The curtain of years had fallen and risen again on the same scene, the
valley which stretched off toward the setting sun and the guardian
mountain which stood unchanged at its head. But this was October, the
royal season of purple and gold and red, when the asters and
sunflowers were blooming their lives away in one lavish outpouring of
beauty and the rose bushes were crimson under the kiss of the frost. A
shimmering mass of gold clothed the great cotton-woods along the
winding course of the creek and hills of russet brown replaced those
of vivid green I had first seen sixteen years before.
Where the young bride had stood on that July day, amid the strange
surroundings, looking with inexperienced eyes upon a new world, she
stood again, seeing it from the angle of a participant, from the
viewpoint of a woman, fused by the furnace of experience into a part
of that life.
It was the same scene, but the setting had changed and as a flood of
memories swept over me I felt as though I were a reincarnated spirit,
walking the earth in a third phase of existence, having passed through
the first, a light-hearted girl among family and friends in urban
surroundings, having lived through the second, an atom in the midst of
those vast wind-swept plains amongst elemental conditions, a part in
the great primitive struggle for existence and coming back again to
find the prairies transformed by cultivation into farms, with the
crops covering the hills and bottom lands like a huge patch-work quilt
of green, brown and brilliant yellow, fastened together with black
threads of barbed wire.
Above on the hill stood a church and a school-house, those certain
indications of community life. Across the meadows great red barns and
towering wind mills overshadowed the less pretentious houses. Bridges
spanned the creek with its shifting, treacherous sand and in place of
the dim winding trails across the prairie, neatly fenced county roads
decorously followed the section lines.
It was the same—yet everything was changed. This well-ordered farming
community seemed prosaic, it lacked the romance and charm of the old
ranch life and the glorious sense of unlimited freedom.
The bunkhouse was occupied by the family of a hard-working farmer who
had married the daughter of our caretaker, Parker; tractors, ploughs
and harrows filled the space about the blacksmith shop. I resented
those unfamiliar implements and the prosperous farms. On all sides
there was heard a strange language of silos, separators and “crop
rotation”. I had become a part of the old life, but here I felt
restricted and out of place—an alien.
Inside the house all, too, was changed. The books which Joe had
scorned, the crystal clock and our Lares and Penates were in our
Denver home, but on the ranch I missed them and most of all the old
familiar faces. All had gone. Several of the boys had stayed in the
country, married and taken up farming, raising bounteous crops and
numerous children. Some, individual and picturesque to the end, had
crossed the Great Divide, others had sought new positions in Wyoming,
the last of the frontier states. Bill was there cooking in an oil
camp. We received characteristic, though infrequent, letters from him,
usually in the early summer, labored epistles over which he had “sworn
and sweat,” as he expressed it, which began by assuring us that he was
well and hoped that we were the same and ended by an earnest request
to go with us as cook “in case you was thinkin’ of goin’ campin’.” He
went with us when we did go, the same old Bill, unchanged in heart or
humor.
Old Bohm was dead. The final act of that great tragedy took place in
an isolated mine where he had sunk all his fortune in a golden
prospect. Hoping to regain it, the fortune he held in trust for a
friend had followed, but the game he had played so successfully before
failed when Nemesis took a hand. His friend went to the mine to demand
an accounting and several hours later Bohm’s body, broken and
bleeding, was taken from the depths of the mine. According to the
story of his companion, the only witness, he had slipped and fallen to
the bottom of the shaft—and his death, as his life, remained an
enigma.
But down through the long years the echoes of the past reverberated.
Again and again we heard them, sometimes very faintly, then with
perfect distinctness and on that day of our return after a long
absence we felt again that mysterious suggestion of tragedy and the
echoes were startlingly clear.
As I came in from my walk just before supper, a strange man rode up
and Mr. Parker asked him to stop.
He told us his name and during the progress of the meal took little
part in the conversation, but after he had eaten his supper he leaned
back in his chair and in response to Owen’s question, said:
“No, I ain’t exactly a stranger round here, but this old kitchen is
about the only thing that ain’t changed. I used to know every inch of
ground in this country when I was punchin’ cows for the Three Circle
outfit. This was the only ranch within twenty-five miles. I’ve et here
lots of times.”
“You knew the Bohms then?” I asked, trying as always to find the
answer to the riddle of old Bohm’s personality.
“Sure, I knew the Bohms,” the stranger replied, his clear blue eyes
meeting mine frankly. “I knowed everybody there was in the country,
there wasn’t many in them days, jest the Bohms, the Mortons, the
Bosmans and the La Montes. They’re most all gone now except Bosman. I
heered old La Monte died last winter—but Lord, he’s been worse ’en
dead for most twenty years. Did you folks know him?”
“Scarcely, we only saw him once,” and before me rose the picture of
the desolate old place, the slowly opened door and that living ghost
on the threshold.
The stranger again spoke.
“You folks bought from Bohm, so you knowed him, didn’t you?”
“Oh, yes, we knew him.” Owen answered for my thoughts were far away.
“Well, sir,” said the old cow-puncher, reaching for a toothpick, “Jim
Bohm was a great one, he was the slickest man in this country. He
didn’t have nothin’ but a little band of horses that he drove up from
Texas when he came, but he kept gettin’ richer all the time.” I came
back to the present with a start, his words were almost the same Mrs.
Morton had used sixteen years before.
“Wasn’t he honest?” I asked, wondering what the reply would be.
He did not answer for a moment.
“Well, I can’t say as to that. I jest knowed him from meetin’ him on
the round-ups and when I stopped here. I never had no dealin’s with
him, but he sure had a reputation for all the meanness there was, and
I guess he deserved it. He was good company though, and Lord, how he
could play the fiddle.” He was interrupted by a sudden clatter. Mrs.
Parker had dropped her spoon and was looking at him as if fascinated.
“I liked Mrs. Bohm, but I never had no use for him. I don’t know about
the other things, but he sure done Jean La Monte dirt.” He rose from
the table and walked toward the door. “Well, I reckon I’d better be
movin’ on, I want to get to Bosman’s tonight.” He looked up the
valley, “I can see Bohm now, ridin’ that big black horse of his,
carryin’ a little cotton-wood switch for a whip, and laughin’ at
everything, he was a queer one, sure enough. Well, so long—thank you
for my supper,” and he went out into the evening.
“Big black horse! He was always on a big black horse!” That pitiful
refrain of Jean La Monte as he had sought the rider of that horse
through all those weary years. Again I saw the men waiting in the
wagon and that poor half-clad figure stooping to pick up a little
cotton-wood switch, and I wondered if across the great divide La Monte
had caught up with Bohm at last.
* * * * *
Owen was busy in the office making out contracts for recently
purchased land. Mr. Parker and an agent were entertaining some
land-buyers, scraps of their conversation “bushels to the acre” and
“back in Kansas” reached me from time to time as I walked up and down
under the stars.
“Where are you, childy?” Dear Mrs. Parker was always concerned when I
was not in sight. “Out there alone?” she asked as she came across the
yard to join me. We sat down on the bunk-house steps, glorying in the
beauty of the night. We were silent for a few moments and then she
spoke.
“Do you know, Mrs. Brook, him talkin’ about Mr. Bohm tonight at supper
has made me think of so many things. I never paid much attention to
all them stories old Mrs. Morton and other folks told, but some mighty
queer things have happened since we’ve been here.”
“What kind of things?” I asked, wondering if she, too, had breathed
the air of mystery which surrounded the old ranch.
“Well, I don’t know exactly,” she hesitated, “you’ll think I’m silly,
perhaps, but you know sometimes when I’m down there,” she pointed to
the house among the trees, “makin’ out my postal reports, sometimes
it’s eleven or twelve o’clock before I’m through. It’s awful quiet
after everyone’s gone to sleep and I’ve heard all kinds of queer
sounds, maybe they might be rats or the wind, but often and often,
just as plain as I can hear your voice now, I’ve heard the sound of a
violin like somebody was playin’. It give me an awful start when that
man spoke of Bohm’s havin’ played the violin.”
“Perhaps somebody is playing,” I ventured, with a well remembered
sensation of ice in the region of my spine. “The houses aren’t far
away now; you could easily hear someone playing if the wind was in the
right direction.”
Mrs. Parker shook her head.
“No, that ain’t it. There ain’t a violin in the country, and, besides,
it’s too near; it’s like it came from here”—Mrs. Parker looked up at
the bunkhouse door—“and none of Ethel’s plays.”
I said nothing. I remembered too well hearing the strains of the
violin as they used to float out through the silent night while old
Bohm played to himself up there in the bunkhouse, hour after hour. I
was troubled as the echoes of the past grew louder.
“And then,” Mrs. Parker resumed, “there was that passage. I told you
about that, didn’t I?”
“No. Passage! What passage?” I turned to her in the moonlight which
showed a puzzled frown between her eyes.
“Why, the passage old Dad Patten found. I thought I’d told you about
that, but maybe it was the year that you and Mr. Brook was away.” She
paused a moment. “The third year after Ethel and John came here, John,
he raised such a big crop of potatoes the cellar was plumb full, so he
had Dad tear out some of the old bins under the bunk house to make
some larger ones. Tom Lane was helpin’ him, and, of course, Tom was
drunk. They’d tore out one or two, but when they come to the third,
they found a deep hole behind it about four foot square. They stuck a
spade into it, but it seemed to go back so far Dad he thought he’d
investigate, so he begun to crawl into it to see how far it went. He
was well in when Tom begun to laugh and act like he was goin’ to wall
him up, so Dad backed out, for he said that he was afraid Tom was just
drunk enough to do it. Dad said, though, that he went in the whole
length of his body and stretched his arm out as far as he could, but
didn’t touch nothin’, so he knew it went on further, and he said that
it seemed to lead off in the direction of the old root cellar.”
“Root cellar,” I repeated, too perturbed to say anything else.
“Yes,” said Mrs. Parker, “but, you know, Dad, he’d never heard any of
them stories about the root cellar; Dad’s too deaf to hear anything,
so he didn’t think nothin’ about it except that it was some kind of an
old dugout, and they went on and built the new bins, and about two
months after John had got all his potatoes in Dad happened to say
something about it. I was so beat I like to died, and when I told Dad
what folks said about the old root cellar and Bohm, he turned as white
as a sheet. You couldn’t get him up to the bunk house now if you was
to drag him.”
“You don’t believe——” I began, then stopped as Mrs. Parker rose and
put her hand on my shoulder.
“Childy, I don’t know whether I believe them tales or not. I’ve
scarcely been off this place since you went away ten years ago and
I’ve seen and heard some mighty strange things. There’s lots of things
in life we can’t explain—we just have to accept ’em, and that’s the
way I’ve had to do here. Maybe there’s spirits and maybe there ain’t,
but there’s some facts there’s no gettin’ ’round”—Mrs. Morton’s very
words again—“but Dad’s findin’ that passage sure made me believe ’em
more than I ever did before, and I do believe that some terrible
things have been done right here on this dear old place, and that
somewhere old Bohm’s spirit’s mighty restless.”
* * * * *
Owen and I sat up before the fire talking until late that night, for
one of the buyers wanted the home place. It was hard to give it up,
for we both loved it, but the old life had passed, and we were not a
part of the new. Owen’s business kept him almost constantly in Denver,
and we were at the ranch so little it seemed useless to cling to it
longer. The most difficult decision had been made ten years before.
This, in a way, was more simple, yet this was final; it meant the
breaking of the last tie which bound us to those broad acres, and we
were both silent a long time after we had agreed that it was best to
let the old place go.
Suddenly I thought of my conversation with Mrs. Parker, and told Owen
of the finding of the passage under the bunk house. He sat looking
into the fire, and made no comment until I had finished.
“It is strange, to say the least. I don’t suppose we shall ever know
the real truth about it, but it doesn’t make much difference now; and
if old Bohm’s spirit is wandering about here it will feel a little out
of place in a cornfield.”
“It certainly will, but, Owen, don’t you hope ‘it’s mighty restless
somewhere’?”
“Indeed I do,” he laughed, and then grew serious again. “It’s been
wonderful from first to last, our life here.” He sighed a little.
“What experiences we’ve had!”
“Yes, it has,” I said, getting up and standing by the fireplace, where
Owen joined me. “It hasn’t always been easy, but I wouldn’t take
anything for the things I’ve learned. I’m not the ‘Tenderfoot’ you
brought out sixteen years ago; I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Westerner now.
My whole view of life has changed. It has not only been a wonderful
experience, Owen, but a wonderful privilege—to have lived here.”
Without a word we watched the last log break apart. The glowing sparks
lighted the room for a single instant, then died down, and in the
fading light of the coals we turned away.
That night I lay awake. Vivified by the thought of the final parting
which was to come, our whole life on the ranch passed in review before
me, the problems and the difficulties, the adjustments, the changed
conditions and that disturbing sense of unsolved mystery.
I got up and stood by the window looking out upon a world of silver.
Myriads of stars shone faintly in the heavens dimmed by the glory of
the moon, the pale outline of the mountain was just visible, and, as
on that first day when my heart was so heavy, I felt the sense of
confusion give way to peace.
From the vast spaces, under the guardianship of that commanding
summit, we had gained a new sense of proportion, freedom from
hampering trivialities and a broader vision of life and its
responsibilities.
Standing there in the moonlight facing the mountain, I saw in it more
than a symbol and source of strength; to me it had become indeed the
abiding place of a God.
Looking back over the years, all the changes revealed only the
evolution of a wondrous plan. We had launched our frail barque in the
midst of the prairie sea at the ebb of the tide of the wild, lawless
days of the West; with the flow we had been carried through the years
of a well-ordered pastoral existence to the era of agricultural
productivity, and on each succeeding wave we had seen civilization
borne higher and higher toward the ultimate goal set by the Great
Spirit.
Ours had been, indeed, a wonderful experience.