While the deft waiter was clearing the table and serving the small
coffees he kept silence. But when the time was fully ripe he said what
there was to be said.
"You've got us by the nape of the neck, as usual, Blount. Name your
terms."
"I have named them. Get in line with the new public opinion and we'll do
what we can for you."
During the long pause following this curt ultimatum the masterful
dictator of railroad policies deliberated thoughtfully upon many things.
With the ex-senator as the all-powerful head of the machine in this
State of many costly battle-fields, it would have been a weakness
inexcusable on the part of so astute a commander as McVickar if David
Blount's history, political and personal, had not been known to him in
all its details. As a contingency to be met sooner or later, the
vice-president had anticipated the thing which had now come to pass.
That Blount should wish to push the fortunes of his son was perfectly
natural; and it was no less natural that he should push them by making
the railroad company's pay-roll furnish the motive-power. The magnate
smiled inwardly when he remembered that he had given Gantry, the
division traffic manager of the Transcontinental, a quiet hint to look
up one Evan Blount, a young lawyer, on his next visit to Boston. By all
odds it would be better to wait for Gantry's report before taking any
irrevocable steps in the bargaining with Evan Blount's father; but
unhappily the crisis had arrived, and in all probability it could not be
postponed. None the less, the vice-president tried craftily for the
postponement.
"You're asking a good deal, Blount, and you don't seem to realize it.
You are practically demanding that we lay down our arms and put a
possible enemy in the saddle on the eve of a battle. If we should agree
to meet the people of this State half-way, as you suggest, what
guarantee have we that we won't be compelled to go all the way?"
The fine-lined wrinkles were appearing again at the corners of the
hereditary Blount eyes.
"You can't quite rise to the occasion, can you, Hardwick?" smiled the
boss. "You'd like to behave yourself and be good, of course; but you
want to be cocksure beforehand that it isn't going to cost too much."
"Well, anyway, I'm going to ask for a little time in which to consider
it," was the vice-president's final word.
"Sure! You have all the time there is between now and the election. Go
on and do your considering. I've told you what I'm going to do."
"You know very well that we can't allow you to do what you propose. With
an unfriendly attorney-general we might as well throw up our hands first
as last."
"All right; it's right pointedly up to you," was the calm reply.
The vice-president rose and dusted the cigar-ash from his coat-sleeve
with the table-napkin. When he looked up, the heavy frown was again
furrowing itself between his eyes.
"Let me know when your son is coming and I'll try to make it possible to
meet him here," he said rather gratingly.
And thus, at the precise moment when Richard Gantry, some three thousand
miles away to the eastward, was declaring his weariness and his
intention of going to bed, the two-man conference in the Inter-Mountain
private dining-room was closed.
III
A FALSE GALLOP OF MEMORIES
As a churlish fate decreed, it turned out that Evan Blount was not to
have Gantry for a travelling companion beyond Chicago. On the second day
of westward faring the railroad traffic manager, whose business followed
him like an implacable Nemesis wherever he went, had wire instructions
to stop and confer with his vice-president in the Illinois metropolis.
Hence, on the morning of the following day, Blount continued his journey
alone.
Twenty-odd hours later the returning expatriate had crossed his Rubicon;
in other words, his train had rolled through the majestic steel bridge
spanning the clay-colored flood of the Missouri River at Omaha, and he
was entering upon scenes which ought to have been familiar--which should
have been and were not, so many and striking were the changes which had
been wrought during his fourteen years of absence.
Though he was far enough from realizing it, his education and the
Eastern environment had given him a touch of Old-World insularity. The
through sleeper in which he had his allotment of space was well filled,
and there were the usual opportunities for the making of passing
acquaintanceships in the smoking-compartment. But it was not until the
second day, after the dining-car luncheon and its aftermath of a
well-chosen cigar had broken down some of the barriers of the acquired
reserve, that he fell into talk with the prosperous-looking gentleman
who had seized upon the only chair in the smoking-compartment--a man
whose thin, hawk-like face, narrowly set eyes, and uneasy manner were
singularly out of keeping with the fashionable cut of his clothes, with
his liberal tips, and with the display of jewelry on his watch-fob.
At first the conversation was baldly desultory, as it was bound to be,
with an escaped lover, whose disappointment was still rasping him like a
newly devised Nessus shirt, to sustain an undivided half of it. The
hawk-faced one, who had boarded the train at Omaha and whose section was
directly opposite Blount's, defined himself as a mine-owner whose
property, vaguely located as somewhere "in the mountains," was involved
in litigation.
It was the reference to the litigation which first drew Blount beyond
the boundaries of the commonplaces. Oddly enough, considering the fact
that his planned-for Eastern career would have given him little occasion
to dip into the mining codes, he had specialized somewhat in mining law.
Hence, when the hawk-faced man had told his story, Blount found himself
thawing out sufficiently to be suggestively helpful to the man who had
apparently purchased more trouble than profits in his mining ventures.
Into the cleft thus opened by the axe of human sympathy the man in the
wicker chair presently inserted a wedge of cautious inquiry touching
another matter. In addition to his mining ventures he had been making
investments in timber-lands, or, rather, in certain lumber companies
operating "in the mountains"--bad investments, he feared, since the
Government had lately taken such a decided stand against the cutting of
timber in the mountain-land reserves and water-sheds. Was it likely, he
asked, that the talk would materialize in restraining action? If so, he
was in the hole again--worse off than he should be if his mining
lawsuits should go against him.
Again Blount, good-naturedly charitable and not a little amused by the
nervous anxiety of the gentleman of many troubles, gave an opinion.
"Conservation, in timber as well as in other remaining resources of the
country, has come to be a word which is in everybody's mouth," was the
form the opinion took. "The plain citizen who isn't familiar with the
methods of the timber sharks would do well to keep his money out of
their hands if he doesn't wish to be held as _particeps criminis_ with
them in the day of reckoning."
"Say!" ejaculated the thin man, wriggling nervously in his chair. "If
you were a Government agent yourself you could hardly put the case
stronger for the conservation crowd!"
Now, in ordinary circumstances, nothing was ever farther from Blount's
normal attitude toward his fellow-men than a disposition to yield to the
sudden joking impulse. But the hawk-faced man's perturbation was so
real, or so faultlessly simulated, that he could not resist the
temptation.
"How do you know that I am not a Government agent?" he demanded, with a
decent show of gravity.
"Because you are not travelling on Government transportation," was the
shrewd retort.
At another time Blount might have wondered why a casual fellow-traveller
should have taken the trouble to make the discovery. But at the moment
he was intent only upon keeping the small misunderstanding alive.
"I suppose you have seen my ticket, but you can't tell anything by
that," he countered, laughing. "A good many civilian employees of the
Government travel nowadays on regular tickets, like other people."
"I know damned well they do," admitted the anxious one; and then, with a
swift eye-shot which Blount missed: "Especially if they happen to be
travelling on the quiet to catch some poor devil napping on the job."
"You needn't be alarmed; you haven't told me anything that the
department could make use of," returned Blount, carrying the jest the
one necessary move farther along.
It was precisely at this point, as Blount remembered afterward, that the
timber-thieving subject was dropped. Later on, after the talk had
drifted back to mining, and from mining to politics, the nervous
gentleman pleaded weariness and declared his intention of going to his
section to take a nap, and presently disappeared to carry it out.
Blount was not sorry to be left alone. In response to a vague stirring
of something within him--a thing which might have been the primitive
underman yawning and stretching to its awakening--he had been trying in
the window-facing intervals to reconstruct the passing panorama of
mountain and plain upon the recollections of his boyhood. As yet there
was little familiarity save in the broader outlines. Where he remembered
only the fallow-dun prairie, dotted with dog-mounds, there were now vast
ranches planted to sod corn; and upon the hills the cattle ranges were
no longer open. The towns, too, at which the train made its momentary
stops, were changed. The straggling shack hamlets of the cattle-shipping
period, with the shed-roofed railroad station, the whitewashed
loading-corral, and the towering water-tank--all backgrounded by a thin
line of saloons and dance-halls--had disappeared completely, and the
window-watcher found himself looking in vain for the flap-hatted,
cigarette-smoking horsemen with which the West of his boyhood had been
chiefly peopled.
Farther along toward evening the great range, which had been visible for
hours in the westward vista, began to define itself in peaks and high,
bald shoulderings of wind-swept mesas. Here was something definite and
tangible for the stirring underman to lay hold upon. Blount, the
sober-minded, the self-contained, found a curious transformation working
itself out in quickened pulses and exhilarating nerve-tinglings. Boston,
the Law School, the East of the narrow walk-ways and the still narrower
rut of custom and convention, were fading into a past which already
seemed age-old and half forgotten. He threw open the window at his elbow
and drank in deep inspirations of the hill-sweeping blast. It was sweet
in his nostrils, and the keen crispness of it was as fine wine in his
blood. After all, he had been but a sojourner in the other world, and
this was his homeland.
At the dining-car dinner, which was served while the higher peaks of the
main range were as vast islands floating in a sea of crimson and gold,
Blount missed the man of many troubles. The dining-car was well filled,
and, though the faces of the diners were all unfamiliar, the hum of
talk, the hurrying of the waiters, and the subdued clamor drowning
itself in the under-drone of the drumming wheels answered well enough
for companionship. There are times when even the voice of a friend is an
intrusion, and the returning exile had happed upon one of them.
Largeness, the inspiring breadth of the immensities, was what he craved
most; and when he had cut the many-coursed dinner short, he hurried back
to his Pullman window, hoping that he might have the smoking-compartment
to himself again.
The unspoken wish was granted. When he entered the smoking-room he
found it empty; and, filling his cutty pipe, he drew the cushioned
wicker chair out to face the open window. Fresh glimpses of the
northward landscape shortly brought a renewal of the heart-stirrings;
and when he finally had the longed-for sight of a bunch of grazing
cattle, with the solitary night-herd hanging by one leg in the saddle to
watch the passing of the train, the call of the homeland was trumpeting
in his ears, and he would have given anything in reason to be able to
changes places, temporarily at least, with the care-free horseman whose
wiry, muscular figure was struck out so artistically against the
dun-colored hillside.
"Would I really do such a thing as that?" he asked himself half
incredulously, when the night-herd and his grazing drove had become only
a picturesque memory; and out of the heart-stirrings and
pulse-quickenings came the answer: "I more than half believe that I
would--that I'd jump at the chance." Then he added regretfully: "But
there isn't going to be any chance."
"Any chance to do what?" rumbled a mellow voice at his elbow, and Blount
turned quickly to find that a big, bearded man, smoking an abnormally
corpulent cigar, had come in to take his seat on the divan.
At another time Blount, the conventional Blount, would have been
self-conscious and embarrassed, as any human being is when he is caught
talking to himself. But with the transformation had come a battering
down of doors in the house of the broader fellowship, and he laughed
good-naturedly.
"You caught me fairly," he acknowledged. "I thought I still had the
place to myself."
"But the chance?" persisted the big man, looking him over appraisively.
"You don't look like a man who has had to hang round on the aidges
hankerin' after things he couldn't get."
"I guess I haven't had to do that very often," was the reflective
rejoinder. "But a mile or so back we passed a bunch of cattle, with the
night man riding watch; I was just saying to myself that I'd like to
change places with that night-herd--only there wasn't going to be any
chance."
The bearded man's laugh was a deep-chested rumbling suggestive of rocks
rolling down a declivity.
"Lordy gracious!" he chuckled. "If you was to get a leg over a bronc',
and the bronc' should find it out--Say, I've got a li'l' blue horse out
on my place in the Antelopes that'd plumb give his ears to have you try
it; he shore would. You take my advice, and don't you go huntin' a job
night-ridin' in the greasewood hills. Don't you do it!"
"I assure you I hadn't thought of doing it for a permanency. But just
for a bit of adventure, if the chance should offer while I'm in the
notion. I believe I'd take it. I haven't ridden a cow-pony for fourteen
years, but I don't believe I've lost the knack of it."
"Ho!" said the big man. "Then you ain't as much of a tenderfoot as you
look to be. Shake!" and he held out a hand as huge as a bear's paw.
Following the hand-grip he grew confidential. "'Long in the afternoon I
stuck my head in at the door and saw you chewin' the rag with a
thin-faced old nester that couldn't set still in his chair while he
talked. Know him?"
"Not at all," said Blount promptly. "He has the section opposite mine,
and he got on at Omaha."
"Well, I wouldn't want to know him if I was you," was the bearded man's
comment. Then: "Tryin' to get you to invest in some o' his properties?"
"Oh, no."
"Well, he will, if he gets a chance. He'd go furder'n that; he'd nail
you up to the cross and skin you alive if there was any money in it for
him. His name's Simon Peter, and it ort to be Judas. I know him down to
the ground!"
"Simon Peter?" said Blount inquiringly.
"Ya-as; Simon Peter Hathaway. And my name's Griggs; Griggs, of the
Antelopes, back o' Carnadine--if anybody should ask you who give you
your pointer on Simon Peter Judas. I don't blacklist no man in the dark,
and I've said a heap more to that old ratter's face than I've ever said
behind his back. Ump! him a-wrigglin' in that chair you're settin' in
and tryin' to fix up some way to skin you! Don't tell me! I know blame'
well what he was tryin' to do."
Blount listened and was interested, not so much in the bit of gossip as
in the big, red-faced ranchman, who so evidently had a grudge to pay
off.
"I am not likely to have any dealings with Mr. Hathaway," he rejoined.
"And I must do him the bare justice of saying that he wasn't trying to
sell me anything. The shoe was on the other foot. He seemed to be afraid
he was in danger of losing out, and he was asking my advice."
"S.P. Hathaway lose out? Not on your life, my young friend! You say he
was askin' for advice? You've done stirred up my curiosity a whole heap,
and I reckon you'll have to tell me who you are before it'll ca'm down
again."
Blount laughed. "Mr. Hathaway thinks I am a special agent for the
Government, travelling on business for the Forest Service."
"The hell he does!" exploded the big man. Then he reached over and laid
a swollen finger on Blount's knee. "Say, boy, before you or him ever
gets off this train--Sufferin' Moses! what was that?"
The break came upon a thunderous crash transmitting itself from car to
car, and the long, heavy train came to a juggling stop. The ranchman
sprang to his feet with an alacrity surprising in so huge a body and
ducked to look out of the open window.
"Twin Buttes!" he gurgled. "And, say, it's a wreck! We've hit something
right slap in the middle of the yard! Let's make a break for the scene
of the confliggration till we see who's killed!"
Blount followed the ranchman's lead, but shortly lost sight of the
burly figure in the crowd of curious passengers pouring from the hastily
opened vestibules. Seen at closer range, the accident appeared to be
disastrous only in a material sense. The heavy "Pacific-type" locomotive
had stumbled over the tongue of a split switch, leaving the rails and
making a blockading barrier of itself across the tracks. Nobody was
hurt; but there would be a delay of some hours before the track could be
cleared.
Finding little to hold him in the spectacle of the derailed locomotive,
Blount strolled on through the railroad yard to the station and the
town. He remembered the place chiefly by its name. In his boyhood it had
been the nearest railroad forwarding-point for the mines at Lewiston,
thirty miles beyond the Lost Hills. Now, as it appeared, it had become a
lumber-shipping station. To the left of the railroad there were numerous
sawmills, each with its mountain of waste dominated by a black chimney,
screen-capped. For the supply of logs an enormous flume led down from
the slopes of the forested range on the south, a trough-like water-chute
out of which, though the working-day was ended, the great logs were
still tumbling in an intermittent stream.
North of the town the valley broke away into a region of bare mesas
dotted with rounded, butte-like hills, with the buttressing ranges on
either side to lift the eastern and western horizons. The northern
prospect enabled Blount to place himself accurately, and the tide of
remembrance swept strongly in upon him. Some forty-odd miles away to the
northeast, just beyond the horizon-lifting lesser range, lay the
"short-grass" region in which he had spent the happy boyhood. An hour's
gallop through the hills to the westward the level rays of the setting
sun would be playing upon the little station of Painted Hat, the
one-time shipping-point for the home ranch. And half-way between Painted
Hat and the "Circle-Bar," nestling in the hollowed hands of the
mountains, were the horse-corrals of one Debbleby, a true hermit of the
hills, and the boy Evan's earliest school-master in the great book of
Nature.
Blount's one meliorating softness during the years of exile had
manifested itself in an effort to keep track of Debbleby. He knew that
the old horse-breeder was still alive, and that he was still herding his
brood mares at the ranch on the Pigskin. The young man, fresh from the
well-calculated East, threw up his head and sniffed the keen, cool
breeze sweeping down from the northern hills. He was not given to
impulsive plan-changing. On the contrary, he was slow to resolve and
proportionately tenacious of the determination once made. But the
stirring of boyish memories accounted for something; and in the sanest
brain there are sleeping cells of irresponsibility ready to spring alive
at the touch of suggestion. What if he should--
He sat down upon the edge of the station platform and thought it out
deliberately. Since it would be hours before the tracks could be cleared
and the rail journey resumed, what was to prevent him from taking an
immediate and delightful plunge into the region of the heart-stirring
recollections? Doubtless old Jason Debbleby was at this moment sitting
on the door-step of his lonely ranch-house in the Pigskin foot-hills,
smoking his corn-cob pipe and, quite possibly, wondering what had become
of the boy whom he had taught to "rope down" and saddle and ride. Blount
estimated the distance as he remembered it. With a hired horse he might
reach Debbleby's by late bedtime; and after a night spent with the old
ranchman he could ride on across the big mesa to the capital.
Another ineffectual attempt to find out how soon the relief train from
the capital might be expected decided Blount. Arranging with the Pullman
conductor to have his hand-luggage left in Gantry's office at the
capital, the man in search of his boyhood crossed quickly to a
livery-stable opposite the station, bargained for a saddle-horse,
borrowed a poncho and a pair of leggings, and prepared to break
violently, for the moment at least, with all the civilized traditions.
He would go and see Debbleby--drop in upon the old horse-breeder without
warning, and thus get his first revivified impression of the homeland
unmixed with any of the disappointing changes which were doubtless
awaiting him at the real journey's end.
Now it chanced that the livery-stable was an adjunct to the single hotel
in the small sawmill town, and as Blount was mounting to ride he saw the
thin-faced man, whom the ranchman, Griggs, had named for him, standing
on the porch of the hotel in earnest talk with three others who, from
their appearance, might have figured either as "timber jacks" or
cowboys. Blount was on the point of recognizing his companion of the
Pullman smoking-compartment as he rode past the hotel to take the trail
to the northward, but a curious conviction that the gentleman with the
bird-of-prey eyes was making him the subject of the earnest talk with
the three men of doubtful occupation restrained him. A moment later,
when he looked back from the crossing of the railroad track, he saw that
all four of the men on the porch were watching him. This he saw; and if
the backward glance had been prolonged for a single instant he might
also have seen a big, barrel-bodied man with a red face stumbling out of
the side door of the shack hotel to make vigorous and commanding signals
to stop him. But this he missed.
There was an excuse for the oversight as well as for the speedy blotting
out of the picture of the four men watching him from the porch of the
hotel. With a fairly good horse under him, with the squeak of the
saddle-leather in his ears and the smell of it in his nostrils, and with
the wide world of the immensities into which to ride unhampered and
free, the lost boyhood was found. Not for the most soul-satisfying
professional triumph the fettered East could offer him would he have
curtailed the free-reined flight into the silent wilderness by a single
mile.
For the first half-hour of the invigorating gallop the fugitive from
civilization had the sunset glow to help him find the trail. After that
the moon rose, and the landmarks, which had seemed more or less familiar
in daylight, lost their remembered featurings. During the first few
miles the trail had led broadly across the table-land, with the eastern
mountains withdrawing and the Lost River Range looming larger as its
lofty sky-line was struck out sharply against the sunset horizon.
Farther on, in the transition darkness between sunset and moon-rise, the
trail disappeared entirely; but so long as he was sure of the general
direction, Blount held on and gave the tireless little bronco a loose
rein. The Debbleby ranch lay among the farther foot-hills of the western
range, with the broad gulch of the Pigskin cutting a plain highway
through the mountains. If he could find one of the head-water streams of
the Pigskin, all of which took their rise in the gulches of the mesa,
there could be no danger of losing the way.