The decision which Cavanagh made between love and duty distinguished the
officer from the man, the soldier from the civilian. He did not hesitate
to act, and yet he suffered a mental conflict as he rode back toward the
scene of that inhuman sacrifice on the altar of greed. His heart went out
to Lee Virginia in longing. Her appealing voice still lay in his ear with
an effect like the touch of her soft lips, and his flagging horse suffered
from the unconscious pressure of his haste.
"It will be hours before any part of the sheriff's posse can reach the
falls, even though they take to the swiftest motors, and then other long
hours must intervene before I can ride down to her. Yes, at least a day
and a night must drag their slow course before I can hope to be of service
to her," and the thought drew a groan of anxiety from him. At such moments
of mental stress the trail is a torture and the mountain-side an
inexorable barrier.
Half-way to the hills he was intercepted by an old man who was at work on
an irrigating ditch beside the road. He seemed very nervous and very
inquisitive, and as he questioned the ranger his eyes were like those of a
dog that fears his master's hand. Ross wondered about this afterward, but
at the moment his mind was busy with the significance of this patient
toiler with a spade. He was a prophetic figure in the most picturesque and
sterile land of the stockman. "Here within twenty miles of this peaceful
fruit-grower," he said, "is the crowning infamy of the free-booting
cowboy. My God, what a nation we are!"
He wondered, as he rode on, whether the papers of the State would make a
jest of _this_ deed. "Will this be made the theme for caustic comment in
the Eastern press for a day, and then be forgotten?"
As his hot blood cooled he lost faith in even this sacrifice. Could
anything change the leopard West into the tameness and serenity of the ox?
"No," he decided, "nothing but death will do that. This generation, these
fierce and bloody hearts, must die; only in that way can the tradition of
violence be overcome and a new State reared."
At the foot of the toilsome, upward-winding trail he dismounted, and led
his weary horse. Over his head, and about half-way to the first hilltop,
lay a roof of fleecy vapor, faint purple in color and seamless in texture.
Through this he must pass, and it symbolized to him the line of
demarkation between the plain and the mountain, between order and
violence.
Again he rose above it, to find it a fantastic sea lit by the sun, and
glowing with pink and gold and violet. Celestial in its ethereal beauty,
it threw into still more appalling shadow the smoking altar of passion
toward which he spurred. From moment to moment the surface rose and
shifted in swift, tumultuous, yet soundless waves, breaking round
pine-clad promontories in shimmering breakers, faint, and far, and
serene.
Down through a deep canon to the south a prodigious river of mist was
rushing, a silent cataract of ashy vapor plunging to a soundless beach.
Above and beyond it the high peaks shone in radiance so pure that the
heart of the lover ached with the pain of its evanescent beauty. It was as
if he were looking across a foaming flood upon the stupendous and shining
park of some imperial potentate whose ornate and splendid country home lay
just beyond. Rocky spires rose like cathedral towers, and fortresses
abutted upon the stream. And yet in the midst of that glorified plain the
smoke of the burning rose.
Slowly he led his horse along the mountain-side, grasping with eager
desire at every changing aspect of this marvellous scene. It was
infinitely more gorgeous, more compelling, than his moonlight experience
the night before, for here reality, definite and powerful, was interfused
with mystery. These foot-hills, hitherto pleasantly precipitous, had
suddenly become grandiose. All was made over upon a mightier scale, each
rock and tree being distorted by the passing translucent clouds into a
kind of monstrous yet epic proportion.
Ghostly white ledges broke from the darker mist like fields of distant
crusted snow. Castellated crags loomed from the mystic river like
fortified islands. Cattle, silent, enormously aggrandized, emerged like
fabled beasts of the eld, and stared upon him, their jaws dripping with
dew. Bulls roared from the obscure deeps. Dead trees, with stark and
sinister arms, menaced warningly. All was as unreal as the world of pain's
delirium, and yet was as beautiful as the poet's vision; and the ranger,
feeling that he was looking upon one of Nature's rarest displays, removed
his hat in worship of it, thrilling with pride and satisfaction over the
thought that this was his domain, his to guard and preserve.
The crowning glow of mystery and grace came as he led his horse out upon a
projecting point of rocky ledge to rest. Here the cliff descended abruptly
to an enormous depth, and upon the vaporous rolling flood beneath him a
dome of darker shadow rested. At the summit of this shadow an aureole of
rainbow light, a complete and glorious circle rested, in the midst of
which his own image was flung, grotesque and gigantic.
"The Shadows of the Brocken!" he exclaimed, in ecstasy, all his
bitterness, his care, forgotten. "Now I understand Goethe's lines." In all
his life in the hills he had never before witnessed such a combination of
peak and sun and cloud and shadow.
His love for the range came back upon him with such power that tears
misted his eyes and his throat ached. "Where else will I find such scenes
as this?" he asked himself. "Where in all the lowlands could such
splendors shine? How can I leave this high world in which these wonders
come and go? I will not! Here will I bring my bride and build my home.
This is my world."
But the mist grew gray, the aureole of fire faded, the sun went down
behind the hills, and the chill of evening deepened on the trail, and as
he reapproached the scene of man's inhumanity to man the thought of
camping there beside those charred limbs called for heroic resolution. He
was hungry, too, and as the air pinched, he shivered.
"At the best, the sheriff cannot reach here before midnight," he said, and
settled down to his unsought, revolting vigil.
His one relief lay in the mental composition of a long letter to Lee
Virginia, whose life at that moment was a comfort to him. "If such purity,
such sweetness, can come from violence and vulgarity, then surely a new
and splendid State can rise even out of the ashes of these murdered men.
Perhaps this is the end of the old," he mused, "perhaps this is the
beginning of the new," and as he pondered the last faint crimson died out
of the west. "So must the hate and violence die out of America," he said,
"leaving the clear, sweet air of liberty behind."
He was near to the poet at the moment, for he was also the lover. His
allegiance to the great republic stood the test. His faith in democracy
was shaken, but not destroyed. "I will wait," he decided. "This shall be
the sign. If this deed goes unavenged, then will I put off my badge and my
uniform, and go back to the land where for a hundred years at least such
deeds as these have been impossible."
He built a fire, as night fell, to serve both as beacon and as a defence
against the cold. He felt himself weirdly remote in this vigil. From his
far height he looked abroad upon the tumbled plain as if upon an ocean
dimly perceptible yet august. "At this moment," he said, "curious and
perhaps guilty eyes are wondering what my spark of firelight may mean."
His mind went again and again to that tall old man in the ditch. What was
the meaning of his scared and sorrowful glance? Why should one so
peacefully employed at such a time and in such a place wear the look of a
hunted deer? What meant the tremor in his voice?
Was it possible that one so gentle should have taken part in this deed?
"Preposterous suspicion, and yet he had a guilty look."
He was not a believer in ghosts, but he came nearer to a fear of the dark
that night than ever before in his life. He brought his horse close to the
fire for company, and was careful not to turn his back upon the dead. A
corpse lying peacefully would not have produced this overpowering horror.
He had seen battle-fields, but this pile of mangled limbs conquered even
the hardened campaigner. He shivered each time his memory went back to
what he had first looked upon--the charred hand, the helpless heel.
From his high hill of meditation he reviewed the history of the West.
Based in bloody wars between the primitive races, and between the trappers
and their allies, the land had passed through a thin adumbration of
civilization as the stockmen drove out the buffalo and their hunters.
Vigilantes, sheriff's posses (and now and again the regular army) had
swept over these grassy swells on errands of retributory violence, and so
the territory had been divided at last into populous States. Then
politics, the great national game, had made of them a power, with Senators
to represent a mere handful of miners and herdsmen. In the Congress of the
United States these commonwealths had played their unscrupulous games,
trading for this and for that local appropriation. Happily in some
instances these Senators had been higher than their State, but in other
cases they represented only too loyally the violent and conscienceless
cow-man or lumber king, and now, as Redfield had said, the land-boomer was
to have his term. The man who valued residents, not Wild West performers,
was about to govern and despoil; this promoter, almost as selfish as the
cattle king, was about to advance the State along the lines of _his_
conception of civilization; and so, perhaps, this monstrous deed, this
final inexcusable inhuman offence against law and humanity, was to stand
as a monument dividing the old from the new. Such, at least, was the
ranger's hope.
At last, far in the night, he heard the snort of a horse and the sound of
voices. The law (such as it was) was creeping up the mountain-side in the
person of the sheriff of Chauvenet County, and was about to relieve the
ranger from his painful responsibility as guardian of the dead.
At last he came, this officer of the law, attended (like a Cheyenne chief)
by a dozen lesser warriors of various conditions and kinds, but among
them--indeed, second only to the sheriff--was Hugh Redfield, the Forest
Supervisor, hot and eager with haste.
As they rode up to the fire, the officer called out: "Howdy, ranger! How
about it?"
Ross stated briefly, succinctly, what he had discovered; and as he talked
other riders came up the hill and gathered closely around to listen in
wordless silence--in guilty silence, the ranger could not help believing.
The sheriff, himself a cattle-man, heard Cavanagh without comment till he
had ended with a gesture. "And there they are; I turn them over to you
with vast relief. I am anxious to go back to my own peaceful world, where
such things do not happen."
The sheriff removed his hat and wiped his brow, then swore with a mutter
of awe. "Well, by God, this is the limit! You say there were three
bodies?"
"I lacked the courage to sort them out. I've been in battle, Mr. Sheriff,
and I've seen dead men tumbled in all shapes, but someway this took the
stiffening out of my knees. I rode away and left them. I don't care to see
them again. My part of this work is done."
Redfield spoke. "Sheriff Van Horne, you and I have been running cattle in
this country for nearly thirty years, and we've witnessed all kinds of
shooting and several kinds of hanging, but when it comes to chopping and
burning men, I get off. I shall personally offer a reward of a thousand
dollars for the apprehension of these miscreants, and I hope you'll make
it your solemn duty to hunt them to earth."
"You won't have far to go," remarked Ross, significantly.
"What do you mean?" asked the sheriff.
"I mean this slaughter, like the others that have taken place, was the
work of cattle-men who claim this range. Their names are known to us
all."
"Can it be possible!" exclaimed Redfield, looking round at the silent
throng, and in the wavering light certain eyes seemed to shift and fall.
"In what essential does it differ from the affair over on the Red Desert?"
demanded Cavanagh. "Who would kill these poor sheep-herders but cattle-men
warring for the grass on which we stand?"
"But they would not dare to do such work themselves."
"No one else would do it. Hired assassins would not chop and burn. Hate
and greed were both involved in this butchery--hate and greed made mad by
drink. I tell you, the men who did this are less than a day's ride of
where we stand."
A silence followed--so deep a silence that the ranger was convinced of the
fact that in the circle of his listeners stood those who, if they had not
shared in the slaughter, at least knew the names of the guilty men.
At last the sheriff spoke, this time with a sigh. "I hope you're all
wrong, Cavanagh. I'd hate to think any constituent of mine had sanctioned
this job. Give me that lantern, Curtis."
The group of ranchers dismounted, and followed the sheriff over to the
grewsome spot; but Redfield stayed with the ranger.
"Have you any suspicion, Ross?"
"No, hardly a suspicion. However, you know as well as I that this was not
a sudden outbreak. This deed was planned. It represents the feeling of
many cattle-men--in everything but the extra horror of its execution.
_That_ was the work of drunken, infuriated men. But I am more deeply
concerned over Miss Wetherford's distress. Did she reach you by telephone
to-night?"
"No. What's the trouble?"
"Her mother is down again. I telephoned her, and she asked me to come to
her, but I cannot go, for I have a case of smallpox up on the hill. Ambro,
the Basque herder, is down with it, and another herder is up there alone
with him. I must go back to them. But meanwhile I wish you would go to the
Fork and see what you can do for her."
His voice, filled with emotion, touched Redfield, and he said: "Can't I go
to the relief of the herder?"
"No, you must not think of it; you are a man of a family. But if you can
find any one who has had the smallpox send him up; the old herder who is
nursing the patient is not strong, and may drop any moment. Then it's up
to me."
The men came back to the camp-fire conversing in low voices, some of them
cursing in tones of awe. One or two of them were small farmers from Deer
Creek, recent comers to the State, or men with bunches of milk-cows, and
to them this deed was awesome.
The sheriff followed, saying: "Well, there's nothing to do but wait till
morning. The rest of you men better go home. You can't be of any use
here."
For more than three hours the sheriff and Redfield sat with the ranger
waiting for daylight, and during this time the name of every man in the
region was brought up and discussed. Among others, Ross mentioned the old
man in the ditch.
"He wouldn't hurt a bumblebee!" declared the sheriff. "He's got a bunch of
cattle, but he's the mildest old man in the State. He's the last rancher
in the country to even stand for such work. What made you mention him?"
"I passed him as I was riding back," replied Cavanagh, "and he had a
scared look in his eyes."
The sheriff grunted. "You imagined all that. The old chap always has a
kind of meek look."
Cavanagh, tired, hungry, and rebellious, waited until the first faint
light in the east announced the dawn; then he rose, and, stretching his
hand out toward it, said: "Here comes the new day. Will it be a new day to
the State, or is it to be the same old round of savagery?"
Redfield expressed a word of hope, and in that spirit the ranger mounted
and rode away back toward the small teepee wherein Wetherford was doing
his best to expiate his past--a past that left him old and friendless at
fifty-five. The sheriff and his men took up the work of vengeance which
fell to them as officers of the law.
It was nearly noon of a glorious day as Cavanagh, very tired and very
hungry, rode up to the sheep-herder's tent. Wetherford was sitting in the
sun calmly smoking his pipe, the sheep were feeding not far away, attended
by the dog, and an air of peace covered his sunlit rocky world.
"How is the Basque?" asked the ranger.