UNCONVENTIONAL BEHAVIOR
Their situation was somewhat beyond the seat of noisy business and
raucous-throated pleasure. Mrs. Reed, while living in an unending state
of shivers on account of the imagined perils which stalked the footsteps
of June, was a bit assured by their surroundings.
In front of them was a vacant plot, in which inoffensive horses took
their siesta in the sun, awaiting someone to come along and hire them
for rides of inspection over the lands which were soon to be apportioned
by lot. A trifle farther along stood a little church, its unglazed
windows black and hollow, like gouged-out eyes. Mrs. Reed drew a vast
amount of comfort from the church, and their proximity to it, knowing
nothing of its history nor its present uses. Its presence there was
proof to her that all Comanche was not a waste of iniquity.
Almost directly in front of their tent the road branched--one prong
running to Meander, the county Seat, sixty miles away; the other to the
Big Horn Valley. The scarred stagecoaches which had come down from the
seventies were still in use on both routes, the two on the Meander line
being reenforced by democrat wagons when there was an overflow of
business, as frequently happened in those prosperous times.
Every morning the company assembled before the tent under the canvas
spread to protect the cookstove, to watch Mrs. Reed and Sergeant
Schaefer get breakfast, and to offer suggestions about the fire, and
admire June at her toast-making--the one branch of domestic art, aside
from fudge, which she had mastered. About that time the stage would
pass, setting out on its dusty run to Meander, and everybody on it and
in it would wave, everybody in the genial company before the tent would
wave back, and all of the adventurers on both sides would feel quite
primitive, in spite of the snuffling of the locomotive at the railway
station, pushing around freight-cars.
The locomotive seemed to tell them that they should not be deceived,
that all of this crude setting was a sham and a pretense, and that they
had not yet outrun the conveniences of modern life.
Dr. Slavens appeared to be getting the upper hand of his melancholy, and
to be drawing the comfort from his black pipe that it was designed to
give. Next to the sergeant he was the handiest man in the camp, showing
by his readiness to turn a full hand at anything, from paring potatoes
to making a fire, that he had shifted for himself before that day. The
ladies all admired him, as they always admire a man who has a little
cloud of the mysterious about him. Mrs. Reed wondered, audibly, in the
presence of June and Miss Horton, if he had deserted his wife.
The others were full of the excitement of their novel situation, and
drunk on the blue skies which strained the sunlight of its mists and
motes, pouring it down like a baptismal blessing. Even William Bentley,
the toolmaker, romped and raced in the ankle-deep dust like a boy.
Sunrise always found the floating population of Comanche setting
breakfastward in a clamoring tide. After that, when the land-office
opened at nine o'clock, the stream turned toward it, the crowd grew
around it, fringing off into the great, empty flat in which it stood--a
stretch of naked land so white and gleaming under the sun that it made
the eyes ache. There the land-seekers and thrill-hunters kicked up the
dust, and got their thousands of clerkly necks burned red, and their
thousands of indoor noses peeled, while they discussed the chances of
disposing of the high numbers for enough to pay them for the expense of
the trip.
After noonday the throngs sought the hydrant and the shade of the
saloons, and, where finances would permit, the solace of bottled beer.
And all day over Comanche the heel-ground dust rose as from the
trampling of ten thousand hoofs, and through its tent-set streets the
numbers of a strong army passed and repassed, gazing upon its gaudy
lures. They had come there to gamble in a big, free lottery, where the
only stake was the time spent and the money expended in coming, in which
the grand prize was Claim Number One.
"It looks to me," said Horace Bentley, the bald lawyer, "like a great
many people are going to be bitterly disappointed in this game. More
than forty thousand have registered already, and there are three days
more before the books close. The government circulars describing the
land say there are eight thousand homesteads, all told--six hundred of
them suitable for agriculture once they are brought under irrigation,
the rest grazing and mineral land. It seems to me that, as far as our
expectations go in that direction, we might as well pack up and go
home."
Four days in camp had made old-timers out of the company gathered under
the awning before their tent, waiting for the meal which Mrs. Reed and
her assistants were even then spreading on the trestle-built table.
There had been a shower that afternoon, one of those gusty, blustery,
desert demonstrations which had wrenched the tents and torn hundreds of
them from their slack anchoring in the loose soil.
After the storm, with its splash of big drops and charge of blinding
dust, a cool serenity had fallen over the land. The milk had been washed
out of the distances, and in the far southwest snowy peaks gleamed
solemnly in the setting sun, the barrier on the uttermost edge of the
desert leagues which so many thousand men and women were hungry to
share.
"Yes, it's a desperate gamble for all of us," Dr. Slavens admitted. "I
don't see any more show of anybody in this party drawing a low number
than I see hope for a man who stands up to one of the swindles in the
gambling-tents over there."
"Still," argued Milo Strong, the Iowa teacher, "we've got just the same
chance as anybody out of the forty thousand. I don't suppose there's any
question that the drawing will be fair?"
"It will be under the personal management of the United States Land
Commissioner at Meander," said Horace Bentley.
"How do they work it?" asked June, perking up her head in quick interest
from her task of hammering together the seams of a leaky new tin cup.
She had it over a projecting end of one of the trestles, and was going
about it like a mechanic.
"Where did you learn that trick?" inquired the toolmaker, a look in his
eyes which was pretty close kin to amazement.
"Huh!" said June, hammering away. "What do you suppose a college
education's good for, anyway? But how do they manage the drawing?" she
pressed.
"Did they teach you the game of policy at Molly Bawn?" the lawyer
asked.
"The idea!" sniffed Mrs. Reed.
Miss Horton smiled into her handkerchief, and June shook her head in
vigorous denial.
"I don't even know what it is," said she. "Is it some kind of
insurance?"
"It beats insurance for the man that runs the game," said Strong,
reminiscently.
"All of the names of those who register will be taken to Meander when
the registration closes," explained Horace. "There are half a dozen
clerks in the little office here transcribing the names on to small
cards, with the addresses and all necessary information for notifying a
winner. On the day of the drawing the forty thousand-odd names will be
put into a big hollow drum, fitted with a crank. They'll whirl it, and
then a blindfolded child will put his hand into the drum and draw out
Number One. Another child will then draw Number Two, and so on until
eight thousand names have come out of the wheel. As there are only eight
thousand parcels of land, that will end the lottery. What do you think
of your chance by now, Miss Horton?"
"Why, it looks fair enough, the way they do it," she answered,
questioning Dr. Slavens with her eyes.
He shook his head.
"You can't tell," he responded. "I've seen enough crookedness in this
tent-town in the past four days to set my suspicions against everything
and every official in it."
"Well, the drawing's to be held at Meander, you know," reminded William
Bentley, the toolmaker, "and Meander advertises itself as a moral
center. It seems that it was against this town from the very start--it
wanted the whole show to itself. Here's a circular that I got at Meander
headquarters today. It's got a great knock against Comanche in it."
"Yes, I saw it," said the doctor. "It sounds like one crook knocking
another. But it can't be any worse than this place, anyhow. I think I'll
take a ride over there in a day or so and size it up."
"Well, I surrender all pretensions to Claim Number One," laughed Mrs.
Reed, a straining of color in her cheeks.
June had not demanded fudge once in four days. That alone was enough to
raise the colors of courage in her mother's face, even if there hadn't
been a change in the young lady for the better in other directions. Four
days of Wyoming summer sun and wind had made as much difference in June
as four days of September blaze make in a peach on the tip of an exposed
bough. She was browning and reddening beautifully, and her hair was
taking on a trick of wildness, blowing friskily about her eyes.
It was plain that June had in her all the making of a hummer. That's
what Horace Bentley, the lawyer, owned to himself as he told her
mother in confidence that a month of that high country, with its
fresh-from-creation air, would be better for the girl's natural
endowments than all the beauty-parlors of Boston or the specialists
of Vienna. Horace felt of his early bald spot, half believing that
some stubby hairs were starting there already.
There was still a glow of twilight in the sky when lights appeared in
the windowless windows of the church, and the whine of tuning fiddles
came out of its open door. Mrs. Reed stiffened as she located the sound,
and an expression of outraged sanctity appeared in her face. She turned
to Dr. Slavens.
"Are they going to--to--_dance_ in that building?" she demanded.
"I'm afraid they are," said he. "It's used for dancing, they tell me."
"But it's a church--it's consecrated!" she gasped.
"I reckon it's worn off by this time," he comforted. "It was a church a
long, long time ago--for Comanche. The saloon man across from it told me
its history. He considered locating in it, he said, but they wanted too
much rent.
"When Comanche was only a railroad camp--a good while before the rails
were laid this far--a traveling preacher struck the town and warmed them
up with an old-style revival. They chipped in the money to build the
church in the fervor of the passing glow, and the preacher had it put
up--just as you see it, belfry and all.
"They even bought a bell for it, and it used to ding for the sheepmen
and railroaders, as long as their religion lasted. When it ran out, the
preacher moved on to fresh fields, and a rancher bought the bell to call
his hands to dinner. The respectable element of Comanche--that is, the
storekeepers, their wives, daughters and sons, and the clerks, and
others--hold a dance there now twice a week. That is their only
relaxation."
"It's a shame!" declared Mrs. Reed.
"Oh, I don't know," said the doctor easily.
"I'm _so_ disappointed in it!" said she.
"Because it represents itself as a church when it's something else?"
inquired the doctor softly. "Well, I shouldn't be, if I were you. It has
really nothing to be ashamed of, for the respectable are mightily in the
minority in Comanche, I can tell you, madam--that is, among the regular
inhabitants."
"Let's go over and look on," suggested William Bentley. "It may make
some of you gloomy people forget your future troubles for a while."
The party soon found that looking on exposed them to the contagion of
sociability. They were such wholesome-looking people at the gathering,
and their efforts to make the visitors who stood outside the door feel
at home and comfortable were so genuine, that reserve dissolved most
unaccountably.
It was not long before June's mother, her prejudices against such
frivolous and worldly use of a church blown away, was pigeoning around
with William Bentley. Likewise Mrs. Mann, the miller out of sight and
out of mind, stepped lightly with Horace, the lawyer, the sober black
bag doubled up and stored in the pocket of his coat, its handles
dangling like bridle-reins.
June alone was left unpaired, in company with the doctor and Miss
Horton, who asserted that they did not dance. Her heels were itching to
be clicking off that jolly two-step which the Italian fiddlers and
harpist played with such enticing swing. The school-teacher and the
sergeant were not with them, having gone out on some expedition of their
own among the allurements of Comanche.
But June hadn't long to bear the itch of impatience, for ladies were not
plentiful at the dance. Before anybody had time to be astonished by his
boldness, a young man was bowing before June, presenting his crooked
elbow, inviting her to the dance with all the polish that could possibly
lie on any one man. On account of an unusually enthusiastic clatter of
heels at that moment, Dr. Slavens and Miss Horton, a few paces distant,
could not hear what he said, but they caught their breaths a little
sharply when June took the proffered arm.
"Surest thing you know," they heard her eager little voice say as she
passed them with a happy, triumphant look behind.
Dr. Slavens looked at Miss Horton; Miss Horton looked at the doctor.
Both laughed.
"Well, I like that!" she exclaimed.
"Yes," he agreed, but apparently from quite a different angle, "so do I.
It's natural and unaffected; it's coming down to first principles. Well,
I don't see that there's anything left for you and me to do but use up
some of this moonlight in a walk. I'd like to see the river in this
light. Come?"
"Oh, that would be unconventional!" she protested.
But it was not a strong protest; more of a question perhaps, which left
it all to him.
"This is an unconventional country," he said. "Look at it, as white as
snow under this summer moon."
"It's lovely by night," she agreed; "but this Comanche is like a sore
spot on a clean skin. It's a blight and a disfigurement, and these
noises they make after dark sound like some savage revel."
"We'll put them behind us for two hours or so," he decided with finality
which allowed no further argument.
As they set off toward the river he did not offer her the support of his
arm, for she strode beside him with her hands swinging free, long step
to his long step, not a creature of whims and shams, he knew, quite able
to bear her own weight on a rougher road than that.
"Still it _is_ unconventional," she reflected, looking away over the
flat land.
"That's the beauty of it," said he. "Let's be just natural."
They passed beyond the straggling limits of Comanche, where the town
blended out into the plain in the tattered tents and road-battered
wagons of the most earnest of all the home-seekers, those who had staked
everything on the hope of drawing a piece of land which would serve at
last as a refuge against the world's buffeting.
Under their feet was the low-clinging sheep-sage and the running herbs
of yellow and gray which seemed so juiceless and dry to the eye, but
which were the provender of thousands of sheep and cattle that never
knew the shelter of fold or stable, nor the taste of man-grown grain or
fodder, from the day of their birth to the day of their marketing.
Winter and summer alike, under the parching sun, under the strangling
drifts, that clinging, gray vegetation was the animals' sole nutriment.
Behind the couple the noises of Comanche died to murmurs. Ahead of them
rose the dark line of cottonwoods which stood upon the river-shore.
"I want to take another look at the Buckhorn Cañon," said the doctor,
stalking on in his sturdy, farm-bred gait.
"It makes a fearful roar," she remarked as they approached the place
where the swift river, compressed into the flumelike passage which it
had whetted out of the granite, tossed its white mane in the moonlight
before plunging into the dark door of the cañon.
"I've been hearing yarns and traditions about that cañon ever since I
came here," he told her. "They say it's a thousand feet deep in
places."
"June and I came over here this morning," said Agnes, "along with
Sergeant Schaefer. He said he didn't believe that June could hike that
far. I sat here on the rocks a long time watching it. I never saw so
much mystery and terror in water before."
She drew a little nearer to him as she spoke, and he put his hand on her
shoulder in an unconscious movement of restraint as she leaned over
among the black boulders and peered into the hissing current.
"Do you suppose anybody ever went in there?" she asked.
"They say the Indians know some way of getting through," he replied,
"but no white man ever went into the cañon and came out alive. The last
one to try it was a representative of a Denver paper who came out here
at the beginning of the registration. He went in there with his camera
on his back after a story."
"Poor fellow! Did he get through--at all?"
"They haven't reported him on the other side yet. His paper offers a
reward for the solution of the mystery of his disappearance, which is no
mystery at all. He didn't have the right kind of footgear, and he
slipped. That's all there is to it."
He felt her shudder under his hand, which remained unaccountably on her
warm shoulder after the need of restraint had passed.
"It's a forbidding place by day," said she, "and worse at night. Just
think of the despair of that poor man when he felt himself falling down
there in the dark!"
"Moccasins are the things for a job like that," he declared. "I've
studied it all out; I believe I could go through there without a
scratch."
"What in the world would anybody want to do it for? What is there to be
gained by it, to the good of anybody?" she wondered.
"Well, there's the reward of five hundred dollars offered by the
newspaper in Denver," he answered.
"It's a pitiful stake against such odds!" she scorned.
"And all the old settlers say there's gold in there--rich pockets of it,
washed out of the ledges in the sides of the walls and held by the rocks
in the river-bed and along the margins. A nugget is picked up now and
then on the other side, so there seems to be ground for the belief that
fortune waits for the man who makes a careful exploration."
"He couldn't carry enough of it out to make it worth while," she
objected.
"But he could go back," Dr. Slavens reminded her. "It would be easy the
second time. Or he might put in effect the scheme a sheep-herder had
once."
"What was that?" she asked, turning her face up to him from her place on
the low stone where she sat, the moonlight glinting in her eyes.
He laughed a little.
"Not that it was much of a joke the way it turned out," he explained.
"He went in there to hunt for the gold, leaving two of his companions to
labor along the brink of the cañon above and listen for his signal shout
in case he came across any gold worth while. Then they were to let a
rope down to him and he'd send up the treasure. It was a great scheme,
but they never got a chance to try it. If he ever gave any signal they
never heard it, for down there a man's voice strained to its shrillest
would be no more than a whisper against a tornado. You can believe that,
can't you, from the way it roars and tears around out here?"
"All the gold that remains unmined wouldn't tempt me a hundred feet down
that black throat," she shuddered. "But what became of the adventurer
with the scheme?"
"He came through in time--they caught him at the outlet over there in
the mountains. The one pocket that remained in his shredded clothing was
full of gold nuggets, they say. So he must have found it, even if he
couldn't make them hear."
"What a dismal end for any man!"
"A man could beat it, though," said he, leaning forward in thoughtful
attitude. "He'd need a strong light, and moccasins, so he could cling to
the rocks. I believe it could be done, and I've thought a good deal
about exploring it myself for a day or two past. If I don't draw a low
number I think I'll tackle it."
"Don't you attempt it!" she cried, clutching his arm and turning her
white face to him affrightedly. "Don't you ever dare try it!"
He laughed uneasily, his eyes on the black gash into which the foaming
river darted.
"Oh, I don't know; I've heard of men doing riskier things than that for
money," he returned.
Agnes Horton's excitement and concern seemed to pass with his words. She
propped her chin in her palms and sat pensively, looking at the broken
waters which reared around the barrier of scattered stones in its
channel.
"Yes, men sometimes take big risks for money--even the risk of honor and
the everlasting happiness of others," said she.
It was like the wind blowing aside a tent-flap as he passed, giving him
a glimpse of its intimate interior. That little lifting of her reserve
was a glance into the sanctuary of her heart. The melancholy of her eyes
was born out of somebody's escapade with money; he was ready to risk his
last guess on that.
"Besides, there may be nothing to that story of nuggets. That may be
just one of these western yarns," she added.
"Well, in any case, there's the five hundred the Denver paper offers,
besides what I could make by syndicating the account of my adventure
among the Sunday papers. I used to do quite a lot of that when I was in
college."
"But you don't need money badly enough to go into that place after it.
Nobody ever needed it that badly," she declared.
"Don't I?" he answered, a little biting of bitter sarcasm in his tone.
"Well, you don't know, my lady, how easy that money looks to me compared
to my ordinary channels of getting it."
"It can't be so very hard in your profession," she doubted, as if a bit
offended by his attitude of martyrdom before an unappreciative world. "I
don't believe you have half as hard a time of it as some who have too
much money."
"The hardship of having too much money is one which I never experienced,
so I can't say as to that," he said, moved to smiles by the humor of it.
"But to understand what I mean by hardship you must know how I've
struggled in the ruts and narrow traditions of my profession, and
fought, hoped, and starved. Why, I tell you that black hole over there
looks like an open door with a light inside of it compared to some of
the things I've gone through in the seven years that I've been trying to
get a start. Money? I'll tell you how that is, Miss Horton; I've thought
along that one theme so confounded long that it's worn a groove in my
brain.
"Here you see me tonight, a piece of driftwood at thirty-five, and all
for the want of money enough to buy an automobile and take the
darned-fool world by storm on its vain side! You can't scratch it with a
diamond on its reasoning side--I've scratched away on it until my nails
are gone.
"I've failed, I tell you, I've botched it all up! And just for want of
money enough to buy an automobile! Brains never took a doctor
anywhere--nothing but money and bluff!"
"I wonder," she speculated, "what will become of you out here in this
raw place, where the need of a doctor seems to be the farthest thing in
the world, and you with your nerve all gone?"
It would have reassured her if she could have seen the fine flush which
this charge raised in his face. But she didn't even look toward him, and
couldn't have noted the change if she had, for the moonlight was not
that bright, even in Wyoming.
"But I haven't lost my nerve!" he denied warmly.
"Oh, yes, you have," she contradicted, "or you wouldn't admit that
you're a failure, and you wouldn't talk about money that way. Money
doesn't cut much ice as long as you've got nerve."
"That's all right from your view," said he pettishly. "But you've had
easy going of it, out of college into a nice home, with a lot of those
pink-faced chaps to ride you around in their automobiles, and opera and
plays and horse-shows and all that stuff."
"Perhaps," she admitted, a soft sadness in her voice. "But wait until
you've seen somebody drunk with the passion of too much money and crazy
with the hunger for more; wait until you've seen a man's soul grow black
from hugging it to his heart, and his conscience atrophy and his manhood
wither. And then when it rises up and crushes him, and all that are his
with it----"
He looked at her curiously, waiting for her to round it out with a
personal citation. But she said no more.
"That's why you're here, hoping like the rest of us to draw Number
One?"
"Any number up to six hundred will do for me," she laughed, sitting
erect once more and seeming to shake her bitter mood off as she spoke.
"And what will you do with it? Sell out as soon as the law allows?"
"I'll live on it," dreamily, as if giving words to an old vision which
she had warmed in her heart. "I'll stay there and work through the hope
of summer and the bleakness of winter, and make a home. I'll smooth the
wild land and plant trees and green meadows, and roses by the door, and
we'll stay there and it will be--_home_!"
"Yes," he nodded, understanding the feeling better than she knew. "You
and mother; you want it just that way."
"How did you know it was mother?" she asked, turning to him with a
quick, appreciative little start.
"You're the kind of a woman who has a mother," he answered. "Mothers
leave their stamp on women like you."
"Thank you," said she.
"I've often wanted to run away from it that way, too," he owned, "for
failure made a coward of me more than once in those hard years. There's
a prospect of independence and peace in the picture you make with those
few swift strokes. But I don't see any--you haven't put any--any--_man_
in it. Isn't there one somewhere?"
"No," simply and frankly; "there isn't any man anywhere. He doesn't
belong in the picture, so why should I draw him in?"
Dr. Slavens sighed.
"Yes; I've wanted to run away from it more than once."
"That's because you've lost your nerve," she charged. "You shouldn't
want to run away from it--a big, broad man like you--and you must not
run away. You must stay and fight--and fight--and _fight_! Why, you talk
as if you were seventy instead of a youth of thirty-five!"
"Don't rub it in so hard on that failure and nerve business," he begged,
ashamed of his hasty confession.
"Well, _you_ mustn't talk of running away then. There are no ghosts
after you, are there?"
The moonlight was sifting through the loose strands of her gleaming hair
as she sat there bareheaded at his side, and the strength of his life
reached out to her, and the deep yearning of his lonely soul. He knew
that he wanted that woman out of all the world full of women whom he had
seen and known--and passed. He knew that he wanted her with such strong
need that from that day none other could come across the mirror of his
heart and dim her image out of it.
Simply money would not win a woman like her; no slope-headed son of a ham
factory could come along and carry her off without any recommendation but
his cash. She had lived through that kind of lure, and she was there on
his own level because she wanted to work out her clean life in her own
clean way. The thought warmed him. Here was a girl, he reflected, with a
piece of steel in her backbone; a girl that would take the world's
lashings like a white elm in a storm, to spring resiliently back to
stately poise after the turmoil had passed. Trouble would not break
her; sorrow would only make her fineness finer. There was a girl to stand
up beside a man!
He had not thought of it before--perhaps he had been too melancholy and
bitter over his failure to take by storm the community where he had
tried to make his start--but he believed that he realized that moment
what he had needed all along. If, amid the contempt and indifference of
the successful, he'd had some incentive besides his own ambition to
struggle for all this time, some splendid, strong-handed woman to stand
up in his gloom like the Goddess of Liberty offering an ultimate reward
to the poor devils who have won their way to her feet across the bitter
seas from hopeless lands, he might have stuck to it back there and won
in the end.
"That's what I've needed," said he aloud, rising abruptly.
She looked up at him quickly.
"I've needed somebody's sympathy, somebody's sarcasm, somebody's soft
hand--which could be correctional on occasion--and somebody's
heart-interest all along," he declared, standing before her dramatically
and flinging out his hands in the strong feeling of his declaration.
"I've been lonely; I've been morose. I've needed a woman like you!"
Without sign of perturbation or offense, Agnes rose and laid her hand
gently upon his arm.
"I think, Dr. Slavens," she suggested, "we'd better be going back to
camp."
They walked the mile back to camp with few words between them. The
blatant noises of Comanche grew as they drew nearer.
The dance was still in progress; the others had not returned to camp.
"Do you care to sit out here and wait for them?" he asked as they
stopped before the tent.
"I think I'll go to bed," she answered. "I'm tired."
"I'll stand sentry," he offered.
She thanked him, and started to go in. At the door she paused, went back
to him, and placed her hand in her soothing, placid way upon his arm
again.
"You'll fight out the good fight here," said she, "for this is a country
that's got breathing-room in it."
She looked up into his face a bit wistfully, he thought, as if there
were more in her heart than she had spoken. "You'll win here--I know
you'll win."
He reached out to put his arm about her, drawn by the same warm
attraction that had pulled the words from him at the riverside. The
action was that of a man reaching out to lean his weary weight upon some
familiar object, and there was something of old habit in it, as if he
had been doing it always.
But she did not stay. He folded only moonlight, in which there is little
substance for a strong man, even in Wyoming. Dr. Slavens sighed as the
tent-flap dropped behind her.
"Yes; that's what I've needed all the time," said he.
He sat outside with his pipe, which never had seemed so sweet. But, for
all of its solace, he was disturbed by the thought that perhaps he had
made a blunder which had placed him in a false light with Miss
Horton--only he thought of her as Agnes, just as if he had the right.
For there were only occasions on which Dr. Slavens admitted himself to
be a fizzle in the big fireworks of the world. That was a charge which
he sometimes laid to himself in mortification of spirit, or as a
flagellant to spur him along the hard road. He had not meant to let it
slip him aloud over there by the river, because he didn't believe it at
all--at least not in that high-hoping hour.
So he sat there in the moonlight before the tent, the noises of the town
swelling louder and louder as the night grew older, his big frame
doubled into the stingy lap of a canvas chair, his knees almost as high
as his chin. But it was comfortable, and his tobacco was as pleasant to
his senses as the distillation of youthful dreams.
He had not attained the automobile stage of prosperity and arrogance,
certainly. But that was somewhere ahead; he should come to it in time.
Out of the smoke of his pipe that dreamy night he could see it. Perhaps
he might be a little gray at the temples when he came to it, and a
little lined at the mouth, but there would be more need of it then than
now, because his legs would tire more easily.
But Agnes had taken that foolishly blurted statement for truth. So
it was his job henceforward to prove to Agnes that he was not bankrupt
in courage. And he meant to do it he vowed, even if he had to get a
tent and hang out his shingle in Comanche. That would take nerve
unquestionably, for there were five doctors in the place already, none
of them making enough to buy stamps to write back home for money.
Already, he said, he was out of the rut of his despondency; already the
rust was knocked off his back, and the eagerness to crowd up to the
starting-line was on him as fresh again as on the day when he had walked
away from all competitors in the examination for a license before the
state board.
At midnight the others came back from the dance and broke the trend of
his smoke-born dreams. Midnight was the hour when respectable Comanche
put out its lights and went to bed. Not to sleep in every case, perhaps,
for the din was at crescendo pitch by then; but, at any event, to
deprive the iniquitous of the moral support of looking on their
debaucheries and sins.
Dr. Slavens was in no mood for his sagging canvas cot, for his new
enthusiasm was bounding through him as if he had been given an
intravenous injection of nitroglycerin. There was Wyoming before him,
all white and virginal and fresh, a big place for a big deed. Certainly,
said Dr. Slavens. Just as if made to order for his needs.
So he would look around a bit before turning in, with his high-stepping
humor over him, and that spot on his arm, where her hand had lain, still
aglow with her mysterious fire.