me out here. They burst like lightning out of a clear sky. I would have
done just that thing for Ruby.... Mad, you say?... Why, man, she’s not
hopeless! There was something deep behind that impulse. Strange--not
understandable! I’m at the mercy of every hour I spend here. Benton
has got into my blood. And I see how Benton is a product of this great
advance of progress--of civilization--the U. P. R. We’re only atoms in
a force no one can understand.... Look at Reddy King. That cowboy was
set--fixed like stone in his character. But Benton has called to the
worst and wildest in him. He’ll do something terrible. Mark what I say.
We’ll all do something terrible. You, too, Place Hough, with all
your cold, implacable control. The moment will come, born out of this
abnormal time. I can’t explain, but I feel. There’s a work-shop in this
hell of Benton. Invisible, monstrous, and nameless!... Nameless like
the new graves dug every day out here on the desert.... How few of
the honest toilers dream of the spirit that is working on them. That
Irishman, Shane, think of him. He fought while his brains oozed from a
hole in his head; I saw, but I didn’t know then. I wanted to take his
place. He said, no, he wasn’t hurt, and Casey would laugh at him. Aye,
Casey would have laughed!.... They are men. There are thousands of them.
The U. P. R. goes on. It can’t be stopped. It has the momentum of a
great nation pushing it on from behind.... And I, who have lost all I
cared for, and you, who are a drone among the bees, and Ruby and Stanton
with their kind, poor creatures sucked into the vortex; yes, and that
mob of leeches, why we all are so stung by that nameless spirit that
we are stirred beyond ourselves and dare both height and depth of
impossible things.”
“You must be drunk,” said Place, gravely, “and yet what you say hits me
hard. I’m a gambler. But sometimes--there are moments when I might be
less or more. There’s mystery in the air. This Benton is a chaos. Those
hairy toilers of the rails! I’ve watched them hammer and lift and dig
and fight. By day they sweat and they bleed, they sing and joke and
quarrel--and go on with the work. By night they are seized by the
furies. They fight among themselves while being plundered and murdered
by Benton’s wolves. Heroic by day--hellish by night.... And so, spirit
or what--they set the pace.”
Next afternoon, when parasitic Benton awoke, it found the girl Ruby dead
in her bed.
Her door had to be forced. She had not been murdered. She had destroyed
much of the contents of a trunk. She had dressed herself in simple
garments that no one in Benton had ever seen. It did not appear what
means she had employed to take her life. She was only one of many. More
than one girl of Benton’s throng had sought the same short road and
cheated life of further pain.
When Neale heard about it, upon his return to Benton, late that
afternoon, Ruby was in her grave. It suited him to walk out in the
twilight and stand awhile in the silence beside the bare sandy mound. No
stone--no mark. Another nameless grave! She had been a child once, with
dancing eyes and smiles, loved by some one, surely, and perhaps mourned
by some one living. The low hum of Benton’s awakening night life was
borne faintly on the wind. The sand seeped; the coyotes wailed; and
yet there was silence. Twilight lingered. Out on the desert the shadows
deepened.
By some chance the grave of the scarlet woman adjoined that of a laborer
who had been killed by a blast. Neale remembered the spot. He had walked
out there before. A morbid fascination often drew him to view that
ever-increasing row of nameless graves. As the workman had given his
life to the road, so had the woman. Neale saw a significance in the
parallel.
Neale returned to the town troubled in mind. He remembered the last look
Ruby had given him. Had he awakened conscience in her? Upon questioning
Hough, he learned that Ruby had absented herself from the dancing-hall
and had denied herself to all on that last night of her life.
There was to be one more incident relating to this poor girl before
Benton in its mad rush should forget her.
Neale divined the tragedy before it came to pass, but he was as
powerless to prevent it as any other spectator in Beauty Stanton’s hall.
Larry King reacted in his own peculiar way to the news of Ruby’s
suicide, and the rumored cause. He stalked into that dancing-hall, where
his voice stopped the music and the dancers.
“Come out heah!” he shouted to the pale Cordy.
And King spun the man into the center of the hall, where he called him
every vile name known to the camp, scorned and slapped and insulted
him, shamed him before that breathless crowd, goaded him at last into a
desperate reaching for his gun, and killed him as he drew it.
21
Benton slowed and quieted down a few days before pay-day, to get ready
for the great rush. Only the saloons and dance-halls and gambling-hells
were active, and even here the difference was manifest.
The railroad-yard was the busiest place in the town, for every train
brought huge loads of food, merchandise, and liquor, the transporting of
which taxed the teamsters to their utmost.
The day just before pay-day saw the beginning of a singular cycle
of change. Gangs of laborers rode in on the work-trains from the
grading-camps and the camps at the head of the rails, now miles west
of Benton. A rest of several days inevitably followed the visit of the
pay-car. It was difficult to keep enough men at work to feed and water
the teams, and there would have been sorry protection from the Indians
had not the troops been on duty. Pay-days were not off-days for the
soldiers.
Steady streams of men flowed toward Benton from east and west; and that
night the hum of Benton was merry, subdued, waiting.
Bright and early the town with its added thousands awoke. The morning
was clear, rosy, fresh. On the desert the colors changed from soft gray
to red and the whirls of dust, riding the wind, resembled little clouds
radiant with sunset hues. Silence and solitude and unbroken level
reigned outside in infinite contrast to the seething town. Benton
resembled an ant-heap at break of day. A thousand songs arose, crude and
coarse and loud, but full of joy. Pay-day and vacation were at hand!
“Then drill, my Paddies, drill!
Drill, my heroes, drill!
Drill all day,
No sugar in your tay,
Workin’ on the U. P. Railway.”
Casey was one Irish trooper of thousands who varied the song and tune
to suit his taste. The content alone they all held. Drill! They were
laborers who could turn into regiments at a word.
They shaved their stubby beards and donned their best--a bronzed,
sturdy, cheery army of wild boys. The curse rested but lightly upon
their broad shoulders.
Strangely enough, the morning began without the gusty wind so common to
that latitude, and the six inches of powdery white dust did not rise.
The wind, too, waited. The powers of heaven smiled in the clear, quiet
morning, but the powers of hell waited--for the hours to come, the night
and the darkness.
At nine o’clock a mob of five thousand men had congregated around the
station, most of them out in the open, on the desert side of the track.
They were waiting for the pay-train to arrive. This hour was the only
orderly one that Benton ever saw. There were laughter, profanity,
play--a continuous hum, but compared to Benton’s usual turmoil, it was
pleasant. The workmen talked in groups, and, like all crowds of men
sober and unexcited, they were given largely to badinage and idle talk.
“Wot was ut I owed ye, Moike?” asked a strapping grader.
Mike scratched his head. “Wor it thorty dollars this toime?”
“It wor,” replied the other. “Moike, yez hev a mimory.”
A big Negro pushed out his huge jaw and blustered at his fellows.
“I’s a-gwine to bust thet yaller nigger’s haid,” he declared.
“Bill, he’s your fr’en’. Cool down, man, cool down,” replied a comrade.
A teamster was writing a letter in lead-pencil, using a board over his
knees.
“Jim, you goin’ to send money home?” queried a fellow-laborer.
“I am that, an’ first thing when I get my pay,” was the reply.
“Reminds me, I owe for this suit I’m wearin’. I’ll drop in an’ settle.”
A group of spikers held forth on a little bank above the railroad track,
at a point where a few weeks before they had fastened those very rails
with lusty blows.
“Well, boys, I think I see the smoke of our pay-dirt, way down the
line,” said one.
“Bandy, your eyes are pore,” replied another.
“Yep, she’s comin’,” said another. “‘Bout time, for I haven’t two-bits
to my name.”
“Boys, no buckin’ the tiger for me to-day,” declared Bandy.
He was laughed at by all except one quiet comrade who gazed thoughtfully
eastward, back over the vast and rolling country. This man was thinking
of home, of wife and little girl, of what pay-day meant for them.
Bandy gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder.
“Frank, you got drunk an’ laid out all night, last payday.”
Frank remembered, but he did not say what he had forgotten that last
pay-day.
A long and gradual slope led from Benton down across the barren desert
toward Medicine Bow. The railroad track split it and narrowed to a mere
thread upon the horizon. The crowd of watching, waiting men saw smoke
rise over that horizon line, and a dark, flat, creeping object. Through
the big throng ran a restless murmur. The train was in sight. It might
have been a harbinger of evil, for a subtle change, nervous, impatient,
brooding, visited that multitude. A slow movement closed up the
disintegrated crowd and a current of men worked forward to encounter
resistance and opposing currents. They had begun to crowd for
advantageous positions closer to the pay-car so as to be the first in
line.
A fight started somewhere, full of loud curses and dull blows; and then
a jostling mass tried the temper of the slow-marching men. Some boss
yelled an order from a box-car, and he was hooted. There was no order.
When the train whistled for Benton a hoarse and sustained shout ran
through the mob, not from all lips, nor from any massed group, but taken
up from man to man--a strange sound, the first note of calling Benton.
The train arrived. Troops alighting preserved order near the pay-car;
and out of the dense mob a slow stream of men flowed into the car at one
end and out again at the other.
Bates, a giant digger and a bully, was the first man in the line, the
first to get his little share of the fortunes in gold passing out of the
car that day.
Long before half of that mob had received its pay Bates lay dead upon a
sanded floor, killed in a drunken brawl.
And the Irishman Mike had received his thirty dollars.
And the big Negro had broken the head of his friend.
And the teamster had forgotten to send money home.
And his comrade had neglected to settle for the suit of clothes he was
wearing.
And Bandy, for all his vows, had gone straight for bucking the tiger.
And Frank, who had gotten drunk last pay-day, had been mindful of wife
and little girl far away and had done his duty.
As the spirit of the gangs changed with the coming of the gold, so did
that of the day.
The wind began to blow, the dust began to fly, the sun began to burn;
and the freshness and serenity of the morning passed.
Main street in Benton became black-streaked with men, white-sheeted with
dust. There was a whining whistle in the wind as it swooped down. It
complained; it threatened; it strengthened; and from the heating desert
it blew in stiflingly hot. A steady tramp, tramp, tramp rattled the
loose boards as the army marched down upon Benton. It moved slowly,
the first heave of a great mass getting under way. Stores and shops,
restaurants and hotels and saloons, took toll from these first comers.
Benton swallowed up the builders as fast as they marched from the
pay-train. It had an insatiable maw. The bands played martial airs, and
soldiers who had lived through the Rebellion felt the thrill and the
quick-step and the call of other days.
Toward afternoon Benton began to hurry. The hour was approaching when
crowded halls and tents must make room for fresh and unspent gangs. The
swarms of men still marched up the street. Benton was gay and noisy and
busy then. White shirts and blue and red plaid held their brightness
despite the dust. Gaudily dressed women passed in and out of the halls.
All was excitement, movement, color, merriment, and dust and wind and
heat. The crowds moved on because they were pushed on. Music, laughter,
shuffling feet and clinking glass, a steady tramp, voices low and voices
loud, the hoarse brawl of the barker--all these varying elements merged
into a roar--a roar that started with a merry note and swelled to a
nameless din.
The sun set, the twilight fell, the wind went down, the dust settled,
and night mantled Benton. The roar of the day became subdued. It
resembled the purr of a gorging hyena. The yellow and glaring
torches, the bright lamps, the dim, pale lights behind tent walls, all
accentuated the blackness of the night and filled space with shadows,
like specters. Benton’s streets were full of drunken men, staggering
back along the road upon which they had marched in. No woman now showed
herself. The darkness seemed a cloak, cruel yet pitiful. It hid the
flight of a man running from fear; it softened the sounds of brawling
and deadened the pistol-shot. Under its cover soldiers slunk away
sobered and ashamed, and murderous bandits waited in ambush, and brawny
porters dragged men by the heels, and young gamblers in the flush of
success hurried to new games, and broken wanderers sought some place to
rest, and a long line of the vicious, of mixed dialect, and of different
colors, filed down in the dark to the tents of lust.
Life indoors that night in Benton was monstrous, wonderful, and hideous.
Every saloon was packed, and every dive and room filled with a hoarse,
violent mob of furious men: furious with mirth, furious with drink,
furious with wildness--insane and lecherous, spilling gold and blood.
The gold that did not flow over the bars went into the greedy hands
of the cold, swift gamblers or into the clutching fingers of wild-eyed
women. The big gambling-hell had extra lights, extra attendants,
extra tables; and there round the great glittering mirror-blazing bar
struggled and laughed and shouted a drink-sodden mass of humanity. And
all through the rest of the big room groups and knots of men stood
and sat around the tables, intent, absorbed, obsessed, listening
with strained ears, watching with wild eyes, reaching with shaking
hands--only to gasp and throw down their cards and push rolls of gold
toward cold-faced gamblers, with a muttered curse. This was the night
of golden harvest for the black-garbed, steel-nerved, cold-eyed
card-sharps. They knew the brevity of time, and of hour, and of life.
In the dancing-halls there was a maddening whirl, an immense and
incredible hilarity, a wild fling of unleashed, burly men, an honest
drunken spree. But there was also the hideous, red-eyed drunkenness that
did not spring from drink; the unveiled passion, the brazen lure, the
raw, corrupt, and terrible presence of bad women in absolute license at
a wild and baneful hour.
That was the last pay-day Beauty Stanton’s dancing-hall ever saw.
Likewise it was to be the last she would ever see. In the madness of
that night there was written finality--the end. Benton had reached its
greatest, wildest, blackest, vilest. But not its deadliest! That must
come--later--as an aftermath. But the height or the depth was reached.
The scene at midnight was unreal, livid, medieval. Dance of cannibals,
dance of sun-worshipers, dance of Apaches on the war-path, dance of
cliff-dwellers wild over the massacre of a dreaded foe--only these
orgies might have been comparable to that whirl of gold and lust in
Beauty Stanton’s parlors.
Benton seemed breathing hard, laboring under its load of evil, dancing
toward its close.
Night wore on and the hour of dawn approached. The lamps were dead; the
tents were dark; the music was stilled; and the low, soft roar was but a
hollow mockery of its earlier strength.
Like specters men staggered slowly and wanderingly through the gray
streets. Gray ghosts! All was gray. A vacant laugh pealed out and a
strident curse, and then again the low murmur prevailed. Benton
was going to rest. Weary, drunken, spent nature sought oblivion--on
disordered beds, on hard floors, and in dusty corners. An immense and
hovering shadow held the tents and halls and streets. Through this
opaque gloom the silent and the mumbling revelers reeled along. Louder
voices broke the spell only for an instant. Death lay in the middle of
the main street, in the dust--and no passing man halted. It lay as well
down the side streets in sandy ditches, and on tent floors, and behind
the bar of the gambling-hell, and in a corner of Beauty Stanton’s
parlor. Likewise death had his counterpart in hundreds of prostrate
men, who lay in drunken stupor, asleep, insensible to the dust in their
faces. No one answered the low moans of the man who, stabbed and robbed,
had crawled so far and could crawl no farther.
But the dawn would not stay back in order to hide Benton’s hideousness.
The gray lifted out of the streets, the shadows lightened, the east
kindled, and the sweet, soft freshness of a desert dawn came in on the
gentle breeze.
And when the sun arose, splendid and golden, with its promise and
beauty, it shone upon a ghastly, silent, motionless sleeping Benton.
22
To Allie Lee, again a prisoner in the clutches of Durade, the days in
Benton had been mysterious, the nights dreadful. In fear and trembling
she listened with throbbing ears to footsteps and low voices, ceaseless,
as of a passing army, and a strange, muffled roar, rising and swelling
and dying.
Durade’s caravan had entered Benton in the dark. Allie had gotten an
impression of wind and dust, lights and many noisy hurried men, and
a crowded jumble of tents. She had lived in the back room of a canvas
house. A door opened out into a little yard, fenced high with many
planks, over or through which she could not see. Here she had been
allowed to walk. She had seen Durade once, the morning after Fresno and
his gang had brought her to Benton, when he had said that meals would
be sent her, and that she must stay there until he had secured better
quarters. He threatened to kill her if he caught her in another attempt
to escape. Allie might have scaled the high fence, but she was more
afraid of the unknown peril outside than she was of him.
She listened to the mysterious life of Benton, wondering and fearful;
and through the hours there came to her the nameless certainty of
something tremendous and terrible that was to happen to her. But spirit
and hope were unquenchable. Not prayer nor reason nor ignorance was the
source of her sustained and inexplicable courage. A star shone over
her destiny or a good angel hovered near. She sensed in a vague and
perplexing way that she must be the center of a mysterious cycle of
events. The hours were fraught with strain and suspense, yet they passed
fleetingly. A glorious and saving moment was coming--a meeting that
would be as terrible as sweet. Benton held her lover Neale and her
friend Larry. They were searching for her. She felt their nearness. It
was that which kept her alive. She knew the truth with her heart. And
while she thrilled at the sound of every step, she also shuddered,
for there was Durade with his desperadoes. Blood would be spilled.
Somewhere, somehow, that meeting would come. Neale would rush to her.
And the cowboy! ... Allie remembered the red blaze of his face, the
singular, piercing blue of his eye, his cool, easy, careless air, his
drawling speech--and underneath all his lazy gentleness a deadliness of
blood and iron.
So Allie Lee listened to all sounds, particularly to all footsteps,
waiting for that one which was to make her heart stand still.
Some one had entered the room adjoining hers and was now fumbling at the
rude door which had always been barred from the other side. It opened.
Stitt, the mute who attended and guarded her, appeared, carrying
bundles. Entering, he deposited these upon Allie’s bed. Then he made
signs for her to change from the garb she wore to the clothes contained
in the bundles. Further, he gave her to understand that she was to
hurry, that she was to be taken away. With that he went out, shutting
and barring the door after him.
Allie’s hands shook as she opened the packages. That very hour might
bring her freedom. She was surprised to find a complete outfit of
woman’s apparel, well made and of fine material. Benton, then, had
stores and women. Hurriedly she made the change, which was very welcome.
The dress did not fit her as well as it might have done, but the bonnet
and cloak were satisfactory, as were also the little boots. She found a
long, dark veil and wondered if she was expected to put that on.
A knocking at the door preceded a call, “Allie, are you ready?”
“Yes,” she replied.
The door opened. Durade entered. He appeared thinner than she had ever
seen him, with more white in or beneath his olive complexion, and there
were marks of strain and of passion on his face. Allie knew he labored
under some strong, suppressed excitement. More and more he seemed to
lose something of his old character--of the stately Spanish manner.
“Put that veil on,” he said. “I’m not ready for Benton to see you.”
“Are you--taking me away?” she asked.
“Only down the street. I’ve a new place,” he replied. “Come. Stitt will
bring your things.”
Allie could not see very well through the heavy veil and she stumbled
over the rude threshold. Durade took hold of her arm and presently led
her out into the light. The air was hot, windy, dusty. The street was
full of hurrying and lounging men. Allie heard different snatches of
speech as she and Durade went on. Some stared and leered at her, at
which times Durade’s hold tightened on her arm and his step quickened.
She was certain no one looked at Durade. Some man jostled her, another
pinched her arm. Her ears tingled with unfamiliar coarse speech.
They walked through heavy sand and dust, then along a board walk, to
turn aside before what was apparently a new brick structure, but a
closer view proved it to be only painted wood. The place rang hollow
with a sound of hammers. It looked well, but did not feel stable
underfoot. Durade led her through two large hall-like rooms into a small
one, light and newly furnished.
“The best Benton afforded,” said Durade, waving his hand. “You’ll be
comfortable. There are books--newspapers. Here’s a door opening into
a little room. It’s dark, but there’s water, towel, soap. And you’ve a
mirror.... Allie, this is luxury to what you’ve had to put up with.”
“It is, indeed,” she replied, removing her veil, and then the cloak and
bonnet. “But--am I to be shut up here?”
“Yes. Sometimes at night early I’ll take you out to walk. But Benton
is--”
“What?” she asked, as he paused.
“Benton will not last long,” he finished, with a shrug of his shoulders.
“There’ll be another one of these towns out along the line. We’ll go
there. And then to Omaha.”
More than once he had hinted at going on eastward.
“I’ll find your mother--some day,” he added, darkly. “If I didn’t
believe that I’d do differently by you.”
“Why?”
“I want her to see you as good as she left you. Then!... Are you ever
going to tell me how she gave me the slip?”
“She’s dead, I told you.”
“Allie, that’s a lie. She’s hiding in some trapper’s cabin or among the
Indians. I should have hunted all over that country where you met my
caravan. But the scouts feared the Sioux. The Sioux! We had to run. And
so I never got the truth of your strange appearance on that trail.”
Allie had learned that reiteration of the fact of her mother’s death
only convinced Durade the more that she must be living. While he had
this hope she was safe so long as she obeyed him. A dark and sinister
meaning lay covert in his words. She doubted not that he had the nature
and the power to use her in order to be revenged upon her mother. That
passion and gambling appeared to be all for which he lived.
Suddenly he seized her fiercely in his arms. “You’re the picture of
HER!”
Then slowly he released her and the corded red of his neck subsided. His
action had been that of a man robbed of all he loved, who remembered, in
a fury of violent longing, hate, and despair, what he had lost in life.
Allie was left alone.