Billy Brue Finds His Man
Each spring the old man grew restive and raw like an unbroken colt. And
when the distant mountain peaks began to swim in their summer haze, and
the little rushing rivers sang to him, pleading that he come once more
to follow them up, he became uncontrollable. Every year at this time he
alleged, with a show of irritation, that his health was being sapped by
the pernicious indulgence of sleeping on a bed inside a house. He
alleged, further, that stocks and bonds were but shadows of wealth,
that the old mines might any day become exhausted, and that security
for the future lay only in having one member of the family, at least,
looking up new pay-rock against the ever possible time of adversity.
"They ain't got to makin' calendars yet with the rainy day marked on
'em," he would say. "A'most any one of them innocent lookin' Mondays or
Tuesdays or Wednesdays is liable to be _it_ when you get right up on to
it. I'll have to start my old bones out again, I see that. Things are
beginnin' to green up a'ready." When he did go it was always understood
to be positively for not more than two weeks. A list of his reasons for
extending the time each year to three or four months would constitute
the ideal monograph on human duplicity. When hard-pushed on his return,
he had once or twice been even brazen enough to assert that he had lost
his way in the mountain fastnesses. But, for all his protestations, no
one when he left in June expected to see him again before September at
the earliest. In these solitary tours he was busy and happy, working
and playing. "Work," he would say, "is something you want to get done;
play is something you jest like to be doin'. Snoopin' up these gulches
is both of 'em to me."
And so he loitered through the mountains, resting here, climbing there,
making always a shrewd, close reading of the rocks.
It was thus Billy Brue found him at the end of his second day's search.
A little off the trail, at the entrance to a pocket of the canyon, he
towered erect to peer down when he heard the noise of the messenger's
ascent. Standing beside a boulder of grey granite, before a background
of the gnarled dwarf-cedars, his hat off, his blue shirt open at the
neck, his bare forearms brown, hairy, and muscular, a hammer in his
right hand, his left resting lightly on his hip, he might have been the
Titan that had forged the boulder at his side, pausing now for breath
before another mighty task. Well over six feet tall, still straight as
any of the pines before him, his head and broad shoulders in the easy
poise of power, there was about him from a little distance no sign of
age. His lines were gracefully full, his bearing had still the
alertness of youth. One must have come as near as Billy Brue now came
to detect the marks of time in his face. Not of age--merely of time;
for here was no senility, no quavering or fretful lines. The grey eyes
shone bright and clear from far under the heavy, unbroken line of brow,
and the mouth was still straight and firmly held, a mouth under sure
control from corner to corner. A little had the years brought out the
rugged squareness of the chin and the deadly set of the jaws; a little
had they pressed in the cheeks to throw the high bones into broad
relief. But these were the utmost of their devastations. Otherwise
Peter Bines showed his seventy-four years only by the marks of a
well-ordered maturity. His eyes, it is true, had that look of _knowing_
which to the young seems always to betoken the futility of, and to warn
against the folly of, struggle against what must be; yet they were kind
eyes, and humourous, with many of the small lines of laughter at their
corners. Reading the eyes and mouth together one perceived gentleness
and sternness to be well matched, working to any given end in amiable
and effective compromise. "Uncle Peter" he had long been called by the
public that knew him, and his own grandchildren had come to call him by
the same term, finding him too young to meet their ideal of a
grandfather. Billy Brue, riding up the trail, halted, nodded, and was
silent. The old man returned his salutation as briefly. These things by
men who stay much alone come to be managed with verbal economy. They
would talk presently, but greetings were awkward.
Billy Brue took one foot from its stirrup and turned in his saddle,
pulling the leg up to a restful position. Then he spat, musingly, and
looked back down the canyon aimlessly, throwing his eyes from side to
side where the grey granite ledges showed through the tall spruce and
pine trees.
But the old man knew he had been sent for.
"Well, Billy Brue,--what's doin'?"
Billy Brue squirmed in the saddle, spat again, as with sudden resolve,
and said:
"Why,--uh--Dan'l J.--_he's_ dead."
The old man repeated the words, dazedly.
"Dan'l J.--_he's_ dead;--why, who else is dead, too?"
Billy Brue's emphasis, cunningly contrived by him to avoid giving
prominence to the word "dead," had suggested this inquiry in the first
moment of stupefaction.
"Nobody else dead--jest Dan'l J.--_he's_ dead."
"Jest Dan'l J.--my boy--my boy Dan'l dead!"
His mighty shape was stricken with a curious rigidity, erected there as
if it were a part of the mountain, flung up of old from the earth's
inner tragedy, confounded, desolate, ancient.
[Illustration: "'_WELL, BILLY BRUE, WHAT'S DOIN_'?'"]
Billy Brue turned from the stony interrogation of his eyes and took a
few steps away, waiting. A little wind sprang up among the higher
trees, the moments passed, and still the great figure stood transfixed
in its curious silence. The leathers creaked as the horse turned. The
messenger, with an air of surveying the canyon, stole an anxious glance
at the old face. The sorrowful old eyes were fixed on things that were
not; they looked vaguely as if in search.
"Dan'l!" he said.
It was not a cry; there was nothing plaintive in it. It was only the
old man calling his son: David calling upon Absalom. Then there was a
change. He came sternly forward.
"Who killed my boy?"
"Nobody, Uncle Peter; 'twas a stroke. He was goin' over the line and
they'd laid out at Kaslo fer a day so's Dan'l J. could see about a spur
the 'Lucky Cuss' people wanted--and maybe it was the climbin' brought
it on."
The old man looked his years. As he came nearer Billy Brue saw tears
tremble in his eyes and roll unnoted down his cheeks. Yet his voice was
unbroken and he was, indeed, unconscious of the tears.
"I was afraid of that. He lived too high. He et too much and he drank
too much and was too soft--was Dan'l.--too soft--"
The old voice trembled a bit and he stopped to look aside into the
little pocket he had been exploring. Billy Brue looked back down the
canyon, where the swift stream brawled itself into white foam far below.
"He wouldn't use his legs; I prodded him about it constant--"
He stopped again to brace himself against the shock. Billy Brue still
looked away.
"I told him high altitudes and high livin' would do any man--" Again he
was silent.
"But all he'd ever say was that times had changed since my day, and I
wasn't to mind him." He had himself better in hand now.
"Why, I nursed that boy when he was a dear, funny little red baby with
big round eyes rollin' around to take notice; he took notice awful
quick--fur a baby. Oh, my! Oh, dear! Dan'l!"
Again he stopped.
"And it don't seem more'n yesterday that I was a-teachin' him to throw
the diamond hitch; he could throw the diamond hitch with his eyes shut
--I reckon by the time he was nine or ten. He had his faults, but they
didn't hurt him none; Dan'l J. was a man, now--" He halted once more.
"The dead millionaire," began Billy Brue, reading from the obituary in
the Skiplap _Weekly Ledge_, "was in his fifty-second year. Genial,
generous to a fault, quick to resent a wrong, but unfailing in his
loyalty to a friend, a man of large ideas, with a genius for large
operations, he was the type of indefatigable enterprise that has
builded this Western empire in a wilderness and given rich sustenance
and luxurious homes to millions of prosperous, happy American citizens.
Peace to his ashes! And a safe trip to his immortal soul over the
one-way trail!"
"Yes, yes--it's Dan'l J. fur sure--they got my boy Dan'l that time. Is
that all it says, Billy? Any one with him?"
"Why, this here despatch is signed by young Toler--that's his
confidential man."
"Nobody else?"
The old man was peering at him sharply from under the grey protruding
brows.
"Well, if you must know, Uncle Peter, this is what the notice says that
come by wire to the _Ledge_ office," and he read doggedly:
"The young and beautiful Mrs. Bines, who had been accompanying her
husband on his trip of inspection over the Sierra Northern, is
prostrated by the shock of his sudden death."
The old man became for the first time conscious of the tears in his
eyes, and, pulling down one of the blue woollen shirt sleeves, wiped
his wet cheeks. The slow, painful blush of age crept up across the iron
strength of his face, and passed. He looked away as he spoke.
"I knew it; I knew that. My Dan'l was like all that Frisco bunch. They
get tangled with women sooner or later. I taxed Dan'l with it. I
spleened against it and let him know it. But he was a man and his own
master--if you can rightly call a man his own master that does them
things. Do you know what-fur woman this one was, Billy?"
"Well, last time Dan'l J. was up to Skiplap, there was a swell party on
the car--kind of a coppery-lookin' blonde. Allie Ash, the brakeman on
No. 4, he tells me she used to be in Spokane, and now she'd got her
hooks on to some minin' property up in the Coeur d'Alene. Course, this
mightn't be the one."
The old man had ceased to listen. He was aroused to the need for
action.
"Get movin', Billy! We can get down to Eden to-night; we'll have the
moon fur two hours on the trail soon's the sun's gone. I can get 'em to
drive me over to Skiplap first thing to-morrow, and I can have 'em make
me up a train there fur Montana City. Was he--"
"Dan'l J. has been took home--the noozepaper says."
They turned back down the trail, the old man astride Billy Brue's
horse, followed by his pack-mule and preceded by Billy.
Already, such was his buoyance and habit of quick recovery and
readjustment under reverses, his thoughts were turning to his grandson.
Daniel's boy--there was the grandson of his grandfather--the son of his
father--fresh from college, and the instructions of European travel,
knowing many things his father had not known, ready to take up the work
of his father, and capable, perhaps, of giving it a better finish. His
beloved West had lost one of its valued builders, but another should
take his place. His boy should come to him and finish the tasks of his
father; and, in the years to come, make other mighty tasks of
empire-building for himself and the children of his children.
It did not occur to him that he and the boy might be as far apart in
sympathies and aims as at that moment they were in circumstance. For,
while the old man in the garb of a penniless prospector, toiled down
the steep mountain trail on a cheap horse, his grandson was reading the
first news of his father's death in one of the luxurious staterooms of
a large steam yacht that had just let down her anchor in Newport
Harbour. And each--but for the death--had been where most he wished to
be--one with his coarse fare and out-of-doors life, roughened and
seamed by the winds and browned by the sun to mahogany tints; aged but
playing with boyish zest at his primitive sport; the other, a
strong-limbed, well-marrowed, full-breathing youth of twenty-five, with
appetites all alert and sharpened, pink and pampered, loving luxury,
and prizing above all things else the atmosphere of wealth and its
refinements.