A RIFT IN THE LUTE
In the cool of the evening Justin Merrick drove down from the
Sweetwater Dam to the Diamond Bar K ranch. It was characteristic of him
that his runabout was up to date and in perfect condition. He had an
expensive taste in the accessories of life, and he either got the best
or did without.
Hands and face were tanned from exposure to the burning sun of the
Rockies, but he was smooth-shaven and immaculate in the engineer’s suit
which fitted his strong, heavy-set figure so snugly.
He drove with precision, as he did everything else in his well-ordered
life. There was in his strength no quality of impatience or turbulence.
He knew what he wanted and how to get it. That was why he had traveled
so far on the road to success and would go a great way farther.
To-night he anticipated two pleasant hours with Betty Reed. He would
tell her about the work and how it was getting along, his difficulties
with the sand formation at the head gates and how he was surmounting
them. Even before she spoke, he would know from her eager eyes that she
was giving him the admiration due a successful man from his sweetheart.
Afterward he would pass to more direct and personal love-making, which
she would evade if possible or accept shyly and reluctantly. She was
wearing his ring, but he doubted whether he had really stormed the
inner fortress of her heart. This uncertainty, and the assurance
that went with it of a precious gift not for the first chance comer,
appealed to his fastidious instinct, all the more that he was sure she
would some day come to him with shining eyes and outstretched hands.
To-night Merrick found Betty distrait and troubled. Her attention to
the recital of his problems was perfunctory. He was conscious of a
slight annoyance. In spite of his force, Justin was a vain man, always
ready to talk of himself and his achievements in a modest way to an
interested and interesting young woman.
It appeared that her father had had a difficulty with some tramps,
which had eventuated in insolence that had brought upon the vagrants
summary physical punishment. From her account of it, Justin judged that
Reed had not handled the matter very wisely. There was a way to do such
things with a minimum of friction.
But he saw no need of worrying about it. The tramps had been given what
they deserved and the affair was closed. It was like a woman to hold it
heavily on her conscience because one of the ne’er-do-wells chanced to
be young and good-looking.
“If you’d seen him,” Betty protested. “A gentleman by the look of him,
or had been once, fine-grained, high-spirited, and yet so down-and-out.”
“If he’s down-and-out, it’s his own fault. A man’s never that so long
as he holds to self-respect.”
This was incontrovertibly true, but Betty chose to be irritated. Justin
was so obviously successful. He might have had a little sympathy for
the underdog, she thought. Everybody did not have a square, salient jaw
like his. Weakness was not necessarily a crime.
“He looks as though life had mauled him,” she said. “It’s taken
something vital out of him. He doesn’t care what happens any more.”
“If he can only mooch his three meals a day and enough cash to keep him
supplied with bootleg poison,” the engineer added.
They were walking up to the Three Pines, a rocky bluff from which they
could in the daytime see far down the valley. She stopped abruptly. If
she did not stamp her foot, at least the girl’s manner gave eloquently
the effect of this indulgence.
“He’s not like that at all--not at all. Don’t you ever sympathize with
any one that’s in hard luck?” she cried out, her cheeks glowing with a
suffusion of underlying crimson.
“Not when he lies down under it.”
She flashed at him a look resentful of his complacency. It held, too,
for the first time a critical doubt. There was plenty to like about
Justin Merrick, and perhaps there was more to admire. He got things
done because he was so virile, so dominant. To look at the lines and
movements of his sturdy body, at the close-lipped mouth and resolute
eyes, was to know him a leader of men. But now a treasonable thought
had wirelessed itself into her brain. Had he a mind that never ranged
out of well-defined pastures, that was quite content with the social
and economic arrangement of the world? Did there move in it only a
tight little set of orthodox ideas?
“How do you know he lies down under it?” she asked with spirit. “How do
we know what he has to contend with? Or how he struggles against it?”
If his open smile was not an apology, it refused, anyhow, to be at
variance with her. “Maybe so. As you say, I didn’t see him and you did.
We’ll let it go at that and hope he’s all you think he is.”
Betty, a little ashamed of her vagrant thoughts, tried to find a
common ground upon which they could stand. “Don’t you think that men
are often the victims of circumstance--that they get caught in currents
that kinda sweep them away?”
“‘I am the captain of my soul,’” he quoted sententiously.
“Yes, _you_ are,” she admitted, after one swift glance that took in the
dogged, flinty quality of him. “But most of us aren’t. Take Dad. He’s
strong, and he’s four-square. But he wouldn’t have gone as far as he
did with these tramps if he hadn’t got carried away. Well, don’t you
think maybe this boy is a victim of ‘the bludgeonings of chance’? He
looked like it to me.”
“We make ourselves,” he insisted. “If the things we buck up against
break us, it’s because we’re weak.”
“Yes, but--” Betty’s protest died away. She was not convinced, and
she made another start. “It seems to me that when I read the new
novelists--Wells, Galsworthy, or Bennett, say--one of the things I get
out of them is that we _are_ modified by our environment, not only
changed by it, but sometimes made the prey of it and destroyed by it.”
“Depends on how solid on our feet we are,” answered the engineer.
“That’s the plea of the agitator, I know. He’s always wanting to do
impossible things by law or by a social upheaval. There’s nothing to
it. A man succeeds if he’s strong. He fails if he’s weak.”
This creed of the individualist was sometimes Betty’s own, but
to-night she was not ready to accept it. “That would be all very well
if we all started equal. But we don’t. What about a man who develops
tuberculosis, say, just when he is getting going? He’s weak, but it’s
no fault of his.”
“It may or may not be. Anyhow, it’s his misfortune. You can’t make the
world over because he’s come a cropper. Take this young tramp of yours.
I’d like to try him out and show you whether there’s anything to him.
I’d put him on the work and let him find his level. Chances are he’d
drift back to the road inside of a week. When a man’s down-and-out, it
isn’t because he doesn’t get a chance, but because of some weakness in
himself.”
Betty knew that in the case of many this was true. For a year or more
she had been an employer of labor herself. One of the things that had
impressed her among the young fellows who worked for her was that they
did find their level. The unskilled, shiftless, and less reliable were
dropped when work became slack. The intelligent and energetic won
promotion for themselves.
But she did not believe that it was by any means a universal truth.
Men were not machines, after all. They were human beings. However, she
dropped the subject.
“He’s gone, so you won’t have a chance to prove your case,” she said.
“Tell me about the work. How is it going?”
The Sweetwater Dam project had been initiated to water what was known
as the Flat Tops, a mesa that stretched from the edge of the valley to
the foothills. It had been and still was being bitterly opposed by some
of the cattlemen of Paradise Valley because its purpose was to reclaim
for farming a large territory over which cattle had hitherto ranged at
will. Their contention held nothing of novelty. It had been argued all
over the West ever since the first nesters came in to dispute with the
cattle barons the possession of the grazing lands. A hundred districts
in a dozen States had heard the claim that this was a cattle country,
unfit for farming and intensive settlement. Many of them had seen it
disproved.
The opposition of powerful ranching interests had not deterred Justin
Merrick. Threats did not disturb him. He set his square jaw and pushed
forward to the accomplishment of his purpose. As he rode or drove
through the valley, he knew that he was watched with hostile eyes by
reckless cowpunchers who knew that his success would put a period to
the occupation they followed. Two of them had tried to pick a quarrel
with him at Wild Horse on one occasion, and had weakened before his
cool and impassive fearlessness.
But he did not deceive himself. At any hour the anger of these men
might flare out against him in explosive action. For the first time in
his life he was carrying a revolver.
Clint Reed was a stockholder and a backer of the irrigation project. He
owned several thousand acres on the Flat Tops, and it was largely on
account of his energy that capital had undertaken the reclamation of
the dry mesa.
The head and front of the opposition was Jake Prowers, who had brought
down from early days an unsavory reputation that rumor said he more
than deserved. Strange stories were whispered about this mild-mannered
little man with the falsetto voice and the skim-milk eyes. One of them
was that he had murdered from ambush the successful wooer of the girl
he wanted, that the whole countryside accepted the circumstantial
evidence as true, and in spite of this he had married the young widow
within a year and buried her inside of two. Nesters in the hills near
his ranch had disappeared and never been seen again. Word passed as on
the breath of the winds that Prowers had dry-gulched them. Old-timers
still lived who had seen him fight a duel with two desperadoes on the
main street of Wild Horse. He had been carried to the nearest house
on a shutter with three bullets in him, but the two bad men had been
buried next day.
The two most important ranchmen in the valley were Clint Reed and
Jake Prowers. They never had been friendly. Usually they were opposed
to each other on any public question that arose. Each was the leader
of his faction. On politics they differed. Clint was a Republican,
Jake a Democrat. There had been times when they had come close to
open hostilities. The rivalry between them had deepened to hatred on
the part of Prowers. When Reed announced through the local paper the
inception of the Sweetwater Dam project, his enemy had sworn that it
should never go through while he was alive.
Hitherto Prowers had made no move, but everybody in the district knew
that he was biding his time. Competent engineers of the Government had
passed adversely on this irrigation project. They had decided water
could not be brought down from the hills to the Flat Tops. Jake had
seen the surveys and believed them to be correct. He was willing that
Reed and the capitalists he had interested should waste their money on
a fool’s dream. If Justin Merrick was right--if he could bring water
through Elk Creek Cañon to the Flat Tops--it would be time enough for
Prowers to strike. Knowing the man as he did, Clint Reed had no doubt
that, if it became necessary in order to defeat the project, his enemy
would move ruthlessly and without scruple. It was by his advice that
Justin Merrick kept the dam guarded at night and carried a revolver
with him when he drove over or tramped across the hills.