"In all the wide border his steed was the best," and the name and fame of
Terence O'Ryan were known from Strathcona to Qu'appelle. He had ambition
of several kinds, and he had the virtue of not caring who knew of it. He
had no guile, and little money; but never a day's work was too hard for
him, and he took bad luck, when it came, with a jerk of the shoulder and
a good-natured surprise on his clean-shaven face that suited well his
wide grey eyes and large, luxurious mouth. He had an estate, half ranch,
half farm, with a French Canadian manager named Vigon, an old prospector
who viewed every foot of land in the world with the eye of the
discoverer. Gold, coal, iron, oil, he searched for them everywhere,
making sure that sooner or later he would find them. Once Vigon had
found coal. That was when he worked for a man called Constantine Jopp,
and had given him great profit; but he, the discoverer, had been put off
with a horse and a hundred dollars. He was now as devoted to Terence
O'Ryan as he had been faithful to Constantine Jopp, whom he cursed waking
and sleeping.
In his time O'Ryan had speculated, and lost; he had floated a coal mine,
and "been had"; he had run for the local legislature, had been elected,
and then unseated for bribery committed by an agent; he had run races at
Regina, and won--he had won for three years in succession; and this had
kept him going and restored his finances when they were at their worst.
He was, in truth, the best rider in the country, and, so far, was the
owner also of the best three-year-old that the West had produced. He
achieved popularity without effort. The West laughed at his enterprises
and loved him; he was at once a public moral and a hero. It was a legend
of the West that his forbears had been kings in Ireland like Brian
Borhoime. He did not contradict this; he never contradicted anything.
His challenge to all fun and satire and misrepresentation was, "What'll
be the differ a hundred years from now!"
He did not use this phrase, however, towards one experience--the advent
of Miss Molly Mackinder, the heiress, and the challenge that reverberated
through the West after her arrival. Philosophy deserted him then; he
fell back on the primary emotions of mankind.
A month after Miss Mackinder's arrival at La Touche a dramatic
performance was given at the old fort, in which the officers of the
Mounted Police took part, together with many civilians who fancied
themselves. By that time the district had realised that Terry O'Ryan
had surrendered to what they called "the laying on of hands" by Molly
Mackinder. It was not certain, however, that the surrender was complete,
because O'Ryan had been wounded before, and yet had not been taken
captive altogether. His complete surrender seemed now more certain to
the public because the lady had a fortune of two hundred thousand
dollars, and that amount of money would be useful to an ambitious man in
the growing West. It would, as Gow Johnson said, "Let him sit back and
view the landscape o'er, before he puts his ploughshare in the mud."
There was an outdoor scene in the play produced by the impetuous
amateurs, and dialogue had been interpolated by three "imps of fame" at
the suggestion of Constantine Jopp, one of the three, who bore malice
towards O'Ryan, though this his colleagues did not know distinctly. The
scene was a camp-fire--a starlit night, a colloquy between the three,
upon which the hero of the drama, played by Terry O'Ryan, should break,
after having, unknown to them, but in sight of the audience, overheard
their kind of intentions towards himself.
The night came. When the curtain rose for the third act there was
exposed a star-sown sky, in which the galaxy of Orion was shown with
distinctness, each star sharply twinkling from the electric power behind-
a pretty scene evoking great applause. O'Ryan had never seen this back
curtain--they had taken care that he should not--and, standing in the
wings awaiting his cue, he was unprepared for the laughter of the
audience, first low and uncertain, then growing, then insistent,
and now a peal of ungovernable mirth, as one by one they understood
the significance of the stars of Orion on the back curtain.
O'Ryan got his cue, and came on to an outburst of applause which shook
the walls. La Touche rose at him, among them Miss Molly Mackinder in the
front row with the notables.
He did not see the back curtain, or Orion blazing in the ultramarine
blue. According to the stage directions, he was to steal along the trees
at the wings, and listen to the talk of the men at the fire plotting
against him, who were presently to pretend good comradeship to his face.
It was a vigorous melodrama with some touches of true Western feeling.
After listening for a moment, O'Ryan was to creep up the stage again
towards the back curtain, giving a cue for his appearance.
When the hilarious applause at his entrance had somewhat subsided, the
three took up their parable, but it was not the parable of the play.
They used dialogue not in the original. It had a significance which the
audience were not slow to appreciate, and went far to turn "The Sunburst
Trail" at this point into a comedy-farce. When this new dialogue began,
O'Ryan could scarcely trust his ears, or realise what was happening.
"Ah, look," said Dicky Fergus at the fire, "as fine a night as ever I saw
in the West! The sky's a picture. You could almost hand the stars down,
they're so near."
"What's that clump together on the right--what are they called in
astronomy?" asked Constantine Jopp, with a leer.
"Orion is the name--a beauty, ain't it?" answered Fergus.
"I've been watching Orion rise," said the third--Holden was his name.
"Many's the time I've watched Orion rising. Orion's the star for me.
Say, he wipes 'em all out--right out. Watch him rising now."
By a manipulation of the lights Orion moved up the back curtain slowly,
and blazed with light nearer the zenith. And La Touche had more than the
worth of its money in this opening to the third act of the play. O'Ryan
was a favourite, at whom La Touche loved to jeer, and the parable of the
stars convulsed them.
At the first words O'Ryan put a hand on himself and tried to grasp the
meaning of it all, but his entrance and the subsequent applause had
confused him. Presently, however, he turned to the back curtain, as
Orion moved slowly up the heavens, and found the key to the situation.
He gasped. Then he listened to the dialogue which had nothing to do with
"The Sunburst Trail."
"What did Orion do, and why does he rise? Has he got to rise? Why was
the gent called Orion in them far-off days?" asked Holden.
"He did some hunting in his time--with a club," Fergus replied. "He kept
making hits, he did. Orion was a spoiler. When he took the field there
was no room for the rest of the race. Why does he rise? Because it is a
habit. They could always get a rise out of Orion. The Athens Eirenicon
said that yeast might fail to rise, but touch the button and Orion would
rise like a bird."
At that instant the galaxy jerked up the back curtain again, and when the
audience could control itself, Constantine Jopp, grinning meanly, asked:
"Why does he wear the girdle?"
"It is not a girdle--it is a belt," was Dicky Fergus's reply. "The gods
gave it to him because he was a favourite. There was a lady called
Artemis--she was the last of them. But he went visiting with Eos,
another lady of previous acquaintance, down at a place called Ortygia,
and Artemis shot him dead with a shaft Apollo had given her; but she
didn't marry Apollo neither. She laid Orion out on the sky, with his
glittering belt, around him. And Orion keeps on rising."
"Will he ever stop rising?" asked Holden.
Followed for the conspirators a disconcerting moment; for, when the
laughter had subsided, a lazy voice came from the back of the hall,
"He'll stop long enough to play with Apollo a little, I guess."
It was Gow Johnson who had spoken, and no man knew Terry O'Ryan better,
or could gauge more truly the course he would take. He had been in many
an enterprise, many a brush with O'Ryan, and his friendship would bear
any strain.
O'Ryan recovered himself from the moment he saw the back curtain, and
he did not find any fun in the thing. It took a hold on him out of all
proportion to its importance. He realised that he had come to the
parting of the ways in his life. It suddenly came upon him that
something had been lacking in him in the past; and that his want of
success in many things had not been wholly due to bad luck. He had been
eager, enterprising, a genius almost at seeing good things; and yet
others had reaped where he had sown. He had believed too much in his
fellow-man. For the first time in his life he resented the friendly,
almost affectionate satire of his many friends. It was amusing, it was
delightful; but down beneath it all there was a little touch of ridicule.
He had more brains than any of them, and he had known it in a way; he had
led them sometimes, too, as on raids against cattle-stealers, and in a
brush with half-breeds and Indians; as when he stood for the legislature;
but he felt now for the first time that he had not made the most of
himself, that there was something hurting to self-respect in this prank
played upon him. When he came to that point his resentment went higher.
He thought of Molly Mackinder, and he heard all too acutely the vague
veiled references to her in their satire. By the time Gow Johnson spoke
he had mastered himself, however, and had made up his mind. He stood
still for a moment.
"Now, please, my cue," he said quietly and satirically from the trees
near the wings.
He was smiling, but Gow Johnson's prognostication was right; and ere long
the audience realised that he was right. There was standing before them
not the Terry O'Ryan they had known, but another. He threw himself fully
into his part--a young rancher made deputy sheriff, who by the occasional
exercise of his duty had incurred the hatred of a small floating
population that lived by fraud, violence, and cattle-stealing. The
conspiracy was to raid his cattle, to lure him to pursuit, to ambush him,
and kill him. Terry now played the part with a naturalness and force
which soon lifted the play away from the farcical element introduced into
it by those who had interpolated the gibes at himself. They had gone a
step too far.
"He's going large," said Gow Johnson, as the act drew near its close,
and the climax neared, where O'Ryan was to enter upon a physical struggle
with his assailants. "His blood's up. There'll be hell to pay."
To Gow Johnson the play had instantly become real, and O'Ryan an injured
man at bay, the victim of the act--not of the fictitious characters of
the play, but of the three men, Fergus, Holden, and Constantine Jopp, who
had planned the discomfiture of O'Ryan; and he felt that the victim's
resentment would fall heaviest on Constantine Jopp, the bully, an old
schoolmate of Terry's.
Jopp was older than O'Ryan by three years, which in men is little, but in
boys, at a certain time of life, is much. It means, generally, weight
and height, an advantage in a scrimmage. Constantine Jopp had been the
plague and tyrant of O'Ryan's boyhood. He was now a big, leering fellow
with much money of his own, got chiefly from the coal discovered on his
place by Vigon, the half-breed French Canadian. He had a sense of dark
and malicious humour, a long horse-like face, with little beady eyes and
a huge frame.
Again and again had Terry fought him as a boy at school, and often he had
been badly whipped, but he had never refused the challenge of an insult
when he was twelve and Jopp fifteen. The climax to their enmity at
school had come one day when Terry was seized with a cramp while bathing,
and after having gone down twice was rescued by Jopp, who dragged him out
by the hair of the head. He had been restored to consciousness on the
bank and carried to his home, where he lay ill for days. During the
course of the slight fever which followed the accident his hair was cut
close to his head. Impetuous always, his first thought was to go and
thank Constantine Jopp for having saved his life. As soon as he was able
he went forth to find his rescuer, and met him suddenly on turning a
corner of the street. Before he could stammer out the gratitude that was
in his heart, Jopp, eyeing him with a sneering smile, said drawlingly:
"If you'd had your hair cut like that I couldn't have got you out, could
I? Holy, what a sight! Next time I'll take you by the scruff, putty-
face--bah!"
That was enough for Terry. He had swallowed the insult, stuttered his
thanks to the jeering laugh of the lank bully, and had gone home and
cried in shame and rage.
It was the one real shadow in his life. Ill luck and good luck had been
taken with an equable mind; but the fact that he must, while he lived,
own the supreme debt of his life to a boy and afterwards to a man whom he
hated by instinct was a constant cloud on him. Jopp owned him. For some
years they did not meet, and then at last they again were thrown together
in the West, when Jopp settled at La Touche. It was gall and wormwood to
Terry, but he steeled himself to be friendly, although the man was as
great a bully as the boy, as offensive in mind and character; but withal
acute and able in his way, and with a reputation for commercial sharpness
which would be called by another name in a different civilisation. They
met constantly, and O'Ryan always put a hand on himself, and forced
himself to be friendly. Once when Jopp became desperately ill there had
been--though he fought it down, and condemned himself in every term of
reproach--a sense of relief in the thought that perhaps his ancient debt
would now be cancelled. It had gone on so long. And Constantine Jopp
had never lost an opportunity of vexing him, of torturing him, of giving
veiled thrusts, which he knew O'Ryan could not resent. It was the
constant pin-prick of a mean soul, who had an advantage of which he could
never be dispossessed--unless the ledger was balanced in some inscrutable
way.
Apparently bent on amusement only, and hiding his hatred from his
colleagues, Jopp had been the instigator and begetter of the huge joke of
the play; but it was the brains of Dick Fergus which had carried it out,
written the dialogue, and planned the electric appliances of the back
curtain--for he was an engineer and electrician. Neither he nor Holden
had known the old antipathy of Terry and Constantine Jopp. There was
only one man who knew the whole truth, and that was Gow Johnson, to whom
Terry had once told all. At the last moment Fergus had interpolated
certain points in the dialogue which were not even included at rehearsal.
These referred to Apollo. He had a shrewd notion that Jopp had an idea
of marrying Molly Mackinder if he could, cousins though they were; and he
was also aware that Jopp, knowing Molly's liking for Terry, had tried to
poison her mind against him, through suggestive gossip about a little
widow at Jansen, thirty miles away. He had in so far succeeded that,
on the very day of the performance, Molly had declined to be driven home
from the race-course by Terry, despite the fact that Terry had won the
chief race and owned the only dog-cart in the West.
As the day went on Fergus realised, as had Gow Johnson, that Jopp had
raised a demon. The air was electric. The play was drawing near to its
climax--an attempt to capture the deputy sheriff, tie him to a tree, and
leave him bound and gagged alone in the waste. There was a glitter in
Terry's eyes, belying the lips which smiled in keeping with the character
he presented. A look of hardness was stamped on his face, and the
outlines of the temples were as sharp as the chin was set and the
voice slow and penetrating.
Molly Mackinder's eyes were riveted on him. She sat very still, her
hands clasped in her lap, watching his every move. Instinct told her
that Terry was holding himself in; that some latent fierceness and iron
force in him had emerged into life; and that he meant to have revenge on
Constantine Jopp one way or another, and that soon; for she had heard the
rumour flying through the hall that her cousin was the cause of the
practical joke just played. From hints she had had from Constantine that
very day she knew that the rumour was the truth; and she recalled now
with shrinking dislike the grimace accompanying the suggestion. She had
not resented it then, being herself angry with Terry because of the
little widow at Jansen.
Presently the silence in the hall became acute; the senses of the
audience were strained to the utmost. The acting before them was more
realistic than anything they had ever seen, or were ever likely to see
again in La Touche. All three conspirators, Fergus, Holden, and Jopp,
realised that O'Ryan's acting had behind it an animal anger which
transformed him. When he looked into their eyes it was with a steely
directness harder and fiercer than was observed by the audience. Once
there was occasion for O'Ryan to catch Fergus by the arm, and Fergus
winced from the grip. When standing in the wings with Terry he ventured
to apologise playfully for the joke, but Terry made no answer; and once
again he had whispered good-naturedly as they stood together on the
stage; but the reply had been a low, scornful laugh. Fergus realised
that a critical moment was at hand. The play provided for some dialogue
between Jopp and Terry, and he observed with anxiety that Terry now
interpolated certain phrases meant to warn Constantine, and to excite
him to anger also.
The moment came upon them sooner than the text of the play warranted.
O'Ryan deliberately left out several sentences, and gave a later cue, and
the struggle for his capture was precipitated. Terry meant to make the
struggle real. So thrilling had been the scene that to an extent the
audience was prepared for what followed; but they did not grasp the full
reality--that the play was now only a vehicle for a personal issue of a
desperate character. No one had ever seen O'Ryan angry; and now that the
demon of rage was on him, directed by a will suddenly grown to its full
height, they saw not only a powerful character in a powerful melodrama,
but a man of wild force. When the three desperadoes closed in on O'Ryan,
and, with a blow from the shoulder which was not a pretence, he sent
Holden into a far corner gasping for breath and moaning with pain, the
audience broke out into wild cheering. It was superb acting, they
thought. As most of them had never seen the play, they were not
surprised when Holden did not again join the attack on the deputy
sheriff. Those who did know the drama--among them Molly Mackinder--
became dismayed, then anxious. Fergus and Jopp knew well from the blow
O'Ryan had given that, unless they could drag him down, the end must be
disaster to some one. They were struggling with him for personal safety
now. The play was forgotten, though mechanically O'Ryan and Fergus
repeated the exclamations and the few phrases belonging to the part.
Jopp was silent, fighting with a malice which belongs to only half-breed,
or half-bred, natures; and from far back in his own nature the distant
Indian strain in him was working in savage hatred. The two were
desperately hanging on to O'Ryan like pumas on a grizzly, when suddenly,
with a twist he had learned from Ogami the Jap on the Smoky River, the
slim Fergus was slung backward to the ground with the tendons of his arm
strained and the arm itself useless for further work. There remained now
Constantine Jopp, heavier and more powerful than O'Ryan.
For O'Ryan the theatre, the people, disappeared. He was a boy again on
the village green, with the bully before him who had tortured his young
days. He forgot the old debt to the foe who saved his life; he forgot
everything, except that once again, as of old, Constantine Jopp was
fighting him, with long, strong arms trying to bring him to the ground.
Jopp's superior height gave him an advantage in a close grip; the
strength of his gorilla-like arms was difficult to withstand. Both were
forgetful of the world, and the two other injured men, silent and awed,
were watching the, fight, in which one of them, at least, was powerless
to take part.
The audience was breathless. Most now saw the grim reality of the scene
before them; and when at last O'Ryan's powerful right hand got a grip
upon the throat of Jopp, and they saw the grip tighten, tighten, and
Jopp's face go from red to purple, a hundred people gasped. Excited men
made as though to move toward the stage; but the majority still believed
that it all belonged to the play, and shouted "Sit down!"
Suddenly the voice of Gow Johnson was heard "Don't kill him--let go,
boy!"
The voice rang out with sharp anxiety, and pierced the fog of passion and
rage in which O'Ryan was moving. He realised what he was doing, the real
sense of it came upon him. Suddenly he let go the lank throat of his
enemy, and, by a supreme effort, flung him across the stage, where Jopp
lay resting on his hands, his bleared eyes looking at Terry with the fear
and horror still in them which had come with that tightening grip on his
throat.
Silence fell suddenly on the theatre. The audience was standing. A
woman sobbed somewhere in a far corner, but the rest were dismayed and
speechless. A few steps before them all was Molly Mackinder, white and
frightened, but in her eyes was a look of understanding as she gazed at
Terry. Breathing hard, Terry stood still in the middle of the stage, the
red fog not yet gone out of his eyes, his hands clasped at his side,
vaguely realising the audience again. Behind him was the back curtain in
which the lights of Orion twinkled aggressively. The three men who had
attacked him were still where he had thrown them.
The silence was intense, the strain oppressive. But now a drawling voice
came from the back of the hall. "Are you watching the rise of Orion?"
it said. It was the voice of Gow Johnson.
The strain was broken; the audience dissolved in laughter; but it was not
hilarious; it was the nervous laughter of relief, touched off by a native
humour always present in the dweller of the prairie.
"I beg your pardon," said Terry quietly and abstractedly to the audience.
And the scene-shifter bethought himself and let down the curtain.
The fourth act was not played that night. The people had had more than
the worth of their money. In a few moments the stage was crowded with
people from the audience, but both Jopp and O'Ryan had disappeared.
Among the visitors to the stage was Molly Mackinder. There was a meaning
smile upon her face as she said to Dicky Fergus:
"It was quite wonderful, wasn't it--like a scene out of the classics--the
gladiators or something?"
Fergus gave a wary smile as he answered: "Yes. I felt like saying Ave
Caesar, Ave! and I watched to see Artemis drop her handkerchief."
"She dropped it, but you were too busy to pick it up. It would have been
a useful sling for your arm," she added with thoughtful malice. "It
seemed so real--you all acted so well, so appropriately. And how you
keep it up!" she added, as he cringed when some one knocked against his
elbow, hurting the injured tendons.
Fergus looked at her meditatively before he answered. "Oh, I think we'll
likely keep it up for some time," he rejoined ironically.
"Then the play isn't finished?" she added. "There is another act? Yes,
I thought there was, the programme said four."
"Oh yes, there's another act," he answered, "but it isn't to be played
now; and I'm not in it."
"No, I suppose you are not in it. You really weren't in the last act.
Who will be in it?"
Fergus suddenly laughed outright, as he looked at Holden expostulating
intently to a crowd of people round him. "Well, honour bright, I don't
think there'll be anybody in it except little Conny Jopp and gentle Terry
O'Ryan; and Conny mayn't be in it very long. But he'll be in it for a
while, I guess. You see, the curtain came down in the middle of a
situation, not at the end of it. The curtain has to rise again."
"Perhaps Orion will rise again--you think so?" She laughed in satire;
for Dicky Fergus had made love to her during the last three months with
unsuppressed activity, and she knew him in his sentimental moments; which
is fatal. It is fatal if, in a duet, one breathes fire and the other
frost.
"If you want my opinion," he said in a lower voice, as they moved towards
the door, while people tried to listen to them--"if you want it straight,
I think Orion has risen--right up where shines the evening star--Oh, say,
now," he broke off, "haven't you had enough fun out of me? I tell you,
it was touch and go. He nearly broke my arm--would have done it, if I
hadn't gone limp to him; and your cousin Conny Jopp, little Conny Jopp,
was as near Kingdom Come as a man wants at his age. I saw an elephant
go 'must' once in India, and it was as like O'Ryan as putty is to dough.
It isn't all over either, for O'Ryan will forget and forgive, and Jopp
won't. He's your cousin, but he's a sulker. If he has to sit up nights
to do it, he'll try to get back on O'Ryan. He'll sit up nights, but
he'll do it, if he can. And whatever it is, it won't be pretty."
Outside the door they met Gow Johnson, excitement in his eyes. He heard
Fergus's last words.
"He'll see Orion rising if he sits up nights," Gow Johnson said. "The
game is with Terry--at last." Then he called to the dispersing gossiping
crowd: "Hold on--hold on, you people. I've got news for you. Folks,
this is O'Ryan's night. It's his in the starry firmament. Look at him
shine," he cried, stretching out his arm towards the heavens, where the
glittering galaxy hung near the zenith. "Terry O'Ryan, our O'Ryan--he's
struck oil--on his ranch it's been struck. Old Vigon found it. Terry's
got his own at last. O'Ryan's in it--in it alone. Now, let's hear the
prairie-whisper," he shouted, in a great raucous voice. "Let's hear the
prairie-whisper. What is it?"
The crowd responded in a hoarse shout for O'Ryan and his fortune.
Even the women shouted--all except Molly Mackinder. She was wondering if
O'Ryan risen would be the same to her as O'Ryan rising. She got into her
carriage with a sigh, though she said to the few friends with her:
"If it's true, it's splendid. He deserves it too. Oh, I'm glad--I'm so
glad." She laughed; but the laugh was a little hysterical.
She was both glad and sorry. Yet as she drove home over the prairie she
was silent. Far off in the east was a bright light. It was a bonfire
built on O'Ryan's ranch, near where he had struck oil--struck it rich.
The light grew and grew, and the prairie was alive with people hurrying
towards it. La Touche should have had the news hours earlier, but the
half-breed French-Canadian, Vigon, who had made the discovery, and had
started for La Touche with the news, went suddenly off his head with
excitement, and had ridden away into the prairie fiercely shouting his
joy to an invisible world. The news had been brought in later by a
farmhand.
Terry O'Ryan had really struck oil, and his ranch was a scene of decent
revelry, of which Gow Johnson was master. But the central figure of it
all, the man who had, in truth, risen like a star, had become to La
Touche all at once its notoriety as well as its favourite, its great man
as well as its friend, he was nowhere to be found. He had been seen
riding full speed into the prairie towards the Kourmash Wood, and the
starlit night had swallowed him. Constantine Jopp had also disappeared;
but at first no one gave that thought or consideration.
As the night went on, however, a feeling began to stir which it is not
good to rouse in frontier lands. It is sure to exhibit itself in forms
more objective than are found in great populations where methods of
punishment are various, and even when deadly are often refined. But
society in new places has only limited resources, and is thrown back on
primary ways and means. La Touche was no exception, and the keener
spirits, to whom O'Ryan had ever been "a white man," and who so rejoiced
in his good luck now that they drank his health a hundred times in his
own whiskey and cider, were simmering with desire for a public reproval
of Constantine Jopp's conduct. Though it was pointed out to them by the
astute Gow Johnson that Fergus and Holden had participated in the
colossal joke of the play, they had learned indirectly also the whole
truth concerning the past of the two men. They realised that Fergus and
Holden had been duped by Jopp into the escapade. Their primitive sense
of justice exonerated the humourists and arraigned the one malicious man.
As the night wore on they decided on the punishment to be meted out by La
Touche to the man who had not "acted on the square."
Gow Johnson saw, too late, that he had roused a spirit as hard to appease
as the demon roused in O'Ryan earlier in the evening. He would have
enjoyed the battue of punishment under ordinary circumstances; but he
knew that Miss Molly Mackinder would be humiliated and indignant at the
half-savage penalty they meant to exact. He had determined that O'Ryan
should marry her; and this might be an obstruction in the path. It was
true that O'Ryan now would be a rich man--one of the richest in the West,
unless all signs failed; but meanwhile a union of fortunes would only be
an added benefit. Besides, he had seen that O'Ryan was in earnest, and
what O'Ryan wanted he himself wanted even more strongly. He was not
concerned greatly for O'Ryan's absence. He guessed that Terry had ridden
away into the night to work off the dark spirit that was on him, to have
it out with himself. Gow Johnson was a philosopher. He was twenty years
older than O'Ryan, and he had studied his friend as a pious monk his
missal.
He was right in his judgment. When Terry left the theatre he was like
one in a dream, every nerve in his body at tension, his head aflame, his
pulses throbbing. For miles he rode away into the waste along the
northern trail, ever away from La Touche and his own home. He did not
know of the great good fortune that had come to him; and if, in this
hour, he had known, he would not have cared. As he rode on and on
remorse drew him into its grasp. Shame seized him that he had let
passion be his master, that he had lost his self-control, had taken a
revenge out of all proportion to the injury and insult to himself. It
did not ease his mind that he knew Constantine Jopp had done the thing
out of meanness and malice; for he was alive to-night in the light of
the stars, with the sweet crisp air blowing in his face, because of an
act of courage on the part of his schooldays' foe. He remembered now
that, when he was drowning, he had clung to Jopp with frenzied arms and
had endangered the bully's life also. The long torture of owing this
debt to so mean a soul was on him still, was rooted in him; but suddenly,
in the silent searching night, some spirit whispered in his ear that this
was the price which he must pay for his life saved to the world, a
compromise with the Inexorable Thing. On the verge of oblivion and the
end, he had been snatched back by relenting Fate, which requires
something for something given, when laws are overridden and doom
defeated. Yes, the price he was meant to pay was gratitude to one of
shrivelled soul and innate antipathy; and he had not been man enough to
see the trial through to the end! With a little increased strain put
upon his vanity and pride he had run amuck. Like some heathen gladiator
he had ravaged in the ring. He had gone down into the basements of human
life and there made a cockpit for his animal rage, till, in the contest,
brain and intellect had been saturated by the fumes and sweat of fleshly
fury.
How quiet the night was, how soothing to the fevered mind and body, how
the cool air laved the heated head and flushed the lungs of the rheum of
passion! He rode on and on, farther and farther away from home, his back
upon the scenes where his daily deeds were done. It was long past
midnight before he turned his horse's head again homeward.
Buried in his thoughts, now calm and determined, with a new life grown up
in him, a new strength different from the mastering force which gave him
a strength in the theatre like one in delirium, he noticed nothing. He
was only conscious of the omniscient night and its warm penetrating
friendliness; as, in a great trouble, when no words can be spoken, a cool
kind palm steals into the trembling hand of misery and stills it, gives
it strength and life and an even pulse. He was now master in the house
of his soul, and had no fear or doubt as to the future, or as to his
course.
His first duty was to go to Constantine Jopp, and speak his regret like a
man. And after that it would be his duty to carry a double debt his life
long for the life saved, for the wrong done. He owed an apology to La
Touche, and he was scarcely aware that the native gentlemanliness in him
had said through his fever of passion over the footlights: "I beg your
pardon." In his heart he felt that he had offered a mean affront to
every person present, to the town where his interests lay, where his
heart lay.
Where his heart lay--Molly Mackinder! He knew now that vanity had
something to do, if not all to do, with his violent acts, and though
there suddenly shot through his mind, as he rode back, a savage thrill at
the remembrance of how he had handled the three, it was only a passing
emotion. He was bent on putting himself right with Jopp and with La
Touche. With the former his way was clear; he did not yet see his way as
to La Touche. How would he be able to make the amende honorable to La
Touche?
By and by he became somewhat less absorbed and enveloped by the
comforting night. He saw the glimmer of red light afar, and vaguely
wondered what it was. It was in the direction of O'Ryan's Ranch, but he
thought nothing of it, because it burned steadily. It was probably a
fire lighted by settlers trailing to the farther north. While the night
wore on he rode as slowly back to the town as he had galloped from it
like a centaur with a captive.
Again and again Molly Mackinder's face came before him; but he resolutely
shut it out of his thoughts. He felt that he had no right to think of
her until he had "done the right thing" by Jopp and by La Touche. Yet
the look in her face as the curtain came down, it was not that of one
indifferent to him or to what he did. He neared the town half-way
between midnight and morning. Almost unconsciously avoiding the main
streets, he rode a roundabout way towards the little house where
Constantine Jopp lived. He could hear loud noises in the streets,
singing, and hoarse shouts. Then silence came, then shouts, and silence
again. It was all quiet as he rode up to Jopp's house, standing on the
outskirts of the town. There was a bright light in the window of a room.
Jopp, then, was still up. He would not wait till tomorrow. He would do
the right thing now. He would put things straight with his foe before he
slept; he would do it at any sacrifice to his pride. He had conquered
his pride.
He dismounted, threw the bridle over a post, and, going into the garden,
knocked gently at the door. There was no response. He knocked again,
and listened intently. Now he heard a sound-like a smothered cry or
groan. He opened the door quickly and entered. It was dark. In another
room beyond was a light. From it came the same sound he had heard
before, but louder; also there was a shuffling footstep. Springing
forward to the half-open door, he pushed it wide, and met the terror-
stricken eyes of Constantine Jopp--the same look that he had seen at
the theatre when his hands were on Jopp's throat, but more ghastly.
Jopp was bound to a chair by a lasso. Both arms were fastened to the
chair-arm, and beneath them, on the floor, were bowls into which blood
dripped from his punctured wrists.
He had hardly taken it all in--the work of an instant--when he saw
crouched in a corner, madness in his eyes, his half-breed Vigon. He
grasped the situation in a flash. Vigon had gone mad, had lain in wait
in Jopp's house, and when the man he hated had seated himself in the
chair, had lassoed him, bound him, and was slowly bleeding him to death.
He had no time to think. Before he could act Vigon was upon him also,
frenzy in his eyes, a knife clutched in his hand. Reason had fled, and
he only saw in O'Ryan the frustrator of his revenge. He had watched the
drip, drip from his victim's wrists with a dreadful joy.
They were man and man, but O'Ryan found in this grisly contest a vaster
trial of strength than in the fight upon the stage a few hours ago. The
first lunge that Vigon made struck him on the tip of the shoulder, and
drew blood; but he caught the hand holding the knife in an iron grasp,
while the half-breed, with superhuman strength, tried in vain for the
long brown throat of the man for whom he had struck oil. As they
struggled and twisted, the eyes of the victim in the chair watched them
with agonised emotions. For him it was life or death. He could not cry
out--his mouth was gagged; but to O'Ryan his groans were like a distant
echo of his own hoarse gasps as he fought his desperate fight. Terry was
as one in an awful dream battling with vague impersonal powers which
slowly strangled his life, yet held him back in torture from the final
surrender.
For minutes they struggled. At last O'Ryan's strength came to the point
of breaking, for Vigon was a powerful man, and to this was added a
madman's energy. He felt that the end was coming. But all at once,
through the groans of the victim in the chair, Terry became conscious of
noises outside--such noises as he had heard before he entered the house,
only nearer and louder. At the same time he heard a horse's hoofs, then
a knock at the door, and a voice calling: "Jopp! Jopp!"
He made a last desperate struggle, and shouted hoarsely.
An instant later there were footsteps in the room, followed by a cry of
fright and amazement.
It was Gow Johnson. He had come to warn Constantine Jopp that a crowd
were come to tar and feather him, and to get him away on his own horse.
Now he sprang to the front door, called to the approaching crowd for
help, then ran back to help O'Ryan. A moment later a dozen men had Vigon
secure, and had released Constantine Jopp, now almost dead from loss of
blood.
As they took the gag from his mouth and tied their handkerchiefs round
his bleeding wrists, Jopp sobbed aloud. His eyes were fixed on Terry
O'Ryan. Terry met the look, and grasped the limp hand lying on the
chair-arm.
"I'm sorry, O'Ryan, I'm sorry for all I've done to you," Jopp sobbed.
"I was a sneak, but I want to own it. I want to be square now. You can
tar and feather me, if you like. I deserve it." He looked at the
others. "I deserve it," he repeated.
"That's what the boys had thought would be appropriate," said Gow Johnson
with a dry chuckle, and the crowd looked at each other and winked. The
wink was kindly, however. "To own up and take your gruel" was the
easiest way to touch the men of the prairie.
A half-hour later the roisterers, who had meant to carry Constantine Jopp
on a rail, carried Terry O'Ryan on their shoulders through the town,
against his will. As they passed the house where Miss Mackinder lived
some one shouted:
"Are you watching the rise of Orion?"
Many a time thereafter Terry O'Ryan and Molly Mackinder looked at the
galaxy in the evening sky with laughter and with pride. It had played
its part with Fate against Constantine Jopp and the little widow at
Jansen. It had never shone so brightly as on the night when Vigon struck
oil on O'Ryan's ranch. But Vigon had no memory of that. Such is the
irony of life.