THE QUEST SUPREME
It was twilight again, and such a twilight as only the Blue
Mountains of that far divide may know. It barred the west with
golden bands, painted lavish purples and mauves in the hollows, and
reddened the everlasting snows on the summits. It deepened the
greens of the tamaracks, and made iridescent the foams of the
streams tearing downward joyously to the wide rivers below. It
painted the reddish-yellow bars of the cross on the peak above the
Croix d'Or, and rendered its outlines a glorified symbol. It lent
stateliness to the finger of granite beneath the base that told
those who paused that beneath the shaft rested one who had a loyal
heart. It swooped down and lingered caressingly on the strong, tender
face of the girl who sat on the wall surrounding the graves of
Bells Park and "the best woman that ever lived."
"For some reason," Joan said, speaking to the two men beside her, "the
ugliness of some of it has gone. There is nothing left but the good
and the beautiful. Ah, how I love it--all! All!"
Dick's arm slipped round her, and drew her close, and unresisting, to
his side.
"And but for you and Bill," he said softly, "it might never have ended
this way."
"Humph!" drawled the deep voice of the grizzled old miner. "Things is
just the way they have to be. Nobody can change 'em. The Lord Almighty
fixes 'em, and I expect they have to work out about as He wants 'em
to. Somehow, up here in the tops of the hills, where it's close to the
sky, He seems a heap friendlier and nearer than He does down on the
plains. 'Most always I feel sorry for them poor fellers that live down
there. They seem like such lonesome, forgotten cusses."
The youthful couple by him did not answer. Their happiness was too
new, too sacred, to admit of speech.
"Now," Bill went on argumentatively, "me and Bully Presby are friends.
He likes me for standin' up for my own, and told me so to-day. He
ain't got over that feller Wolff yet. Says he could have killed him
when he found out Wolff had poisoned the water and rolled the bowlder
into the shaft to pen us in. I reckon Wolff tried to blackmail him
about what he knew, but the Bully didn't approve none of the other
things. That ain't his way of fightin'. You can bet on that! He
drifted over and got the green lead in the Cross, when others had
given it up and squandered money. That shows he was a real miner. We
come along, and--well--all he's done is just to help us find it, and
then hand over the proceeds, all in the family, as I take it. Nobody's
loser. The families gets tangled up, and instead of there bein' two
there's just one. The Rattler and the Croix d'Or threatens to be made
into one mine, and the two plants consolidated to make it more
economical. The green lead's the best ledge in the Blue's, and 'most
everybody seems to be gettin' along pretty well. That ain't luck. It's
God Almighty arrangin' things for the best."
He sat for a moment, and gave a long sigh, as if there were something
else in his mind that had not been uttered. Dick lifted his eyes, and
looked at him affectionately, and then whispered into the ear close by
his shoulder: "Shall I tell him now?"
"Do!" Joan said, drawing away from him, and looking expectantly at the
giant.
Dick fumbled in his pocket with a look of sober enjoyment.
"Oh, by the way, Bill," he said, "I got a letter from Sloan a few days
ago. Here it is. Read it."
The latter took it, and frowning as he opened it, held it up to catch
the light.
"Great Scott!" he exclaimed. "Gives the Croix d'Or to you. Says he
wants you to have it, because you're the one that made good on it, and
he don't need the money! That the deeds are on the way by registered
mail, and all he asks is a small bar from the first clean-up!"
He folded the letter, and held it in his hands, looking thoughtfully
off into the distance for a time while he absorbed the news.
"Why, Dick," he said, "you're a rich man! Richer'n I ever expected
you'd be; but I'm a selfish old feller, after all! It seems to me as
if we ain't never goin' to be the same again, as we uster be when all
we had was a sack of flour and a side of bacon, and the whole
North-west to prospect. It seems as if somethin' mighty dear has
gone."
Dick got up and stood before him, with his hands in his pockets, and
smiling downward into his eyes.
"I've thought of that, too, Bill," he said, "and I can't afford to
lose you. I'd rather lose the Cross. So I'll tell you something that
I told Joan, long ago--that if ever the mine made good, and I could
give you something beside a debt, you were to have half of what I
made. A few days ago it would have been a quarter interest you owned.
Now it is a half. We're partners still, Bill, just as we were when
there was nothing but a sack of flour and a side of bacon to divide."
They looked at him, expecting him to show some sign of excitement, but
he did not. Instead, he reached over, and painstakingly pulled a weed
from the foot of the wall, and threw it away. He cleared his throat
once or twice, but did not look at them, and then got to his feet and
started as if to go down to the camp. Then, as if his feelings were
under control again, came back, and took one of Joan's and one of
Dick's hands into his own toil-worn palms, and said:
"Thanks, Dick! It's more'n I deserve, this knowin' both of you, and
havin' you give me a share in the Cross! And I accept it; but
conditionally."
He dropped their hands, and turned to look around, as if seeing a very
broad world.
"What is the condition?" Joan asked, laying her hand on his arm, and
looking up at him. "Can we change it?"
"No," he said; "you can't. I've had a hard hit of my own for a long
time now. I'm a-goin' to try to heal it. I'm goin' away on what may be
a short, or a long, long trail." His voice dropped until it was
scarcely audible. "I'm goin' away to keep goin' till I find The Lily.
And when I find her, I'll come back, and bring her with me, if she'll
come."
He turned his back toward them, unbuttoned the flap of his flannel
shirt, and reached inside. He drew out a sheet of paper wrapped in an
old silk handkerchief, as if it were a priceless possession to be
carefully preserved, and held it toward them. He did not look at
either of them as he spoke.
"I got that a long time ago," he said; "but somehow I could never say
anything about it to any one. And I reckon you're the only two in the
world that'll ever see it. Read it and give it back to me when--when
you come down the mountain."
He turned and stalked away over the trail, his feet planting
themselves firmly, as he had walked through life with firmness.
They watched him go, and opened the letter, and read, in a high,
strong handwriting:
DEAR MR. MATHEWS: I am writing you of business, for one thing, and
because I feel that I must, for another. I have paid for a
tombstone suitable for Bells Park, whom I esteemed more than I
have most men. And I have paid for its delivery to you, knowing
that you will have it mounted in place. So you must pay nothing
for it in any form, as I wish to stand all the expense in memory
of an old and tried friend. I have left Goldpan for good and all,
and all those old associations of my life. I am starting over
again, to make a good and clean fight, in clean surroundings. I am
sick to death of all that has made up my life. I am bitter,
knowing that I was handicapped from the start. My father educated
me because it was easier to have me in a boarding school in all my
girlhood than to have me with him. I never knew my mother. I had
no love bestowed upon me in my girlhood. When I came of age my
father, who was an adventurer of the discredited gentleman type,
gave me to a friend of his. I learned a year after I had been
married that I had been sold to my husband--God save the mark! I
tried to be patient when he dragged me from camp to camp, and I
want to say that whatever else I have been, I have been good. You
understand me, I hope, because I am defending myself to you, the
only living being for whose esteem I care. I have had two happy
moments in my life--one when the news was brought me that my
husband had shot himself across a gambling table, and the second
when you faced me that night after Bells Park was killed, alone
there in the street after your partner had gone on, and said:
"Lily, it hurts you as it does me. You're on the level, little
pal. I want to stop long enough to tell you I believe in you."
Then you went on, and I shall not see you again.
I am writing this from a place I shall leave before it starts to
you. You could not find me if you had the desire, and so I say to
you that which perhaps I never should have said, if we had
remained in sight of each other in the Blue Mountains. You are the
only man I have ever met who made me heartsick because I was not
worthy of him, and could not aspire to his level. You are the only
man I have ever loved so much that it was an ache. You are the
only man who told me by the look in his eyes, that he thought my
life unworthy, and accused me without words every time we met. I
am through with it, and if it will do you any good to know that
your reproaches have done more than anything else to cause me to
begin all over again, and live a different life, I want you to
have that satisfaction. And this shall be my only good-by.
LILY MEREDITH.
For a long time Joan stood holding the letter in her hands, and then,
as if fathoming its cry of loneliness, clutched it tightly to her
breast.
"He will find her!" she said. "I know it! He must! It wouldn't be kind
of heaven to keep her from him. And he loved her all the time!"
Far across the peaks of the Blue Mountains the last rays of the sunset
went out, as an extinguished torch. A bird near by cheeped sleepily,
and the new night was coming to its own. Throbbing, rumbling, and
grinding in a melody softened by distance, the roar of the Rattler's
mills became audible, as it brought the yellow gold, glistening and
beautiful, from its sordid setting of earth. In the camp of the Croix
d'Or a chorus was wafted faintly up as men sitting in the dusk sang:
"Hearts that are brave and true, my lads, hearts that are brave and
true!"
Silently, arm in arm, they gave a last lingering look at the shaft,
the peak above, and turned down the trail to the camp which seemed all
aglow with rosy light.
THE END
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