The Freebooters of the Wilderness Part 10

"Then, take it," she said.

He bent over her lips in an exquisite torture that could neither give nor take enough till she struggled to free herself, when he crushed her the closer, and kissed the closed eyes and the forehead and the hair and the pulsing throat. Then he opened his arms.

She sank on the morris chair and hid her face in her hands. They neither of them spoke nor heard very much but the pounding of their own hearts. Wayland gazed out in the dark at the s.h.i.+ny flood-tides of the river. She had not meant--she had meant always to be free; she had not meant to mingle her life currents in the destiny of others.

The door opened suddenly. It was old Calamity, red-shawled and stooping.

"Missa Vellam say not for vait no longer, Mademoiselle! She aw' right.

She say t'ank you now for to go home!"

Eleanor rose with a shuddering sigh

"Come then, Calamity," she said.

Wayland walked with her to the ranch house, the old half-breed woman pattering behind. The gray dawn-light lay on the river mistily. At the gate, she turned.

"Has Mr. Matthews come back yet, Calamity?"

Calamity gave a vigorous shake of her head.

"I am going up to the Rim Rocks at once to see what's become of him.

Go on in, Calamity; I want to speak to Miss MacDonald! Forgive me," he pleaded. "I had no right. I have no right to anything till I have cleaned up this d.a.m.nable h.e.l.l-work. I must not leave duty till I have fought this thing out; and I must not drag you in; but I wanted--" he paused; "I couldn't help it."

She trembled, but she took refuge in neither the subterfuge nor the pretence of the Eastern woman.

"It was yours," she said.

Wayland's eyes flashed their grat.i.tude. "It's so G.o.d-blessed beautiful, Eleanor; it's so wonderfully beautiful I mustn't spoil it with my man hands! I couldn't believe it true without the memory you've given me; but you must keep me in line! Now that I have that memory in my heart I'll drink it, and hike for the firing line! My place isn't here; you must never let me break my resolution again."

"I never will," interrupted Eleanor.

"We've got to fight this thing to the last ditch! If the innocent may be done to death by our law makers; if murder can be planned and carried out unpunished; there's an end to our democracy! Last year it was a little school teacher strangled down in the Desert; n.o.body punished, because that would have interfered with a voting gang on election day. This year, it's Fordie. _If these crimes had been committed under a monarchy, the people would have tanned the hide of the king into boot leather_! Last year it was the little school teacher. This year it's Fordie. Tomorrow, it may be any man, woman or child in the Valley. If they'd keep their crimes among their own kind, there would be some excuse for this let-alone policy; but when freedom to do what a man likes means freedom to push crime into your life and mine, freedom to deprive others of freedom, it's time the Nation jumped on somebody! We've got to fight this d.a.m.nable thing to the last ditch, Eleanor!"

"Good luck and G.o.d speed," she said without looking up; and she turned without once looking back, and walked up the slab steps of the rustic entrance to the ranch house.

CHAPTER IX

RIGHT INTO MIGHT

Don't wait for Mr. Matthews and me. We are setting out on the Long Trail. It is the Long Trail this Nation will have to travel before Democracy arrives. It is the Trail of the Man behind the Thing; and we'll not quit till we get him. You remember what our old visitor said about "splitting the air to get somewhere." We are going to quit "sawing the air" and "split it to get somewhere." We are going to set out after the Man; the little codger first, as a foot print on the Long Trail to the lair of the Man Higher Up.

You cannot stab a lot of things to life as you did last night and the night before, and then expect them to lie quiet and be the same. You have sent me forth on the Long Trail, Eleanor; and I shall hunt the better because you have stabbed me alive and will never let me go to sleep again. I thank you; and yet, I can't thank you, mine _Alder Liefest_--look up and see what that means in old Saxon--Yours in Life and Death and Always and Out Beyond.

d.i.c.k.

I have ordered a wreath from Smelter City for Fordie. Find it hard to stop writing and go from you; but the darned old Mountain doesn't look the same; it's all draped out in such "dam-phool 'appiness" that I am glad in the shadow of Death.

d.i.c.k. (2nd)

Don't forget every day dawn and sunset, I come to renew the Seal. Ever study Algebra in college? Then look up what this means.

d.i.c.k. (nth)

And because she had graduated from girl to woman between sunset and daydawn of that Death Watch, she kissed the last signature, right in the midst of the German cook's dishes, set all higgeldy-piggeldy on the oilcloth top instead of the linen cover, owing to the distraction of the night's tragedy. It was his first love letter; and because it was his first, he did not know it was a love letter. He had written it on the pages of a field note book. On the reverse side, were figures of triangulations and scaled timbers, which Eleanor fingered lovingly because the dumb signs seemed to connect her life with his before--before what? Ask those who know!

The note was lying at her breakfast place when she came out from a sleepless night, a night that seemed to pa.s.s swinging between the gates of Life and the gates of Death, with phantoms on the trail between, of Love so terrible its glory blinded her, of Crime so dark its shadow obscured her faith in G.o.d. For hours, she had lain quivering to the consciousness of that moment when Life leaped up to meet and blend with Life in Love. For hours, she had lain quivering to the consciousness of Crime stalking satyr-faced amid the shadows of Life, Greed and Murder and l.u.s.t, hiding beneath suave words, behind conventionality, draped in all the broad phalacteries of law, ready to leap fanged at the throat of Innocence in a Land of Let-Alone; and she emerged from the conflict of these two forces no longer what would be called a Christian, no longer a Quiescent, no longer a Let Alone. She emerged knowing that Democracy must become a joke, and Christianity the laughing stock of the ages, unless Right could be made over into Might.

Then, she found the Ranger's note at her late breakfast--it was a shockingly late breakfast, it was after the noon hour--the note saying that he had set out on the Long Trail that the Nation must travel, the trail of the Man behind the Thing, the Man Higher Up. It was as it had been from the first with him, the meeting half-way of their thoughts from different beginnings; and she kissed the signature with a gesture that played havoc with the breakfast dishes and sent Calamity snivelling and muttering from the kitchen. The ignorant half-breed's knowledge of life among the miners of the Black Hills and the s.h.i.+ngle men of the Bitter Boot saw-mills didn't admit explanations of love that kissed signatures and impelled tears.

And yet while revolution convulsed two souls you could have gone from end to end of the Valley that week or to every cabin on the Homestead Claim of the Ridge and not heard a living soul speak one word of the tragedy on the Rim Rocks. Were they moral cowards? I don't think so.

Wasn't it more of that spirit of Let Alone? If you had mentioned the terrible episode to a casual settler, he would have given you a blank look and remarked "that he hadn't heard."

The story set down here, I could not myself have learned if a chance ramble over the foot hills of the Rim Rocks had not led one day to a solitary little grave, surrounded by a picket fence marked by the figure of a kneeling child carved in rough sand stone. As the guest of the Mission School, I made the mistake of asking the mother, herself, whose grave that was. Women, who are neither politicians nor politic, have a plain way of uttering harsh facts. She did not speak about the author of her boy's death in soft words, that little white haired mother. She used a term oftener heard in the purlieus of criminal courts. "To think," she exclaimed bitterly, "to think that Fordie, descended from generations of Williams who have pioneered and fought for and built up this country since ever the first Williams landed in Boston in 1666, was done to death by this murderer, this truckster, this political trickster, this outcast from the European gutters, this huckster of lazaretto morals and bawd houses, who is overturning our Nation with his oiled villainies and peddler ways! No, we have never taken Government aid and we never shall! I like to know that my Indian girls are safe." What more she added, I do not relate; for an angered mother has a way of uttering terrible truths.

To-day, if you visit that grave on the crest of the saddle back, you will find it flanked by two others, a man's on one side with the figure of a trader carved in sandstone by the Indians; on the other, old Calamity's with a plain granite slab; though I have heard strict people say her body ought not to have been laid there because of the vagrant character of her early life.

Indian boys from the school had shaped the coffin and carved the figure for the stone. A girlish teacher read the Church Services for the dead; and the children's voices rose a thin tremulous treble in the funeral hymn around the grave. Wild flowers covered the casket, pearl everlasting and the wind flower and the white Canada violet and the painter's brush vari-colored as a flame; and a wreath had come up from Smelter City.

Sights and sounds that have been a setting for sorrow, haunt the mind.

After that day, Eleanor could never hear the hammer of the woodp.e.c.k.e.r, the lone cry of circling hawk, the whistling of the solitary mountain marmot, without hearing also the thin treble of the Indian pupils breaking and silencing on that funeral hymn till only the mother's voice sang clarion to the end. She heard the low melting trill of the blue bird and the wrangling rasp of the jay--true and counterfeit, peace and discord--had G.o.d put right and wrong in the world for the friction of the conflict between, to develop souls? Had one been set over against the other, like light and shadow, to train the spiritual eye to know?

Then, the Indian boys began to lower the casket. One young pall bearer faltered and slipped his hold; it was the little white haired mother's hand steadied the rope that lowered, and slowly lowered, out of sight for ever. Then one of the girl teachers dropped in a great bunch of mountain laurel. Eleanor succeeded in leading the mother away.

Were the amethyst portals still ajar to the infinite life; or did the shadow of the Cross, of the time-old ever-recurring crucifixion, darken the vista of a glad future? The Indian children filed in through the gate of the Mission school. At the gate, the mother looked up the Saddle back. She had no time for the pampered luxury of self conscious grief. She had directed the making of the coffin and the carving of the sandstone and had led the funeral hymn to the end; but now she looked back. Ashes of roses across the sky, creeping phantom shadows, and in her heart, the sombre presence of the after-desolation which neither faith nor fort.i.tude casts out. She would go to sleep dull with the woe of it and dream depressed of its loneliness, to waken heavy with the memory. Then, by and by, would come the peace that the dead send, which is not forgetfulness. But now she looked back, looked back with the wrench that was the tearing of flesh and spirit asunder.

Above the new-made grave, across those topaz sunset gates, stood the figure of the native woman, shawl thrown from her head reaving the long black hair; and from the hill crest came such a long low cry as might have been a ghost echo of all the age-old world sorrows. Eleanor felt the quick twitch on her arm. Without a word, without a tear, the boy's mother had fainted.

"We ought to have looked out for that," explained one of the girl teachers from the school. "We ought to have left Calamity home. She has always done that since they took her child away."

"Had she a child?" asked Eleanor.

"Yes; and they took it away when she went insane."

Eleanor slept with the leaves of the field-book under her pillow that night; but she slept the heavy dreamless sleep of baffled hope.

CHAPTER X

THE HANDY MAN GETS BUSY