One spring day a young man of good mental furnishing and very slender
purse walked over the shoulder of Mount Mogallon and down the trail to
Gold Creek. He walked because the stage fare seemed too high.
Two years and four months later he was pointed out to strangers by the
people of Sweetwater Springs. "That is Richard Clement, the sole owner
of 'The Witch,' a mine valued at three millions of dollars." This in
itself was truly an epic.
Sweetwater Springs was a village in a cañon, out of which rose two
wonderful springs of water whose virtues were known throughout the
land. The village was wedged in the cañon which ran to the mighty
breast of Mogallon like a fold in a king's robe.
The village and its life centered around the pavilion which roofed the
spring, and Clement spent his evenings there in order to see the
people, at least, as they joyously thronged about the music-stand and
sipped the beautiful water which the Utes long, long ago called "sweet
water," and visited with reverence and hope of returning health.
Since the coming of his great wealth Clement had not allowed himself a
day's vacation, and he had grown ten years older in that time. There
were untimely signs of age in his hair and in the troubled lines of
his face. He was a young man, but he looked a strong and stern and
careworn man to those whose attention was called to him. He was a
conscientious man, and the possession of great wealth was not without
its gravities.
For the first time he felt it safe to leave his mine in other hands.
He had a longing to mix with his kind once more, and in his heart was
the secret hope that somewhere among the women of the Springs he might
find a girl to take to wife. He arranged his vacation for July, not
because it was ever hot at the Creek, but because he knew the Springs
swarmed at that time with girls from the States. It would have
troubled him had any one put these ideas into words and accused him of
really seeking a bride.
He was a self-unconscious man naturally, and he hardly realized yet
how widely his name had gone as the possessor of millions. He supposed
himself an unnoticed atom as he stood at the spring on the second
night of his stay in the village. Of a certainty many did not know
him, but they saw him, for he was a striking figure--a handsome
figure--though that had never concerned him. He was, in fact, feeling
his own insignificance.
He was standing there in shadow looking out somberly upon the streams
of people as they came to take their evening draught at the wonderful
water of the effervescing spring. The sun had gone behind the high
peaks to the west, and a delicious, dry coolness was in the cañon.
It seemed to Clement to be a very fashionable and leisurely throng--so
long had he been absent from people either modish or easeful. He felt
himself to be hopelessly outside all this youth and brilliancy and
merriment, and he looked upon it all with a certain wistfulness.
He perceived at length that the strollers were not all of the same
conditions. There were rough, brown cow-boys from La Junta and Cajon,
and miners in rough dress down from the gulches for a night, but
mainly the promenaders appealed to him with elegance of dress and
manner.
Many of the ladies came without hats, which added to the charm of
their eyes and hair. Some of them looked twice at the tall man with
the big mustache and broad hat, who seemed to be watching for some
tardy friend.
As he studied them his memory freshened and he came to understand them
better. He analyzed them into familiar types. This was a banker and
his wife from some small town--the wife fussy and consequential, the
husband coldly dignified. This group was composed of a doctor and his
daughters. Behind them came a merchant from some Nebraska town--he
rough of exterior, his children dainty of dress and very pretty.
Occasionally a group of college-bred girls came up without
escort--alert, self-helpful and serene. They saw Clement at once, and
studied him carefully as they drank their beauty cup at the circular
bench before the spring. All good-looking men had interest to them.
All classes came, a varied stream, yet they were Western, and of the
well-to-do condition for the larger part.
The deft boy swung the glasses of water on his tripartite dipper with
ceaseless splash and clink. There was a pleasant murmur of talk in
which an Eastern listener would have heard the "r" sound
well-defined. There were many couples seated about the pavilion on the
benches and railings. It was all busy yet tranquil. Each loiterer had
fed, had taken his draught of healing water--and this was the hour of
pleasant gossip and repose. Clement fell at last to analyzing the
action of the boy who supplied the water at the pool. He slammed the
glasses into the pool, and set them on the bench with a click as
regular as a pump. Occasionally, however, he was indifferent. With
some of his customers he handled the glasses as if they contained
nectar, thus indicating his generous patrons. Once he stopped and
dipped the glass into the pool with his own hand--a doubtful
action--and extended it with a bow to a young lady who said "thank
you" so sweetly that he blushed and stammered in reply.
All this fixed Clement's attention, and as the young girl lifted the
glass in her slim hand he wondered how she had escaped his notice for
a single moment. A woman at his side said sighfully, "There is that
consumptive girl again, she hasn't long to stay." She was as pale, as
fragile, and as lovely as the mountain columbine. Her face was thin,
and her head shapely, but her eyes! They burned like rarest
topaz--deep, dark and sad. Clement shivered as he felt them fixed upon
him, and yet he could not turn away as he should have done.
He gazed at her with a sudden feeling which was not awe, nor
compassion, nor love, but was all of these. He felt in his soul the
subtlest sadness in all the world--the sadness of a strong man who
looks upon a beautiful young girl who is dying.
Extremest languor was in every movement. She was dressed in dark, soft
garments--very simple and graceful in effect, and her bearing was that
of one accustomed to willing service from others. Her smile was as sad
as her eyes which had in them the death-shadow.
Clement's action, the unwavering self-forgetful intentness of his
look, arrested her attention, and she returned his gaze for an
instant, and then turned away and took the arm of an elderly gentleman
who stood beside her. She moved slowly, as an invalid walks when for
the first time she is permitted a short walk in the outdoor air,
leaning heavily on her companion.
The big miner roused himself and stood straight and tall, hesitating
whether to follow or not--a sudden singular pain in his heart, as if
he were losing something very close to his life.
He obeyed the impulse to follow, and moved down the path, just out of
reach of observation, he fancied. As he made way through the crowd he
grew aware again of his heavy limbs, of his great height, of his
swinging, useless hands. It had been so long since he had mingled with
a holiday company, he appeared as self-conscious as a boy.
Once the fair invalid turned and looked back, but she was too far away
for him to discern the expression of her face. He was not possessed
of self-esteem enough to believe she had turned to look for him.
He followed them in their slow pace till they turned in at the doorway
of the principal hotel of the village. They entered at the ladies'
door while he kept on to the main entrance and rotunda. There was no
elevator in the house, and the invalid paused a moment before
attempting the stairway. It was pitiful to see her effort to make
light of it all to her companion, who was quite evidently her father.
She smiled at him even while she pressed one slim hand against her
bosom.
Clement longed to take her in his arms and carry her up the
stairway--it seemed the thing most worth doing in all the world--but
he could only lean against the desk and see them go slowly stair by
stair out of sight.
"Who are they?" he asked of the clerk whom he detected also watching
them with almost the same breathless interest.
"Chicago merchant, G. B. Ross. That's his daughter. She's pretty far
gone--consumption, I reckon. It looks tough to see a girl like that go
off. You'd think now----"
Clement did not remain to hear the clerk moralize further; he went
immediately to his own hotel, paid his bill, and ordered his baggage
sent to the other house. He wondered at himself for this overpowering
interest in a sick girl, and at his plan to see her again.
He reasoned that he would be able to see her at breakfast time,
provided she came down to breakfast, and provided he hit upon the same
hour of eating. He began to calculate upon the probable hour when she
would come down. It was astounding how completely she occupied his
thought already.
He struck off up the cañon where no sound was, other than the roar of
the wild little stream which seemed to lift its voice in wilder clamor
as the night fell. Its presence helped him to think out his situation.
He had grown self-analytical during his life in the camp, where he
was alone so far as his finer feelings were concerned, and he had come
to believe in many strange things which he said nothing about to any
friend he had.
He had come to believe in fate and also in intuition. A powerful
impulse to do he counted higher than reason. That is to say, if he had
a powerful impulse to run a shaft in a certain direction he would so
act, no matter if his reason declared dead against it. The hidden and
uncontrollable processes of his mind had given him the secret of "The
Witch's" gold, had led him right in his shafting and in his selection
of friends and assistants--and had made him a millionaire at
thirty-seven years of age. He was prone to over-value the intuitional
side of his nature, probably--an error common among practical men.
Fate was, with him, luck raised to a higher power. What was to be
would be; the unexpected happened; the expected, hoped for, labored
for, did not always happen. All around him men stumbled upon mines,
while other men, more skilful, more observant, failed. The luck was
against them.
It was quite in harmony with his nature that he should be absorbed in
the singular and powerful impulse he had to seek an acquaintance with
that poor dying girl.
Dying! At that word he rebelled. God would not take so beautiful a
creature away from earth; men needed her to teach them gentleness and
submission. More than this, he had an almost uncontrollable impulse to
go to her, and putting aside doctors say to her:
"I am the one to heal you."
He had never had an impulse to heal before, but the fact that it was
unaccountable and powerful and definite, fitted in with his successes.
He gave it careful thought. It must mean something because it had
never come to him before, and because it rose out of the mysterious
depths of his brain.
She must not die! The wind, the mountains, the clear air, the good,
sweet water, the fragrant pines, the splendid sun--these things must
help her. "And I, perhaps I, too, can help her?"
Back in the glare of the hotel rotunda, with its rows of bored men
sitting stolidly smoking, idly talking, his impulse and his resolution
seemed very unmanly and preposterous. It is so easy to lose faith in
the elemental in the midst of the superficial and ephemeral of daily
habit.