Book: The Freebooters of the Wilderness

A >> Agnes C. Laut >> The Freebooters of the Wilderness




Yet this was the world where her father had come penniless, a refugee
from miscarried justice, and had won out. It was the world where he
had been shot down by some miserable, criminal assassin, who, it was
more than likely, had mistaken him for Wayland. It was Wayland's
world, a world in the making. Well had Matthews designated it--The
United States of the World! More Jews than in Palestine; more Germans
than in Berlin; more Italians than in Rome; more Russians than in St.
Petersburg; more Canadians than in any four Canadian cities combined;
more descendants of the British than in the British Isles--the United
States of the World in the Making! Was it any wonder crime was
rampant; and Democracy rocked to the shock of collision and
miscalculation and inexperience; and Righteousness became a tacking to
progress, not a straight line, like the zig-zag of the ship making
headway all the time, but tacking back and forward to wind and current?
It was good to be alive and take part in the making of the United
States of the World!

She had had breakfast and luncheon in her apartments. At mid-day, she
saw Wayland coming along the thronged main street. At every step, some
man stopped him to shake hands; and groups turned and gazed after him
as he passed, and spat their approval or disapproval with great
emphasis at the mottled pavement. Below the window, a big Swede
grabbed his two shoulders with the grip of a steam crane.

"Say, you Vaylan', huh?" he asked. "Say, you a' right! You ever need
yob, Vaylan', you 'ply our union! Huh?" and he laughed, and went on;
and the tears welled to Eleanor's eyes.

Then came the lawyer to read the will; and after the lawyer's
departure, Matthews had told her how she concerned his errand down from
the North; and when the door closed on Matthews, she burst into tears.

She saw the street lights come twinkling out, and she did not turn on
the light of the sitting room chandelier. Did he love her at all; or
if he did, did he know what this waiting all day meant to a woman?
Then, it came to her in a flash, his wistful look in the morning behind
the forced gayety, his reference to the last ride, to keeping
resolutions. Was that resolution for the sake of his work at all; or
for her? Of course, Matthews had told him in the Desert; and with the
thought, the weight that had oppressed her rolled from her heart. She
jumped from her chair and uttered a low cry of happy laughter.

"Oh, I'll soon make short work of that resolution," she vowed.

Alas and alas! Samson straining his manhood for strength to shore up a
resolution, and here was a sharpening of scissors to shear him well!

There was a knock on the door. She thought it the waiter coming up
with a late dinner and had called "come in," when the door opened, and
in the glare of light from the hall way stood the news editor,
embarrassed and hesitating.

"Please come in." She pressed the electric button, shook hands with
him and shut the door. His air was at once apologetic and glad, but
all the bitterness and anger seemed to have gone. He stood holding his
soft felt hat in his hand and looking through his glasses, very
steadily and kindly, Eleanor thought.

"Won't you sit down?"

"We newspaper chaps should pretty nearly apologize for coming into your
presence, Miss MacDonald," he began. "I've wanted to tell you how we
fellows all regret that. I hope you know that kind of thing doesn't
come from inside the office. It comes from influences outside."

He had seated himself shading his eyes from the light with his hand, an
old trick of his compositor days, and still looked at her in the same
friendly way.

"Ever hear of the Down-East daily that black-guarded one of our
greatest presidents the very day he died? I've often wondered if the
public realized when that item appeared that not an editor on the staff
knew it was coming out, that when two of the editors read it, they
cried and went to pieces right there and then before their men for very
shame! Item had been sent straight to the composing room just before
the forms were locked up, by man who owned the paper. President had
refused him some public concession. Such things sometimes happen to
lesser folks than presidents."

"Were you so kind as to come here to say all this to me?" asked Eleanor.

"No, Miss MacDonald, I wasn't!" He blushed furiously, like a boy
caught in the act culpable. "Fact is, I'm keen to see Wayland, been
such a crush of men round him all day, haven't been able to get in a
word with him."

It was her turn to blush furiously.

"I didn't want him to go off up the Valley before I could get hold of
him. I wanted to have a shake with him. We're in the same boat now,
Miss MacDonald."

"I don't the very least bit in the world understand what you are
saying."

The news editor laughed and laid his hat on the onyx centre table
beneath the electric lights.

"Why, we're both fired," he said.

"Fired?" repeated Eleanor.

This time he laughed aloud: "I don't mean fired out of a gun," he
explained. "We're fired out of our job. I knew after the inquest, I'd
get the sack," he went on, making light of it, "but the wire didn't
come till this morning."

There were a lot of things the news editor didn't tell Eleanor just
here; and I beg of you, dear reader, to remember these things when you
execrate the press; for they happen every day to plain fellows, some of
them profane fellows, who make no professions and blow no trumpet.
When the news editor walked out of the office that morning, he owned,
besides the Smelter City lots, which were mortgaged to the hilt, and
six "kiddies," who had to be fed, precisely the five dollar bill in his
pocket, the clothes on his back and the duster coat that he carried out
on his arm. It was a mere detail, of course; but it was one of the
details he didn't tell Eleanor. When he had gone home and told his
wife, she had asked, "For Heaven's sake, Joe, what ever will we do, run
a fruit stand; or peddle milk?" Joe had answered the distracted
question with a lighter hearted laugh than she had heard for many a
day. Then he had gone off to catch Wayland.

But Eleanor did not know all this. Her quick wit grasped one salient
fact. You think, perhaps, it was that Wayland had been dismissed? It
wasn't.

"You mean that you have lost your position because of the evidence you
gave for us?"

Then the news editor did what he always told his underlings not to do
and to do--"Never lie; but if you have to, lie like a gentleman."

"Not at all, Miss MacDonald! I got fired because I told the truth! If
I had given evidence that was simply in your favor, I'd deserve to be
fired; but it was only a matter of somebody letting in a little honest
daylight. I told Wayland at the time that I'd cooked my dough! Funny
enough, the wire that came firing me this morning was immediately
followed by a wire from Washington announcing that he has been
dismissed for taking three weeks' absence without leave. We got it in
the neck together, Miss MacDonald, and I thought maybe Wayland would be
game enough to have a--a--a shake with me over it."

"Yes, a shake," smiled Eleanor. "I'd like to mix it for you!"

The news editor suddenly lost all shyness, burst out laughing, leaned
forward and shook hands.

"Don't know whether you know it or not," he went on, "but about a month
ago one of those d--I beg your pardon, Miss MacDonald, Down-East
scribblerettes, that come out to see the West from a Pullman car window
and put things right, passed through here. Somebody got him and filled
him up pretty full with a lot of lies about Wayland--"

"You mean Brydges gave him the facts?" asked Eleanor.

"Well, maybe, Brydges may have had him out in the forty horse power
car! He sent a lot of awful rot East! That wasn't the worst of it.
You'd think the Eastern fellows would know the difference between a
maverick and a long-horn! He's been going round to the Eastern editors
giving them doped stuff, lies dated out here written right down in New
York! They've been hammering the Forest Service for the last month!
I'll bet that dough-head never put a foot in National Forests once
while he was West: rot about running off settlers, and shutting down
mines, and hampering lumbering operations, and low down personal stuff!
Anyway, between lies and dope, they've got Wayland! He's fired! I've
been trying to get hold of him all day. Your old man's phrase, 'United
States of the World,' kind of caught on with the crowd: they've kind of
wakened up! Funny thing, the way that happens to a crowd! Your
professional wind-jammer can orate till he busts his head, he never
knows it has happened till the crowd has got away from him! Been a
crush of men round Wayland all day, by G--, I beg your pardon--but if
he isn't drowned, 'twon't be their fault! They are talking of putting
him up as a candidate."

"As a what?" exclaimed Eleanor.

"Run for Congress," explained the news man.

She had gone quickly forward to the window, righting a shade to hide
the flood of joy that surged up to her face.

"Excuse me--Mr.----? But I don't know your name?"

"My name? Oh, my name is--Legion," said the news editor dryly.

"Well, what was it you said the other day," she had mustered courage to
turn and face him again, "what was it you said the other day about a
moneyed man backing an independent paper through this fight? Don't you
remember, after the inquest, Mr. Legion?"

He uttered a shout of laughter, and she understood and laughed too.

"Oh, the independent paper is floundering on the edge of failure.
They'll have to swing in line with the side that pays them best at
election time. One could buy up their debts now for a few thousand
dollars, perhaps not twenty thousand. Another fifty or so would swing
her off on an independent tack. There's been a great awakening. The
people have their ears down to the ground for the coming change, Miss
MacDonald; and the politicians don't know it! If we could swing her
off well, she'd be a paying concern in a year; then the politicians
could be d--I beg your pardon, the special interests could go to the
Devil! That's what I wanted to talk about to Wayland. He's the
winning horse! We haven't either of us got anything left to lose but
some frayed convictions, and by God," (this time, he did not notice he
had said it), "we'd invest 'em in an independent for all we're worth!
I'm hot; and I've an idea Wayland isn't just at milk and water
temperature; and the public isn't; and we'd have them! We'd force the
other crowd to yell at the top of their voices for reform inside of six
months. There's a lot about that Rim Rocks affair even the owners of
the sheep don't know; but why in the Devil am I telling all this to a
woman?"

She had drawn her chair up to the table where he sat.

"Because, I suppose, the woman wants to know. In case, you don't see
Wayland, do you mind giving me the exact figures about that independent
paper? We are all to go home together to-morrow. Let us put the
figures down. I can tell him the rest when the others are not about;
and do you know, I think I have heard him speak of some one who might
back this kind of scheme?"

Oh, crafty woman! Do you think the kindly eyes behind those strongly
focussed glasses did not bore in behind your guarded words? Just once
did she interrupt his quick run of explanations.

"Is your idea to run an altogether _staid_ journal, or a yellow one?"
she asked.

He was plainly taken aback. He laid down his pencil.

"If you were a man, I could explain that easier!"

"Because, I'm done with the kind of goodness that's pickled and put
away in a self-sealer where it won't spoil like old-fashioned jam for
company," she said.

The news editor's eyes opened very wide, indeed! She had said "_I'm
done_" quite as unconsciously as he had let slip words inadmissable in
polite converse.

"It isn't piety done up in homoeopathic pills the world wants," she
went on.

"No, it's punch," he broke in; "and what's the use of dickering with a
little two-for-a-cent high-brow, superior, exclusive, self-righteous
rag of a daily that will reach only a handful of sissy people?
Democracy is here; and it's here for keeps, the rule of the many good
or bad; and it's as your old parson said in the court room, it's _going
to be the United States of the World_. What's the use of issuing a rag
sheet that will preach to a little parlorful of sissies and high-brows?
You've got to get the crowd, and to educate 'em up to self-government,
to pelt 'em to a pulp with facts! You've got to get 'em if you take
them by the scruff of the neck, Miss MacDonald! While the churches and
the teachers and the preachers sit back self-superior and
self-sufficient, Miss MacDonald, where's the crowd? They're out in the
street! You've got to get 'em! You've got to get the facts before
'em! People curse the yellow journals! All right! But they reach an
audience of a million a day; every one of them; and your self-superior
journals don't touch ten-thousand! Miss MacDonald, which is having the
telling influence, for good or evil? Which is getting the crowd? Oh,
I know they publish pictures of pugilists' big toes and base ball
pitchers' thumbs the size of a half page; but if I could ram a moral
truth or a hard fact down the fool-public's throat on the very next
page by advertising it with a pugilist's big toe, I'd do it--you bet!
I'd take a leaf out of the Devil's note book and go him one better!
You ask whether I'd publish a yellow journal? Miss MacDonald, if I
could get the facts of exactly what is going on in this country before
the public, I wouldn't publish 'em yellow! I'd publish truth bloody
red!"


When the Williams and Matthews came in from the missionary meeting,
Eleanor was standing under the centre light leaning against the table
with her back to the door.

"Feeling better, dear?" asked Mrs. Williams.

"So much better that I'm going to bed to sleep every minute for the
first night for a week."

"Surely," cried Williams clapping his hands. "A MacDonald never had
nerves."

Matthews was trying to read her face as she shook hands saying
good-night.

"No," she answered his look, shaking her head, "I must decide for
myself, Mr. Matthews."

The three stood talking in the room she had left.

"Do you think we ought to have told her?" asked Mrs. Williams
solicitously.

"No! Leave Wayland t' tell her himself t'morrow! A make no doubt that
buckboard won't hold five people! Is it six o'clock we set out? A'm
longin' for m' own wee uns!"

"One thing," declared Williams, throwing himself on a chair, "if
Wayland runs, I'm going to stump it for him! We've got to get busy,
Matthews! The old order changeth! We've got to keep up with the
procession!"

If you had not known her utter conservatism as to all things pertaining
to women, you could not appreciate the response of the missionary's
wife. (She was an ultra-anti-suffragette.)

"I am sure, my dear," she cried, "I know a couple of hundred people on
our summer circuit in the Upper Pass that I could make vote right."




CHAPTER XXVIII

THE UNITED STATES OF THE WORLD

"Wayland, for a man who's had his head cut off, you look uncommon
joyous, tho' you're a bit white about the chops."

"Had a shave," answered Wayland dryly.

The yellow buckboard was rattling over the pressed brick pavement of
Smelter City towards the suburbs. Williams was in the front seat with
Matthews, who was driving. Eleanor and Mrs. Williams were in the
second seat, with Wayland standing behind as he had stood that night
going up to the Rim Rocks. Behind trotted two range ponies with empty
saddles.

"I thought, perhaps, you'd prefer driving out beyond the suburbs," he
had explained. "There's a good trail up to the hog's back opposite the
_Brule_."

They watched her leap down from the buckboard and mount the saddle, a
little awkward at first whether to put the right knee fore or aft, from
her Eastern training to a side saddle; and side saddles in the range
country are rare as low neck gowns and tuxedo coats; but once she had
caught the far stirrup, riding was riding. She had the pace, and the
two figures loped off up the burn for the hill known as the _Brule_,
Wayland turning and waving his hat.

"Now the Lord have mercy on your soul, Williams. This ride will settle
it; an' A'm not darin' t' hope which way it goes! A 'm not keen to go
back empty-handed with yon little old lady payin' m' expenses heavy an'
generous; but yet--but yet--"

"Yet what?" asked Mrs. Williams, leaning forward between the two men.

"Th' great joy comes only once; an' when it cam' t' me, A put a
handspike thro' it, an' kept it."


He had come to her that morning with a look on his face that she had
not dreamed a human face could wear. She wondered if all men crucified
for right won such joy. And he did not tread earth. He trod air.
Eleanor could not trust her eyes to meet his. She felt their light
burning to the centre of her soul. What was it? Was it renunciation?
The thought turned her faint. Her determination to break his
resolution seemed the cheap obtrusion of egotism on the great mission
of a devoted life. Then, going up the hog's back trail along the rim
of the Ridge, they were facing the Holy Cross Mountain. The glint of
the morning sun on the far snows shone like diamonds, a tiared jeweled
thing poised in mid-heaven like a crown held by invisible hands; the
base of the lower mountain outlines melting and losing edge in the
purple shadows; the crown only, shining diademed, winged with opal
light.

"Look Dick," she said pointing with her riding crop, "do you remember
the night on the Ridge? Do you remember about the snow flakes massing
to the avalanche? It has--hasn't it? The Nation has wakened up."

Wayland looked ahead. He couldn't answer. 'Remember the night on the
Ridge?' He had a lump in his throat and an ache at his heart from
never letting himself remember it. By that strange perversity, which
we all know in ourselves, he couldn't talk. The hundred and one things
he had wanted to ask, died on his lips in a dumbness of gladness. Of
course, you, dear reader, on the return of a husband or wife
(prospective or present), on the sudden appearance of friend or kith
have never been similarly affected. You didn't forget the questions
you had meant to ask till thousands of miles again separated you.

It was good to leave the Valley road and go into seclusion and shelter
on the Forest trail; for a hurricane September wind was blowing, the
kind of Western wind that the Eastern woman with a big hat thinks is
possessed by ten thousand devils; the kind of wind that the Eastern
office man with sensitive eyes curses with tears that are not grief;
the kind of wind that makes the Westerner put screw nails in _his_ hat
and look out for the fire guard round wheat, stock and timber.

Such a different home-going he had planned from this visitation of dumb
devils that obsessed them both! He used to dream at night in the
Desert of the day, perhaps, coming when they should set out together
adventuring a life joy in the Forests; _his_ Forests; when he would
show her the golden cottonwoods and the pale birches nursing the
pineries to strong maturity; and the fire blisters on the firs; and the
sugar blisters on the sugar pines; and the rain of green-gray tempered
light from the under side of the funereal hemlocks; and the park like
glades of the wonderfully straight and serried soldier ranks of the
engleman spruce and the lodge-pole pines; and the larches yellow as
gold dust to the touch of the alchemist autumn. He wanted to bring out
his violin some day with her and see if they could catch the exact tone
and pitch of the pines, when they began harping those age-old melodies
of Pan: they were harping them to-day in the high wind; he was sure it
was the same as the bass undertone of a big orchestra. Had she ever
noticed the way the seeds came fluffing out of the cinnamon cones and
the asters and the golden rod and the fire flower in September, for all
the world like fairies sailing pixie parachutes? People said that
autumn was sad, it presaged death! Did it? A Forester did not see it
so; he saw the triumphal procession of the years lighted to its
consummation by the flaming torches of ten thousand golden twinkling
gay, recklessly gay flowers and trees--the cottonwood and the poplar
and the larch, the cone flower and the golden rod and the aster! But
to-day, he could not say a word. They were no longer _his_ Forests.
He had been cast out from his life work--the continuity of a National
Life Work broken--because he had dared to interfere with the petty
plans of peanut politicians and public plunderers.

"It is level here! Let us gallop out of this bare burn to the shelter
of the evergreens," she said. "I don't mind wind, but I'd just as soon
get under cover where it couldn't lash us so."

And the horses came chugging and breathing hard up on the sheltered
trail below the evergreens. She reined her horse to the slowest of
walks.

"Did you see the news editor before you left town?" she asked.

"Yes, he came over to my hotel last night about twelve o'clock. He had
the biggest fool-scheme you ever heard of my running for Congress and
buying a paper to boost out the Ring and all that! Thunder, I don't
want to run! I've no ax to grind! I prefer to stay a free lance in
the fighting ranks!"

"And do you think the fellows, who want to run and have an ax to grind,
do best for the Nation?" asked Eleanor. "Why wouldn't you run if the
people demanded it?"

"There is the plain brutal fact that it takes money," explained
Wayland. "I haven't the ambition; and I have less money. I haven't
more than will set me up on some little one-horse irrigation farm. Oh,
I know some fool had been filling him up about my having rich friends
East, who would put up money for this campaign and finance a new kind
of newspaper for the Valley! I'd like to knock the fool's head off who
told him that! It's all a lie! Of course, I knew lots of moneyed
chaps at Yale; but thunderation, I'd have to want public office a good
deal harder than I do to go round cap in hand! Why, Eleanor, a fellow
who would do that wouldn't be worth shucks to represent the people."

"Did you tell him that?" asked Eleanor.

"Yes and more! I told him he was clean plumb fool-crazy! Why,
Eleanor, when that fellow was fired out of his job yesterday morning,
he hadn't ten dollars ahead in the world! I'm not a bank, myself; but
then I haven't a wife and kiddies. Do you know, Eleanor, that fellow
had more pluck than I would have had under the same circumstances? I
couldn't let the results of this kind of a fight come down on a woman."

"What did he say when you told him he was crazy?"

"Oh, went locoed clean out of his head, kicked my hat off the bed post,
took out a fiver, said, 'Wayland, that's my last! I'll bet it a
hundred odd you do the very thing I'm outlining tonight.'"

"It was a safe bet," said Eleanor. "He had come to see me before he
went to you! I was the person, who told him you had a friend, who
would put up the money. I didn't tell him who the friend was; for it
happens to be myself. No: you needn't blow up, Dick; or drop dead of
apoplexy! He didn't come to tell me, or ask a woman's money! He had
come hunting you; and I pumped it out of him. He's a brick not to
mention my name to you. I like that in a man; and I am going to do it,
Dick; and you needn't blow up with rage! You can swear if it would
relieve pressure; but I am going to do it! I am going to do it at
once! Don't you see what a cowardly foolish thing it would be of you
to give up and slink into a hole just because you're defeated? It's
just what you said would happen that night on the Ridge. Don't you
remember, you said it was bound to be a losing fight; and I said it
didn't matter a bit if a man were crucified long as the cause won out?
Well, you sent me the note saying you had set out on the Trail and
would never quit till you got the Man Higher Up. How are you going to
get the Man Higher Up if you don't go right after him in the House and
the Senate? They've crucified you; and it's going to be the making of
you. Men don't destroy an opponent unless they fear him! If he's a
fool, they give him rope enough to hang himself; but if they fear him,
they slander him and blacken him and misrepresent him and try to
destroy him! Well, they've done all that to you and tried to destroy
you; and instead of destroying you, they've only made the people call
on you for a leader! Don't you see what a cowardly thing it would be
to slink away now because you are defeated? Why, that's the very time
a man can't afford to quit, and still call himself a man. No, don't
try to stop me! I lay awake all last night thinking it out! They'll
not have a chance to call you a woman-made man! I'll place a certain
amount with my lawyer for Mr. Williams. You know my father always
helped the Mission School more or less; and a woman is supposed to be
soft on Missions. Mr. Williams will loan it to the news editor. Only,
I may as well tell you, Dick, you are not going to be allowed to stop
now! You wrote me that a person couldn't stab certain things to life
and then expect them to lie quiet as if nothing had happened. That
cuts both ways. Men are pretty good egotists; but I wonder if you ever
thought what that means with me, with the people you have prodded up to
resent the Ring in the Valley here. Do you know Dick, if you would
quit now, I'd despise myself for ever having loved you."

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