open his negotiations. Peter cooked himself an elaborate breakfast--and
drank half a cup of coffee. Then he sat, as he had the day before,
staring straight in front of him, seeing nothing. After a time he placed
the girl's picture and the square mirror side by side on the table and
looked at them intently.
He rose, kicking his chair over backward, and went out to his claims
once more.
The men in the gulch had awakened. Most of them had finished the more
imperative demands of location the day before, so now they were more at
leisure to satisfy their curiosity and their love of comment by
inspecting the original discovery to which all this stampede was due. As
a consequence Peter found a great gathering on the _Jim Crow_. Some of
the men were examining chunks of ore, others were preparing to descend
the shafts, still others were engaged idly in reading the
location-notice tacked against a stub pine. One of the latter, the same
individual who had joked Peter in the saloon, caught sight of the
prospector as he approached.
"Hullo, Happy!" he called, pointing at the weather-beaten notice. "What
do you call this?" He winked at the rest. The history of Peter's losses
was well known.
"What?" asked Peter, strangely.
"You ain't got this readin' right. She says 'fifteen hundred feet'; the
law says she ought t' read 'fifteen hundred _linear_ feet.' Your claim
is n.g. I'm goin' t' jump her on you."
The statement was ridiculous; everybody knew it, and prepared to laugh,
loud-mouthed.
Peter, without a word, shot the speaker through the heart. Men said at
his trial that it was the most brutal and unprovoked murder they had
ever known.
VII
THE GIRL IN RED
"It isn't _that_ I object to," protested the Easterner, leaning forward
from the rough log wall to give emphasis to his words, "for I believe in
everyone having his fun his own way. If you're going in for orgies, why,
have 'em _good_ orgies, and be done with it. But my kick's on letting
these innocent young girls who are just out for the fun--it's awful!"
"It's hell!" assented the Westerner, cheerfully.
"Now, look at that pretty creature over there----"
The young miner followed his companion's gaze through the garishly lit
crowd. Then, as though in doubt as to whether he had seen correctly, he
tried it again.
"Which do you mean?" he asked, puzzled.
"The one in red. Now, she----"
The Westerner snorted irrepressibly.
"What's the matter with you?" inquired the Easterner, looking on him
with suspicious eyes.
The other choked his laugh in the middle, and instantly assumed an
expression of intense solemnity. It was as though a candle had blown out
in the wind.
"Beg pardon. Nothing," he asserted with brevity of enunciation. "Go on."
The girl in red was standing tiptoe on a bench under one of the big
lanterns. She was holding her little palm slantwise over the chimney,
and by blowing against it was trying to put out the lamp. Her face was
very serious and flushed. Occasionally the lamp would flare up a little,
and she would snatch her hand away with a pretty gesture of dismay as
the uprising flame would threaten to scorch it. A group of interested
men surrounded and applauded her. Two on the outside stood off the
proprietor of the dance-hall. The proprietor was objecting.
"Well, then, just look at that girl, I say," the Easterner went on.
"She's as pretty and fresh and innocent as a mountain flower. She's
having the time of her young life, and she just thinks it means a good
time and nothing else. Some day she'll find out it means a lot else. I
tell you, it's awful!"
The Westerner surveyed his friend's flushed face with silent amusement.
The girl finally succeeded in blowing the light out, and everybody
yelled.
"Same old fellow you were in college, aren't you, Bert?" he said,
affectionately; "succouring the distressed and borrowing other people's
troubles. What can you do?"
"Do, do! What can any man do? Take her out of this! appeal to her better
nature!"
Bert started impulsively forward to where the girl--with assistance--was
preparing to jump from the bench. The miner caught his sleeve in alarm.
"Hold on, don't make a row! Wait a minute!" he begged; "she isn't worth
it! There, now listen," as the other sank back expectantly to his former
position. His bantering manner returned. "You and the windmills," he
breathed, in relief. "I'll just shatter your ideals a few to pay for
that scare. You shall now hear a fact or so concerning that pretty,
innocent girl--I forget your other adjective. In the first place, she
isn't in the mountain-flower business a little bit. Her name is Anne
Bingham, but she is more popularly known as Bismarck Anne, chiefly
because of all the camps of our beloved territory Bismarck is the only
one she hasn't visited. Therefore, it is concluded she must have come
from there."
"Bismarck Anne!" repeated the Easterner, wonderingly. "She isn't the
one----"
"The very same. She's about as bad as they make 'em, and I don't believe
she misses a pay-day dance a year. She's all right, now; but you want to
come back a little later. Anne will be drunk--gloriously drunk--and very
joyful. I will say that for her. She has all the fun there is in it
while it lasts."
"Whew!" whistled the Easterner, in dazed repulsion, looking with
interest on the girl's animated face.
"Oh, what do you care!" responded the miner, carelessly. "She has her
fun."
Bismarck Anne jumped into the nearest man's arms, was kissed, bestowed a
slap, and flitted away down the room. She deftly stole the accordion
from beneath the tall look-out stool on which a musician sat and ran,
evolving strange noises from the instrument, and scampering in and out
among the benches, pursued by its owner. The men all laughed heartily,
and tried to trip up the pursuer. The women laughed hollow laughs, to
show they were not jealous of the sensation she was creating. Finally
she ran into the proprietor, just turning from relighting the big lamp.
The proprietor, being angry, rescued the accordion roughly; whereupon
Anne pouted and cast appealing glances on her friends. The friends
responded to a man. The proprietor set up the drinks.
The music started up again. Miners darted here and there toward the
gaudily dressed women, and, seizing them about the waist, held them
close to their sides, as a claim of proprietorship before the whole
world. Perspiring masters of ceremonies, self-constituted and drunk,
rushed back and forth, trying to put a semblance of the quadrilateral
into the various sets. Everybody shuffled feet impatiently.
The dance began with a swirl of noise and hilarious confusion. Bismarck
Anne added to the hilarity. She was having a high old time; why
shouldn't she? She had had three glasses of forty-rod, and was blessed
by nature with a lively disposition and an insignificant bump of
reverence. Moreover, she was healthy of body, red of blood, and reckless
of consequences. Pleasure appealed to her; the stir of action, the
delight of the flow of high spirits, thrilled through every fibre of her
being. She had no beliefs, as far as she knew. If she could have told
of them, they would have proved simple in the extreme--that life comes
to those who live out their possibilities, and not to those who deny
them. And Anne had many possibilities, and was living them fast. She
felt almost physically the beat of pleasure in the atmosphere about her,
and from it she reacted to a still higher pitch. She had drunk three
glasses, and her head was not strong. Her feet moved easily, and she was
very certain of her movements. She had become just hazy enough in her
mental processes to have attained that happy indifference to what is
likely to happen in the immediate future, and that equally happy
disregard of consequences which the virtuous never experience.
Impressions reduced themselves to their lowest terms--movement and
noise. The room was full of rapidly revolving figures. The racket was
incessant, and women's laughter rose shrill above it, like wind above a
storm. Anne moved amid it all as the controller of its destinies, and
wherever she went seemed to her to be the one stable point in the
kaleidoscopic changes. Men danced with her, but they were meaningless
men. One begged her to dance with him, but Anne stopped to watch a youth
blowing brutishly from puffed cheeks, so the man cursed and left her
for another girl. Beyond the puffing youth lights were dancing, green
and red. Anne paused and looked at them gravely.
The people, the room, the sounds seemed to her to come and go in great
bursts. Between these bursts Anne knew nothing except that she was
happy; above all else she was happy. As incidents men kissed her and she
drank; but these things were not essentially different from the lights
and the bursts of consciousness. Anne began to take everything for
granted.
After a time Anne paused again to look gravely at strange lights. But
this time they seemed not to be red or green, but to be of orange, in
long, fiery flashes, like ribbons thrown suddenly out and as suddenly
withdrawn. The noise stopped, and was succeeded by a buzzing. For a
moment the girl's blurred vision saw clearly the room, all still, except
for a man huddled in one corner, and on the floor a slowly gathering
pool of red. Someone thrust her out of the door with others, and she
began to step aimlessly, uncertainly, along the broad street.
She felt dimly the difference between the hot air of the dance-hall and
the warm air out of doors. The great hills and the stars and the
silhouetted houses came and went in visions, just as had the people and
the noise inside the hall. The idea of walking came to her, and occupied
her mind to the exclusion of everything else, and she set about it with
great intentness. How far she went and in what direction did not seem to
matter. When she moved she was happy; when she stopped she was
miserable. So she wandered on in the way she knew, and yet did not know,
out of the broad streets of the town, through a wide cleft in the hills,
up a long grassy valley that wound slowly and mounted gradually,
following the brawl of the stream, until at last she found herself in a
little fern-grown dell at the entrance of Iron Creek Pass. She pushed
her fingers through her fallen hair, and idly over the shimmering stuff
of her gown. Far above her she saw waveringly the stars. Finally the
idea of sleep came to her, just as the idea of walking had come to her
before. She sank to her knees, hesitated a moment, and then, with the
sigh of a tired child, she pillowed her head on her soft round arm and
closed her eyes.
* * * * *
The poor-wills ceased their plaintive cries. A few smaller birds chirped
drowsily. Back of the eastern hills the stars became a little dimmer,
and the soft night breeze, which had been steadily blowing through the
darkened hours, sank quietly to sleep. The subtle magic of nature began
to sketch in the picture of day, throwing objects forward from the dull
background, taking them bodily out of the blackness, as though creating
them anew. Fresh life stirred through everything. The vault of heaven
seemed full of it, and all the ravines and by-ways caught up its
overflow in a grand chorus of praise to the new-whitening morning.
The woman stirred drowsily and arose, throwing back her heavy hair from
her face. The flush of sleep still dyed her cheek a rich crimson, which
came and went slowly in the light of the young sun, vying in depth now
with the silk of her gown, now with the still deeper tones of a mountain
red-bird which splattered into rainbow tints the waters of the brook.
She caught the sound of the stream, and went to it. The red-bird
retreated circumspectly, silently. She knelt at the banks and splashed
the icy water over her face and throat, another red-bird, another wild
thing pulsing and palpitating with life. Then she arose to the full
height of her splendid body and looked abroad.
The morning swept through her like a river and left her clean. In the
eye of nature and before the presence of nature's innumerable creatures
she stood as innocent as they. She had entered into noisome places, but
so had the marsh-hawk poising grandly on motionless wing there above.
She had scrambled in the mire, and she was ruffled and draggled and
besmirched; so likewise had been the silent flame-bird in the thicket,
but he had washed clean his plumes and was now singing the universal
hymn from the nearest bush-top. The woman drew her lungs full of the
morning. She stretched slowly, lazily, her muscles one by one, and stood
taller and freer for the act. The debauch of the last night, the
debauches of other and worse nights, the acid-like corrosion of that
vulgarity which is more subtle than sin even, all these things faded
into a past that was dead and gone and buried forever. The present alone
was important, and the present brought her, innocent, before an innocent
nature. As she stood there dewy-eyed, wistful, glowing, with loosened
hair, the grasses clinging to her, and the dew, she looked like a
wide-eyed child-angel newly come to earth. To her the morning was great
and broad, like a dream to be dreamed and awakened from, something
unreal and evanescent which would go. Her heart unfolded to its
influence, and she felt within her that tenderness for the beautiful
which is nearest akin to holy tears.
As she stood thus, musing, it seemed natural that a human figure should
enter and become part of the dream. It seemed natural that it should be
a man, and young; that he should be handsome and bold. It seemed natural
that he should rein in his horse at the sight of her. So inevitable was
it all, so much in keeping with the soft sky, the brooding shadow of the
mountain, the squirrel noises, and the day, that she stood there
motionless, making no sign, looking up at him with parted lips, saying
nothing. He was only a fraction, a small fraction, of all the rest. His
fine brown eyes, the curl of his long hair, the bronze of his features
mattered no more to her than the play of the sunlight on Harney.
Then he spurred his horse forward, and something in her seemed to snap.
From the dream-present the woman was thrust roughly back into her past.
The sunlight faded away before her eyes, oozing from the air in drop
after drop of golden splendour, the songs of the birds died, the
murmuring of the brook became an angry brawl that accused the world of
wickedness. The morning fled. From a distance, far away, farther than
Harney, farther than the sky, the stranger's brown eyes looked
pityingly. Her sin was no longer animal. It had touched her soul.
Instead of an incident it had become a condition which hemmed her in,
from which she could not escape. Suddenly she saw the difference. She
dwelt in darkness; he, with his clear soul, dwelt in light. She threw
herself face downward on the earth, weeping and clutching the grass in
the agony of her sin.
Then a new sound smote the air. She sat upright and listened.
Around the bend she heard a high-pitched voice declaiming in measured
tones.
"'Thy kingdom is an everlasting kingdom, and Thy dominion endureth
throughout all generations,'" the voice chanted.
"'The Lord upholdeth all that fall, and raiseth all that he bowed
down.'"
The speaker strode in sight. He was one of the old-fashioned itinerant
preachers occasionally seen in the Hills, filled with fanatic
enthusiasm, journeying from place to place on foot, exhorting by the
fear of hell fire rather than by the hope of heaven's bliss, half-crazy,
half-inspired, wholly in earnest. His form was gaunt. He was clad in a
shiny black coat buttoned closely, and his shoes showed dusty and huge
beneath his carefully turned-up trousers. A beaver of ancient pattern
was pushed far back from his narrow forehead, and from beneath it
flashed vividly his fierce hawk-eyes. Over his shoulder, suspended from
a cane, was a carpet-bag. He stepped eagerly forward with an immense
excess of nervous force that carried him rapidly on. Nothing more out of
place could be imagined than this comical figure against the simplicity
of the hills. Yet for that very reason he was the more grateful to the
woman's perturbed soul. She listened eagerly for his next words.
He strode fiercely across the stones of the little ford, declaiming with
energy, with triumph:
"'The eyes of all wait upon Thee, and Thou givest them their meat in due
season.
"'Thou openest Thine hand, and satisfieth the desire of every living
thing.
"'The Lord is righteous in all His ways, and holy in all His works.
"'The Lord is nigh unto all them that call upon Him, to all that call upon
Him in truth.
"'He will fulfil the desire of all that fear Him: He also will hear their
cry and save them.'"
Anne saw but two things plainly in all the world--the clear-eyed
stranger like a god; this fiery old man who spoke words containing
strange, though vague, intimations of comfort. From the agony of her
soul but one thought leaped forth--to make the comfort real, to find out
how to raise herself from her sin, to become worthy of the goodness
which she had that morning for the first time clearly seen. She sprang
forward and seized the preacher's arm. Interrupted in his ecstasy, he
rolled his eyes down on her but half comprehending.
"How? How?" she gasped. "Help me! What must I do?"
She held out her empty hands with a gesture of appeal. The old man's
mind still burned with the fever of his fanatical inspiration. He hardly
saw her, and did not understand all the import of her words. He looked
at her vacantly, and caught sight of her outstretched hands.
"'And to work with your hands as we command you,'" he quoted vaguely,
then shook himself free of her detaining grasp and marched grandly on,
rolling out the mighty syllables of the psalms.
"To work with my hands; to work with my hands," the woman repeated
looking at her outspread palms. "Yes, that is it!" she said, slowly.
* * * * *
Anne Bingham washed dishes at the Prairie Dog Hotel for a week. The
first day was one of visions; the second one of irksomeness; the third
one of wearisome monotony. The first was as long as it takes to pass
from one shore to the other of the great dream-sea; the second was an
age; the third an eternity. The first was rose-hued; the second was
dull; the third was filled with the grayness that blurs activity turned
to mechanical action.
And on the eighth day occurred the monthly pay-day dance of the Last
Chance mine. All the men were drunk, all the women were drunker, but
drunkest of all was the undoubted favourite of the company, Bismarck
Anne. Two men standing by the door saw nothing remarkable about that--it
had happened the last week. But in that time Bismarck Anne had had her
chance, she had eaten of the fruit of the Tree, and so now was in mortal
sin.
THE END
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
THE McCLURE PRESS, NEW YORK
STANDARD FICTION
A selected list of the Standard Fiction published by McClure, Phillips
and Company, 44-60 East 23d St., N. Y.
Cloth, 12mo. Each $1.50, unless otherwise indicated.
ADE, GEORGE
IN BABEL
BURGESS, GELETT [with WILL IRWIN]
THE REIGN OF QUEEN ISYL
THE PICAROONS
CONRAD, JOSEPH
LORD JIM
YOUTH
FALK
ROMANCE [with F.M. HUEFFER]. Illustrated.
CROCKETT, S. R.
THE FIREBRAND
FLOWER O' THE CORN
THE BANNER OF BLUE
CUTTING, MARY STEWART
LITTLE STORIES OF MARRIED LIFE
DASKAM, JOSEPHINE
THE MADNESS OF PHILIP. Illustrated.
DOUGLAS, GEORGE
THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS
DOYLE, A. CONAN
THE GREEN FLAG
THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES [$1.25]. Illustrated.
THE ADVENTURES OF GERARD.
DUNCAN, NORMAN
THE WAY OF THE SEA. Frontispiece.
FINDLATER, MARY
THE ROSE OF JOY
FRASER, W. A.
THOROUGHBREDS. Illustrated.
HARLAND, HENRY
MY FRIEND PROSPERO. Frontispiece.
HARRIS, JOEL CHANDLER
GABRIEL TOLLIVER
THE MAKING OF A STATESMAN [$1.25].
A LITTLE UNION SCOUT [$1.25].
HOPE, ANTHONY
TRISTRAM OF BLENT
JEPSON, EDGAR
THE ADMIRABLE TINKER. Illustrated.
KEAYS, H. A. MITCHELL
HE THAT EATETH BREAD WITH ME
LESSING, BRUNO
CHILDREN OF MEN [$1.25].
LONDON, JACK
THE GOD OF HIS FATHERS
MARTIN, GEORGE MADDEN
EMMY LOU: HER BOOK AND HEART. Illustrated.
MERRIMAN, HENRY SETON
BARLASCH OF THE GUARD
MEREDITH, ELLIS
HEART OF MY HEART [$1.25].
PHILLIPS, HENRY WALLACE
RED SAUNDERS [1.25] Illustrated.
PHILLIPS, DAVID GRAHAM
GOLDEN FLEECE. Illustrated.
THE MASTER-ROGUE. "
ROSEBORO', VIOLA
THE JOYOUS HEART
ROWLAND, HENRY C.
SEA SCAMPS
SPEARMAN, FRANK H.
HELD FOR ORDERS
TARKINGTON, BOOTH
THE GENTLEMAN FROM INDIANA
THE TWO VANREVELS
MONSIEUR BEAUCAIRE [1.25]. Illustrated.
TOLSTOY, COUNT LEO
ANNA KARENIN. 2 vols., each, net, $2.00
WAR AND PEACE. 3 vols., each, net, $2.00
IVAN ILYITCH. 1 vol., $2.00
WEYMAN, STANLEY
THE LONG NIGHT
WHITE, WILLIAM ALLEN
THE COURT OF BOYVILLE. Illustrated.
WHITE, STEWART EDWARD
THE BLAZED TRAIL. Illustrated.
THE SILENT PLACES. "
WYATT, EDITH
EVERY ONE HIS OWN WAY
TRUE LOVE
YOUNG, ROSE E.
SALLY OF MISSOURI
On net books add 7 per cent. to list price for postage.
End of Project Gutenberg's Blazed Trail Stories, by Stewart Edward White