Book: The Freebooters of the Wilderness

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"What's that?" asked the Senator, without turning.

"It is, if he sees we're going to involve her, he'll quit."

Moyese didn't answer. He rose from his chair and walked to a rear
window, where he stood looking out. Did he credit what he had heard?
Was it a recital of facts, or a distortion of facts through a tainted
mind? Did Brydges, himself, believe what he had tried to convey? Or
was his job to obtain certain results at any cost: and was this part of
the cost? Ask yourself that of the tainted news you read every day.
Ask why those who recognize the lie do not brand it as such; why those
who are uncertain do not verify before they repeat and credit; and you
will probably have some clue to the little melodrama of dishonor
enacted in the office of a legal luminary at Smelter City that
sweltering hot July day. When you come to observe it, Bat's recital
contained nothing that might not have been posted in eminent
respectability on a church warden's door. Like fresh fruit passed
through a mouldy cellar, the facts came from the medium of the narrator
with the unclean contagion of cellar mould. The next narrator would
not pass on the facts. He would pass on the cellar rot.

"If we served up those two stories together hot," emphasized Bat, "we'd
about cut the throat of any opposition to our interests in the Valley?
He'd quit! I'll bet before he'd see her involved, he'd jump his job!"

When the Senator turned his face to the handy man, he was very sober.
He stood looking over the tops of his glasses boring into Bat's face.

"It's a pity," he said.

"Yes, it's too bad: one hates to have one's faith in human nature all
balled out this way; but you never know what kind of a fact you're
going ping up against where a woman is concerned." Something in the
Senator's look stopped Bat mid-way.

"Brydges, I thought I told you never to meddle with the damphool who
makes excuses for what he's going to do. Never do anything, unless you
have some end worth while in view; then, if it's worth while, do it,
damn it, and don't waste time excusing the means! Now, I'll have
nothing to do with this; mind that, Brydges. You do it off your own
responsibility. If MacDonald were one of our party, I wouldn't make
use of it, if it were ten times over and over true. You'll have to be
very careful how you use that, at all! It's effective. I don't deny
it's very effective; but it's a pity! If you use that at all, you'll
have to use it so it's not libelous."

"Libelous?" burst out the handy man wakening up suddenly, scratching
his tousled head and trying to make head or tail of orders that said
'do it' and 'don't do it' in one breath. "I can write it without a
name so every man in the State will know who it is: give it as a joke;
fetch in Calamity as the mother of the whole mess; the call of the
blood, you know; reversion to type! They'll have to prove that the
intent was malice before they can get a judgment. They'll have to come
out with the truth before they can prove libel. It isn't libelous if
it's done as a joke without malice."

Moyese had flung himself down in his chair with a blow of his clenched
fist on the desk, when the opening of the office door stopped the oath
of disgust on his lips; and Eleanor MacDonald stood framed in the
yellow light shining in from the hot street. For a moment, the
transition from sun to shade blinded her. Then, she saw who was with
the Senator. Brydges sprang up waiting to return her recognition. She
made no sign. She walked over where he was standing. The Senator had
half risen from his desk. Was it the spirit of the ancestral Indian in
her eyes; or of the Man with the Iron Hand? Brydges' oily gloss went
to tallow under her look. Moyese knew looks that drilled; and Brydges
himself could bore behind for motives; but this look was not a drill:
it was a Search Light; and the handy man--well, perhaps, it was the
heat--the handy man suddenly wilted.

"You can go, Brydges," ordered Moyese.

"All right! See you again about that, Senator!" Brydges grabbed up
the loose notes from the desk and bolted, banging the door behind him.

The Senator's face seemed at once to age and trench with lines. He
motioned her to the vacated chair and remained bending forward over his
desk till she had seated herself. Then, he sat down, suddenly
remembered his hat, and laid it off. If she had sunk forward on the
desk weeping; if she had made a sign of appeal; he would have gone
round and caressed her and petted her and told her she must _stop_
Wayland. His whole manhood went out to comfort her, to stand between
her and what? . . . Was it the drive of those wheels of which he was a
cog? But when she looked across the desk, the eyes had no appeal, the
Search Light had turned on him.

"You must excuse me if you heard what I was saying, when you came in,
Miss Eleanor; but it was a G-- doggon lie! I had been angered: I had
been angered very much; and that's a bad thing on a hot day." He was
slipping back to the usual suavity.




CHAPTER XIX

BALLOTS FOR BULLETS

It was Calamity, who had carried the trouble-making coat across from
the Mission Library to the MacDonald Ranch House. Eleanor had found it
in the big living room that day after she had read the note saying he
was setting out "on the Long Trail, the trail this Nation will have to
follow before Democracy arrives; the trail of the Man behind the
Thing." Somehow, she lost interest in her reading and her driving, and
spent the most of that first week after the funeral in the steamer
chair on the Ranch House piazza. Were the topaz gates of the sunset
still ajar to a new infinite life; or did satyr faces haunt the shadows
of the trail, satyr faces of the Greed that had plotted the bloody
villainy of the Rim Rocks? She had thought she knew joy before, joy
that rapt her from life in a race reverie. Now, she knew joy, tense as
pain; and the consciousness never left her. It was there; beside,
inside, above, all round, an enveloping atmosphere to everything she
thought and said and did. She could not read; for while her eyes
passed _over_ the lines, that consciousness danced in flames _between_
the lines. She tried to forget herself in her work--in the sorting of
the littered shelves, in the mending for the ranch hands absent with
her father in the Upper Pass; but It was there just the same, at her
elbow; in behind the commonplace weaving rainbow mists, a shadowy deity
of thought all pervasive as ether. Before, she had been as one
standing in front of the up-lifted veil. Now, she knew she had passed
in behind the veil, and could not if she would come out to the former
place. Life symbols empty of meaning before, suddenly became
allegorical of eternity--the bridal veil, the orange wreaths, the ring
typical of the infinite, the vows of service, the angel of the drawn
sword on the back trail. Yet she knew she had promised to keep him
resolute, standing strong to his work, unflinching because of her.

It was, perhaps, typical of those ancestral traits that fear for him
never once entered her thoughts. His work was on the firing line; and
had she not _once_ said that a life more or less did not matter? That
was before his life had become her life. That is, fear for him did not
enter her waking thoughts. It was different when she slept. Then the
uncurbed thoughts hovered like the face in the picture of "the Sleeping
Warrior." One night as she sat in the steamer chair, a cold wind came
down from the Pass. The cook explained it was because of the snow
slide that had filled up the canyon.

"Calamity," she called, "bring me out something to put round my
shoulders; don't bring a shawl: I hate shawls!"

And Calamity, perfectly naturally, brought out Wayland's coat. Eleanor
did not laugh; for she knew it was only since Calamity had stopped
roving the Black Hills that she had exchanged male attire for the
Indian woman's insignia of good conduct, a shawl. She waited till
Calamity had pattered down to the basement. Then, she slipped into the
coat with a queer little laugh that would have played havoc with
Wayland's resolutions, and running her hands up the long dangling
sleeve ends, lay back to a reverie that could hardly be called thought.
It was consciousness, delirious foolish consciousness, possible only to
youth; and the consciousness slipped into a drowse between sleeping and
waking. It was--where was it? In the shadow realms of wonderful dream
consciousness, his face, the face in "the Happy Warrior"; but not her
face: instead was the evil fellow seen that night in the storm on the
Rim Rocks clubbing his gun at Fordie's pinto pony through the mists;
only he wasn't clubbing it at Fordie; he was aiming at Wayland; and
there was the white horse. She wakened herself with her cry. That
happened to be the night Wayland had camped in the Desert arroyos.

One afternoon, Sheriff Flood had called to know if her father had come
back and what "he intended to do about it." Incidentally, he mentioned
that the Forest Ranger had gone through the Pass that led to the
Desert: there had been a snow slide; but he "guessed" the Ranger was
"too cute a mountain man to be caught." That night, she shivered as
she sat in the steamer chair; and she drew Wayland's coat around her;
but it was not to delirious thoughts. When she fell asleep, she saw
him lying on his face in the Desert; and she called him, and called
him, and never could reach him, and awakened herself with her own
calling. Wayland's professional friend, who was a psychologist,
explained both incidents as auto suggestion from the coat awakened by
the uneasiness of the unconscious fears; an explanation that explains
by saying x is y.

At all events, she never again used the coat; and having nothing to
conceal, didn't conceal it, which is the most damning evidence you can
offer to a tortuous mind. She hung the coat in the apartment off the
big living room. Then, the despatch came out about the two bodies
found in the Desert. The same mail brought a letter from her father
asking her to meet him at Smelter City; and there at the Ranch House
gate stood Mr. Bat Brydges, handy man of the Valley, quizzing the ranch
hands, quizzing the German cook, quizzing Calamity at the very foot of
rustic slab steps that ran up from the basement.

"What is he after, Calamity?"

The half breed woman had dashed up the back stairs to Eleanor's room.

"He want t' know if Waylan--Ranga fellah--has ever stay here, dis
house--he ever go back Cabin House--tepee on hill--night dey keel
leetle boy?"

Even then, Eleanor did not realize the drift of the handy man's
activities. She thought perhaps, he, too, might be anxious about
Wayland.

"What did you tell him, Calamity?"

"I tell heem," Calamity dropped her soft patois to a guttural, "I tell
heem, y' go Hell!"

"Ca-lam-ity?" rebuked Eleanor.

But what was it in the gentleman's jaunty air, in the smile of the
sleepy tortoise-shell eyes, in the play of a self-conscious dimple
round the fat double chin? Eleanor had not passed from her own
apartment to the big living room before a repulsion that she could not
define swept over her in a physical shudder; and Mr. Bat Brydges'
report to the Senator of that interview had been fairly accurate. She
did not know that she had not greeted him with the common courtesy due
a caller, that she had stood looking past him to the open door, that
she had left him standing first on one leg then on the other till Bat
had been forced to terminate the interview; and she had not the
faintest conception of what her own feeling of repulsion meant. He had
scarcely gone before she wished she had asked him about those two
bodies found in the Desert. As a matter of fact, she called up the
"Smelter City Independent." The editor could give her no details. He
asked her very particularly who was inquiring; and having nothing to
conceal, she did not conceal it. He allayed her fears in almost the
words that the Senator had used to lay Bat's suspicions, if the bodies
had been those of Government men, the Ranger's Badge would have been
found and the news flashed all over America.

"Oh, thank you, so much! You know the sheep lost on the Rim Rocks
belonged to our ranch; and I wouldn't like to think that he had lost
his life defending our interests."

Then something odd occurred with the telephone. She distinctly heard
the voice at the other end telling somebody that, "Brydges was up there
now." Then, the voice was assuring her, "They would let her know if
they heard anything more."

Eleanor rang off with a sense of relief; and yet with a sickening
feeling, of what? It was the same feeling she had had when Brydges
came in with his jaunty air.


She was standing at the Ranch House gate waiting for the stage to
Smelter City. Calamity had carried down the yellow suit case. The
words came from Eleanor's lips before she thought; or she could never
have asked the question:

"Calamity, who was it took your little baby away?"

The suit case fell from the Indian woman's hand.

"D' pries'," she said, "Father Moran."

Eleanor thought a moment, racking her memory in vain for that name in
her convent life of Quebec. She was digging her toe in the dust of the
road.

"Was that before or after you went to the Black Hills, Calamity?"

But Calamity had gone without a word; and the stage came whipping
across the bridge from the Moyese Ranch; a double-tandem stage driven
by a bronzed fellow with one arm, whose management of the reins
absorbed Eleanor so that she forgot to notice the fat form hoisting her
suit case to the roof. Then, she was inside; and the door had swung
shut; and the fat form squeezed in next to the door; and she was lost
in her own thoughts oblivious of her close packed neighbors till the
stage stopped again with a jerk, and the sharp edge of a black
cart-wheel-hat decorated with plumes enough for an undertaker's wagon
cut a swath that threatened to slice off one of Eleanor's ears.

"I beg your pardon," said Eleanor.

"Oh, I guess tha' wuz my fault," and a mouthful of gold teeth above an
ash colored V of neck and below the most wonderful straw stack of wheat
colored hair simpered up at Eleanor from beneath the black
cart-wheel-hat; simpered and ended up in a funny little tittering
laugh. Eleanor took a quick glance at her neighbors, all men but the
cart-wheel-hat to one side and a little young-old lady opposite with a
hectic flush, and very protuberant hard mouth and beady little brown
eyes. Eleanor noticed the brown eyes were accompanied by red hair, and
she recognized the presiding genius of the English Colony.

"A beautiful morning for a ride down the Valley," remarked Eleanor
absently.

"What? I beg your pardon? Did you speak to me?"

It wasn't the words. It was the hard tone of surprise.

"We're in luck to have such a morning to ride down," amplified Eleanor.

"Yes," said the lady with the hectic flush; and Eleanor felt the gold
teeth simpering beneath the undertaker's plumes.

What was it? Eleanor took a second look at the two women, and
recognized both, the Sheriff's wife and the English lady. They were
arrayed gorgeously, her neighbor across in lavender silk, her elbow
traveller in black with a profusion of cheap lace round the ash colored
V of exposed skin: Eleanor wished the woman had powdered all the way
down. She, herself, had come garbed for the dust of stage travel, a
broad brimmed English sailor and a kakhi duster motoring coat. Was it
because she was not garbed as the others that they rebuffed her
friendly overtures, she wondered. At the next stop, she passed out to
go up and ride on the driver's seat, manifestly an impossible feat for
ladies in lavender and undertaker's plumes. A fat hand reached forward
to shove the door open. It was Bat Brydges'. She nodded her thanks,
and the handy man bowed with a sweep of his hat naming her aloud for
the whole stage to hear. If a look could have blasted Mr. Bat Brydges,
he would have been dissolved in gaseous matter from the expression that
passed over the face under the sailor hat. She heard the hilarity
break bounds inside as she mounted the driver's seat; and felt very
much as you have felt when you have come out of the clatter of the
orchestra pit where you have chanced to sit next to a musk-scented
neighbor.


But she forgot the lavender grandee and the gold teeth and the
undertaker's plumes, as she sat on the upper seat with the one-armed
driver behind the double tandem grays. The sun was coming up over the
Rim Rocks in a half fan of fire; and the light was on the Ridge; and
all the silver cataracts tossing down the sheer wall shone wind-blown
spray against the evergreens. The Valley widened as it dropped to the
leap and fume and swirl of the foaming river; and the double tandem
grays kept step with a proud chacking up of heads and bristling of
arched necks and movement of thigh and shoulder muscles under satin
skin like shuttles.

"You must be very proud of your beautiful horses," she said to the
driver.

The driver 'lowed he was: that 'un dappled on the rump there, that 'un
was foaled, let me see? year o' the rush to the Black Hills, with a
squirt of chewing tobacco over the front wheel and a damn't, and
another squirt and more damn't's; and before Eleanor realized the
one-armed driver had asked her if she wouldn't like to learn to drive
double tandems; and she had the reins in her hands; and the double
tandem grays took the bit in their teeth to show what double tandem
grays and ample oats could do.

"How-do," called the driver with a squirt of tobacco over the front
wheel at a rancher loping across the trail. "How-do; y' are up early,
y' son of a gun! What d' y' know?"

"Senator's goin' t' stand again this fall," called the man.

The driver emitted another damn't in true Western style just as
innocently as an Easterner says "Oh, yes, indeed," or an Englishman
says "My word." In fact Eleanor lost count of the damn't's.

"How ever do you manage it?" she asked shifting the reins.

"With my one arm, y' mean?" The stage driver laughed and aimed more
chewing tobacco at that innocent front wheel; and the question drew out
such a story of heroism in spite of the damn't's and the tobacco squids
as made her proud of human clay, just as she had been ashamed of human
something or other inside the stage with the lavender silk and the gold
teeth and Bat's frozen tallow smile.

"Why, it was the year o' the Kootenay rush, ye mind? No, ye don't
mind, ye weren't born then, were y'? Damn't," and a punctuation in
tobacco. "Wall, 'twas in the early days 'fore we had steam hoists an'
things." (Another punctuation mark--a good big one.) "We was usin' an
old hand hoist. Guess the shaft was about hundred feet down--straight
down, an' we was gettin' in the pay streak, bringin' up barrels o' rock
showin' more color every load. Wall, them loads was hauled up to the
dumps by a hand hoist y' onderstand, kind of winch, like y' turn a
handle in old fashioned down East wells. Wall--" (Another punctuation
mark and another dip for ink, so to speak, from the plug in the hand of
the one-armed driver.) "boys were all down under. Say--'twas in the
days when ol' Calamity was runnin' the hills. Know Calamity? She was
a wild 'un in _her_ day; an' they say MacDonald, the rich sheep man,
has kind o' sorter given her a home these late years. Wall--I ain't
the one t' say he shouldn't. Her morals weren't much better in them
days than the crazy patch quilts ladies used to make down East when I
was a boy; but she's settled down I hear; an' I ain't the one to say
MacDonald don't deserve credit for what he's done. She saved many a
poor miner's life from the Indians in them ol' days, saved 'em by a
shave, carried 'em in on her shoulder to the Deadwood Hospital, or
nussed 'em well on the spot, an' all the while, she wazn't no better
than she ought t' be; wazn't there a woman in Scripture like that?
Kind o' seems to me the church folks forgets that Rahub gurl!
Wall--'twas about those days." (More showers of damn't's and tobacco
on that front wheel.) "Boys was all under. Big load of rock was
comin' up. I waz man at the hoist, man on the easy job that day.
Wall--wad y' believe it, the damn thing bruk--bruk plum whoop an'
started spinnin' round back side first with the load o' rock an' the
boys under comin' up the ladder. I yelled for a kid we had workin'
round to get me a jack wrench, a hand spike, Hell, any ol' thing to
stop her kitin' that load o' rock down on the boys! Kid stood gopin'
there an' sayin' 'What d'y' say?' Say,--damn't--an' that load o' rock
goin' plumb down on the boys, heavy enough to smash 'em to pulp. There
weren't nothin' handy near 'cept me, so I jumped this here arm that you
find missin' right into the wheel! It stopped her all right, the load
didn't fall on the boys; and they got up all right by the ladder;
but--say, mebbe the cogs o' that damn wheel didn't do a thing to my
arm. Say--the doctor didn't need to amputate it. That winch did him
out o' his job."

"You mean," said Eleanor, slowing the grays to a reluctant walk down
grade, while the driver clamped the front wheel brake with his foot,
"you mean because there was no crowbar, or anything to stop the hoist
flying backwards and killing the men under the load of rock, you mean
because there was no crowbar, you jumped into the wheel, yourself?"

"Sure," said the man astonished at her question; and because Eleanor
was a true Westerner and didn't mind the tobacco squids and the
damn't's in the least (where they belonged) she gave that one-armed
driver a look that would have made any man proud: only the one-armed
driver didn't see it.

"They took up a purse an' wanted to give me a perscription--damn't, but
I told 'em t' turn it in t' the Horspital. Any man w'd a' done same
for a yellow dog. What d'y' want t' give a fellow a medal for not
bein' stinkin' coward?"


Eleanor laughed. It was a happy silver laugh like the light on the
Ridge cataracts. Somehow, the one-armed stage driver with his
unconscious heroism and equally unconscious profanity gave her a sense
of the big wholesome unconscious outdoor world, just as the lavender
silks and undertaker's plumes and tallow smile inside smothered her
with a drugged sense of heavy unwholesome musk. The one-time miner did
not know it; but what Eleanor was saying to herself was--"So much bad
in the best of us and so much good in the worst of us." Then she
thought of the Senator and his genial smile and his voice soft as a
woman's, and his love of flowers. He, too, must have his vein of
heroism, if one could only find it. She thought and thought as the
tandem grays arched their necks at the sound of the tramway bells in
the nearing city; thought and thought, vague wordless thoughts full of
hope; vague womanish thoughts that women have thought since time began
of finding that magic vein of heroism in the Man that is to transmute
slag into gold, hog into human, and greed into generosity, and lust
into love; thought and thought the gentle womanish hoping-against-hope
thoughts that women have worn out their lives thinking and enslaved
their bodies and pawned their souls. If only one could find _that_
vein in the Senator, the battle would be won without the letting of
blood and smashing of reputations; as if peace without victory were
ever worth while since time began.

Then, the stage was rattling over the pressed brick pavement of Smelter
City; and the tandem grays were pretending to shy at the electric cars;
and the one-armed driver came near expectorating his entire internal
anatomy out of sheer joy and pride in the arched necks and the frail
driver with the black curls under the broad brimmed English sailor hat
handling the reins. She had pulled off her heavy buckskin gloves; and
she never knew how absurdly like matches her fingers looked to the big
one-time miner beside her; nor how the exhilaration brought the tints
of the painters' flower to her cheeks and the light of the Alpine pools
to her eyes. Every man on the street turned and looked back, while the
gold teeth inside blinked with self conscious certainty that _they_ did
it; and the lavender silks wore a peculiarly cynical smile. Loafers
sat up and followed the stage with eager eyes far as they could see it
and said, "By Gawd--whose gurl is that?" Oh, Mr. Bat Brydges intended
every bar room buffer and loafer in the State should know, 'whose girl'
that was before night. Everything was fair in love and war; and Bat
considered he had run down a case of both. According to his lights, he
had; but his lights were smutty and in need of trimming.

The stage dropped the gold teeth at a dentist's office, and the
lavender silks at a manicure's 'studio,' I believe she called it; and
Bat swung off while the coach was still moving; and Eleanor reluctantly
gave up the reins at the transcontinental station.

"Thank you so much. I don't know when I have had as good a time," she
said, giving the stage driver the sensation of a king in disguise.

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