MARSHALL HANEY'S LAST TRAIL
Marshall Haney was a brave man, and his resolution was fully taken, but
that final touch of Bertha's hand upon his arm very nearly unnerved him.
His courage abruptly fell away, and, leaning back against the cushions
of his carriage, with closed eyelids (from which the hot tears dripped),
he gave himself up to the temptation of a renewal of his life. It was
harder to go, infinitely harder, because of that impulsive, sweet
caress. Her face was so beautiful, too, with that upward, tender,
pitying look upon it!
While still he sat weak and hesitant, a roughly dressed man of large and
decisive movement stopped and greeted him. "Hello, Mart, how are you
this fine day?"
Haney put his tragic mask away with a stroke of his hand, and hastily
replied: "Comin' along, Dan, comin' along. How are things up on the
peak?"
"Still pretty mixed," replied the miner, lightly; then, with a further
look around, he stepped a little nearer the wheel. "Hell's about to
break loose again, Mart."
"What's the latest?"
"I can't go into details, and I mustn't be seen talking with you, but
Williams is in for trouble. Tell him to reverse engine for a few weeks.
Good-day," and he walked off, leaving the impression of having been sent
to convey a friendly warning.
Haney seized upon this message. His resolution returned. His voice took
on edge and decision. "Oscar," he called quickly, "drive me down to the
station, I want to get that ten-thirty-seven train."
As the driver chirruped to his horses and swung out into the street,
Marshall Haney, with full understanding that this was to be his eternal
farewell, turned and looked up, hoping to catch a last glimpse of his
wife's sweet face at the window. A sign, a smile, a beckoning, and his
purpose might still have faltered, but the recall did not take place,
and facing the west he became again the man of will. When the carriage
drew up to the platform he gave orders to his coachman as quietly as
though this were his usual morning ride. "Now, Oscar, you heard what
that friend of mine said?"
"Yes, sir."
"Well, forget it."
"Very well, sir."
"But tell Mrs. Haney I've gone up to the mine. You can say to her that
Williams sent for me. You can tell her, but to no one else, what you
heard Dan say. You understand?"
"Yes, sir."
"All right, that stands. Now you go home and wait till about
twelve-thirty. Then go down for Mrs. Haney."
The coachman, a stolid, reliable man, well trained to his duties, did
not offer to assist his master, but sat in most approved alertness upon
his box while Haney painfully descended to the walk.
The train was about to move, and the conductor had already signalled the
engineer to "go ahead," but at sight of the gambler, whom he knew,
stopped the train and helped Haney aboard. "A minute more and you would
have been left. Going up to the mine, I reckon?"
They were still on the platform as Mart answered, "Yes, I'm due to take
a hand in the game up there." He said this with intent to cover his
trail.
He was all but breathless as he dropped into a seat near the door. The
sense of leaden weakness with which he had come to struggle daily had
deepened at the moment into a smothering pain which threatened to blind
him.
"I must be quiet," he thought--"I will not die in the car." There seemed
something disgraceful, something ignominious in such a death.
Gradually his fear of this misfortune grew less. "What does it matter
where death comes or when it comes? The quicker the better for all
concerned."
Nevertheless, he opened the little phial of medicine which Steele had
given him and swallowed two of the pellets. That they were a powerful
stimulant of the heart he knew, but that an overdose would kill he only
suspected from Steele's word of caution.
They were, indeed, magical in their effect. His brain cleared, his pulse
grew stronger, and the feeling of benumbing weakness which dismayed him
passed away.
The conductor, on his round, found him sitting silently at the window,
very pale and very stern, his eyes fixed upon the brawling stream along
whose winding course the railway climbed. While noting the number of
Mart's pass the official leaned over and spoke in a low voice, but Haney
heard what he said as through a mist. He was no longer moved by the
sound of the bugle. A labor war was temporary, like a storm in the
pines. It might arrest the mining for a few weeks or a month, but
through it all, no matter what happened, deep down in the earth lay
Bertha's wealth, secure of any marauder. So much he was able to reason
out.
One or two of the passengers who knew him drew near, civilly inquiring
as to his health, and to each one he explained that he was on the gain
and that he was going up to the camp to study conditions for himself.
They were all greatly excited by the news of battle, but they did not
succeed in conveying their emotion to Haney. With impassive countenance
he listened, and at the end remarked: "'Tis all of a stripe to me, boys.
I'm like the soldier on the battle-field with both legs shot off. I hear
the shouting and the tumult, but I'm out of the running."
Without understanding his mood, they withdrew, leaving him alone. His
mind went back to Bertha. "What will she do when she finds me gone? She
will not be scared at first. She will wire to stop me; but no
matter--before she can reach me, I'll be high in the hills."
He could not prevent his mind from dwelling on her. He tried to fix his
thoughts upon his life as a boyish adventurer, but could not keep to
those earlier periods of his career. All of his days before meeting her
seemed base or trivial or purposeless. She filled his memory to the
exclusion of all other loves and desires. She was at once his wife and
his child. He possessed a thousand bright pictures of her swift and
graceful body, her sunny smile, her sweet, grave eyes. He recalled the
first time he saw her on the street in Sibley, and groaned to think how
basely he had planned against her. "She never knew that, thank God!" he
said, fervently.
Then came that unforgetable drive to the ranch, when she put her hand in
his--and on this hour he dwelt long, searching his mind deeply in order
that no grain of its golden store of incident should escape him. His
throat again began to ache with a full sense of the loss he was
inflicting upon himself. "'Tis a lonely trail I'm takin' for your sake,
darlin'," he whispered, "but 'tis all for the best."
Slowly the train creaked and circled up the heights, following the sharp
turnings of the stream, passing small towns which were in effect summer
camps of pleasure-seekers, on and upward into the moist heights where
the grass was yet green and the slopes gay with flowers. A mood of
exaltation came upon the doomed man as he rose. This was the place to
die--up here where the affairs of men sank into insignificance like the
sound of the mills and the rumble of trains. Here the centuries circled
like swallows and the personal was lost in the ocean of silence.
At one of these towns which stood almost at the summit of the pass the
conductor brought a telegram, and Mart seized it with eager, trembling
hands. It was (as he expected) a warning from Bertha. She implored him
to let the mine go and to return by the next train.
He was too nerveless of fingers to put the sheet back within its
envelope, and so thrust it, a crumpled mass, into his pocket. It was as
if her hand was at his shoulder, her voice in his ear, but he did not
falter. To go back now would be but a renewal of his torture. There
could not come a better time to go--to go and leave no suspicion of his
purpose behind him.
Just over the summit, at a bare little station, the train was held for
orders, and Haney, who was again suffocating and almost blind, took
another dose of the mysterious drug, and with its effect returned to a
dim perception of his surroundings. He was able vaguely to recall that a
trail which began just back of the depot mounted the hill towards his
largest mine. A desire to see Williams, his faithful partner, his most
loyal friend, came over him, and, rising to his feet, he painfully crept
down the aisle to the rear of the car and dropped off unnoticed, just as
the conductor's warning cry started a rush for the train.
As the last coach disappeared round the turn the essential bleak
loneliness of the place returned. The station seemed deserted by every
human being, even the operator was lost to sight, and the gambler,
utterly solitary, with clouded brain and laboring breath, turned towards
the height, his left leg dragging like a shackle.
For the first half-mile the way was easy, and by moving slowly he
suffered less pain than he had expected. Around him the frost-smitten
aspens were shivering in the wind, their sparse leaves dangling like
coins of red-and-yellow gold, and all the billowing land below, to the
west, was iridescent with green and flame-color and crimson. A voiceless
regret, a dim, wide-reaching, wistful sadness came over him, but did not
shake his resolution. He had but to look down at his crippled body to
know that the beauty of the world was no longer his to enjoy. His days
were now but days of pain.
He had always loved the heights. From the time he had first sighted this
range he had never failed to experience a peculiar exaltation as he
mounted above the ranch and the mine. Gambler and night-owl though he
had been, he had often spent his afternoons on horseback riding high
above the camps, and now some small part of his love of the upper air
came back to lead him towards his grave. With face turned to the
solitudes of the snows, with ever-faltering steps, he commenced his
challenging march towards death.
At the first sharp up-raise in the way his heart began to pound and he
swayed blindly to and fro, unable to proceed. For an instant he looked
down in dismay at the rocky, waiting earth, a most inhospitable grave. A
few minutes' rest against a tree, and his brain cleared. "Higher--I must
go higher," he said to himself; "they'll find me here."
As he rose he could see the town spread wide on the hill-tops beneath
him--the cabins mere cubes, the mill a child's toy. He could discern men
like ants moving to and fro as if in some special excitement--but he did
not concern himself with the cause. His one thought was to mount--to
blend with the firs and the rocks. He drew the phial from his pocket and
held it in his hand in readiness, with a dull fear that the chemical
would prove too small, too weak, to end his pain.
It was utterly silent and appallingly lonely on this side of the great
peak. Hunters were few and prospectors were seldom seen. These
upward-looping trails led to no mine--only to abandoned prospect
holes--for no mineral had ever been found on the western slope. The
copses held no life other than a few minute squirrels, and no sound
broke the silence save the insolent cry of an occasional jay or
camp-bird. To die here was surely to die alone and to lie alone, as the
fallen cedar lies, wrought upon by the wind and the snows and the rain.
Nevertheless, his suicidal idea persisted. It had become the one final,
overpowering, directing resolution. There is no passion more persistent
than that which leads to self-destruction. In the midst of the blinding
swirl of his thought he maintained his purpose to put himself above the
world of human effort and to become a brother of the clod, to mix
forever with the mould.
Slowly he dragged himself upward, foot by foot, seeking the friendly
shelter and obscurity of a grove of firs just above him. Twice he sank
to his knees, a numbing pain at the base of his brain, his breath
roaring, his lips dry, but each time he rose and struggled on, eager to
reach the green and grateful shelter of the forest, filled with desire
to thrust himself into its solitude; and when at last he felt the chill
of the shadow and realized that he was surely hidden from all the world,
he turned, poised for an instant on a mound where the trail doubled
sharply, gave one long, slow glance around, then hurled himself down the
rocky slope. Even as he leaped his heart seemed to burst and he fell
like a clod and lay without further motion. It was as if he had been
smitten in flight by a rifle-ball.
Around him the small animals of the wood frolicked, and the jay called
inquiringly, but he neither saw nor heard. He was himself but a gasping
creature, with reason entirely engaged in the blind struggle which the
physical organism was instinctively making to continue in its wonted
ways. All the world and all his desires, save a longing for his fair
young wife, were lost out of his mind, and he thought of Bertha only in
a dim and formless way--feeling his need of her and dumbly wondering why
she did not come. In final, desperate agony, he lifted the phial of
strychnine to his lips, hoping that it might put an end to his
suffering; but before this act was completed a sweet, devouring flood of
forgetfulness swept over him, his hand dropped, and the unopened bottle
rolled away out of his reach. Then the golden sunlight darkened out of
his sky, and he died--as the desert lion dies--alone.
* * * * *
When they found him two days later he lay with his head pillowed upon
his left arm, his right hand outspread upon the pine leaves--palm upward
as if to show its emptiness. A bird--the roguish gray magpie--had stolen
away the phial as if in consideration of the dead man's wish, and no
sign of his last despairing act was visible to those who looked into his
face. His going was well planned. Self-murder was never written opposite
the name of Marshall Haney.
THE END