OUT OF NIGHT AND STORM
When Rose Cannon woke on the morning after her arrival at Antelope, a
memory of the snowflakes of the evening before made her jump out of
bed and patter barefooted to the window. It seemed to her it would be
“lots of fun” to be snowed up at Antelope, and when she saw only a thin
covering of white on the hotel garden and the diminishing perspective
of roofs, she drew her mouth into a grimace of disappointment.
With hunched-up shoulders, her hands tucked under her arms, she stood
looking out, her breath blurring the pane in a dissolving film of
smoke. It was a cold little world. Below her the garden--the summer
pride of Perley’s Hotel--lay a sere, withered waste, its shrubs stiff
in the grip of the cold. The powdering of snow on its frost-bitten
leaves and grizzled grass added to its air of bleakness. Beyond rose
the shingled roofs of Antelope’s main street. From their white-coated
slopes black stovepipes sent aloft spirals of smoke, a thinner,
fainter gray than the air into which they ascended. The sky lowered,
low-hanging and full of menace. The snowflakes that now and then idly
circled down were dark against its stormy pallor. Rose, standing gazing
up, wondered if her father would go on to Greenhide, the new camp
twenty miles from Antelope, where an important strike had recently been
made.
Half an hour later when they met at breakfast he told her he would not
leave for Greenhide that morning. Perley had warned him not to attempt
it, and he for his part knew the country well enough to realize that
it would be foolhardy to start under such a threatening sky. It would
be all right to stop over at Antelope till the weather made up its
mind what it meant to do. It might not be fun for her, but then he had
warned her before they left San Francisco that she would have to put up
with rough accommodations and unaccustomed discomforts.
Rose laughed. Her father did not understand that the roughness and
novelty of it all was what she enjoyed. He was already a man of means
when she was born, and she had known nothing of the hardships and
privations through which he and her mother had struggled up to fortune.
Rocky Bar the night before and Antelope this morning were her first
glimpses of the mining region over which the pioneers had swarmed in
’49, Bill Cannon, only a lad in his teens, among them.
Now she sat sidewise in her chair, sweeping with animated eyes the
primitive dining-room, its walls whitewashed, its low ceiling hung
with strands of pinked-out, colored paper, its board floor here and
there crossed by strips of cocoanut matting. At one end a hole in the
wall communicated with the kitchen and through this the naked arms of
the Chinaman, brown against the uprolled ends of his white sleeves,
protruded, offering dishes to the single waitress who was not always
there to receive them.
The girl, Cora by name, was particularly delinquent this morning.
Several times the Chinaman was forced to remove his arms and substitute
his face in the opening while he projected an enraged yell of “Corla!”
among the hotel guests. Her dereliction of duty was caused by an
overpowering interest in the Cannons, round whom she hovered in
enchanted observation. On ordinary occasions Cora was content to wait
on the group of men, local bachelors whose lonely state made it more
convenient for them “to eat” at the hotel, and who sat--two bending
lines of masculine backs--at either side of a long table. Cora’s usual
method was to set the viands before them and then seat herself at the
end of the table and enliven the meal with light conversation. To-day,
however, they were neglected. She scarcely answered their salutations,
but, banging the dishes down, hasted away to the Cannon table, where
she stood fixedly regarding the strange young lady.
Perley’s warnings of bad weather were soon verified. Early in the
afternoon the idle, occasional snowflakes had begun to fall thickly,
with a soft, persistent steadiness of purpose. The icy stillness of the
morning gave place to a wind, uncertain and whispering at first, but,
as the day advanced, gathering volume and speed. The office and bar
filled with men, some of them--snow powdered as if a huge sugar-sifter
had been shaken over them--having tramped in from small camps in the
vicinity. Clamor and vociferations, mixed with the smell of strong
drinks and damp woolens, rose from the bar. Constant gusts of cold air
swept the lower passages, and snow was tramped into the matting round
the hall stove.
At four o’clock, Willoughby, the Englishman who had charge of the
shut-down Bella K. mine, came, butting head down against the wind, a
group of dogs at his heels, to claim the hospitality of the hotel. His
watchman, an old timer, had advised him to seek a shelter better stored
with provisions than the office building of the Bella K. Willoughby,
whose accent and manner had proclaimed him as one of high distinction
before it was known in Antelope that he was “some relation to a lord,”
was made welcome in the bar. His four red setter dogs, shut out from
that hospitable retreat by the swing door, grouped around it and
stared expectantly, each shout from within being answered by them with
plaintive and ingratiating whines.
The afternoon was still young when the day began to darken. Rose
Cannon, who had been sitting in the parlor, dreaming over a fire of
logs, went to the window, wondering at the growing gloom. The wind had
risen to a wild, sweeping speed, that tore the snow fine as a mist.
There were no lazy, woolly flakes now. They had turned into an opaque,
slanting veil which here and there curled into snowy mounds and in
other places left the ground bare. It seemed as if a giant paint-brush,
soaked in white, had been swept over the outlook. Now and then a
figure, head down, hands in pockets, the front of the body looking as
though the paint-brush had been slapped across it, came into view,
shadowy and unsubstantial in the mist-like density.
Rose looked out on it with an interest that was a little soberer than
the debonair blitheness of her morning mood. If it kept up they might
be snowed in for days, Perley had said. That being the case, this room,
the hotel’s one parlor, would be her retreat, her abiding place--for
her bedroom was as cold as an ice-chest--until they were liberated.
With the light, half-whimsical smile that came so readily to her lips,
she turned from the window and surveyed it judicially.
Truly it was not bad. Seen by the light of the flaming logs pulsing
on the obscurity already lurking in the corners, it had the charm of
the fire-warmed interior, tight-closed against outer storm. A twilight
room lit only by a fire, with wind and snow outside, is the coziest
habitation in the world. It seemed to Rose it would make a misanthrope
feel friendly, prone to sociable chat and confidence. When the day grew
still dimmer she would draw the curtains (they were of a faded green
rep) and pull up the old horsehair arm-chairs that were set back so
demurely in the corners. Her eyes strayed to the melodeon and then to
the wall above it, where hung a picture of a mining millionaire, once
of the neighborhood, recently deceased, a circlet of wax flowers from
his bier surrounding his head, and the whole neatly incased in glass.
Washington crossing the Delaware made a pendent on the opposite wall.
On the center-table there were many books in various stages of unrepair
and in all forms of bindings. These were the literary aftermath left
by the mining men, who, since the early sixties, had been stopping at
Antelope on their hopeful journeys up and down the mineral belt.
She was leaving the window to return to her seat by the fire when the
complete silence that seemed to hold the outside world in a spell was
broken by sudden sounds. Voices, the crack of a whip, then a grinding
thump against the hotel porch, caught her ear and whirled her back
to the pane. A large covered vehicle, with the whitened shapes of
a smoking team drooping before it, had just drawn up at the steps.
Two masculine figures, carrying bags, emerged from the interior, and
from the driver’s seat a muffled shape--a cylinder of wrappings which
appeared to have a lively human core--gave forth much loud and profane
language. The isolation and remoteness of her surroundings had already
begun to affect the town-bred young lady. She ran to the door of the
parlor, as ingenuously curious to see the new arrivals and find out who
they were as though she had lived in Antelope for a year.
Looking down the hall she saw the front door open violently inward
and two men hastily enter. The wind seemed to blow them in and before
Perley’s boy could press the door shut the snow had whitened the damp
matting. No stage passed through Antelope in these days of its decline,
and the curiosity felt by Rose was shared by the whole hotel. The
swing door to the bar opened and men pressed into the aperture. Mrs.
Perley came up from the kitchen, wiping a dish. Cora appeared in the
dining-room doorway, and in answer to Miss Cannon’s inquiringly-lifted
eyebrows, called across the hall:
“It’s the Murphysville stage on the down-trip to Rocky Bar. I guess
they thought they couldn’t make it. The driver don’t like to run no
risks and so he’s brought ’em round this way and dumped ’em here. There
ain’t but two passengers. That’s them.”
She indicated the two men who, standing by the hall stove, were
divesting themselves of their wraps. One of them was a tall upright old
man with a sweep of grizzled beard covering his chest, and gray hair
falling from the dome of a bald head.
The other was much younger, tall also, and spare to leanness. He wore a
gray fedora hat, and against its chill, unbecoming tint, his face, its
prominent, bony surfaces nipped by the cold to a raw redness, looked
sallow and unhealthy. With an air of solicitude he laid his overcoat
across a chair, brushing off the snow with a careful hand. Buttoned
tight in a black cutaway with the collar turned up about his neck, he
had an appearance of being uncomfortably compressed into garments too
small for him. His shiny-knuckled, purplish hands, pinching up the
shoulders of his coat over the chair-back, were in keeping with his
general suggestion of a large-boned meagerly-covered lankness. The
fact that he was smooth-shaven, combined with the unusual length of
dark hair that appeared below his hat-brim, lent him a suggestion of
something interestingly unconventional, almost artistic. In the region
where he now found himself he would have been variously set down as
a gambler, a traveling clergyman, an actor, or perhaps only a vender
of patent medicines who had some odd, attractive way of advertising
himself, such as drawing teeth with an electric appliance, or playing
the guitar from the tail-board of his showman’s cart.
Now, having arranged his coat to its best advantage, he turned to
Perley and said with a curiously deep and resonant voice,
“And, mine host, a stove in my bedroom, a stove in my bedroom or I
perish.”
Cora giggled and threw across the hall to Miss Cannon a delighted
murmur of,
“Oh, say, ain’t he just the richest thing?”
“You’ve got us trapped and caged here for a spell, I guess,” said the
older man. “Any one else in the same box?”
“Oh, you’ll not want for company,” said Perley, pride at the importance
of the announcement vibrating in his tone. “We’ve got Willoughby here
from the Bella K. with his four setter dogs, and Bill Cannon and his
daughter up from the coast.”
“Bill Cannon!”--the two men stared and the younger one said,
“Bill Cannon, the Bonanza King from San Francisco?”
“That’s him all right,” nodded Perley. “Up here to see the diggings at
Greenhide and snowed in same as you.”
Here, Rose, fearing the conversation might turn upon herself, slipped
from the doorway into the passage and up the stairs to her own room.
An hour later as she stood before the glass making her toilet for
supper, a knock at the door ushered in Cora, already curled, powdered
and beribboned for that occasion, a small kerosene lamp in her hand.
In the bare room, its gloom only partly dispelled by the light from
a similar lamp on the bureau and the red gleam from the stove,
Miss Cannon was revealed in the becoming half-dusk made by these
imperfectly-blending illuminations, a pink silk dressing-gown loosely
enfolding her, a lightly brushed-in suggestion of fair hair behind her
ears and on her shoulders. Her comb was in her hand and Cora realized
with an uplifting thrill that she had timed her visit correctly and was
about to learn the mysteries of Miss Cannon’s coiffure.
“I brung you another lamp,” she said affably, setting her offering
down on the bureau. “One ain’t enough light to dress decently by. I
have three,” and she sank down on the side of the bed with the air of
having established an intimacy, woman to woman, by this act of generous
consideration.
“Them gentlemen,” she continued, “are along on this hall with you and
your pa. The old one’s Judge Washburne, of Colusa, a pioneer that used
to know Mrs. Perley’s mother way back in Sacramento in the fifties, and
knew your pa real well when he was poor. It’s sort of encouraging to
think _your_ pa was ever poor.”
Rose laughed and turned sidewise, looking at the speaker under the arch
of her uplifted arm. There were hair-pins in her mouth and an upwhirled
end of blond hair protruded in a gleaming scattering of yellow over her
forehead. She mumbled a comment on her father’s early poverty, her lips
showing red against the hair-pins nipped between her teeth.
“And the other one,” went on Cora, her eyes riveted on the
hair-dressing, her subconscious mind making notes of the disposition of
every coil, “his name’s J. D. Buford. And I’d like you to guess what
he is! An actor, a stage player. He’s been playing all up the state
from Los Angeles and was going down to Sacramento to keep an engagement
there. It just tickles me to death to have an actor in the house. I
ain’t never seen one close to before.”
The last hair-pin was adjusted and Miss Cannon studied the effect with
a hand-glass.
“An actor,” she commented, running a smoothing palm up the back of her
head, “that’s just what he looked like, now I think of it. Perhaps
he’ll act for us. I think it’s going to be lots of fun being snowed up
at Antelope.”
The sound of a voice crying “Cora” here rose from the hallway and that
young woman, with a languid deliberation of movement, as of one who
obeys a vulgar summons at her own elegant leisure, rose and departed,
apologizing for having to go so soon. A few minutes later, the hour of
supper being at hand, Rose followed her.
She was descending the stairs when a commotion from below, a sound
of voices loud, argumentative, rising and falling in excited chorus,
hurried her steps. The lower hall, lit with lamps and the glow of its
stove, heated to a translucent red, was full of men. A current of cold
could be felt in the hot atmosphere and fresh snow was melting on the
floor. Standing by the stove was a man who had evidently just entered.
Ridges of white lay caught in the folds of his garments; a silver hoar
was on his beard. He held his hands out to the heat and as Rose reached
the foot of the stairs she heard him say,
“Well, I tell you that any man that started to walk up here from Rocky
Bar this afternoon must have been plumb crazy. Why, John L. Sullivan
couldn’t do it in such a storm.”
To which the well-bred voice of Willoughby answered,
“But according to the message he started at two and the snow was hardly
falling then. He must have got a good way, past the Silver Crescent
even, when the storm caught him.”
A hubbub of voices broke out here, and, seeing her father on the edge
of the crowd, Rose went to him and plucked his sleeve, murmuring,
“What’s happened? What’s going on?”
He took his cigar out of his mouth and turned toward her, speaking low
and keeping his eyes on the men by the stove.
“The telegraph operator’s just had a message sent from Rocky Bar that a
man started from there this afternoon to walk up here. They don’t think
he could make it and are afraid he’s lost somewhere. Perley and some of
the boys are going out to look for him.”
“What a dreadful thing! In such a storm! Do you think they’ll ever find
him?”
He shrugged, and replaced his cigar in his mouth.
“Oh, I guess so. If he was strong enough to get on near here they ought
to. But it’s just what the operator says. The feller must have been
plumb crazy to attempt such a thing. Looks as if he was a stranger in
the country.”
“It’s a sort of quiet, respectable way of committing suicide,” said the
voice of the actor behind them.
Rose looked over her shoulder and saw his thin, large-featured face, no
longer nipped and reddened with cold, but wreathed in an obsequious and
friendly smile which furrowed it with deep lines. Her father answered
him and she turned away, being more interested in the preparations for
the search party. As she watched these she could hear the desultory
conversation behind her, the actor’s comments delivered with an
unctuous, elaborate politeness which, contrasted with her father’s
gruff brevity, made her smile furtively to herself.
A jingle of sleigh bells from without threw the party into the sudden
bustle of departure. Men shrugged themselves into their coats and tied
comforters over their ears. Perley emerged from the bar, shrouded in
outer wrappings, and crowding a whisky flask into his pocket. The
hall door was thrown open, and through the powdery thickness of the
atmosphere the sleigh with its restive horses could be seen drawn up
at the porch steps. Those left behind pressed into the doorway to
speed the departure. Shouted instructions, last suggestions as to the
best methods for conducting the search filled the air, drowning the
despairing whines that Willoughby’s dogs, shut in the bar, sent after
their master. With a broken jingle of bells the sleigh started and in a
moment was swallowed up in the blackness of the storm.
Supper was an animated meal that evening. The suddenly tragic interest
that had developed drew the little group of guests together with the
strands of a common sympathy. The judge and the actor moved their seats
to the Cannons’ table. Cora was sent to request the doctor--a young
man fresh from his graduation in San Francisco who took his meals
at the bachelor’s table--to join them and add the weight of medical
opinion to their surmises as to the traveler’s chances of survival.
These, the doctor thought, depended as much upon the man’s age and
physical condition, as upon the search party’s success in finding him.
And then they speculated as to the man himself, drawing inferences from
the one thing they knew of him, building up his character from this
single fact, deducing from it what manner of man he should be, and why
he should have done so strangely foolhardy a thing.
After supper they retired to the parlor, piled the fire high and sat
grouped before it, the smoke of cigars and cigarettes lying about their
heads in white layers. It was but natural that the conversation should
turn on stories of the great storms of the past. Rose had heard many
such before, but to-night, with the wind rocking the old hotel and the
thought of the lost man heavy at her heart, she listened, held in a
cold clutch of fascinated attention, to tales of the emigrants caught
in the passes of the Sierra, of pioneer mining-camps relieved by mule
trains which broke through the snow blockade as the miners lay dying
in their huts, of men risking their lives to carry succor to comrades
lost in their passage from camp to camp on just such a night as this.
Now and then one of Willoughby’s dogs, long since broken from the
confinement of the bar, came to the door and put in an inquiring head,
the ears pricked, the eyes full of hopeful inquiry, a feathered tail
wagging in deprecating friendliness. But its master was not there and
it turned away, disappointed, to run up the hall, sniffing under closed
doors and whimpering in uneasy loneliness.
Rose sat crouched over the fire, and as the fund of stories became
exhausted and silence gradually settled on the group, her thoughts
turned again to the traveler. She had been shocked at first, as the
others were, by the thought of a fellow creature lost in the storm; but
as the evening advanced, and the talk threw round his vague, undefined
figure the investiture of an identity and a character, she began to see
him less as a nebulous, menaced shape than as a known individuality. He
seemed to be advancing out of the swirling blackness of the night into
extending circles of the acquainted and the intimate. He was drawing
near, drawing out of the limbo of darkness and mystery, into the light
of their friendly fire, the grasp of their welcoming hands. He took
shape in her imagination; she began to see his outline forming and
taking color. With every tick of the clock she felt more keenly that he
was some one who needed her help, and whom she must rescue. By ten she
was in a ferment of anguished expectancy. The lost traveler was to her
a man who had once been her friend, now threatened by death.
The clock hand passed ten, and the periods of silence that at intervals
had fallen on the watchers grew longer and more frequent, and finally
merged into a stillness where all sat motionless, listening to the
storm. It had increased with the coming of the dark and now filled the
night with wildness and tumult. The wind made human sounds about the
angles of the house, which rocked and creaked to its buffets. The gale
was fitful. It died away almost to silence, seeming to recuperate its
forces for a new attack, and then came back full of fresh energies. It
struck blows on the doors and windows, like those of a fist demanding
entrance. Billowing rushes of sound circled round the building, and
then a rustling passage of sleet swept across the curtained pane.
It was nearly eleven, and for fifteen minutes no one had spoken a word.
Two of the dogs had come in and lain down on the hearth-rug, their
noses on their paws, their eyes fixed brightly and ponderingly on the
fire. In the midst of the motionless semicircle one of them suddenly
raised its head, its ears pricked. With its muzzle elevated, its eyes
full of awakened intelligence, it gave a low, uneasy whimper. Almost
simultaneously Rose started and drew herself up, exclaiming, “Listen!”
The sound of sleigh bells, faint as a noise in a dream, came through
the night.
In a moment the lower floor was shaken with movement and noise. The bar
emptied itself on to the porch and the hall doors were thrown wide. The
sleigh had been close to the hotel before its bells were heard, and
almost immediately its shape emerged from the swirling whiteness and
drew up at the steps. Rose, standing back in the parlor doorway, heard
a clamor of voices, a rising surge of sound from which no intelligible
sentence detached itself, and a thumping and stamping of feet as the
searchers staggered in with the lost traveler. The crowd separated
before them and they entered slowly, four men carrying a fifth, their
bodies incrusted with snow, the man they bore an unseen shape covered
with whitened rugs from which an arm hung, a limp hand touching the
floor. Questions and answers, now clear and sharp, followed them, like
notes upon the text of the inert form:
“Where’d you get him?”
“About five miles below on the main road. One of the horses almost
stepped on him. He was right in the path, but he was all sprinkled over
with snow.”
“He’s not dead, is he?”
“Pretty near, I guess. We’ve pumped whisky into him, but he ain’t shown
a sign of life.”
“Who is he?”
“Search me. I ain’t seen him good myself yet. Just as we got him the
lantern went out.”
There was a sofa in the hall and they laid their burden there, the
crowd edging in on them, horrified, interested, hungrily peering. Rose
could see their bent, expressive backs and the craning napes of their
necks. Then a sharp order from the doctor drove them back, sheepish,
tramping on one another’s toes, bunched against the wall and still
avidly staring. As their ranks broke, the young girl had a sudden,
vivid glimpse of the man, his head and part of his chest uncovered. Her
heart gave a leap of pity and she made a movement from the doorway,
then stopped. The lost traveler, that an hour before had almost assumed
the features of a friend, was a complete stranger that she had never
seen before.
He looked like a dead man. His face, the chin up, the lips parted under
the fringe of a brown mustache, was marble white, and showed a gray
shadow in the cheek. The hair on his forehead, thawed by the heat, was
lying in damp half-curled semicircles, dark against the pallid skin.
There was a ring on the hand that still hung limp on the floor. The
doctor, muttering to himself, pulled open the shirt and was feeling
the heart, when Perley, who had flown into the bar for more whisky,
emerged, a glass in his hand. As his eye fell upon the man, he stopped,
stared, and then exclaimed in loud-voiced amaze:
“My God--why, it’s Dominick Ryan! Look here, Governor”--to Cannon who
was standing by his daughter in the parlor doorway, “come and see for
yourself. If this ain’t young Ryan I’m a Dutchman!”
Cannon pushed between the intervening men and bent over the prostrate
figure.
“That’s who it is,” he said slowly and unemotionally. “It’s Dominick
Ryan, all right. Well, by ginger!” and he turned and looked at the
amazed innkeeper, “that’s the queerest thing I ever saw. What’s brought
him up here?”
Perley, his glass snatched from him by the doctor who seemed entirely
indifferent to their recognition of his patient, shrugged helplessly.
“Blest if I know,” he said, staring aimlessly about him. “He was here
last summer fishing. But there ain’t no fishing now. God, ain’t it a
good thing that operator at Rocky Bar had the sense to telegraph up!”