The women were engaged in cooking supper, or were above in the roof-room
brushing out their crimps by the light of an unshaded kerosene lamp, placed
on the pine wash-stand which did duty as a dressing-table. The men's voices
came jarringly through the loose boards of the floor from below.
About that hour arrived the unbidden guest, and like the others he had
brought his “gun.” He was stopped at the door and told that he could
not come in among the girls to make trouble. He denied that he had come
with any such intention. There were persons present,--he mentioned no
names,--who were no more eligible, socially speaking, than himself, and he
ranked himself low in saying so; where such as these could be admitted, he
proposed to show that he could. He offered, in evidence of his good faith
and peaceable intentions, to give up his gun; but on the condition that he
be allowed one dance with the partner of his choosing, regardless of her
previous engagements.
This unprecedented proposal was referred to the girls, who were charmed
with its audacity. But none of them spoke up for the outcast till Hetty
said she could not think what they were all afraid of; a dozen to one, and
that one without his weapon! Then the other girls chimed in and added their
timid suffrages.
There may have been some twinges of disappointment, there could hardly have
been surprise, when the black sheep directed his choice without a look
elsewhere to Hetty. She stood up, smiling but rather pale, and he rushed
her to the head of the room, securing the most conspicuous place before his
rival, who with his partner took the place of second couple opposite.
“Keep right on!” the fiddler chanted, in sonorous cadence to the music, as
the last figure of the set ended with “Promenade all!” He swung into the
air of the first figure again, smiling, with his cheek upon his instrument
and his eyes upon the floor. Hetty fancied that his smile meant more than
merely the artist's pleasure in the joy he evokes.
“_Keep_ your places!” he shouted again, after the “Promenade all!” a second
time had raised the dust and made the lamps flare, and lighted with smiles
of sympathy the rugged faces of the elders ranged against the walls. The
side couples dropped off exhausted, but the tops held the floor, and
neither of the men was smiling.
The whimsical fiddler invented new figures, which he “called off” in time
to his music, to vary the monotony of a quadrille with two couples missing.
The opposite girl was laughing hysterically; she could no longer dance nor
stand. The rival gentleman looked about him for another partner. One girl
jumped up, then, hesitating, sat down again. The music passed smoothly into
a waltz, and Hetty and her bad boy kept the floor, regardless of shouts and
protests warning the trespasser that his time was up and the game in other
hands.
Three times they circled the room; they looked neither to right nor left;
their eyes were upon each other. The men were all on their feet, the music
playing madly. A group of half-scared girls was huddled, giggling and
whispering, near the door of the dimly lighted shed-room. Into the midst
of them Hetty's partner plunged, with his breathless, smiling dancer in his
arms, passed into the dim outer place to the door where his horse stood
saddled, and they were gone.
They crossed the little valley known as Seven Pines; they crashed
through the thin ice of the creek; they rode double sixteen miles before
daybreak, Hetty wrapped in her lover's “slicker,” with the blue-bordered
handkerchief, her only wedding-gift, tied over her blowing hair.
THE WATCHMAN.
I.
The far-Eastern company was counting its Western acres under water
contracts. The acres were in first crops, waiting for the water. The water
was dallying down its untried channel, searching the new dry earth-banks,
seeping, prying, and insinuating sly, minute forces which multiplied and
insisted tremendously the moment a rift had been made. And the orders were
to “watch” and “puddle;” and the watchmen were as other men, and some of
them doubtless remembered they were working for a company.
Travis, the black-eyed young lumberman from the upper Columbia, had been
sent down with a special word from the manager commending him as a tried
hand, equal to any post or service. The ditch superintendent was looking
for such a man. He gave him those five crucial miles between the head-gates
and Glenn's Ferry, the notorious beat that had sifted Finlayson's force
without yet finding a man who could keep the banks. Some said it was the
Arc-light saloon at Glenn's Ferry; some said it was the pretty girl at
Lark's.
Whatever it was, Travis raged at it in the silent hours of his one-man
watch; and the report had gone up the line now, three times since he had
taken hold, of breaks on his division. And the engineer would by no means
“weaken” on a question of the work, nor did the loyal watchman ask that any
one should weaken, to spare him. He was all eyes and ears; he watched by
daylight, he listened by dark, and the sounds that he heard in his dreams
were sounds of water searching the banks, swirling and sinking into holes,
or of mud subsiding with a wretched flop into the insidious current.
It was a queer country along the new ditch below the head-gates; as old and
sun-bleached and bony as the stony valleys of Arabia Petrea; all but that
strip of green that led the eye to where the river wandered, and that warm
brown strip of sown land extending field by field below the ditch.
Lark's ranch was the first one below the head-gates, lying between the
river and the ditch, an old homesteader's claim, sub-irrigated by means of
rude dams ponding the natural sloughs. The worn-out land, never drained,
was foul and sour, lapsing into swamps, the black alkali oozing and
spreading from pools in its boggy pastures.
A few pioneer fruit-trees still bloomed and bore, undiscouraged by neglect,
and cast homelike shadows on the weedy grass around the cabin and sheds
that slouched at all angles, with nails starting and shingles warping in
the sun.
Similar weather-stains and odd kicks and bulges the old rancher's person
exhibited, when he came out to sun himself of a rimy morning, when cobwebs
glittered on the short, late grass, and his joints reminded him that the
rains were coming. And up and down the cow-trail below the ditch, morning
and evening, went his dairy-herd to pasture; and after them loitered Nancy,
on a strawberry pony with milk white mane and tail.
The lights and shadows chased her in and out among the willows and fleecy
cottonwoods and tall swamp-grasses; but Travis rode in the glare, on
the high ditch-bank, and, although they passed each other daily, he had
never had a good look at the “pretty girl at Lark's.” But one morning the
white-faced heifer broke away and bolted up the ditch-bank, and in a cloud
of sun-smitten dust Nancy followed, a figure of virginal wrath with scarlet
cheeks and wind-blown hair. Reining her pony on the narrow bank, she called
across to Travis in a voice as clear and fresh as her colors:--
“Head her off, can't you? _What_ are you about!” This last to the pony, who
was behaving “mean.”
“Ride to the bridge and head her this way. I can drive her up the bank,”
Travis responded.
Nancy obeyed him, and waited at the bridge while he endeavored to persuade
the heifer of the error of her ways. The heifer was not easily persuaded,
and Travis was wet to the waist before he had got her out; but he lost
nothing of the bright figure guarding the bridge, a slender shape all
pink and blue and dark blue, with hair like the sun on brown water,
and a perfect seat, and a ringing voice calling thanks and bewildering
encouragement to her ally in the stream. And this was old Solomon's
daughter!
But “Oh, my Nancy!” the boys would groan, with excess of appreciation
beyond words, and for that Nancy heeded them not: and now Travis knew that
the boys were right.
“Thank you ever so much!” her clear voice lilted, as the discomfited
runaway dashed down the bank to the path she had forsaken. “I'm ever so
sorry she dug all those bad tracks in the ditch. Will they do any harm?”
Travis assured her that nothing did harm if only it were known in time.
“What is the matter with it, anyhow,--the ditch? Isn't it built right?”
“The ditch is the prettiest I ever saw,” Travis responded, with all the
warmth of his unrequited devotion to that faithless piece of engineering.
“All new ditches need watching till the banks get settled.”
“Well, I should say that _you_ watched! Don't you ever stir off that bank?”
“I eat and sleep sometimes.”
“You must have a pretty dry camp up above. Wouldn't you like some milk once
in a while?”
“Thanks; I never happened to fall in with the milkman on my beat.”
“We have lots to spare, and buttermilk too, if you're not too proud to come
for it. The others used to.”
“I guess I don't quite catch on.”
“The other watchmen, the boys who were here before you.”
“Oh,” said Travis coldly.
“Well, any time you choose to come down I'll save some for you,” said the
girl, as if that matter were settled.
“I'm afraid it is rather off my beat,” Travis hesitated, “but I'm just as
much obliged.”
Nancy straightened herself haughtily. “Oh, it is nothing to be obliged for,
if you don't care to come.”
“I did not say I didn't care,” Travis protested; but she was gone. The dust
flew, and presently her dark blue skirt and the pony's silver tail flashed
past the willows in the low grounds.
“I shall never see her again,” he mourned. “So much for those other fellows
spoiling her idea of a watchman's duty. Of course she thought I could come
if I wanted to. Did she ask them, I wonder?”
Nancy was piqued, but not resentful. The more he did not come, as evening
after evening smiled upon the level land; the more she thought of Travis,
alone in his dusty camp, alone on his blinding beat; the more she dwelt
upon the singularity and constancy of his refusal, the more she respected
him for it.
So one day he did see her again. She was sitting on the bridge planks,
leaning forward, her arms in her lap, her hat tipped back, a star of white
sunlight touching her forehead. She lifted her head when she heard him
coming and put her hand over her eyes, as if she were dizzy with watching
the water.
“How's the ditch?” she called in a voice of sweetest cheer. She was on her
feet now, and he saw how entrancing she was, in a blue muslin frock and a
broad white hat with a wreath of pink roses bestrewing the tilted brim. Had
they got company at the ranch? was his jealous reflection.
“How's the ditch behaving itself these days?” she repeated.
“Much as usual, thank you,” Travis beamed from his saddle.
“Breaking, as usual?”
“Yes; it broke night before last.”
“Well, I don't believe it's much of a ditch, anyhow. I wouldn't fret about
it if I was you. Don't you think I'm very good-natured, after your snubbing
me so? Here I've brought you a basket of apples, seeing you wouldn't spare
time from your old ditch to come for them yourself. That in the napkin is a
little pat of fresh butter.” She lifted the grape-leaves that covered the
basket. “I thought it might taste good in camp.”
“Good! Well, I rather guess it will taste good! See here, I can't ever
thank you for this--for bringing it yourself.” He had few words, but his
looks were moderately expressive.
Nancy blushed with pleasure. “Well, I had to--when folks are so wrapped up
in their business. There, with Susan's compliments! Susan's the heifer you
rounded up for me in the ditch. I know she made you a lot of work, tracking
holes in your banks you're so fussy about. Do you really think it is a good
ditch?”
“I am positive it is.”
“Then if anything goes wrong down here they will lay the blame on you?”
“They are welcome to. That's what I am here for.”
Nancy openly acknowledged her approval of a man that stood right up to his
work and would take no odds of any one.
“The other boys were always complaining and saying it was the ditch. But
there, I know it is mean of me to talk about them.”
“I guess it won't go any further,” said Travis dryly.
“Well, I hope not. They were good boys enough, but pretty trifling
watchmen, I shouldn't wonder.”
Travis had nothing to say to this, but he made a mental note or two.
“When will you give me a chance to return your basket?”
“Why, anytime; there's no hurry about the basket. Have you any regular
times?”
He looked away, dissembling his joy in the question, and answered as if he
were making an official report,--
“I leave camp at six, patrol the line to the ferry and back, lay off an
hour, and down again at eleven. Back in camp at three, and two hours for
dinner. On again at five, and back in camp at nine. I pass this bridge, for
instance, at seven and nine of a morning, twelve and two afternoons, and
six and eight in the evening.”
“Six and eight,” Nancy mused, with a slight increase of color. “Well, I can
stop some evening after cow-time, I suppose; but it isn't any matter about
the basket.”
Six evenings, going and coming, Travis delayed in passing the bridge,
on the watch for Nancy; six times he filled the basket with such late
field-flowers as he could find, and she never came. On the seventh evening
his heart announced her, from as far off as his eyes beheld her. This
time she was in white, without her hat, and she wore a blue ribbon in
her gold-brown braids,--a blue ribbon in her braids, and a red, red rose
in either cheek; and her colors, and the colors of the sky, floated like
flowers on the placid water.
“Well, where is the basket, then?” she merrily demanded.
“I left it behind, for luck.”
“For luck? What sort of luck?”
“Six times I brought it, and you were never here; so to-night I just
kicked it into the tent and came off without it. It seems to have been
about the right thing to do.”
“What, my basket!”
“Your basket. And it was filled with wild flowers, the prettiest I could
find. It's your own fault for not coming before.”
“I never set any day that I know of. I have been up to town.”
Travis was not pleased to hear it.
“Yes; and I saw your company's manager. What a young man he is! I had no
idea managers were ever young. And stylish--my! I'm sure I hope he'll know
me when he sees me again,” she added, coloring and dropping her eyes.
Travis grimly expressed the opinion that he probably would. Nancy continued
to strike the wrong note with cruel precision; she could not have done
better had she calculated her words; and all the while looking as innocent
as the shining water under her feet,--and that last time she had been so
kind!
And the ditch was as provoking as Nancy, rewarding his devotion with breaks
that defied all explanation. It was not possible that the patience of
the management could hold out much longer; and when he should have been
dismissed in disgrace from his post, Nancy would lightly class him as
another of those “good boys enough, but trifling watchmen.”
II.
The first dry moon was just past the full. At nine o'clock the sky began to
whiten above the long, bare ridge of the side-hill cut. At half past, the
edge of the moon's disk clove the sky-line, and the shadow of the ridge
crept down among the willows and tule-beds of the bottom. At ten the shadow
had shrunk; it lay black on the ditch-bank, but the whispering treetops
below were turning in silver light that flickered along the cow-path and
caught the still eye of a dark, shallow pool among the tules.
Nancy had chosen this night for a stroll to the bridge, where Travis might
be expected to pass, any time between eight o'clock and moonrise. Instead
of Travis came a man whom she recognized as one of the watchmen from a
lower division. He saluted her, after the custom of the country, claiming
nothing on personal grounds but the privilege to look rather hard at the
girlish figure silhouetted against the water. It was yet early enough for
sky-gleams to linger on still pools, or to color the wimpling reaches of
the ditch.
Nancy was disappointed; she had not come out to see a strange rider passing
on Travis's gray horse. Her little plans were disconcerted. She had waited
for what she considered a dignified interval, before seeming to take
cognizance of her watchman's hours; now it appeared that the part of
dignity might be overdone. Had Travis been superseded on his beat? She was
conscious of missing him already. Her walk home, through the confidential
willows, struck a chill of loneliness which the aspect of the house did not
dispel. All was as dark and empty as she had left it. Was her father still
at work at those tedious dams? This had been his given reason for frequent
absences of late, after his usual working hours; though why he should
choose the dark nights for mending his dams Nancy had not asked herself.
To-night she wanted him, or somebody, to drive away this queer new ache
that made the moonlight too large and still for one little girl to wander
in alone.
She searched for him. He was in none of the expected places; the dank
fields were as empty as the house. She turned back to the ditch; from its
high bank she could see farther into the shadowy places of the bottom.
Travis, meanwhile, had been leisurely pursuing his evening beat. He had
overtaken one of his fellow-watchmen, on foot, walking to town, had lent
him his horse for the last two miles to camp, and invited him to help
himself to what he could find for supper, without waiting for his host.
“It is a still night,” said Travis; “I'll mog along slowly up the ditch,
and put in a little extra listening: it's at night the water talks.”
Long after the rider had passed on, the tread of his horse's hoofs was
heard, diminishing on the hard-tramped bank; a loosened stone rattled down
and splashed into the water; the wind rustled in the tule-beds; then all
surface sounds ceased, and the only talker was the ditch, chuckling and
dawdling like an idle child on its errand, which it could not be persuaded
to take seriously, to the desert lands.
Travis came to the ticklish spot near the bridge, and stopped to listen.
Here the ditch cut through beds of clean sand, where the water might sink
and work back into the old ground, the sand holding it like a sponge, till
all the bottom became a bog, and the banks sank in one wide-spread, general
wash-out. The first symptom of such deep-seated trouble would be the
water's motion in the ditch,--whirling round and round as if boring a hole
in the bottom.
Travis laid his ear to the current, for he could judge of the water's
movement by the sound. All seemed right at the bridge, but far up the ditch
he was aware of a new demonstration. He listened awhile, and then walked on
with long, light steps and gained upon the sound, which persisted, defining
itself as a muffled churning at marked intervals, with now and then a
wait between. The prodding was of some tool at work under water, at the
ditch-bank.
He crossed to the upper side, and moved forward cautiously along the ridge,
crouching that his figure might not be seen against the sky.
Nancy had gone up the cow-trail, past the low grounds, and was just
climbing the bank when a dark shape, of man or beast, crashed down the
opposite slope and shot like a slide of rock into the water.
A half-choked cry followed the plunge, then ugly sounds of a scuffle under
the ditch-bank--men breathing hard, sighing and snorting; and somebody
gasped as if he were being held down till his breath was gone.
“Get in there, you old muskrat! You shall stop your own breaks if it takes
your cursed carcass to do it! Now then, have you got your breath?”
Nancy stayed only to hear a voice that was her father's, convulsed with
terror and the chill of his repeated duckings, begging to be spared the
anguish of drowning by night in three feet of ditch-water.
“Mr. Travis,” she screamed, “you let my father be, whatever you are doing
to him! Father, you come right home and get on dry clothes!”
Travis was as much amazed as if Diana with the moon on her forehead had
appeared on the ditch-bank to take old Solomon Lark under her maiden
protection; but no less he stuck to his prize of war.
“Your father hasn't time to change his clothes just yet, Miss Nancy; he's
got some work to do first.”
“Who are you, to be setting my father to work? Let go of him this minute!
You are drowning him; you are choking him to death!” sobbed the frantic
girl. The shadow fortunately withheld the details of her father's
condition, but she had seen enough. Had Travis been drinking? Was the man
bereft of his senses?
He was quite himself apparently,--hideously cool, yet roused, and his voice
cut like steel.
“You had better go home, Miss Nancy, and light a fire and warm a blanket
for your father's bed. He'll be pretty cold before he gets through with
this night's work.”
After this cruel speech he took no more notice of Nancy, but leaped upon
the ditch-bank and began hurling earth in great shovelfuls, patting the old
man on the head with his cold tool whenever he tried to clamber up after
him.
“You'd better not try _that_,” he roared in a terrible voice that wounded
Nancy like a blow. “Get in there, now! Puddle, puddle, or I'll have you
buried to the ears in five minutes!”
It was shocking, hideous, like a horrible dream. The earth rattled down all
about Solomon, and frequently upon him; the water was thick with mud, and
the wretched old man tramped and puddled for dear life, helping to mend the
hole which he had secretly dug where no eye could discover, till the water
had fingered it and enlarged the mischief to a break.
It was the work of vermin, and as such Travis had treated his prisoner.
Nancy felt the insult as keenly as she abhorred the cruelty. She fled,
hysterical with wrath and despair at her own helplessness. But while she
made ready the means of consolation at home, her thinking powers came back,
and, between what she suspected and what she remembered, she was not wholly
in the dark as to the truth between her father and Travis.
There was no one to warm Travis's blankets, when he fell back upon camp
about daybreak, reeking with cold perspiration, soaked with ditch-water and
sore in every muscle from his frenzy of shoveling. He had had no supper
the night before; his guest had eaten all the cooked food, burned all his
light-wood kindlings, and forgotten to cover the bread-pail, and his bread
was full of sand. He didn't think much of those tenderfeet, who called
themselves ditch-men, on that lower division where there was no work at all
to speak of.
He began--worse comfort--to consider his police work from a daughter's
point of view. Alas for himself and Nancy! His idyl of the ditch was
shattered like the tender sky-reflections that bloomed on its still waters,
and vanished when the waters were troubled. His own thoughts were as that
roily pool where he had ducked the old man in the darkness. He overslept
himself, after thinking he should not sleep at all, and started down
his beat not until noon of the next day. Halfway to the bridge on the
ditch-bank he met Nancy Lark. She gave him a note, which he dismounted to
take, she vouchsafing no greeting, not even a look, and standing apart
while he read it, with the air of a martyr to duty.
Mr. Travis [the letter ran],--I am a death-struck man in consequence of
your outrageous treatment of me last evening. I've took a dum chill, and
it has hit me in the vitals through standing in water up to my armpits. If
you think your fool ditch is worth more than a Human's life, though your
company's enemy, that's for you to settle as you can when the time comes
you'll have to. I don't ask any favors. But if you got anny desency left in
you through working for that fish-livered company of bondholders coming out
here to stomp us farmers into the dirt, you will call this bizness quits. I
aint in no shape to fight ditches no more. You have put me where I be, and
the less said on both sides the better, it looks to me. If that's so you
can say so by word or writing. I should prefer writing as I aint got that
confidence I might have. Yours truly,
SOLOMON LARK.
“Miss Nancy,” said Travis gently, “is your father very sick this morning?”
“I don't know,” Nancy replied.
“Have you sent for a doctor?”
“He won't let me.”
“Have you read this letter?” She flashed an indignant look at him.
“I wish you would, then.”
“It is not my letter. I don't know what's in it, and I don't care to know.”
“Do you know what your father was doing in the ditch last night?”