THE REBIRTH OF SIM GAGE
Neither Sim Gage nor his neighbor slept to any worth that night. At
times one would speak, but they held no discussion. Wid Gardner, in an
iron wrath, was thinking much.
Sim Gage lay with his eyes opened toward the rude ceiling. In his
heart was something new. Hitherto in all his life he had never
quarreled with fate, but smiled at it as something beyond his making or
his mending. He was one of the world's lost sheep, one of the army of
the unhoping. The mountains, the valleys, the trees, had been enough
for him, the glint of the sun on the silver gray of the sage yonder on
the plains. He had been content to spend his life here where chance
had thrown him. But now--and Sim Gage himself knew it--something new
had been born in Sim Gage's heart. It troubled him. He lay there and
bent his mind upon the puzzle, intensely, wonderingly.
It had been bravado with him up to the time that he knew this girl was
coming out. After that, curiosity and a sense of fair play, mingled,
had ensued. Then a new feeling had come after he had met the girl
herself--pity, and remorse in regard to a helpless woman. Sim Gage did
not know the dangerous kinship that pity holds. He knew no proverbs
and no poetry.
But now, mixed also with his feeling of vague loss, his sense of rage,
there was now, as Sim Gage realized perfectly well, a new and yet more
powerful emotion in his soul. He was not the same man, now; he never
again would be. Pity and propinquity and the great law had done their
work! For the first and only time in all his life Sim Gage was in love!
Love dareth and endureth all things, magnifies and lessens, softens and
hardens, loosens and binds, establishes for itself new worlds,
fabricates for itself new values, chastens, humbles, makes weak, makes
strong. Sim Gage never before had known how merciless, how cruel all
this may be. He was in love. With all his heart and life and soul he
loved _her_, right or wrong. There had been a miracle in Two-Forks
Valley.
The two men were astir long before dawn. Wid Gardner first kicked off
his blankets. "I'll find me a horse," said he. "You git breakfast,
Sim, if you can." He went into the darkness of the starlit morning.
Sim Gage, his wounded leg stiff and painful enough, crawled out of his
bunk--the same where She but now had slept--and made some sort of a
light by means of matches and a stub of candle; found a stick and made
some shavings; made shift to start a fire. With a hatchet he found on
the floor he hacked off more of the charred woodwork of his own
door-frame, seeing that it must be ruined altogether. It was nothing
to him what became of this house. The only question in his mind was,
Where was She? What had happened to Her?
His breakfast was that of the solitary man in such surroundings. He
got a little bacon into a pan, chipped up some potatoes which he
managed to pare--old potatoes now, and ready to sprout long since. He
mixed up some flour and water with salt and baking powder and cooked
that in a pan.
The odors of the cooking brought new life into the otherwise silent
interior of Sim Gage's cabin. Sim felt something at his feet, at his
leg. It was the Airedale puppy which he had left curled up all night
at the foot of his bed. The scent of the meat now had awakened him,
and he was begging his new master for attention.
Sim leaned down stiffly to pat him on the head, gave him a bit of food.
Then he bethought him of the sack of fowls which he had entirely
forgotten--found them luckily still alive in the wagon bed, cut off the
sacking around them, and drove them out into the open to shift for
themselves as best they might. But the little dog would not be cast
off. He followed Sim wherever he went, licked his hand. That made him
think how She would have petted the puppy had She been there. He had
got the dog for Her.
By the time he had the meal ready Wid Gardner was back leading a horse.
There was no saddle at either ranch now, but Wid searched around and
found a bit of discarded sack, a piece of rope near the burned barn.
"I'll ride down the valley," said he after the two had eaten in
silence. "Wait till I ride down to Jensen's. He'll come along."
"Well, hurry back," said the new Sim, with a resolution and decision in
his voice which surprised his neighbor. "I can't very well go off
alone. Send word down to the dam. We got to clean out this gang."
"Yes," replied Wid, "they'd better look out who's working on the dam.
It ain't all soldiers. You can't tell a thing about where this is
going to run to--they might blow out the dam, for all you can tell.
They ain't up in there for no good,--after the timber, likely. I
wonder how many there is of them."
"I don't care how many there is," said Sim Gage simply.
Early as Gardner was, he was not the only traveler on the road. As he
approached Nels Jensen's gate he saw below that place on the road the
light of a car traveling at speed.
He slid off his horse, tied the animal, and stood, rifle in hand,
directly in front of the approaching vehicle.
"Halt!" he cried, and flung up his left hand high, the rifle held in
his right, under his arm pit.
It was no enemy who now slowed down the car and cut out the lights. A
voice not unfamiliar called out, "What's wrong with you, man? What do
you want? You trying to hold me up?"
"Is that you, Doc? No one passes here. What are you doing up here?"
Wid walked up to the edge of the car.
"I'm on a call, that's what I'm doing up here," replied Doctor Barnes.
"Have you heard anything about an accident up on the Reserve?"
"Accidents a-plenty, right around here. I don't know nothing about the
Reserve. Who told you?"
"A man, last night late. Said there was a man hurt up in the timber
camp, for me to go up fast as I could. Tree fell on him. They left
him up there alone, because they couldn't bring him out."
"That so?" commented Wid Gardner grimly.
--"So that elected me, you see. Every time I try to get a night's
sleep, here comes some damn sagebrusher and wants me to come out and
cure his sick cow, or else mamma's got a baby, or a horse has got in
the wire, or papa's broke a leg, or something. Damn the country
anyhow! I wish I'd never seen it. I'm a doctor, yes, but I'm the
Company doctor, and I don't have to run on these fool trips. But of
course I do," he added, smiling sunnily after his usual fashion. "So I
come along here. And you hold me up. What do _you_ want?"
"I want you to wait and come in and see Nels Jensen with me, Doc," said
Wid Gardner. "Hell's to pay."
"What's wrong?" Doctor Barnes' face grew graver.
"We don't know what. When Sim and me come home, some one had been here
when we was gone. Sim's barn is burned, and all his hay, and all mine,
and my house--I haven't got lock, stock nor barrel left of my ranch,
and nothing to make a crop with."
"What do you think?" asked Doctor Barnes gravely.
"We don't know what to think. It's like enough a hold-on from that old
Industrial work--they been threatening all down the valley, since times
are hard and wages fell a little after the war work shut down. There
was some hay burned down below there. Folks said it was spontaneous
combustion, or something--said it got hot workin' in the stacks. I
ain't so sure now. It's them old ways. As if they ever got anything
by that!"
Dr. Barnes puckered his lips into a long whistle. "I wonder if there's
any two and two to put together in _this_ thing!" said he. "I came up
here to get that poor devil out of the woods. But who can tell what in
the merry hell has really happened up there?"
"We got to go and see," said Wid Gardner. "You know that woman?"
The doctor nodded.
"She's gone too. Whoever it was took her off in a car from up at the
head of Sim Gage's lane."
Doctor Barnes got down out of the car, and the two walked through Nels
Jensen's gate. Jensen was afoot, ready for the day's work. He agreed
that one of his boys would carry the news to the Company dam.
"Better give us a little something to eat along with us, Karen," he
said to his wife. He took down his rifle, and looked inquiringly at
Doctor Barnes. "Have you got an extra gun?" asked the latter. Jensen
nodded, finding the spare piece near at hand.
Very little more was said. They all walked out into the morning, when
the red ball of the sun was coming up above the misty valley.
"Go on ahead in the car," said Wid. "I'll bring my horse."
They met at Sim Gage's half-burned home. Sim himself hobbled out,
rifle under one arm and the little Airedale under the other, the latter
wriggling and barking in his delight. The purr of a good motor was
soon under them. In a few moments they were out of Sim Gage's lane and
along the highway as far as the point where the Tepee Creek trail
turned off into the mountains.
"Wait here, Doc," said Wid, "Sim and me want to have a look--we know
the track of that car that done the work down here."
But when they bent over the trail, they saw that it was different
from what it had been when they left it the night before! Wid cursed
aloud, and Sim Gage joined him heartily.
"It's wiped out," said Sim. "Some one's been over this trail since
last night. This car ain't got no busted tire."
"That may be the very man that came down and called me!" exclaimed
Doctor Barnes.
"I heard him when he went down the road," nodded Nels Jensen--"last
night. I'll bet that's the same car. I'll bet it come down out of the
mountains."
They passed on up the creek valley toward the Reserve far more rapidly
than the weaker car of Big Aleck had climbed the same grade the day
previous, but the main body of the forest lay three thousand feet above
the valley floor, and the ascent was so sharp that at times they were
obliged to stop in order to allow the engine to cool.
"What's that?" said Sim Gage after a time, when they had been on their
way perhaps an hour up the winding cañon, and had paused for the time.
"Smoke? That ain't no camp fire--it's more."
They made one or two more curves of the road and then got confirmation.
A long, low blanket of smoke was drifting off down the valley to the
right, settling in a gray-blue cloud along the mountain side. The wind
was from left to right, so that the smoke carried free of the trail.
"She's a-fire, boys!" exclaimed Wid. "We better git out of here while
we can."
"We ain't a-going to do nothing of the sort," said a quiet voice. Wid
Gardner turned to look into the face of Sim Gage. "We're a-going right
on up ahead."
Wid Gardner looked at Doctor Barnes. The latter made his answer by
starting the car once more. Although they did not know it, they now
were approaching their journey's end. They could not as yet see the
swift advance of the fire from tree to tree, because the wind as yet
was no stronger than the gentle air of morning; could not as yet hear
any roar of the flames. But they saw that now, on these mountain
slopes before them, one of the most valuable timber bodies in the state
was passing into destruction.
"God damn their souls!" said Wid Gardner fervently. "Wasn't it enough
what they done to us already?"
"Go on, Doc." It was Sim's voice. Wid Gardner knew perfectly well
what drove Sim Gage on.
But the car soon came to a sudden halt. A couple of hundred yards on
ahead lay an open glade. At the left of the trail stood a great wall
tent.
In an instant, every man was out of the car, the three ranchmen, like
hounds on the scent, silently trotting off, taking cover from tree to
tree. A few moments, and the four of them, rifles at a ready, had
surrounded the tent. As they closed in, they all heard a high, clear
voice--one they would not have suspected Sim Gage to have
owned--calling out: "Throw up your hands, in there!" Actually, Sim
Gage was leader!
There came an exclamation in a hoarse and broken voice. "Who are you?
Don't shoot--I surrender."
"How many are there of you?" inquired Doctor Barnes.
"It's me--Big Aleck--I'm shot--I'm dying-- Help!--Who is it?"
"Come out, Aleck!" called the high and resolute voice of Sim
Gage--"Come on out!"
"I can't come out. I'm shot, I tell you."
Then Sim Gage did what ordinarily might not have been a wise thing to
do. Without pause he swept aside the tent flap with the barrel of his
rifle, and stepped in, quickly covering the prostrate figure that lay
on the bloody blankets before him.
Big Aleck was able to do more than move. He raised one hand, feebly,
imploring mercy.
"Come out, damn you!" said Sim Gage, his hand at the dollar of the
crippled man. He dragged his prisoner out into the light and threw him
full length,--mercilessly--upon the needle-covered sand.
The crippled man began to weep, to beg. It was small mercy he saw as
he looked from face to face.
"That's my man," exclaimed Doctor Barnes. "But it's not any accident
with a tree. That's gun shot!"
"Who done that work down below?" demanded Sim of the prostrate man.
"Where is she? Tell me!" His voice still rang high and imperative.
Big Aleck shivered where he lay. Now he too saw the flames on ahead in
the woods.
"Who set that fire?" demanded the Doctor suddenly. "Whose work was
that?"
"It was sabcats!" said Big Aleck, frightened into an ingenious lie.
"They was in here. I'm the government foreman. I don't know how they
got in or got out. They must of set a 'clock' somewhere for to start
it."
"Who do you mean--sabcats?" demanded Doctor Barnes. The other three
stood coldly and implacably staring at the crippled man.
"I caught them in here--I'm in charge of this work, you see. I tried
to stop them. They shot me and left me here. They said they'd send a
doctor."
"I'm the doctor," replied the medical man, who stood looking at him.
"Where is that woman?"
Big Aleck rolled his head. "I don't know. I don't know nothing. I'm
shot--I'm going to die."
"We've got to get out," said Doctor Barnes. "Boys, shall we get him
into the car?"
"No!" said Sim Gage, sharply. "I won't ride with him. _Where is
she_?" He stepped close up to Big Aleck, pushing in front of the
others. "You know. Damn you, tell me!"
"Keep him away!" yelled Big Aleck. "He's going to kill me!" He tried
to get on his elbows, his hands and knees, but could not, broken down
as he was. He was abject--an evil man overtaken by an evil fate.
"Where is she?" repeated Sim Gage. "Tell me!"
"I tell you I don't know. She ran off, that way."
"That's the car that brung her up!" said Wid Gardner, motioning toward
the ragged tire of the rear wheel. "See that tire, Sim? That's the
car! She's been here."
"Go see if you can git the trail, Wid," said Sim Gage to his friend.
"Quick!"
Sim himself passed for a moment, hurriedly, to the car which had
brought his party up. He had left the little dog tied there, but now
heard it whining, and stopped to loosen it. It ran about, barking.
Head down, Sim Gage stumbled off, following a trail which he half
thought he saw, but he lost it on the pine needles, and came back,
bitter of heart, once more to face the man who lay helpless on the
ground--the man who now he knew was his enemy, not to be forgiven or
spared.
"Where is she?" he said to Aleck once more. "It was her trail, I know
it. Tell me the truth now, while you can talk."
"You was follering right the way she went, far as I know," moaned
Aleck. "How kin I tell where she went, after I was shot?"
"After you was shot? Who shot you? _Did she_?"
"I told you who shot me. It was them fellers."
"Then why didn't they kill you, if they wanted to? They _could_ of
finished you, couldn't they? Where's my six-shooter, Aleck--you took
it outen my house, and you know you did."
He stepped back into the tent and began to kick around among the
blankets. "There's nothing here excepting your own rifle." He came
out, unloaded the gun, smashed the lever against the nearest tree.
"You won't never need no gun no more," said he.
"I'll have to look after him, now," said Doctor Barnes, stepping
forward. He had stood looking at the crippled man, his own hands on
his hips. "He's bad off."
"Keep away--don't you touch him!" It was still the new voice of Sim
Gage that was talking now, and there was something in his tone which
made the others all fall back. All the time Sim Gage's rifle was
covering the writhing man.
"I tried to save her," whimpered Big Aleck now.
"You lie! Why did you bring her up here then? Why didn't you leave
her there--she didn't have to come." Sim Gage still was talking now
sharp, decisive. "Where is she now?"
"Good God, man, I told you I didn't know. How do I know which way
she'd run? She said she was blind--but I don't believe she was."
"_Why_ don't you?" demanded Sim Gage. "_Because she could shoot
you_?--Because she _did_ shoot you, twice? What made her? Where's my
gun? Did she take it with her after she shot you?"
The sweat broke out now on the gray and grimed forehead of the
suffering man. "I won't tell you nothing more!" he broke out. "What
right you got to arrest me? I ain't committed no crime, and you ain't
got no warrant. I want a lawyer. I want this doctor to take care of
me. I got money to get a lawyer. I don't have to answer no questions
you ask me."
"You say she went over that way?" Sim's finger was pointing across the
road in the direction of the fire.
"I told you, yes," nodded Big Aleck. And Sim Gage's own knowledge
gained from the last direction of the footprints confirmed this.
"Blind--and out all night in these mountains!" he said, his voice
shaking for the first time. "And then comes that fire. You done that,
Aleck--you know you done it."
"I told you I didn't know nothing," protested the crippled man, who now
had turned again upon his back. "I ain't a-goin' to talk. It was them
fellers."
"Some things you'd better know," said Sim Gage, suddenly judge in this
court, suddenly assembled. "Some things I know now. You come down to
my house your own self. It was you set my barn a-fire and burned my
house and my hay, and killed my stock. It was you carried that girl
off. I know why you done it, too. You wasn't fighting that bunch in
here--they was with you. You was all on the same business, and you
know it. You made trouble before the war, and you're making it now,
when we're all trying to settle down in the peace."
He was beginning to tremble now as he talked. "Didn't she shoot
you?--Now, tell me the truth."
"Yes!" said the prisoner suddenly, seeing that in the other's eyes
which demanded the truth. "She did shoot me, and then ran away. She
took your gun. But I didn't set the fire. Honest to God, I don't know
how it got out. I swear--oh, my God--have mercy!"
But what he afterward would have sworn no man ever knew. There was a
rifle shot--from whose rifle none of the four ever could tell. It
struck Big Aleck fair below the eyes, and blew his head well apart. He
fell backward at the door of the tent.
They turned away slowly. Just for an instant they stood looking at the
sweeping blanket of smoke. They walked to the car, paying no further
attention to the figure which lay motionless behind them. The fire
might come and make its winding sheet.
It was coming. Wid Gardner lifted his head. "Wind's changing," said
he. "Hurry!"
They headed down the trail as fast as might be.
"_Wait_, now, Doc!" said Sim Gage, a moment after they started. "Wait
now!"
"What's up?" said Doctor Barnes. "Look at that smoke."
"Where's that little dog, now? We've forgot him."
He sprang out of the car, began stumbling back up the trail, his own
leg dragging.
"Cut off the car!" he called back. "I can't hear a thing."
As he stood there came up to him from the mountain side a sound which
made him turn and plunge down in that direction himself. It was a
shot. Then the bark of the Airedale, baying "treed."
The dog itself, keen of nose, and of the instinct to run almost any
sort of trail, even so very faint as this on which it was set, had in
part followed out the winding course of the fleeing girl after Sim Gage
himself had abandoned it, thinking it had been laid on that trail. And
now what Sim saw on ahead, down the hill, below the trail, was the
figure of Mary Warren herself, sitting up weakly, gropingly, on the log
over which she had fallen the night before--beneath which, like some
animal, she had cowered all that awful night on the heap of pine
needles which she had swept up for herself!
A cry broke from Sim Gage's lips. She heard him and herself called out
aloud, "Sim! Sim! Is it you? I knew it was you when the dog came!"
And then, still shivering and trembling with fear and cold and
exhaustion, Mary Warren once more lost all sense of things, and dropped
limp. The little dog stood licking at her hands and face.
Here was work for Doctor Barnes after all. He took charge. The four
of them carried the woman up the hill to the car. He had restoratives
which served in good stead now.
"Poor thing!" said he. "Out all night! It's just a God's mercy she
didn't freeze to death, that's all."
He himself was wondering at the extraordinary beauty of this woman.
Who was she--what was there in this talk that two ranchmen had made,
down there at the dam? Why, this was no ordinary ranchwoman at all,
but a woman of distinction, one to attract notice anywhere.
Mary Warren at last began to talk,--before the smoke cloud drove them
down the trail. "I heard a shot," said she, turning a face toward
them. "Who was it? I didn't signal then, for I didn't know. I
waited. Then the dog came."
No one answered her.
"That must have been what brought me to. It sounded up the hill.
Where--where is he?"
They did not answer even yet, and she went on.
"Who are you all?" she demanded. "I don't see you, of course." She
was looking into the face of Doctor Barnes who bent above her, his hand
on her pulse.
"I'm Doctor Barnes," said he. "I work down at the Company's plant at
the big dam. You are Miss Mary Warren, are you not?"
She nodded. "Yes."
"I won't introduce these others, but they're all friends--we all are."
She was recognizing the voice, the diction of a gentleman. The thought
gave her comfort.
"What's that smoke?" she said suddenly, herself catching the scent
pervading the air.
"The whole mountain's afire," said Sim Gage. "We got to hurry if we
get out of here."
"I know--it was those people!--Where is that man? You found him?"
The voice of Doctor Barnes broke in quickly. "He'd been hurt by a
tree--we had to leave him because he was too far gone, Miss Warren,"
said he. "We couldn't save him. He couldn't answer any questions--not
even a hypothetical question--when we tried him. But now, don't try to
talk. He's got what he had coming, and he'll never trouble you again."
"Whose little dog is this?" she asked suddenly, reaching out a hand
which the young Airedale kissed fervently. "If it hadn't been for that
little dog, you'd never have found me, would you? You couldn't have
heard me call. I would not have dared to shoot. Whose little dog?"
"It's yours, ma'am," said Sim Gage. "And I got four hens."