THE COUNTY ATTORNEY
“I too am going to Wind City,” said a pleasant voice at her side. “You
will let me help you with your things, will you not?”
The slender girl standing before the ticket window, stuffing change into
her coin purse, turned quickly.
“Why, Mr. Gordon,” she said, holding out a small hand with frank
pleasure. “How very nice! Thank you, will you take my rain-coat? It has
been such a bother. I would bring it right in the face of Uncle
Hammond’s objections. He said it never rained out this way. But I surely
have suffered a plenty for my waywardness. Don’t you think so?”
“It behooves a tenderfoot like you to sit and diligently learn of such
experienced and toughened old-timers as we are, rather than flaunt your
untried ideas in our faces,” responded Gordon, with a smile that
transformed the keen gray eyes of this man of much labor, much lofty
ambition, and much sorrow, so that they seemed for the moment strangely
young, laughing, untroubled; as clear of taint of evil knowledge as the
source of a stream leaping joyously into the sunlight from some mountain
solitude. It was a revelation to Louise.
“I will try to be a good and diligent seeker after knowledge of this
strange land of yours,” she answered, with a little laugh half of
embarrassment, half of enjoyment of this play of nonsense, and leading
the way to her suit-case and Mary outside. “When I make mistakes, will
you tell me about them? Down East, you know, our feet travel in the
ancient, prescribed circles of our forefathers, and they are apt to go
somewhat uncertainly if thrust into new paths.”
And this laughing, clever girl had cried with homesickness! Well, no
wonder. The worst of it was, she could never hope to be acclimated. She
was not—their kind. Sooner or later she must go back to God’s country.
To her surprise, Gordon, though he laughed softly for a moment, answered
rather gravely.
“If my somewhat niggardly fate should grant me that good fortune, that I
may do something for you, I ask that you be not afraid to trust to my
help. It would not be half-hearted—I assure you.”
She looked up at him gratefully. His shoulders, slightly stooped,
betokening the grind at college and the burden-bearing in later years,
instead of suggesting any inherent weakness in the man, rather inspired
her with an intuitive faith in their quiet, unswerving, utter
trustworthiness.
“Thank you,” she said, simply. “I am so glad they did not hurt you much
that day in the court-room. We worried—Mary and I.”
“Thank you. There was not the least danger. They were merely venting
their spite on me. They would not have dared more.”
There is always a crowd at the Velpen station for outgoing or incoming
trains. This meeting of trains is one of the dissipations of its
people—and an eminently respectable dissipation. It was early—the
eastbound leaves at something past eight—yet there were many people on
the platform who did not seem to be going anywhere. They were after such
stray worms as always fell to the lot of the proverbial early bird. The
particular worm in question that morning was the new girl court
reporter, homeward bound. Many were making the excuse of mailing belated
letters. Mary was standing guard over the suit-case and umbrella near
the last car. She seemed strangely alone and aloof standing there, the
gravity of the silent prairie a palpable atmosphere about her.
“There’s my brakeman,” said Louise, when she and Gordon had found a seat
near the rear. Mary had gone and a brakeman had swung onto the last car
as it glided past the platform, and came down the aisle with a grin of
recognition for his “little white lamb.”
“How nice it all seems, just as if I had been gone months instead of
days and was coming home again. It would be funny if I should be
homesick for the range when I get to Wind City, wouldn’t it?”
“Let us pray assiduously that it may be so,” answered Gordon, with one
of his rare smiles. He busied himself a moment in stowing away her
belongings to the best advantage. “It gets in one’s blood,—how or when,
one never knows.”
They rode in silence for a while.
“Tell me about your big fight,” said Louise, presently. The road-bed was
fairly good, and they were spinning along on a down grade. He must needs
bend closer to hear her.
She was good to look at, fair and sweet, and it had been weary years
since women had come close to Gordon’s life. In the old college days,
before this hard, disappointing, unequal fight against the dominant
forces of greed, against tolerance of might overcoming right, had begun
to sap his vitality, he had gone too deeply into his studies to have
much time left for the gayeties and gallantries of the social side in
university life. He had not been popular with women. They did not know
him. Yet, though dubbed a “dig” by his fellow-collegians, the men liked
him. They liked him for his trustworthiness, admired him for his rugged
honesty, desired his friendship for the inspiration of his high ideals.
The memory of these friendships with men had been an ever-present source
of strength and comfort to him in these later years of his busy life.
Yet of late he had felt himself growing calloused and tired. The
enthusiasm of his younger manhood was falling from him somewhat, and he
had been but six years out of the university. But it was all so
hopeless, so bitterly futile, this moral fight of one man to stay the
mind-bewildering and heart-sickening ceaseless round of wheels of open
crime and official chicanery. Was the river bridged? And what of the
straw? His name was a joke in the cattle country, a joke to horse thief,
a joke to sheriff. Its synonym was impotency among the law-abiders who
were yet political cowards. What was the use? What could a man do—one
man, when a fair jury was a dream, when ballots were so folded that the
clerk, drawing, might know which to select in order to obtain a jury
that would stand pat with the cattle rustlers? Much brain and brawn had
been thrown away in the unequal struggle. Let it pass. Was there any
further use?
Then a woman came to him in his dark hour. His was a stubborn and
fighting blood, a blood that would never cry “enough” till it ceased to
flow. Yet what a comforting thing it was that this woman, Louise, should
be beside him, this woman who knew and who understood. For when she
lifted those tender gray eyes and asked him of his big fight, he knew
she understood. There was no need of explanation, of apology, for all
the failure of all these years. A warm gratitude swept across his heart.
And she was so neat and sweet and fair, unspoiled by constant contact
with, and intimate knowledge of, the life of the under world; rather was
she touched to a wonderful sympathy of understanding. It was good to
know such a woman; it would be better to be a friend of such a woman; it
would be best of all to love such a woman—if one dared.
“What shall I talk about, Miss Dale? It is all very prosaic and
uninteresting, I’m afraid; shockingly primitive, glaringly new.”
“I breakfasted with a stanch friend of yours this morning,” answered
Louise, somewhat irrelevantly. She had a feeling—a woman’s feeling—that
this earnest, hard-working, reserved man would never blurt out things
about himself with the bland self-centredness of most men. She must use
all her woman’s wit to draw him out. She did not know yet that he was
starved for sympathy—for understanding. She could not know yet that two
affinities had drifted through space—near together. A feathery zephyr,
blowing where it listed, might widen the space between to an infinity of
distance so that they might never know how nearly they had once met; or
it might, as its whim dictated, blow them together so that for weal or
for woe they would know each the other.
“Mrs. Higgins, at the Bon Ami,” she continued, smiling. “I was so hungry
when we got to Velpen, though I had eaten a tremendous breakfast at the
Lazy S. But five o’clock is an unholy hour at which to eat one’s
breakfast, isn’t it, and I just couldn’t help getting hungry all over
again. So I persuaded Mary to stop for another cup of coffee. It is
ridiculous the way I eat in your country.”
“It is a good country,” he said, soberly.
“It must be—if you can say so.”
“Because I have failed, shall I cry out that law cannot be enforced in
Kemah County? Sometimes—may it be soon—there will come a man big enough
to make the law triumphant. He will not be I.”
He was still smarting from his many set-backs. He had worked hard and
had accomplished nothing. At the last term of court, though many cases
were tried, he had not secured one conviction.
“We shall see,” said Louise, softly. Her look, straight into his eyes,
was a glint of sunlight in dark places. Then she laughed.
“Mrs. Higgins said to me: ‘Jimmie Mac hain’t got the sense he was born
with. His little, dried-up brain ’d rattle ’round in a mustard seed and
he’s gettin’ shet o’ that little so fast it makes my head swim.’ She was
telling about times when he hadn’t acted just fair to you. I am
glad—from all I hear—that this was taken out of his hands.”
“I can count my friends, the real ones, on one hand, I’m afraid,” said
Gordon, with a good-humored smile; “and Mrs. Higgins surely is the
thumb.”
“I am glad you smiled,” said Louise. “That would have sounded so bitter
if you had not.”
“I couldn’t help smiling. You—you have such a way, Miss Dale.”
It was blunt but it rang true.
“It is true, though, about my friends. If I could convict—Jesse Black,
for instance,—a million friends would call me blessed. But I can’t do it
alone. They will not do it; they will not help me do it; they despise me
because I can’t do it, and swear at me because I try to do it—and there
you have the whole situation in a nutshell, Miss Dale.”
The sun struck across her face. He reached over and lowered the blind.
“Thank you. But it is ‘’vantage in’ now, is it not? You will get justice
before Uncle Hammond.”
Unconsciously his shoulders straightened.
“Yes, Miss Dale, it is ‘’vantage in.’ One of two things will come to
pass. I shall send Jesse Black over or—” he paused. His eyes, unseeing,
were fixed on the gliding landscape as it appeared in rectangular spots
through the window in front of them.
“Yes. Or—” prompted Louise, softly.
“Never mind. It is of no consequence,” he said, abruptly. “No fear of
Judge Dale. Juries are my Waterloo.”
“Is it, then, such a nest of cowards?” cried Louise, intense scorn in
her clear voice.
“Yes,” deliberately. “Men are afraid of retaliation—those who are not
actually blood-guilty, as you might say. And who can say who is and who
is not? But he will be sent over this time. Paul Langford is on his
trail. Give me two men like Langford and that anachronism—an honest man
west of the river—Williston, and you can have the rest, sheriff and
all.”
“Mr. Williston—he has been unfortunate, has he not? He is such a
gentleman, and a scholar, surely.”
“Surely. He is one of the finest fellows I know. A man of the most
sensitive honor. If such a thing can be, I should say he is too honest,
for his own good. A man can be, you know. There is nothing in the world
that cannot be overdone.”
She looked at him earnestly. His eyes did not shift. She was satisfied.
“Your work belies your words,” she said, quietly.
Dust and cinders drifted in between the slats of the closed blind.
Putting her handkerchief to her lips, Louise looked at the dark streaks
on it with reproach.
“Your South Dakota dirt is so—black,” she said, whimsically.
“Better black than yellow,” he retorted. “It looks cleaner, now, doesn’t
it?”
“Maybe you think my home a fit dwelling place for John Chinaman,” pouted
Louise.
“Yes—if that will persuade you that South Dakota is infinitely better.
Are you open to conviction?”
“Never! I should die if I had to stay here.”
“You will be going back—soon?”
“Some day, sure! Soon? Maybe. Oh, I wish I could. That part of me which
is like Uncle Hammond says, ‘Stay.’ But that other part of me which is
like the rest of us, says, ‘What’s the use? Go back to your kind. You’re
happier there. Why should you want to be different? What does it all
amount to?’ I am afraid I shall be weak enough and foolish enough to go
back and—stay.”
There was a stir in the forward part of the car. A man, hitherto sitting
quietly by the side of an alert wiry little fellow who sat next the
aisle, had attempted to bolt the car by springing over the empty seat in
front of him and making a dash for the door. It was daring, but in vain.
His companion, as agile as he, had seized him and forced him again into
his place before the rest of the passengers fully understood that the
attempt had really been made.
“Is he crazy? Are they taking him to Yankton?” asked Louise, the pretty
color all gone from her face. “Did he think to jump off the train?”
“That’s John Yellow Wolf, a young half-breed. He’s wanted up in the
Hills for cattle-rustling—United States Court case. That’s Johnson with
him, Deputy United States Marshal.”
“Poor fellow,” said Louise, pityingly.
“Don’t waste your sympathy on such as he. They are degenerates—many of
these half-breeds. They will swear to anything. They inherit all the
evils of the two races. Good never mixes. Yellow Wolf would swear
himself into everlasting torment for a pint of whiskey. You see my cause
of complaint? But never think, Miss Dale, that these poor chaps of
half-breeds, who are hardly responsible, are the only ones who are
willing to swear to damnable lies.” There was a tang of bitterness in
his voice. “Perjury, Miss Dale, perjury through fear or bribery or
self-interest, God knows what, it is there I must break, I suppose,
until the day of judgment, unless—I run away.”
Louise, through all the working of his smart and sting, felt the quiet
reserve strength of this man beside her, and, with a quick rush of
longing to do her part, her woman’s part of comforting and healing, she
put her hand, small, ungloved, on his rough coat sleeve.
“Is that what you meant a while ago? But you don’t mean it, do you? It
is bitter and you do not mean it. Tell me that you do not mean it, Mr.
Gordon, please,” she said, impulsively.
Smothering a wild impulse to keep the hand where it had lain such a
brief, palpitating while, Gordon remained silent. God only knows what
human longing he crushed down, what intense discouragement, what sick
desire to lay down his thankless task and flee to the uttermost parts of
the world to be away from the crying need he yet could not still. Then
he answered simply, “I did not mean it, Miss Dale.”
And then there did not seem to be anything to say between them for a
long while. The half-breed had settled down with stolid indifference.
People had resumed their newspapers and magazines and day dreams after
the fleeting excitement. It was very warm. Louise tried to create a
little breeze by flicking her somewhat begrimed handkerchief in front of
her face. Gordon took a newspaper from his pocket, folded it and fanned
her gently. He was not used to the little graces of life, perhaps, but
he did this well. An honest man and a kindly never goes far wrong in any
direction.
“You must not think, Miss Dale,” he said, seriously, “that it is all bad
up here. I am only selfish. I have been harping on my own little corner
of wickedness all the while. It is a good land. It will be better before
long.”
“When?” asked Louise.
“When we convict Jesse Black and when our Indian neighbors get over
their mania for divorce,” he answered, laughing softly.
Louise laughed merrily and so the journey ended as it had begun, with a
laugh and a jest.
In the Judge’s runabout, Louise held out her hand.
“I’m almost homesick,” she cried, smiling.