them. He had but just read her letter, being returned that morning from
the East. The letter had come the day he left town, and thinking that it
was a receipted bill, he had locked it up, unopened, in his desk. He
feared that Mrs. Jim had been anxious about the matter, and he hastened
to relieve her mind. While he apologized for his own carelessness, he
congratulated her upon her escape.
"He congratulates me, he congratulates me!" she whispered hoarsely; "O
my God!"
She did not yet comprehend the letter nor the checks which had fluttered
to the floor. It was only the last sentence that she took note of,
because of its jarring sense.
Suddenly the meaning of it all broke upon her. Those were her checks!
Ruin had evaded her! She could not prove upon it her loyalty to Jim, her
loyalty to grief. Fate had shipwrecked her, and now it was decreed that
the sun should shine and the sea subside in smiling peace. It was more
than she could bear. She flung the letter from her, and, stooping, she
picked up the checks and crushed them in her clenched hands. How dared
they come back to mock at her! How dared Fate take her all, and toss her
what she did not value! How dared--Heaven? Was it Heaven she was
defying? Ah! she must not lose her soul, Heaven knew she would not lose
her soul--for Jim's sake!
She opened her clenched hands and smoothed out the checks, patiently,
meekly; and then she went on with the bills, a strange calm in her
mind, different from the calm of the last three days.
And then, for the first time, it struck her that the bills were all made
out to Jim.
JAMES BIXBY,
to HIRAM ROGERS, Dr.
to JAMES WILKINS, Dr.
to FIELDS & LYMAN, Dr.
It was his name that would have been disgraced, not hers; his memory
would have been stained. She turned white with terror of the danger
past.
After a while she put the bills aside, and drew out her folios of
pressed flowers. It seemed a hundred years since she had worked upon
them. How exquisite they were, those delicate ghosts of flowers;--the
regal columbine, the graceful gilia, coreopsis gleaming golden,
anemones, pale and soft. How they kept their loveliness when life was
past! They were only flower memories, but how fair they were, and how
lasting! No frost to blight them, no winds to tear their silken petals
any more! Well might they outlast the hand that pressed them!
And soon Marietta found herself doing the old, accustomed work with all
the old skill, and with a new grace and delicacy of touch. And when the
friends in her old home which she had left for Jim's sake, urged her to
come back to them, she answered, no;--she would rather stay in Colorado
and do her flower-books;--adding, in a hand that scrawled more than
usual with the effort for composure:
"They are my consolation."
XI.
A STROKE IN THE GAME.
The mining boom was off, and Springtown was feeling the reaction as
severely as so sanguine and sunny a little place was capable of doing.
To one who had witnessed, a year or more previous, the rising of the
tide of speculation, whose tossing crest had flung its glittering drops
upon the loftiest and firmest rocks of the business community, the
streets of the little Rocky Mountain town had something the aspect of
the shore at low tide. Such a witness was Harry Wakefield, if, indeed, a
man may be said to have "witnessed" a commotion which has swept him off
his feet and whirled him about like a piece of driftwood. It was, to be
sure, quite in the character of a piece of driftwood that Wakefield had
let himself be drawn into the whirlpool, and he could not escape the
feeling that, tossed as he was, high and dry upon the shore, he was
getting quite as good as he deserved.
"Yes, I'm busted!" he remarked to his friend Chittenden, the
stock-broker, as the two men paused before the office-door of the
latter. "It was the Race-Horse that finished me up. No, thanks, I won't
come in. A burnt child dreads the fire!"
"We're all cool enough now-a-days," Chittenden replied, shrugging his
shoulders. "Couldn't get up a blaze to heat a flat-iron!" and he passed
in to the office, with the air of a man whose occupation is gone.
As Wakefield turned down the street, his eye fell upon a stock-board
across the way, a board upon which had once been jotted down from day to
day, a record of his varying fortunes. He remembered how, a few months
ago, that same board showed white with Lame Gulch quotations. He
reflected that, while the price set against each stock had made but a
modest showing, running from ten cents up into the second dollar, a man
of sense,--supposing such a phenomenon to have weathered the
"boom,"--would have been impressed with the fact that the valuation thus
placed upon the infant camp aggregated something like twenty millions of
dollars. The absurdity of the whole thing struck Wakefield with added
force, as he read the solitary announcement which now graced the
board,--namely:
"To exchange: 1000 Race-Horse for a bull-terrier pup."
"Kind o' funny; ain't it?" said a voice close beside him.
It was Dicky Simmons, a youth of seedy aspect, but a cheerful
countenance, who had come up with him, and was engaged in the perusal of
the same announcement.
"Hullo, Simmons! Where do you hail from?"
"From Barnaby's ranch. I'm trying my hand at agriculture until this
thing's blown over!"
"Think it's going to?"
"Oh, yes! When the tide's dead low it's sure to turn!" and the old
hopeful look glistened in the boy's face.
"That's the case in Nature," Wakefield objected. "Nature hadn't anything
to do with the boom. It was contrary to all the laws."
"Oh, I guess Nature has a hand in most things," Dicky replied with
cheerful assurance. "Anyhow she's made a big deal up at Lame Gulch, and
those of us who've got the sand to hold on will find that she's in the
management."
"Think so?"
"Sure of it!"
"Hope you're right. Anyhow, though, I'd try the old girl on agriculture
for a while, if I were you. How's Barnaby doing, by the way?"
"Holding on by the skin of his teeth."
"What's wrong there?"
"Can't collect;" was the laconic reply.
The two companions in adversity were walking toward the post-office,
moved, perhaps, by the subtle attraction which that institution
exercises over the man who is "down on his luck." There was no mail due,
yet they turned, with one accord, in at the door, and repaired to their
respective boxes. As Wakefield looked up from the inspection of his
empty one, he saw Simmons, with an open letter or circular in his hand.
Catching Wakefield's eye he laughed.
"Well?" Wakefield queried.
"You know, Wake," said Dicky, in a confidential tone. "The thing's too
funny to be serious. Here's the Trailing Arbutus (you're not in that, I
believe), capitalization a million and a half shares, calls a meeting
of stockholders to consider how to raise money to get the mine out of
the hands of a receiver. Now, guess how much money they want!"
"How much?"
"_Five hundred dollars!_ Five hundred dollars on a million and a half
shares! I say, Wake, they couldn't be funnier if they tried!"
Agreeable as Dicky's company usually was, Wakefield was glad when the
boy hailed the Barnaby milk-cart, and betook himself and his insistent
brightness under its canvas shelter. The white covered wagon went
rattling out of town, and Wakefield, somewhat to his surprise, found
himself striding after it.
"Anyhow, he's hit it off better than I have," he said to himself; and as
he perceived how rapidly the cart was disappearing, he had a sense of
being distanced, and he involuntarily quickened his pace.
The street he was following was one that he strongly approved of,
because it had the originality to cut diagonally across the rectangular
plan of the town. The houses on either hand were small and
unpretentious, but tidy little homesteads, and he did not like to think
of the mortgages with which, according to Chittenden, the "boom" had
weighted more than one modest roof. In the strong sense of general
disaster which he was struggling under, those mortgages seemed almost
visible to the eye. He was glad when he had left the town behind him,
and was marching on between stretches of uncultivated prairie and bare
reddish hillocks. They, at least, stood for what they were,--and see,
how the wildflowers had thrust themselves up through the harsh gritty
sand; that great tract of yellow vetches, for instance, that had brought
up out of the earth a glory of gold that might well put all Lame Gulch
to the blush! Over yonder stood the Range, not beautiful, in the
uncompromising noon light, but strong and steadfast, with an almost
moral vigor in its outlines.
He had lost sight of the milk-cart altogether, and was plodding on,
simply because there seemed to be nothing better to do with himself. He
presently came opposite a low, conical hill which he recognized as "Mt.
Washington,"--a hill whose elevation above sea-level was said to be
precisely that of New England's loftiest peak. Wakefield reflected that
he was never likely to reach that classic altitude with less exertion
than to-day, and that on the whole it would be rather pleasant than
otherwise to find himself at that particular height. There was a
barbed-wire fence intervening, and it pleased him to take it "on the
fly." He had undoubtedly been going down-hill of late, but his legs, at
least, had held their own, he assured himself, with some satisfaction,
as he alighted, right side up, within the enclosure. He thought, with a
whimsical turn, of Pheidippides, the youth who used his legs to such
good purpose; who "ran like fire,"--shouted, "Rejoice, we conquer!"--then
"died in the shout for his meed." How simple life once was, according to
Browning and the rest! What a muddle it was to-day, according to Harry
Wakefield! And all because a girl had refused him! He had been trying
all along not to think of Dorothy Ray, but by the time he had reached
the summit of the hill,--that little round of red sand, where only a
single yellow cactus had had the courage to precede him,--he knew that
his hour of reckoning had come. He had gambled, yes; but it was for her
sake he had gambled; he had lost, yes, but it was she he had lost.
He flung himself down on the bare red hilltop, and with his chin in his
hands, gazed across irrigated meadows and parched foothills to the grim
slope of the mountains. And stretched there, with his elbows digging
into the sandy soil, his mind bracing itself against the everlasting
hills, he let the past draw near.
There was an atmosphere about that past, a play of light and shadow, a
mist of poetry and romance, that made the Colorado landscape in the
searching noon light seem typical of the life he had led there:--a
crude, prosaic, _metallic_ sort of life. And after the first shrinking
from the past, his mind began to feel deliciously at home in it.
How he had loved Dorothy Ray! How the thought of her had pervaded his
life, as the sunshine pervades a landscape! Yet not like the sunshine;
for sunshine is fructifying, and his life had been singularly fruitless.
There was no shirking the truth, that the year he had spent reading law
in her father's office, the year he had discovered that his old friend
and playmate was the girl of his choice, had been a wasted year. In all
that did not directly concern her he had dawdled, and Dorothy knew and
resented it.
He remembered how, on one occasion, she had openly preferred Aleck Dorr
to himself; Aleck Dorr, with his ugly face and boorish manners, who was
cutting a dash with a newly acquired fortune.
"Dorothy," Wakefield asked abruptly, the next time he got speech of
her,--it was at the Assembly and she had only vouchsafed him two
dances,--"Dorothy, what do you like about that boor?"
"In the first place he isn't a boor," she answered. "He's as
gentlemanlike as possible."
"Supposing he is, then! That's a recommendation most of us possess."
She gave him a scrutinizing, almost wistful look. How dear she was,
standing there in the brilliant gas-light, fresh and natural in her
ball-dress and sparkling jewels as she had been when her hair hung down
in a big braid over her gingham frock.
"You gentlemanlike? That's something you could never be, Harry,--because
you are a gentleman. But that's all you are," she added, with a sudden
impatience that checked his rising elation.
"I don't see that there was any call for snubbing," he retorted angrily.
He was often angry with Dorothy; that was part of the old
good-fellowship he had used to value so much, but which seemed so
insufficient now.
"Snubbing? I thought I made you a very pretty compliment," she answered,
with a little caressing tone that he found illogically comforting.
"You haven't told me why you like this gentlemanlike boor," he
persisted.
"I should think anybody might see that! I like him because he amounts to
something; because he has made a fortune, if you insist. It takes a
_man_ to do that!"
Upon which, before Wakefield had succeeded in framing a suitable retort,
Dorr came up, with a ponderous joke, and claimed a promised waltz.
Well! Dorr need not be in such thundering spirits! He had no chance with
her at any rate!
And only a few months later it turned out that he, Harry Wakefield, had
as little chance as Dorr.
At this point in his reflections Wakefield's elbows began to feel rough
and gritty. He turned himself round and sat with his back to the
mountains, looking eastward, his hands clasping one knee. He was glad
the prairie was broken up into mounds and hillocks over there, and had
not the look of the sea that it took on from some points of view. There
was a group of pines off to the left; he had been too preoccupied to
observe them as he came along the road,--strangely enough too, for a
group of trees is an unusual sight out on the prairie. What a lot of
trees there were in the East though, and how wofully he had come to
grief among them up there on the North Shore! Only a year ago it had
happened, only a year ago, in the fragrant New England June! His married
sister had had Dorothy and himself visiting her at the same time. Well,
Fanny had done her best for him, though it was no good. He wondered, in
passing, how it happened that a fellow could come to care more for
anybody else than for a sister like Fanny!
He had found Dorothy sitting in perfect idleness under a big pine-tree
that lovely June morning. There were robins hopping about the lawn; the
voices of his sister's children came, shrill and sweet, calling to one
another as they dug in the garden by the house. The tide was coming in;
he could hear it break against the rocks over yonder, while the far
stretches of sea glimmered softly in the sunshine. Dorothy looked so
sweet and beneficent as she sat under the big pine-tree in the summer
sunshine, that all his misgivings vanished. Before he knew what he was
about he had "asked her."
And here the little drama was blurred and muffled in his memory. He
wondered, as he clasped his knees and studied the tops of the
pine-trees, how he had put the question; whether he had perhaps put it
wrong. He could not recall a word he had said; but her words in reply
fell as distinct on his ear, as the note of the meadow-lark, down there
by the roadside. How the note of the meadow-lark shot a thrill through
the thin Colorado air,--informed with a soul the dazzling day! How
cruelly sweet Dorothy's voice had been, as she said:
"No, Harry, I couldn't!"
It had made him so angry that he hardly knew how deep his hurt was.
"You have no right to say no!" he had heard himself say.
He could not remember whether that was immediately, or after an interval
of discussion. She had stood up and turned away, not deigning to reply.
And then the memory of that talk at the ball had struck him like a blow.
"Wait, Dorothy! You must wait!" he had cried, aware that his imperative
words clutched her like a detaining hand. Then, while his breath came
fast, almost chokingly, he had said: "Tell me, Dorothy, is it because
you don't call me _a man_ that you won't have me?"
The angry challenge in his voice hardened her.
"I don't know anything about how much of a man you are, Harry
Wakefield," she had declared, with freezing indifference. "I only know
you are not the man for me."
That had been practically the end of it. They had got through the day
very creditably he believed, and the next morning they had departed on
their several ways.
Wakefield had read law like mad for a week, and then he had started for
Colorado. He had a favorite cousin out there whose husband was making a
fortune in Lame Gulch stocks, and he thought that even prosaic
fortune-hunting in a new world would be better than the gnawing chagrin
that monopolized things in the old. Better be active than passive, on
any terms. By the time he was well on his westward way, the sting of
that refusal had yielded somewhat, and he began to take courage again.
Perhaps when he had made a fortune! "It takes a man to do that," she had
said. Well, he had four times the money to start with that Dick Dayton
had had, and look, what chances there were!
Once fairly launched in the stirring, out-of-door Colorado life, his
spirits had so far recovered their tone that he could afford to be
magnanimous. Accordingly he wrote the following letter to Dorothy:
"DEAR DOROTHY,
"You were right; I wasn't half good enough for you. No fellow is,
as far as that goes! Don't you let them fool you on that score! It
makes me mad when I think about it. You always knew the worst of
me, but you don't really know the first thing about any other man.
I'm coming back next year to try again. Do give me the chance,
Dorothy! Remember, I don't tell you you could make anything you
like of me--that's the rubbish the rest will talk. I'm going to
make something of myself first! And if I don't do it in a year, I
am ready to work seven years,--or seventy,--or seventy-seven years;
if you'll only have me in the end! That would have to be in Heaven,
though, wouldn't it? Well, it would come to the same thing in the
end! It would be Heaven for me, wherever it was!"
Wakefield had the habit of saying to Dorothy whatever came into his
head; and so he had written his letter without any thought of effect.
But the answer he got was so carefully worded that he could make nothing
of it. At the end of three non-committal pages she wrote:
"I ought not to wish you good luck, for Papa says if you have it it
will be your ruin. I did not suppose that circumstances could ruin
anybody,--anybody that had any backbone, I mean. But I do wish you
good luck all the same, and if you're the kind of person to be
ruined by it, why, I'm sorry for you!"
There was something in that letter, non-committal as it was, that gave
Wakefield the impression that a correspondence would be no furtherance
to his interests. He did not write again, and he only knew, from his
sister Fanny, that Dorothy was a greater favorite than ever that season;
a fact from which he could gather little encouragement. He had flung
himself like a piece of driftwood into the whirl of speculation; he had
lost more thousands than he cared to think about, the bulk of his
patrimony in fact, and his last chance was gone of making the fortune
that was to have been the winning of Dorothy. "It takes a man to do
that!" she had said.
Well, that was the end of it! As far as he was concerned, Dorothy Ray
had ceased to exist; the past had ceased to exist, the pleasant past,
with its deceitful mists and bewildering sunbeams. Things out here were
crude, but they were real! He got on his feet and turned about once
more. Between Mt. Washington and the range was a fertile ranch; broad
fields of vivid alfalfa, big barns, pastures dotted with cattle; a line
of light-green cottonwoods ran along the borders of the creek. What was
that about the wilderness blossoming like the rose? He turned again and
looked toward the barren hillocks. Even they, dead and inhospitable as
they appeared at a little distance, afforded nourishment for cactus and
painter's-brush, prickly poppy and hardy vetches. Dorothy Ray might do
as she pleased,--his fortune might go where it would! That need not be
the end of all things. Life, to be sure, might seem a little like a game
of chess after the loss of the Queen! Pretty tough work it was likely to
be to save the game, but none the less worth while for all that. He
wondered what his next move would be,--and meanwhile, before
recommencing the game, why not seize the most obvious outlet for his
newly roused energies, by tearing down the hill at a break-neck gallop
and clearing the wire fence at a bound!
"Took you for a jack-rabbit!" said a gruff voice close at hand, as he
landed on his two feet by the dusty roadside.
"Not a bad thing to be," Wakefield panted, falling in step with the
speaker, who was walking toward the town at a brisk pace.
"Not unless the dogs are round," the stranger demurred.
"Dogs! A jack-rabbit would never know how game he was, if it wasn't for
the dogs!"
"Any on your track?" asked the man with a grin. "Looked like it when you
come walluping down the mounting!"
"A whole pack of them," Wakefield answered. "Didn't you see anything of
them?"
"Can't say I did."
"You're not so smart as you look, then;" and they went jogging on like
comrades of a year's standing.
The new acquaintance appeared to be a man of sixty or thereabouts. A
crowbar and shovel which he carried over his shoulder seemed a part of
his rough laborer's costume. He had a shrewd, good sort of face, and a
Yankee twang to his speech.
"You carry those things as easy as a walking-stick," Wakefield observed,
ready to reciprocate in point of compliments. "What do you use them
for?"
"Ben mendin' the bit o' _codderoy_ down yonder," was the answer.
"Is that your trade?"
"No, not partic'larly. I make a trade of most anything I kin work at.
Happened to be out of a job last week, so I took up with this."
"Got through with it?"
"Yes; stopped off to-day. Got done just in time. They start in on the
road next week, 'n they've took me on."
"What road's that?"
"The new branch in."
"Oh! In to Lame Gulch. I heard they were going to start in on that."
"Yes; the 'Rocky Mounting' are doin' it. They say there'll be trains
runnin' in from the Divide inside of six months."
Wakefield looked sceptical; he had heard that sort of talk before.
"Do you like railroad work?" he asked.
"Not so well's this. I like my own job better, only 'taint so _stayin'_.
Might 've had another month's work, on the road to the canon over there;
but that would ha' ben the end on 't. So I'm goin' to throw up that job
this afternoon."
"What's wanted on the canon road?"
"Wal, it wants widenin', an' it wants bracin' up here 'n there, 'n
there's a power of big stuns to be weeded out. A reel purty job it's
goin' to be, too, in there by the runnin' water, among the _fars_ 'n the
birds 'n the squirrels."
"I suppose you could hardly have managed that all by yourself?"
"Oh, yes! It's an easy job."
"And you think you could have done it with just your two hands and a
shovel and a crowbar?"
"Wal, yes,--'n a pinch o' powder now and then, 'n somethin' to drill a
hole with,--an' a little nat'ral gumption."
Wakefield liked the sound of it all uncommonly well. For a man who had
come to a rough place in his own road,--a jumping-off place he had once
thought it might prove to be,--would it not be rather a pleasant thing,
to smooth off a road for the general public? It would be a stroke in the
game, at least, and that was his main concern just now. Such a good,
downright, genuine sort of work too! He had an idea that if he could
once get his grip on a crowbar, and feel a big rock come off its bottom
at his instigation, he should have a stirring of self-respect. After
all, of all that he had lost, that was perhaps the most important thing
to get back.
Just as he had arrived at this sensible conclusion his companion came to
a halt.
"Here's my shanty; where's yours?" he asked.
"Haven't got any!"
"I'd ask you in if we wasn't packin' up to go."
"Does your wife go with you?"
"Why, nat'rally!"
"Say," Wakefield queried, as the man turned in at the gate. "How did you
go to work to get that job up in the canon?"
"Went to 'Bijah Lang, the street-commissioner."
"You haven't got any friend who would like you to pass the job over to
him?"
"No."
"Think I could do it?"
"Wal, yes,--if you've got the gumption! Your arms and legs 'pear to be
all right! Ever see any work of the kind?"
"Yes; I used to watch them on the road up Bear Mountain, at Lame Gulch."
"Know how to drill a hole in a rock?"
"Learned that when I was a boy."
"Know the difference between _joint_ powder and the black stuff?"
"Yes; though I never handled giant powder myself."