CHAPTER XVI

ANOTHER HOUR

"But it seems as though I had always known you," said Franklin, turning

again toward the tall figure at the window. There was no reply to

this, neither was there wavering in the attitude of the head whose

glossy back was turned to him at that moment.

"It was like some forgotten strain of music!" he blundered on, feeling

how hopeless, how distinctly absurd was all his speech. "I surely must

always have known you, somewhere!" His voice took on a plaintive

assertiveness which in another he would have derided and have

recognised as an admission of defeat.

Mary Ellen still gazed out of the window. In her mind there was a

scene strangely different from this which she beheld. She recalled the

green forests and the yellow farms of Louisburg, the droning bees, the

broken flowers and all the details of that sodden, stricken field.

With a shudder there came over her a swift resentment at meeting here,

near at hand, one who had had a share in that scene of desolation.

Franklin felt keenly enough that he was at disadvantage, but no man may

know what there is in the heart of a girl. To Mary Ellen there seemed

to be three ways open. She might address this man bitterly, or

haughtily, or humorously. The latter course might have been most

deadly of all, had it not been tempered with a certain chivalrousness

which abode in Mary Ellen's heart. After all, thought she, here was a

man who was one of their few acquaintances in this strange, wild

country. It might be that he was not an ill sort of man at heart, and

by all means he was less impossible of manner than any other she had

seen here. She had heard that the men of a womanless country were

sometimes suddenly disconcerted by the appearance of womankind upon

their horizon. There was a certain quality about this man which, after

all, left him distinctly within the classification of gentleman.

Moreover, it would be an ill thing for her to leave a sore heart on the

first day of her acquaintance in this town, with which her fortunes

were now apparently to be so intimately connected.

Mary Ellen turned at length and seated herself near the window. The

light of which many women are afraid, the cross-light of double windows

on the morning after a night of dancing, had no terrors for her. Her

eye was clear, her skin fresh, her shoulders undrooping. Franklin from

his seat opposite gazed eagerly at this glorious young being. From his

standpoint there were but few preliminaries to be carried on. This was

the design, the scheme. This was what life had had in store for him,

and why should he hesitate to enter into possession? Why should he

delay to speak that which was foremost in his soul, which assuredly at

that very moment must be the foremost concern in all the interlocking

universe of worlds? After his fashion he had gone straight. He could

not understand the sickening thought that he did not arrive, that his

assertion did not convince, that his desire did not impinge.

Mary Ellen turned toward him slowly at length, and so far from seeming

serious, her features bore the traces of a smile. "Do you know," said

she, "I think I heard of a stage-driver--wasn't it somewhere out

West--who was taking a school-teacher from the railroad to the

schoolhouse--and he--well, that is to say--"

"He said things--"

"Yes, that is it. He said things, you know. Now, he had never seen

the school-teacher before."

"Yes, I have heard of that story," said Franklin, smiling as he

recalled the somewhat different story of Sam and the waiter girl. "I

don't just recollect all about it."

"It seems to me that the stage-driver said something--er, like--maybe

he said it was 'like forgotten music' to him."

Franklin coloured. "The story was an absurdity, like many others about

the West," he said. "But," he brightened, "the stage-driver had never

seen the school-teacher before."

"I don't quite understand," said Mary Ellen coldly. "In my country it

was not customary for gentlemen to tell ladies when they met for the

first time that it was 'like a strain of forgotten music'--not the

first time." And in spite of herself she now laughed freely, feeling

her feminine advantage and somewhat exulting in spite of herself to see

that even here upon the frontier there was opportunity for the

employment of woman's ancient craft.

"Music never forgotten, then!" said Franklin impetuously. "This is at

least not the first time we have met." In any ordinary duel of small

talk this had not been so bad an attack, yet now the results were

something which neither could have foreseen. To the mind of the girl

the words were shocking, rude, brutal. They brought up again the whole

scene of the battlefield. They recalled a music which was indeed not

forgotten--the music of that procession which walked across the heart

of Louisburg on that far-off fatal day. She shuddered, and upon her

face there fell the shadow of an habitual sadness.

"You have spoken of this before, Captain Franklin," said she, "and if

what you say is true, and if indeed you did see me--there--at that

place--I can see no significance in that, except the lesson that the

world is a very small one. I have no recollection of meeting you.

But, Captain Franklin, had we ever really met, and if you really cared

to bring up some pleasant thought about the meeting, you surely would

never recall the fact that you met me upon that day!"

Franklin felt his heart stop. He looked aside, his face paling as the

even tones went on:

"That was the day of all my life the saddest, the most terrible. I

have been trying ever since then to forget it. I dare not think of it.

It was the day when--when my life ended--when I lost everything,

everything on earth I had."

Franklin turned in mute protest, but she continued:

"Because of that day," said she bitterly, "to which you referred as

though it were a curious or pleasant thought, since you say you were

there at that time--because of that very day I was left adrift in the

world, every hope and every comfort gone. Because of Louisburg--why,

this--Ellisville! This is the result of that day! And you refer to it

with eagerness."

Poor Franklin groaned at this, but thought of no right words to say

until ten hours afterward, which is mostly the human way. "I know--I

could have known," he blundered--"I should not be so rude as to suppose

that--ah, it was only _you_ that I remembered! The war is past and

gone, The world, as you say, is very small. It was only that I was

glad--"

"Ah, sir," said Mary Ellen, and her voice now held a plaintiveness

which was the stronger from the droop of the tenderly curving

lips--"ah, sir, but you must remember! To lose your relatives, even in

a war for right and principle--and the South was right!" (this with a

flash of the eye late pensive)--"that is hard enough. But for me it

was not one thing or another; it was the sum of a thousand misfortunes.

I wonder that I am alive. It seems to me as though I had been in a

dream for a long, long time. It is no wonder that those of us left

alive went away, anywhere, as far as we could, that we gave up our

country--that we came even here!" She waved a hand at the brown

monotony visible through the window.

"You blame me as though it were personal!" broke in Franklin; but she

ignored him.

"We, our family," she went on, "had lived there for a dozen

generations. You say the world is small. It is indeed too small for a

family again to take root which has been torn up as ours has been. My

father, my mother, my two brothers, nearly every relative I had, killed

in the war or by the war--our home destroyed--our property taken by

first one army and then the other--you should not wonder if I am

bitter! It was the field of Louisburg which cost me everything. I

lost all--all--on that day which you wish me to remember. You wish me

to remember that you saw me then, that I perhaps saw you. Why, sir, if

you wished me to hate you, you could do no better--and I do not wish to

hate any one. I wish to have as many friends as we may, here in this

new country; but for remembering--why, I can remember nothing else, day

or night, but Louisburg!"

"You stood so," said Franklin, doggedly and fatuously, "just as you did

last night. You were leaning on the arm of your mother--"

Mary Ellen's eyes dilated. "It was not my mother," said she.

"A friend?" said Franklin, feelingly as he might.

"The mother of a friend," said Mary Ellen, straightening up and

speaking with effort. And all the meaning of her words struck Franklin

fully as though a dart had sunk home in his bosom.

"We were seeking for my friend, her son," said Mary Ellen. "I--Captain

Franklin, I know of no reason why we should speak of such things at

all, but it was my--I was to have been married to the man for whom we

were seeking, and whom we found! That is what Louisburg means to me.

It means this frontier town, a new, rude life for us. It means meeting

you all here--as we are glad and proud to do, sir--but first of all it

means--that!"

Franklin bowed his head between his hands and half groaned over the

pain which he had cost. Then slowly and crushingly his own hurt came

home to him. Every fibre of his being, which had been exultingly

crying out in triumph at the finding of this missing friend--every

fibre so keenly strung--now snapped and sprang back at rag ends. In

his brain he could feel the parting one by one of the strings which but

now sang in unison. Discord, darkness, dismay, sat on all the world.

The leisurely foot of Buford sounded on the stair, and he knocked gaily

on the door jam as he entered.

"Well, niece," said he, "Mrs. Buford thinks we ought to be starting

back for home right soon now."

Mary Ellen rose and bowed to Franklin as she passed to leave the room;

but perhaps neither she nor Franklin was fully conscious of the

leave-taking. Buford saw nothing out of the way, but turned and held

out his hand. "By the way, Captain Franklin," said he, "I'm mighty

glad to meet you, sir--mighty glad. We shall want you to come down and

see us often. It isn't very far--only about twenty-five miles south.

They call our place the Halfway Ranch, and it's not a bad name, for

it's only about halfway as good a place as you and I have always been

used to; but it's ours, and you will be welcome there. We'll be up

here sometimes, and you must come down. We shall depend on seeing you

now and then."

"I trust we shall be friends," mumbled Franklin.

"Friends?" said Butord cheerily, the smiling wrinkles of his own thin

face signifying his sincerity; "why, man, here is a place where one

needs friends, and where he can have friends. There is time enough and

room enough, and--well, you'll come, won't you?" And Franklin, dazed

and missing all the light which had recently made glad the earth, was

vaguely conscious that he had promised to visit the home of the girl

who had certainly given him no invitation to come further into her

life, but for whose word of welcome he knew that he should always long.

BOOK III

THE DAY OF THE CATTLE

CHAPTER XVII

ELLISVILLE THE RED

Gourdlike, Ellisville grew up in a night. It was not, and lo! it was.

Many smokes arose, not moving from crest to crest of the hills as in

the past, when savage bands of men signalled the one to the other, but

rising steadily, in combined volume, a beacon of civilization set far

out in the plains, assuring, beckoning. Silently, steadily, the people

came to this rallying place, dropping in from every corner of the

stars. The long street spun out still longer its string of toylike

wooden houses. It broke and doubled back upon itself, giving

Ellisville title to unique distinction among all the cities of the

plains, which rarely boasted more than a single street. The big hotel

at the depot sheltered a colony of restless and ambitious life. From

the East there came a minister with his wife, both fresh from college.

They remained a week. The Cottage Hotel had long since lost its key,

and day and night there went on vast revelry among the men of the wild,

wide West, then seeing for the first time what seemed to them the joy

and glory of life. Little parties of men continually came up from the

South, in search of opportunity to sell their cattle. Little parties

of men came from the East, seeking to buy cattle and land. They met at

the Cottage, and made merry in large fashion, seeing that this was a

large land, and new, and unrestrained.

Land and cattle, cattle and land. These themes were upon the lips of

all, and in those days were topics of peace and harmony. The cattleman

still stood for the nomadic and untrammelled West, the West of wild and

glorious tradition. The man who sought for land was not yet recognised

as the homesteader, the man of anchored craft, of settled convictions,

of adventures ended. For one brief, glorious season the nomad and the

home dweller shook hands in amity, not pausing to consider wherein

their interests might differ. For both, this was the West, the free,

unbounded, illimitable, exhaustless West--Homeric, Titanic, scornful to

metes and bounds, having no scale of little things.

Here and there small, low houses, built of the soil and clinging grimly

to the soil, made indistinct dots upon the wide gray plains. Small

corrals raised their ragged arms. Each man claimed his herd of kine.

Slowly, swinging up from the far Southwest, whose settlement, slower

and still more crude, had gone on scores of years ago when the

Spaniards and the horse Indians of the lower plains were finally beaten

back from the _rancherias_, there came on the great herds of the gaunt,

broad-horned cattle, footsore and slow and weary with their march of

more than a thousand miles. These vast herds deployed in turn about

the town of Ellisville, the Mecca for which they had made this

unprecedented pilgrimage. They trampled down every incipient field,

and spread abroad over all the grazing lands, until every township held

its thousands, crowded by the new thousands continually coming on.

Long train loads of these cattle, wild and fierce, fresh from the

chutes into which they were driven after their march across the

untracked empire of the range, rolled eastward day after day. Herd

after herd pressed still farther north, past Ellisville, going on

wearily another thousand miles, to found the Ellisvilles of the upper

range, to take the place of the buffalo driven from the ancient feeding

grounds. Scattered into hundreds and scores and tens, the local market

of the Ellisville settlers took its share also of the cheap cattle from

the South, and sent them out over the cheap lands.

It was indeed the beginning of things. Fortune was there for any man.

The town became a loadstone for the restless population ever crowding

out upon the uttermost frontier. The men from the farther East dropped

their waistcoats and their narrow hats at Ellisville. All the world

went under wide felt and bore a jingling spur. Every man was armed.

The pitch of life was high. It was worth death to live a year in such

a land! The pettinesses fell away from mankind. The horizon of life

was wide. There was no time for small exactness. A newspaper, so

called, cost a quarter of a dollar. The postmaster gave no change when

one bought a postage stamp. A shave was worth a quarter of a dollar,

or a half, or a dollar, as that might be. The price of a single drink

was never established, since that was something never called for. For

a cowman to spend one hundred dollars at the Cottage bar, and to lose

ten thousand dollars at cards later in the same evening, was a feat not

phenomenal. There were more cattle, south in Texas. The range-men,

acquainted with danger and risk, loving excitement, balked at no

hazard. Knowing no settled way of life, ignorant of a roof, careless

of the ways of other lands, this town was a toy to them, a jest, just

as all life, homeless, womanless, had been a jest. By day and by

night, ceaseless, crude, barbaric, there went on a continuous carousal,

which would have been joyless backed by a vitality less superb, an

experience less young. Money and life--these two things we guard most

sacredly in the older societies, the first most jealously, the latter

with a lesser care. In Ellisville these were the commodities in least

esteem. The philosophy of that land was either more ignorant or more

profound than ours. Over all the world, unaided by a sensational

press, and as yet without even that non-resident literature which was

later to discover the Ellisvilles after the Ellisvilles were gone,

there spread the tame of Ellisville the Red, the lustful, the

unspeakable. Here was a riot of animal intensity of life, a mutiny of

physical man, the last outbreak of the innate savagery of primitive man

against the day of shackles and subjugation. The men of that rude day

lived vehemently. They died, and they escaped. The earth is trampled

over their bold hearts, and they have gone back into the earth, the

air, the sky, and the wild flowers. Over their graves tread now those

who bow the neck and bear the burden and feed the wheels, and know the

despair of that civilization which grinds hope from out the heart. The

one and the other came, departed, and will depart. The one and the

other, the bond and the free, the untamed and the broken, were pawns in

the iron game of destiny.

The transient population of Ellisville, the cattle sellers and cattle

buyers and land seekers, outnumbered three to one the resident or

permanent population, which catered to this floating trade, and which

supplied its commercial or professional wants. The resident one third

was the nucleus of the real Ellisville that was to be. The social

compact was still in embryo. Life was very simple. It was the day of

the individual, the day before the law.

With this rude setting there was to be enacted a rapid drama of

material progress such as the world has never elsewhere seen; but first

there must be played the wild prologue of the West, never at any time

to have a more lurid scene than here at the Halfway House of a

continent, at the intersection of the grand transcontinental trails,

the bloody angle of the plains. Eight men in a day, a score in a week,

met death by violence. The street in the cemetery doubled before that

of the town. There were more graves than houses. This superbly

wasteful day, how could it presage that which was to come? In this

riotous army of invasion, who could have foreseen the population which

was to follow, adventurous yet tenacious, resolved first upon

independence, and next upon knowledge, and then upon the fruits of

knowledge? Nay, perhaps, after all, the prescience of this coming time

lay over Ellisville the Red, so that it roared the more tempestuously

on through its brief, brazen day.

CHAPTER XVIII

STILL A REBEL

In the swift current of humanity then streaming up and down the cattle

range, the reputation of the Halfway House was carried far and near;

and for fifty miles east and west, for five hundred miles north and

south, the beauty of the girl at the Halfway House was matter of

general story. This was a new sort of being, this stranger from

another land, and when applied to her, all the standards of the time

fell short or wide. About her there grew a saga of the cow range, and

she was spoken of with awe from the Brazos to the Blue. Many a rude

cowman made long pilgrimage to verify rumours he had heard of the

personal beauty, the personal sweetness of nature, the personal

kindness of heart, and yet the personal reserve and dignity of this new

goddess, whose like was not to be found in all the wide realms of the

range. Such sceptics came in doubt, but they remained silent and

departed reverent. Wider and wider grew her circle of devoted

friends--wild and desperate men who rarely knew a roof and whose hands

stayed at no deed, but who knew with unerring accuracy the value of a

real woman.

For each of these rude, silent, awkward range riders, who stammered in

all speech except to men or horses, and who stumbled in all locomotion

but that of the saddle, Mary Ellen had a kind spot in her soul, never

ceasing to wonder as she did at the customs and traditions of their

life. Pinky Smith, laid up at the Halfway House with a broken leg

(with which he had come in the saddle for over fifty miles), was

blither in bed than he had ever been at table. Ike Wallace, down with

a fever at the same place, got reeling into saddle at dawn of a

cheerless day, and rode himself and a horse to death that day in

stopping a stampede. Pain they knew not, fear they had not, and duty

was their only god. They told her, simply as children, of deeds which

now caused a shudder, now set tingling the full blood of enthusiasm,

and opened up unconsciously to her view a rude field of

knight-errantry, whose principles sat strangely close with the best

traditions of her own earlier land and time. They were knights-errant,

and for all on the Ellisville trail there was but one lady. So

hopeless was the case of each that they forbore to argue among

themselves.

"No broadhorn there," said Pinky Smith, after he got well, and assumed

the envied position of oracle on matters at the Halfway House. "That

ain't no range stock, I want to tell you all. What in h----l she doin'

out yer I give it up, but you can mark it down she ain't no common

sort."

"Oh, she like enough got some beau back in the States," said another,

grumblingly.

"Yes, er up to Ellis," said Pinky, sagely. "Thet lawyer feller up

there, he come down to the ranch twict when I was there, and I 'low

he's shinin' round some."

"Well, I dunno," said the other, argumentatively, as though to classify

lawyers and cow-punchers in much the same category.

"But, pshaw!" continued Pinky. "He don't seem to hold no edge neither,

fur's I could see. It was him that was a-doin' all the guessin'. She

just a-standin' pat all the time, same fer him as fer everybody else.

Reckon she ain't got no beau, an' don't want none."

"Beau be d----d!" said his friend. "Who said anything about beau?

First thing, feller's got to be fitten. Who's fitten?"

"That's right," said Pinky. "Yet I shore hope she's located yer fer

keeps. Feller says, 'They's no place like home,' and it's several mile

to another ranch like that'n', er to another gal like her."

"D----n the lawyer!" said the other, after a time of silence, as they

rode on together; and Pinky made understanding reply.

"That's what!" said he. "D----n him, anyhow!"

As for Edward Franklin himself, he could not in his moments of wildest

egotism assign himself to a place any better than that accorded each

member of the clans who rallied about this Southern lady transplanted

to the Western plains. Repulsed in his first unskilled, impetuous

advance; hurt, stung, cut to the quick as much at his own clumsiness

and failure to make himself understood as at the actual rebuff

received. Franklin none the less in time recovered sufficient

equanimity to seek to avail himself of such advantages as still

remained; and he resolved grimly that he would persist until at least

he had been accepted as something better than a blundering boor. Under

Major Buford's invitation he called now and again at the Halfway Ranch,

and the major was gladder each time to see him, for he valued the

society of one whose experiences ran somewhat parallel with his own,

and whose preferences were kindred to those of his natural class; and,

moreover, there was always a strange comradery among those whose

problems were the same, the "neighbours" of the sparsely settled West.

Mrs. Buford also received Franklin with pleasure, and Mary Ellen

certainly always with politeness. Yet, fatal sign, Mary Ellen never

ran for her mirror when she knew that Franklin was coming. He was but

one of the many who came to the Halfway House; and Franklin, after more

than one quiet repulse, began to know that this was an indifference

grounded deeper than the strange haughtiness which came to be assumed

by so many women of the almost womanless West, who found themselves in

a land where the irreverent law of supply and demand assigned to them a

sudden value.

Of lovers Mary Ellen would hear of none, and this was Franklin's sole

consolation. Yet all day as he laboured there was present in his

subconsciousness the personality of this proud and sweet-faced girl.

Her name was spelled large upon the sky, was voiced by all the birds.

It was indeed her face that looked up from the printed page. He dared

not hope, and yet shrunk from the thought that he must not, knowing

what lethargy must else ingulf his soul. By day a sweet, compelling

image followed him, until he sought relief in sleep. At night she was

again the shadowy image of his dreams. Reason as well as instinct

framed excuses for him, and he caught himself again arguing with the

world that here was destiny, here was fate! Wandering blindly over all

the weary intervening miles, weak and in need of strength to shelter

her, tender and noble and gentle, worthy of love and needing love and

care in these rude conditions for which she was so unfit--surely the

stars had straightened out his life for him and told him what to do!

He heard so clearly the sweet, imperious summons which is the second

command put upon animate nature: First, to prevail, to live; second, to

love, to survive! Life and love, the first worthless without the

latter, barren, flowerless, shorn of fruitage, branded with the mark of

the unattained. As tree whispers unto tree, as flower yearns to

flower, so came the mandate to his being in that undying speech that

knows no change from the beginning to the end of time.

Against this overwhelming desire of an impetuous love there was raised

but one barrier--the enduring resistance of a woman's will, silent, not

strenuous, unprotesting, but unchanged. To all his renewed pleadings

the girl said simply that she had no heart to give, that her hope of

happiness lay buried on the field of Louisburg, in the far-off land

that she had known in younger and less troubled days. Leaving that

land, orphaned, penniless, her life crushed down at the very portal of

womanhood, her friends scattered, her family broken and destroyed, her

whole world overturned, she had left also all hope of a later

happiness. There remained to her only the memory of a past, the honour

that she prized, the traditions which she must maintain. She was

"unreconstructed," as she admitted bitterly. Moreover, so she said,

even could it lie in her heart ever to prove unfaithful to her lover

who had died upon the field of duty, never could it happen that she

would care for one of those who had murdered him, who had murdered her

happiness, who had ruined her home, destroyed her people, and banished

her in this far wandering from the land that bore her.

"Providence did not bring me here to marry you," she said to Franklin

keenly, "but to tell you that I would never marry you--never, not even

though I loved you, as I do not. I am still a Southerner, am still a

'rebel.' Moreover, I have learned my lesson. I shall never love

again."

CHAPTER XIX

THAT WHICH HE WOULD

Poor medicine as it is, work was ever the best salve known for a

hurting heart. Franklin betook him to his daily work, and he saw

success attend his labours. Already against the frank barbarity of the

cattle days there began to push the hand of the "law-and-order"

element, steadily increasing in power. Although all the primitive

savage in him answered to the summons of those white-hot days to every

virile, daring nature, Franklin none the less felt growing in his heart

the stubbornness of the man of property, the landholding man, the man

who even unconsciously plans a home, resolved to cling to that which he

has taken of the earth's surface for his own. Heredity, civilization,

that which we call common sense, won the victory. Though he saw his

own face in the primeval mirror here held up to him, Franklin turned

away. It was sure to him that he must set his influence against this

unorganized day of waste and riotousness. He knew that this perfervid

time could not endure, knew that the sweep of American civilization

must occupy all this land as it had all the lands from the Alleghenies

to the plains. He foresaw in this crude new region the scene of a

great material activity, a vast industrial development. The swift

action of the early days was to the liking of his robust nature, and

the sweep of the cattle trade, sudden and unexpected as it had been, in

no wise altered his original intention of remaining as an integer of

this community. It needed no great foresight to realize that all this

land, now so wild and cheap, could not long remain wild and cheap, but

must follow the history of values as it had been written up to the edge

of that time and place.

Of law business of an actual sort there was next to none at Ellisville,

all the transactions being in wild lands and wild cattle, but, as did

all attorneys of the time, Franklin became broker before he grew to be

professional man. Fortunate in securing the handling of the railroad

lands, he sold block after block of wild land to the pushing men who

came out to the "front" in search of farms and cattle ranches. His own

profits he invested again in land. Thus he early found himself making

much more than a livelihood, and laying the foundation of later

fortune. Long since he had "proved up" his claim and moved into town

permanently, having office and residence in the great depot hotel which

was the citadel of the forces of law and order, of progress and

civilization in that land.

The railroad company which founded Ellisville had within its board of

directors a so-called "Land and Improvement Company," which latter

company naturally had the first knowledge of the proposed locations of

the different towns along the advancing line. When the sale of town

lots was thrown open to the public, it was always discovered that the

Land and Improvement Company had already secured the best of the

property in what was to be the business portion of the town. In the

case of Ellisville, this inner corporation knew that there was to be

located here a railroad-division point, where ultimately there would be

car shops and a long pay roll of employees. Such a town was sure to

prosper much more than one depending solely upon agriculture for its

support, as was to be the later history of many or most of these far

Western towns. Franklin, given a hint by a friendly official, invested

as he was able in town property in the village of Ellisville, in which

truly it required the eye of faith to see any prospect of great

enhancement. Betimes he became owner of a quarter-section of land here

and there, in course of commissions on sales. He was careful to take

only such land as he had personally seen and thought fit for farming,

and always he secured land as near to the railroad as was possible.

Thus he was in the ranks of those foreseeing men who quietly and

rapidly were making plans which were later to place them among those

high in the control of affairs. All around were others, less shrewd,

who were content to meet matters as they should turn up, forgetting that

"The hypocritic days

Bring diadems and fagots in their hands;

To each they offer gifts after his will."

Everywhere was shown the Anglo-Saxon love of land. Each man had his

quarter-section or more. Even Nora, the waitress at the hotel, had

"filed on a quarter," and once in perhaps a month or so would "reside"

there overnight, a few faint furrows in the soil (done by her devoted

admirer, Sam) passing as those legal "improvements" which should later

give her title to a portion of the earth. The land was passing into

severalty, coming into the hands of the people who had subdued it, who

had driven out those who once had been its occupants. The Indians were

now cleared away, not only about Ellisville but far to the north and

west. The skin-hunters had wiped out the last of the great herds of

the buffalo. The face of Nature was changing. The tremendous drama of

the West was going on in all its giant action. This torrent of rude

life, against which the hands of the law were still so weak and

unavailing, had set for it in the ways of things a limit for its flood

and a time for its receding.

The West was a noble country, and it asked of each man what nobility

there was in his soul. Franklin began to grow. Freed from the

dwarfing influences of army life, as well as from the repressing

monotony of an old and limited community, he found in the broad horizon

of his new surroundings a demand that he also should expand. As he

looked beyond the day of cattle and foresaw the time of the plough, so

also he gazed far forward into the avenues of his own life, now opening

more clearly before him. He rapidly forecast the possibilities of the

profession which he had chosen, and with grim self-confidence felt them

well within his power. Beyond that, then, he asked himself, in his

curious self-questioning manner, what was there to be? What was to be

the time of his life when he could fold his hands and say that, no

matter whether it was success or failure that he had gained, he had

done that which was in his destiny to do? Wherein was he to gain that

calmness and that satisfaction which ought to attend each human soul,

and entitle it to the words "Well done"? Odd enough were some of these

self-searchings which went on betimes in the little office of this

plainsman lawyer; and strangest of all to Franklin's mind was the

feeling that, as his heart had not yet gained that which was its right,

neither had his hand yet fallen upon that which it was to do.

Franklin rebelled from the technical side of the law, not so much by

reason of its dry difficulty as through scorn of its admitted weakness,

its inability to do more than compromise; through contempt of its

pretended beneficences and its frequent inefficiency and harmfulness.

In the law he saw plainly the lash of the taskmaster, driving all those

yoked together in the horrid compact of society, a master inexorable,

stone-faced, cruel. In it he found no comprehension, seeing that it

regarded humanity either as a herd of slaves or a pack of wolves, and

not as brethren labouring, suffering, performing a common destiny,

yielding to a common fate. He saw in the law no actual recognition of

the individual, but only the acknowledgment of the social body. Thus,

set down in a day miraculously clear, placed among strong characters

who had never yet yielded up their souls, witnessing that time which

knew the last blaze of the spirit of men absolutely free. Franklin

felt his own soul leap into a prayer for the continuance of that day.

Seeing then that this might not be, he fell sometimes to the dreaming

of how he might some day, if blessed by the pitying and understanding

spirit of things, bring out these types, perpetuate these times, and so

at last set them lovingly before a world which might at least wonder,

though it did not understand. Such were his vague dreams,

unformulated; but, happily, meantime he was not content merely to dream.

CHAPTER XX

THE HALFWAY HOUSE

"Miss Ma'y Ellen," cried Aunt Lucy, thrusting her head in at the door,

"oh, Miss Ma'y Ellen, I wish't you'd come out yer right quick. They's

two o' them prai' dogs out yer a-chasin' ouah hens agin--nasty, dirty

things!"

"Very well, Lucy," called out a voice in answer. Mary Ellen arose from

her seat near the window, whence she had been gazing out over the wide,

flat prairie lands and at the blue, unwinking sky. Her step was free

and strong, but had no hurry of anxiety. It was no new thing for these

"prairie dogs," as Aunt Lucy persisted in calling the coyotes, to chase

the chickens boldly up to the very door. These marauding wolves had at

first terrified her, but in her life on the prairies she had learned to

know them better. Gathering each a bit of stick, she and Aunt Lucy

drove away the two grinning daylight thieves, as they had done dozens

of times before their kin, all eager for a taste of this new feathered

game that had come in upon the range. With plenteous words of

admonition, the two corralled the excited but terror-stricken speckled

hen, which had been the occasion of the trouble, driving her back

within the gates of the inclosure they had found a necessity for the

preservation of the fowls of their "hen ranch." Once inside the

protecting walls, the erring one raised her feathers in great anger and

stalked away in high dudgeon, clucking out anathemas against a country

where a law-abiding hen could not venture a quarter of a mile from

home, even at the season when bugs were juiciest.

"It's that same Domineck, isn't it, Lucy?" said Mary Ellen, leaning

over the fence and gazing at the fowls.

"Yess'm, that same ole hen, blame her fool soul! She's mo' bother'n

she's wuf. I 'clare, ever' time I takes them er' chickens out fer a

walk that ole Sar' Ann hen, she boun' fer to go off by herse'f

somewheres, she's that briggotty; an' first thing I knows, dar she is

in trouble again--low down, no 'count thing, I say!"

"Poor old Sarah!" said Mary Ellen. "Why, Aunt Lucy, she's raised more

chickens than any hen we've got."

"Thass all right, Miss Ma'y Ellen, thass all right, so she have, but

she made twict as much trouble as any hen we got, too. We kin git two

dollahs fer her cooked, an' seems like long's she's erlive she boun'

fer ter keep me chasin' 'roun' after her. I 'clare, she jest keep the

whole lot o' ouah chickens wore down to a frazzle, she traipsin 'roun'

all the time, an' them a-follerin' her. Jess like some womenfolks.

They gad 'roun' so much they kain't git no flesh ontoe 'em. An', of

co'se," she added argumentatively, "we all got to keep up the

reppytation o' ouah cookin'. I kain't ask these yer men a dollah a

meal--not fer no lean ole hen wif no meat ontoe her bones--no, ma'am."

Aunt Lucy spoke with professional pride and with a certain right to

authority. The reputation of the Halfway House ran from the Double

Forks of the Brazos north to Abilene, and much of the virtue of the

table was dependent upon the resources of this "hen ranch," whose fame

was spread abroad throughout the land. Saved by the surpassing grace

of pie and "chicken fixings," the halting place chosen for so slight

reason by Buford and his family had become a permanent abode, known

gratefully to many travellers and productive of more than a living for

those who had established it. It was, after all, the financial genius

of Aunt Lucy, accustomed all her life to culinary problems, that had

foreseen profit in eggs and chickens when she noted the exalted joy

with which the hungry cow-punchers fell upon a meal of this sort after

a season of salt pork, tough beef, and Dutch-oven bread.

At first Major Buford rebelled at the thought of innkeeping. His

family had kept open house before the war, and he came from a land

where the thoughts of hospitality and of price were not to be mentioned

in the same day. Yet all about him lay the crude conditions of a raw,

new country. At best he could get no product from the land for many

months, and then but a problematical one. He was in a region where

each man did many things, and first that thing which seemed nearest at

hand to be done. It was the common sense of old Aunt Lucy which

discovered the truth of the commercial proposition that what a man will

pay for a given benefit is what he ought to pay. Had Aunt Lucy asked

the cow-punchers even twice her tariff for a pie they would have paid

it gladly. Had Mary Ellen asked them for their spurs and saddles, the

latter would have been laid down.

From the Halfway House south to the Red River there was nothing edible.

And over this Red River there came now swarming uncounted thousands of

broad-horned cattle, driven by many bodies of hardy, sunburned,

beweaponed, hungry men. At Ellisville, now rapidly becoming an

important cattle market, the hotel accommodations were more pretentious

than comfortable, and many a cowman who had sat at the board of the

Halfway House going up the trail, would mount his horse and ride back

daily twenty-five miles for dinner. Such are the attractions of corn

bread and chicken when prepared by the hands of a real genius gone

astray on this much-miscooked world.

Many other guests were among those "locators," who came out to

Ellisville and drove to the south in search of "claims." These usually

travelled over the route of Sam, the stage-driver, who carried the mail

to Plum Centre during its life, and who never failed to sound the

praises of the Halfway House. Thus the little Southern family quickly

found itself possessed of a definite, profitable, and growing business.

Buford was soon able to employ aid in making his improvements. He

constructed a large dugout, after the fashion of the dwelling most

common in the country at that time, This manner of dwelling,

practically a roofed-over cellar, its side-walls showing but a few feet

above the level of the earth, had been discovered to be a very

practical and comfortable form of living place by those settlers who

found a region practically barren of timber, and as yet unsupplied with

brick or boards. In addition to the main dugout there was a rude barn

built of sods, and towering high above the squat buildings rose the

frame of the first windmill on the cattle trail, a landmark for many

miles. Seeing these things growing up about him, at the suggestion and

partly through the aid of his widely scattered but kind-hearted

neighbours, Major Buford began to take on heart of grace. He foresaw

for his people an independence, rude and far below their former plane

of life, it was true, yet infinitely better than a proud despair.

It was perhaps the women who suffered most in the transition from older

lands to this new, wild region. The barren and monotonous prospect,

the high-keyed air and the perpetual winds, thinned and wore out the

fragile form of Mrs. Buford. This impetuous, nerve-wearing air was

much different from the soft, warm winds of the flower-laden South. At

night as she lay down to sleep she did not hear the tinkle of music nor

the voice of night-singing birds, which in the scenes of her girlhood

had been familiar sounds. The moan of the wind in the short, hard

grass was different from its whisper in the peach trees, and the

shrilling of the coyotes made but rude substitute for the trill of the

love-bursting mocking bird that sang its myriad song far back in old

Virginia.

Aunt Lucy's soliloquizing songs, when she ceased the hymns of her

fervid Methodism, turned always to that far-off, gentle land where life

had been so free from anxiety or care. Of Dixie, of the Potomac, of

old Kentucky, of the "Mississip'," of the land of Tennessee--a score of

songs of exile would flow unconscious from her lips, until at last,

bethinking to herself, she would fall to weeping, covering her face

with her apron and refusing to be comforted by any hand but that of

Mary Ellen, the "young Miss Beecham," whose fortunes she had followed

to the end of the world.

Sometimes at night Mrs. Buford and her niece sang together the songs of

the old South, Mary Ellen furnishing accompaniment with her guitar.

They sang together, here beneath the surface of this sweeping sea of

land, out over which the red eye of their home looked wonderingly. And

sometimes Mary Ellen sang to her guitar alone, too often songs which

carried her back to a morbid, mental state, from which not even the

high voice of this glad, new land could challenge her. Very far away

to her seemed even the graves of Louisburg. Father, mother, brothers,

lover, every kin of earth nearest to her, had not death claimed them

all? What was there left, what was there to be hoped here, cast away

on this sea of land, this country that could never be a land of homes?

Sad doctrine, this, for a young woman in her early twenties, five feet

five, with the peach on her cheek in spite of the burning wind, and

hands that reached out for every little ailing chicken, for every

kitten, or puppy that wanted comforting.

But when the morning came and the sun rose, and the blue sky smiled,

and all the earth seemed to be vibrant with some high-keyed summoning

note--how difficult then it was to be sad! How far away indeed seemed

the once-familiar scenes! How hard it was not to hope, here in this

land of self-reliance and belief! It was the horror of Mary Ellen's

soul that when this sun shone she could not be sad. This land, this

crude, forbidding, fascinating land--what was there about it that swept

her along against her will?

CHAPTER XXI

THE ADVICE OF AUNT LUCY

One day Aunt Lucy, missing Quarterly Meeting, and eke bethinking herself

of some of those aches and pains of body and forebodings of mind with

which the negro is never unprovided, became mournful in her melody, and

went to bed sighing and disconsolate. Mary Ellen heard her voice

uplifted long and urgently, and suspecting the cause, at length went to

her door.

"What is it, Aunt Lucy?" she asked kindly.

"Nothin', mam; I jess rasslin' wit ther throne o' Grace er l'il bit. I

don't wan' to 'sturb you-all."

"We don't want to disturb you, either, Aunt Lucy," said Mary Ellen gently.

"Thass hit, Miss Ma'y Ellen, thass _hit_! It ain't fitten fer a ole

nigger 'ooman to be prayin' erroun' whah white folks is. You kain't seem

to let out good an' free; 'n ef I kain't let out good an' free, 'pears

like I don't git no hol' on salvation. We all po' weak sinners, Miss

Ma'y Ellen."

"Yes, I know, Lucy."

"An' does you know, Miss Ma'y Ellen, I sorter gits skeered sometimes, out

yer, fer fear mer supplercashuns ain't goin' take holt o' heaven jess

right. White folks has one way er prayin', but er nigger kain't pray

erlone--no, mam, jess kain't pray erlone."

"I thought you were doing pretty well, Lucy."

"Yass'm, pretty well, but not nothin' like hit useter be back in ole

Vehginny, when 'bout er hunderd niggers git to prayin' all to onct.

Thass whut goin' to fotch the powah on er suffrin' human soul--yes, ma'm!"

"Now, Aunt Lucy," said Mary Ellen sagely, "there isn't anything wrong

with your soul at all. You're as good an old thing as ever breathed, I'm

sure of that, and the Lord will reward you if he ever does any one, white

or black."

"Does you think that, honey?"

"Indeed I do."

"Well, sometimes I thinks the Lord ain' goin' to fergive me fer all ther

devilment I done when I was l'il. You know, Miss Ma'y Ellen, hit take a

life er prayer to wipe out ouah transgresshuns. Now, how kin I pray, not

to say _pray_, out yer, in this yer lan'? They ain't a chu'ch in a

hunderd mile o' yer, so fer's I kin tell, an' they shoh'ly ain't no

chu'ch fer cullud folks. Law me, Miss Ma'y Ellen, they ain't ary nother

nigger out yer nowheres, an' you don' know how lonesome I does git!

Seems to me like, ef I c'd jess know er sengle nigger, so'st we c'd meet

onct in er while, an' so'st we c'd jess kneel down togetheh an' pray

comfer'ble like, same's ef 'twus back in ole Vehginny--why, Miss Ma'y

Ellen, I'd be the happiest ole 'ooman ever you did see. Mighty bad sort

o' feelin', when a pusson ain't right shore 'bout they soul. An' when I

has to pray erlone, I kain't never be right shore!"

Mary Ellen rose and went to her room, returning with her guitar. She

seated herself upon the side of the bed near Aunt Lucy--an act which

would have been impossible of belief back in old Virginia--and touched a

few low chords. "Listen, Aunt Lucy," she said; "I will play and you may

sing. That will make you feel better, I think."

It was only from a perfect understanding of the negro character that this

proposal could come, and only a perfect dignity could carry it out with

grace; yet there, beneath the floor of the wide prairie sea, these

strange exercises were carried on, the low throbbing of the strings

according with the quavering minors of the old-time hymns, until Aunt

Lucy wiped her eyes and smiled.

"Thank yer. Miss Ma'y' Ellen," she said; "thank yer a thousand times.

You shoh'ly does know how toe comfort folks mighty well, even a pore ole

nigger. Law bless yer, honey, whut c'd I do without yer, me out yer all

erlone? Seems like the Lord done gone 'way fur off, 'n I kain't fotch

him noways; but when white folks like Miss Ma'y Ellen Beecham come set

down right side o' me an' sing wif me, den I know ther Lord, he standin'

by listenin'. Yas'm, he shoh'ly goin' to incline his eah!"

Women are women. There is no synonym. Women, white and white, black and

black, or, if need be, white and black, have sympathies and

understandings and revealings which they never carry to the opposite sex.

It is likely that no man ever explored the last intricacy of that sweet

and wondrous maze, a woman's heart; yet the woman who marries, and who

has with her a husband, sets herself for the time outside the circle of

all other husbandless women who may be about her. Thus it was

that--without any loss of self-respect upon the one side, or any

forgetfulness upon the other of that immovable line between black and

white which had been part of the immemorial creed of both--Mary Ellen and

Aunt Lucy, being companionless, sometimes drifted together in the way of

things.

On the morning following Aunt Lucy's devotional exercises that good soul

seemed to be altogether happy and contented, and without any doubts as to

her future welfare. She busied herself with the preparation of the food

for the chickens, meantime half unconsciously humming a song in

reminiscent minor. "Custard pie--custard pie," she sang, softly, yet

unctuously, as she stirred and mingled the materials before her; "custard

pie--_custard_ pie. Hope ter eat hit twell I die--twell I die."

Mary Ellen was out in the open air, bonnetless and all a-blow. It was a

glorious, sunny day, the air charged with some essence of vital stimulus.

Tall and shapely, radiant, not yet twenty-three years of age, and

mistress of earth's best blessing, perfect health--how could Mary Ellen

be sad? All the earth and sky, and the little twittering ground birds,

and the bustling fowls, forbade it. The very stir of life was

everywhere. She walked, but trod as steps the wild deer, lightly, with

confidence, high-headed.

"Chick-chick-chick-chickee!" called Mary Ellen, bending over the fence of

the chicken yard, and noting with pleasure the hurrying, clacking throng

of fowls that answered and swarmed about her. "Chick, chick, chick!"

"I'll be thah t'reckly wif ther feed, Miss Ma'y Ellen," called out Aunt

Lucy from the kitchen. And presently she emerged and joined her mistress

at the corral.

"Aunt Lucy," said Mary Ellen, "do you suppose we could ever raise a

garden?"

"Whut's dat, chile--raise er gyarden? Kain't raise no gyarden out yer,

noways."

"I was just thinking may be we could have a garden, just a little one,

next year."

"Hit don' never rain ernuf, chile, in this yer country."

"I know, but couldn't we use the water from the well? The windmill is

always pumping it up, and it only runs to waste. I was thinking, if we

had a few peas, or beans, or things like that, you know--"

"Uh-huh!"

"And do you suppose a rose bush would grow--a real rose bush, over by the

side of the house?"

"Law, no, chile, whut you talkin' 'bout? Nothin' hain't goin' to grow

yer, 'less'n hit's a little broom cohn, er some o' that alfalafew, er

that soht er things. Few beans might, ef we wortered 'em. My lan!" with

a sudden interest, as she grasped the thought, "whut could I git fer

right fraish beans, real string beans, I does wondeh! Sakes, ef I c'd

hev string beans an' apple pies, I shoh'ly c'd make er foh'tune, right

quick. Why, they tellin' me, some folks over ontoe that ther Smoky

River, las' fall, they gethered 'bout hate er peck o' sour green

crabapples, an' they trade hate o' them ornery things off fer a beef

critter--'deed they did. String beans--why, law, chile!"

"We'll have to think about this garden question some day," said Mary

Ellen. She leaned against the corral post, looking out over the wide

expanse of the prairie round about. "Are those our antelope out there,

Lucy?" she asked, pointing out with care the few tiny objects, thin and

knifelike, crowned with short black forking tips, which showed up against

the sky line on a distant ridge. "I think they must be. I haven't

noticed them for quite a while."

"Yass'm," said Aunt Lucy, after a judicial look. "Them blame l'il goats.

Thass um. I wish't they all wuzn't so mighty peart an' knowin' all ther

time, so'st Majah Buford he c'd git one o' them now an' then fer to eat.

Antelope tennerline is shoh'ly mighty fine, briled. Now, ef we jess had

a few sweet 'taters. But, law! whut am I sayin'?"

"Yes," said Mary Ellen practically. "We haven't the antelope yet."

"I 'member mighty well how Cap'n Franklin sent us down er quarter o'

an'lope," said Aunt Lucy. "Mighty fine meat, hit wuz. An' to think, me

a brilin' a piece o' hit fer a low-down white trash cow-driver whut come

yer to eat! Him a-sayin' he'd ruther hev chicken, cause he wuz raised on

an'lope! Whut kin' o' talk wuz thet? He talk like an'lope mighty

common. Takes Cap'n Franklin toe git ole Mr. An'lope, though.

"Er--Miss Ma'y Ellen," began Aunt Lucy presently, and apparently with a

certain reservation.

"Yes?"

Aunt Lucy came over and sat down upon a sod heap, resting her chin upon

her hand and looking fixedly at the girl, who still stood leaning against

the post.

"Er--Miss Ma'y Ellen--" she began again.

"Yes. What is it, Lucy?"

"Does you know--?"

"Do I know what?"

"Does you know who's jess erbout ther fines' and likelies' man whut lives

in all these yer pahts erroun' yer?"

Mary Ellen stopped tossing bits of bread to the chickens. "No, Aunt

Lucy," she said. "I hadn't thought about that."

"Yes, you has!" cried Aunt Lucy, rising and shaking a bodeful forefinger.

"Yes you _has_, an' yes you _does_! An' you don' 'preshuate him, thass

whut. Him a wushshippin' you!"

Mary Ellen began tossing bread again. "How do you know that?" she asked.

"How does I know?--law me, jes listen to thet chile! How does I know?

Ain' he done tole me, an' yo' an' Lizzie, an' Majah Buford--an' _you_?

Ain' he done tole you a dozen times? Don' everybody know hit? Him ez

fine er man you goin' toe see right soon, I tell you. Tall ez yo' fatheh

wuz, an' strong ez er li'ne. He kin git ole Mr. An'lope. He kin ride

ary beastis in this yer onery country. An' him a-wukkin' for ther

railroad, an' a lawyeh, an' all that. He's shoh' boun' toe be rich, one

o' these yer days. An' he's a gemman, too, mo'oveh; he's a gemman!

Reckon I knows quality! Yas, sir, Cap'n Franklin, she shoh'ly am the

bestes' man fer a real lady to choosen--bestes' in all this yer lan'.

Uh-huh!"

"I never thought of him--not in that way," said Mary Ellen, not quite

able to put an end to this conversation.

"Miss Ma'y Ellen," said Aunt Lucy solemnly, "I'se wukked fer you an' yo'

fam'ly all my life, an' I hates to say ary woh'd what ain't fitten. But

I gotto to tell you, you ain' tellin' the _trufe_ to me, toe yo' old

black mammy, right now. I tells you, an' I knows it, tha' hain't nary

gal on earth ever done look at _no_ man, I don't care who he wuz, 'thout

thinkin' 'bout him, an' 'cidin' in her min', one way er otheh whetheh she

like fer to mah'y that ther man er not! If er 'ooman say she do

different f'om thet, she shoh'ly fergettin' o' the trufe, thass all!

Ain' thought o' him! Go 'long!" Aunt Lucy wiped her hand upon her apron

violently in the vehemence of her incredulity.

Mary Ellen's face sobered with a trace of the old melancholy.

"Aunt Lucy," she said, "you mean kindly, I am sure, but you must not talk

to me of these things. Don't you remember the old days back home? Can

you forget Master Henry, Aunt Lucy--can you forget the days--those

days--?"

Aunt Lucy rose and went over to Mary Ellen and took her hand between her

own great black ones. "No, I doesn't fergit nothin', Miss Ma'y Ellen,"

she said, wiping the girl's eyes as though she were still a baby. "I

doesn't fergit Mas' Henry, Gord bless him! I doesn't fergit him any mo'n

you does. How kin I, when I done loved him much ez I did you? Wuzn't I

goin' to come 'long an' live wif you two, an' take keer o' you, same's I

did to the old place? I was a-lookin' to ther time when you an' Mas'

Henry wuz a-goin' ter be mah'ied. But now listen toe yo' ole black

mammy, whut knows a heap mo'n you does, an' who is a-talkin' toe you

because you ain't got no real mammy o' yer own no mo'. You listen toe

me. Now, I done had fo' husban's, me. Two o' them done died, an' one

distapeart in the wah, an' one he turn out no 'count. Now, you s'pose I

kain't love no otheh man?"

Mary Ellen could not restrain a smile, but it did not impinge upon the

earnestness of the other.

"Yas'm, Miss Ma'y Ellen," she continued, again taking the girl's face

between her hands. "Gord, he say, it hain't good fer man toe be erlone.

An' Gord knows, speshul in er lan' like this yer, hit's a heap mo' fitten

fer a man toe be erlone then fer a 'ooman. Some wimmen-folks, they's

made fer grievin', all ther time, fer frettin', an' worr'in', an'

er-mopin' 'roun'. Then, agin, some is made fer _lovin_'--I don' say fer

lovin' mo'n one man to er time; fer ther ain't no good 'ooman ever did

thet. But some is made fer _lovin_'. They sech er heap o' no 'count

folks in ther worl', hit do seem like a shame when one o' them sort don'

love nobody, an' won't let nobody love them!"

Mary Ellen was silent. She could not quite say the word to stop the old

servant's garrulity, and the latter went on.

"Whut I does say, Miss Ma'y Ellen," she resumed, earnestly looking into

the girl's face as though to carry conviction with her speech--"whut I

does say, an' I says hit fer yo' own good, is this; Mas' Henry, he's

daid! He's daid an' buh'ied, an' flowehs growin' oveh his grave, yeahs

'n yeahs. An' you never wuz mahied toe him. An' you _wan't_ nothin' but

a gal. Chile, you don't know nothin' '_bout_ lovin' yit. Now, I says

toe you, whut's ther use? Thass hit, Miss Ma'y Ellen, whut's ther use?"

CHAPTER XXII

EN VOYAGE

"I wish, Sam," said Franklin one morning as he stopped at the door of

the livery barn--"I wish that you would get me up a good team. I'm

thinking of driving over south a little way to-day."

"All right, Cap," said Sam. "I reckon we can fix you up. How far you

goin'?"

"Well, about twenty-five or thirty miles, perhaps."

"Which will bring you," said Sam meditatively, "just about to the

Halfway House. Seein' it's about there you'll be stopping I reckon I

better give you my new buggy. I sort of keep it, you know, for special

'casions."

Franklin was too much absorbed to really comprehend this delicate

attention, even when Sam rolled out the carriage of state, lovingly

dusting off the spokes and with ostentation spreading out the new lap

robe. But finally he became conscious of Sam, standing with one foot

on the hub of a wheel, chewing a straw, and with a certain mental

perturbation manifest in his countenance.

"Cap," said he, "I know just how you feel."

"What's that?" said Franklin.

"Well, I mean, I allow me and you is pretty much in the same boat."

"Eh?" said Franklin, puzzled.

"Why, both us fellers is fixed about the same."

"I'm afraid I don't quite understand you."

"Well, now, er--that is, you know, we both got a girl, you know--I

mean, we each has a girl--"

Franklin's face was not inviting, which fact Sam noticed, hastening

with his apology.

"Oh, no offence, Cap," said he hurriedly, "but I was just a-thinkin'.

You know that Nory girl over to the hotel. Well, now, I'm gone on that

girl, the worst sort o' way. Honest, Cap, I ain't happy. I used ter

eat an' sleep 'thout no sort of trouble, but now I'm all used up. I

ain't right. An' it's Nory."

"Why don't you marry her?" asked Franklin calmly.

Sam gasped. "I--I--that's it, that's just it! I--can't ast her!" he

said, with despair and conviction in his voice. "I've tried, and I

can't say a word to her about it, nothin' more than mebbe to ast her to

pass me the butter. She don't seem to understand."

"Well, what do you expect? Do you think she is going to ask you about

it herself?"

"My God, Cap, I don't know! I ever she did, I know mighty well what

I'd say. But she won't, and I can't. And there we are. I lose my

nerve every time I try to speak to her. Now, I say this to you, man to

man, you know, and no one the wiser; I can talk to anybody else about

this, to anybody but just Nory. Now, you've been goin' down to this

here Halfway House a-plenty for a long time, and I don't know as you

seem much furder along 'an I am. So I allowed maybe you was hooked up

a good deal the way I be. You go down there, an' set down and eat, an'

you set around like, but can't seem to make no break--you don't dast to

say what you want to say. Is that so?"

Franklin flushed, his first impulse being of distinct displeasure; yet

he recognised the perfect good faith of the other's remarks and turned

away without reply.

"An' what I was goin' to say," continued Sam, following after him, "is

like this. Now, you ain't afraid of Nory, an' I ain't afraid of Miss

Beecham. Turn about's fair play. I'll speak to Miss Beecham for you,

if you'll just sort o' lay this here before Nory for me. You needn't

say much, understand! If I ever onct get started, you know, I'll be

all right. I could tell her all about it then, easy enough. Now, say,

Cap, six of one and half a dozen of the other. Is it a go?"

Franklin could not keep back a smile. "Well, in regard to my half of

it," he said, "I can neither affirm nor deny it. But if what you say

were true, don't you think you might find it pretty hard to talk to

Miss Beauchamp on this matter?"

"Not in a hundred!" said Sam eagerly. "I'd just as soon talk to Miss

Beecham as not. I'd ruther. They ain't no feller around here that I

think's any whiter than you be. An' Lord knows, that girl down there

is handsome as ever looked through a bridle, and kind as she is

handsome. I've seen her now, reg'lar, in my trips down there for quite

a while, an' I promise you, she's a thoroughbred, an' high strung, but

as even gaited as ever stepped. Yes, sir!"

"She is all that, I think, Sam," said Franklin soberly.

"Then it's a go, Cap?"

"Well, I'll tell you, Sam," said Franklin kindly, "maybe we'd better

let it run along a little while as it is. You know, girls have odd

notions of their own. Perhaps a girl would rather have a man speak for

himself about that sort of thing. And then, the asking sometimes is

the easiest part of it."

"Then you'll ast Nory for me?"

"Well, if I could say a word, just a hint, you know--"

"You won't!" exclaimed Sam bitterly, and in tones; of conviction. "You

won't! There ain't nobody won't! I've tried, an' there won't nobody!

There'll be some d----d cow-puncher blow in there some day and marry

that Nory girl, an' I never will git to tell her the way I feel."

"Oh, yes, you will," said Franklin. "It'll come to you some time; and

when it does, friend," he added gravely, laying a hand upon Sam's

shoulder, "I hope she'll not say no to you forever."

"Forever, Cap?"

"Yes, it sometimes happens that way."

"Forever? Well, if Nory ever said no to me onct, that shore would

settle it. I know what I'd do: I'd sell out my barn an' I'd hit the

trail mighty quick. Do they ever do that way, Cap?"

"Yes," said Franklin, "they tell me that they sometimes do. They're

strange creatures, Sam."

"An' that's no lie!" said Sam. "But here, I'm forgettin' of your span."

He disappeared within the barn, whence presently arose sounds of

tumult. The "span" emerged with one half of its constituent parts

walking on its hind legs and lashing out viciously in front.

"Well, I don't know about that black," said Franklin critically. "He's

a bit bronco, isn't he?"

"What, him?" said Sam. "Naw, he's all right. You don't suppose I'd

run in any wild stock on you, do you? He's been hitched up sever'l

times, an' he's plumb gentle. May rare up a little at first, but he's

all right. Of course, you want to have a little style about you, goin'

down there."

Franklin got into the buggy, while Sam held the head of the "plumb

gentle" horse. When cast loose the latter reared again and came down

with his fore feet over the neck yoke. Nimbly recovering, he made a

gallant attempt to kick in the dashboard. This stirred up his mate to

a thought of former days, and the two went away pawing and plunging.

"So long!" cried Sam, waving his hand. "Good luck!"

Franklin was for a time busy in keeping his team upon the trail, but

soon they settled down into a steady, shuffling trot, to which they

held for mile after mile over the hard prairie road. The day was

bright and clear, the air sweet and bracing. An hour's drive from the

town, and the traveller seemed in a virgin world. A curious coyote sat

on a hill, regarding intently the spectacle of a man travelling with

wheels beneath him, instead of the legs of a horse. A band of antelope

lined up on the crest of a ridge and stood staring steadfastly. A

gray-winged hawk swept wide and easily along the surface of the earth

on its morning hunting trip. Near by the trail hundreds of cheerful

prairie dogs barked and jerked their ceaseless salutation. An ancient

and untroubled scheme of life lay all around him, appealing in its

freshness and its charm. Why should a man, a tall and strong man, with

health upon his cheek, sit here with brooding and downcast eye,

heedless of the miles slipping behind him like a ribbon spun beneath

the wheels?

Franklin was learning how fast bound are all the ways of life to the

one old changeless way. This new land, which he and his fellow-men

coveted, why was it so desired? Only that over it, as over all the

world behind it, there might be builded homes. For, as he reflected,

the adventurers of the earth had always been also the home-builders;

and there followed for him the bitter personal corollary that all his

adventure was come to naught if there could be no home as its ultimate

reward. His vague eye swam over the wide, gray sea about him, and to

himself he seemed adrift, unanchored and with no chart of life.

CHAPTER XXIII

MARY ELLEN

Lifting and shimmering mysteriously in the midday sun, as though

tantalizing any chance traveller of that wide land with a prospect

alluring, yet impossible, the buildings of the Halfway station now

loomed large and dark, now sank until they seemed a few broken dots and

dashes just visible upon the wide gray plain. Yet soon the tall frame

of the windmill showed high above the earth, most notable landmark for

many a mile, and finally the ragged arms of the corral posts appeared

definitely, and then the low peak of the roof of the main building.

For miles these seemed to grow no closer, but the steady trot of the

little horses ate up the distance, and Franklin found himself again at

the spot with which he was already so well acquainted that every

detail, every low building and gnarled bit of wood, was tabulated

surely in his mind. The creak of the windmill presently came to his

ears as a familiar sound, but rasping and irritating on his strong

nerves as the croak of the elder Fate.

Franklin drove up to the great dugout which made the main building, in

front of which the soil had been worn bare and dusty by many hoofs.

The Halfway House was now a business enterprise of assured success.

Many signs of prosperity appeared to the eye accustomed to the crude

simplicity of the frontier. These immigrants from the far-off South,

incongruous and unfitted as they had seemed in this harsh new country,

had apparently blundered into a material success far beyond that of

their average neighbour. The first years, the hardest ones of their

struggle, were past, and the problem of existence was solved. In those

days one did not always concern himself about problems more intricate

and more distant.

Buford met him in the yard, and the two together busied themselves in

taking care of the team, the former apologizing that he still had no

servant for such work, "I did have a nigger here for a while," he said,

"but he turned out no account, and the first I knew he went off for a

cow-puncher down the trail. I'm mighty glad to see you again, captain,

for it looked as though you had forsaken us. It certainly is a comfort

to see a gentleman like yourself once in a while. We meet plenty of

cowmen and movers, decent folk enough, but they have a lack, sir, they

have a lack. I maintain, sir, that no gentleman can flourish without

that intelligent social intercourse with his kind which is as much a

part of his livin', sir, as the eatin' of his daily bread. Now, as I

was sayin' about General Lee, sir--but perhaps we would better go in

and join the ladies. They will be glad to see you, and later on we can

resume our discussion of the war. I am willing to admit, sir, that the

war is over, but I never did admit, and, sir, I contend yet, that Lee

was the greatest general that the world ever saw--far greater than

Grant, who was in command of resources infinitely superior. Now,

then--"

"Oh, uncle, uncle!" cried a voice behind him. "Have you begun the war

over again so soon? You might at least let Mr. Franklin get into the

house."

Mary Ellen stood at the door of the dugout, just clear of the front,

and upon the second step of the stair, and her hand half shading her

eyes. The sun fell upon her brown hair, changing its chestnut to a

ruddy bronze, vital and warm, with a look as though it breathed a

fragrance of its own. A little vagrant lock blew down at the temple,

and Franklin yearned, as he always did when he saw this small truant,

to stroke it back into its place. The sun and the open air had kissed

pink into the cheek underneath the healthy brown. The curve of the

girl's chin was full and firm. Her tall figure had all the grace of a

normal being. Her face, sweet and serious, showed the symmetry of

perfect and well-balanced faculties. She stood, as natural and as

beautiful, as fit and seemly as the antelope upon the hill, as well

poised and sure, her head as high and free, her hold upon life

apparently as confident. The vision of her standing there caused

Franklin to thrill and flush. Unconsciously he drew near to her, too

absorbed to notice the one visible token of a possible success; for, as

he approached, hat in hand, the girl drew back as though she feared.

There was something not easily to be denied in this tall man, his

figure still military in its self-respect of carriage, with the broad

shoulders, the compact trunk, the hard jaw, and the straight blue eye

of the man of deeds. The loose Western dress, which so illy became any

but a manly figure, sat carelessly but well upon him. He looked so fit

and manly, so clean of heart, and so direct of purpose as he came on

now in this forlorn hope that Mary Ellen felt a shiver of

self-distrust. She stepped back, calling on all the familiar spirits

of the past. Her heart stopped, resuming at double speed. It seemed

as though a thrill of tingling warmth came from somewhere in the

air--this time, this day, this hour, this man, so imperative, this new

land, this new world into which she had come from that of her earlier

years! She was yet so young! Could there be something unknown, some

sweetness yet unsounded? Could there be that rest and content which,

strive as she might, were still missing from her life? Could there be

this--and honour?

Mary Ellen fled, and in her room sat down, staring in a sudden panic.

She needed to search out a certain faded picture. It was almost with a

sob that she noted the thin shoulders, the unformed jaw, the eye

betokening pride rather than vigour, the brow indicative of petulance

as much as sternness. Mary Ellen laid the picture to her cheek, saying

again and again that she loved it still. Poor girl, she did not yet

know that this was but the maternal love of a woman's heart, pitying,

tender and remembering, to be sure, but not that love over which the

morning stars sang together at the beginning of the world.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE WAY OF A MAID

The Halfway House was an oasis in the desert. To-day it was an oasis

and a battle ground. Franklin watched Mary Ellen as she passed quietly

about the long, low room, engaged in household duties which she

performed deftly as any servant. He compared these rude necessities

with the associations amid which he knew this girl had been nurtured,

and the thought gave him nothing but dissatisfaction and rebellion. He

longed to give her all the aid of his own strength, and to place her

again, as he felt he some day might, in something of the old ease and

comfort, if not in the same surroundings. Yet, as he bethought himself

of the apparent hopelessness of all this, he set his teeth in a mental

protest near akin to anger. He shifted in his seat and choked in his

throat a sound that was half a groan. Presently he rose, and excusing

himself, went out to join Buford at the corral.

"Come," said the latter, "and I'll show you around over our

improvements while we are waitin' for a bite to eat. We are goin' to

have a great place here some day. Besides our own land, Miss Beauchamp

and our servant have a quarter-section each adjoinin' us on the west.

If ever this land comes to be worth anything at all, we ought to grow

into something worth while."

"Yes," said Franklin, "it will make you rich," and as they walked about

he pointed out with Western enthusiasm the merits of the country

round-about.

The "bite to eat" was in time duly announced by a loud, sonorous note

that arose swelling upon the air. Aunt Lucy appeared at the kitchen

door, her fat cheeks distended, blowing a conch as though this were

Tidewater over again.

The long table was spread in the large room of general assembly, this

room being, as has been mentioned, excavated from the earth, so that,

as they sat at table, their heads were perhaps nearly level with the

surface of the ground. The short side walls, topped with a heavy

earthen roof made of this sort of abode a domicile rude and clumsy

enough, but one not lacking in a certain comfort. In the winter it was

naturally warm, and in the summer it was cool, the air, caught at

either end by the gable of the roof, passing through and affording

freshness to the somewhat cellar-like interior. Cut off from the main

room were three smaller rooms, including the kitchen, from which Aunt

Lucy passed back and forth with massive tread. The table was no

polished mahogany, but was built of rough pine boards, and along it

stood long benches instead of chairs. For her "white folks" Aunt Lucy

spread a cloth at one end of this long table, placing also in order the

few pieces of china and silver that had survived a life of vicissitudes.

"I may be poor," said Buford, commenting grimly on the rude appearance

of the board, "and I reckon we always will be poor, but when the time

comes that I can't have a silver spoon in my coffee, then I want to

die."

"Major!" said Mrs. Buford reprovingly from the head of the table, where

she sat in state, "I do not like to hear you speak in that way. We are

in the hands of the Lord."

"Quite right," said Buford, "and I beg pardon. But, really, this

country does bring some changes, and we ourselves surely change with

it. No one seems to think of the past out here."

"Don' you b'lieve I don' never think o' the past!" broke in a deep and

uninvited voice, much to Mrs. Buford's disquietude. "This yer sho'hly

is a lan' o' Sodom an' Tomorrow. Dey ain't a sengle fiahplace in the

hull country roun' yer. When I sells mer lan' fer a hundred dollahs,

fust thing I'm a-goin' do is to build me a fiahplace an' git me er nice

big settle to putt in front o' hit, so'st I kin set mer bread to raise

befo' the fiah, like all bread orter be sot. How kin a pusson cook out

yet--not to say, _cook_?"

"That will do, Lucy," said Mrs. Buford.

"We are demoralized," said Mary Ellen hopelessly, "and I resent it. I

resent your knowing us or knowing anything about our lives. If you had

never heard anything at all about us it mightn't have been so bad. We

came out here to get away from every one."

Franklin bit his lip. "Mary Ellen, my child!" cried Mrs. Buford.

"That's hardly fair," said Franklin. "We are all beginners in this

land." Yet there was an awkward break in the conversation.

"Providence guides all our ways," said Mrs. Buford, somewhat

irrelevantly, and with her customary sigh.

"Amen!" cried a hearty voice from the kitchen. "'Scuse meh!"

"You will oblige me, captain," said Buford as they finally rose from

the table, "if you will be so good as to drive Miss Beauchamp over to

the claim shanty after a while. I'll just ride along over on

horseback. I don't like to put a guest to work, but really I need a

little help about that roof. It has fallen in at one corner, and I

presume it ought to be repaired, for the sake of Miss Beauchamp's

conscience when she goes to the Land Office to prove up."

Franklin assented to this proposition with such eagerness that he

blushed as he saw how evident had been his pleasure at this opportunity

for a moment's speech alone with the girl who sat so near but yet so

unapproachable. "I'll be delighted," said he.

Mary Ellen said nothing. The pink spot in her cheek was plainly

deeper. It did not lessen as she stood watching the struggle the two

men had in again hitching to the buggy the wild black horse. Seizing

the tug with one hand and the singletree with the other, Franklin

fairly swept the obdurate beast off its balance as he forced it to its

place at the pole. His strength was apparent.

"Are you afraid to ride behind that horse?" asked he.

"I don't think so," she replied simply, and her uncle helped her in,

while Franklin steadied the team. Yet how Franklin hated the wild

black horse now! All the way across the prairie during the short drive

to the shanty the beast gave him plenty to do to keep it inside the

harness, and he had no time for a single word. The girl sat silent at

his side, looking straight ahead. Franklin felt her arm brush his at

the jolting of the vehicle now and then. Her hand, brown and shapely,

lay in her lap. As Franklin gathered the slack of the reins, his own

hand approaching hers, it seemed to him that an actual emanation, a

subtle warmth, stole from her hand to his, an unspoken appeal from some

vital source. A vague, delicious sense of happiness came over him. He

too fell quite silent. He guided the horses as though he saw neither

them nor aught else between him and some far-off horizon. At the

shanty he helped her down. Ignorant, he saw not the tale of a bosom

heaving, nor read correctly the story of the pink in the cheek. He

believed rather the import of a face turned away, and of features set

in a mask of repose. There had as yet been no word.

The claim shanty was indeed in some need of repair. One corner of the

roof had fallen in, carrying with it a portion of the sod wall that

made the inclosure, and spilling a quantity of earth in the bed

customarily occupied by Aunt Lucy when she "resided" here in company

with her mistress in their innocent process of acquiring one hundred

and sixty acres of land apiece by means of a double dwelling place.

Upon the opposite side, protected by a screen, Franklin caught sight of

a corner of the other bed. There were also upon that side of the shack

a little table, a chair, and a dainty looking-glass, with a few other

such feminine appurtenances. Two wash-stands, with basins, went far

toward completing the remaining furniture. It must be admitted that

there was dust upon the table and in the basins. The housekeeper in

Mary Ellen apologized as she began to clean them. "We don't sleep here

very often," she said.

"And aren't you afraid?" said Franklin.

"Not now. We used to be afraid of the coyotes, though, of course, they

can't hurt us. Once uncle killed a rattlesnake in the shanty. It had

crawled in at the door. I don't think, though, that you could get Lucy

to sleep here alone overnight for all the land out of doors."

In order to make the needed repairs to the roof, it was necessary to

lay up again a part of the broken wall, then to hoist the fallen

rafters into place prior to covering the whole again with a deep layer

of earth. Franklin, standing upon a chair, put his shoulders under the

sagging beams and lifted them and their load of disarranged earth up to

the proper level on the top of the wall, while Buford built under them

with sods. It was no small weight that he upheld. As he stood he

caught an upturned telltale glance, a look of sheer feminine admiration

for strength, but of this he could not be sure, for it passed fleetly

as it came. He saw only the look of unconcern and heard only the

conventional word of thanks.

"Now, then, captain," said Buford, "I reckon we can call this shack as

good as new again. It ought to last out what little time it will be

needed. We might go back to the house now. Mightily obliged to you,

sir, for the help."

As Mary Ellen stepped into the buggy for the return home her face had

lost its pink. One of the mysterious revulsions of femininity had set

in. Suddenly, it seemed to her, she had caught herself upon the brink

of disaster. It seemed to her that all her will was going, that in

spite of herself she was tottering on toward some fascinating thing

which meant her harm. This tall and manly man, she must not yield to

this impulse to listen to him! She must not succumb to this wild

temptation to put her head upon a broad shoulder and to let it lie

there while she wept and rested. To her the temptation meant a

personal shame. She resisted it with all her strength. The struggle

left her pale and very calm. At last the way of duty was clear. This

day should settle it once for all. There must be no renewal of this

man's suit. He must go.

It was Mary Ellen's wish to be driven quickly to the house, but she

reckoned without the man. With a sudden crunching of the wheels the

buggy turned and spun swiftly on, headed directly away from home.

"I'll just take you a turn around the hill," said Franklin, "and then

we'll go in."

The "hill" was merely a swell of land, broken on its farther side by a

series of _coulees_ that headed up to the edge of the eminence. These

deep wash-cuts dropped off toward the level of the little depression

known as the Sinks of the White Woman River, offering a sharp drop, cut

up by alternate knifelike ridges and deep gullies.

"It isn't the way home," said Mary Ellen.

"I can't help it," said Franklin. "You are my prisoner. I am going to

take you--to the end of the world."

"It's very noble of you to take me this way!" said the girl with scorn.

"What will my people think?"

"Let them think!" exclaimed Franklin desperately. "It's my only

chance. Let them think I am offering you myself once more--my

love--all of me, and that I mean it now a thousand times more than I

ever did before. I can't do without you! It's right for us both. You

deserve a better life than this. You, a Beauchamp, of the old Virginia

Beauchamps--good God! It breaks my heart!"

"You have answered yourself, sir," said Mary Ellen, her voice not

steady as she wished.

"You mean--"

"I am a Beauchamp, of the old Virginia Beauchamps. I live out here on

the prairies, far from home, but I am a Beauchamp of old Virginia."

"And then?"

"And the Beauchamps kept their promises, women and men--they always

kept them. They always will. While there is one of them left alive,

man or woman, that one will keep the Beauchamp promise, whatever that

has been."

"I know," said Franklin gently, "I would rely on your word forever. I

would risk my life and my honour in your hands. I would believe in you

all my life. Can't you do as much for me? There is no stain on my

name. I will love you till the end of the world. Child--you don't

know--"

"I know this, and you have heard me say it before, Mr. Franklin; my

promise was given long ago. You tell me that you can never love any

one else."

"How could I, having seen you? I will never degrade your memory by

loving any one else. You may at least rely on that."

"Would you expect me ever to love any one else if I had promised to

love you?"

"You would not. You would keep your promise. I should trust you with

my life."

"Ah, then, you have your answer! You expect me to keep my promises to

you, but to no one else. Is that the honourable thing? Now, listen to

me, Mr. Franklin. I shall keep my promise as a Beauchamp should--as a

Beauchamp shall. I have told you long ago what that promise was. I

promised to love, to marry him--Mr. Henry Fairfax--years ago. I

promised never to love any one else so long as I lived. He--he's

keeping his promise now--back there--in old Virginia, now. How would I

be keeping mine--how am I keeping mine, now, even listening to you so

long? Take me back; take me home. I'm going to--going to keep my

promise, sir! I'm going to keep it!"

Franklin's heart stood cold. "You're going to keep your promise," he

said slowly and coldly. "You're going to keep a girl's promise, from

which death released you years ago--released you honourably. You were

too young then to know what you were doing---you didn't know what love

could mean--yet you are released from that promise. And now, for the

sake of a mere sentiment, you are going to ruin my life for me, and

you're going to ruin your own life, throw it away, all alone out here,

with nothing about you such as you ought to have. And you call that

honour?"

"Well, then, call it choice!" said Mary Ellen, with what she took to be

a noble lie upon her lips. "It is ended!"

Franklin sat cold and dumb at this, all the world seeming to him to

have gone quite blank. He could not at first grasp this sentence in

its full effect, it meant so much to him. He shivered, and a sigh

broke from him as from one hurt deep and knowing that his hurt is

fatal. Yet, after his fashion, he fought mute, struggling for some

time before he dared trust his voice or his emotions.

"Very well," he said. "I'll not crawl--not for any woman on earth!

It's over. I'm sorry. Dear little woman, I wanted to be your friend.

I wanted to take care of you. I wanted to love you and to see if I

couldn't make a future for us both."

"My future is done. Leave me. Find some one else to love."

"Thank you. You do indeed value me very high!" he replied, setting his

jaws hard together.

"They tell me men love the nearest woman always. I was the only

one--"

"Yes, you were the only one," said Franklin slowly, "and you always

will be the only one. Good-bye."

It seemed to him he heard a breath, a whisper, a soft word that said

"good-bye." It had a tenderness that set a lump in his throat, but it

was followed almost at once with a calmer commonplace.

"We must go back," said Mary Ellen. "It is growing dark."

Franklin wheeled the team sharply about toward the house, which was

indeed becoming indistinct in the falling twilight. As the vehicle

turned about, the crunching of the wheels started a great gray prairie

owl, which rose almost beneath the horses' noses and flapped slowly

off. The apparition set the wild black horse into a sudden simulation

of terror, as though he had never before seen an owl upon the prairies.

Rearing and plunging, he tore loose the hook of one of the

single-trees, and in a flash stood half free, at right angles now to

the vehicle instead of at its front, and struggling to break loose from

the neck-yoke. At the moment they were crossing just along the head of

one of the _coulees_, and the struggles of the horse, which was upon

the side next to the gully, rapidly dragged his mate down also. In a

flash Franklin saw that he could not get the team back upon the rim,

and knew that he was confronted with an ugly accident. He chose the

only possible course, but handled the situation in the best possible

way. With a sharp cut of the whip he drove the attached horse down

upon the one that was half free, and started the two off at a wild race

down the steep _coulee_, into what seemed sheer blackness and immediate

disaster. The light vehicle bounded up and down and from side to side

as the wheels caught the successive inequalities of the rude descent,

and at every instant it seemed it must surely be overthrown. Yet the

weight of the buggy thrust the pole so strongly forward that it

straightened out the free horse by the neck and forced him onward. In

some way, stumbling and bounding and lurching, both horses and vehicle

kept upright all the way down the steep descent, a thing which to

Franklin later seemed fairly miraculous. At the very foot of the pitch

the black horse fell, the buggy running full upon him as he lay lashing

out. From this confusion, in some way never quite plain to himself,

Franklin caught the girl out in his arms, and the next moment was at

the head of the struggling horses. And so good had been his training

at such matters that it was not without method that he proceeded to

quiet the team and to set again in partial order the wreck that had

been created in the gear. The end of the damaged singletree he

re-enforced with his handkerchief. In time he had the team again in

harness, and at the bottom of the _coulee_, where the ground sloped

easily down into the open valley, whence they might emerge at the lower

level of the prairie round about. He led the team for a distance down

this floor of the _coulee_, until he could see the better going in the

improving light which greeted them as they came out from the gully-like

defile. Cursing his ill fortune, and wretched at the thought of the

danger and discomfort he had brought upon the very one whom he would

most gladly have shielded, Franklin said not a word from the beginning

of the mad dash down the _coulee_ until he got the horses again into

harness. He did not like to admit to his companion how great had been

the actual danger just incurred, though fortunately escaped. The girl

was as silent as himself. She had not uttered a cry during the time of

greatest risk, though once she laid a hand upon his arm. Franklin was

humiliated and ashamed, as a man always is over an accident.

"Oh, it's no good saying I'm sorry," he broke out at last. "It was my

fault, letting you ride behind that brute. Thank God, you're not hurt!

And I'm only too glad it wasn't worse. I'm always doing some

unfortunate, ignoble thing. I want to take care of you and make you

happy, and I would begin by putting your very life in danger."

"It wasn't ignoble," said the girl, and again he felt her hand upon his

arm. "It was grand. You went straight, and you brought us through.

I'm not hurt. I was frightened, but I am not hurt."

"You've pluck," said Franklin. Then, scorning to urge anything further

of his suit at this time of her disadvantage, though feeling a strange

new sense of nearness to her, now that they had seen this distress in

common, he drove home rapidly as he might through the gathering dusk,

anxious now only for her comfort. At the house he lifted her from the

buggy, and as he did so kissed her cheek. "Dear little woman," he

whispered, "good-bye." Again he doubted whether he had heard or not

the soft whisper of a faint "Good-bye!"

"But you must come in," she said.

"No, I must go. Make my excuses," he said. "Good-bye!" The horses

sprang sharply forward. He was gone.