Madeira was standing at the plate-glass window. He had his thumbs in his
trousers pockets, and he was rocking to and fro, shifting his weight
from his heels to the balls of his feet peculiarly, as though seeking
for balance. His eyes were moodily thoughtful, and he kept snapping at
his lower lip with his big white teeth.
"Why, God bless you, Steering!" he cried pleasantly, moving out to the
curb as the horses came up, "I made a mistake in missing you at the
house yesterday. Want to see you again, as soon as I can. What about
to-night, young man? Going to get in home early, aren't you, Sally?"
"Yes, Dad, early."
"Well then, my boy, you just stop by the bank, when you get in from the
hills, will you? I shan't leave the bank before eight o'clock. Shan't be
home to supper, Honeyful."
"All right, Mr. Madeira, I'll come," assented Steering; "look for me
sometime before eight."
"All right, my boy. So long, Honeyful."
Again the horses moved off, side by side. Soon the town lay far behind
the riders, who were following the shimmering Di around the blue hills.
Where the road ran up the bluff into heavy timber they got into deep
odorous silences, the silences of young unspoiled places; musical, too,
somehow, over and beyond the stillness. Where the road came down to the
bottom land along the river the silence shook with the river's silver
mystery. No matter where the road ran, always off beyond them lay the
hills, ridge upon ridge, beautiful, glorious.
"Aren't they tremendous?" said the girl, "Aren't you glad they are
almost yours?" A sense of possession was indeed mounting into a cry of
rejoicing within Steering. He admitted it and then laughed at it.
"It's the house of Grierson that should rejoice," he said longingly.
"Wait until I bring you out above Salome Park," said the girl. "I, too,
have some land up here that's worth while. From my land you can look
straight across the country for miles, back again into your land."
Sometimes, as they journeyed, they passed log cabins backed up against
the long hills, or squatting close to the shining river. Sometimes, as
they journeyed, the red bluffs beetled up above them, tall and frowning.
Sometimes the trees, trailing long green veils, all but met across the
Di below them. Once they passed a saw-mill, set and buzzing; once they
had to wait in the woods while a string of cattle stampeded by; once
they saw a man in a skiff far down the Di. He raised his hand and waved
to them for loneliness' sake. He looked sick with loneliness.
"You know your Missouri by heart," Steering commented admiringly, as she
led him through bridle-paths and by short cuts with a fine woodsmanship.
"Well, I ought to. The times that I have been over it, with Piney, a
ragged Robin-goodfellow at my heels! This is the apple-jack country that
we are in now. Did you know that? Apple-jack stands for our big red
apples and for zinc. There's some of both down here, see!" She stopped
him on a high spur in the ridge road and waved her riding whip toward
the flats below, whose miles upon miles of apple trees made him wonder.
"But wait for Salome Park," she insisted, and led him on.
Riding along beside her, listening to her, forgetful of his
complications, his hills billowing toward him, Steering grew intensely
happy. Just to look at her was enough to make a man happy. Her black,
semi-fitting riding-habit outlined her graces of form enchantingly, the
admirable litheness of her broad deep chest, her firmly-knit back. In
her vigour of well-shaped bone and sinew and muscle she constantly
emphasised the unpoetic nuisance of superfluous flesh. Beneath her
little black hat her burnished hair lay coiled in soft smooth masses low
on her neck. The wonderful vitality that beat through her veins brought
the red colour to her cheeks in delicate waves. In her sunny amber eyes
the high lights danced far back, dazzlingly.
"Now," she cried at last, "one more climb, and here we are at the
summit! Fine, isn't it? That's Salome Park, all of it, as far as you can
see, until you see the Tigmores curving around way off yonder to the
west again. Ah, yes, I thought you would like it!"
From the summit of the Tigmore Ridge, on which they had stopped, there
spread out an endless stretch of country, with small cleared spaces
where the wheat and corn could grow, and with trout glens gleaming here
and there through the trees, and with bosky places and woodsy places in
between.
"Oh, it's wonderful," said Steering.
"This is the best view in the Tigmores," said the girl. "From here you
can imagine that you see the Boston Mountains on a clear day. And away
off down there run the Kiamichi--you will have to take my word for it,
you can't see them. Cowskin Prairie, where the three States and the
Territory come together, is off that way, too."
The big Missouri loneliness hung over it all, shutting them in, shutting
the world out. "Psha! there isn't any world outside," said Steering,
and drew his horse nearer to hers. "There isn't any world outside. This
is all there is to it, and just you and I in it. Don't you believe me?"
"We will play that's the way of it," she said, the spell of the land
upon her, too, the spell of the day upon her, her own heart's red spell
upon her.
"Oh, me! Oh, me!" He brought his horse up closer, his eyes finding hers,
and pleading with them.
"Well?" she cried, "well?" a wavering, waiting smile on her lips. Even
like that, even leaning toward him she had a splendid self-trust; she
was confidential, but a little remote.
Suddenly the man beside her clamped his jaws together harshly and held
his tongue imprisoned behind his teeth. His chest lifted and shook as he
sucked down a deep breath. There, near her, the glory of the hills
outrolled before him, the keen snap of the elixir of love, the
deathless, in his blood, life seemed hard, brutally hard. Everything was
hard, and wrong. He had come down here for practical purposes, he had
come needing every ounce of his energies for those purposes, yet, day
by day, and minute by minute, he was being confronted by psychic or
moral crises, of one kind and another, that used up all the force in
him. Here and now the demand upon him was terrific. His love for Sally
Madeira had grown upon him daily, hourly, engaging all that was best in
him, pulling him away beyond his old best, inspiring, and remaking him.
To have to fight it, even for her sake, even because he must protect her
from so hard a fate as fate with him promised to be, was like sacrilege.
The force of his self-conflict took all the colour from his lips, all
the light from his eyes. "My God! My God!" he cried, a short, sharp cry,
that beat up the Tigmores and broke and splintered into the big
loneliness futilely. Then he jerked his horse about abruptly. "We must
go back now," he said.
But the girl, who had been watching, turned her eyes from him and held
her horse still for a short moment. The glory of the hills came on
across the wide park to her and enfolded her, met in kind by the
radiance of her wonderful hair, her sunny eyes, her glowing skin. The
joy of the night before, the morning's passionate grief, the ingenuous
hope and prayer in her ride after Steering, the sweet, anxious torture
of the journey to Salome Park were all giving place to a large,
impersonal comprehension of the conflict in Steering's soul. She had
known before that there was trouble brewing between him and her father.
She knew now, past all doubting, that he loved her, knew it from his
face, his voice. And even while her heart filled and quivered with
knowing it, some higher power of divination made her know, too, that he
was caught between his love of her and his difficulty with her father in
an inexplicable, soul-shaking way.
When Steering, a few feet below her, turned again towards her, she
looked finer, fairer, more immortally young and strong than he had ever
seen her look. She rode down to him fearlessly and put her hand out.
"Sometimes the thing to do is just to stand steady," she said, "isn't
that it?"--bridging all the unspoken thought and feeling between them,
understanding, helping.
He clung to her hand, and its answering pressure was that of a
comrade's, strong and reassuring. "Miss Madeira," he said, at last,
simply, "things are so bad with me that if I don't stand steady and face
them exactly as they come, not giving in an inch anywhere along the
line, I shan't be able to stand at all."
"Ah, but you will stand that way--steady," she said, and drew her hand
from his, and led the way homeward. She had accepted her fate to wait
and endure while he "faced things."
They went back into the sunset together, almost silent. Far and wide
rolled the hills in their flaunting glory, and, now and again, the
girl's breath trembled and stung her,--that tidal sense of colour
leaping and rioting within her, perhaps. Now and again the man's jaws
set together more firmly. When they talked at all it was of little
things.
"Why didn't I ever meet you at Miss Gossamer's?" he asked once.
"You were in Philadelphia when I was visiting Elsie, that was why.
Neither you nor Mr. Carington were in New York that month. I remember
that I got an idea that Elsie missed Mr. Carington, or you, or both. Mr.
Carington was in love with her, wasn't he?"
"Yes, he's always been in love with her, I think.--Do you like the
East?" he asked again, not caring for the subject of Miss Gossamer.
"To get an education in."
"You are well educated," he said, as though making comparisons.
In that matter of education, her selective abilities had been indeed
good. She had taken from her opportunities developmental elements and
used them within herself wisely. She had fine conceptions of art, she
was well-read; and because she had foreseen that she would be too rich
to have any separate use for the things of art and learning, she had
seized upon and welded all her inclinations and accomplishments into an
harmonious, delightful completeness as Woman. In the result, her
education seemed to be one of the especial reasons that you liked her.
"But as for that," said Steering, speaking his thought aloud, "reasons
don't count. There are plenty of reasons, but one really never gets at
the biggest reason of all."
"You hardly expect me to understand that," she said, laughing frankly, a
musical laugh that had in it the shaking, white flash of a rock-fluted
hill-stream.
"No, no! I don't expect you to understand that," he said.
They went on through the deep, odorous wood, down close to the river's
pale, shallow mystery again, and so back to the big gate at Madeira
Place. There at the gate the girl put out her hand to him again.
"Good-bye!" she said softly, "good-bye!"
As he bent to kiss the hand his breath came hard. "It is not good-bye,"
he said. "It shall not be. I swear it."
Then he dashed on down the ridge road toward Canaan, to find Crittenton
Madeira.
_Chapter Ten_
WHO'S GOT THE TIGMORES?
That Monday was hard on Madeira. It was his normal mental habit to come
to a conclusion instantly, and cut a way for it across other people's
ideas and notions with the impetus and onslaught of a cannon-ball. That
Monday his mentality was below--or above--normal. He kept telling
himself that he was mixed. His desire to crush Steering, pick him up and
crumple him and thrust him aside, stood before him constantly, like the
picture of the physical thing. Up to the time that he had seen his
daughter run out of the dining-room that morning, her face averted, the
desire had been steadily taking on colour and size. But, with the girl's
brave broken cry, there had come on to him an intolerable question. For
a long time he would not let the question get into words, or in any way
define itself within his brain. Still, all morning long, he recognised
that the question and that desire of his to crush Steering were ranged
before him in some sort of fierce competitive effort. A thousand times
he wished that he had had the courage to ask Sally candidly just what
she had meant, just where she stood with regard to Steering, but he knew
that he could never have asked her. Good friends though he and his
daughter were, there was between them the definite reserve that lies
between all good friends in the sphere of the big things of life. He
could not have asked her, and she could not have told him if he had
asked her.
He fretted through a busy morning in a terrible uncertainty. When Sally
had come by the bank to tell him of her proposed ride with Steering, he
had watched her with painful, anxious scrutiny. But the girl's control
had become perfect by that hour, and Madeira had to go back into the
bank with the uncertainty still thickly upon him. Pausing there in the
bank at the plate-glass window for a reflectful moment, he came to a
swift resolve. He saw that he could not afford to make any mistake. He
resolved to give Steering another chance to get right on the company
matter. When he had gone out to the curb to make an appointment for the
evening with Steering, he had told himself that it was because the boy
might as well have the chance as not have it, and, when he had gone
back, he had known that, lie to himself about it as he might, it was
because he was afraid for Sally Madeira, afraid that this Steering was
about to mean something in her life, afraid that he, as the girl's
father, might bring some unhappiness upon her.
All the long afternoon the thing continued to worry him; added to the
torment he was suffering from the burning letter in his vest-pocket, it
was well-nigh unendurable. He had to work vehemently to make the time
pass. Toward six o'clock, he began to realise that he had been shaping
the time toward the evening's appointment with Steering. As he got it
shaped he grew more peaceful. He was arranging things so that he could
win out with Steering. Little by little he came to accept the winning
out as an assured thing, and in accepting it his grievance against
Steering lightened, finally appearing to him as an easy thing to dispose
of. Even the letter in his pocket grew less scorching. Sometimes he
forgot, for minutes together, that it was there. Upon the hypothesis
that Steering would "come around" everything smoothed out. Resting
securely upon that hypothesis, Madeira even formulated the words with
which he would take Steering's surrender: "God love us, that's all
right! You just trust to me from now on. From now on I'll look out for
you, my boy." He could hear himself saying that.
At six o'clock, still shaping the day toward the appointment with
Steering, he took a great bevy of men, farmers, stockmen, storekeepers,
to the Canaan Hotel for supper. Headed by Madeira,--who kept close to
him a man named Salver, to whom he constantly referred as "our
engineering friend from Joplin,"--the party stamped into the hotel
dining-room. And though various members of the party were heavily
booted, big, brawny, and in other ways cut out as assertive, it was much
as though they were not there, so completely did Madeira fill the room.
In the hotel office, after the supper had been disposed of, though every
man had a cigar or a pipe in his mouth, it seemed as though Madeira were
really doing all the smoking, so insistently did the smoke wreaths twist
about his big face, as the others edged nearer him and closed in upon
him. On the outside, on the way back up town, the street seemed full of
Madeira. Even when some few of the satellites broke away from him and
scattered into other parts of the town, at the livery stable, the drug
store, the Grange, talking a little dubiously, the impression was
definite that they were only meteoric scraps, cast-off clinkers that
could not stand the fire and the fizz and the whirl in Madeira's orbit.
The superintendent of the Tigmore County schools, a long, lean man with
a trick of covert sarcasm, happened to be in Canaan that day, and he
cracked a joke about Madeira's "galley-gang," as the bevy of men swept
past him on their way back to the bank. In Canaan almost any joke had a
fair chance to become classic through immediate and long-drawn
repetition, and the superintendent's joke was soon going up and down the
street as majestically as though swathed in a Roman toga. By seven
o'clock the joke had come on to Madeira's ears. At eight o'clock the
superintendent was one of seven men who sat in conference with Madeira
in the private office of the bank. That was Madeira's way. Besides
Salver, the Joplin man, and the superintendent, there were at the
conference Larriman, a man who counted his acres by the thousands in
We-all Prairie; Heinkel, the German sheep-raiser from the southern part
of the county; Shelby, from the cotton lands of the Upper Bottom;
Pegram, the Canaan postmaster, and Quin Beasley, from the Grange store.
They were all still there when Steering came in. Fresh from the hills,
young, alert, deep-lunged, brown-faced, Steering was a good sort to look
at as he strode into the room. He had ridden on into Canaan to the tune
of high, purposeful music, after parting with Sally Madeira. His
experience with her out there on the hills, his profounder impression of
her fineness, had acted upon him like unbearably sweet harmonies,
urgent, inspirational. He was this minute keen for something to do,
something hard, earnest, momentous. If the whole truth were told, he
wanted to fight.
Madeira got up and shook hands with him, the more vigorously and noisily
because of a sharp lambent flare that leaped out from the younger man's
consciousness like a warning, and, reaching Madeira, stung and irritated
him. As they stood gripping each the other's hand, both big, both
vigorous, both determined, there was yet a fine line of distinction
between them. On one side of the line stood the younger man with his
ideals. On the other side stood Madeira, without any ideals.
"Come in, Steering, my boy!" In spite of himself, in spite of the "my
boy," Madeira's voice rang harshly. "Lord love us, we are having a
little preliminary meeting here. You know all these gentlemen, I think?
I'm just reading to them some matter that I have got ready. I'll go on
reading, if you don't mind. Sit down over there and listen."
And, Steering, shaking hands with the men nearest him, and bowing to the
men farthest from him, sat down and listened.
As Madeira resumed his chair at his desk, he seemed to brace himself
toward some sort of finality. His voice, when he spoke, was ominously
quiet for a noisy man's voice. "Here's something about the country in
general," he began slowly, dispassionately, "that I think might interest
a fellow who is considering coming down here either to mine or to farm.
See what you think of this: 'It was in 1874 that the first carload of
zinc ore went up to the zinc works in Illinois. That was the beginning.
Heretofore Missouri had been supposed to be agricultural only, but here
was a new Missouri, whose wheat and corn and fruit wealth was found to
be supplemented by a mineral wealth of mammoth greatness. Settlers who
wanted to mine began to come in, towns to spring up, and capital to be
invested. The country was developed with lightning-like speed. From the
Joplin stretch as a nucleus, lines of development have been steadily
projected since 1874 to this day. There are not a great many undeveloped
big acreages of land left in any of the southern Missouri counties. Of
the few that remain by far the largest and most promising is the country
known as the Tigmore Stretch. A remarkable feature of this region,
besides its great agricultural possibilities, is that the surface
exposure in the hillsides shows distinct mineral-bearing horizons, beds
of zinc carbonates, whose promise of zinc sulphide at a greater depth is
absolutely reliable. That it needs only deep shafting and drilling to
unearth more remarkable riches than even Missouri herself has as yet
yielded up, is evident from the outcrops'--by the way, gentleman,"
Madeira here interrupted himself to say, still in his quiet,
dispassionate tone, "Salver has spent a good many days in the hills
lately, and he has decided that the deeper-seated sulphides are just as
surely in the hills as are the carbonates. He has done a lot of
verifying. Aint that right, Salver?"
Salver shuffled his feet and said yes, that was right, and Madeira read
again from his notes, picking out bits here and there, and beginning
each time, "Now take this. See what you think of this," his voice
staying monotonously even.
"'But, besides the zinc and lead and iron and coal, Missouri's
well-improved farms invite the intending settler.'" (Steering thought of
the lean hill farms as he listened.) "'There is an abundance of timber,
in itself a great saving to the house-builder, and there are innumerable
streams and water-courses and lakes. The altitude is over one thousand
feet above the sea-level, and the climate is the healthiest in the
United States. Both mining and farming can be carried on the year
round.' ... And now, lastly, about this form letter that I have drafted
for intending investors--it runs like this: 'Dear Mr. So-and-So,' (I
mean to have the name filled in in each one, I want it to be a personal
letter) 'May I ask you to examine the status of our Canaan Mining and
Development Company, as set forth briefly in the enclosed pamphlet. A
careful reading will convince you that we are organised for legitimate
business and development, rather than for speculation. From personal
knowledge, I am able to vouch for all the representations made by the
Company. There are a half hundred Tigmore County men already in the
Company'--which will, of course, be the fact when the letter is sent,"
explained Madeira. "'If you are not already one of them, I should like
for you to be. I think you know my record in this part of the country,
as well as the record of the enterprises for which I have stood sponsor,
and I am confident that when you begin to feel interested in the mining
developments through this section, you will investigate the Canaan
Company before investing with the other companies that are sure to
spring up like mushrooms in our track.' ... And then, this: 'The chief
working properties of the Canaan Company, the Tigmores, can without
doubt be made to pay from one hundred to five hundred per cent, on any
investment within the first year. The Canaan Company will not have to
depend upon shallow sheets of mineral against dead rock, as do many of
the speculative enterprises of the mining section. The Canaan Company
will not cut blind. It knows its field, it knows its chances, it knows
its future'--and so on, and so on--how do you think it goes, boys?"
They thought it went rapidly, and they said so with loud endorsement.
"Well, I decided I'd get the thing moving here at home first,"
elaborated Madeira; "when all's said and done, a fellow likes to see his
own place and people profit by what's going on. I'm going to send that
letter out first to the Tigmore County people, and then move out in
wider circles later. Shouldn't you think that was the way to work it
out?"
Yes, they thought that was the way. Indeed, the way seemed such a good
one, and the work was evidently to be so carefully, so conscientiously
performed that, to Steering, as he had listened, the crying shame of it
all had been not that it wasn't true,--it might be true, there was no
telling,--but that Madeira, its promoter, didn't care a rap whether it
was true or not. Or, after all, was he, Steering, wrong about that? Had
Madeira changed about? Been himself convinced that the actual prospects
were so good that it was senseless not to depend upon them, without any
of the wings that his fancy might give them? Had the thing become with
Madeira, during these more recent days, something larger, something
legitimate? All the other men were taking Madeira's attitude seriously.
They showed that they were by the emotionalism, effusive, admiring, with
which they hung upon Madeira for a few last words, by their blind
dependence, their awe. When the seance broke up finally, they strayed
away from him haltingly, like lost sheep.
The impression of Madeira upon the men, as he let them out of the door,
was so profound that it came on to Steering with the value of a
reflection. He felt himself growing a little hopeful that the thing
really was to be right and straight, as he watched Madeira turn from the
door.