Claim Number One Part 25

"So I concluded," he said, "that if the land described by their numbers was valuable to them it would be valuable to me. That my guess was good, I had proof when I filed. The chap who was piloting Peterson up to the window, and who I suspect was the 'Jerry' of the message, wanted to know where I got the figures. He wasn't a bit nice about it, either."

A swift pallor overspread Agnes Horton's face; a look of fright stood in her eyes.

"Was he a tall man, dark, with heavy eyebrows?" she inquired, waiting his answer with parted lips.

"That fits him," said he. "Do you know him?"

"It's Jerry Boyle, the Governor's son. He is Walker's friend; Walker brought him to camp the day after you disappeared. He had an invitation for Mrs. Reed and her party from his mother--you know they had been expecting it. And he said--he said----"

"He said----"

"That is, he told Walker that he saw you--_drunk_ at two o'clock that morning."

"Hum-m," rumbled the doctor, running his hands through his hair. "Hum-m!

I thought I knew that voice!"

He got to his feet in his agitation. Agnes rose quickly, placing her hand on his arm.

"Was he the other man?" she asked.

"Well, it's a serious charge to lay against the Governor's son," he replied, "but I'm afraid he was the other man."

There was such a look of consternation in her face that he sought to calm her.

"He's not likely to go any further with it, though," Slavens added.

"Oh, you don't know him. You don't know him!" Agnes protested earnestly.

He searched her face with a quick glance.

"Do you?" he asked, calmly.

"There is something bad in his face--something hiding, it seems to me,"

she said, without show of conscious evasion.

"I'll call him, no matter what move he makes," Slavens declared, looking speculatively across the gorge. "Look how high the sun is up the wall over yonder. I think we'd better be going back."

"Oh, I've kept you too long," she cried in self-reproach. "And to think you were in the saddle all night."

"Yes; I lost the trail and rode a good many miles out of the way," said he. "But for that I'd have been on hand an hour sooner."

"Well, you were in time, anyway."

"And I've drawn blindly," he laughed. "I've got a piece of land marked 'Grazing,' on the chart. It may be worth a fortune, and it may be worth twenty cents an acre. But I'm going to see it through. When are you going to file?"

"My number comes on the fifth day, but lapses may bring me in line tomorrow," she answered. "Smith, the stage-driver, knows of a piece adjoining the one he has selected for himself, if n.o.body 'beats him to it,' as he says. He has given me the numbers, and I'm going to take his word for it. About half of it can be irrigated, and it fronts on the river. The rest is on the hills."

"I hope you may get it. Smith ought to know what's good in this country and what isn't. When you have it you'll lead on the water and plant the rose?"

"And plant the rose," she repeated softly.

"Don't you think," he asked, taking her hand tenderly as she walked by his side, "that you'd better let me do the rough work for you now?"

"You are too generous, and too trusting in one unknown," she faltered.

The beat of hoofs around the sharp turn in the road where it led out into the valley in which Meander lay, fell sharp and sudden on their ears. There the way was close-hemmed with great boulders, among which it turned and wound, and they scarcely had time to find a standing-place between two riven shoulders of stone when the horseman swept around the turn at a gallop.

He rode crouching in his saddle as if to reach forward and seize some fleeing object of pursuit, holding his animal in such slack control that he surely must have ridden them down if they had not given him the entire way. His hat was blown back from his dark face, which bore a scowl, and his lips were moving as if he muttered as he rode. Abreast of the pair he saw them where they stood, and touched his hat in salute.

In the dust that he left behind they resumed their way. Dr. Slavens had drawn Agnes Horton's hand through his arm; he felt that it was cold and trembling. He looked at her, perplexity in his kind eyes.

"That's the man who stood with Peterson at the head of the line," he said.

"Yes; Jerry Boyle," she whispered, looking behind her fearfully.

"Let's hurry on! I'm afraid," she added with the ineffectiveness of dissimulation, "that I've kept you from your sleep too long. Together with your awful experience and that long ride, you must be shattered for the want of rest."

"Yet I could stand up under a good deal more," he rejoined, his thoughts trailing Jerry Boyle up the shadowy gorge. "But I was asking you, before that fellow broke in----"

She raised her hand appealingly.

"Don't, please. Please--not now!"

CHAPTER XIII

SENTIMENT AND NAILS

Vast changes had come over the face of that land in a few days. Every quarter-section within reach of water for domestic uses had its tent or its dugout in the hillside or its hastily built cabin of planks. Where miles of unpeopled desert had stretched lonely and gray a week before, the smoke of three thousand fires rose up each morning now, proclaiming a new domain in the kingdom of husbandry.

On the different levels of that rugged country, men and women had planted their tent-poles and their hopes. Unacquainted with its rigors, they were unappalled by the hards.h.i.+ps, which lay ahead of them, dimly understood. For that early autumn weather was benignant, and the sun was mellow on the hills.

Speculation had not turned out as profitable as those who had come to practice it had expected. Outside of the anxiety of Jerry Boyle and others to get possession of the apparently worthless piece of land upon which Dr. Slavens had filed, there were no offers for the relinquishment of homesteads. That being the case, a great many holders of low numbers failed to file. They wanted, not homes, but something without much endeavor, with little investment and no sweat. So they had pa.s.sed on to prey upon the thrifty somewhere else, leaving the land to those whose hearts were hungry for it because it _was_ land, with the wide horizon of freedom around it, and a place to make home.

And these turned themselves to bravely leveling with road-sc.r.a.pers and teams the hummocks where the sagebrush grew, bringing in surveyors to strike the level for them in the river-sh.o.r.e, plotting ditches to carry the water to their fields. Many of them would falter before the fight was done; many would lose heart in the face of such great odds before the green blessing of alfalfa should rise out of the sullen ground.

Many a widow was there, whose heart was buried in a grave back East, and many a gray man, making his first independent start. Always the West has held up its promise of freedom to men, and the hope of it has led them farther than the hope of gold.

About midway between Meander and Comanche, Agnes Horton was located on the land which Smith had selected for her. Smith had retired from driving the stage and had established a sort of commercial center on his homestead, where he had a store for supplying the settlers' needs. He also had gone into the business of contracting to clear lands of sagebrush and level them for irrigation, having had a large experience in that work in other parts of the state.

Agnes had pitched her tent on the river-bank, in a pleasant spot where there was plenty of grazing for her horse. Just across her line, and only a few hundred yards up-stream, a family was encamped, putting up a permanent home, making a reckless inroad among the cottonwoods which grew along the river on their land. Across the stream, which was fordable there, a young man and his younger wife, with the saddle-marks of the city on them, had their white nest. Agnes could hear the bride singing early in the morning, when the sun came up and poured its melted gold over that hopeful scene, with never a cloud before its face.

Twenty miles farther along, toward Comanche, Dr. Slavens had pitched his tent among the rocks on the high, barren piece of land which he had selected blindly, guided by Hun Shanklin's figures. He was not a little surprised, and at the same time cheered and encouraged, to find, when he came to locating it, that it was the spot where they had seen Shanklin and another horseman on the afternoon of their stage excursion, when the two had been taken by Smith as men of evil intent, and the doctor had been called to the box to handle the lines.

His neighbors in the rich valley below him regarded him with doubt of his balance, and that was a current suspicion up and down the river among those who did not know the story. But the politicians in Meander, and those who were on hand before the filing began, who knew how Jerry Boyle had nursed Axel Peterson, and how he had dropped the Scandinavian when the stranger rode up unexpectedly and filed on Number One, believed that the doctor had held inside information, and that his claim was worth millions.

But if the quarter-section contained anything of value, there was no evidence of it that Dr. Slavens could find. It was about the crudest and most unfinished piece of earth that he ever had seen outside the Buckhorn Canon. It looked as if the materials for making something on a tremendous pattern had been a.s.sembled there, thrown down promiscuously, and abandoned.