Stepsons of Light Part 14

VIII

"Look on my face. My name is Might-Have-Been-- I am also called No-More, Too-Late, Farewell."

--_Credit Lost._

"It is a hard world," sighed Charlie See. "Life is first one thing and then it is a broom factory."

They made a gay cavalcade of laughter and s.h.i.+ning life, those four young people. They had been to show Charlie over the gristmill and the broom factory, new jewels in Garfield's crown, and now they turned from deed to dream, rode merry for a glimpsing of to-morrow, where Hobby Lull planned a conquest more lasting than Caesar's. Their way led now beyond the mother ditch to lands yet unredeemed, which in the years to come would lie under a high ditch yet to be. So they said and thought. But what in truth they rode forth for to see was east of the sun and west of the moon--not to be told here. Where youth rides with youth under a singing sky the chronicle should be broad-s.p.a.ced between the lines; a double story, word and silence. To what far-off divine event we move, there shall be no rapture keener than hoping time in unspoiled youth.

The embankments of the mother ditch were head-high to them as they rode. They paused on the high bridge between the desert and the sown.

Behind lay the broad and level clearings, orchard, kempt steading and alfalfa; a step beyond was the raw wilderness, the yucca and the sand, dark mesquite in hummocks and mottes and clumps, a brown winding belt between the mother ditch and the first low bench land. The air came brisk and sweet; it rippled the fields to undulant s.h.i.+mmer of flas.h.i.+ng purple and green and gold.

"Your _'cequia madre_ is sure brimful this evenin'," remarked the guest.

"Always is--when we don't need it. In dry weather she gets pretty low enough," said Hobby. "Colorado people get the first whack at the water, and New Mexico takes what is left. Never high water here except at flood time. Fix that different some day. We got to fight flood and drought now, one down, another come on. Some day we'll save the flood water. Sure! No floods, no drought. Easy as lying! _Vamonos!_"

The road followed the curving ditch; their voices were tuned to lipping water and the drone of bees. Lull pointed out the lines where his high ditch was to run at the base of the bench land, with flume at gully and canon steeps. As eye and mapping hand turned toward Redgate a man came down Redgate road to meet them; a man on a Maltese horse.

He rode briskly, poised, sure-swaying as ever bird on bough. Charlie See warmed to the lithe youth of him.

"There, fellow citizens," he said, "there is what I'd call a good rider!"

As the good rider came abreast he swept off his hat. His eyes were merry; he nodded greeting and shook back a mop of blackest hair. The sun had looked upon him. He checked the blue horse in his stride--not to stop, but to slow him; he spoke to Lull in pa.s.sing.

"Garfield post office?" He jerked a thumb toward the bridge; for indeed, seen across the ramparts of the ditch, there was small distinction between visible Garfield and the scattered farmsteads.

"This way?"

"Yes."

"Just across the bridge," added Lyn. The story scorns to suppress the truth--she smiled her dimpliest.

"Thanks," said the stranger; and then, as he came abreast of Charlie See: "And the road to Hillsboro? Back this way--or straight on?"

"Straight through. Take the right hand at the post office--straight to the ford. You'll have to swim, I reckon."

"Yes," said the stranger indifferently. He was well beyond See and Edith Harkey now, and the blue horse came back into the road and into his reaching stride. "Thanks." The stranger looked back with the last word; at the same time Miss Dyer turned her head. They smiled.

"And they turned Lot's wife into a pillar of salt!" said Mr. Lull bitterly.

"He had such smiling eyes," urged Lyn.

"Ruin and destruction! See! Edith! Spread out--head her off!" Hobby grabbed Lyn's bridle rein and led his captive away at a triumphant trot.

They turned aside to inspect the doubtful pa.s.sage where the future ditch must clamber and twist to cross Deadman; Hobby Lull explained, defended, expounded; he bristled with estimates, alternative levels and acre costs; here was the inevitable way, but yonder there was a choosing; at that long gray point, miles away, the ditch must leave the river to gain the needed grades. He sparkled with irresistible enthusiasm, he overbore opposition.

"Look here, folks!" said Hobby. "See those thunder-heads? It's clouding up fast. It's going to rain and there's not a man in town can stop it. I aimed to take you up and show you the place we picked to make the ditch head, but I judge we best go home. We can see the ditch head another day."

"Now was I convinced or only persuaded?" Charlie See made the grumbling demand of Edith as they set their faces homeward.

Yet he was secretly impressed; he paused by jungle and sandy swale or ribbed and gullied slope for admiration of orchards unplanted and friendly homesteads yet to be; he drew rein by a pear thicket and peered half enviously into its th.o.r.n.y impenetrable keeps.

"Who lives there, Edith? That's the best place we've seen. Big fine house and all, but it looks comfortable and homey, just the same--mighty pleasant and friendly. And them old-fas.h.i.+oned flower beds are right quaint."

"Hollyhocks," she breathed; "and marigolds, and four o'clocks. An old-fas.h.i.+oned woman lives here."

Charlie's voice grew wistful. "I might have had a place like this just as well as not--if I'd only had sense enough to hear and hark. Hobby Lull brought me out here and put me wise, years ago, but I wouldn't listen. There was a bunch of us. Hobby and--and--now who else was it? It was a merry crowd, I can remember that. Hobby did all the talking--but who were the others? And have they forgotten too? It was a long time ago, before the big ditch. Oh, dear! I do wish I could remember who was with me!"

His voice trailed off to silence and a sigh that was only half a.s.sumed.

"You make it seem very real," she said, unconscious of her answering deeper sigh.

"Real. It is real! Look there--and there--and there!"

"That is all Hobby's work," said Edith as her eyes followed his pointing finger, and saw there what he saw--the city of his vision, the courts and palaces of love. "He has the builder's mind."

"Yes. It is a great gift." It was said ungrudgingly. "I wish I had it.

That way lies happiness. Me--I am a spectator."

She shook her reins to go, with a last look at his phantom farmlands.

"'An' I 'a stubb'd Thurnaby waaste.' That's what they'll put on Hobby's tombstone."

She lifted up her eyes from the waste places and the seeming, and let them rest on the glowing mesas beyond the river and the long dim ridges of misty mountain beyond and over all; and saw them in the light that never was on sea or land. The heart of the good warm boisterous earth called to kindred clay, "and turned her sweet blood into wine."

Shy happiness tinged her pale cheek with color, a tint of wild rose and sea-sh.e.l.l delicacy, faint and all unnoted; he was half inattentive to her as she rode beside him, glowing in her splendid spring, a n.o.ble temple of life, a sanctuary ready for clean sacrifice.

"Yes. Hobby, he's all right. Him and his likes, they put up the brains and take the risks and do the work. But after it's all done some of these austere men we read about, they'll ooze in and gather the crops."

"He doesn't miss much worth having. What may be weighed and counted and stolen and piled in heaps--oh, yes, Hobby Lull may miss that. Not real things, like laughter and joy and--and love, Charlie."

Charlie See turned his head toward Redgate. She read his thought; in her face the glow of life faded behind the white skin. But he did not see it; nor the thread of pain in her eyes. In his thought she was linked with Adam Forbes, and at her word he smiled to think of his friend, and looked up to Redgate where, even then, "Nicanor lay dead in his harness."

Pete Harkey's buckboard stood by the platform in front of the little store, and the young people waited there for him and his marketing.

"Mail day?" asked Charlie.

"Nope. To-morrow is the big day."

"We used to get it three times a week," said Lyn. "Now it's only twice."

"When I was a boy," said See thoughtfully, "I always wanted to rob a stage, just once. Somehow or other I never got round to it." His brow clouded.

"Why, Mr. See!"

"Charlie," said Mr. See. "Well, you needn't be shocked. Society is very unevenly divided between the criminal and the non-criminal cla.s.ses."