A rider had his choice in journeying to Canyon Pass from a southerly
direction--say from Lamberton, which lies between the railroad and the
desert--of following the river trail to be deafened by the boisterous
voice of the flood, or of climbing to the high lands and there jogging
along the wagon track which finally dipped down the steeps to the ford
of the West Fork and so into the mining town.
Spring was drifting into the background of the year. The cottonwood
leaves were the size of squirrel ears. The new fronds of the piñon had
expanded to full size and now their needles quivered in the heat of the
almost summer-like day. Joe Hurley, sitting his heavy-haunched bay,
giving as easily to the animal's paces as a sack of meal, followed the
wagon track rather than the river trail and so came to that fork where
wheel-ruts from a westerly direction joined the road along the brink of
the canyon wall.
A cream-colored pony came cantering along the trail from Hoskins, its
rider as gaily dressed as a Mexican vaquero--a splotch of color against
the background of the evergreens almost startling to his vision. But it
was the identity of this rider that invigorated the tone of the mining
man's reflections.
"Nell Blossom! The only sure-enough cure for ophthalmia! Am I going to
have the pleasure of being your escort back to Canyon Pass? It will sure
do me proud. The Passonians are honing for you, Nell."
"I'm going back to the Pass--yes, Mr. Hurley," she said, pulling down her
pony to the more sedate pace of his big bay.
"Where you been since you left us all in the lurch? There was almost a
riot at the Grub Stake when Tolley found out you had gone."
"Boss Tolley hasn't got anything on me," she said defensively. "I'd
never sing there again, anyway."
"Somebody said you'd lit out for the desert with Steve Siebert and Andy
McCann," and he chuckled. "They started the same day you vamoosed."
"I might just as well have gone with those old desert rats. Pocket
hunting couldn't be much worse than Hoskins."
"Great saltpeter! What took you to Hoskins?" exclaimed Hurley. "Where's
your local pride? If you weren't born at Canyon Pass, you've lived there
most of your life. You shouldn't encourage a dump like Hoskins to
believe for a moment that it has greater attractions than the Pass."
"If I thought it might be more attractive, I learned better," she said
shortly.
"Mother Tubbs got a letter from you, but she wouldn't tell us where you
were."
"No," Nell said. "I didn't want the boys riding over there and starting
a roughhouse at the Tin Can Saloon."
"Great saltpeter!" exclaimed Hurley again. "You don't mean to say you
been caroling your roundelays in _that_ place?"
"A girl has to work somewhere, and I was sick to death of the Grub
Stake."
"Boss Tolley is no pleasant citizen and his joint is no sweet-scented
garden spot, I admit," Hurley agreed. "Personally I'd like to see Tolley
run out of town and the Grub Stake eliminated. But Colorado Brown has
opened a new place and is going to run it right--so he says."
"That's what is bringing me back," Nell confessed. "He got word to me by
Mother Tubbs, and he made me a better offer than Tolley ever would. But
I expect one cabaret is about like another in these roughneck towns."
"I don't know about that," the man said defensively. "We mean to try to
clean up Canyon Pass. The boys have got to have amusement. Colorado
Brown is a white man, and, if he gets the backing of the better element,
he can give a good show and sell better hootch and better grub than ever
Boss Tolley dared to."
"Hootch is hootch," Nell interrupted. "It's all bad. There's nothing
good about a rotten egg, Mr. Hurley. And the men's money is wasted in
all those places--plumb wasted!"
He had been watching her closely as they talked. He had been watching
Nell closely, off and on, for several years. Like many of the other
young and unattached men of Canyon Pass, Joe Hurley had at one time
attempted to storm the fortress of Nell Blossom's heart. Finally he had
become convinced that the girl was not for him.
Joe Hurley neither wore his heart on his sleeve nor was he unwise enough
to anger Nell by forcing his attentions beyond that barrier she had
raised between them. His were merely the objections of any clean-minded
man when he had seen her yielding to the machinations of Dick the Devil.
Joe knew the gambler's kind.
He had felt no little anxiety when, with the usual spring exodus of the
two old desert rats, Steve Siebert and Andy McCann, Nell and Dick
Beckworth had likewise disappeared from the Grub Stake. Dick, of course,
had settled with Boss Tolley; he intimated that he was starting north
for the railroad at Crescent City. The hour had been so early that
nobody else had chanced to see the gambler and the girl ride away. Nell
was missed later, and all the right thinking men of the town, although
they said little, feared the worst for Nell Blossom.
Nell had displayed at the last some little interest in Dick the Devil.
The other girls at the Grub Stake gossiped about it.
Then came Mother Tubbs with a bona-fide letter from the girl to dam the
flood of gossip. Nell was working as usual in a cabaret. She had left
Boss Tolley because she could not stand him any longer. She was bitter
about the Grub Stake and its proprietor. And not a word in the letter
about Dick Beckworth. It was plain, even to the most suspicious, that
Dick had not gone with her after all.
These few facts colored Joe Hurley's thoughts as they rode along the
track. What colored Nell's?
When the sprightly talk lapsed between them, the girl's face fell into
unhappy lines. She who had been as blithe as a field lark all her life
was showing to Joe Hurley for the first time a most unnatural soberness
of spirit. Her eyes, their gaze fixed straight ahead, were filmed with
remoteness that his friendly glance could not penetrate.
Something had changed Nell Blossom. She was no longer the happy-go-lucky
girl she had been heretofore. He wondered if, after all, her affair with
Dick Beckworth was serious.
They skirted the Overhang, their horses now at a canter. Nell suddenly
pulled in her mount at a place where a patch along the brink of the
treacherous cap had recently crumbled.
"Looks as if there might have been a small slide," observed Hurley
cheerfully.
"Was--was anybody hurt?"
"Reckon not. Just about where the big slide was years ago. There are
always bits dropping down this cliff. I tell 'em there's bound to be
another landslip some time that will play hob with Runaway River and
maybe flood out the town again. It's like living over a volcano."
Nell still looked back at the broken edge of the cliff. "Nobody missing,
then? Nobody--er--left town?"
He laughed. "Nobody but you and old Steve and Andy McCann. Those old
desert rats lit out the same morning you left town. Hold on! I don't
know as you know it; but Dick Beckworth went about that time. He's gone
to Denver, so Tolley says, to deal faro at a big place there."
He could not see the girl's face. As far as he knew the statement made
no impression upon her. They jogged on practically in silence until they
came to the point where the wagon-track plunged steeply to the ford of
the West Fork, and from which spot the squalid town was first visible.
"Ugh!" Nell shuddered and glanced at Joe again. "It is such an ugly
place."
"Where's your civic pride, Nell?" and the other chuckled.
"What is there to be proud of?" was her sharp demand.
"It's a money-making town."
"Money!"
"Quite a necessary evil, that same money," he rejoined. "Gold is a good
foundation to build a town upon. Canyon Pass has 'got a future in front
of it,' as the feller said. Business is booming. Bank deposits are
increasing. Three families have bought piano-players, and there are at
least a dozen talking machines in town--besides the female citizens," and
he laughed again.
"All that?" in a sneering tone. "Still, the bulk of the wages from the
mines and washings are spent for drink and in gambling. The increase in
bank deposits I bet are made by the merchants and honkytonk keepers, Mr.
Hurley. Canyon Pass is prosperous--yes. But at the expense of everything
decent and everybody's decency. Mother Tubbs has got it right. Canyon
Pass hasn't got a heart."
"Oh--heart!"
"Yes, heart. There's neither law nor gospel, she says. Only such law as
is enforced at the muzzle of the sheriff's gun. And as far as religion
goes--when was there ever a parson in Canyon Pass?"
"They're rare birds, I admit. But you needn't blame me, Nell."
"I do blame you!" she exclaimed fiercely. "You're at fault--you, and
Slickpenny Norris who runs the bank, and Bill Judson of the Three Star,
and the manager of the Oreode Company, and the other more influential
men. It is your fault that there isn't a church and other civilized
things in Canyon Pass."
"Great saltpeter, Nell! You're not wailing for a Sunday School and a sky
pilot?"
"Me? I reckon not!" She almost spat out the scornful denial. "I'm just
telling you what your old Canyon Pass is. It's a back number. But I'm
free to confess if a parson and a crew of psalm-singing tenderfoots came
here, I'd like enough pull my freight again--and that time for keeps!
Even Hoskins would be more endurable."
At this outburst Joe Hurley broke into laughter. Nell Blossom was
paradoxical--had always been.
And yet, what Nell had said about the shortcomings of Canyon Pass stuck
in Joe Hurley's mind. Within a few days the thought, fermenting within
him, resulted in that letter which had so interested--not to say
excited--the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt in far-away Ditson Corners.