"coureur-de-bois," ranging far southward from the Great Lakes, came
upon it and its name. Promptly identifying lost soul with purgatory
he called it in turn "_La Rivière-de-la-Purgatoire_," the river of
purgatory, as if to say, "All hope abandon, ye who enter here." In
turn the name supplanted the other and abided.
When the cowboy followed the pioneer, knowing neither French nor
Spanish, he onomatopoetized the last appellation into "_The Picket
Wire_," which was as near as he could come to the pronunciation of
Purgatoire. The Spanish passed, the French disappeared, the cowboy
and his like remained. Picket Wire it became and Picket Wire it will
remain to the end of the chapter. There is no natural descent from
lost souls to Picket Wire, though many lost souls may have been lost
because of picket wires, but that is how it came to be. And the
original disaster was not entirely forgotten either. It was
perpetuated in the butte which became "Spanish Mesa." France, alas,
coming between, had no memorial.
Well, not being a purgatorial Styx, after a time the valley and the
ravine were both explored. The hills were tapped in fruitless search
for precious metals, which were not found, and then it was abandoned
to the hunter. When the railroad came the Picket Wire had been first
studied in the hope of finding a practicable way over the mountains,
but the ravine on the other side of the mesa had been found to offer
a shorter and more practicable route. And, by the way, this ravine,
taking its name from the little brook far down in its narrows, was
known as the "Kicking Horse"; so named, no one knew why, by the
Indians and freely translated by the white men. At any rate there
was at least some association between Picket Wire and Kicking Horse,
as the experienced know!
So the railroad ran up the ravine and the Picket Wire was left still
virgin to the assaults of man. But the day came when it was
despoiled of its hitherto long standing, unravished innocence. Axes
were laid to the roots of the trees, drills were driven into the
rocks of the hills. Crashed down were the pines of the centuries,
crushed were paleocosmic rocks with new and strange fires. Scarred
and gashed and torn and ripped were the grass-covered hills. Huge
expanses of yellow clay were revealed beneath the richer deposits
whereon the sod had flourished.
Shouts of men, cracking of whips, trampling of horses, groaning of
wheels, wordless but vocal protests of beasts of burden mingled with
the ringing of axes, the detonations of dynamite. The whistle of
engines and the roar of steam filled the valley. Under the direction
of engineers, a huge mound of earth arose across its narrowest part,
nearest a shoulder, or spur, of the mesa reaching westward. No more
should the silver Picket Wire flow unvexed on its way to the sea. It
was to be dammed.
All that the huge, hot inferno of baked plain, where sage brush and
buffalo grass alone grow, needed to make it burgeon with wheat and
corn was water. The little Picket Wire, which had meandered and
sparkled and chattered on at its own sweet will was now to be held
until it filled a great lake-like reservoir in the hills back of the
new earth dam. Then through skillfully located irrigation ditches
the water was to be given to the millions of hungry little wheatlets
and cornlets, which would clamor for a drink. The fierce sun was no
longer to work its unthwarted will in burning up the prairie.
The sage brush and buffalo grass were to go like the Indian before
the march of civilization. Nature is more refined than man. The
liquid that settled the Indian was accurately known as "firewater."
Incidentally, the same compound took a great many whites, not all the
baser sort either. But that which was to sweep away the greasy sage
brush and the coarse, rank grass, there being no longer any buffalo,
was the water of life which came down from heaven. At least the snow
caps of the range whence the Picket Wire flowed, and the great clouds
that once in a long time swept over the peaks and dropped their
burden on the bluff shoulders of the mountains, were as near heaven
as it is possible to get on this earth.
With the promise of water on the plain beyond, Coronado sprang into
sudden recrudescence of newer and more vigorous life. In the
language of the West it "boomed." The railroad had been a forlorn
branch running up into the mountains and ending nowhere. Its first
builders had been daunted by difficulties and lack of money, but as
soon as the great dam was projected, which would open several hundred
thousand acres for cultivation and serve as an inspiration in its
practical results to other similar attempts, people came swarming
into the country buying up the land, the price for acreage steadily
mounting. The railroad accordingly found it worth while to take up
the long-abandoned construction work of mounting the range and
crossing it. Men suddenly observed that it was the shortest distance
between two cardinal points, and one of the great transcontinental
railways bought it and began improving it to replace its original
rather unsatisfactory line.
The long wooden trestle which crossed the broad, sandy depression in
front of the town, the bed of the ancient river, through which the
Picket Wire and further down its affluent, the Kicking Horse, flowed
humbly and modestly, was being replaced by a great viaduct of steel.
Far up the gorge past the other side of the Spanish Mesa another
higher trestle had already been replaced by a splendid steel arch. A
siding had been built near the ravine, a path made to the foot of the
mesa, and arrangements were being made to run a local train up from
the town when all was completed to give the people an opportunity to
ride up the gorge and see the great pile of rock, on which enterprise
was already planning the desecration of a summer hotel, the blasphemy
of an amusement park!
XIX
THE NEW RODMAN
Up the valley of the Picket Wire one morning in early fall came a
young man roughly dressed like the average cow-puncher from the
ranches further north. He rode well, not with the carelessness and
security and mastery of the cowboy, yet with a certain attention to
detail and a niceness that betrayed him to the real rough-rider of
the range. Just as the clothes he wore, although they had been
bought at the same general store where the ordinary cattleman's
outfit was purchased, were worn in a little different way that again
betrayed him. One look into the face of the man, albeit his mustache
and beard hid the revealing outlines of mouth and chin, sufficed to
show that here was no ordinary cow-puncher.
He rode boldly enough among the rocks of the trail and along the
rough road, which had been made by the wheels of the wagons and hoofs
of the horses. Yet a close observer would have seen a certain
hesitancy in his approach. He checked his horse from time to time
and looked back. A bold man determined on a course does not check
his horse and look back, yet no one who knew him could accuse this
horseman of timidity. There was about him some of the quiet
confidence begot of achievement, some of the power which knowledge
brings and which success emphasizes, yet there were uncertainty and
hesitation, too, as if all had not been plain sailing on his course.
To be the resident engineer charged with the construction of a great
earth dam like that across the Picket Wire, requires knowledge of a
great many things beside the technicalities of the profession, chief
among them being a knowledge of men. As the newcomer threw his leg
over the saddle-horn, stepped lightly to the ground, dropping the
reins of his pony to the soil at the same time, Vandeventer, the
engineer in question, looked at him with approval. Some subtle
recognition of the man's quality came into his mind. Here was one
who seemed distinctly worth while, one who stood out above the
ordinary applicant for jobs who came in contact with Vandeventer, as
the big mesa rose above the foothill. However, the chief kept these
things to himself as he stood looking and waiting for the other man
to begin:
"Are you the resident engineer?" asked the newcomer quietly, yet
there was a certain nervous note in his voice, which the alert and
observant engineer found himself wondering at, such a strain as might
come when a man is about to enter upon a course of action, to take a
strange or perilous step, such a little shiver in his speech as a
naked man might feel in his body before he plunged into the icy
waters of the wintry sea.
"I am."
"I'd like a job."
"We have no use for cow-punchers on this dam."
"I'm not exactly a cow-puncher, sir."
"What are you?"
"Look here," said the man, smiling a little, "I've been out in this
country long enough to learn that all that it is necessary to know
about a man is 'Will he make good?' Let us say that I am nothing and
let it go at that."
"Out of nothing, nothing comes," laughed the engineer, genuinely
amused.
Some men would have been angry, but Vandeventer rather enjoyed this.
"I didn't say I was good for nothing," answered the other man,
smiling in turn, though he was evidently serious enough in his
application.
"Well, what can you do? Are you an engineer?"
"We'll pass over the last question, too, if you please. I think I
could carry a rod if I had a chance and there was a vacancy."
"Umph," said Vandeventer, "you think you could?"
"Yes, sir. Give me a trial."
"All right, take that rod over there and go out on the edge of the
dam where that stake shows, and I'll take a sight on it."
Now there are two ways--a hundred perhaps--of holding a rod; one
right way and all the others wrong. A newcomer invariably grasps it
tightly in his fist and jams it down, conceiving that the only way to
get it plumb and hold it steady. The experienced man strives to
balance it erect on its own base and holds it with the tips of his
fingers on either side in an upright position, swaying it very
slightly backward and forward. He does it unconsciously, too.
Vandeventer had been standing by a level already set up when the
newcomer arrived and the rod was lying on the ground beside it. The
latter picked it up without a word, walked rapidly to the stake,
loosened the target, and balanced the rod upon the stake. As soon as
Vandeventer observed that his new seeker after work held the rod in
the right way, he did not trouble to take the sight. He threw his
head backward and raised his hand, beckoningly.
"It so happens," he began, "that I can give you a job. The rodman
next in the line of promotion has been given the level. One of the
men went East last night. You can have the job, which is----"
"I don't care anything about the details," said the man quickly and
gladly. "It's the work I want."
"Well, you'll get what the rest do," said Vandeventer. "Now, as you
justly remarked, I have found that it is not considered polite out
here to inquire too closely into a man's antecedents and I have
learned to respect local customs, but we must have some name by which
to identify you, make out your pay check, and----"
"Do you pay in checks?"
"No, but you have to sign a check."
"Well, call me Smith."
Vandeventer threw back his head and laughed. The other man turned a
little red. The chief engineer observed the glint in his new
friend's eye.
"I'm not exactly laughing at you," he explained, "but at the singular
lack of inventiveness of the American. We have at least thirty
Smiths out of two hundred men on our pay-roll, and it is a bit
confusing. Would you mind selecting some other name?"
"If it's all the same to you," announced the newcomer amusedly--the
chief's laughter was infectious--"I'm agreeable to Jones, or Brown,
or----"
"We have numbers of all of those, too."
"Really," said the man hesitatingly, "I haven't given the subject any
thought."
"What about some of your family names?"
"That gives me an idea," said the newcomer, who decided to use his
mother's name, "you can call me Roberts."
"And I suppose John for the prefix?"
"John will do as well as any, I am sure."
"We have about fifty Johns. Every Smith appears to have been born
John."
"How did you arrange it?" asked the other with daring freedom, for a
rodman does not enter conversation on terms of equality with the
chief engineer.
"I got a little pocket dictionary down at the town with a list of
names and I went through that list with the Smiths, dealing them out
in order. Well, that will do for your name," he said, making a
memorandum in the little book he pulled out of his flannel shirt
pocket. He turned to a man who had come up to the level. "Smith,"
he said--"by the way this is Mr. Claude Smith, Mr. Roberts--here's
your new rodman. You know your job, Roberts. Get to work."
And that is how Bertram Meade, a few months after the failure of the
great bridge, once again entered the ranks of engineers, beginning,
as was necessary and inevitable, very low down in the scale.
XX
THE VALLEY OF DECISION
Much water had run under the bridges of the world and incidentally
over the wreck of the International, since that bitter farewell
between Bertram Meade and Helen Illingworth over the grave of the old
engineer. Life had seemed to hold absolutely nothing for Meade as he
knelt by that low mound and watched the woman walk slowly away with
many a backward glance, with many a pause, obviously reluctant. He
realized that the lifting of a hand would have called her back. How
hard it was for him to remain quiet; and, finally, before she
disappeared and before she took her last look at him, to turn his
back resolutely as if to mark the termination of the situation.
Father, fame, reputation, love, taken away at one and the same
moment! A weaker man might have sent life to follow. In the
troubled days after the fall of the bridge, his father's death, the
inquests, his testimony and evidence freely given, and that parting,
something like despair had filled the young engineer's heart. Life
held nothing. He debated with himself whether it would not be better
to end it than to live it. He envied his father his broken heart.
Singularly enough, the thing that made life of least value was the
thing that kept him from throwing it away--the woman.
Striving to analyze the complex emotions that centered about his
losses he was forced to admit, although it seemed a sign of weakness,
that love of woman was greater than love of fame, that in the balance
one girl outweighed bridge and father. That the romance was ended
was what made life insupportable. Yet the faint, vague possibility
that it might be resumed if he could find some way to show his
worthiness was what made him cling to it.
Of course he could have showed without much difficulty and beyond
peradventure at the inquest over Abbott and the investigation into
the cause of the failure of the bridge--unfortunate but too
obvious--that the frightful and fatal error in the design was not his
and that he had protested against the accepted plan, if only he had
found the letter addressed to his father. But that he would never do
and the letter had not been discovered anyway. He did not even
regret the bold falsehood he had uttered or the practical subornation
of perjury of which he had been guilty in drawing out and accepting
and emphasizing Shurtliff's testimony.
There had been no inquest over his father's death. The autopsy had
showed clearly heart failure. He had not been compelled to go on the
witness stand and under oath as to that. Although, if that had been
demanded, he must needs have gone through with it. Indeed so prompt
and public had been his avowals of responsibility that he had not
been seriously questioned thereon. He had left nothing uncertain.
There was nothing concealed.
He had inherited a competence from his father. It was indeed much
more than he or anyone had expected. He had realized enough ready
money from the sale of certain securities for his present needs. The
remainder he placed in Shurtliff's care and a few days after the
funeral, having settled everything possible, he took a train for the
West.
The whole world was before him, and he was measurably familiar with
many portions of it. He could have buried himself in out-of-the-way
corners of far countries, in strange continents. These possibilities
did not attract him. He wanted to get away from, out of touch with,
the life he had led. He wished to go to some place where he could be
practically alone, where he could have time to recover his poise, to
think things out, to plan his future, to try to devise a means for
rehabilitation, if it were possible. He could do that just as well,
perhaps better, in America than in any place else. And there was
another reason that held him to his native land. He would still
tread the same soil, breathe the same air, with the woman. He did
not desire to put seas between them.
He swore to himself that the freedom he had offered her, that he had
indeed forced upon her unwilling and rejecting it, should be no empty
thing so far as he was concerned. He would leave her absolutely
untrammeled. He would not write to her or communicate with her in
any way. He would not even seek to hear about her and of course as
she would not know whither he had gone or where he was she could not
communicate with him. The silence that had fallen between them
should not be broken even forever unless and until---- Ah, yes, he
could not see any way to complete that "unless and until" at first,
but perhaps after a while he might.
He knew exactly where he would go. Dick Winters, another classmate
and devoted friend at Cambridge, had gone out West shortly after
graduation. He had a big cattle ranch miles from a railroad in a
young southwestern state. Winters, like the other member of the
youthful triumvirate, Rodney, was a bachelor. He could be absolutely
depended upon. He had often begged Meade to visit him. The engineer
would do it now. He knew Winters would respect his moods, that he
would let him severely alone, that he could get on a horse and ride
into the hills and do what he pleased, think out his thoughts
undisturbed.
To Winters, therefore, he had gone. He had an idea that his future
would be outside of engineering. Indeed he had put all thought of
his chosen profession out of his mind and heart, at least so he
fancied. Yet, spending an idle forenoon in Chicago waiting for the
departure of the western train, he found himself irresistibly drawn
to the great steel-framed structures, the sky-scrapers rising gaunt
and rigid above the other buildings of the city. He remembered that
Chicago was the home of the tall building, that in it the first great
constructions that were to make American engineering famous had
astonished the world, and he took deep interest in comparing the
older buildings with the newer. Again the train was delayed and held
up for half an hour just as it reached the Mississippi River. He
left his seat in the dining-car, his dinner uneaten on the table, to
go out and inspect the bridge during the half-hour that the "Limited"
lay idle. The next day some enormous irrigation works in western
Nebraska so engrossed his attention and aroused his interest that in
spite of himself he stopped over between trains to see them. And
these actions were typical.
Yet after every one of these excursions back into his own field, his
conscience smote him. Was he never to get away from this
engineering? Was there nothing else for him but brick and stone,
steel and concrete, designs and plans and undertaking and
accomplishment in the world? Because it was the thing that he must
abandon and put out of his mind, engineering seemed the only thing he
cared for. There would be no engineering on that ranch on the slopes
of the range. He could settle the question there.
Winters was glad to see him. He and Rodney and Meade had been the
warmest of friends. Of course Meade could not tell Rodney the truth
on account of his newspaper connections, but he decided finally that
he could and would tell Winters under assurance of absolute secrecy.
For one thing the big cattleman had bluntly refused to credit his
friend's first statements; and, when he at last heard the truth, he
blamed him roundly while he appreciated fully the nobleness of his
self-sacrifice. The clear-headed, practical Winters put it this way:
Meade was capable of doing splendid service to humanity as an
engineer and bade fair to be even greater than his father, yet for
the sake of the fame of a dead man, to whom after all it would matter
little, he had thrown away that splendid opportunity!
This was a new thought to Meade and a disturbing one. Unfortunately,
as even Winters was forced to acknowledge, the suggestion came too
late. The course had been entered upon. It would be cowardly to try
to change it now. Indeed it would have been impossible with the
disappearance of the written protests and notes. Even if Shurtliff
had been willing, no one would have believed a delayed retraction and
explanation, and Shurtliff would not have been willing Meade well
knew. Neither for that matter was Meade himself. He was glad that
the affair had been settled and would not change it now even though
Winters' rough-and-ready presentation of the situation disquieted him.
Winters, who saw how greatly overwrought and unstrung his friend was,
contented himself with the assertion. He did not press the point or
argue it with him. He rested quietly confident that matters would
right themselves some way in the long run. He treated Meade exactly
right. He left him to his own devices. He did not force his company
upon him. Sometimes the engineer would mount a horse---and all at
the ranch were at his disposal--and would ride away into the woods
and mountains with a camping outfit. Sometimes he would be gone for
several days, coming back white and haggard and exhausted but victor
in some hard battle fought out alone.
Before Meade had left New York he had deposited a sufficient sum of
money with one of the leading florists there and on every Saturday a
box of the rarest and most beautiful flowers was delivered namelessly
to Helen Illingworth. She knew the florist from whom they came but
never questioned him. She divined that they came from Meade in the
absence of any card. She did not make the slightest effort, however,
to confirm that conclusion or find out how or why they were sent so
regularly. She just took the flowers to her heart, wept over them,
kissed them, and loved them; and every time they came she held her
head higher.
One day there came to the ranch a letter to Winters from Rodney, full
of friendly chat and pleasant reminiscence.
"Meade has disappeared absolutely," wrote Rodney in closing. "Even
Miss Illingworth, to whom he was reported engaged and upon whom I
have called occasionally, says she does not know his whereabouts,
although she confided to me, knowing my friendship for him, that a
New York florist sends her flowers every week, which she knows could
come only from him. Of course you saw in the papers his connection
with the tragedy and failure of the International? I happened to be
the man to whom he made the admission of the error in his
calculations. Although his frank statement was corroborated by that
of the older Meade's private secretary, I have never been able to
believe it, neither does Miss Illingworth. I know Bert, and so does
she. We can't accept even his own testimony. We have been working
together to establish the truth, but with very faint prospects of
success so far. There's some tremendous mystery about it. I have
thought that maybe Meade might have come to you. If he has show him
this letter and beg him to tell us the truth at any rate."
Winters passed the letter over to Meade without comment. The
engineer read it with passionate eagerness. He was hungry for any
news of Helen Illingworth. The flowers were being received. She had
divined whence they came. That was something. And Rodney was
calling upon her. A sharp pang of jealousy shot through him at that,
although he knew there was no reason. Dear old Rodney! He could see
his grave face, his disapproving manner, his air of unbelief, as he
had taken down Meade's words in the office that tragic day.
Of course, Helen Illingworth was not a recluse as he was. She
mingled in society. She took up life with its demands. She entered
into its pleasures and fulfilled its duties. He was jealous of
everyone who might come in contact with her, but he knew the names of
none except Rodney.