Читать книгу Justin Wingate, Ranchman - Whitson John Harvey - Страница 1

Before swinging out of the saddle in front of the little school house which was serving as a church, Curtis Clayton, physician and philosopher, looked over the valley which held the story of a romantic hope and where he was to bury his own shattered dream. The rain of the morning had cleared away the bluish ground haze, the very air had been washed clean, and the land lay revealed in long levels and undulating ridges. Behind towered the mountain, washed clean, too, its flat top etched against the sky and every crag and peak standing out sharp and hard as a cameo.

Clayton’s broncho pawed restlessly on the edge of a grass-grown cellar. All about the tiny cluster of unoccupied houses were other grass-grown cellars, and the foundation lines of vanished buildings, marking the site of the abandoned town. Beside the school house, from which came now the sound of singing, horses were tied to a long hitching rack. A few farm wagons stood near, the unaccustomed mud drying on their wheels.

Clayton dismounted and began to tie his horse. His left arm, stiff and bent at the elbow, swung awkwardly and gave such scant aid that he tightened the knot of the hitching strap by pulling it with his teeth. He was dressed smartly, in dust-proof gray, and wore polished riding boots. His unlined face showed depression and weariness. In spite of this it was a handsome face, lighted by clear dark eyes. The brow, massive and prominent, was the brow of a thinker. Over it, beneath the riding cap, was a tangle of dark hair, now damp and heavy. When he spoke to his horse his tones were suggestive of innate kindness. There were no spurs on the heels of his riding boots, and he patted the horse affectionately before turning to the door of the church.

The interior was furnished as a school house. Cramped into the seats, with feet drawn up and arms on the tops of the desks, sat the few people who composed the congregation, young farmers and their wives and small children, with wind-burned, honest faces. Apart from the others was a boy, whose slight form fitted easily into the narrow space he occupied. He sat well forward and looked steadily at the preacher, turning about, however, as all did, when Clayton came in at the door.

Clayton’s entrance and the turning about of the people to look broke the rhythmic swing of the hymn, but the preacher, standing behind the teacher’s desk which served as pulpit, lifted his voice, beating the time energetically with the book he held, and the hymn was caught up again with vigor. He smiled upon Clayton, as the latter squeezed into a rear seat, as if to assure him that he was welcome and had disturbed no one.

The preacher took his text from the thirty-fifth chapter of Isaiah:

“The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose. It shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice even with joy and singing.... Strengthen ye the weak hands, and confirm the feeble knees. Say to them that are of a fearful heart, ‘Be strong, fear not.’”

Clayton was not greatly interested in the Scripture read, in the preacher, nor in the people. He had entered to get away from his own thoughts more than anything else. But, weary of thinking, he tried now to let the preacher lead him out of himself.

His attention was caught and held by the application of the text. The preacher was using it not as a spiritual metaphor, but as a promise to be fulfilled literally and materially in the near future and in that place. Looking through the open windows at the level grasslands damp with the recent rain, he saw the good omen. The desert was there now, but men should till it and it should blossom as the rose; yellow grain fields should billow before the breezes that came down from the mountain; the blue bloom of alfalfa should make of the valley a violet cup spilling its rich perfume on the air and offering its treasure of honey for the ravishing of the bee; rice corn, Kaffir corn, and sorghum should stand rank on rank, plumed, tufted, and burnished by the sunlight. Paradise—Clayton heard the name of the valley and the town for the first time—should become as the Garden of God.

Clayton saw that the man was a dreamer, putting into form the cherished hopes of the people in the narrow seats before him. A land boom had cast high its tide of humanity, then had receded, leaving these few caught as the drift on the shore. The preacher was one of them; and he looked into their eyes with loving devotion and flushing face, as he contrasted the treeless valley of the present with the Paradise of his desire. He was a dreamer who believed his dream and was trying to make his hearers believe it.

At first Clayton had observed the outer man standing behind that teacher’s desk; he had noted the shabby, shiny suit of black, scrupulously clean, the coat much too long and every way too large, the white neatly-set cravat, and the protruding cuffs, which he was sure were scissors-trimmed. Now he looked only at the man’s face, with its soft brown beard which the wind stirred at intervals, at the straight goodly nose, at the deep-set dreamy eyes, and through the eyes into the mind of the dreamer.

“The temperament of a seer, of a Druid priest, of a prophet of old!” was his thought. “He prophesies the impossible; yet by and by some one may appear who will be able to show that the impossible has had fulfillment. It has happened before.”

Willing to forget himself further and know more of this man who, it could be seen, longed for a mental companionship which the members of his congregation could not give him, Clayton remained after the services, accepting a pressing invitation to tarry awhile.

“We do not often have visitors here now,” said the preacher, pathetically.

So through the hot afternoon they sat together in the preacher’s little home, the one occupied house in the town, while he dilated on his dream; and as the day grew cool, they walked together by the banks of the tepid stream and looked at the deserted houses and the blaze of the sun behind the flat-topped mountain. The boy who had sat so far forward and given such apparent attention to the sermon walked out with them. Absorbed in studying the personality of the preacher, Clayton gave the silent boy little attention.

As the sun slipped down behind the mountain, throwing pleasant shadows across the valley, Clayton took his horse from the preacher’s stable and set out for a ride. And as he went the preacher stood in his doorway, smiling and dreaming his dream.

From his boyhood, Peter Wingate had been a dreamer. In his college days the zeal of the missionary was infused into his veins, and the Far West, which he pictured as a rough land filled with rough and Godless men, drew him. He had found it poorer than the East, more direct and simple, more serious and sincere, but not Godless. And he had come to love it. It was a hopeful, toiling land, rough perhaps, but as yet unspoiled.

Then a day came which brought a new interest into his life. A youth climbed down from a white-topped prairie schooner with a bundle in his arms and entered the preacher’s house. The bundle held a baby, whose mother had died in the white-topped wagon. As the youth, who was almost a man in stature, but still a boy in years, told the story of the child, and placed in Wingate’s hands its few belongings, he spoke of Paradise. At first the spiritual-minded minister thought he referred to spiritual things, then understood that he was speaking of a new town, situated in a wonderful valley that widened down from the mountains. Thenceforth, though the child had not come from this new town, this new town and its promise became linked in the minister’s mind with the child; and by and by he journeyed to it, when the boy was well-grown and sturdy and the town had been caught up suddenly in the whirl of a wild boom.

He began to preach in the new school house, and organized a new church; and soon the fiery earnestness and optimism of the boom was infused into his heart, supplementing the zeal of the missionary. He no longer saw Paradise as it was, but as he wished it to be. The very name allured him. He had long preached of a spiritual Paradise; here was the germ of an earthly one. From rim to rim, from mountain to mesa, it was, to his eyes, a favored valley, fitted for happy homes. The town vanished, and the settlers departed, but the dream remained. The dreamer still saw the possibilities and the beauties—the fruitful soil, the sun-kissed grassy slopes, the alluring blue mountains. And the dream was associated with the child; the dreamer, the dream, and the child, were as one, for had not the child brought to the dreamer his first knowledge of this smiling land?

So Wingate remained after the boom bubble broke, encouraging the few sturdy farmers who clung with fondness to the valley. Even when one by one the houses, all but those belonging to the town company, were torn down and borne away, the dream was not shattered. The dreamer became the agent of the company, charged with the care of the remaining houses until the dream should reach again toward fulfillment.

While he waited, the dreamer pictured the joy and devotion with which he would minister to the spiritual needs of the new people, who would love him he knew even as he should love them. And thus waiting, he moved the rounds of his simple life, in the midst of the few, who rewarded his love and zeal with ever-renewed devotion. Even those who cared nothing for religion cared for the religious teacher, and came regularly to hear him preach.

They could not give much to his support; they had not much themselves, but he needed so very little. He had his small stipend from the missionary organization of his denomination, the garden he tended on the low land by the stream yielded well in the favorable seasons, and the missionary barrel filled with clothing which some worthy ladies had sent him from the East two years before had held such a goodly store of cast-off garments that neither he nor the child, a stout boy now, had required anything in that line since. The shiny, long-tailed coat which he kept so scrupulously clean and which was a world too large for him, and the tight-fitting, ink-spattered sailor suit which the boy wore, had come from the depths of that barrel, which seemed as miraculous in its way as the widow’s cruse of oil.

And now, when he had seen no stranger in Paradise for months, and no new face except when he journeyed once a week to preach in the little railroad town at the base of the mountain, there had come this pleasant-voiced man, who spoke well of the prophetic sermon and seemed able to appreciate the promise and future of the land.

When Curtis Clayton returned from his ride night had fallen. The Milky Way had stretched its shining trail across the prairies of the sky, and the Dipper was pouring the clouds out of its great bowl and shaking them from its handle.

Clayton sat looking at the night sky, and as he sat thus the boy came out to put away his horse. Within the house, Wingate, busy with coffee pot and frying pan, directed him to the room he was to occupy, and announced that supper would be ready soon.

At the end of fifteen minutes the boy tapped on Clayton’s door. The latch had not caught, and the door flew open. The boy stood in hesitation, looking into the little room, wondering if he had offended. What he beheld puzzled him. Clayton had been burning letters in the tiny stove; and beside the lamp on the little table, with scorched edges still smoking, stood the photograph of a beautiful woman. Clayton had evidently committed it to the flames, and then relenting had drawn it back. Turning quickly now, when he heard the door moving on its hinges, he caught up the photograph and thrust it hastily into an inner pocket of his coat, but not before the boy had been given a clear view of the pictured face.

Wingate talked of his dream, when grace had been said and the supper was being eaten. The boy thought of the burned letters and of the scorched photograph showing that alluringly beautiful face, and wondered blindly. He saw that the stranger was not listening to the talk of the minister; and observed, too, what the dreamer did not, that the stranger ate very little, and without apparent relish. Though he could not define it, and did not at all understand it, something in the man’s face and manner moved him to sympathy.

For that reason, when, after supper, the minister had talked to the end of his dream and was about to begin all over again, the boy slipped away, and returning put a small book into the stranger’s hands. Clayton stared at it, then looked up, and for the first time saw the boy. He had already seen a face and form and a sailor suit, but not the boy. Now he looked into the clear open blue eyes, set in an attractive, wind-tanned face. His features lost their grim sadness and he smiled.

“Your son?” he said, speaking to Wingate.

The dreamer showed surprise. He had already spoken to this man of the boy.

“My adopted son, but a real son to me in all but the ties of blood.”

The boy drew open the little Bible he had placed in Clayton’s hands. Some writing showed on the fly-leaf. The boy’s fore-finger fell on the writing.

“My very own mother wrote those words, and my name there—Justin,” he announced, reverently.

Clayton looked at the writing, and then again at the boy. The record on the fly-leaf was but a simple memorandum, in faded ink:

“Justin, my baby boy, is now six months old. May God bless and preserve him and may he become a good man.”

A date showed, in addition to this, but that was all; not even the mother’s name was signed.

“This was in it, too; it is my hair.”

The boy pulled the book open at another place and extracted a brown wisp.

“We think it is his hair,” said Wingate. “It was found beside the writing on the fly-leaf.”

Then while the boy crowded close against Clayton’s knees, and Clayton sat holding the open Bible in his hands, Wingate told the story of this child, who now bore the name of Justin Wingate.

“The young fellow who brought him to me said there were some papers, which he had left behind, having forgotten them when he set out, and that he would fetch them later. But he never came again,—he was only a boy, and boys forget—and I even failed to get his name, being somewhat excited at the time, because of the strange charge given to me, a bachelor minister.”

Clayton read the words over slowly, and looked intently at the boy.

“It is a good name,” he said at length.

The boy took the book and placed the wisp of hair carefully between the pages as he closed it. He was still standing close against the knees of this man, as if he desired to help or comfort him, or longed for a little of the real father love he had never known. But Clayton, after that simple statement, dropped into silence. This absence of speech was not observed by Wingate, who had found in the story of the boy an opportunity to take up again the narrative of his introduction to Paradise and his life there since. Yet the boy noticed. His face flushed slowly; and when Clayton still remained mute and unresponsive, he slipped away, with a choke in his throat.

Shortly afterward he said good night to the visitor, kissed the dreamer on his bearded cheek, and with the Bible still in his hands crept away to bed. Wingate sat up until a late hour, talking of his dream, receiving now and then a monosyllabic assent to some prophetic statement. Having started at last to his room Clayton hesitated on the threshold and turned back.

“As you are the agent of the town company you could let one of those houses, I suppose?” was his unexpected inquiry.

The face of the dreamer flushed with pleasure.

“Most assuredly.”

“Then you may consider one of them rented—to me; it doesn’t matter which one. I think I should like to stop here awhile.”

It was one o’clock and the Sabbath was past. Wingate, his dream more vivid than it had been for months, sat down at his little writing desk, and in a fever of renewed hope began to pen a letter to the town company, announcing the letting of a house and prophesying an early revival of the boom.