the night thinking about other people!”
“If you mean me, people of my age need very little sleep.”
“May I kiss you good-night, Paul's mother?”
“You may kiss me because I am Paul's mother, not because I do not
sleep.”
Moya's lips touched a cheek as white and almost as cold as the frosted
window-panes through which the moon was glimmering. She thought of the
icy roses on her wedding dress.
Downstairs her father was smoking his bedtime cigar. Mrs. Creve, very
sleepy and cosy and flushed, leaned over the smouldering bed of coals.
She held out her plump, soft hand to Moya.
“Come here and be scolded! We have been scolding you steadily for the
last hour.”
“If you want that young man to get his strength back, you'd better not
keep him up talking half the night,” the colonel growled softly. “Do you
see what time it is?”
Moya knelt and leaned her head against her father. She reached one hand
to Mrs. Creve. They did not speak again till her weak moment had passed.
“It will be very soon,” she said, pressing the warm hand that stroked
her own. “You will help me pack, aunt Annie; and then you'll stay--with
father? I know you are glad to have me out of the way at last!”
XVII
THE HIDDEN TRAIL
Because they had set forth on a grim and sorrowful quest, it need not
be supposed that Paul and Moya were a pair of sorrowful pilgrims. It was
their wedding journey. At the outset Moya had said: “We are doing the
best we know. For what we don't know, let us leave it and not brood.”
They did not enter at once upon the more eccentric stages of the search.
They went by way of the Great Northern to Portland, descending from snow
to roses and drenching rains. At Pendleton, which is at the junction
of three great roads, Paul sent tracers out through express agents
and train officials along the remotest slender feeders of these lines.
Through the same agents it was made known that for any service rendered
or expense incurred on behalf of the person described, his friends would
hold themselves gratefully responsible.
At Portland, Paul searched the steamer lists and left confidential
orders in the different transportation offices; and Moya wrote to his
mother--a woman's letter, every page shining with happiness and as free
from apparent forethought as a running brook.
They returned by the Great Northern and Lake Coeur d'Alene, stopping
over at Fort Sherman to visit Mrs. Creve, who was giddy with joy
over the wholesome change in Paul. She, too, wrote a woman's letter
concerning that visit, to the colonel, which cleared a crowd of shadows
from his lonely hearth.
Thence again to Pendleton came the seekers, and Paul gathered in his
lines, but found nothing; so cast them forth again. But through all
these distant elaborations of the search, in his own mind he saw the
old man creeping away by some near, familiar trail and lying hid in some
warm valley in the hills, his prison and his home.
It was now the last week in March. The travelers' bags were in the
office, the carriage at the door, when a letter--pigeon-holed and
forgotten since received some three weeks before--was put into Paul's
hand.
I run up against your ad. in the Silver City Times [the communication
began]. If you haven't found your man yet, maybe I can put you onto
the right lead. I'm driving a jerky on the road from Mountain Home to
Oriana, but me and the old man we don't jibe any too well. I've got
a sort of disgust on me. Think I'll quit soon and go to mining. Jimmy
Breen he runs the Ferry, he can tell you all I know. Fifty miles from
Mountain Home good road can make it in one day. Yours Respecfully,
J. STRATTON.
It was in following up this belated clue that the pilgrims had come to
the Ferry inn, crossing by team from valley to valley, cutting off a
great bend of the Oregon Short Line as it traverses the Snake River
desert; those bare high plains escarped with basalt bluffs that
open every fifty miles or so to let a road crawl down to some little
rope-ferry supported by sheep-herders, ditch contractors, miners,
emigrants, ranchmen, all the wild industries of a country in the dawn of
enterprise.
Business at the Ferry had shrunk since the railroad went through. The
house-staff consisted of Jimmy Breen, a Chinese cook of the bony, tartar
breed, sundry dogs, and a large bachelor cat that mooned about the empty
piazzas. In a young farming country, hungry for capital, Jimmy could not
do a cash business, but everything was grist that came to his mill; and
he was quick to distinguish the perennial dead beat from a genuine case
of hard luck.
“That's a good axe ye have there,” pointing suggestively to a new one
sticking out of the rear baggage of an emigrant outfit. “Ye better l'ave
that with me for the dollar that's owing me. If ye have money to buy
new axes ye can't be broke entirely.” Or: “Slip the halter on that calf
behind there. The mother hasn't enough to keep it alive. There's har'ly
a dollar's wort' of hide on its bones, but I'll take it to save it
droppin' on the road.” Or, he would try sarcasm: “Well, we'll be
shuttin' her down in the spring. Then ye can go round be Walter's Ferry
and see if they'll trust ye there.” Or: “Why wasn't ye workin' on the
Ditch last winter? Settin' smokin' your poipe in the tules, the wife and
young ones packin' sagebrush to kape ye warm!”
On the morning after their distinguished arrival, Jimmy's guests came
down late to a devastated breakfast-table. Little heaps of crumbs here
and there showed where earlier appetites had had their destined hour and
gone their way. At an impartial distance from the top and the foot of
the table stood the familiar group of sauce and pickle bottles, every
brand dear to the cowboy, including the “surrup-jug” adhering to its
saucer. There was a fresh-gathered bunch of wild phlox by Moya's plate
in a tumbler printed round the edge with impressions of a large moist
male thumb.
“Catchee plenty,” the Chinaman grinned, pointing to the plain outside
where the pale sage-brush quivered stiffly in the wind. “Bymbye plenty
come. Pretty col' now.”
“You'll be getting a large hump on yourself, Han, me boy. 'T is a cash
crowd we have here--and a lady, by me sowl!” Thus Jimmy exhorted his
household. Times were looking up. They would be a summer resort before
the Ditch went through; it should be mentioned in the Ditch company's
prospectus. Jimmy had put his savings into land-office fees and had a
hopeful interest in the Ditch.
A spur in the head is worth two in the heel. Without a word from “the
boss” Han had found time to shave and powder and polish his brown
forehead and put on his whitest raiment over his baggiest trousers.
There was loud panic among the fowls in the corral. The cat had
disappeared; the jealous dogs hung about the doors and were pushed out
of the way by friends of other days.
Seated by the office fire, Paul was conferring with Jimmy, who was
happy with a fresh pipe and a long story to tell to a patient and paying
listener. He rubbed the red curls back from his shining forehead,
took the pipe from his teeth, and guided a puff of smoke away from his
auditor.
“I seen him settin' over there on his blankets,”--he pointed with
his pipe to the opposite shore plainly visible through the office
windows,--“but he niver hailed me, so I knowed he was broke. Some, whin
they're broke, they holler all the louder. Ye would think they had an
appointment wit' the Governor and he sint his car'iage to meet them. But
he was as humble, he was, as a yaller dog.--Out! Git out from here--the
pack of yez! Han, shut the dure an' drive thim bloody curs off the
piazzy. They're trackin' up the whole place.--As I was sayin', sor,
there he stayed hunched up in the wind, waitin' on the chanst of a team
comin', and I seen he was an ould daddy. I stud the sight of him as long
as I cud, me comin' and goin'. He fair wore me out. So I tuk the boat
over for 'im. One of his arrums he couldn't lift from the shoulder, and
I give him a h'ist wit' his bundle. Faith, it was light! 'Twinty years
a-getherin',' he cackles, slappin' it. 'Ye've had harrud luck,' I says.
''T is not much of a sheaf ye are packin' home.' 'That's as ye look at
it,' he says.
“I axed him what way was he goin'. He was thinking to get a lift as far
as Oriana, if the stages was runnin' on that road. 'Then ye 'll have to
bide here till morning,' I says, 'for ye must have met the stage
goin' the other way.' 'I met nothing,' says he; 'I come be way of the
bluffs,'--which is a strange way for one man travelin' afoot.
“The grub was on the table, and I says, 'Sit by and fill yourself up.'
His cheeks was fallin' in wit' the hunger. With that his poor ould eye
begun to water. 'Twas one weak eye he had that was weepin' all the time.
'I've got out of the habit of reg'lar aitin',' he says. 'It don't take
much to kape me goin'.' 'Niver desave yourself, sor! 'T is betther feed
three hungry men than wan “no occasion.”' His appetite it grew on him
wit' every mouthful. There was a boundless emptiness to him. He lay
there on the bench and slep' the rest of the evening, and I left him
there wit' a big fire at night. And the next day at noon we h'isted him
up beside of Joe Stratton. A rip-snorter of a wind was blowin' off the
Silver City peaks. His face was drawed like a winter apple, but he wint
off happy. I think he was warm inside of himself.”
“Did you ask him his name?”
“Sure. Why not? John Treagar he called himself.”
“Treagar? Hagar, you mean!”
“It was Treagar he said.”
“John Hagar is the man I am looking for.”
“Treagar--Hagar? 'T is comin' pretty close to it.”
“About what height and build was he?”
“He was not to say a tall man; and he wasn't so turrible short neither.
His back was as round as a Bible. A kind of pepper and saltish beard he
had, and his hair was blacker than his beard but white in streaks.”
“A _dark_ man, was he?”
“He would be a _dark_ man if he was younger.”
“The man I want is blue-eyed.”
“His eyes was blue--a kind of washed-out gray that maybe was blue wanst;
and one of them always weepin' wit' the cold.”
“And light brown hair mixed with gray, like sand and ashes--mostly
ashes; and a thin straggling beard, thinner on the cheeks? A high head
and a tall stooping figure--six feet at least; hands with large joints
and a habit of picking at them when”--
“Ye are goin' too fast for me now, sor. He was not that description of
a man, nayther the height nor the hair of him. Sure't is a pity for ye
comin' this far, and him not the man at all. Faith, I wish I was the man
meself! I wonder at Joe Stratton anyhow! He's a very hasty man, is Joe.
He jumps in wit' both feet, so he does. I could have told ye that.”
* * * * *
Moya, always helplessly natural, and now very tired as well, when Paul
described with his usual gravity this anti-climax, fell below all the
dignities at once in a burst of childish giggling. Paul looked on
with an embarrassed smile, like a puzzled affectionate dog at the
incomprehensible mirth of humans. Paul was certainly deficient in humor
and therefore in breadth. But what woman ever loved her lover the less
for having discovered his limitations? Humor runs in families of the
intenser cultivation. The son of the soil remains serious in the face of
life's and nature's ironies.
XVIII
THE STAR IN THE EAST
So the search paused, while the searchers rested and revised their
plans. Spring opened in the valley as if for them alone. There were
mornings “proud and sweet,” when the humblest imagination could have
pictured Aurora and her train in the jocund clouds that trooped along
the sky,--wind-built processions which the wind dispersed. Wild flowers
spread so fast they might have been spilled from the rainbow scarf of
Iris fleeting overhead. The river was in flood, digging its elbows into
its muddy banks. The willow and wild-rose thickets stooped and washed
their spring garments in its tide.
Primeval life and love were all around them. Meadow larks flung their
brief jets of song into the sunlight; the copses rustled with wings;
wood-doves cooed from the warm sunny hollows, and the soft booming of
their throaty call was like a beating in the air,--the pulse of spring.
They had found their Garden. Humanity in the valley passed before them
in forms as interesting and as alien as the brother beasts to Adam:
the handsome driver of the jerky, Joe Stratton's successor, who sat at
dinner opposite and combed his flowing mustache with his fork in a lazy,
dandified way; the darkened faces of sheep-herders enameled by sun and
wind, their hair like the winter coats of animals; the slow-eyed farmers
with the appetites of horses; the spring recruits for the ranks of labor
footing it to distant ranches, each with his back-load of bedding, and
the dust of three counties on his garments.
The sweet forces of Nature shut out, for a season, Paul's _cri du
coeur_. One may keep a chamber sacred to one's sadder obligations and
yet the house be filled with joy. Further ramifications of the search
were mapped out with Jimmy's indifferent assistance. For good reasons of
his own, Jimmy did little to encourage an early start. He would explain
that his maps were of ancient date and full of misinformation as to
stage routes. “See that now! The stages was pulled off that line five
year ago, on account of the railroad cuttin' in on them. Ye couldn't
make it wid'out ye took a camp outfit. There's ne'er a station left, and
when ye come to it, it's ruins ye'll find. A chimbly and a few rails,
if the mule-skinners hasn't burned them. 'Tis a country very devoid
of fuel; sagebrush and grease-wood, and a wind, bedad! that blows the
grass-seeds into the next county.”
When these camping-trips were proposed to Moya, she hesitated and
responded languidly; but when Paul suggested leaving her even for a day,
her fears fluttered across his path and wiled him another way. Vaguely
he felt that she was unlike herself--less buoyant, though often
restless; and sometimes he fancied she was pale underneath her
sun-burned color like that of rose-hips in October. Various causes kept
him inert, while strength mounted in his veins, and life seemed made for
the pure joy of living.
The moon of May in that valley is the moon of roses, for the heats once
due come on apace. The young people gave up their all-day horseback
rides and took morning walks instead, following the shore-paths lazily
to shaded coverts dedicated to those happy silences which it takes two
to make. Or, they climbed the bluffs and gazed at the impenetrable
vast horizon, and thought perhaps of their errand with that pang
of self-reproach which, when shared, becomes a subtler form of
self-indulgence.
But at night, all the teeming life of the plain rushed up into the sky
and blazed there in a million friendly stars. After the languor of the
sleepy afternoons, it was like a fresh awakening--the dawn of those
white May nights. The wide plain stirred softly through all its miles
of sage. The river's cadenced roar paused beyond the bend and outbroke
again. All that was eerie and furtive in the wild dark found a curdling
voice in the coyote's hunting-call.
In a hollow concealed by sage, not ten minutes' walk from the Ferry inn,
unknown to the map-maker and innocent of all use, lay a perfect floor
for evening pacing with one's eyes upon the stars. It was the death mask
of an ancient lake, done in purest alkali silt, and needing only the
shadows cast by a low moon to make the illusion almost unbelievable.
Slow precipitation, season after season, as the water dried, had left
the lake bed smooth as a cast in plaster. Subsequent warpings had lifted
the alkali crust into thin-lipped wavelets. But once upon the floor
itself the resemblance to water vanished. The warpings and Grumblings
took the shape of earth as made by water and baked by fire. Moya
compared it to a bit of the dead moon fallen to show us what we are
coming to. They paced it soft-footed in tennis shoes lest they should
crumble its talc-like whiteness. But they read no horoscopes, for they
were shy of the future in speaking to each other,--and they made no
plans.
One evening Moya had said to Paul: “I can understand your mother so much
better now that I am a wife. I think most women have a tendency towards
the state of being _un_married. And if one had--children, it would
increase upon one very fast. A widow and a mother--for twenty years. How
could she be a wife again?”
Paul made no reply to this speech which long continued to haunt him;
especially as Moya wrote more frequently to his mother and did not offer
to show him her letters. In their evening walks she seemed distrait, and
during the day more restless.
One night of their nightly pacings she stopped and stood long, her head
thrown back, her eyes fixed upon the dizzy star-deeps. Paul waited a
step behind her, touching her shoulders with his hands. Suddenly she
reeled and sank backwards into his arms. He held her, watching her
lovely face grow whiter; her eyelids closed. She breathed slowly,
leaning her whole weight upon him.
Coming to herself, she smiled and said it was nothing. She had been that
way before. “But--we must go home. We must have a home--somewhere.
I want to see your mother. Paul, be good to her--forgive her--for my
sake!”
XIX
PILGRIMS AND STRANGERS
Aunt Polly Lewis was disappointed in the latest of her beneficiaries.
It was nine years since her husband had locked up his savings in the
Mud Springs ranch, a neglected little health-plant at the mouth of the
Bruneau. If you were troubled with rheumatism, or a crick in the back,
or your “pancrees” didn't act or your blood was “out o' fix, why, you'd
better go up to Looanders' for a spell and soak yourself in that blue
mud and let aunt Polly diet ye and dost ye with yerb tea.”
When Leander courted aunt Polly in the interests of his sanitarium, she
was reputed the best nurse in Ada County. The widow--by desertion--of a
notorious quack doctor of those parts: it was an open question whether
his medicine had killed or her nursing had cured the greater number of
confiding sick folk. Leander drove fifty miles to catechise this notable
woman, and finding her sound on the theory of packs hot and cold, and
skilled in the practice of rubbing,--and having made the incidental
discovery that she was a person not without magnetism,--he decided on
the spot to add her to the other attractions of Mud Springs ranch; and
she drove home with him next day, her trunk in the back of his wagon.
The place was no sinecure. Bricks without straw were a child's pastime
to the cures aunt Polly and the Springs effected without a pretense
to the comforts of life in health, to say nothing of sickness. Modern
conveniences are costly, and how are you to get the facilities for “pay
patients” when you have no patients that pay! Prosperity had overlooked
the Bruneau, or had made false starts there, through detrimental schemes
that gave the valley a bad name with investors. The railroad was still
fifty miles away, and the invalid public would not seek life itself,
in these days of luxurious travel, at the cost of a twelve hours'
stage-ride. However, as long as the couple had a roof over their
heads and the Springs continued to plop and vomit their strange,
chameleon-colored slime, Leander would continue to bring home the sick
and the suffering for Polly and the Springs to practice on. Health
became his hobby, and in time, with isolation thrown in, it began to
invade his common sense. He tried in succession all the diet fads of the
day and wound up a convert to the “Ralston” school of eating. Aunt Polly
had clung a little longer to the flesh-pots, but the charms of a system
that abolished half the labor of cooking prevailed with her at last, and
in the end she kept a sharper eye upon Leander at mealtime than ever he
had upon her.
The ignorant gorgings of their neighbors were a head-shaking and a
warning to them, and more than once Leander's person was in jeopardy
through his zealous but unappreciated concern for the brother who eats
in darkness.
He had started out one winter morning from Bisuka, a virtuous man. His
team had breakfasted, but not he. A Ralstonite does not load up his
stomach at dawn after the manner of cattle, and such pious substitutes
for a cup of coffee as are permitted the faithful cannot always be had
for a price. At Indian Creek he hauled up to water his team, and to
make for himself a cinnamon-colored decoction by boiling in hot water
a preparation of parched grains which he carried with him. This he
accomplished in an angle of the old corral fence out of the wind. There
is no comfort nor even virtue in eating cold dust with one's sandwiches.
Leander sunk his great white tushes through the thick slices of
whole-wheat bread and tasted the paste of peanut meal with which they
were spread. He ate standing and slapped his leg to warm his driving
hand.
A flutter of something colored, as a garment, caught his eye, directing
it to the shape of a man, rolled in an old blue blanket, lying
motionless in a corner of the tumble-down wall. “Drunk, drunk as a hog!”
pronounced Leander. For no man in command of himself would lie down to
sleep in such a place. As if to refute this accusation, the wind
turned a corner of the blanket quietly off a white face with closed
eyelids,--an old, worn, gentle face, appealing in its homeliness, though
stamped now with the dignity of death. Leander knelt and handled the
body tenderly. It was long before he satisfied himself that life was
still there. Another case for Polly and the Springs. A man worth saving,
if Leander knew a man; one of the trustful, trustworthy sort. His heart
went out to him on the instant as to a friend from home.
It was closing in for dusk when he reached the Ferry. Jimmy was away,
and Han, in high dudgeon, brought the boat over in answer to Leander's
hail. He had grouse to dress for supper, inconsiderately flung in upon
him at the last moment by the stage, four hours late.
“Huh! Why you no come one hour ago? All time 'Hullo, hullo'! Je' Cli'!
me no dam felly-man--me dam cook! Too much man say 'Hullo'!”
The prospect was not good for help at the Ferry inn, so, putting his
trust in Polly and the Springs, Leander pushed on up the valley.
When Aunt Polly's patients were of the right sort, they stayed on after
their recovery and helped Leander with the ranch work. But for the most
part they “hit the trail” again as soon as their ills were healed,
not forgetting to advertise the Springs to other patients of their own
class. The only limit to this unenviable popularity was the size of the
house. Leander saw no present advantage in building.
But in case they ever did build--and the time was surely coming!--here
was the very person they had been looking for. Cast your bread upon the
waters. The winter's bread and care and shelter so ungrudgingly bestowed
had returned to them many-fold in the comfortable sense of dependence
and unity they felt in this last beneficiary, the old man of Indian
Creek whom they called “Uncle John.”
“The kindest old creetur' ever lived! Some forgitful, but everybody's
liable to forgit. Only tell him one thing at once, and don't confuse
him, and he'll git through an amazin' sight of chores in a day.”
“Just the very one we'll want to wait on the men patients,” Aunt Polly
chimed in. “He can carry up meals and keep the bathrooms clean, and wash
out the towels, and he's the best hand with poultry. He takes such good
care of the old hens they're re'lly ashamed not to lay!”
It was spring again; old hopes were putting forth new leaves. Leander
had heard of a capitalist in the valley; a young one, too, more prone to
enthusiasm if shown the right thing.
“I'm going down to Jimmy's to fetch them up here!” Leander announced.
“Are there two of them?”
“He has brought his wife out with him. They are a young couple. He's the
only son of a rich widow in New York, and Jimmy says they've got money
to burn. Jimmy don't take much stock in this 'ere 'wounded guide'
story--thinks it's more or less of a blind. He's feeling around for
a good investment--desert land or mining claims. Jimmy thinks he
represents big interests back East.”
Aunt Polly considered, and the corners of her mouth moistened as she
thought of the dinner she would snatch from the jaws of the system on
the day these young strangers should visit the ranch.