The White Divide.
If a phrenologist should undertake to "read" my head, he would undoubtedly
find my love of home--if that is what it is called--a sharply defined
welt. I know that I watched the lights of old Frisco slip behind me with
as virulent a case of the deeps as often comes to a man when his digestion
is good. It wasn't that I could not bear the thought of hardship; I've
taken hunting trips up into the mountains more times than I can remember,
and ate ungodly messes of my own invention, and waded waist-deep in snow
and slept under the stars, and enjoyed nearly every minute. So it wasn't
the hardships that I had every reason to expect that got me down. I think
it was the feeling that dad had turned me down; that I was in exile,
and--in his eyes, at least--disgraced, it was knowing that he thought me
pretty poor truck, without giving me a chance to be anything better.
I humped over the rail at the stern, and watched the waves slap at us
viciously, like an ill-tempered poodle, and felt for all the world like a
dog that's been kicked out into the rain. Maybe the medicine was good for
me, but it wasn't pleasant. It never occurred to me, that night, to wonder
how dad felt about it; but I've often thought of it since.
I had a section to myself, so I could sulk undisturbed; dad was not small,
at any rate, and, though he hadn't let me have his car, he meant me to be
decently comfortable. That first night I slept without a break; the second
I sat in the smoker till a most unrighteous hour, cultivating the
acquaintance of a drummer for a rubber-goods outfit. I thought that,
seeing I was about to mingle with the working classes, I couldn't begin
too soon to study them. He was a pretty good sort, too.
The rubber-goods man left me at Seattle, and from there on I was at the
tender mercies of my own thoughts and an elderly lady with a startlingly
blond daughter, who sat directly opposite me and was frankly disposed to
friendliness. I had never given much time to the study of women, and so
had no alternative but to answer questions and smile fatuously upon the
blond daughter, and wonder if I ought to warn the mother that "clothes do
not make the man," and that I was a black sheep and not a desirable
acquaintance. Before I had quite settled that point, they left the train.
I am afraid I am not distinctly a chivalrous person; I hummed the Doxology
after their retreating forms and retired into myself, with a feeling that
my own society is at times desirable and greatly to be chosen.
After that I was shy, and nothing happened except that on the last evening
of the trip, I gave up my sole remaining five dollars in the diner, and
walked out whistling softly. I was utterly and unequivocally strapped.
I went into the smoker to think it over; I knew I had started out with
a hundred or so, and that I had considered that sufficient to see me
through. Plainly, it was not sufficient; but it is a fact that I looked
upon it as a joke, and went to sleep grinning idiotically at the thought
of me, Ellis Carleton, heir to almost as many millions as I was years
old, without the price of a breakfast in his pocket. It seemed novel and
interesting, and I rather enjoyed the situation. I wasn't hungry, then!
Osage, Montana, failed to rouse any enthusiasm in me when I saw the place
next day, except that it offered possibilities in the way of eating--at
least, I fancied it did, until I stepped down upon the narrow platform and
looked about me. It was two o'clock in the afternoon, and I had fasted
since dinner the evening before. I was not happy.
I began to see where I might have economized a bit, and so have gone on
eating regularly to the end of the journey. I reflected that stewed
terrapin, for instance, might possibly be considered an extravagance under
the circumstances; and a fellow sentenced to honest toil and exiled to the
wilderness should not, it seemed to me then, cause his table to be
sprinkled, quite so liberally as I had done, with tall glasses--nor need
he tip the porter quite so often or so generously. A dollar looked bigger
to me, just then, than a wheel of the _Yellow Peril_. I began to feel
unkindly toward that porter! he had looked so abominably well-fed and
sleek, and he had tips that I would be glad to feel in my own pocket
again. I stood alone upon the platform and gazed wistfully after the
retreating train; many people have done that before me, if one may believe
those who write novels, and for once in my life I felt a bond of sympathy
between us. It's safe betting that I did more solid thinking on frenzied
finance in the five minutes I stood there watching that train slid off
beyond the sky-line than I'd done in all my life before. I'd heard, of
course, about fellows getting right down to cases, but I'd never
personally experienced the sensation. I'd always had money--or, if
I hadn't, I knew where to go. And dad had caught me when I'd all but
overdrawn my account at the bank. I was always doing that, for dad paid
the bills. That last night with Barney MacTague hadn't been my night to
win, and I'd dropped quite a lot there. And--oh, what's the use? I was
broke, all right enough, and I was hungry enough to eat the proverbial
crust.
It seemed to me it might be a good idea to hunt up the gentleman named
Perry Potter, whom dad called his foreman. I turned around and caught a
tall, brown-faced native studying my back with grave interest. He didn't
blush when I looked him in the eye, but smiled a tired smile and said he
reckoned I was the chap he'd been sent to meet. There was no welcome in
his voice, I noticed. I looked him over critically.
"Are you the gentleman with the alliterative cognomen?" I asked him
airily, hoping he would be puzzled.
He was not, evidently. "Perry Potter? He's at the ranch." He was damnably
tolerant, and I said nothing. I hate to make the same sort of fool of
myself twice. So when he proposed that we "hit the trail," I followed
meekly in his wake. He did not offer to take my suit-case, and I was about
to remind him of the oversight when it occurred to me that possibly he
was not a servant--he certainly didn't act like one. I carried my own
suitcase--which was, I have thought since, the only wise move I had made
since I left home.
A strong but unsightly spring-wagon, with mud six inches deep on the
wheels, seemed the goal, and we trailed out to it, picking up layers of
soil as we went. The ground did not _look_ muddy, but it was; I have since
learned that that particular phase of nature's hypocrisy is called "doby."
I don't admire it, myself. I stopped by the wagon and scraped my shoes on
the cleanest spoke I could find, and swore. My guide untied the horses,
gathered up the reins, and sought a spoke on his side of the wagon; he
looked across at me with a gleam of humanity in his eyes--the first I had
seen there.
"It sure beats hell the way it hangs on," he remarked, and from that
minute I liked him. It was the first crumb of sympathy that had fallen to
me for days, and you can bet I appreciated it.
We got in, and he pulled a blanket over our knees and picked up the whip.
It wasn't a stylish turnout--I had seen farmers driving along the
railroad-track in rigs like it, and I was surprised at dad for keeping
such a layout. Fact is, I didn't think much of dad, anyway, about that
time.
"How far is it to the Bay State Ranch?" I asked.
"One hundred and forty miles, air-line," said he casually. "The train was
late, so I reckon we better stop over till morning. There's a town over
the hill, and a hotel that beats nothing a long way."
A hundred and forty miles from the station, "air-line," sounded to me like
a pretty stiff proposition to go up against; also, how was a fellow going
to put up at a hotel when he hadn't the coin? Would my mysterious guide
be shocked to learn that John A. Carleton's son and heir had landed in a
strange land without two-bits to his name? Jerusalem! I couldn't have paid
street-car fare down-town; I couldn't even have bought a paper on the
street. While I was remembering all the things a millionaire's son can't
do if he happens to be without a nickel in his pocket, we pulled up before
a place that, for the sake of propriety, I am willing to call a hotel; at
the time, I remember, I had another name for it.
"In case I might get lost in this strange city," I said to my companion as
I jumped out, "I'd like to know what people call you when they're in a
good humor."
He grinned down at me. "Frosty Miller would hit me, all right," he
informed me, and drove off somewhere down the street. So I went in and
asked for a room, and got it.
This sounds sordid, I know, but the truth must be told, though the
artistic sense be shocked. Barred from the track as I was, sent out to
grass in disgrace while the little old world kept moving without me to
help push, my mind passed up all the things I might naturally be supposed
to dwell upon and stuck to three little no-account grievances that I hate
to tell about now. They look small, for a fact, now that they're away out
of sight, almost, in the past; but they were quite big enough at the
time to give me a bad hour or two. The biggest one was the state of my
appetite; next, and not more than a nose behind, was the state of my
pockets; and the last was, had Rankin packed the gray tweed trousers that
I had a liking for, or had he not? I tried to remember whether I had
spoken to him about them, and I sat down on the edge of the bed in that
little box of a room, took my head between my fists, and called Rankin
several names he sometimes deserved and had frequently heard from my lips.
I'd have given a good deal to have Rankin at my elbow just then.
They were not in the suit-case--or, if they were, I had not run across
them. Rankin had a way of stowing things away so that even he had to do
some tall searching, and he had another way of filling up my suit-cases
with truck I'd no immediate use for. I yanked the case toward me, unlocked
it, and turned it out on the bed, just to prove Rankin's general
incapacity as valet to a fastidious fellow like me.
There was the suit I had worn on that memorable excursion to the Cliff
House--I had told Rankin to pitch it into the street, for I had
discovered Teddy Van Greve in one almost exactly like it, and--Hello!
Rankin had certainly overlooked a bet. I never caught him at it before,
that's certain. He had a way of coming to my left elbow, and, in a
particularly virtuous tone, calling my attention to the fact that I had
left several loose bills in my pockets. Rankin was that honest I often
told him he would land behind the bars as an embezzler some day. But
Rankin had done it this time, for fair; tucked away in a pocket of the
waistcoat was money--real, legal, lawful tender--m-o-n-e-y! I don't
suppose the time will ever come when it will look as good to me as it did
right then. I held those bank-notes--there were two of them, double
XX's--to my face and sniffed them like I'd never seen the like before and
never expected to again. And the funny part was that I forgot all about
wanting the gray trousers, and all about the faults of Rankin. My feet
were on bottom again, and my head on top. I marched down-stairs,
whistling, with my hands in my pockets and my chin in the air, and told
the landlord to serve dinner an hour earlier than usual, and to make it a
good one.
He looked at me with a curious mixture of wonder and amusement. "Dinner,"
he drawled calmly, "has been over for three hours; but I guess we can give
yuh some supper any time after five."
I suppose he looked upon me as the rankest kind of a tenderfoot. I
calculated the time of my torture till I might, without embarrassing
explanations, partake of a much-needed repast, and went to the door;
waiting was never my long suit, and I had thoughts of getting outside and
taking a look around. At the second step I changed my mind--there was that
deceptive mud to reckon with.
So from the doorway I surveyed all of Montana that lay between me and the
sky-line, and decided that my bets would remain on California. The sky was
a dull slate, tumbled into what looked like rain-clouds and depressing to
the eye. The land was a dull yellowish-brown, with a purple line of hills
off to the south, and with untidy snow-drifts crouching in the hollows.
That was all, so far as I could see, and if dulness and an unpeopled
wilderness make for the reformation of man, it struck me that I was in a
fair way to become a saint if I stayed here long. I had heard the
cattle-range called picturesque; I couldn't see the joke.
Frosty Miller sat opposite me at table when, in the course of human
events, I ate again, and the way I made the biscuit and ham and boiled
potatoes vanish filled him with astonishment, if one may judge a man's
feelings by the size of his eyes. I told him that the ozone of the plains
had given me an appetite, and he did not contradict me; he looked at my
plate, and then smiled at his own, and said nothing--which was polite of
him.
"Did you ever skip two meals and try to make it up on the third?" I asked
him when we went out, and he said "Sure," and rolled a cigarette. In those
first hours of our acquaintance Frosty was not what I'd call loquacious.
That night I took out the letter addressed to one Perry Potter, which dad
had given me and which I had not had time to seal in his presence, and
read it cold-bloodedly. I don't do such things as a rule, but I was
getting a suspicion that I was being queered; that I'd got to start my
exile under a handicap of the contempt of the natives. If dad had stacked
the deck on me, I wanted to know it. But I misjudged him--or, perhaps, he
knew I'd read it. All he had written wouldn't hurt the reputation of any
one. It was:
The bearer, Ellis H. Carleton, is my son. He will probably be
with you for some time, and will not try to assume any authority
or usurp your position as foreman and overseer. You will treat
him as you do the other boys, and if he wants to work, pay him
the same wages--if he earns them.
It wasn't exactly throwing flowers in the path my young feet should tread,
but it might have been worse. At least, he did not give Perry Potter his
unbiased opinion of me, and it left me with a free hand to warp their
judgment somewhat in my favor. But--"If he wants to work, pay him the same
wages--if he earns them." Whew!
I might have saved him the trouble of writing that, if I had only known
it. Dad could go too far in this thing, I told myself chestily. I had
come, seeing that he insisted upon it, but I'd be damned if I'd work for
any man with a circus-poster name, and have him lord it over me. I hadn't
been brought up to appreciate that kind of joke. I meant to earn my
living, but I did not mean to get out and slave for Perry Potter. There
must be something respectable for a man to do in this country besides
ranch work.
In the morning we started off, with my trunks in the wagon, toward the
line of purple hills in the south. Frosty Miller told me, when I asked
him, that they were forty-eight miles away, that they marked the Missouri
River, and that we would stop there overnight. That, if I remember,
was about the extent of our conversation that day. We smoked
cigarettes--Frosty Miller made his, one by one, as he needed them--and
thought our own thoughts. I rather suspect our thoughts were a good many
miles apart, though our shoulders touched. When you think of it, people
may rub elbows and still have an ocean or two between them. I don't know
where Frosty was, all through that long day's ride; for me, I was back in
little old Frisco, with Barney MacTague and the rest of the crowd; and
part of the time, I know, I was telling dad what a mess he'd made of
bringing up his only son.
That night we slept in a shack at the river--"Pochette Crossing" was the
name it answered to--and shared the same bed. It was not remarkable for
its comfort--that bed. I think the mattress was stuffed with potatoes; it
felt that way.
Next morning we were off again, over the same bare, brown, unpeopled
wilderness. Once we saw a badger zigzagging along a side-hill, and Frosty
whipped out a big revolver--one of those "Colt 45's," I suppose--and shot
it; he said in extenuation that they play the very devil with the range,
digging holes for cow-punchers to break their necks over.
I was surprised at Frosty; there he had been armed, all the time, and I
never guessed it. Even when we went to bed the night before, I had not
glimpsed a weapon. Clearly, he could not be a cowboy, I reflected, else
he would have worn a cartridge-belt sagging picturesquely down over one
hip, and his gun dangling from it. He put the gun away, and I don't know
where; somewhere out of sight it went, and Frosty turned off the trail and
went driving wild across the prairie. I asked him why, and he said, "Short
cut."
Then a wind crept out of the north, and with it the snow. We were climbing
low ridges and dodging into hollows, and when the snow spread a white veil
over the land, I looked at Frosty out of the tail of my eye, wondering if
he did not wish he had kept to the road--trail, it is called in the
rangeland.
If he did, he certainly kept it to himself; he went on climbing hills and
setting the brake at the top, to slide into a hollow, and his face kept
its inscrutable calm; whatever he thought was beyond guessing at.
When he had watered the horses at a little creek that was already skimmed
with ice, and unwrapped a package of sandwiches on his knee and offered
me one, I broke loose. Silence may be golden, but even old King Midas got
too big a dose of gold, once upon a time, if one may believe tradition.
"I hate to butt into a man's meditations," I said, looking him straight in
the eye, "but there's a limit to everything, and you've played right up to
it. You've had time, my friend, to remember all your sins and plan enough
more to keep you hustling the allotted span; you've been given an
opportunity to reconstruct the universe and breed a new philosophy of
life. For Heaven's sake, _say_ something!"
Frosty eyed me for a minute, and the muscles at the corners of his mouth
twitched. "Sure," he responded cheerfully. "I'm something like you; I hate
to break into a man's meditations. It looks like snow."
"Do you think it's going to storm?" I retorted in the same tone; it had
been snowing great guns for the last three hours. We both laughed, and
Frosty unbent and told me a lot about Bay State Ranch and the country
around it.
Part of the information was an eye-opener; I wished I had known it when
dad was handing out that roast to me--I rather think I could have made him
cry enough. I tagged the information and laid it away for future
reference.
As I got the country mapped out in my mind, we were in a huge capital H.
The eastern line, toward which we were angling, was a river they call the
Midas--though I'll never tell you why, unless it's a term ironical. The
western line is another river, the Joliette, and the cross-bar is a range
of hills--they might almost be called mountains--which I had been facing
all that morning till the snow came between and shut them off; White
Divide, it is called, and we were creeping around the end, between them
and the Midas. It seemed queer that there was no way of crossing, for the
Bay State lies almost in a direct line south from Osage, Frosty told me,
and the country we were traversing was rough as White Divide could be, and
I said so to Frosty. Right here is where I got my first jolt.
"There's a fine pass cut through White Divide by old Mama Nature," Frosty
said, in the sort of tone a man takes when he could say a lot more, but
refrains.
"Then why in Heaven's name don't you travel it?"
"Because it isn't healthy for Ragged H folks to travel that way," he said,
in the same eloquent tone.
"Who are the Ragged H folks, and what's the matter with them?" I wanted to
know--for I smelled a mystery.
He looked at me sidelong. "If you didn't look just like the old man," he
said, "I'd think yuh were a fake; the Ragged H is the brand your ranch is
known by--the Bay State outfit. And it isn't healthy to travel King's
Highway, because there's a large-sized feud between your father and old
King. How does it happen yuh aren't wise to the family history?"
"Dad never unbosomed himself to me, that's why," I told him. "He has
labored for twenty-five years under the impression that I was a kid just
able to toddle alone. He didn't think he needed to tell me things; I know
we've got a place called the Bay State Ranch somewhere in this part of the
world, and I have reason to think I'm headed for it. That's about the
extent of my knowledge of our interest here. I never heard of the White
Divide before, or of this particular King. I'm thirsting for information."
"Well, it strikes me you've got it coming," said Frosty. "I always had
your father sized up as being closed-mouthed, but I didn't think he made
such a thorough job of it as all that. Old King has sure got it in for the
Ragged H--or Bay State, if yuh'd rather call us that; and the Ragged H
boys don't sit up nights thinking kind and loving thoughts about him,
either. Thirty years ago your father and old King started jangling over
water-rights, and I guess they burned powder a-plenty; King goes lame to
this day from a bullet your old man planted in his left leg."
I dropped the flag and started him off again. "It's news to me," I put in,
"and you can't tell me too much about it."
"Well," he said, "your old man was in the right of it; he owns all the
land along Honey Creek, right up to White Divide, where it heads; uh
course, he overlooked a bet there; he should have got a cinch on that
pass, and on the head uh the creek. But he let her slide, and first he
knew old King had come in and staked a claim and built him a shack right
in our end of the pass, and camped down to stay. Your dad wasn't joyful.
The Bay State had used that pass to trail herds through and as the easiest
and shortest trail to the railroad; and then old King takes it up, strings
a five-wired fence across at both ends of his place, and warns us off.
I've heard Potter tell what warm times there were. Your father stayed
right here and had it out with him. The Bay State was all he had, then,
and he ran it himself. Perry Potter worked for him, and knows all about
it. Neither old King nor your dad was married, and it's a wonder they
didn't kill each other off--Potter says they sure tried. The time King got
it in the leg your father and his punchers were coming home from a breed
dance, and they were feeling pretty nifty, I guess; Potter told me they
started out with six bottles, and when they got to White Divide there
wasn't enough left to talk about. They cut King's fence at the north end,
and went right through, hell-bent-for-election. King and his men boiled
out, and they mixed good and plenty. Your father went home with a hole in
his shoulder, and old King had one in his leg to match, and since then
it's been war. They tried to fight it out in court, and King got the best
of it there. Then they got married and kind o' cooled off, and pretty soon
they both got so much stuff to look after that they didn't have much time
to take pot-shots at each other, and now we're enjoying what yuh might
call armed peace. We go round about sixty miles, and King's Highway is bad
medicine.
"King owns the stage-line from Osage to Laurel, where the Bay State gets
its mail, and he owns Kenmore, a mining-camp in the west half uh White
Divide. We can go around by Kenmore, if we want to--but King's Highway?
Nit!"
I chuckled to myself to think of all the things I could twit dad about if
ever he went after me again. It struck me that I hadn't been a
circumstance, so far, to what dad must have been in his youth. At my
worst, I'd never shot a man.