now unemployed. Loyal, illegal service to a rival, presumably favored, might have been scant recommendation to a narrower man; but that was precisely why Lathrop Ormsby Otis selected Jimmy. A good sort, the Professor.
The excavations had been highly successful. While Quinlan was working, the Professor and Dolly had explored the black depth of Palomas Gap. It is to Caballo Mountain what a particularly deep and wide axe-notch is to a log—if you imagine it done by a particularly inexpert axeman—a deep-gashed chasm, rended and splintered and riven through the mighty range. In the six miles from eastern base to western there was a fall of three thousand feet to the level of the Rio Grande. Since Noah's time, great boulders, caught by some chance irregularity of the cañon floor, spun topwise by swift floods, had worn a score of burnished basins, round, symmetrical and deep, in the solid rock, and had themselves been ground to powder. These deep basins are the Palomas Tanks.
Dolly and her father had seen them all, as far down as they could safely go—sunless depths, shadowed mossy clefts, carven cliff and dizzy precipice.
This was the day set for their return. But on the last night the two mules had made a bee-line for Dundee, hobbles and all, and Jimmy was after them afoot.
As the Professor had already rather a surplusage of broken pottery, there was no more digging to do. So old Pat taught gleeful Dolly to pitch horseshoes. At dinnertime Jimmy had not returned. So Pat Quinlan acted as chef. Later came a miner, known to both Otis and Quinlan as a man friendless and discarded. Dinner was set out again for him.
He was camped at the foot of the mountain on the other side, he said. Coming through the Gap on the North Trail he had followed up a bit of float and found a likely-looking vein. Would Otis and Pat go back with him and witness his location papers? It was not far. He pointed out the spot; half a mile west and half a mile up.
They agreed, nothing loth. Dolly elected to stay in camp. It was rather hot and she was tired; she would sleep in her tent. Quinlan took up his rifle. "And we might see a deer along toward sunset," he said.
The vein was duly located, with all its variations, dips, spurs and angles, as the "Concho." From the location point they paced off two hundred and fifty steps toward the crest, with liberal allowance for the broken and boulder-strewn ground. The cool, deep shadows were about them; the sun was behind the peak. Here they built the "west-end center" monument, and the miner climbed at a right angle up the hill for an estimated hundred yards to put up the northwest corner monument. The southwest corner was dispensed with.
Then they retraced their steps to the central location monument, and stepped off the appointed seven hundred and fifty feet down the rough hillside.
"Oi'll build the lower monument and be on me way to stir up supper—drat the b'y!" said Quinlan. So Otis and the prospector erected the monument at the northeastern corner, and then turned down toward camp.
"Your boy Jim must 'a' had to 'a' gone clean to town for his mules," said the prospector. "But he'll be back some time tonight. He's some of a boy."
"I hope so," said Otis. "I want"
Something struck him a fearful blow in the shoulder. He pitched forward—a crash of rifle shots, bullets droning by, splintering on rocks. Half stunned, Otis was on his feet, the miner helping him, running madly down the hill. "’Paches!"
A hideous fear gripped at the Professor's heart. Oh, Dolly! Dolly! A bullet nipped his leg, burning like red-hot iron. He fell again. Wild yells of fiendish triumph. The miner dragged him to the shelter of a ledge close at hand. He put his six-shooter in an interstice between two rocks, and fired swiftly.
"Are you hurt bad?" he asked.
"I don't know. I think not. Dolly! Dolly!" Otis was half conscious and failing.
The miner stood with his back to Otis, watching for a chance to fire.
"I'm hit too. No difference. We're gone geese anyhow. Peek-Boo!" He fired. "Look! They've left their horses while they crep' on us. See 'em, back on the divide1? Maybe I can stand 'em off till old Pat gets the girl. There! I think I hit one! If they get me take my gun and watch that open space. But they'll go down beyond the ridge, of course, as soon as they see the girl."
Crack! Crack! An Indian, unseen before, rose from behind a bush, shrieking horribly, pitched over on his face and lay still. Quinlan was behind a boulder not fifty yards below them. Otis struggled to his knees. He had a glimpse of Dolly.
The miner cursed viciously as he fired. "The damned fool! What does he stay to help us for? Why don't he get the girl? It must be he's cut off."
The answer came. There was a shot, Quinlan crumpled down, in a heap, then staggered to his knees, crawled around, rested his rifle over the little boulder, and took a long, slow aim at—Dorothy, four hundred yards away. A dozen Indians fired at him. Quinlan's rifle jerked—then it grew steady on the rock as he pulled the trigger. A whiff of dust lashed out beyond Dorothy. He had overshot. He slid over sidewise, sprawling down the hillside; his rifle fell clattering.
Releasing Otis, the miner sprang to his feet and thrust the pistol into his hands. "Shoot! I'll try and get to the rifle. What's that?"
He turned his blood-stained face. The firing all stopped. On the south side of the Gap, down the steep edge paralleling that on which they fought, a cloud of dust whirled thundering, incredibly swift, zigzagged, billowed aside to show the heart of it—a black horse and a man! Loose stones rolled crashing from it, fire flashed through it as iron slipped and shrieked on bare rock. It hurled fiercely downward over bush and slide, talus and stair and rocky steep; rode triumphant, irresistible, on the very wings of Death. "Kennedy! By God, he'll do it!" the miner bellowed. He broke from cover in a desperate dash for Quinlan's rifle. The Indians were shooting across the chasm at Kennedy; the miner was halfway to Quinlan's rock before any shot was fired at him. Otis crawled to the open and shot wildly. If they would but shoot at him! To gain time! To spare but one little moment to the miner that he might give Kennedy the extra seconds! A delirium of shouts, shots, bewildering echoes—a hideous, painted face showed before him—was blotted out. The miner had got to Quinlan's gun, and he was a marksman. One moment he crouched behind the rock. Kennedy was safely down the terrible slope, racing on for the wagon. But below, beyond the ridge, rifles were spitting fire. Could he run that gauntlet?
A Beserk fury was on the miner. Firing as he ran, he made for the comb of the ridge, straight toward his yelling foes. Bullets touched him but did not check him. Through a red mist an Indian rose in his path. He pulled trigger, but there was no report. The magazine was empty. The redskin fired, almost into his fact, but missed! The clubbed rifle swept him down. The miner wrenched the Apache's rifle from the clenched fingers and dropped to shelter. From where he was now the three Indians below were in plain view and easy range. If Kennedy could pass them! A storm of bullets raged around him. Once, twice, he fired. Two of them floundered in death flurry; the third wriggled from sight. Kennedy was almost to the girl.
From Behind His Back, Indians Bounded Down Toward Him,
Eager to Capture Him Alive
The miner rose and walked steadily down into the open. He was riddled; all his failing energies were concentrated on one steadfast purpose, one forlorn hope: one shot at that wriggling bronze body. A puff of smoke rose below. Kennedy had the girl in the saddle before him, shielded by his body. Another smoke puff! The miner planted his feet wide apart, a grim and terrible figure. From behind his back Indians rose from concealment and bounded down toward him, eager to capture him alive for torture. He brushed back the sweat and blood from his eyes; the prone brown body lay before the sights. He pulled the trigger; as the smoke blew aside, his dimming eyes looked again along the motionless barrel. The body was turned over, the arms outspread. The miner lowered the gun-muzzle, leaned heavily on the stock, swayed; the echoes dwindled to silence.
You want to know this man's name? I like to write his name. It is an honored name in Dundee, and men bear it proudly who are no kith or kin of his. If you would ask them why, in the space of a single eye-flight, no less than three several youths of five or six and twenty years or so have the same odd and cumbrous double name, the question will be evaded. But, when they come to know you well, it may be, some night when the friendly stars burn warm and low, and the soft wind ripples the bunch grass, and the fire glows faint through the banked ash, and all the songs are done—they may tell you how Adam Sleiter died.
IX
AHUNDRED terrible seconds before, Kennedy had spurred from behind his sheltering knoll on the mountain crest. One look across the Gap, the gleam of a white dress by the wagon; the line of least resistance led straight to death and shame. As he followed it, in that wild downward plunge, his mind, in some impregnable inner citadel, planned steadily, calm and cool. A flashing vision of chances, dangers, hopes; he settled on the one sure way as swift and straight as ever shot fell from tower.
He dragged the dazed girl up before him. As he passed the wagon he snatched a canteen that swung cooling from the brake. He turned southward, up the wide, smooth draw. He looked back. The Indians were mounting, streaming down the steep slope in furious pursuit. Dolly moaned in his arms: "Father! Father!"
Noche was strained and bruised in every tendon and joint; he was failing under the double weight. A bullet had plowed across Kennedy's cheek; otherwise he was unhurt. Had Noche fared as well, had the girl been able to find her way or to stand the terrible ride, he might now send her on alone and keep the pursuit off long enough; but it would not do. She could never find her way out of the hills—the horse would die. He took the right-hand prong; the Indians were gaining. He began with a lie.
"Listen, Dolly. There are two of them"—he had not seen Quinlan—"they are behind shelter, they may escape. We can do them no good. I can save you and, perhaps, save them. But you must do what I tell you—and it is no light thing. Here you must ride alone. He can't carry us both up this hill."
He leaped off and clung to the stirrup-leather as the gasping horse lunged bravely, jerkily, sobbing up the steep. The foremost Indians were still more than a rifle shot behind.
"I'll stop 'em a little while Noche gets his breath," said Kennedy. "Look! Noche's shot through his thigh! No wonder he's giving out."
They passed over the little divide. Kennedy drew his rifle from the scabbard, crept back and shot several times at long range. One of the horses fell at the fire. The Indians dared not follow up the bare hillside. They turned aside to right and left for a long détour. That would give them half an hour—enough. Kennedy's hand brushed the holster at his hip. His revolver was gone—lost in the desperate ride down the mountain. His face—caked with dirt and blood—grew a shade graver. This would complicate matters, hurry his purposed signaling.
"Ride along now, Dolly, and I'll tell you my plan. I've checked the Indians for a while. Before they get sight of us we'll be in the thick timber. They'll follow our trail, but they'll be slow and cautious. They'll never know when I may stop and waylay them."
They clambered up the hill. "There's a cave up there that Hiram knows about. I'll have to leave you there."
"Leave me? Oh, Don!" She was shaking with fear.
He lied again. "It is to save your father's life, Dolly. I could stay with you and fight them off. But I'm going up on the mountain to signal with a fire for help to come. If I don't your father will have no show." All of which was untrue. The plan was that the Apaches should follow him—leaving her scatheless. As for Otis, Don believed him dead.
She shuddered, but straightened up like the brave girl she was. "I'll do it—for Father. How will you signal?"
Don was breathless from the furious pace. "I can't talk here. We must hurry. Wait till we get in the trees, where the red devils can't see us and shoot at us."
Five minutes later they reached the friendly shelter. The Apaches were not in sight. Don slowed to a walk. Black Noche was foam-white, failing, but stumbled gallantly along as if he knew how much depended on him.
"It'll be dark before I leave you. I'll go on clear to the top of Timber Mountain. There I'll build a fire right on the crest, undouble my saddle blanket, hold it up before the fire, take it way, hold it up again; so they'll see the fire at Dundee in short dots or long dashes—just like the Morse code, only for the eye instead of the ear. It's an old dodge. Everybody knows it. I told you I used to be a telegrapher."
"Couldn't you do that here?"
"It will take a long time. They may not see it at first. After dark I'll gain on the Indians, and when I get to the top I'll be so far ahead that I'll have time enough. But Noche can never take you to the top. I'll lead him up as far as he can go and then leave him. That's one reason. There are two better ones. They can see a fire better if it is built on the skyline. Then they can see the signal at Palomas to the northwest, just as they do at Dundee on the northeast. If any one in Palomas or Vega Blanco can read Morse that gives your father a much better chance—and us too. It's only six or seven miles to Palomas, and eighteen to Dundee. Come, Dorothy—be brave! It's the only way."
"I will," she said. Her tears were falling fast. She dried them now. That appeal—for Father—nerved her for her terrible task as nothing else could have done.
"I won't go very near to the cave. It's hidden by a big juniper in front of it. A smooth rock ledge runs off from it, where you'll leave no tracks. I'll watch till you get safely there. Take the canteen. Oh, and you'll find canned stuff there, and a blanket. That's where I've made headquarters while I've been hiding out. I call it my kitchen. You'll be safe. I'll tear a piece from your dress, and leave little bits of it sticking on the brush as I go up. Give me one of your shoes, too. After I leave Noche I'll make a track with it once in a while. And—here's the place."
A shout reached them faintly from far below. He helped her off. Her body was quivering. He kissed her pale cheek.
"It's pretty tough for you, Dolly. Remember, it's for Daddy. One thing more—the most important of all." He handed her the rifle and lied again. "I've got my revolver—I'll be all right. They won't know but what I've still got the rifle. After I get an answer I'll try to come back to you. Keep awake. There's a bend in the cave. Stay in the back part. If Hiram comes he will call. If any one comes"—he faltered, he pressed her hands tight—"wait—wait—be sure! But if by any chance it should be the Apaches" He touched his heart. "Be sure; you understand?"
"Yes, Don. I'll—I'll not fail you. Just a minute." She clung to him. "There—I'll be brave now—for Daddy! Good-by!"
"I'm trusting you, Dolly—trusting you with a great deal more than my life. You have the hardest part. I'm proud of you." He tore a strip from her dress and took off the little shoe. "Straight along the rock behind that juniper. There—I'll not say good-by, but, as Aloys Priesser always says—Auf Wiedersehen! Good little Dolly, brave little girl! We'll make it yet—see if we don't! Go now."
She held up her lips silently. He watched the little figure to the juniper. Then he took Noche's bridle and went on his appointed upward way.
••••••
Pappy Sickles washed up after supper, paused at the tent door to bite off a generous portion of navy plug, dropped the flap behind him and went sauntering across the plaza toward the post-office. He stopped. On Timber Mountain a sudden light flared along the wind-blown sky; a high and leaping flame. "Some fool prospector set fire to a Curajo pole," sniffed Pappy. "Cur'us how some folks likes to climb." He walked on, but checked again. "Hey! What's that?"
It was a smaller, steadier light a little to one side of the first one. While he looked it disappeared—flamed again—went and came in purposed brief eclipse.
Pappy turned and took to his aged heels. He burst into the telegraph office.
"Daglish! Dalton Daglish! There's a message on Timber Mountain! Green grass—time for Injuns!"
The night operator looked out through the open window and saw the winking light above the roof of Armstrong's store. Dot dot, dot dot dot, dot dash, dash! He snatched up pad and pencil, slipped through the window, took the message down under the blood-red glare of the semaphore. Pappy followed through the corridor and stood beside him, to read, white-lipped:
—ast Dolly Otis hid in kitchen Apaches out Kennedy Apaches out Tell Hiram Yoast Dolly Otis hidden in my cave—
Pappy filled his lungs and bellowed across the startled dark. "Ho-o-o! Hiram Yoast!" The agent stuck his head through a second-story window. "Got a gun?" yelled Pappy. "Then shoot, damn ye, shoot! 'Paches in the Gap!"
Shots, shouts, lights streaming into the night from opened doors, running feet.
"Hiram Yoast!" High voices took up the relayed call and shrilled it across the town. "Hiram Yoast! Hiram Yoast!"
Pappy pointed. They saw the twinkling light. Daglish scrawled over the paper. The sweat dropped from his brow. A loose sheet fluttered to Lewis as he tore it off. Lewis held it to the light. A roar went up: "Here he is, here's Yoast!" Hiram Yoast and Kaylor pushed through the circle. "Read it, you numskull, read it out loud!" screamed Pappy.
Hiram Yoast Apaches out Dolly Otis hidden in our cave Otis killed in Palomas Gap Don Kennedy ten to twenty braves Hiram Yoast Apaches out—
Daglish was left alone. Men were running in every direction; to the stables, to their tents for guns. "Build a fire, some of you damned fools, out to one side. Boxes, barrels, whisky, coal-oil!" That was Polk Armstrong at the store door.
The slow, steady message came from the hill:
Dolly Otis in my hide-out Otis killed in gap Answer Indians close Kennedy Hiram Yoast Apaches Dolly hid in cave Don Kenn—
The beacon twinkled no more. For a little space it burned clear, then sank dimly to darkness.
The swiftest, readiest thundered on ahead—Lewis, Yoast, Kaylor, Teagardner, Horsethief Fisher, Smith-Leonard, Springtime Morgan, Pappy. Far behind came others. In Dundee the slower or less fortunate were yet arming, saddling; strangers' horses, stage horses, all that were in Dundee stables; saddles levied from the store, saddles from tentmen whose horses were hobbled out. And in every direction from town went men afoot, to drive in the hobbled and picketed and loose horses—saddle horses, freight horses, mules—to follow later.
"Here, fellows, this won't do!" It was the gray veteran Teagardner who took the lead of the others, as they breasted the slope of Three-Mile Hill. "We're doing up our horses. Slow down. We save time in the long run. We got to take it on a trot. Hiram—in case you get wiped out—tell us, so there can't be no mistake, where the girl's cave is." So Hiram told them.
"All right—we can't miss that. Pres, you and Pappy fall back, and check them fellows up. Killin' their horses won't get 'em there. We'll push on for the girl first. After we get her we'll see what we can do for Don. Pres, you pick out ten or twelve of the best-mounted and come after us. Pappy, your horse is better'n Pres's. Change with him. Then you take the rest of the men and go to the Gap. Put the best trackers out at daylight, lookin' for sign. When you get it follow it to hell. If you find Otis and Pat and Jimmy dead, leave 'em and go after the 'Paches."
"Jimmy ain't there," said Pappy. "His mules run away and come to town. He started back just before sundown. We'll catch him. He'll see the fire and stop. No, he won't. He'll see the fire and hurry on like hell beatin' tanbark."
"Well, if you find him, leave him and the mules and three or four men in the Gap. We'll bring the girl and—the others—in the wagon."
"All right." Pappy reined up. "Here's your horse, Pres."
The van pushed on at a long, swinging trot, leaning forward, standing in the stirrups.
"Hiram, you jest happened to know where this cave is, I s'pose?" said Kaylor.
"Happened, yes. He's my pardner."
Smith-Leonard touched the sheriff's elbow. They fell back into the dust. Behind them, in the trail, bits of torn paper eddied and spun in the soft nightwind.
X
OTIS felt water splashed on his face, trickling down his throat. He gulped it greedily and opened his eyes. A savage face bent over him, swarthy, repulsive, hateful. In the clear starlight he could see the smeared paint, the dirty headcloth bound turbanwise above the beady black eyes. Dim shapes were busy in the gloom behind.
His last conscious thought had been of Sleiter falling slowly, slowly; of Kennedy and Dolly flashing through the broad bar of sunlight before the Gap to the black shadow beyond. It came to him now with a thrill of pride and triumph and grateful joy—Don would save her. A terrible racking pain throbbed and beat through his shoulder, but he made no outcry. His head whirled dizzily. He concentrated all his thought on that one picture: Sleiter's bending knees, his red beard about the propping gunstock; far below, in a golden haze, the black horse and his burden laboring across the glory and glow of sunset.
Another Indian came. They threw him roughly into the saddle. The pain was unendurable; he gave a stifled shriek. They bound his feet under the horse's belly and led him away. Every step was agony worse than death. His hands were free. He clutched desperately at the high, sharp saddle-horn. The gripping muscles helped him, but the groans came. He was very weak. His clothes clung to his flesh, soaking in blood. They went down the hill, by the wagon, crossed the head of the Gap and climbed back up the mountain from which Kennedy had come. The pain cleared his senses, his eyes grew wonted to the night. There were shadowy, silent riders before—five, six, seven. Thorns dug at his legs, branches whipped his face, clutched at his shattered shoulder; the bitterness of death was on him. He set his mind stubbornly on the one thought: Dolly was safe; once for all he abandoned hope for himself. He thought of Lena; and then for a long, long time he set his teeth and groaned no more.
They crossed to the west side and crawled southward along a rocky ledge near the top. They crept along a hogback, hugged close under the crest of Timber Mountain—on, ever on, to the south. A merciful lethargy of weakness came to him. He drooped over, the elbow of his good arm clinging to the high-pointed horn; his hair was in the horse's mane.
Centuries afterward the journey came to an end. He roused himself and looked about numbly. They were in a craterlike sink on the mountainside. He could not see the peak, the plains, the westward rim or the mountain ranges beyond. A clump of dwarfed and stunted trees grew in the hollow, a narrow circle of jagged and crumbling rock shut out all the world beside. So, he thought, this was the end of radiant life. To this undreamed-of narrow valley his feet had tended since childhood—to Gethsemane.
There were but two of the Indians with him now; the others had fallen out on the way, unseen by Otis. They dragged him off and bundled him down by a lightning-blasted tree; they wrenched his arms around the stump behind his back and tied him fast. Then they left him.
The thirst which had tormented him from the beginning tortured him now. His wounds, aggravated as they were by the rough journey, were nothing to this; but it was the wounds that made the thirst so terrible. His tongue and lips had already begun to swell. There was not even a cooling dew.
No weakling, this! Waiting, he braced his soul firmly to meet the end. The stars burned warm and near in the violet-black sky. He watched them, waiting. Then he closed his eyes. Faces, thronging, vivid, real—Dolly, her dead mother, smiling, tender; Lena's face, rosy-flushing; Hiram's, bright, wide-eyed; Don's, resolute and high and strong. Again that flashing vision, the Titan Sleiter tottering to his fall, the black horse racing forever across the blazing sunset.
He could not see the stars—warm tears were in his eyes. Not of sorrow—of love and pride.
The far-off, measured beat of soft footsteps; they came nearer to him—the trampling of many feet. The moon rose radiant over the crater's low rim; the rocky circle became a shore, bordered on a pool of dancing, rippling light; the soft air was sweet and pure and cool.
The trampling feet came into the circle behind him. Forms monstrous, barbarous, fantastic, silent, flitted from the shad owed barrier into the silver fire. There was a horse with a shapeless burden; they cast off ropes and threw a bundle at his feet. A man, fast bound; his head touched Otis' foot, his face was in the dust, his sunny hair dabbled and dank with blood. He rolled over silently.
"God! Dolly?"
"Safe!" said Kennedy. "Safe!" The man was beautiful; the glory of strength and courage and manhood glowed through flesh and stain.
"Thank God! Where?" exclaimed Otis.
"I dare not tell you. One of these devils speaks English," he whispered. "But I've sent word, smoke-talk. Hiram'll get her."
The Indians were bunched together, talking in deep, low gutturals. "Now they're making medicine. Bad medicine for you and me, Professor."
"Are you wounded?" said Otis.
"No such luck. Just this scratch on my face. But I see you are. Is it bad?"
"I'm dying of thirst. How could they get you this way?"
"Unwounded, you mean? I left Dolly my gun. I had mighty little time to telegraph. Slow work. But they got it. I saw a big blaze at Dundee just as the Indians picked me. How bad are you hurt?"
Otis told him. "Good for you!" said Don grimly "You won't last so long."
"They'll—torture us, then?"
"Sure thing. Who was the shooting-man with you? He seemed to understand his business. Dead?"
"Sleiter … Dead."
At this Don lay silent a little. Then he raised his head out of the dust. His eyes were bright in the moonlight. "A real nice little old world, isn't it, Professor?" he said slowly and gently. "'And God saw … and behold it was very good."
Otis did not answer, grasping slowly the measure of the man. The Indians came back. They rolled Kennedy on his back; they lashed him, in the form of a cross, between four trees, slipping a loop on wrist and ankle, straining the ropes tight. Then they melted silently away, all but one. This one was evidently the leader. He gave directions to the others. Then he came back and looked silently from Kennedy to Otis. A brutal bulk of body; cruel, watchful eyes; a broad face, debased, fiendish, leering; from its blunted outlines, the moonlight tinge of the copper skin, there might be a drop of white blood in his veins. The footsteps died away.
"This is going to be a bad business. I wish it were over," said Don. Already, beyond the bruising ropes, the flesh was beginning to swell and blacken.
The breed spoke—broken Spanish and English, but intelligible. "Tengo hambre. I eat now. You mek veesit wit' friend. Poco tiempo you tell me where hide mujer, eh?" He kicked Kennedy in the ribs and turned away.
"I'm afraid you're letting yourself in for a disappointment, old man," gasped Kennedy when he could get his breath. "Too bad. But it isn't done, you know."
The Indian looked over his shoulder. "You tell purty soon. You mek fire-talk for men, eh? But my man mek big trail. White man tek follow. You tell me soon."
He made a very small fire. From his saddle he brought a canteen and a chunk of dirty beef, which last he threw on the fire.
Otis spoke. His head drooped forward on his breast.
"You believe that—now?"
"Believe? What? Oh, I see. God saw the world and the rest of it? And 'I shall not wholly die'—or annihilation?" Kennedy laughed; the gorging Indian raised his eyes and stared. "The ruling passion! Oh, Professor, you're a keen one for arguing. … I believe. It probably don't mean to me at all what it does to you. Names, you know. … as Lena said. … But God? I believe in a loving and merciful God. I know. I can't give logic for it, but I know—now more than ever. Now more than ever. I thank Him for His gifts—for strength, for courage, for the knowledge that— I shall not tell! … And, perhaps … I shall not wholly die. … Perhaps. Quien sabe?"
"I Thank Him for the Knowledge That—I Shall Not Tell! . . . I Shall Not Wholly Die . . . Perhaps"
After a little he spoke again. "There's one more thing, Professor. It's not important at all, but—I wasn't in the train robbery. They were hungry. I harbored them. I didn't know. If I had known I would probably—possibly, anyhow—have taken them in just the same."
"Does it matter?" said Otis.
"Not a bit. I just wanted you to know."
The Apache rose, took the iron cleaning rod from the butt of his rifle, then screwed it together, laid it in the coals. He took out his sheath-knife and hacked from a maguey plant a dozen of its keen, stiff, brown spikes. He put his foot on Kennedy's neck, ripped at the flannel shirt, laid bare the gleaming white chest, the strained arms. "Digame, pues—where you put that girl?"
The stars wheeled on their calm cycles. The moon saw things. She peered in distant windows, where sleeping youth dreamed of high achievement and smiled; where age, smiling, dreamed of youth. In far cities where lights, white-gleaming, splendid, revel and laugh and song; and sweet eyes sparkled where happy lovers danced together; so swift the hours! But on this bleak hillside—to this poor wrung wretch—
It was harder, far harder, for Otis, watching, mumbling with thick lips a prayer that God in His mercy might send swiftly the Angel of Release, than for Kennedy, bound, bleeding, crucified, quivering. The tortured flesh shrank and flinched—not the masterless spirit.
Now the moon was high, the east was streaked with red. The tortured man grew weaker. A froth of white and red bubbled on his swollen lips. The eyes stared glassily There was a change; delirium. Sometimes he raved and muttered, sometimes the bleeding lips moved, but no words came.
Hal will know. Hal can do anything. He threw Ben Rice. He broke Judge Morgan's colt—Judge Boiling. … This was the battlefield—men have died here.
He saw the long, misty ridges of North Carolina's hills; southward, the dim outline of Cæsar's Head beyond the border. Hark, listen! Was that the gate-latch—Alice! slender, radiant, shy and gay. Her beauty glowed through the dusk. She was in black, there was scarlet at her throat, scarlet her lips, purple-black her hair. She saw him; she came faster, her eyes alight … came through the bending lilies all arow. …
O sister Phoebe, how merry were we,
The night we sat under the juniper tree!—
The juniper tree, heigho!
He was riding the Staked Plains. That patch of white, that is three hundred miles away, the White Mountain beyond the Pecos. …
High over turmoil, dust and din
The clarion call of Honor rings. …
"Hiram Yoast will know. In the kitchen."
"Kennedy! Kennedy! For God's sake!—Kennedy! Don!"
Perhaps it was the summons, perhaps the Indian's fierce intent face as he bent to hear, that brought him back. Not to the agony of his poor, maimed body—to a sharper pang. Dead, that girl sweetheart, asleep on an Alabama hillside all these years—these wasted years. … Lena—Argive Helen! Ah!—In the thin light of dawn he saw the livid face before him, the cracked and bleeding lips, the imploring eyes—Otis! The girl? Had he babbled—had he told anything? The Indian's relentless eyes blazed into his. Had he told? No. The Indian had been still listening. Then—he never would. His head lolled over helplessly.
"Don't! No! No!—Don't burn me any more! I can't stand it. I can't! The girl" His voice was a husky whisper. His jaws fell hideously apart; the black tongue lay against the teeth. "The girl … in the cañon"
Otis strained forward, cursed him, with swollen and blackened lips—traitor, Judas, liar, coward!
"—hid where" The weak words died away.
The Indian bent closer—too close! The ghastly head jerked upward; Kennedy's teeth crunched in the brown throat, crushed gullet and windpipe together, held fast. The great muscles knotted and slid and heaved under the copper skin, the hands struck and wrenched and tore, the great body thrashed and floundered, twisted and leaped and writhed in horrible convulsion of death agony; the terrible steel-trap at his throat was unbroken, unshaken, crushing out his life. The Indian's hand groped at his belt. A glint of steel, his gun jerked spasmodically, he pulled trigger and fired—into the ground. One last shudder and the two lay still, dead clay on unconscious clay. But the red man's arms were smooth and round, his fingers outspread, relaxed; Kennedy's hands were clenched; on his strained arms the sinews stood out like cords, the bunched muscles knotted to rigid iron, his jaw frozen and set in its awful task.
••••••
They had found Dolly before midnight. Leaving her safeguarded, they scattered far and wide for Don. So, in the warm white dawn Hiram Yoast and Teagardner heard the far-off shot that marked the red-skin's dying effort. They burst over the circling barrier, black against a red flame of sun, flashed down the greening slope. Otis was huddled against his tree in a wailing heap. Under the dead Indian Kennedy kept his unyielding grip—senseless, blackened, mutilated, gashed and hacked and burned; but living, and likely to live.
XI
LENA and Breese were in the K.C.X., which, being interpreted, is the Kansas City Express, eastbound flyer from the Mexicos. Rincon is a junction town. The K.C.X. and the Highline Accommodation from Silver City made connections here, incidentally taking dinner during baggage transfer. Dundee was the next stop—forty miles.
A "pusher" helped them climb up the mesa to Grama. Then the K.C.X. gathered speed for the straightaway across a yellow world. Breese was deep in his paper. Lena looked drearily out at the great desert. Against that vastness they seemed to crawl, a futile toy, a matchbox train.
As they broke through the gateways of the benches above Upham, down to the broad white valley of Aleman, Lena saw, along the side of the outpost hills to westward, black, antlike specks which she knew to be horsemen. A round-up, she thought. Again, at Six-Mile Lake, she saw a wagon and a line of horsemen creeping toward Dundee along the leftward road from Mescal. She hardly noted these things. A dream was swiftly drawing to its close; she must dream fast.
"You run over alone, Lena," said Breese, as the whistle blew Dundee. "I've got to send a wire."
To Lena's surprise, the customary crowd was missing from the platform. She spoke to the agent about it.
"Beautiful day, isn't it? But where's everybody?"
The agent mumbled something unintelligible, snatched up a package from the truck and disappeared in the express-room.
"How very rude!" observed Miss Mallory, somewhat indignant. Crossing the plaza she noted the deserted and silent streets. No smoke came from the bachelor tents. A lone rider was coming swiftly down Three-Mile Hill. That was the only sign of life in sight.
She stopped at the post-office. A woman and two Mexican freighters were trading at the back part of the store. Deputy Rowe pushed her mail through the grating without raising his eyelids. "Good-day. Back again?" he said, and went into instant and total eclipse behind a broad, unfolded paper. Miss Mallory stared at him quite vindictively.
"I declare," she said aloud as she went down the steps, "the town is bewitched. The Sleeping Beauty" She stopped short, with a twinge at the thought of the Prince and the cruel hedge of thorns. The horseman was at the foot of the slope. Two others were just visible now, topping the rise beyond. "Thank goodness, some one's coming anyway."
Milly, the pretty waitress, met her at the door. She looked rather flushed and disheveled, Milly; her eyes were suspiciously red. "Please, Miss Mallory, Mrs. Breese says she isn't well and not to wake her up." She rattled it off glibly, turned and went along the hall without waiting for a reply.
"Well!" said Lena. "But where's the Professor and Dolly?"
"Gone to the mountains." Milly flung it over her shoulder, slipped through the door and almost slammed it behind her.
Miss Mallory's brown eyes widened to their fullest extent at this, the third repetition of this cavalier reception. Beyond the door Milly was in tears. But how was Lena to know that? "Minx!" she snapped. She had been irritable of late. She stamped her little foot. "Has every one suddenly gone mad?" she demanded of the empty hall. Receiving no answer, she went to her room in a pet, changed her dress, and gave herself up to the fascination of mail-reading.
So much engrossed was she that she failed to note the noises about her. Not till she laid the last letter down was she conscious of a broken murmur of voices without, of others nearer. Surely that was Aunt Polly she heard.
She stepped into the hallway. Through the hall door she had seen a glimpse of a drooping black head she knew. That was Hiram Yoast's horse. She opened her aunt's door. Guardy Breese, Aunt Polly and Hiram stood at the window.
"—bringing Sleiter and Quinlan behind. The best half of them are hot on the trail." That was Hiram.
"You tell her, Mother," said Breese. Their backs were to her; they neither saw nor heard her.
"Aunt Polly," she began. Hiram whirled around. His eye was very bright, his face was haggard and drawn. Lena's hand went to her throat. "Hiram!" The swift color surged to the hair-roots—then faded and left her marble-white. The other hand stole behind to clutch at the door-frame. "What is it?—Don! … So that is why Dundee is empty; a whole town against one hunted man! Oh, they are brave men—brave! And you"—she flung out her hand—"I thought you were his friend."
Hiram's lips opened uneasily, closed again; his eyelids lowered.
"But, Lena, Hiram has" So far Aunt Polly got; her face was beaming and bright. Breese put his finger on her mouth. "Lena—my dear—they are bringing him in." His eyes were on the rug at his feet.
"Oh!" Aunt Polly's smile cut her to the heart. "Oh, Aunt Polly, how can you? He was always so good to you." She stepped into the room; she turned upon Hiram, her eyes scorned him. "Why are you not with him? Not one friend at his side, not one true! If you were in his place he would not fail."
Through the window she saw hurrying shapes streaming across the plaza. A wild cheer rose and rose again; a roar that swelled and beat horribly upon her ears.
They followed. She swept along the hall, through the parlor, through the open door to the veranda. The wagon, the dismounted, silent riders beyond, the jaded horses; the Professor, white, smiling, propped in the wagon-seat by Kim Ki and young Jimmy—a litter—Dolly walked beside it—Don!—Breese caught her hand, his voice was in her ear, his eyes were frankly wet. With a choking sob her arms went out. That, Kennedy, lithe, strong Kennedy—that quiet shape, bandaged and white and still? Every head was bare, every eye was turned to him in exaltation, in welcome and high honor and pride and love. Across the little space she saw his eyes, and their light was all for her.
Men and women fell back and left them alone. There were those who leaned out to touch the litter, the bandaged hand. They bore him slowly along that silent lane and laid him at her feet.
THE END
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