revulsion of feeling upon him. This effort of his to bring Steering
around by strategy was galling him. He resented that any such effort
should ever have been saddled upon him. He considered that from the
start Steering should have been with him. Most fiercely of all he
resented that he, Crittenton Madeira, should have let himself get into
the position of trying to mollify Steering. "By God!" he was saying to
himself with a convulsive anger, "Me to have to mollify! By God! Me!"
Then the thought of Sally came back to him, goading him and confusing
him. On a sudden impulse of candour he cried out to Steering, as he came
on to his desk.
"Steering! God love you, why do you want trouble between you and me?
Don't you see that I have this thing here under my thumb? Don't you see
that you mustn't go against me, my boy? Here's your chance back again.
I'm handing it out to you. Stand by me. You won't be sorry. All my plans
are made now. I have once or twice in my life thought the thing to do
down here was to stir up a furore over some of the lakes and the springs
and the scenery and make a health resort out of the region, but I have
settled away from that now, settled straight at zinc. But Lord bless
you! zinc or no zinc we can't fail to make a pile of money out of this.
Why do you want to be a fool and hold back from me when I'm willing to
pull you along? You ought to see by now that you can't do anything
without me, or go against me. 'Tisn't everybody I'm willing to pull
along, Steering. Why, boy, from the start, I've treated you on the
square, let you know me on the inside--let--and, here and now, I'm still
willing to pull you along, if you'll come along!--eh, what?"
With Madeira's words, matching Madeira's excitement, blazing furiously
and whitely, out leaped the slower, stronger fire of the younger man's
personality.
"See here!" shouted Steering, "twice now I've done my best to hope that
somehow, somewhere you were going to throw me one line of commercial
honesty and decency. I haven't asked you to measure up to very high
standards, I'd have been satisfied with damned little; I've waited on
you and hoped for you and let you try to bull-doze me, but by God! I'm
done. You hear, I'm done!" He got up and the lean strength of his
determination and the long reach of his body were all-powerful. "Don't
you try this game with me again, Mr. Madeira! Don't you ever try any
game with me again--No! Keep back! Not that either!"
Madeira had gone crazy for the time. Possessed only by that desire to
crush the thing that opposed him, he lifted his big clenched fists
straight up over his head and came at Steering, fiery-eyed, perfervid
with relish of the moment when he could close down on his enemy and make
an end of him. He panted as he came, and as he came the veins in his
temples stood out, purple and knotted. A little line of froth lay upon
his lower lip.
"Eh, God! You!--Wait there!--You!--You!----"
Steering, with the old prowess that had made the boys on the gridiron
stand aside and howl for him, reached up and brought Madeira's arms down
with a circling, sweeping blow, then caught the bulky, staggering body
and thrashed it into a chair, forgetful that it was Madeira, forgetful
of Sally Madeira, forgetful of everything for one red instant save a
savage masculine joy in his own strength.
Then he took out a cigar and lit it, and his mental readjustment
followed quickly. "Mr. Madeira," he said, puffing slowly at the cigar,
the match's yellow light on his face showing that he was pale, "I am
sorry that you made me do that, sir. Still, I must add this to what I've
said,--don't, please, ever try to pull me along with you again. I guess
I'm going in a different direction. This leaves everything settled
between us. Our paths aren't apt to cross again. You aren't hurt, I
hope? There is nothing that I can do for you?"
Madeira made no answer. He was sitting, a wooden figure, in front of his
desk where Steering had thrashed him down. His temples were still
purplish, but the crazy light was no longer in his eyes. They were dull
and fishy. Steering had gone to the office door, then the bank door had
clanked to behind him before Madeira moved. He began working his fingers
then, watching them questioningly, stupidly. They felt stiff and numb.
Suddenly he leaned forward exhausted. His head rolled on the desk.
"Sally?" he whimpered, in a furtive, scared way, "Sally?"
Then, all in a moment, he jumped to his feet, clutching at the pocket
that held the Grierson letter, while words came from his mouth in
vehement staccato yelps:
"Eh, God! He'll go against me, will he? Wait. I'll show him. Who's got
the Tigmores? Answer me that now? Who's got the Tigmores?" Off beyond
his window tumbled the long Tigmore line. He crossed the room, all his
strength back with him, and looked out upon the high black hills. "Eh,
God!" he shouted, and beat at his chest where the letter lay, "Dead men
tell no tales! _I've got the Tigmores!_"
_Chapter Eleven_
TALL THINGS
One late fall afternoon a man and a boy lingered under the shadow of
tall trees and pondered tall things. The boy was propped against the
trunk of an oak; his hat was pushed back from his face; his black
tumbling hair made his slim brown face seem browner, his long eyes
darker than they were; his young intensities of fancy and feeling were
aroused, and manifest in the tremble of his lip, the vibrancy of his
voice, the shaking light of his glance. The man lay flat on his back
with a book spread out over his stomach and his long white fingers
interlaced across the book fondly. Down at their feet the Di flowed
swiftly, with the eyrie shiver on her bosom, making haste, like a
frightened woman, past the lonely Tigmores toward the livelier corn and
cotton lands. All around the horizon the sky so throbbed that here and
there it rent the sheer cloud-veil that lay in delicate illusion over
the blue. Through the trees played frightened flashes of colour, the
whisk of a cardinal's wing, the burnt-red plume of a fox-squirrel's
tail. In the air there was a palpitancy that was to the dream senses
what colour vibrations are to the eye.
The man took up the book and began to read from it, and this was the
burden of the reading:
"'Nobody can pretend to explain in detail the whole enigma of first
love. But a general explanation is suggested by evolutional
philosophy,--namely, that the attraction depends upon an inherited
individual susceptibility to special qualities of feminine influence,
and subjectively represents a kind of superindividual recognition,'" the
man smiled gravely and repeated the last stave with questioning care,
"'and subjectively represents a kind of superindividual recognition?--a
sudden wakening of that inherited composite memory which is more
commonly called passional affinity.'--I have a notion that that may mean
something or other, Piney?"
"Don't ast me."
The reader began again: "'Certainly if first love be evolutionally
explicable, it means the perception by the lover of something
differentiating the beloved from all other women,--something
corresponding to an inherited ideal within himself, previously latent,
but suddenly lighted and defined,'--an inherited ideal--something
differentiating the beloved from all other women," murmured the reader
earnestly. He put the book back upon his stomach, and there was a long
silence in the woods, broken by a distant reverberation, short, sharp,
suggestive. Piney jumped, like the highly strung, alert young animal
that he was.
"Whut wuz it, Mist' Steerin'?"
"Uncle Bernique's blasts, Piney. He's on the trail." The silence
remained unbroken for another long period.
"Mist' Steerin'," began Piney at last; he had a long spear of sere grass
in his mouth and he chewed at it argumentatively, "d'you think,--I
couldn't adzackly tell whut that writin' wuz a-aimin' at, but simlike
f'm the way it goes on that ef the sort of thing it makes aout to happen
happens onst, it oughtn't never to happen agin, hmh?" Piney's long drawn
notes of rising inflection were musical. "Simlike, ef a man onst finds
the right woman they oughtn't never to be no more right women, hmh?"
"There ought not to be, Piney, son."
"Well, but they gen'ly is, hmh?" Bruce straightened out one foot with an
impatient kick. Ever since they had fallen into the habit of abstracted
talks on this imponderable subject, Piney had seemed able, with a sort
of elfin craft, to make Bruce remember Miss Elsie Gossamer's light,
fleeting touch upon his life. He had never mentioned Miss Gossamer to
Piney in all their mutual experience, yet the tramp-boy was constantly
skirmishing up from afar with a generalisation, like a high-held
transparency, that illuminated Miss Gossamer's memory for Bruce. Three
hypotheses had presented to Bruce in the way of explanation: one, that
he himself was possessed by a little embarrassed consciousness that he
should have had any past at all in view of the present; another, that
Miss Sally Madeira had just possibly set Piney on to worry him about
Miss Gossamer; and the last, that Piney, divining that a man could
hardly reach Bruce's age without some pages of romance behind him, was
forever, out of his own perspicacity, trying to make Bruce re-read those
pages, so that this new page, that had been turned under the hand of
Sally Madeira, might not be written.
"Piney," Bruce answered at last regretfully, "it's a pagan world. Men
make mistakes. I think it's largely because they want so much to love
that they love somebody, anybody, till the right person comes along."
"Should think they 'ud wait," demurred Piney stubbornly.
"Well, n--o, that's the notion of a man who has met the right person
exactly in the beginning; or it's a woman's notion; but it isn't the
notion of a man who, with a sense for beauty and sweetness, waits, like
a harp for its music, out in the open where beauty and sweetness beat
down upon him. Out in the open a man gets blind. Lord!" went on
Steering, remembering Miss Gossamer again, and trying to explain her to
himself, "how can a man help loving prettiness! That's what a man loves
often and always, Piney, prettiness, grace, vivacity--and then once in
his life he loves a woman--Hah!" cried Steering, as though he had at
last got the best of Miss Gossamer, "that's it--that sounds good."
"Well, d'you think," went on Piney, jerking his spear of grass
viciously, "d'you think that a man cand fall in love with a lady rat
off, just knowin' her a few weeks?" This was one of Piney's ways of
manifesting the jealousy that disquieted him, slurring covertly, and
with his lips flickering peculiarly, at Steering's brief acquaintance
with Miss Madeira. He was always showing in innumerable ways the hold
that Bruce had taken upon his young affections, but he could not help
showing, too, the sore spot of his valuation of Steering's regard for
Miss Madeira. Though they mentioned Miss Madeira between them only
casually, Bruce knew for himself that Piney, in his crude but vehement
way, was living through a boy's own high tragedy of love for a woman
older than he and beyond his reach, and Piney knew for himself that
Steering, in the most perfect flower of his capacity, had attained his
destiny as a perfect lover, under circumstances most unpropitious. The
fact that the woman who was the object of the boy's enraptured fancy had
levied royal tribute upon the man's love in the same purple-mannered
fashion brought boy and man close. Tacitly they recognised that the bond
between them was strong enough to bear the weight of Piney's jealousy,
and, both watching, they allowed the boy to depend from it, swing on it
and strain it just enough to make both conscious that the bond was
there.
"You know what I think, Piney," said Steering after a long wait, in
which he had been busy remembering the fulness of one moment in the Bank
of Canaan. "I think that if she is the right woman a man can fall in
love in one minute. And I think that if she is the right woman all
eternity will not give him time to fall out of love with her and no sort
of hell of bad situations will ever be wide enough to keep his thoughts
away from her." Steering spoke with a well-ordered restraint, but a
sense of the combination of situations that he himself had come into
lent a ringing, protesting resonance to his voice, and Piney forgot to
be jealous and flashed him a long, keen look of delight. Steering
realised that he sometimes put into words the things that Piney yearned
toward and dreamed, but could not express; and he also realised, from
the added satisfaction that he got out of his words because of Piney's
satisfaction in them, that Piney sometimes enlivened and enriched his
own emotions for him. Their romancing made boy and man delicately
complementary to each other. Steering had taken Piney's love for the
girl who was beyond him as a fine and simple thing, and, taken in that
way, it played up to Bruce's love with the rich imageries and colours of
youth, and made Bruce younger, quicker for it. Piney, on his side, had a
keen, shy consciousness of immaturity and inexperience that made him
attend upon Bruce's outbursts of passion as upon an illumination of what
this thing of man's love could be and should be at its biggest and best.
"That's just exactly the truth," maintained Steering earnestly. It was
remarkable how earnest he could be on this line of opinion. Miss Elsie
Gossamer would have marvelled to hear him. Time was when he had agreed
with Miss Gossamer that only people who had known each other a long
time, as he and she had, could depend upon their attitude toward each
other. The attitude between Miss Gossamer and him had seemed very
reliable in those prehistoric days when congeniality of taste, a flower
face and the probability of getting through life without much worry on
your mind and a good cigar in your mouth had seemed sufficient to him.
Things like that seemed pitifully insufficient now. He wheeled about
restlessly and considered.
From where he and Piney were they could hear the sound of a steam-drill,
thud-thud-thudding into the heart of a distant knob of the Canaan
Tigmores. That notion of Carington's and his about getting into the
hills had undeniably balled up into the veriest nonsense under the
pressure of Crittenton Madeira's control of the Tigmores. Steering
pounded on the ground with one fist and clenched his hands tightly about
his knees. That was not the worst, and he might as well face the worst.
There was also by now the bitterest sort of animosity toward him on
Madeira's part. Old Bernique, who was very fond of Miss Madeira and
loathed her father, had commented to Steering upon that being Madeira's
way with everyone who promised to be too much for him to handle--bah! it
made Steering angry to consider that Madeira should ever have tried to
"handle" him. He loosed the clench of his hands about his knees and
jumped to his feet. That was not the worst, and he might as well face
the worst. Naturally enough the daughter had had to go with the father.
That ride across the sunset glory of the Tigmores had been good-bye
after all. It had been two weeks since he had stood with her on the spur
above Salome Park, and he had seen her twice since; once at the
post-office, where she had said, "Good-morning, Mr. Steering"; once on
Main Street in front of her father's bank, where she had said,
"Good-evening, Mr. Steering."
But for all these things, he was not done with Missouri yet. Even now he
was waiting for old Bernique. When Bernique should come they would be
off again on a long prospect. Bernique and he had been in the hills for
two weeks, skirting the Grierson entail, picking, digging, sniffing for
ore by day, sleeping long sleeps on forest leaves, heaped and aromatic,
by night. He had that day ridden into Canaan for some clean clothes, and
was beating back toward Old Bernique now, having picked up Piney down
the river road.
"Well, Piney, son," Steering invaded the rush of his own thoughts
ruthlessly, "I expect I ought to be toddling. Going to ride part of the
way with me? I think we shall fall in with Uncle Bernique up-stream a
mile or so."
"Why, yes," assented Piney, rising; he made a keen calculation of the
time by the sun, as he got to his feet; "I'll go a-ways with you. I'd
like to see Unc' Bernique--aint seen him simlike fer a long time."
Their horses were tethered in a little glade below them and they went
into the glade as they talked. "We like Uncle Bernique, don't we,
Piney?" suggested Steering, relishing Piney's reference to the old
Frenchman.
"Best old man in the world," answered Piney, with the soft, sweet
shyness, like a girl's, that was always in his voice when he let his
affections find expression.
Before this Steering had heard, from old Bernique himself, the short
story that had connected the affections of the tramp-boy and the
wandering prospector. Piney, Old Bernique had said, was the child of a
woman whom he had known in St. Louis in the old days. Old Bernique, who
was only middle-aged Bernique then, had lived as a neighbour to the
woman, whom he had loved very much. But the woman had married another
man, and had gone away to the Southwest. And, later on, Old Bernique had
followed. And in these later days, since the woman's death, it had been
given him to keep watch and ward over her child, Piney. Piney's parents
had not been Italians at all, so Old Bernique told Steering, just plain,
everyday Americans, from up "at that St. Louis," quite poor and always
on the move. The father had been known throughout the country-side as a
"blame' good fiddler" and the mother had been, oh a vair' wonderful
woman, if one could believe Old Bernique. But there was no Italian blood
in Piney. His feeling for Italy had to be explained in another way. It
was the great sweet note of poetry, music and beauty, of that far
country, vibrating across the years and the miles, taken up as a memory
in the Missouri hills by Old Bernique and, through him, reaching a
Missouri boy's heart, all tuned and pitched for it. That was all there
was to Piney's story. It was only a fragment.
Reaching their horses in the glade, Steering and Piney mounted and
started up the river road. "Can't you come with us for the rest of the
week, son?" asked Bruce, as they journeyed.
"Nope. Goin' trampin' by myse'f." It was Piney's habit to disappear for
days, gipsy that he was. Perhaps the habit was growing upon him a little
of late. He had no abiding place; sometimes he referred to one hill
shanty, sometimes to another, as home; but the home-feeling with him was
at its fullest and strongest when he was "trampin'." Ostensibly his
vocation was that of a travelling farm-hand, but it was all ostentation.
Piney would not work. Not while the pony could carry him from hospitable
farm-house to hospitable farm-house. He was a knight of the saddle, the
uncrowned king of the woods, and Bruce, riding along beside him now,
regarding him, enjoying him, would not have exchanged comradeship with
the boy's simple, high-tuned relish of life for comradeship with kings.
"Miss Madeira is going to Europe, I hear, Piney," adventured Steering.
"Yass." Piney said nothing more for some time. He looked very
thoughtful. "Y'see," he went on after a bit, "I'm a-thinkin' abaout
ridin' off--some'ere--over the Ridge,--bein' gone fer a long time."
"Oh, Lord!" groaned Steering. He very well knew what was taking Piney
away. It was hard on him that the boy's plan for absence should pile up
on Sally Madeira's plan, but he could understand that it would be harder
on the boy to stay in the Tigmores with the inspiration of the Tigmores
hushed and gone.
"Not thinking of going to Italy yet, Piney?" It had come to be an
accepted joke with them, that penchant of Piney's for Italy. The boy was
willing to laugh about it, but his eyes always sobered dreamily in the
end, and invariably he wound up with, "but I'm a-goin', all righty, an'
don't you fergit it." He did now. "But y'see, whilst I'm a-waitin' I git
kinda tired the hills, Mist' Steerin'," he complained, trying to explain
how it was with him without telling anything. "Lots er times I go off
an' don't come back fer a long time." Not till Miss Madeira comes home,
Bruce added out of his own intuition. "Git sorta tired the hills,"
repeated Piney stubbornly.
"Do they stop talking to you, the hills and the woods and the quiet?"
"Yass, they do, sometimes, when I'm pestered--not as I pester much," he
laughed and broke off suddenly in his laughter, with a little sobbing
shake in his breath, and passed on ahead of Steering, who looked away
from him up the bridle road that cut into the Canaan Tigmores.
"There comes Uncle Bernique!" cried Steering then, glad of a chance to
divert Piney. Gazing toward Bernique welcomingly, he was diverted
himself. The old man made no answer to the shouts that Piney and
Steering sent out to him. He peered straight toward them, through them,
his eyes dry and brilliant. He seemed hardly able to sit on his horse,
because of a sort of enervating restlessness; he paid no attention
whatever to his bridle; both of his hands were in the pockets of the
tattered old coat that covered his body.
"Hi there, Pard!" hallooed Piney, with a boy's rich assurance that
recognises neither class nor age.
"Found!" the old man tried to speak, but made a dry, clicking sound
instead. He took his hands from his pockets and held up in each hand a
lump of mineral earth. As he came toward them in that way, both hands
upheld, the wild fever light in his eyes, his thin body electrified with
a strange new vitality, to Steering, who saw all at once what it meant,
his movement was that of the last full strain of the miner's epic.
"Found! Found!" he repeated, as though the sound was blessed, and he
held up the rocks, as though the sight was heaven. When they reached
him, trembling by now themselves, they had to help him from his horse
and quiet and rest him by the roadside before he could tell his tale.
Waiting nervously, Bruce took the nuggets and regarded them; beautiful
specimens, one stratum opaque, and seaming on to that stratum another,
reddish and glinting, like the spiked fire of gold; and on that stratum
another, grey and silver-faceted.
"Pretty splendid," cried Steering, and sat down suddenly and weakly. It
was not to be forgotten that Old Bernique had emerged from the
bridle-path in the Canaan Tigmores.
"When did you make the find, Uncle Bernique?" he asked hoarsely.
"Thees minute," control was coming back to the old man, he raised his
head from Piney's shoulder and leaned toward Bruce--"only thees minute!
And for twenty year I have known that it must be here, the ore, lead and
zinc, in the gr-r-eat quantity! For twenty year! And just thees minute
have I found it!" At the wailing sound of time lost, life lost, in
Bernique's voice, long lines of ghostly, bent-backed miners, with
ghostly, unavailing picks and shovels, seemed to defile down the
bridle-path from the Canaan Tigmores in historic illustration, conjured
up by the hypnosis of the old man's words.
"The troub' has been," went on Bernique feverishly, "that we have not
looked for the ore in that place where the ore is----"
"That's always the troub'," muttered Piney. He had got his composure
back and he seemed now rather good-naturedly contemptuous. Piney's was
not a nature to accommodate itself to the exaltation of an ore find.
"The mother lode runs through the Canaan Tigmores," went on Bernique
hurriedly, "of that I am now convince', but it comes to the surface,--it
comes to the surface,--ah, God above! I expire with it,--let us go to
Choke Gulch, and I will show you where it comes to the surface!"