REALITY IS WEIGHED AND FOUND WANTING
Still dreaming her dreams, still featuring herself as the star of many
adventures, Lorraine followed the brakeman out of the dusty day coach
and down the car steps to the platform of the place called Echo, Idaho.
I can only guess at what she expected to find there in the person of a
cattle-king father, but whatever it was she did not find it. No
father, of any type whatever, came forward to claim her. In spite of
her "Western" experience she looked about her for a taxi, or at least a
streetcar. Even in the wilds of Western melodrama one could hear the
clang of street-car gongs warning careless autoists off the track.
After the train had hooted and gone on around an absolutely
uninteresting low hill of yellow barrenness dotted with stunted sage,
it was the silence that first impressed Lorraine disagreeably. Echo,
Idaho, was a very poor imitation of all the Western sets she had ever
seen. True, it had the straggling row of square-fronted, one-story
buildings, with hitch rails, but the signs painted across the fronts
were absolutely common. Any director she had ever obeyed would have
sent for his assistant director and would have used language which a
lady must not listen to. Behind the store and the post-office and the
blacksmith shop, on the brow of the low hill around whose point the
train had disappeared, were houses with bay windows and porches
absolutely out of keeping with the West. So far as Lorraine could see,
there was not a log cabin in the whole place.
The hitch rails were empty, and there was not a cowboy in sight.
Before the post-office a terribly grimy touring car stood with its
running-boards loaded with canvas-covered suitcases. Three goggled,
sunburned women in ugly khaki suits were disconsolately drinking soda
water from bottles without straws, and a goggled, red-faced,
angry-looking man was jerking impatiently at the hood of the machine.
Lorraine and her suitcase apparently excited no interest whatever in
Echo, Idaho.
The station agent was carrying two boxes of oranges and a crate of
California cabbages in out of the sun, and a limp individual in blue
gingham shirt and dirty overalls had shouldered the mail sack and was
making his way across the dusty, rut-scored street to the post-office.
Two questions and two brief answers convinced her that the station
agent did not know Britton Hunter,--which was strange, unless this
happened to be a very new agent. Lorraine left him to his cabbages and
followed the man with the mail sack.
At the post-office the anaemic clerk came forward, eyeing her with
admiring curiosity. Lorraine had seen anaemic young men all her life,
and the last three years had made her perfectly familiar with that look
in a young man's eyes. She met it with impatient disfavour founded
chiefly upon the young man's need of a decent hair-cut, a less flowery
tie and a tailored suit. When he confessed that he did not know Mr
Britton Hunter by sight he ceased to exist so far as Lorraine was
concerned. She decided that he also was new to the place and therefore
perfectly useless to her.
The postmaster himself--Lorraine was cheered by his spectacles, his
shirt sleeves, and his chin whiskers, which made him look the part--was
better informed. He, too, eyed her curiously when she said "My father,
Mr Britton Hunter," but he made no comment on the relationship. He
gave her a telegram and a letter from the General Delivery. The
telegram, she suspected, was the one she had sent to her dad announcing
the date of her arrival. The postmaster advised her to get a "livery
rig" and drive out to the ranch, since it might be a week or two before
any one came in from the Quirt. Lorraine thanked him graciously and
departed for the livery stable.
The man in charge there chewed tobacco meditatively and told her that
his teams were all out. If she was a mind to wait over a day or two,
he said, he might maybe be able to make the trip. Lorraine took a long
look at the structure which he indicated as the hotel.
"I think I'll walk," she said calmly.
"_Walk?_" The stableman stopped chewing and stared at her. "It's some
consider'ble of a walk. It's all of eighteen mile--I dunno but twenty,
time y'get to the house."
"I have frequently walked twenty-five or thirty miles. I am a member
of the Sierra Club in Los Angeles. We seldom take hikes of less than
twenty miles. If you will kindly tell me which road I must take----"
"There she is," the man stated flatly, and pointed across the railroad
track to where a sandy road drew a yellowish line through the sage,
evidently making for the hills showing hazily violet in the distance.
Those hills formed the only break in the monotonous gray landscape, and
Lorraine was glad that her journey would take her close to them.
"Thank you so much," she said coldly and returned to the station. In
the small lavatory of the depot waiting room she exchanged her slippers
for a pair of moderately low-heeled shoes which she had at the last
minute of packing tucked into her suitcase, put a few extra articles
into her rather smart travelling bag, left the suitcase in the
telegraph office and started. Not another question would she ask of
Echo, Idaho, which was flatter and more insipid than the drinking water
in the tin "cooler" in the waiting room. The station agent stood with
his hands on his hips and watched her cross the track and start down
the road, pardonably astonished to see a young woman walk down a road
that led only to the hills twenty miles away, carrying her luggage
exactly as if her trip was a matter of a block or two at most.
The bag was rather heavy and as she went on it became heavier. She
meant to carry it slung across her shoulder on a stick as soon as she
was well away from the prying eyes of Echo's inhabitants. Later, if
she felt tired, she could easily hide it behind a bush along the road
and send one of her father's cowboys after it. The road was very dusty
and carried the wind-blown traces of automobile tires. Some one would
surely overtake her and give her a ride before she walked very far.
For the first half hour she believed that she was walking on level
ground, but when she looked back there was no sign of any town behind
her. Echo had disappeared as completely as if it had been swallowed.
Even the unseemly bay-windowed houses on the hill had gone under. She
walked for another half hour and saw only the gray sage stretching all
around her. The hills looked farther away than when she started.
Still, that beaten road must lead somewhere. Two hours later she began
to wonder why this particular road should be so unending and so empty.
Never in her life before had she walked for two hours without seeming
to get anywhere, or without seeing any living human.
Both shoulders were sore from the weight of the bag on the stick, but
the sagebushes looked so exactly alike that she feared she could not
describe the particular spot where the cowboys would find her bag,
wherefore she carried it still. She was beginning to change hands very
often when the wind came.
Just where or how that wind sprang up she did not know. Suddenly it
was whooping across the sage and flinging up clouds of dust from the
road. To Lorraine, softened by years of southern California weather,
it seemed to blow straight off an ice field, it was so cold.
After an interminable time which measured three hours on her watch, she
came to an abrupt descent into a creek bed, down the middle of which
the creek itself was flowing swiftly. Here the road forked, a rough,
little-used trail keeping on up the creek, the better travelled road
crossing and climbing the farther bank. Lorraine scarcely hesitated
before she chose the main trail which crossed the creek.
From the creek the trail she followed kept climbing until Lorraine
wondered if there would ever be a top. The wind whipped her narrow
skirts and impeded her, tugged at her hat, tingled her nose and watered
her eyes. But she kept on doggedly, disgustedly, the West, which she
had seen through the glamour of swift-blooded Romance, sinking lower
and lower in her estimation. Nothing but jack rabbits and little,
twittery birds moved through the sage, though she watched hungrily for
horsemen.
Quite suddenly the gray landscape glowed with a palpitating radiance,
unreal, beautiful beyond expression. She stopped, turned to face the
west and stared awestruck at one of those flaming sunsets which makes
the desert land seem but a gateway into the ineffable glory beyond the
earth. That the high-piled, gorgeous cloud-bank presaged a
thunderstorm she never guessed; and that a thunderstorm may be a
deadly, terrifying peril she never had quite believed. Her mother had
told of people being struck by lightning, but Lorraine could not
associate lightning with death, especially in the West, where men
usually died by shooting, lynching, or by pitching over a cliff.
The wind hushed as suddenly as it had whooped. Warned by the twinkling
lights far behind her--lights which must be the small part at last
visible of Echo, Idaho--Lorraine went on. She had been walking
steadily for four hours, and she must surely have come nearly twenty
miles. If she ever reached the top of the hill, she believed that she
would see her father's ranch just beyond.
The afterglow had deepened to dusk when she came at last to the highest
point of that long grade. Far ahead loomed a cluster of square, black
objects which must be the ranch buildings of the Quirt, and Lorraine's
spirits lightened a little. What a surprise her father and all his
cowboys would have when she walked in upon them! It was almost worth
the walk, she told herself hearteningly. She hoped that dad had a good
cook. He would wear a flour-sack apron, naturally, and would be tall
and lean, or else very fat. He would be a comedy character, but she
hoped he would not be the grouchy kind, which, though very funny when
he rampages around on the screen, might be rather uncomfortable to meet
when one is tired and hungry and out of sorts. But of course the
crankiest of comedy cooks would be decently civil to _her_. Men always
were, except directors who are paid for their incivility.
A hollow into which she walked in complete darkness and in silence,
save the gurgling of another stream, hid from sight the shadowy
semblance of houses and barns and sheds. Their disappearance slumped
her spirits again, for without them she was no more than a solitary
speck in the vast loneliness. Their actual nearness could not comfort
her. She was seized with a reasonless, panicky fear that by the time
she crossed the stream and climbed the hill beyond they would no longer
be there where she had seen them. She was lifting her skirts to wade
the creek when the click of hoofs striking against rocks sent her
scurrying to cover in a senseless fear.
"I learned this act from the jack rabbits," she rallied herself
shakily, when she was safely hidden behind a sagebush whose pungency
made her horribly afraid that she might sneeze, which would be too
ridiculous.
"Some of dad's cowboys, probably, but still they _may_ be bandits."
If they were bandits they could scarcely be out banditting, for the two
horsemen were talking in ordinary, conversational tones as they rode
leisurely down to the ford. When they passed Lorraine, the horse
nearest her shied against the other and was sworn at parenthetically
for a fool. Against the skyline Lorraine saw the rider's form bulk
squatty and ungraceful, reminding her of an actor whom she knew and did
not like. It was that resemblance perhaps which held her quiet instead
of following her first impulse to speak to them and ask them to carry
her to the house.
The horses stopped with their forefeet in the water and drooped heads
to drink thirstily. The riders continued their conversation.
"--and as I says time and again, they ain't big enough to fight the
outfit, and the quicker they git out the less lead they'll carry under
their hides when they do go. What they want to try an' hang on for,
beats me. Why, it's like setting into a poker game with a five-cent
piece! They ain't got my sympathy. I ain't got any use for a damn
fool, no way yuh look at it."
"Well, there's the TJ--they been here a long while, and they ain't
packin' any lead, and they ain't getting out."
"Well, say, lemme tell yuh something. The TJ'll git theirs and git it
right. Drink all night, would yuh?" He swore long and fluently at his
horse, spurred him through the shallows, and the two rode on up the
hill, their voices still mingled in desultory argument, with now and
then an oath rising clearly above the jumble of words.
They may have been law-abiding citizens riding home, to families that
were waiting supper for them, but Lorraine crept out from behind her
sagebush, sneezing and thanking her imitation of the jack rabbits.
Whoever they were, she was not sorry she had let them ride on. They
might be her father's men, and they might have been very polite and
chivalrous to her. But their voices and their manner of speaking had
been rough; and it is one thing, Lorraine reflected, to mingle with
made-up villains--even to be waylaid and kidnapped and tied to trees
and threatened with death--but it is quite different to accost
rough-speaking men in the dark when you know they are not being rough
to suit the director of the scene.
She was so absorbed in trying to construct a range of war or something
equally thrilling from the scrap of conversation she had heard that she
reached the hilltop in what seemed a very few minutes of climbing. The
sky was becoming overcast. Already the stars to the west were blotted
out, and the absolute stillness of the atmosphere frightened her more
than the big, dark wilderness itself. It seemed to her exactly as
though the earth was holding its breath and waiting for something
terrible to happen. The vague bulk of buildings was still some
distance ahead, and when a rumble like the deepest notes of a pipe
organ began to fill all the air, Lorraine thrust her grip under a bush
and began to run, her soggy shoes squashing unpleasantly on the rough
places in the road.
Lorraine had seen many stage storms and had thrilled ecstatically to
the mimic lightning, knowing just how it was made. But when that huge
blackness behind and to the left of her began to open and show a
terrible brilliance within, and to close abruptly, leaving the world
ink black, she was terrified. She wanted to hide as she had hidden
from those two men; but from that stupendous monster, a real
thunderstorm, sagebrush formed no protection whatever. She must reach
the substantial shelter of buildings, the comforting presence of men
and women.
She ran, and as she ran she wept aloud like a child and called for her
father. The deep rumble grew louder, nearer. The revealed brilliance
became swift sword-thrusts of blinding light that seemed to stab deep
the earth. Lorraine ran awkwardly, her hands over her ears, crying out
at each lightning flash, her voice drowned in the thunder that followed
it close. Then, as she neared the sombre group of buildings, the
clouds above them split with a terrific, rending crash, and the whole
place stood pitilessly revealed to her, as if a spotlight had been
turned on. Lorraine stood aghast. The buildings were not buildings at
all. They were rocks, great, black, forbidding boulders standing there
on a narrow ridge, having a diabolic likeness to houses.
The human mind is wonderfully resilient, but readjustment comes slowly
after a shock. Dumbly, refusing to admit the significance of what she
had seen, Lorraine went forward. Not until she had reached and had
touched the first grotesque caricature of habitation did she wholly
grasp the fact that she was lost, and that shelter might be miles away.
She stood and looked at the orderly group of boulders as the lightning
intermittently revealed them. She saw where the road ran on, between
two square-faced rocks. She would have to follow the road, for after
all it must lead _somewhere_,--to her father's ranch, probably. She
wondered irrelevantly why her mother had never mentioned these queer
rocks, and she wondered vaguely if any of them had caves or ledges
where she could be safe from the lightning.
She was on the point of stepping out into the road again when a
horseman rode into sight between the two rocks. In the same instant of
his appearance she heard the unmistakable crack of a gun, saw the rider
jerk backward in the saddle, throw up one hand--and then the darkness
dropped between them.
Lorraine crouched behind a juniper bush close against the rock and
waited. The next flash came within a half-minute. It showed a man at
the horse's head, holding it by the bridle. The horse was rearing.
Lorraine tried to scream that the man on the ground would be trampled,
but something went wrong with her voice, so that she could only whisper.
When the light came again the man who had been shot was not altogether
on the ground. The other, working swiftly, had thrust the injured
man's foot through the stirrup. Lorraine saw him stand back and lift
his quirt to slash the horse across the rump. Even through the crash
of thunder Lorraine heard the horse go past her down the hill,
galloping furiously. When she could see again she glimpsed him
running, while something bounced along on the ground beside him.
She saw the other man, with a dry branch in his hand, dragging it
across the road where it ran between the two rocks. Then Lorraine
Hunter, hardened to the sight of crimes committed for picture values
only, realised sickeningly that she had just looked upon a real
murder,--the cold-blooded killing of a man. She felt very sick. Queer
little red sparks squirmed and danced before her eyes. She crumpled
down quietly behind the jumper bush and did not know when the rain
came, though it drenched her in the first two or three minutes of
downpour.