Lifting her bodily, he placed her in a nest of hay. "Now you stay right
there. I'm running this."
Picking up her fork, he put forth all his magnificent strength while she
sat listlessly watching. It seemed as though nothing could banish her
chronic weariness, her ineffable lassitude. Once, indeed, she remarked,
"My, but you're strong!" but voice and words lacked animation. She
added the remarkable climax, "Pa says you are a devil."
"Yes?" he questioned. "An' you bet he's right, gal. Keep a right smart
distance from men like me."
"Oh, I don't know," she slowly answered. "I'd liefer be a devil.
Angels is tiresome. Pa's always talking about them. He's a heap
religious--in spells."
Pausing in his forking, Bender stared down on the small heretic.
Vestigial traces of religious belief occupied a lower strata of his
savage soul. Crude they were, anthropomorphic, barely higher than
superstitions, yet they were there, and chief among them was an idea
that has appealed to the most cultured of men--that woman is incomplete,
nay, lost, without religion.
"Shore, child!" he protested. "Little gals shouldn't talk so. That
ain't the way to get to heaven."
"D' you allow to go there?" she demanded, with disconcerting suddenness.
Bender grimaced, laughed at the ludicrousness of the question. "Don't
allow as I'd be comfortable. Anyway, lumbermen go to t'other place. But
that don't alter your case. Gals all go to heaven."
"Well!" For the first time she displayed some animation. "I ain't!
Pa's talked me sick of it. I allow it's them golden streets he's after.
He'd coin 'em into dollars."
Seeing that Hines had not hesitated in minting this, his flesh and
blood, Bender thought it very likely, and feeling his inability to cope
with such reasonable heresies he attacked the hay instead. Having small
skill in women--the few of his intimate experience being as free of
feminine complexities as they were of virtue--he was sorely puzzled.
Looking backward, he remembered his own pious mother. Hines's wife had
died whispering of religion's consolations; yet here was the daughter
turning a determined back on the source of the mother's comfort. It was
unnatural to his scheme of things, contrary to the law of his vestigial
piety. He would try again! But when, the hay finished, he came back to
her, he quailed before her pale hopelessness; it called God in question.
Limbering up her rake, he watched her drive away, a small, thin figure,
woful speck of life under a vast gray sky. For twisting cloud masses
had blotted out the sun, a chill wind snatched the tops from the
hay-cocks as fast as Bender coiled them, blots of water splashed the
dust before he finished his task.
Black care rode home with him; and as that night the thunder split over
his cabin, he saw Jenny's eyes mirrored on the wet, black pane, and it
was borne dimly upon him that something besides overwork was responsible
for their haunting.
Bender had a friend, a man of his own ilk, with whom he had hit camp and
log-drive for these last ten years. At birth it is supposable that the
friend inherited a name, but in the camps he was known only as the
"Cougar." A silent man, broad, deep-lunged, fierce-eyed, nature had
laid his lines for great height, then bent him in a perpetual crouch.
He always seemed gathering for a spring, which, combined with tigerish
courage, had gained him his name. Inseparable, if Bender appeared on
the Mattawa for the spring drive, it was known that the Cougar might be
shortly expected. If the Cougar stole into a Rocky Mountain camp, a
bunk was immediately reserved for his big affinity. Only a bottle of
whiskey and two days' delay on the Cougar's part had prevented them from
settling up the same section. However, though five miles lay between
their respective homesteads, never a Sunday passed without one man
riding over to see the other, and it was returning from such a visit
that Bender next fell in with Jenny Hines.
It was night and late, but as Bender rode by the forks where Hines's
private road joined on to the Lone Tree trail, a new moon gave
sufficient light for him to see a whitish object lying in the grass. He
judged it a grain-sack till a convulsion shook it and a sob rose to his
ears.
"Good land, girl!" he ejaculated, when, a moment later, Jenny's pale
face turned up to his, "what are you doing here?"
"He's turned me out."
"Who?"
"Jed." The absence of the parental title spoke volumes--of love killed
by slow starvation, cold sternness, of youth enslaved to authority
without mitigation of fatherly tenderness.
Without understanding, Bender felt. "What for?" he demanded.
Crowding against his stirrup, she remained silent, and the touch of her
body against his leg, the mute appeal of the contact, sent a flame of
righteous passion through Bender's big body. Indecision had never been
among his faults. Stooping, he raised her to the saddle before him, and
as she settled in against his broad breast a wave of tenderness flowed
after the flame.
"No, no!" she begged, when he turned in on Jed's trail. "I won't go
back!" And he felt her violently trembling as he soothed and coaxed.
She tried to slip from his arms as they approached the cabin, and her
terror filled him with such anger that his kick almost stove in the
door.
"It's me!" he roared, answering Hines's challenge. "Bender! I came on
your gal lying out on the prairies. Open an' take her in!"
In response the window raised an inch; the moonlight glinted on a
rifle-barrel. "Kick the door ag'in!" Jed's voice snarled, "an' I'll
bore you. Git! the pair of ye!"
"Come, come, Jed." For her sake Bender mastered his anger. "Come, this
ain't right. Let her in an' we'll call it by-gones."
"No, no!" the girl protested.
Though she had whispered, Jed heard, and her protest touched off his
furious wolfish passion. "Git! Won't you git!" he screeched, following
the command with a stream of screamed imprecations, vile abuse.
If alone Bender would have beaten in the door, but there was no
mistaking Hines's deadly intent. Warned by the click of a cocking
hammer, he swung Jenny in front again, galloped out of range; then,
uncertain what to do, he gave his beast its head, and half an hour later
brought up at his own door.
"There, sis," he said, as he lit his lamp, "make yourself happy while I
stable Billy. Then I'll cook up some grub, an' while we're eating we
can talk over things."
She smiled wanly yet gratefully. But when he returned she was rocking
back and forth and moaning.
"Don't take on so," he comforted. "To-night I'll sleep in the stable;
at daybreak we'll hit south for Mother Flynn's." But the moans followed
in quick succession, beaded sweat started on her brow, and as she swung
forward he saw that which, two hours before, had turned Jed Hines into a
foaming beast.
"Oh, my God!" The exclamation burst from him. "You pore little thing!
you pore little child! Only a baby yourself!"
Stooping, he lifted her into his bed, tucked her in, then stood,
doubtful, troubled, looking down upon her. Two-thirds of the settlers in
Silver Creek were of Scotch descent; were deeply dyed with the granite
hardness, harsh malignancy, fervid bigotry which have caused the history
of their race to be written in characters of blood. Fiercely moral,
dogmatically religious, she could expect no mercy at their hands.
Hard-featured women, whose angular unloveliness had efficiently
safeguarded their own virtue, would hate her the more because her fault
had been beyond their compass. Looking forward, Bender saw the poor
little body a passive centre for a whorl of spite, jealousy, virulent
spleen, and the rough heart of him was mightily troubled. In all Silver
Creek, Mrs. Flynn was the only woman to whom he felt he might safely
turn. But Flynn's farm lay eighteen miles to the south--too far; the
child was in imminent labor. What should he do?
"Jenny," he said, "any women folk been to your house lately?"
When she answered that they had been without a visitor for three months,
Bender nodded his satisfaction. "Lie still, child," he said. "I'll be
back right smart."
He was not gone long--just long enough to drive over to and back from
Carter's. "I'm not trusting any of the women hereabouts," he told
Carter. "Though it ain't generally known, the Cougar was married once.
The same Indians that did up Custer cleaned up his wife and family. An'
as he always lived a thousand miles from a doctor, he knows all about
sech things. So if you'll drive like all hell for him, I'll tend to the
little gal."
And Carter drove. In one hour he brought the Cougar, but even in that
short time a wonderful transformation was wrought in that rough cabin
under Bender's sympathetic eyes. From the travail of the suffering girl
was born a woman--but not a mother. For of the essence of life Jenny
had not sufficient to endow the child of her labor. The spark flickered
down in herself, sank, till the Cougar, roughest yet gentlest of nurses,
sweated with apprehension.
"It's death or a doctor," he told Carter, hiding his emotion under a
surly growl. "Now show what them ponies are good for."
And that night those small fiends did "show what they were good
for";--made a record that stood for many a year. Roused from his
beauty-sleep, Flynn caught the whir of hot wheels and wondered who was
sick. It was yet black night when Carter called Father Francis, the
silent mission priest, from his bed. By lantern-light they two, layman
and priest, spelled each other with pick and shovel in the mission acre,
and when the last spadeful dropped on the small grave, Carter flew on.
At cock-crow he pulled into Lone Tree, sixty miles in six hours, without
counting the stop at the mission.
"I doubt I've killed you," he murmured, as the ponies stood before the
doctor's door, "but it just had to be done."
The doctor himself answered the knock. A heavy man, grizzled,
gray-eyed, sun and wind had burned his face to leather, for his days and
nights were spent on trail, pursuing a practice that was only limited by
the endurance of horse-flesh. From the ranges incurably vicious broncos
were sent to his stables, devils in brute form. He used seven teams;
yet the toughest wore out in a year. Day or night, winter or summer, a
hundred in the shade or sixty below, he might be seen pounding them
along the trails. Even now he had just come in from the Pipe Stone,
sixty miles southwest, but he instantly routed out his man.
"Hitch the buckskins, Bill," he said, "and let him run yours round to
the stables, Carter. He'll turn 'em out prancing by the time we're
back."
It took Bill, the doctor, and Carter to get the buckskins clear of town,
but once out the doctor handed the lines to Carter. "Now let 'em run."
Then he fell asleep.
He woke as they passed the mission, exchanged words with the priest, and
dozed again till Carter reined in at Bender's door. Then, shedding
sleep as a dog shakes off water, he entered, clear-eyed, into the battle
with death.
It was night when he came out to Bender and Carter, sprawled on the hay
in the stable.
"She'll live," he answered the lumberman's look, "but she must have
woman's nursing. Who's to be? Mrs. Flynn?" He shook his head. "A good
woman, but--she has her sex's weakness--damned long-tongued."