Читать книгу The Honorable Senator Sage-Brush - Lynde Francis - Страница 7

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As a churlish fate decreed, it turned out that Evan Blount was not to have Gantry for a travelling companion beyond Chicago. On the second day of westward faring the railroad traffic manager, whose business followed him like an implacable Nemesis wherever he went, had wire instructions to stop and confer with his vice-president in the Illinois metropolis. Hence, on the morning of the following day, Blount continued his journey alone.

Twenty-odd hours later the returning expatriate had crossed his Rubicon; in other words, his train had rolled through the majestic steel bridge spanning the clay-colored flood of the Missouri River at Omaha, and he was entering upon scenes which ought to have been familiar—which should have been and were not, so many and striking were the changes which had been wrought during his fourteen years of absence.

Though he was far enough from realizing it, his education and the Eastern environment had given him a touch of Old-World insularity. The through sleeper in which he had his allotment of space was well filled, and there were the usual opportunities for the making of passing acquaintanceships in the smoking-compartment. But it was not until the second day, after the dining-car luncheon and its aftermath of a well-chosen cigar had broken down some of the barriers of the acquired reserve, that he fell into talk with the prosperous-looking gentleman who had seized upon the only chair in the smoking-compartment—a man whose thin, hawk-like face, narrowly set eyes, and uneasy manner were singularly out of keeping with the fashionable cut of his clothes, with his liberal tips, and with the display of jewelry on his watch-fob.

At first the conversation was baldly desultory, as it was bound to be, with an escaped lover, whose disappointment was still rasping him like a newly devised Nessus shirt, to sustain an undivided half of it. The hawk-faced one, who had boarded the train at Omaha and whose section was directly opposite Blount's, defined himself as a mine-owner whose property, vaguely located as somewhere "in the mountains," was involved in litigation.

It was the reference to the litigation which first drew Blount beyond the boundaries of the commonplaces. Oddly enough, considering the fact that his planned-for Eastern career would have given him little occasion to dip into the mining codes, he had specialized somewhat in mining law. Hence, when the hawk-faced man had told his story, Blount found himself thawing out sufficiently to be suggestively helpful to the man who had apparently purchased more trouble than profits in his mining ventures.

Into the cleft thus opened by the axe of human sympathy the man in the wicker chair presently inserted a wedge of cautious inquiry touching another matter. In addition to his mining ventures he had been making investments in timber-lands, or, rather, in certain lumber companies operating "in the mountains"—bad investments, he feared, since the Government had lately taken such a decided stand against the cutting of timber in the mountain-land reserves and water-sheds. Was it likely, he asked, that the talk would materialize in restraining action? If so, he was in the hole again—worse off than he should be if his mining lawsuits should go against him.

Again Blount, good-naturedly charitable and not a little amused by the nervous anxiety of the gentleman of many troubles, gave an opinion.

"Conservation, in timber as well as in other remaining resources of the country, has come to be a word which is in everybody's mouth," was the form the opinion took. "The plain citizen who isn't familiar with the methods of the timber sharks would do well to keep his money out of their hands if he doesn't wish to be held as particeps criminis with them in the day of reckoning."

"Say!" ejaculated the thin man, wriggling nervously in his chair. "If you were a Government agent yourself you could hardly put the case stronger for the conservation crowd!"

Now, in ordinary circumstances, nothing was ever farther from Blount's normal attitude toward his fellow-men than a disposition to yield to the sudden joking impulse. But the hawk-faced man's perturbation was so real, or so faultlessly simulated, that he could not resist the temptation.

"How do you know that I am not a Government agent?" he demanded, with a decent show of gravity.

"Because you are not travelling on Government transportation," was the shrewd retort.

At another time Blount might have wondered why a casual fellow-traveller should have taken the trouble to make the discovery. But at the moment he was intent only upon keeping the small misunderstanding alive.

"I suppose you have seen my ticket, but you can't tell anything by that," he countered, laughing. "A good many civilian employees of the Government travel nowadays on regular tickets, like other people."

"I know damned well they do," admitted the anxious one; and then, with a swift eye-shot which Blount missed: "Especially if they happen to be travelling on the quiet to catch some poor devil napping on the job."

"You needn't be alarmed; you haven't told me anything that the department could make use of," returned Blount, carrying the jest the one necessary move farther along.

It was precisely at this point, as Blount remembered afterward, that the timber-thieving subject was dropped. Later on, after the talk had drifted back to mining, and from mining to politics, the nervous gentleman pleaded weariness and declared his intention of going to his section to take a nap, and presently disappeared to carry it out.

Blount was not sorry to be left alone. In response to a vague stirring of something within him—a thing which might have been the primitive underman yawning and stretching to its awakening—he had been trying in the window-facing intervals to reconstruct the passing panorama of mountain and plain upon the recollections of his boyhood. As yet there was little familiarity save in the broader outlines. Where he remembered only the fallow-dun prairie, dotted with dog-mounds, there were now vast ranches planted to sod corn; and upon the hills the cattle ranges were no longer open. The towns, too, at which the train made its momentary stops, were changed. The straggling shack hamlets of the cattle-shipping period, with the shed-roofed railroad station, the whitewashed loading-corral, and the towering water-tank—all backgrounded by a thin line of saloons and dance-halls—had disappeared completely, and the window-watcher found himself looking in vain for the flap-hatted, cigarette-smoking horsemen with which the West of his boyhood had been chiefly peopled.

Farther along toward evening the great range, which had been visible for hours in the westward vista, began to define itself in peaks and high, bald shoulderings of wind-swept mesas. Here was something definite and tangible for the stirring underman to lay hold upon. Blount, the sober-minded, the self-contained, found a curious transformation working itself out in quickened pulses and exhilarating nerve-tinglings. Boston, the Law School, the East of the narrow walk-ways and the still narrower rut of custom and convention, were fading into a past which already seemed age-old and half forgotten. He threw open the window at his elbow and drank in deep inspirations of the hill-sweeping blast. It was sweet in his nostrils, and the keen crispness of it was as fine wine in his blood. After all, he had been but a sojourner in the other world, and this was his homeland.

At the dining-car dinner, which was served while the higher peaks of the main range were as vast islands floating in a sea of crimson and gold, Blount missed the man of many troubles. The dining-car was well filled, and, though the faces of the diners were all unfamiliar, the hum of talk, the hurrying of the waiters, and the subdued clamor drowning itself in the under-drone of the drumming wheels answered well enough for companionship. There are times when even the voice of a friend is an intrusion, and the returning exile had happed upon one of them. Largeness, the inspiring breadth of the immensities, was what he craved most; and when he had cut the many-coursed dinner short, he hurried back to his Pullman window, hoping that he might have the smoking-compartment to himself again.

The unspoken wish was granted. When he entered the smoking-room he found it empty; and, filling his cutty pipe, he drew the cushioned wicker chair out to face the open window. Fresh glimpses of the northward landscape shortly brought a renewal of the heart-stirrings; and when he finally had the longed-for sight of a bunch of grazing cattle, with the solitary night-herd hanging by one leg in the saddle to watch the passing of the train, the call of the homeland was trumpeting in his ears, and he would have given anything in reason to be able to changes places, temporarily at least, with the care-free horseman whose wiry, muscular figure was struck out so artistically against the dun-colored hillside.

"Would I really do such a thing as that?" he asked himself half incredulously, when the night-herd and his grazing drove had become only a picturesque memory; and out of the heart-stirrings and pulse-quickenings came the answer: "I more than half believe that I would—that I'd jump at the chance." Then he added regretfully: "But there isn't going to be any chance."

"Any chance to do what?" rumbled a mellow voice at his elbow, and Blount turned quickly to find that a big, bearded man, smoking an abnormally corpulent cigar, had come in to take his seat on the divan.

At another time Blount, the conventional Blount, would have been self-conscious and embarrassed, as any human being is when he is caught talking to himself. But with the transformation had come a battering down of doors in the house of the broader fellowship, and he laughed good-naturedly.

"You caught me fairly," he acknowledged. "I thought I still had the place to myself."

"But the chance?" persisted the big man, looking him over appraisively. "You don't look like a man who has had to hang round on the aidges hankerin' after things he couldn't get."

"I guess I haven't had to do that very often," was the reflective rejoinder. "But a mile or so back we passed a bunch of cattle, with the night man riding watch; I was just saying to myself that I'd like to change places with that night-herd—only there wasn't going to be any chance."

The bearded man's laugh was a deep-chested rumbling suggestive of rocks rolling down a declivity.

"Lordy gracious!" he chuckled. "If you was to get a leg over a bronc', and the bronc' should find it out—Say, I've got a li'l' blue horse out on my place in the Antelopes that'd plumb give his ears to have you try it; he shore would. You take my advice, and don't you go huntin' a job night-ridin' in the greasewood hills. Don't you do it!"

"I assure you I hadn't thought of doing it for a permanency. But just for a bit of adventure, if the chance should offer while I'm in the notion. I believe I'd take it. I haven't ridden a cow-pony for fourteen years, but I don't believe I've lost the knack of it."

"Ho!" said the big man. "Then you ain't as much of a tenderfoot as you look to be. Shake!" and he held out a hand as huge as a bear's paw. Following the hand-grip he grew confidential. "'Long in the afternoon I stuck my head in at the door and saw you chewin' the rag with a thin-faced old nester that couldn't set still in his chair while he talked. Know him?"

"Not at all," said Blount promptly. "He has the section opposite mine, and he got on at Omaha."

"Well, I wouldn't want to know him if I was you," was the bearded man's comment. Then: "Tryin' to get you to invest in some o' his properties?"

"Oh, no."

"Well, he will, if he gets a chance. He'd go furder'n that; he'd nail you up to the cross and skin you alive if there was any money in it for him. His name's Simon Peter, and it ort to be Judas. I know him down to the ground!"

"Simon Peter?" said Blount inquiringly.

"Ya-as; Simon Peter Hathaway. And my name's Griggs; Griggs, of the Antelopes, back o' Carnadine—if anybody should ask you who give you your pointer on Simon Peter Judas. I don't blacklist no man in the dark, and I've said a heap more to that old ratter's face than I've ever said behind his back. Ump! him a-wrigglin' in that chair you're settin' in and tryin' to fix up some way to skin you! Don't tell me! I know blame' well what he was tryin' to do."

Blount listened and was interested, not so much in the bit of gossip as in the big, red-faced ranchman, who so evidently had a grudge to pay off.

"I am not likely to have any dealings with Mr. Hathaway," he rejoined. "And I must do him the bare justice of saying that he wasn't trying to sell me anything. The shoe was on the other foot. He seemed to be afraid he was in danger of losing out, and he was asking my advice."

"S.P. Hathaway lose out? Not on your life, my young friend! You say he was askin' for advice? You've done stirred up my curiosity a whole heap, and I reckon you'll have to tell me who you are before it'll ca'm down again."

Blount laughed. "Mr. Hathaway thinks I am a special agent for the Government, travelling on business for the Forest Service."

"The hell he does!" exploded the big man. Then he reached over and laid a swollen finger on Blount's knee. "Say, boy, before you or him ever gets off this train—Sufferin' Moses! what was that?"

The break came upon a thunderous crash transmitting itself from car to car, and the long, heavy train came to a juggling stop. The ranchman sprang to his feet with an alacrity surprising in so huge a body and ducked to look out of the open window.

"Twin Buttes!" he gurgled. "And, say, it's a wreck! We've hit something right slap in the middle of the yard! Let's make a break for the scene of the confliggration till we see who's killed!"

Blount followed the ranchman's lead, but shortly lost sight of the burly figure in the crowd of curious passengers pouring from the hastily opened vestibules. Seen at closer range, the accident appeared to be disastrous only in a material sense. The heavy "Pacific-type" locomotive had stumbled over the tongue of a split switch, leaving the rails and making a blockading barrier of itself across the tracks. Nobody was hurt; but there would be a delay of some hours before the track could be cleared.

Finding little to hold him in the spectacle of the derailed locomotive, Blount strolled on through the railroad yard to the station and the town. He remembered the place chiefly by its name. In his boyhood it had been the nearest railroad forwarding-point for the mines at Lewiston, thirty miles beyond the Lost Hills. Now, as it appeared, it had become a lumber-shipping station. To the left of the railroad there were numerous sawmills, each with its mountain of waste dominated by a black chimney, screen-capped. For the supply of logs an enormous flume led down from the slopes of the forested range on the south, a trough-like water-chute out of which, though the working-day was ended, the great logs were still tumbling in an intermittent stream.

North of the town the valley broke away into a region of bare mesas dotted with rounded, butte-like hills, with the buttressing ranges on either side to lift the eastern and western horizons. The northern prospect enabled Blount to place himself accurately, and the tide of remembrance swept strongly in upon him. Some forty-odd miles away to the northeast, just beyond the horizon-lifting lesser range, lay the "short-grass" region in which he had spent the happy boyhood. An hour's gallop through the hills to the westward the level rays of the setting sun would be playing upon the little station of Painted Hat, the one-time shipping-point for the home ranch. And half-way between Painted Hat and the "Circle-Bar," nestling in the hollowed hands of the mountains, were the horse-corrals of one Debbleby, a true hermit of the hills, and the boy Evan's earliest school-master in the great book of Nature.

Blount's one meliorating softness during the years of exile had manifested itself in an effort to keep track of Debbleby. He knew that the old horse-breeder was still alive, and that he was still herding his brood mares at the ranch on the Pigskin. The young man, fresh from the well-calculated East, threw up his head and sniffed the keen, cool breeze sweeping down from the northern hills. He was not given to impulsive plan-changing. On the contrary, he was slow to resolve and proportionately tenacious of the determination once made. But the stirring of boyish memories accounted for something; and in the sanest brain there are sleeping cells of irresponsibility ready to spring alive at the touch of suggestion. What if he should—

He sat down upon the edge of the station platform and thought it out deliberately. Since it would be hours before the tracks could be cleared and the rail journey resumed, what was to prevent him from taking an immediate and delightful plunge into the region of the heart-stirring recollections? Doubtless old Jason Debbleby was at this moment sitting on the door-step of his lonely ranch-house in the Pigskin foot-hills, smoking his corn-cob pipe and, quite possibly, wondering what had become of the boy whom he had taught to "rope down" and saddle and ride. Blount estimated the distance as he remembered it. With a hired horse he might reach Debbleby's by late bedtime; and after a night spent with the old ranchman he could ride on across the big mesa to the capital.

Another ineffectual attempt to find out how soon the relief train from the capital might be expected decided Blount. Arranging with the Pullman conductor to have his hand-luggage left in Gantry's office at the capital, the man in search of his boyhood crossed quickly to a livery-stable opposite the station, bargained for a saddle-horse, borrowed a poncho and a pair of leggings, and prepared to break violently, for the moment at least, with all the civilized traditions. He would go and see Debbleby—drop in upon the old horse-breeder without warning, and thus get his first revivified impression of the homeland unmixed with any of the disappointing changes which were doubtless awaiting him at the real journey's end.

Now it chanced that the livery-stable was an adjunct to the single hotel in the small sawmill town, and as Blount was mounting to ride he saw the thin-faced man, whom the ranchman, Griggs, had named for him, standing on the porch of the hotel in earnest talk with three others who, from their appearance, might have figured either as "timber jacks" or cowboys. Blount was on the point of recognizing his companion of the Pullman smoking-compartment as he rode past the hotel to take the trail to the northward, but a curious conviction that the gentleman with the bird-of-prey eyes was making him the subject of the earnest talk with the three men of doubtful occupation restrained him. A moment later, when he looked back from the crossing of the railroad track, he saw that all four of the men on the porch were watching him. This he saw; and if the backward glance had been prolonged for a single instant he might also have seen a big, barrel-bodied man with a red face stumbling out of the side door of the shack hotel to make vigorous and commanding signals to stop him. But this he missed.

There was an excuse for the oversight as well as for the speedy blotting out of the picture of the four men watching him from the porch of the hotel. With a fairly good horse under him, with the squeak of the saddle-leather in his ears and the smell of it in his nostrils, and with the wide world of the immensities into which to ride unhampered and free, the lost boyhood was found. Not for the most soul-satisfying professional triumph the fettered East could offer him would he have curtailed the free-reined flight into the silent wilderness by a single mile.

For the first half-hour of the invigorating gallop the fugitive from civilization had the sunset glow to help him find the trail. After that the moon rose, and the landmarks, which had seemed more or less familiar in daylight, lost their remembered featurings. During the first few miles the trail had led broadly across the table-land, with the eastern mountains withdrawing and the Lost River Range looming larger as its lofty sky-line was struck out sharply against the sunset horizon. Farther on, in the transition darkness between sunset and moonrise, the trail disappeared entirely; but so long as he was sure of the general direction, Blount held on and gave the tireless little bronco a loose rein. The Debbleby ranch lay among the farther foot-hills of the western range, with the broad gulch of the Pigskin cutting a plain highway through the mountains. If he could find one of the head-water streams of the Pigskin, all of which took their rise in the gulches of the mesa, there could be no danger of losing the way.

It was some little time after he had left the shoulderings of the eastern range behind that a singular thing happened. Far away on his right he heard the sound of galloping hoofs. Though the moon was nearly full and the treeless landscape was bare of any kind of cover, he could not make out the horseman who was evidently passing him and going in the same direction. At first he thought it was some one who was making a détour to avoid him. Then he smiled at the absurdity of the guess and concluded that he himself was off the trail. This conclusion was confirmed a little later when two other travellers, announcing themselves to the ear as the first one had, and also, like the first, invisible to the sharpest eye-sweep of the moonlit plain, passed him at speed.

After that Blount had the solitudes and vastnesses to himself, and it was not until after the mesa-land had been crossed without a sign of a water-leading gulch to guide him to the Pigskin, and the bronco was patiently picking its way through the hogback of the western range, that the boyish thing he had been led to do took shape as an adventure which might have discomforting consequences.

For, after the hired bronco had wandered aimlessly through many gulches and had climbed a good half-score of the hogback hills, the young man from the East admitted that the boyhood memories were hopelessly and altogether at fault in the deceptive moonlight. Blount gave the horse a breathing halt on one of the hogbacks and tried to reconstruct the puzzling hills into some featuring that he could remember. The effort was fruitless. He was very thoroughly and painstakingly lost.