changing from one slide of the lantern to the other the Master Showman
has permitted us a little glimpse of hurrying, heroic figures and
dazzled us with the clouds of great deeds swiftly done--the teller must
adopt one of two methods. He must either generalize, or be content to
spend his space on single episodes. In that period, every day was a
book. Men counted as nothing experiences filled with an excitement or
a pathos or a beauty intense enough to render significant the whole
life of a quiet New Englander. Acts were many, and trod close on one
another's heels, yet to each act there was a sequence of motive, of
desire, of logical effect, as well capable of being sought out and
described as though they were not entangled and confused in the rush of
the moments. The story teller could find his task in the dissection of
these, and the task would be interesting. But to one who is concerned,
not with a period, but a life, this is impossible.
The fifteen years saw a marked change in the fortunes of the half-breed
known as Michail Lafond. During all that time he had led an apparently
honest and law-abiding life. No man could say that he had been cheated
by him or that he had been favored; but one and all with whom the
half-breed had come into contact could speak with admiration and fear
of the latter's power of seizing the best of the main chance. He had
left the child at the Spotted Tail reservation, giving her name as
Molly Lafond and making arrangements for her maintenance. He turned
some gold claims to advantage, but abandoned that sort of thing as too
uncertain. He participated mildly in the prosperity of several of the
mushroom towns of the period, but soon drew out of booms as possessing
also too much of the element of luck.
He did the hundreds of other things to which men in a new country can
always turn their hands, and in each he made his profit; but in each he
found something lacking to the elaborate scheme of power he had builded
one evening before a prairie camp fire. Finally he hit upon whisky and
dance halls and there he stayed. Abandoning all other enterprises, he
gave his individual attention to these two, for he found in them not
only the surest and largest monetary returns, but the certain
popularity which men accord to those who minister to their pleasures.
From Deadwood to Edgemont there gradually grew up a string of saloons
bearing the name of Lafond. Some of them were paying, some on the
point of paying, some merely lying latent for the boom which Lafond
thought to see in the near future. For, as of old, he delighted in
discounting the future. He liked long shots in his investments.
Over each of these various establishments their owner was in the habit
of placing a man chosen according to the needs of the place, and this
man fell more or less under Lafond's personal supervision according as
the exigencies of the case seemed to demand it. The half-breed's
policy was to keep in actual touch with the most prosperous, and to
give personal effort to the most promising. The others could take care
of themselves until their time came. So at Mulberry Gulch, where the
camp consisted only of a number of grub stakers, he owned a little log
cabin which he had never seen. At Deadwood, an old and prosperous
camp, he was proprietor of a begilded and bemirrored splendor so well
established that it needed only a periodical supervising visit to keep
it running smoothly. At Copper Creek was also nothing but a log-cabin
saloon; but Copper Creek bade fair to amount to something. Perhaps the
spirit of the three kinds was best indicated by the signs over their
counters. Mulberry Gulch exhibited a rudely lettered device informing
the public, "Pies, Whisky and Pistols for Sail Here." Deadwood thirsty
ones learned that they should "Ask for Our 1860 Old Crow; the Finest on
Earth." Copper Creek sententiously remarked: "To Trust is Bust."
All this symbolized nothing more or less than the commercial history of
a successful man in the West. It meant nothing except that Lafond had
the instinct and the cleverness, and so was getting rich. More
interesting than the change of his fortune was the change of the man
himself.
In the old days he had been crafty in a subtle way; but he had been
impulsive, eager, excitable, inclined to jump at the bidding of his
intuitions. Now his character seemed to have expanded and modified. A
powder explosion had slightly bent his straight figure, halted his
gait, and seamed his face with powder marks. To hide these last, he
wore a beard. The effect was one of quiet responsibility, and a
certain geniality, though a keen observer might have hesitated to call
this geniality kindly.
His manner was very quiet. He never reproved his subordinates or
addressed a hasty word to anyone, unless he became thoroughly convinced
of the culprit's incapacity. Then his anger was at white heat. He
could forgive deliberate attempts to evade his commands or conscious
efforts at rascality, for with them he could cope; but mistakes he
never condoned. An occasional slight inversion of the natural order of
words or phrases was all that remained to him of his old accent.
Altogether he was a personage whose public position was
unexceptionable. In the West no man has a past, unless that past is
personified and carries a rebuking six-shooter. He had wealth,
popularity, an acquaintance as wide as the Hills themselves. All that
meant power, especially when combined with a shrewd ability to read
men's characters.
But of the old order one thing remained--his religion. In the storm
and stress of a period hot with events, his life work was conceived and
laid out. The lines of its plan had been seared into his soul by
crime. He no longer felt the smart, but the cicatrix was there, and he
daily bowed to its symbolism, often without a thought of what it really
meant. His was like the future of a boy who has entered the army; his
line of conduct was all prearranged, and his independence of it never
occurred to him. There was no glowering hate in this; only a certain
sense of inevitability. In other words, it was his religion.
[Illustration: "COME ACROSS, OR I'LL..."]
Certain things were to be done. First of all he must become wealthy.
Very well; wealthy he became. He must become popular. Agreed; he
cultivated his fellow men. He must know how to read character and to
hit upon weaknesses. Exactly; he bent his cleverness to the task.
There was a larger end to which these three were but the means; but
that would come later. Just now life meant quiet, earnest compassing
of the three things. Until they were quite within his grasp, he could
afford to shut into the background what their ultimate signification
should be. Lafond lived tranquilly a perfectly moral existence.
But without his volition the great idea crystallized into some sort of
shape. It was always in the background, to be sure; but, after all, a
background fills the picture. _That which men hold to be most dear_!
The years had taught him what it was, without his actually demanding it
of them. Men hold most dear property, reputation, honor among their
fellow men, and the love of women. Women hold most dear virtue and a
good name.
About fifteen years after he had quitted the Indians, Lafond suddenly
realized that he had gained the power and knew how to use it. Quite
dispassionately he looked ahead to the next step.
There were Jim Buckley, Billy Knapp, Alfred and the doctor's family.
The latter now included only the girl, whom Lafond had himself caused
to be raised to young womanhood. Of the others, Jim Buckley and Alfred
had long since left the country--Alfred for Arizona, where he had gone
into cow punching; Buckley for Montana and Idaho, in whose mountains he
was supposed to be prospecting. These two, then, were out of the way
for the present. They would never be difficult to find, and in
comparison with Billy they had held quite a secondary place at the time
of the half-breed's molten state, before he had cooled into the fixed
forms of his conduct of life.
The reason for this throws not a little light on Lafond's character.
The feminine streak in him hated Billy Knapp personally, simply because
that individual was loud in talk, great in size, and blustering in
manner. He could restrain his resentment against the bashful Alfred or
the imperturbable Jim; but not that against a man who seemed always, to
the high strung half-breed, the potential bully. He would have
followed Billy Knapp to China, if necessary.
But it so happened that that individual, after a checkered career, had
settled down in the village or camp of Copper Creek, not forty miles
from Lafond's headquarters at Rapid. Billy's vicissitudes were those
of many of his class. Trained in the liberal give and take policy of
the early frontier times, he found himself, on their ebb, stranded high
and dry without appropriate means of progression. Billy was used to
relying on his plainscraft, his courage, his skill with firearms, and
his personal strength. Such qualities as economy, accuracy of
estimate, frugality, and patience in the overcoming of abstractions
would have been, to his early life, practically useless. He came to be
a big-hearted, generous fellow, without the slightest idea of the value
of money or the burden of debt. He was apt to be seized by many whims,
which he was wont to gratify on the spot.
"Know Billy Knapp?" ruminated an old plainsman once. "Billy Knapp?
Seems to me I do; he's the feller that would buy the co't house yonder
if he could get trusted for it, ain't he?"
It described him. And as in the old days his prestige had depended on
individual prowess of a rather spectacular order, it came about that
Billy was just a little fond of strutting. He liked to play the
patron, he liked to distribute favors, to treat to drinks, to stand as
the representative of great unseen forces, whether of military power in
the old days, or of extensive capital in these latter.
For a great many years this vanity had remained ungratified. Billy had
not the virtues to succeed in the rising commercialism of the new West.
After the last great campaign against the Sioux, he found his usual
occupations almost wiped from the slate. The plains were as safe as
Illinois. He picked up a livelihood still, mainly by reason of his
wonderful gift of persuasion, for Billy could talk black white, if only
the particular shade and the discussion were situated in the West. He
drove stage, broke horses, bossed cattle outfits, and finally drifted
into prospecting.
There his chance came. By a lucky stroke of trading he became
possessed of some really good quartz claims and a small sum of ready
cash. Two weeks later he was in Chicago. It was his first trip east
of the Mississippi, but he knew just what he wanted, and he got it.
Three days of Billy's golden oratory led to the purchase by an Eastern
syndicate of an option on his group of claims, and the understanding
that toward the middle of the following summer a committee of owners
should visit the property in order to discuss ways and means of
developing the various quartz leads.
The delighted Billy returned to Copper Creek. There at last he found
himself the important figure he had always dreamed of being. He posed
to himself and to everybody else. The camp gradually filled, and the
claims round about were snapped up greedily.
Lafond had easily kept himself informed of all this. It was
sufficiently notorious. Now when he came to a realization that the
next move in his game of life was due and that he should put to its
appointed use the power he had so long amassed, he decided to study
Billy Knapp in order to see which of the four--property, reputation,
honor or love--that volatile individual held most dear. He could make
a shrewd guess, but he wanted to be on the ground. And as he thought
about it, there came to him a great wave of enthusiasm and eagerness
over this game he was about to play; a delight in the magnitude of the
stakes and the power of the instruments employed, an intellectual
glorying quite different and separated from his personal feelings in
the matter, or that religious obligation of it which lay at the back of
his soul.
XIV
INTO THE SHADOW OF THE HILLS
The first thing Michail Lafond did in pursuance of his new
determination was to visit the Spotted Tail reservation in order to
reclaim the girl henceforth to be known as Molly Lafond.
No one knows why he had followed out his first impulse to preserve her
life and bring her up. After a time, however, she came to symbolize,
in his half-mystical perception of such things, the first cause of all
that had happened. Personally he liked her because she was such a
free, independent, fiery little creature. He liked to talk to her and
be ordered about by her. He liked also to watch the graceful, decisive
movements of her lithe young body and the sparkle of her hair. She
looked a good deal like her mother.
He even listened with what would appear to be close sympathy to her
complaints of the agent's wife and the life to be led at a reservation.
She and the agent's wife never did get on well. The latter was a
stern, commonplace, fat woman without sympathy. And the life! There
were no men, nothing but Indians. All you could do was to read all day
and all the evening, or ride straight out in any given direction that
led nowhere. Michail Lafond, in his semi-annual visits, was inclined
to agree with her and even to pity her a little. His personal likings
were on the surface, and had nothing whatever to do with the deeps of
his nature.
Just as the surest way of satisfying his thirst for revenge upon Billy
Knapp was to deprive the man of his reputation and his property, so he
had determined to make of Molly a dance-hall girl, like Colorado Jenny.
It would deprive her of virtue and good name, the things a woman holds
most dear. He also felt keenly, in his instinctive dramatic sense, the
fitness of throwing this fine-fibred daughter of a nobler race to the
hungry passions, of watching her reversion little by little to the
brute type; but a formulation of it never came to the surface of his
mind. And yet, I must repeat, there was in one sense nothing personal
in this. Lafond felt no aversion to the girl herself. He took no
pleasure in the thought of cursing her or beating her, as might a man
seeking a hotter revenge. It was just cold, malignant, calculating
hate of something in opposition to him, which she symbolized.
This intellectual form of hatred is a peculiar characteristic of
half-breeds.
When Lafond suggested to Molly that she should leave the agency and
take up her residence with him in Copper Creek, she assented very
gladly, for she felt her present life insupportable. The day before,
she and Mrs. Sweeney, the agent's wife, had come into violent collision.
"Where was you yesterday afternoon?" Mrs. Sweeney had asked, as Molly
came into the kitchen.
It was before breakfast, so Molly shrugged an impatient shoulder.
"Riding," she replied briefly.
"Riding where?" insisted Mrs. Sweeney with heavy persistency.
"Over west."
"See anybody?"
"No."
"Sure?"
"Yes."
The old lady wound her hands in her apron and fixed her charge severely
with her eye.
"Strange how blind some folks is," she went on after a moment. "Now, I
was indoors washing an' I see that young sergeant over there scoutin'
'round."
The words were simple; the tone was not.
"What do you mean?" cried Molly sharply. "Do you mean to say I was
riding with him?"
Mrs. Sweeney wagged her head with aggravating sagacity.
"Nobody needn't put on no shoe that don't fit 'em," she said, and
sighed with the air of a martyr who has discovered all and is
disappointed.
Molly knew that her question had been justified by the woman's
insinuation, that she had put on no shoe, and that if there were a
martyr in the room it was not the agent's wife. Thereupon she said
things excitedly. The agent's wife assumed an injured placidity, than
which there is nothing more aggravating. Finally Molly flounced out of
the room.
The agent's wife, being utterly in the wrong, sulked after the manner
of women for the rest of the day, and had to be sued for forgiveness.
And yet next day, when Molly and the half-breed drove away, Mrs.
Sweeney remembered that the girl had been with them nearly fifteen
years, and wept; and the agent booted a trespassing Indian from his
office with unwonted energy.
Molly, on the other hand, was as happy as a lark. Every man knows the
thrill of anticipation when he stows the gun case under the seat and
induces the pointer to curl up in the straw, just as every woman knows
the delight of an entrance to a room which her presence brightens more
than any other's. Molly experienced the same thrill, the same delight.
She had the instincts of the coquette; the confidence of inexperience;
the false ideals of a knowledge drawn from books and speculation; and
her heart had not yet awakened her conscience. She looked forward to
her own power over men, for she was intelligent, and realized the
extent both of her charms and of her knowledge. The latter was not
inextensive, for in her reading she had enjoyed the overwhelming
advantage of heredity. Heredity is a little scheme by which, to a
great extent, one recognizes knowledge, instead of acquiring it.
They drove along for some distance without speaking. The girl was too
happy and the half-breed too preoccupied to talk.
"Mike," she commanded suddenly after a time, "quit that smoking. I
don't like it."
The half-breed hesitated, narrowing his brow, and looking straight
ahead. Then he silently knocked the ashes from his pipe and slipped it
into his pocket. Molly's eyes flashed with triumphant amusement. The
game had begun. After a time the sun sank into the dark hills, and the
great shadow of Harney crept out of them.
The wagon rattled down a short incline to the broad, shallow bed of the
Cheyenne. Molly turned it aside into a little grass plat.
"We'll camp here to-night," she announced.
"There is better water two mile further, on the trail, on Fall River,"
said Lafond, without moving.
"I said we'd camp here!" repeated the girl sharply.
The half-breed descended and began to unharness the horses.
XV
IN WHICH CHEYENNE HARRY LOSES HIS PISTOL
The camp which was to be the scene of Lafond's operations and of the
girl's anticipated triumphs, lay between Ragged Top and Tom Custer. It
consisted of a double row of log cabins situated in the V of the deep
ravine. The men generally ate in the long dining-room of the hotel,
worked at prospecting in the hills, and spent their evenings in the
centrally situated Little Nugget saloon, the property of Michail Lafond.
The night of the half-breed's arrival the usual crowd was carrying on
the usual discussions on the usual subjects.
One fresh from the East entering the building would have been struck
first with the strangeness of the room. It was long and low, and on
three sides dark. Against the fourth wall was stretched tightly a
white cotton sheet, imitating plaster, in front of which stood the bar.
The bar was polished, narrow, with a foot rest in front and two towels
hanging from metal clasps just under the projecting eaves of it. It
had been brought in sections, by wagon, at considerable expense. Some
three feet behind the bar, stretched a shelf of the same height, towel
covered, on which stood four bottles in front of a little mirror. The
shelf was piled symmetrically with glasses of all shapes--tumblers,
ponies, fine-stemmed wineglasses--arranged in pyramids and squares.
They glittered in the glare of the lamps, and the indirect light from
the white sheet. A dim pink reflection was given back by the
mirror--dim and pink because the glass was draped with pink mosquito
bar. Overhead hung the sign which read, "To Trust is Bust."
Beneath the reflector of the largest lamp lounged the barkeeper reading
a paper. He had spread the paper on the bar, and, having crooked his
elbows out at wide angles around its margin, was bending his head of
straw-colored hair close over the print. He was dressed in white as to
the upper part of his body. Occasionally he read aloud in a monotone
from the paper. At other times his lips moved slowly, shaping the
invisible words as they took form in his sluggish brain.
"The latest creations in ties," he read, "are described by our buyer as
being natty effects in the narrow plaids."
Outside this glare of light from the white-dressed man, and the
glittering pyramids and squares and glasses, and the dim pink
reflections, and the white sheet imitating plaster, the rest of the
room seemed dark by contrast. Near the door and the small front
window, glowed a red-hot stove. Along the walls were ranged chairs.
In the chairs sat many men smoking. Above the men a few cheap pictures
were tacked against the rough walls. One of them represented an
abnormally slim and smooth race horse against a background of vivid
green. Another showed an equally green landscape, throwing into relief
a group of red-coated men on spider-legged horses, pursuing a huddle of
posing white hounds. One of the spider-legged horses had fallen, and
the rider, being projected horizontally forward, was suspended rigidly
in mid air, like Mohammed's coffin, and with as much apparent prospect
of coming to earth. Still another presented the sight of an
exceedingly naked woman descending from an exceedingly flat and marble
couch. One foot was on the floor, and the other knee rested still on
the flat and marble couch. It was labelled "Surprised."
Three large lamps with reflectors illuminated this part of the room.
Then came a strip of comparative dusk; then another hanging-lamp
disclosed a smooth-topped table, on which was a faro lay-out.
The men in the chairs smoked industriously and spoke seldom. The air
was thick with the smoke of strong tobacco, such as "Hand Made" and
"Lucky Strike." Very near the stove sprawled old Mizzou,
low-foreheaded, white-bearded, talking always of women and the merits
of grass-widows and school-ma'ams.
"They is nothin' like 'em!" he asserted with ever-fresh emphasis of
tone. "Back in Chillicothe, whar th' hogs an' gals is co'n-fed, they
is shore bustin'! When one of them critters comes 'round, I feels jest
like raisin' hell and puttin' a chunk under it!"
"Th' _hell_ you do!" snorted Cheyenne Harry, scowling his handsome
brows, "th' _hell_ you do! Give us a rest with yore everlasting
females." He pulled his hat over his eyes, and drew savagely on his
pipe, his right hand over the bowl, his left clasped tight under his
armpit.
Billy Knapp was telling about his mine.
"On that thar Buffalo lode," he said impressively, "I got a lead twenty
foot wide. _Twenty foot_, I say! And it holds out; it holds out a
lot. It's great. I says to them Chicago sharps, I says, 'You won't
find sech a lead as thet thar nowhere else in the Hills,' and by gravy
I believe that's right! I do for shore! An' I says to them, I says,
'It only takes a little sinkin', an' a little five stamp mill, t' put
her on a paying basis to wunst. Ain't no manner of _doubt_ of it! I
tell you it's a chance! that's what it is!'"
He breathed hard with the enthusiasm into which his words lifted him.
He vociferated, telling over and over about his twenty foot lead. He
held his great hand suspended in the air through whole sentences,
bringing it down with a mighty slap as he came to his conclusions. The
men about him listened unmoved. They believed what he said, but they
had got over being excited at it. Jack Graham, his hat on his knees,
twisted his little moustache and smiled amusedly. As the scout
appealed to him from time to time, he nodded silent assent. Over
beyond the bar of dusk, two men were staking small sums at faro. The
keen-eyed dealer was monotonously calling the cards. "All ready; all
down; hands up; jack win; queen lose!" he drawled.
In the corner nearest the door, a youth of eighteen huddled on the
floor asleep. Here and there wandered an active wire-haired dog,
bigger than a fox terrier and of different color, but with the
terrier's bright eyes and alert movements. It was a strange beast,
brown and black on the head, black on the body, badger gray on the
legs, with sharp white teeth, over which bristled gray whiskers of the
stiffness of a hair brush. As it passed the various men, it eyed them
closely, ready to wag its stump of a tail in friendship, or to circle
warily in avoidance of a kick. It was a self-reliant dog, a dog used
to taking care of itself. Men called it Peter, without abbreviation.