ALLUREMENTS OF GLENDORA
In a bend of the Little Missouri, where it broadened out and took on the
appearance of a consequential stream, Glendora lay, a lonely little
village with a gray hill behind it.
There was but half a street in Glendora, like a setting for a stage, the
railroad in the foreground, the little sun-baked station crouching by
it, lonely as the winds which sung by night in the telegraph wires
crossing its roof. Here the trains went by with a roar, leaving behind
them a cloud of gray dust like a curtain to hide from the eyes of those
who strained from their windows to see the little that remained of
Glendora, once a place of more consequence than today.
Only enough remained of the town to live by its trade. There was enough
flour in the store, enough whisky in the saloon; enough stamps in the
post office, enough beds in the hotel, to satisfy with comfort the
demands of the far-stretching population of the country contiguous
thereto. But if there had risen an extraordinary occasion bringing a
demand without notice for a thousand pounds more of flour, a barrel more
of whisky, a hundred more stamps or five extra beds, Glendora would have
fallen under the burden and collapsed in disgrace.
Close by the station there were cattle pens for loading stock, with two
long tracks for holding the cars. In autumn fat cattle were driven down
out of the hidden valleys to entrain there for market. In those days
there was merriment after nightfall in Glendora. At other times it was
mainly a quiet place, the shooting that was done on its one-sided street
being of a peaceful nature in the way of expressing a feeling for which
some plain-witted, drunken cowherder had no words.
A good many years before the day that the Duke and Taterleg came riding
into Glendora, the town had supported more than one store and saloon.
The shells of these dead enterprises stood there still, windows and
doors boarded up, as if their owners had stopped their mouths when they
went away to prevent a whisper of the secrets they might tell of the old
riotous nights, or of fallen hopes, or dishonest transactions. So they
stood now in their melancholy, backs against the gray hill, giving to
Glendora the appearance of a town that was more than half dead, and soon
must fail and pass utterly away in the gray-blowing clouds of dust.
The hotel seemed the brightest and soundest living spot in the place,
for it was painted in green, like a watermelon, with a cottonwood tree
growing beside the pump at the porch corner. In yellow letters upon the
windowpane of the office there appeared the proprietor's name, doubtless
the work of some wandering artist who had paid the price of his lodging
or his dinner so.
ORSON WOOD, PROP.
said the sign, bedded in curlicues and twisted ornaments, as if a
carpenter had planed the letters out of a board, leaving the shavings
where they fell. A green rustic bench stood across one end of the long
porch, such as is seen in boarding-houses frequented by railroad men,
and chairs with whittled and notched arms before the office door, near
the pump.
Into this atmosphere there had come, many years before, one of those
innocents among men whose misfortune it is to fall before the
beguilements of the dishonest; that sort of man whom the promoters of
schemes go out to catch in the manner of an old maid trapping flies in a
cup of suds. Milton Philbrook was this man. Somebody had sold him forty
thousand acres of land in a body for three dollars an acre. It began at
the river and ran back to the hills for a matter of twenty miles.
Philbrook bought the land on the showing that it was rich in coal
deposits. Which was true enough. But he was not geologist enough to know
that it was only lignite, and not a coal of commercial value in those
times. This truth he came to later, together with the knowledge that his
land was worth, at the most extravagant valuation, not more than fifty
cents an acre.
Finding no market for his brown coal, Philbrook decided to adopt the
customs of the country and turn cattleman. A little inquiry into that
business convinced him that the expenses of growing the cattle and the
long distance from market absorbed a great bulk of the profits
needlessly. He set about with the original plan, therefore, of fencing
his forty thousand acres with wire, thus erasing at one bold stroke the
cost of hiring men to guard his herds.
A fence in the Bad Lands was unknown outside a corral in those days.
When carloads of barbed wire and posts began to arrive at Glendora men
came riding in for miles to satisfy themselves that the rumors were
founded; when Philbrook hired men to build the fence, and operations
were begun, murmurs and threats against the unwelcome innovation were
heard. Philbrook pushed the work to conclusion, unmindful of the
threats, moved now by the intention of founding a great, baronial estate
in that bleak land. His further plan of profit and consequence was to
establish a packing-house at Glendora, where his herds could be
slaughtered and dressed and shipped neat to market, at once assuring him
a double profit and reduced expense. But that was one phase of his dream
that never hardened into the reality of machinery and bricks.
While the long lines of fence were going up, carpenters were at work
building a fit seat for Philbrook's baronial aims. The point he chose
for his home site was the top of a bare plateau overlooking the river,
the face of it gray, crumbling shale, rising three hundred feet in
abrupt slope from the water's edge. At great labor and expense Philbrook
built a road between Glendora and this place, and carried water in pipes
from the river to irrigate the grass, trees, shrubs and blooming plants
alien to that country which he planted to break the bleakness of it and
make a setting for his costly home.
Here on this jutting shoulder of the cold, unfriendly upland, a house
rose which was the wonder of all who beheld it as they rode the wild
distances and viewed it from afar. It seemed a mansion to them, its
walls gleaming white, its roof green as the hope in its builder's
breast. It was a large house, and seemed larger for its prominence
against the sky, built in the shape of a T, with wide porches in the
angles. And to this place, upon which he had lavished what remained of
his fortune, Philbrook brought his wife and little daughter, as strange
to their surroundings as the delicate flowers which pined and drooped in
that unfriendly soil.
Immediately upon completion of his fences he had imported well-bred
cattle and set them grazing within his confines. He set men to riding by
night and day a patrol of his long lines of wire, rifles under their
thighs, with orders to shoot anybody found cutting the fences in
accordance with the many threats to serve them so. Contentions and feuds
began, and battles and bloody encounters, which did not cease through
many a turbulent year. Philbrook lived in the saddle, for he was a man
of high courage and unbending determination, leaving his wife and child
in the suspense and solitude of their grand home in which they found no
pleasure.
The trees and shrubs which Philbrook had planted with such care and
attended with such hope, withered on the bleak plateau and died, in
spite of the water from the river; the delicate grass with which he
sought to beautify and clothe the harsh gray soil sickened and pined
away; the shrubs made a short battle against the bleakness of winter,
putting out pale, strange flowers like the wan smile of a woman who
stands on the threshold of death, then failed away, and died. Mrs.
Philbrook broke under the long strain of never-ending battles, and died
the spring that her daughter came eighteen years of age.
This girl had grown up in the saddle, a true daughter of her fighting
sire. Time and again she had led a patrol of two fence-riders along one
side of that sixty square miles of ranch while her father guarded the
other. She could handle firearms with speed and accuracy equal to any
man on the range, where she had been bearing a man's burden since her
early girlhood.
All this information pertaining to the history of Milton Philbrook and
his adventures in the Bad Lands, Orson Wood, the one-armed landlord at
the hotel in Glendora told Lambert on the evening of the travelers'
arrival there. The story had come as the result of questions concerning
the great white house on the mesa, the two men sitting on the porch in
plain view of it, Taterleg entertaining the daughter of the hotel
across the show case in the office.
Lambert found the story more interesting than anything he ever had
imagined of the Bad Lands. Here was romance looking down on him from the
lonely walls of that white house, and heroism of a finer kind than these
people appreciated, he was sure.
"Is the girl still here?" he inquired.
"Yes, she's back now. She's been away to school in Boston for three or
four years, comin' back in summer for a little while."
"When did she come back?"
Lambert felt that his voice was thick as he inquired, disturbed by the
eager beating of his heart. Who knows? and perhaps, and all the rest of
it came galloping to him with a roar of blood in his ears like the sound
of a thousand hoofs. The landlord called over his shoulder to his
daughter:
"Alta, when did Vesta Philbrook come back?"
"Four or five weeks ago," said Alta, with the sound of chewing gum.
"Four or five weeks ago," the landlord repeated, as though Alta spoke a
foreign tongue and must be translated.
"I see," said Lambert, vaguely, shaking to the tips of his fingers with
a kind of buck ague that he never had suffered from before. He was
afraid the landlord would notice it, and slewed his chair, getting out
his tobacco to cover the fool spell.
For that was she, Vesta Philbrook was she, and she was Vesta Philbrook.
He knew it as well as he knew that he could count ten. Something had led
him there that day; the force that was shaping the course of their two
lives to cross again had held him back when he had considered selling
his horse and going West a long distance on the train. He grew calmer
when he had his cigarette alight. The landlord was talking again.
"Funny thing about Vesta comin' home, too," he said, and stopped a
little, as if to consider the humor of it. Lambert looked at him with a
sudden wrench of the neck.
"Which?"
"Philbrook's luck held out, it looked like, till she got through her
education. All through the fights he had and the scrapes he run into
the last ten years he never got a scratch. Bullets used to hum around
that man like bees, and he'd ride through 'em like they _was_ bees, but
none of 'em ever notched him. Curious, wasn't it?"
"Did somebody get him at last?"
"No, he took typhoid fever. He took down about a week or ten days after
Vesta got home. He died about a couple of week ago. Vesta had him laid
beside her mother up there on the hill. He said they'd never run him out
of this country, livin' or dead."
Lambert swallowed a dry lump.
"Is she running the ranch?"
"Like an old soldier, sir. I tell you, I've got a whole lot of
admiration for that girl."
"She must have her hands full."
"Night and day. She's short on fence-riders, and I guess if you boys are
lookin' for a job you can land up there with Vesta, all right."
Taterleg and the girl came out and sat on the green rustic bench at the
farther end of the porch. It complained under them; there was talk and
low giggling.
"We didn't expect to strike anything this soon," Lambert said, his
active mind leaping ahead to shape new romance like a magician.
"You don't look like the kind of boys that'd shy from a job if it jumped
out in the road ahead of you."
"I'd hate for folks to think we would."
"Ain't you the feller they call; the Duke of Chimney Butte?"
"They call me that in this country."
"Yes; I knew that horse the minute you rode up, though he's changed for
the better wonderful since I saw him last, and I knew you from the
descriptions I've heard of you. Vesta'd give you a job in a minute, and
she'd pay you good money, too. I wouldn't wonder if she didn't put you
in as foreman right on the jump, account of the name you've got up here
in the Bad Lands."
"Not much to my credit in the name, I'm afraid," said Lambert, almost
sadly. "Do they still cut her fences and run off her stock?"
"Yes; rustlin's got to be stylish around here ag'in, after we thought we
had all them gangs rounded up and sent to the pen. I guess some of their
time must be up and they're comin' home."
"It's pretty tough for a single-handed girl."
"Yes, it is tough. Them fellers are more than likely some of the old
crowd Philbrook used to fight and round up and send over the road. He
killed off four or five of them, and the rest of them swore they'd salt
him when they'd done their time. Well, he's gone. But they're not above
fightin' a girl."
"It's a tough job for a woman," said Lambert, looking thoughtfully
toward the white house on the mesa.
"Ain't it, though?"
Lambert thought about it a while, or appeared to be thinking about it,
sitting with bent head, smoking silently, looking now and then toward
the ranchhouse, the lights of which could be seen. Alta came across the
porch presently, Taterleg attending her like a courtier. She dismissed
him at the door with an excuse of deferred duties within. He joined his
thoughtful partner.
"Better go up and see her in the morning," suggested Wood, the landlord.
"I think I will, thank you."
Wood went in to sell a cowboy a cigar; the partners started out to have
a look at Glendora by moonlight. A little way they walked in silence,
the light of the barber-shop falling across the road ahead of them.
"See who in the morning, Duke?" Taterleg inquired.
"Lady in the white house on the mesa. Her father died a few weeks ago,
and left her alone with a big ranch on her hands. Rustlers are runnin'
her cattle off, cuttin' her fences----"
"Fences?"
"Yes, forty thousand acres all fenced in, like Texas."
"You don't tell me?"
"Needs men, Wood says. I thought maybe----"
The Duke didn't finish it; just left it swinging that way, expecting
Taterleg to read the rest.
"Sure," said Taterleg, taking it right along. "I wouldn't mind stayin'
around here a while. Glendora's a nice little place; nicer place than I
thought it was."
The Duke said nothing. But as they went on toward the barber-shop he
grinned.