The Freebooters of the Wilderness Part 34

I shall obey you implicitly, my Alder Liefest. I don't know what it is yet; but I'll not let it make any difference in the fight no matter what it is. I have thought of that seal every day and night since I left you, and all day and all night; and I couldn't have pulled through this trip if I hadn't had that well of memory to drink from. You saved my life, tho' you don't know it. Matthews will tell you: and you saved his too.

d.i.c.k. (nth.)

P. S. There's a funny little kid up here, been left by her father in one of the settlers' tents. She's the most pitiable little object I ever saw. I think her father is a drunken tough from Shanty Town. She oughtn't to be left up here alone near such a baby-eater as I am. I wish you'd come up and see about her. If you don't come alone, get Mrs. Williams, or my friend, Matthews.

Calamity went on down the Ridge and Wayland plunged at his mail. On the very top of the pile lay a newspaper in a folder marked with red "Important." Before the pole cat begins operations, he chooses his target. For myself, I think discretion is better than valor in such a case, and you would do well to retreat and let the little genus Mephitis Mephitica infect the air for his own benefit; but Wayland did not know what was coming and tore the paper open and read. Then he flung it from him and stood looking with blazing eyes at the thing on the floor.

"Read it," he said.

The old frontiersman got his gla.s.ses laboriously out of the case and began to read. The sun was behind the Holy Cross, and he stood in the door to get the light on the paper. When he had finished and looked round, he saw Wayland sitting crunched forward with his face in his hands.

"Wayland, man," he slapped him twice on the shoulder, "look up, look up at that picture on the wall above y'r bed."

Wayland took his hands from his eyes. The Alpine glow struck through the doorway against the picture on the wall, the picture she had had Calamity bring down surrept.i.tiously and had sent back framed, the picture of the face above the Warrior.

"Man alive, why w'd y' care for the devil's dirt and skunk stench and snake venom, when y' have, when y' have That? She's a--a trump! She's a thoroughbred! Man, y'd know she had th' blood o' Scottish kings and queens in her veins. Y'll no go down to-night, Wayland, when y'r all undone! 'Twould hurt her. A intended tellin' her to-night why A came; but A'll not now! A'll not now! She must not run from this scandal.

She must face it down before she goes, but A'll go an' see her father an' come back an' tell y'. Cheer up man! 'Tis part o'the fight."

And for the only time in the struggle, Wayland let go; or rather--his manhood got from under leash. You can be stoical all right when _you_ get the blow. It's another thing to be stoical when the blow hits what you love. When the curtain-drop fell on Moyese, it fell on a man pounding the desk, kicking furniture, eating up the telephone, turning the air blue. It fell on the Ranger sitting crunched in his chair gazing through misty eyes at a picture painted by an artist, who was an idealist. Was he down and out? Was Right the sport of fools?

CHAPTER XXII

A DOWNY-LIPPED YOUTH IN GRAY FLANNELS

I suppose it was owing to the fact that she was woman and he was man that she spent that first night of the home-coming in dumb hurt wonder that he had not come immediately to her; and that he pa.s.sed the night in restless fevered fury, knowing well that you cannot both control fire and fan it, fuse metals molten and expect them not to forge, keep a resolution and break it. She had listened eagerly to the old frontiersman's account of the adventures on the trail, up the Pa.s.s precipice, crossing the snow slide and in the desert, where the Ranger had refused to save his own life by abandoning his companion; and the narrative lost nothing in Matthews' recital with his Scottish-Canadian R's rolling out sonorous and strong, where he was moved to admiration or anger. The sheep rancher sat silent through the stirring story with only an occasional glint of fire from his black eyes gazing aimlessly at the floor.

"'Cast your bread upon the waters and after many days it shall return to you again.' 'Minds me of what A saw you do for this woman you call Calamity, in our old Rebellion Days."

Eleanor was sitting on the arm of her father's leather chair. The sheepman glanced up warningly, but Matthews was going ahead full steam.

"We're both older than we were in those days, MacDonald, older an'

wiser, an' for m'self, A should add, a good bit steadier! You, y' were always a sober-faced secret lad, MacDonald; an' till yon day in front o' th' Agency house, A don't think, A hardly think, we men knew what a devil was in y'! A can see y' yet as y' kicked th' gun out o' yon blackguard's hand an' let him take the load o' buckshot square between th' shoulders! 'Twas a handsome thing o' you to take th' poor buddy in an' give her a shelter! How does she come to call herself Calamity?"

MacDonald's foot came down on the floor with a clamp, and he rose.

"She didn't. 'Twas the miners in the Black Hills. She used to bring in so many hard-luck chaps, shot up by the Sioux, bring 'em in on her shoulders from the hills to the camp, that the boys got to calling her Calamity. She had lost her good looks, and--" MacDonald shot a glance of warning in the direction of his daughter--"and the same old story, I guess; she was off the market! One of my trips to the mining camps up state, I found her in a mess of rags picking crusts out of the garbage barrels along a back lane! I brought her back with me. Gave her a week's soak in the bath house--" he paused as if reflecting, "and that it seems was foundation enough for the hog-wash that appeared in one of the papers here. Suppose we take a walk as we discuss old days; they were pretty wild days for discussion before a girl, who didn't know her dad before she was born."

And Eleanor went out on the Ranch House piazza off her room, while the two frontiersmen strolled down the river. How different her outlook on life was from two months before when reference to Calamity had called up mingled fury and horror. Now that she understood, anything in this Western Country might be possible, and understandable, and explainable.

She had his hurried pencil note where she could feel it, under her locket; only the locket was outside above; and the fly leaf of that field book was inside next. "d.i.c.k (nth)," he had signed himself; and he had not come down. She could see the dark shadowy Ridge from her piazza chair, and hear the subdued laughter and lipping of the waters, and he was there--not a half hour's walk away--and he had not come.

There was a full moon. She could see its silver sheen on the River, on the tremulous poplar leaves, sifting through the pine needles and in opal wings round the far luminous cross of snow on the mountain. The night hawks and the swallows dipped and darted and cut the air with humming wings; and once the wire gate squeaked to some one entering.

Eleanor sprang up with her heart beating so that she could not speak; but it was only a white hatted youth in light gray flannels asking Calamity at the bas.e.m.e.nt door "when MacDonald would be back." Did Eleanor imagine it; or did the citified young person in the gray flannels with the red necktie look up towards her hesitatingly, with the suggestion of an ingratiating smile in the pale blue eyes, a suggestion which she could not define but which somehow infuriated her?

Poor pale anaemic youth! He was not used to having his waiting smiles met by the blaze of red fury that flashed to her eyes.

"Calamity, if that person wants anything, tell him to go out to the bunkhouse and see the foreman."

Then, she sank back in her chair both glad and sorry in one breath that Wayland had not been there. She shut her eyes to drink again of the memories that had sustained her all these weeks; and felt the lift and fall of the note his hand had written, pulsing to the rhythm of her breathing; but the memories failed her. Memories were for absence; and he was here; and he had _not_ come. If only he would come now, how she would greet him, holding him unflinchingly to his resolution, of course, and of course; but as a kind of second thought in the back of her head, the under motive beneath all the clamor of light upper notes, she knew to the inmost core of her being that she was wis.h.i.+ng he would come now because her father was out and she was alone and could greet him as flesh and spirit, heart and mind, cried out to greet him; to touch him; to spend themselves upon him in a fierce proud abandon of love and gladness; to give and take, and give and take again, till, till--what? Was this the way to keep him standing strong to his resolutions?

And shall we blame her? Does the beautiful thing we call life spring from postulates and rules and mathematics; or from the spirit's altar fires? And I confess I never see the thing we call vice but I wonder did it not spring from the burning of the refuse heap, which poor humans have mistaken for altar fires?

She heard her father come in late, slamming the mosquito door behind him, and pa.s.s across the dark living room to his own chamber without saying good night. Once, she thought she saw a white sailor hat through the cottonwood hovering along the road. Then, as she looked, the white sailor seemed accompanied by a panama; and she crept into her room with fevered hands and heavy heart, snacking the mosquito door behind her. There was the companion bang of a door being hooked below, old Calamity keeping watch as usual and only turning in, when she heard Eleanor going to bed. Eleanor waited till all was quiet. Then, she drew the burlap portiere across the mosquito door, and lighted her candle, and began writing,--writing what? Was it some d.i.l.d.o of oriental song she had read in Europe; was it the burden of some Indian chant stirring vaguely in her unconscious blood; or was it but the simple love cry of primitive Woman, of that woman who wandered round about the streets of Jerusalem calling her lover? "My flesh cries out to touch you, my beloved," she wrote; "my hands are hungry to touch you, and my spirit is hungrier than my hands. When you were absent, I drank of memories; but now, you are back, the shadow waters have gone; I must have the living. If I could see you but once, I know this wild longing would lie down and be quiet." She stopped writing. Would it?

Would it lie down and be quiet with just a look? A look would be a deep drink of living waters, she knew that; but would it, would it lie down and be quiet? She didn't intend ever to stop loving him. As long as she loved him, and stayed where love could grow by what it fed on, would it lie quiet? Was this keeping him strong to his resolution?

She tore the paper to tiny atoms and burned the sc.r.a.ps bit by bit on her metal paper knife above the candle. Then, she blew out the candle and drew his soiled field-book leaf from her breast. She fell asleep with her head on her arm, and her lips pressed to that fool-thing he had signed at the bottom of his note, "d.i.c.k (the nth)," whatever that meant.

There was no mistaking it next morning at breakfast. She felt strung and upset; and her father looked at her strangely; and Matthews was so keen on covering the general embarra.s.sment that he aimed too far in the other direction, rattling off such a fusilade of Western stories that they sounded hollow. She forgot her own confusion studying the two men. How stooped her father looked! He looked, what was it? Like a man who has waited a long time for something to come, and when it has come, found himself too sad to seize it. His eyes looked as if he had not slept; and Eleanor now observed that the frontiersman's sun-burned nose had a suspicious s.h.i.+ne at the end. If she had not been undone from her own bad night, she would have helped their efforts to cover embarra.s.sment; but now a horrible thought came; a thought born of the low innuendo in the scandal story; and the thought finished her. She felt her self-control going and rose and fled round the end of the table to her room. The old frontiersman stopped mid-way in his story of the brats of Blackfoot boys stealing every st.i.tch of his clothing one day he was bathing in Lower Saskatchewan. Her father jumped to his feet and threw out one arm to stop her. That finished Eleanor. He had never done such a thing before. The only time he had ever shown affection was that night when she had read the scandal in the paper and he had reached up his hand and taken hers. Now, he held her in his arms, bowed, broken, unspeaking. The tears came in a rain. She did not hide her face after the manner of tenderly nurtured shrinking women. She faced him with wide open lashes and br.i.m.m.i.n.g eyes and burning defiance.

"Father, you don't doubt me, too, do you?"

"Doubt you? My G.o.d no, child! It's only I never knew how much I loved you till I realized I might have to part with you."

How strange and non-understanding and non-understandable these men creatures were! Eleanor looked at him; and looked at him. Then she threw her arms round his neck and kissed the dark sad silent face with a frightened tender fervor; and do not laugh, dear reader; for it is only on the stage that the graceful altogether elegant curtain-drop comes; but the old frontiersman had somehow got himself outside the screen door, and immediately on that kiss came through the mosquito wire such a thunder clap of pulpit artillery as is the peculiar prerogative of some large gentlemen when they blow their nose.

MacDonald and Eleanor both burst out laughing; and Eleanor noticed it was a large red cotton one, two for ten they sold in Smelter City.

And all the while, Wayland sat crunched in the chair of the Cabin, gazing and gazing at the face in the picture above "the Happy Warrior,"

till the light faded from the Holy Cross and the moon beams struck aslant the timbered floor, and Calamity's shadow stood in the doorway with a basket on her arm.

"Meesis Villiam send up y' supper," she said.

Wayland ate mechanically. He did not know that he was bursting out with angry words all through the meal.

"To think, they'd stoop, they'd dare to splash their filth and hog-wash on her skirts, to hurt me? Well, they've got me, Calamity? They've got me, old girl! But they've got me in a way they don't expect! You Indians knew the courts were a fraud and lie. They'd have cleared this kind of blackguardism up with a knife. Well--so will I; but it will be another kind of knife. You can't out-Herod a skunk; but you can bury it, Calamity, eh, old girl? We'll bury 'em so deep next election, they'll never see daylight: then we'll pile this pack of exposure on 'em so high they'll never get up again. We're out for scalps, Calamity! No more fighting in the open, eh? We'll spring it on 'em the way you Indians put a knife in a man's back."

"Iss it Moy-eese, heem keel little boy?" asked Calamity softly.

Something in the soft hiss of the words made the Ranger turn. There was a mad look in the glint of the black eyes, and the hands were kneading nervously in and out of the palms.

"Yes, d.a.m.n him, it is Moyese, who is at the bottom of all this deviltry; but don't you worry, Calamity! We're going to get his scalp!"

He paced the Ridge half the night planning his campaign. He would go first thing in the morning and get that child's story of the mine and the "dummy" entryman. Then, he would get that Swede's affidavit before the thick-tow-head realized what he was after. Then, he would get a trained geologist for the examination of the mine, not that flannelled kindergartner, stuck full of bureaucratic self importance as he was of ignorance. Then, he would surprise them by doing absolutely nothing till election time, then "plunk" it all on them through the opposition paper, and stand back, and take his dismissal! Oh, his midnight thoughts raced, as yours and mine have raced, when we have been struck by sorrow, or blackmail, or motiveless malice! He could not make sure of it; but once as he paced near the Ridge trail he thought he saw . . . was it a form in flannels accompanied by a figure resembling Bat's sauntering slowly down to the Valley?

When Wayland dwelt a moment on what such a conjunction of observers might mean, his thoughts jumped. Could Brydges have done it? Back in the Cabin, the face in the picture seemed sentient and s.h.i.+ning in the gloom. It was an absurd notion, of course; for the picture was a shadowy thing in dark sepia; and there was no light but the silver reflection of the moon from the Holy Cross. The Holy Cross,--what was it she had said? Nothing worth while ever won without someone being crucified? How absurdly small, how remotely contemptibly impossible, the scandal thing seemed anyway, as though a skunk could obstruct the avalanche of the ma.s.sed snow flakes by sending up his malodorous stench across the path of the Law! And he loved her and he had her love, and he had known the highest blessedness of life, and nothing could take the consciousness of it from him! Wayland went to sleep dreaming fool-things about the face in the picture. Of course, you never dreamed them, sleeping or waking. At break of day, he picked a sprig of mountain flower, and did certain things to that framed picture, and rode away to his day's work.

"Let's go up and see that little runt of an Irish la.s.sie," Matthews had suggested in the afternoon; and they were leisurely climbing the Ridge Trail, the old frontiersman yarning and yarning of the dear good old days; Eleanor thinking her own thoughts. They met a downy-lipped youth in gray flannels and Mr. Bat Brydges wearing a panama hat and an "Oh-I-know-it-all" air. Both dabbed at their hats to the old man; but Matthews saw them not till they had pa.s.sed when he stopped and turned with a look over his shoulder and a grunt. Eleanor had not learned yet what had happened to the Sheriff; but somehow the old frontiersman's look gave her a satisfaction. Where a crag jutted out from the face of the Ridge and some spruce saplings spanned a spring trickling down from the rocks, Matthews stopped. This was the place! Old rascal! How did he know? Has age ever been young? Eleanor did not know that he was looking at her, did not know that her face was wrapped in mystery and light. Suddenly he placed both hands on her shoulder.

"Eleanor, y'r a magnificent woman! Y' don't mind me callin' y' a woman?"

It was his highest compliment.

"Y're braver than my wife; an' she's the bravest o' them a'! D' y'

know that my wife came half way round the world t' marry me an' go penniless to th' Indian Reserve? D' y' know when she found the Indians sick, d' y' know she went East an' took a full four years' medical course t' be able to attend them? D' y' know she goes all over the Reserve day an' night an' for three hundred miles among th' settlers to attend th' sick? But duty with us is easy. We're rich. Duty brought us together! Duty's goin' t' push y' apart; an' y're not complainin'."

Eleanor could not answer. What was there to say? They went on up the Ridge Trail, Matthews still talking to let her think her own thoughts.