RIGHT INTO MIGHT
Don't wait for Mr. Matthews and me. We are setting out on the Long
Trail. It is the Long Trail this Nation will have to travel before
Democracy arrives. It is the Trail of the Man behind the Thing; and
we'll not quit till we get him. You remember what our old visitor said
about "splitting the air to get somewhere." We are going to quit
"sawing the air" and "split it to get somewhere." We are going to set
out after the Man; the little codger first, as a foot print on the Long
Trail to the lair of the Man Higher Up.
You cannot stab a lot of things to life as you did last night and the
night before, and then expect them to lie quiet and be the same. You
have sent me forth on the Long Trail, Eleanor; and I shall hunt the
better because you have stabbed me alive and will never let me go to
sleep again. I thank you; and yet, I can't thank you, mine _Alder
Liefest_--look up and see what that means in old Saxon--Yours in Life
and Death and Always and Out Beyond.
Dick.
I have ordered a wreath from Smelter City for Fordie. Find it hard to
stop writing and go from you; but the darned old Mountain doesn't look
the same; it's all draped out in such "dam-phool 'appiness" that I am
glad in the shadow of Death.
Dick. (2nd)
Don't forget every day dawn and sunset, I come to renew the Seal. Ever
study Algebra in college? Then look up what this means.
Dick. (nth)
And because she had graduated from girl to woman between sunset and
daydawn of that Death Watch, she kissed the last signature, right in
the midst of the German cook's dishes, set all higgeldy-piggeldy on the
oilcloth top instead of the linen cover, owing to the distraction of
the night's tragedy. It was his first love letter; and because it was
his first, he did not know it was a love letter. He had written it on
the pages of a field note book. On the reverse side, were figures of
triangulations and scaled timbers, which Eleanor fingered lovingly
because the dumb signs seemed to connect her life with his
before--before what? Ask those who know!
The note was lying at her breakfast place when she came out from a
sleepless night, a night that seemed to pass swinging between the gates
of Life and the gates of Death, with phantoms on the trail between, of
Love so terrible its glory blinded her, of Crime so dark its shadow
obscured her faith in God. For hours, she had lain quivering to the
consciousness of that moment when Life leaped up to meet and blend with
Life in Love. For hours, she had lain quivering to the consciousness
of Crime stalking satyr-faced amid the shadows of Life, Greed and
Murder and Lust, hiding beneath suave words, behind conventionality,
draped in all the broad phalacteries of law, ready to leap fanged at
the throat of Innocence in a Land of Let-Alone; and she emerged from
the conflict of these two forces no longer what would be called a
Christian, no longer a Quiescent, no longer a Let Alone. She emerged
knowing that Democracy must become a joke, and Christianity the
laughing stock of the ages, unless Right could be made over into Might.
Then, she found the Ranger's note at her late breakfast--it was a
shockingly late breakfast, it was after the noon hour--the note saying
that he had set out on the Long Trail that the Nation must travel, the
trail of the Man behind the Thing, the Man Higher Up. It was as it had
been from the first with him, the meeting half-way of their thoughts
from different beginnings; and she kissed the signature with a gesture
that played havoc with the breakfast dishes and sent Calamity
snivelling and muttering from the kitchen. The ignorant half-breed's
knowledge of life among the miners of the Black Hills and the shingle
men of the Bitter Boot saw-mills didn't admit explanations of love that
kissed signatures and impelled tears.
And yet while revolution convulsed two souls you could have gone from
end to end of the Valley that week or to every cabin on the Homestead
Claim of the Ridge and not heard a living soul speak one word of the
tragedy on the Rim Rocks. Were they moral cowards? I don't think so.
Wasn't it more of that spirit of Let Alone? If you had mentioned the
terrible episode to a casual settler, he would have given you a blank
look and remarked "that he hadn't heard."
The story set down here, I could not myself have learned if a chance
ramble over the foot hills of the Rim Rocks had not led one day to a
solitary little grave, surrounded by a picket fence marked by the
figure of a kneeling child carved in rough sand stone. As the guest of
the Mission School, I made the mistake of asking the mother, herself,
whose grave that was. Women, who are neither politicians nor politic,
have a plain way of uttering harsh facts. She did not speak about the
author of her boy's death in soft words, that little white haired
mother. She used a term oftener heard in the purlieus of criminal
courts. "To think," she exclaimed bitterly, "to think that Fordie,
descended from generations of Williams who have pioneered and fought
for and built up this country since ever the first Williams landed in
Boston in 1666, was done to death by this murderer, this truckster,
this political trickster, this outcast from the European gutters, this
huckster of lazaretto morals and bawd houses, who is overturning our
Nation with his oiled villainies and peddler ways! No, we have never
taken Government aid and we never shall! I like to know that my Indian
girls are safe." What more she added, I do not relate; for an angered
mother has a way of uttering terrible truths.
To-day, if you visit that grave on the crest of the saddle back, you
will find it flanked by two others, a man's on one side with the figure
of a trader carved in sandstone by the Indians; on the other, old
Calamity's with a plain granite slab; though I have heard strict people
say her body ought not to have been laid there because of the vagrant
character of her early life.
Indian boys from the school had shaped the coffin and carved the figure
for the stone. A girlish teacher read the Church Services for the
dead; and the children's voices rose a thin tremulous treble in the
funeral hymn around the grave. Wild flowers covered the casket, pearl
everlasting and the wind flower and the white Canada violet and the
painter's brush vari-colored as a flame; and a wreath had come up from
Smelter City.
Sights and sounds that have been a setting for sorrow, haunt the mind.
After that day, Eleanor could never hear the hammer of the woodpecker,
the lone cry of circling hawk, the whistling of the solitary mountain
marmot, without hearing also the thin treble of the Indian pupils
breaking and silencing on that funeral hymn till only the mother's
voice sang clarion to the end. She heard the low melting trill of the
blue bird and the wrangling rasp of the jay--true and counterfeit,
peace and discord--had God put right and wrong in the world for the
friction of the conflict between, to develop souls? Had one been set
over against the other, like light and shadow, to train the spiritual
eye to know?
Then, the Indian boys began to lower the casket. One young pall bearer
faltered and slipped his hold; it was the little white haired mother's
hand steadied the rope that lowered, and slowly lowered, out of sight
for ever. Then one of the girl teachers dropped in a great bunch of
mountain laurel. Eleanor succeeded in leading the mother away.
Were the amethyst portals still ajar to the infinite life; or did the
shadow of the Cross, of the time-old ever-recurring crucifixion, darken
the vista of a glad future? The Indian children filed in through the
gate of the Mission school. At the gate, the mother looked up the
Saddle back. She had no time for the pampered luxury of self conscious
grief. She had directed the making of the coffin and the carving of
the sandstone and had led the funeral hymn to the end; but now she
looked back. Ashes of roses across the sky, creeping phantom shadows,
and in her heart, the sombre presence of the after-desolation which
neither faith nor fortitude casts out. She would go to sleep dull with
the woe of it and dream depressed of its loneliness, to waken heavy
with the memory. Then, by and by, would come the peace that the dead
send, which is not forgetfulness. But now she looked back, looked back
with the wrench that was the tearing of flesh and spirit asunder.
Above the new-made grave, across those topaz sunset gates, stood the
figure of the native woman, shawl thrown from her head reaving the long
black hair; and from the hill crest came such a long low cry as might
have been a ghost echo of all the age-old world sorrows. Eleanor felt
the quick twitch on her arm. Without a word, without a tear, the boy's
mother had fainted.
"We ought to have looked out for that," explained one of the girl
teachers from the school. "We ought to have left Calamity home. She
has always done that since they took her child away."
"Had she a child?" asked Eleanor.
"Yes; and they took it away when she went insane."
Eleanor slept with the leaves of the field-book under her pillow that
night; but she slept the heavy dreamless sleep of baffled hope.