A SONG FROM OVER THE SEA
For a little time there was no sound in the big room as Beatrice stood
gazing in open-mouthed astonishment at the piles of gold and silver
pieces heaped upon the table, while Hester stood at the outer door to
listen. The night sounds of the mountain came in: the wind among the
trees, the squeaking of a bat, the far-off yelp of a coyote. Presently,
however, these faint noises were drowned in another, distant but growing
nearer and louder, the angry voices of excited men and the tramp of feet
upon the road.
Beatrice went to the door beside Hester and, for what seemed a very long
time, stood waiting without a word spoken by any one of them, so
intently were they all listening. Much as Beatrice desired that John
Herrick should explain the presence of that money upon the table, she
dreaded his speaking, for she wished to lose no sound of the tumult that
was coming ever nearer up the hill.
The crowd of men was in sight now, climbing the last rise of the trail.
They were singing some wild foreign song: it might have been Russian,
Polish, Hungarian; she knew not which. The words conveyed no meaning to
her, but the loud harsh cadences seemed to cry out a message of their
own: a song of blind tyrannies and passionate rebellion, of cracking
whips and pistol-shots, of villages burning amid curses and weeping and
the cries of children. She shivered with terror as the shouting voices
came close.
“If only they were Americans,” she whispered to Hester. How could any
one control such a mob which scarcely understood a common tongue?
“There is no knowing what they may do,” Hester whispered in answer, “but
if any one is able to quiet them, Roddy can.”
The men came tramping up to the foot of the veranda steps and stopped—a
dense, huddled throng with a tossing lantern carried here and there that
showed the dark faces and the shining, excited eyes. A few figures stood
out against the foreign backgrounds: a handful of American and Irish
laborers, Dan O’Leary, head and shoulders taller than the others, Dabney
Mills hovering on the outskirts of the group, talking incessantly and
entirely unheeded.
Thorvik stood on the lowest step, his back to them, bareheaded and
pouring out a stream of eloquence. Two or three men stepped up to him
and began an earnest discussion, which waxed hotter and hotter as the
minutes passed, as the crowd quieted, and as all stood waiting. Dabney
Mills joined them, shaking his head and protesting vehemently. Beatrice,
leaning forward, caught enough of the broken English to understand the
meaning of their hesitation. They were arguing as to which should go in
first. Inside a great sum of money was spread out upon the table, with
no one to guard it but an injured man and two girls, yet these
disturbers of the night’s peace were quarreling as to who should enter
first.
It was Dan O’Leary who pushed through the crowd finally and strode up
the steps. The girls turned to watch him cross the hall and stop before
the table where John Herrick sat unmoving.
“Well, boss,” the Irishman said simply, “how about it?”
John Herrick’s thin face relaxed into a smile.
“Why don’t your friends come in?” he asked.
“They’re a bit shy,” Dan admitted. “I hear them talking it over how you
can shoot straighter than any other man in Broken Bow County.”
John Herrick’s smile grew broader and he got to his feet.
“Then I suppose I must go out to them,” he said, “if they won’t come
in.”
He limped slowly across the hall and out upon the steps, while a great
roar went up from the men as he appeared.
“The money of which there has been so much talk is in there on my table.
Is there any man who cares to come in to count it?”
There was no answer, nor did any one come forward. Thorvik, hurrying
from one to another, whispering, pointing, urging, seemed to have no
influence at all. Dabney Mills, shrill and abusive, shouted something
from the back of the crowd, but no one moved. Dan O’Leary burst into a
great roar of laughter and slapped his knee.
“You should have heard them tell, on the way up the mountain, what they
were going to do,” he declared to Beatrice at whose side he was
standing. “Thorvik and Mills, why, they were breathing fire, and now
look at them.” He stepped forward and stood by John Herrick. “Boys,” he
said, “I’m through. I came up here with you to ask the boss a question,
to find out if he had got away with any of the Irrigation Company’s
funds. Well, I don’t care any more to ask it. I know he’s all right.”
Beatrice turned at a sound behind her and saw Olaf, followed by old
Julia and Tim, come pushing through the door in the hall within. The man
and the woman were both deaf and the boy slept in one of the
outbuildings, so that they had only just now been awakened by the noise.
Olaf’s eye was fixed unwaveringly upon Thorvik, and that worthy,
suddenly becoming aware of the fact began to sidle away into the
background and disappeared behind the bulk of a gigantic Slovak.
Beatrice laid a restraining hand on Olaf’s arm, for John Herrick was
speaking again.
“You shall have an explanation,” he began, “though I have been waiting
for you to understand of yourselves. While you were talking up your
strike, or rather while your leader was talking and you were listening,
the Irrigation Company was coming to the end of its funds. Why? Because,
after your valuable Thorvik came to this camp, construction dragged, no
man did a full day’s work any more, time and material and money were
being wasted until the whole enterprise was at the edge of disaster. Was
it easy to raise more capital, do you think, when the whole place was
seething with discontent and everybody knew that a strike was coming?
No, the men who had put money into the project, far from being willing
to subscribe more, were wishing they could withdraw. It came about that
we moved first, and shut down the work the very night that you were
ready to declare a strike. It was a good thing for both sides. We all
needed a little time to think things over.”
He paused, as though for comment from his audience, but no one spoke and
he went on again.
“While you have been—resting, I have been working, and I have managed to
arrange for enough capital to carry on the work to the end, on one
condition. When things are not to your liking, you are to use the good
American way of talking things over and settling them peaceably, not the
method you brought with you from over the sea, of rioting and burning
and stirring up hatred between one man and another. On that basis we can
go on. In a crisis like this it is always easiest to blame one man, and
you have chosen to blame me. What you have been saying about me I
neither know nor care, but if you had used your own wits instead of
Thorvik’s, you would have seen how things really stood. And I will tell
you this. Through all this time of waiting, I have kept in my safe a
sufficient sum in cash for immediate use, so that when the time came to
begin again, we could go forward without a day’s, without an hour’s
delay. It is there, as I said, ready for you to earn it. And now have
you had enough of Thorvik and his talk of revolutions? Do you want to go
back to work?”
“We want to go back,” shouted a voice from the crowd.
It was an American voice, but its refrain was taken up in a dozen
foreign tongues. Yes, it was plain that they were weary of their leader
and that they wished to work again.
“Then go home and get some sleep and we will start work in the morning,”
John Herrick said. “The money will be there to pay your next week’s
wages and there will be enough for one thing besides. It will buy your
precious Thorvik a ticket back to his own country and we will all see
that he makes use of it.”
“But—see here,” Dabney Mills’ querulous voice rose above the murmur of
approval, “I’ve be telling them——”
Then it was that Beatrice had the greatest surprise of all her life. She
suddenly found herself standing on the step beside John Herrick, telling
what had happened, making plain to that strange, listening group, what
was the source of Dabney’s story. With her hand holding to her uncle’s,
she spoke out bravely and told the whole truth—just what had really
occurred and just how the reporter had spied and listened and questioned
and put together his so-called facts. She even found herself at the end,
telling of Dabney’s inglorious encounter with the bear.
[Illustration: Beatrice found herself telling what had happened]
Although the men did not understand much English, her speech was so
direct that they could easily comprehend the greater part of it. When
she came to the story of the bear, such a shout of laughter went up that
it drowned what little more she might have wished to say. The men
slapped each other on the shoulder, told the story all over again to one
another in their own tongues, rocked and chuckled and burst forth again
and again in uproarious mirth. It seemed to touch the sense of humor of
every one of them that the strutting, vainglorious young reporter should
have been the hero of such an ignominious adventure. When the gale of
merriment had somewhat laughed itself out, Dan O’Leary’s voice could be
heard above the others.
“We don’t need any more proof that they belong to each other,” he said.
“The pluck of the little one and the pluck of the big one, they sure
come from the same stock. And now let’s be getting back and be ready for
work in the morning. We needn’t spend our time waiting for Sherlock
Holmes. He has gone on ahead, and another of our friends with him.”
Under cover of the noisy laughter, two people had quietly slipped away.
A pair of shadows flitting down the trail, a slim one and a sturdy one,
were the last that Beatrice ever saw of Dabney Mills and of Thorvik.
The crowd dispersed, and went trudging down the mountainside, as John
Herrick had advised, to sleep in preparation for the work next day.
Their voices and laughter could be heard from afar as they wound down
the path—a cheery, comforting sound after the angry shouts and that
wild, terrible song that had heralded their coming. Beatrice, standing
to look after them, felt a sudden wave of friendliness and good-will for
the whole company, which, a short time before, she had regarded with
such terror and repulsion.
She went in at last to talk the whole matter over with John Herrick and
Hester and Olaf and Dan O’Leary, who had stayed behind. They heard the
whole tale, not only of the irrigation project, but of all that had led
up to it. The story was of a man beginning with nothing and in ten years
gathering the fortune that he was now putting into the watering of the
valley. It was wealth reaped from the fertile, untried resources and the
open-handed opportunities of a new country. The valley was in the hands
of prospectors and homesteaders when he came. He had seen the mines
opened, the farms plowed from virgin soil, the wilderness changed to a
settled country. After the pioneers and the farmers, had come the crowd
of foreign laborers, to build the railroads, to pick the fruit, to rear
the houses and dig the irrigation ditches.
“They are a blight on the country,” said Olaf, but John Herrick shook
his head.
“We need them,” he insisted. “We have to help them and teach them; and
their children will be good Americans. There are a few like Thorvik who
will cause trouble to the end of the chapter, but we can make something
of the rest of them.”
It was the mountain above them that alone had not changed, he went on to
tell them, although it was the mountain that had made the valley what it
was. It had given its treasures of gold and silver, the timber and
pasturage of its lower slopes; its roaring streams watered the fields
and the valley was fertile with soil washed from its rocky shoulders.
“A good part of the mountain belongs to me,” John Herrick said, “and a
bit of it to Beatrice, too. I can go higher and higher, blasting its
rocks, cutting its trees, but at a certain point I have to stop. There
is no man yet who has conquered the wind and clouds and cold of the
summit, and Gray Cloud Mountain is still master of us all.”
When at last he ceased talking, it was only because Hester had dropped
asleep in her chair and the gray dawn was showing behind the windows.
Beatrice was still listening eagerly, and so was Olaf, who heaved a long
sigh as the story came to an end.
“I wish I were going to do things like that,” he said wistfully.
“You are,” returned John Herrick, “and so is Beatrice, and Hester, too.
There are just such adventures ahead of all of you, in times like these:
every person who is growing up now will find his share of strange, new
things to do. Now you must take Beatrice home, Olaf. You children should
not have let me talk the whole night away.”
Dan O’Leary, who had said very little, got up and held out his hand to
Olaf as he said good-by.
“We’ll be glad to see you down in the town,” he declared. “We’ve got
over some things we used to think about you, and we’ve learned a great
deal this night.”
They rode slowly down the hill, and Beatrice and Olaf turned in at her
gate, still discussing the night’s adventure.
“He is a real man, John Herrick is,” was Olaf’s final verdict as they
reached the steps of the cabin. “You can’t beat him for fairness or for
pluck. And you know, the first time I saw you, I thought you were like
him. I believe I had begun to understand that you belonged to each other
long before any one told me so.”
She lingered on the steps, watching him lead Buck away to his stable and
then mount his own horse.
“I ride like a sailor,” he admitted as he climbed into the saddle,
“and—I didn’t tell you—I am going to sea again next week. My mother
doesn’t like my going but I can’t stop ashore more than this long. Now
that all this trouble is cleared up, I will go down to stay with her
until I leave. And you will go to see her sometimes, won’t you, after I
am gone?”
“Yes,” promised Beatrice, “but we are going ourselves before very long.
I can’t believe the summer has really passed. Hester is coming with us
to go to the school where Nancy and I go, and John Herrick—can I ever
call him anything else, I wonder—is coming too. But in a year we will
all be back again.”
He rode away, leaving her sitting on the steps, still wide awake and
reluctant to go in. The cabin was very still, since evidently no one had
awakened to miss her in the hours that she had been gone. She sat very
quietly, watching the sky grow red between the black columns of the
pine-trees, listening to the soft thunder of the waterfall and the
growing chorus of the birds as they awoke with the awakening dawn.
An approaching footstep surprised her. Some one had come very softly up
the needle-strewn pathway while she sat there dreaming. It was a figure
that she did not recognize at once—a person with outlandish clothes, and
a yellow face, and with two bundles done up in blue cotton handkerchiefs
hung on the pole upon his shoulder. After a moment of inspection she
exclaimed:
“Joe Ling!”
The Chinaman nodded.
“I leave your house because trouble was coming,” he explained. “Trouble
over now,” he waved his hand toward the village; “I come back again.”
By some secret sense through which Chinamen seem to know everything, he
had got news of the outbreak in the town almost before it had occurred
and had departed; but now, divining just as quickly that the difficulty
was over, he had returned. There could be no more convincing proof that
peace and quiet were really restored in Ely.
Beatrice thought for a moment, inclined at first to send him away. She
was beginning to be more used to the strange ways of Chinamen, however.
“And besides,” she reflected, “it will not do Nancy and me any harm to
have a vacation from our work for these last days that we are here.”
She nodded to Joe Ling and he made his way around the corner of the
house, to be heard presently in the kitchen making preparations for
breakfast as easily as though he had been in residence a twelvemonth.
She would soon be going back to all the old interests, she thought,
still without moving—back to lessons, dances, club meetings. How far
away that had all seemed to be! Everything would look different to her
now. She would never be discontented again nor wonder if the future was
going to be dull, since she had once realized how much life can hold.
Leaning back against the door-post, she sat contentedly staring out
across the hill. In the room upstairs Nancy was stirring, for Beatrice
heard the window close. Soon she would have to go in to relate all that
had happened in the night, but just for a minute more she would watch
the glowing sky, the moving tree-tops and the peak of Gray Cloud
Mountain showing clear and sharp in the first light of dawn.