little troubles before they settle down--besides, what sort of a marriage
would it be if you or I could make it or break it?” But he bore himself
with a deprecating tenderness towards his daughter, in whose affairs he had
meddled, perhaps disastrously, as his better half feared.
* * * * *
The winters of Idaho are not long, even in the higher valleys. Close upon
the cold footsteps of the retreating snows trooped the first wild flowers.
The sun seemed to laugh in the cloudless sky. The children were let loose
on the hills; their voices echoed the river's chime. Its waters, rising
with the melting snows, no longer babbled childishly on their way; they
shouted, and brawled, and tumbled over the bar, rolling huge pine trunks
along as if they were sticks of kindling wood.
One cool May evening, Ruth Mary, climbing the path from the beach, saw
there was a strange horse and two pack animals in the corral. She did not
stop to look at them, but, quickly guessing who their owner must be, she
went on to the house, her knees weak and trembling, her heart beating
heavily. Her father met her at the door and detained her outside. She was
prepared for his announcement. She knew that Joe Enselman had returned,
and that the time was come for her to prove her new resolve, born of the
winter's silent struggle.
“I thought I'd better have a few words with you, Ruthie, before you see
him--to prepare your mind. Set down here.” Mr. Tully took his daughter's
hands in his own and held them while he talked.
“You thought it was queer Joe stayed away so long, didn't you?” Ruth
Mary opened her lips to speak, but no words came. “Well, I did,” said
the father. “Though it was my plan first off. I might 'a' know'd it was
something more 'n business that kep' him. Joe's had an accident. It
happened to him just about the time he meant to 'a' started for home last
fall. It broke him all up,--made him feel like he didn't want to see any of
us just then. He was goin' along a trail through the woods one dark night;
he never knew what stunned him; must have been a twig or something struck
him in the eye; he was giddy and crazy-like for a spell; his horse took him
home. Well, he ain't got but one eye left, Joe ain't. There, Sis, I knew
you'd feel bad. But he's well. It's hurt his looks some, but what's looks!
We ain't any of us got any to brag on. Joe had some hopes at first he'd
git to seein' again out of the eye that was hurt, and so he sent home his
animals and put out for Salt Lake to show it to a doctor there; but it
wan't any use. The eye's gone; and it doos seem as if for the time bein'
some of Joe's grit had gone with it. He went up to Montany and tended to
his business, but it was all like a dumb show and no heart in it. It's cut
him pretty deep, through his bein' alone so long, perhaps, and thinkin'
about how you'd feel. And then he's pestered in his mind about marryin'. He
feels he's got no claim to you now. Says it ain't fair to ask a young girl
that's likely to have plenty good chances to tie up to what's left of him.
I wanted you should know about this before you go inside. It might hurt
him some to see a change in your face when you look at him first. As to
his givin' you your word back, that you'll settle between yourselves; but,
however you fix it, I guess you'll make it as easy as you can for Joe. I
don' know as ever I see a big strappin' fellow so put down.”
Mr. Tully had waited, between his short and troubled sentences, for some
response from Ruth Mary, but she was still silent. Her hands felt cold
in his. As he released them she leaned suddenly forward and hid her face
against his shoulder. She shivered and her breast heaved, but she was not
weeping.
“There, there!” said Mr. Tully, stroking her head clumsily with his large
hand. “I've made a botch of it. I'd ought to 'a' let your mother told ye.”
She pressed closer to him, and wrapped her arms around him without
speaking.
“I expect I better go in now,” he said gently, putting her away from him.
“Will you come along o' me, or do you want to git a little quieter first?”
“You go in,” Ruth Mary whispered. “I'll come soon.”
It was not long before she followed her father into the house. No one was
surprised to see her white and tremulous. She seemed to know where Enselman
sat without raising her eyes; neither did he venture to look at her, as she
came to him, and stooping forward, laid her little cold hands on his.
“I'm glad you've come back,” she said. Then sinking down suddenly on the
floor at his feet, she threw her apron over her head and sobbed aloud.
The father and mother wept too. Joe sat still, with a great and bitter
longing in his smitten countenance, but did not dare to comfort her.
“Pick her up, Joe,” said Mr. Tully.
“Take hold of her, man, and show her you've got a whole heart if you ain't
got but one eye.”
It was understood, as Ruth Mary meant that it should be, without more
words, that Enselman's misfortune would make no difference in their old
relation. The difference it had made in that new resolve born of the
winter's struggle she told to no one; for to no one had she confided her
resolve.
* * * * *
Joe stayed two weeks at the ranch, and was comforted into a semblance of
his former hardy cheerfulness. But Ruth Mary knew that he was not happy.
One evening he asked her to go with him down the high shore path. He told
her that he was going to town the next day on business that might keep him
absent about a fortnight, and entreated her to think well of her promise
to him, for that on his return he should expect its fulfillment. For God's
sake he begged her to let no pity for his misfortune blind her to the
true nature of her feeling for him. He held her close to his heart and
kissed her many times. Did she love him so--and so?--he asked. Ruth Mary,
trembling, said she did not know. How could she help knowing? he demanded
passionately. Had her thoughts been with him all winter, as his had been
with her? Had she looked up the river towards the hills where he was
staying so long and wished for him, as he had gazed southward into the
valleys many and many a day, longing for the sweet blue eyes of his little
girl so far away?
Alas, Ruth Mary! She gazed almost wildly into his stricken face, distorted
by the anguish of his great love and his great dread. She wished that she
were dead. There seemed no other way out of her trouble.
The next morning, before she was dressed, Enselman rode away, and her
father went with him.
She was alone, now, in the midst of the hills she loved--alone as she
would never be again. She foresaw that she would not have the strength to
lay that last blow upon her faithful old friend,--the crushing blow that
perfect truth demanded. Her tenderness was greater than her truth.
* * * * *
The river was now swollen to its greatest volume. Its voice, that had been
the babble of a child and the tumult of a boy, was now deep and heavy like
the chest notes of a strong man. Instead of the sparkling ripple on the
bar, there was a continuous roar of yellow, turbid water that could be
heard a mile away. There had been no fording for six weeks, nor would there
be again until late summer. The useless boat lay in the shallow wash that
filled the deep cut among the willows. The white sand beach was gone; heavy
waves swirled past the banks and sent their eddies up into the channels of
the hills to meet the streams of melted snow. Thunder clouds chased each
other about the mountains, or met in sudden downfalls of rain.
One sultry noon, when the sun had come out hot on the hills after a wet
morning, Ruth Mary, at work in the shed-room, heard a sound that drove the
color from her cheek. She ran out and looked up the river, listening to a
distant but ever increasing roar which could be heard above the incessant
laboring of the waters over the bar. Above the summit of Sheep Mountain, as
it seemed, a huge turban-shaped cloud had rolled itself up, and from its
central folds was discharging gray sheets of water that veered and slanted
with the wind, but were always distinct in their density against the
rain-charged atmosphere. How far away the floods were descending she did
not know; but that they were coming in a huge wall of water, overtaking and
swallowing up the river's current, she was as sure as that she had been
bred in the mountains.
Bare-headed, bare-armed as she was, without a backward look, she ran down
the hill to the place where the boat was moored. Tommy was there, sitting
in the boat and making the shallow water splash as he rocked from side to
side.
“Get out, Tommy, and let me have her, quick!” Ruth Mary called to him.
Tommy looked at her stolidly and kept on rocking. “What you want with her?”
he asked.
“Come out, for mercy's sake! Don't you _hear_ it? There's a cloud-burst on
the mountain.”
Tommy listened. He did hear it, but he did not stir. “It'll be a bully
thing to see when it comes. What you doin'? You act like you was crazy,” he
exclaimed, as Ruth Mary waded through the water and got into the boat.
“Tommy, you will kill me if you stop to talk! Don't you know the camp at
Moor's Bridge? Go home and tell mother I've gone to give 'em warning.”
Tommy was instantly sobered. “I'm going with you,” he said. “You can't
handle her alone in that current.”
Ruth Mary, wild with the delay, every second of which might be the price of
precious lives, seized Tommy in her arms, hugged him close and kissed him,
and by main strength rolled him out into the water. He grasped the gunwale
with both hands. “You're going to be drowned,” he shrieked, as if already
she were far away. She pushed off his hands and shot out into the current.
“Don't cry, Tommy, I'll get there somehow,” she called back to him. She
could see nothing for the first few minutes of her journey but his little
wet, dismal figure toiling, sobbing, up the hill. It hurt her to have had
to be rough with him. But all the while she sat upright with her eyes on
the current, plying her paddle right and left, as rocks and driftwood
and eddies were passed. She heard it coming, that distant roar from the
hills, and prayed with beating heart that the wild current might carry her
faster--faster--past the draggled willow copses--past the beds of black
lava rock, and the bluffs with their patches of green moss livid in the
sunshine--hurling along, past glimpses of the well-known trail she had
followed dreamily on those peaceful rides she might never take again. The
thought did not trouble her, only the fear that she might be overtaken
before she reached the camp. For the waters were coming--or was it the wind
that brought that dread sound so near! She dared not look round lest she
should see, through the gates of the cañon, the black lifted head of the
great wave, devouring the river behind her. How it would come swooping
down, between those high narrow walls of rock, her heart stood still to
think of. If the hills would but open and let it loose, over the empty
pastures--if the river would only hurry, hurry, hurry! She whispered the
word to herself with frantic repetition, and the oncoming roar behind her
answered her whisper of fear with its awful intoning.
She trembled with joy as the cañon walls lowered and fell apart, and she
saw the blessed plains, the low green flats and the willows, and the white
tents of the camp, safe in the sunshine. Now if she be given but one
moment's grace to swing into the bank! The roar behind her made her faint
as she listened. For the first time she turned and looked back, and the cry
of her despair went up and was lost, as boat and message and messenger were
lost,--gone utterly, gorged at one leap by the senseless flood.
* * * * *
At half past five o'clock that afternoon the men of the camp filed out of
the tunnel, along the new road-bed, with the low sunlight in their faces.
It was “Saturday night,” and the whole force was in good humor. As they
tramped gayly along, tools and instruments glinting in the sun, word went
down the line that something unusual had been going on by the river. There
seemed to have been a wild uprising of its waters since they saw it last.
Then a shout from those ahead proclaimed the disaster at the bridge. The
Chinese cook, crouched among the rocks high up under the bluff, where he
had fled for safety when he heard the waters coming, rushed down to them
with wild wavings and gabblings, to tell them of a catastrophe that was
best described by its results. A few provisions were left them, stored in
a magazine under a rock on the hillside. They cooked their supper with the
splinters of the ruined blacksmith's hut. After supper, in the clear, pink
evening light, they wandered about on the slippery rocks, seeking whatever
fragments of their camp equipage the flood might have left them. Everything
had been swept away, and tons of mud and gravel covered the little green
meadow where their tents had stood. Kirkwood, straying on ahead of his
comrades, came to the rocks below the bridge timbers, from which the awning
had been torn away. The wet rocks glistened in the light, but there was a
whiter gleam which caught his eye. He stooped and crawled under the timbers
anchored in the bank, until he came to the spot of whiteness. Was this that
fair young girl from the hills, dragged here by the waters in their cruel
orgy, and then hidden by them as if in shame of their work? Kirkwood
recognized the simple features, the meek eyes, wide open in the searching
light. The mud that filled her garments had spared the pure young face.
Kirkwood gazed into it reverently, but the passionate sacrifice, the
useless warning, were sealed from him. She could not tell him why she was
there.
The three young men watched in turn, that night, by the little motionless
heap covered with Kirkwood's coat. Kirkwood was very sad about Ruth Mary,
yet he slept when his watch was over.
In the morning they nailed together some boards into the shape of a long
box. There was not a boat left on the river; fording was impossible. They
could only take her home by the trail. So once more Ruth Mary traveled that
winding path, high in the sunlight or low in the shade of the shore. A log
of driftwood, left by the great wave, slung on one side of a mule's pack
saddle, balanced the rude coffin on the other. No one meeting the three
engineers and their pack-mule filing down the trail would have known that
they were a funeral procession; but they were heavy-hearted as they rode
along, and Kirkwood would fain it had not been his part to ride ahead and
prepare the family at the ranch for their child's coming.
The mother, with Tommy and Angy hiding their faces against her, stood on
the hill and watched for it, and broke into cries as the mule with its
burden came in sight.
Kirkwood walked with them down the hill to meet it. His comrades
dismounted, and the three young men, with heads uncovered, carried the
coffin over the hill and set it down in the shed-room. Then Tommy, in a
burst of childish grief, made them know that this piteous sacrifice had
been for them.
The tunnel made its way through the hill, the sinuous road-bed wound up the
valley, new camps were built along its course; but when the young men sat
together of an evening and looked at the hills in the strange pink light, a
spell of quietness rested upon them which no one tried to explain.
* * * * *
The railroad has been built these two years. Every summer brings tourists
up into the Bear River valley. They look with delight upon the mountain
stream, bounding down between the hills with the brightness of the morning
on its breast.
“There should be an idyl or a legend belonging to it,” a pretty, dark-eyed
girl with a Boston accent said to Kirkwood, one moonlight evening late in
summer when the river was low, as they drifted softly down between its dim
shores. “Poor little Bear River! did nothing human ever happen near you to
give you a right to a prettier name?”
The river did not answer as it rippled over the bar, nor did Kirkwood speak
for it; but the wood dove's melancholy tremolo came from the misty willows
by the shore, and in some suddenly illumined place in his memory he saw
Ruth Mary, sitting on the high bank in the peaceful afternoon, the sunshine
resting on her smooth, fair hair, the shadow lending its softness to her
shy, down-bent face.
The pity of it, when he thinks of it sometimes, seems to him more than he
can bear. Yet if Ruth Mary had still been there at the ranch on the hills,
she would have been, to him, only “that nice little girl of Tully's who
married the one-eyed packer.”
THE RAPTURE OF HETTY.
The dance was set for Christmas night at Walling's, a horse-ranch where
there were women, situated in a high, watered valley shut in by foothills,
sixteen miles from the nearest town. The cabin with its roof of shakes, the
sheds and corrals, can be seen from any divide between Packer's ferry and
the Fayette.
The “boys” had been generally invited, with one exception to the usual
company. The youngest of the sons of Basset, a pastoral and nomadic house,
was socially under a cloud, on the charge of having been “too handy with
the frying-pan brand.”
The charge could not be substantiated, but the boy's name had been roughly
handled in those wide, loosely defined circles of the range where the force
of private judgment makes up for the weakness of the law, in dealing with
crimes that are difficult of detection and uncertain of punishment. He that
has obliterated his neighbor's brand or misapplied his own, is held as, in
the age of tribal government and ownership, was held the remover of his
neighbor's landmarks. A word goes forth against him potent as the levitical
curse, and all the people say amen.
As society's first public and pointed rejection of him the slight had
rankled with the son of Basset, and grievously it wore on him that
Hetty Rhodes was going, with the man who had been his earliest and most
persistent accuser: Hetty, prettiest of all the bunch-grass belles, who
never reproached nor quarreled, but judged people with her smile and let
them go. He had not complained, though he had her promise,--one of her
promises,--nor asked a hearing in his own defense. The sons of Basset
were many and poor; their stock had dwindled upon the range; her men-folk
condemned him, and Hetty believed, or seemed to believe, as the others.
Had she forgotten the night when two men's horses stood at her father's
fence,--the Basset boy's and that of him who was afterward his accuser; and
the other's horse was unhitched when the evening was but half spent, and
furiously ridden away, while the Basset boy's stood at the rails till close
upon midnight? Had the coincidence escaped her that from this night, of one
man's rage and another's bliss, the ugly charge had dated? Of these things
a girl may not testify.
They met in town on the Saturday before the dance, Hetty buying her
dancing-shoes at the back of the store, where the shoe-cases framed in a
snug little alcove for the exhibition of a “fit.” The boy, in his belled
spurs and “shaps” of goat-hide, was lounging disconsolate and sulky
against one of the front counters; she wore a striped ulster, an enchanted
garment his arm had pressed, and a pink crocheted tam-o'-shanter cocked
bewitchingly over her dark eyes.
Her hair was ruffled, her cheeks were red, with the wind she had faced for
two hours on the spring-seat of her father's “dead axe” wagon. Critical
feminine eyes might have found her a trifle blowzy; the sick-hearted Basset
boy looked once,--he dared not look again.
Hetty coquetted with her partner in the shoe bargain, a curly-headed young
Hebrew, who flattered her familiarly and talked as if he had known her from
a child, but always with an eye to business. She stood, holding back her
skirts and rocking her instep from right to left, while she considered the
effect of the new style; patent-leather foxings and tan-cloth tops, and
heels that came under the middle of her foot, and narrow toes with tips of
stamped leather;--but what a price! More than a third of her chicken-money
gone for that one fancy's satisfaction. But who can know the joy of a
really distinguished choice in shoe-leather like one who in her childhood
has trotted barefoot through the sage-brush and associated shoes only with
cold weather or going to town? The Basset boy tried to fix his strained
attention upon anything rather than upon that tone of high jocosity between
Hetty and the shiny-haired clerk. He tried to summon his own self-respect
and leave the place.
What was the tax, he inquired, on those neck-handkerchiefs; and he pointed
with the loaded butt of his braided leather quirt to a row of dainty
silk mufflers, signaling custom from a cord stretched above the
gentlemen's-furnishing counter.
The clerk explained that the goods in question were first class, all silk,
brocaded, and of an extra size. Plainly he expected that a casual mention
of the price would cool the inexperienced customer's curiosity, especially
as the colors displayed in the handkerchiefs were not those commonly
affected by the cow-boy cult. The Basset boy threw down his last half-eagle
and carelessly called for the one with a blue border. The delicate “baby
blue” attracted him by its perishability, its suggestion of impossible
refinements beyond the soilure and dust of his own grimy circumstances. Yet
he pocketed his purchase as though it had been any common thing, not to
show his pride in it before the patronizing salesman.
He waited foolishly for Hetty, not knowing if she would even speak to him.
When she came at last, loitering down the shop, with her eyes on the gay
Christmas counters and her arms filled with bundles, he silently fell in
behind her and followed her to her father's wagon, where he helped her
unload her purchases.
“Been buying out the store?” he opened the conversation.
“Buying more than father'll want to pay for,” she drawled, glancing at him
sweetly. Those entoiling looks of Hetty's dark-lashed eyes had grown to a
habit with her; even now the little Jewish salesman was smiling over his
brief portion in them. Her own coolness made her careless, as children are
in playing with fire.
“Here's some Christmas the old man won't have to pay for.” A soft paper
parcel was crushed into her hand.
“Who is going to pay for it, I'd like to know? If it's some of your doings,
Jim Basset, I can't take it--so there!”
She thrust the package back upon him. He tore off the wrapper and let
the wind carry his rejected token into the trampled mud and slush of the
street.
Hetty screamed and pounced to the rescue. “What a shame! It's a beauty of
a handkerchief. It must have cost a lot of money. I shan't let you use it
so.”
She shook it, and wiped away the spots from its delicate sheen, and folded
it into its folds again.
“_I_ don't want the thing.” He spurned it fiercely.
“Then give it to some one else.” She endeavored coquettishly to force it
into his hands, or into the pockets of his coat. He could not withstand her
thrilling little liberties in the face of all the street.
“I'll wear it Monday night,” said he. “May be you think I won't be there?”
he added hoarsely, for he had noted her look of surprise, mingled with an
infuriating touch of pity. “You kin bank on it I'll be there.”
Hetty toyed with the thought that after all it might be better that she
should not go to the dance. There might be trouble, for certainly Jim
Basset had looked as if he meant it when he had said he would be there; and
Hetty knew the temper of the company, the male portion of it, too well to
doubt what their attitude would be toward an inhibited guest who disputed
the popular verdict, and claimed social privileges which it had been agreed
that he had forfeited. But it was never really in her mind to deny herself
the excitement of going. She and her escort were among the first couples
to cross the snowy pastures stretching between her father's claim and the
lights of the lonely horse-ranch.
It was a cloudy night, the air soft, chill, and spring-like. Snow had
fallen early and frozen upon the ground; the stockmen welcomed the “chinook
wind” as the promise of a break in the hard weather. Shadows came out and
played upon the pale slopes, as the riders rose and dropped past one long
swell and another of dim country falling away like a ghostly land seeking
a ghostly sea. And often Hetty looked back, fearing, yet half hoping, that
the interdicted one might be on his way, among the dusky, straggling shapes
behind.