Book: The Freebooters of the Wilderness

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After mid-day meal, she ensconced herself in a steamer chair on the
piazza facing the mountain; but her book lay face downward. It was a
book on coniferous trees. She had thought the Valley monotonous when
she had first come back. Now she knew it never remained the same for
two whole hours. The dazzling white of morning had given place to the
yellow glow of afternoon. The River that had flowed quicksilver now
swept seaward pure amber rilled with gold. The fleece clouds herded by
wandering winds had massed to towering cumulus where the sheet
lightnings played; and the Mountain where the silver snow-cross had
glistened in the morning seemed to have changed perspective, to have
retreated and withdrawn to a weird upper world. You no longer saw the
wind-blown cataracts. Purpling shadows, palpable sabling mournful
ghost-forms, folded and wrapped the Ridge with here and there shafts of
slant light, yellow as bars of gold. You could no longer hear the
rampant roar of streams disimprisoned from snow by mid-day sun. With
the slant light came the sibilant hush, the quiet tangible.


She reclined very still in the steamer chair. Life and love and
mystery wrapped her round, the great reverie of the race, the ecstasy
of devotees that sent to death and crusade in the Middle Ages, the
lovelight of life brooding warm and radiant. She no longer saw the
shining pageant of sunlight on the argent fields of an infinite
universe; the sparks and spangles of light in silver cataracts; a world
veiled in gold mist, flame-fired of joy, little cressets of rose edging
every sky-line. She was possessed, obsessed, bathed, enveloped in a
flame of new life. If she thought at all, 'twas in the symbol of the
old Apostle, "in Him we live and move and have our being." She
recalled that God had been defined in the consciousness of the race as
Love. Deep draughts of new existence whelmed her. No longer life
coursed somnolent through unconscious veins. Life ran riotous of
gladness tingling to a living joy so poignant it became pain. Was it
fool-joy born of swifter pulse and time-old inheritance in the flesh?
Was it the rhapsody of self-hypnotism, which ancients would have called
vision? Of such dreams does creation spring full born and enfleshed.
Of such dreams does heroism laugh at death. Of such dreams does life
invest the daily round with rain-bow mist, with the spectrum gamut of
all the colors that blend to the pure white light of daily life. As a
lense splits up light, so love had brought out the hidden colors of
existence, of eternity; as she dreamed, eternity itself seemed short.

Then came the restlessness that had shaken Wayland on the Ridge the
night before, the fire that tests the vessel; and whether the life go
to pieces depend on whether the vessel be both strong and clean. Yet
she was not afraid. She remembered their talk the night before of the
snow flake falling to the same law as the avalanche; and was she not
also a part of the Great Law?

She knew he could not be free till six. She must not go up to the
Ridge. Last night, she had gone heedlessly. She could never go so
again. Then, she realized why the Missionary's wife had linked her
fate with Williams'--a frail bit of china putting itself to the coarse
uses of earthenware--washing, scrubbing, sandpapering three generations
of morals and bodies to make an ideal real. It was Wayland who had
first described Mrs. Williams in that metaphor: "a piece of Bisque or
Dresden," he had said, "and what those lousy Indians need is a wooden
wash tub with lots of soft soap." Then, she wanted to see Mrs.
Williams, to study her with this new knowledge.

A picket fence in imitation of a home in the East ran round the Mission
House. Pitiful attempts at gardening lined the gravel entrance,
periwinkle dried up in the blazing Western sun, sickly scented
geraniums that shrivelled to the night frost, altheas that did better
but refused to bloom. "They don't transplant East to West, any better
than they do West to East. Better follow the Senator's advice and
domesticate our Western ones." Then, the whimsical thought came
perhaps that was what her father had done with her.

The drone of a man's voice from the Mission Parlor surprised her; for
Mr. Williams had gone off with her father to the Upper Pass.

"Here is Miss Eleanor, herself! We were just speaking about you,
Eleanor! This is an old friend of your father's, Mr. Matthews from
Saskatchewan!"

A little woman in gray drew Eleanor inside the Mission Parlor, a little
woman with a white transparent skin trenched by lines of care, but
somehow, when you looked twice, they were lines of beauty chiseled by
time. She was garbed in gray and her hair was almost white, but, from
the first time Eleanor had looked at her hands, the girl wanted to kiss
and cover them with her own--they were such beautifully kept hands but
so gnarled and misshapen with toil. There had been only one child; but
there were eighty Indian children in the Mission School. Had the love
dream paid toll for such toil--Eleanor had asked herself when first she
had seen the Missionary's wife. Now she knew that, whether the love
dream paid toll or not, love would do and was doing the same thing time
without end and everywhere.

Then, she became aware of the massive form of a man topped by an
enormous head of white hair rising in links and hinges from a chair in
the corner till his figure towered above the little woman.

"So this--is Eleanor--MacDonald? Well, well, well!"

He was shaking hands at each word. "A knew your grandfather well.
Many's the time we have raced the dogtrains down MacKenzie River an'
the canoes down the Saskatchewan! 'Twas your grandfather set the
bagpipes skirling when Governor Simpson used to come galloping down the
Columbia in the forties with his paddlers splitting the wind, a dark
fearsome man, child, but a brave one, tho' his heart was hard as his
hand, and his hand was iron--Bras de Fer, Arm of Iron, the Indians
called him; for his left hand, he lost in a duel; and his false hand
was a true hand of iron metal that made many a lazy voyageur bite the
dust. Bless me, but you are a MacDonald to your dainty feet--" holding
her off from him at arm's length. "Eyes true to pedigree, and the
curly hair, and the short upper lip, the only one of all the MacDonalds
that's kept the race type. 'Tis good to see you! A'm right glad to
see you! A'm gladder than you know-"

Eleanor did not wait for any second thought. "And did you know my
mother's people, too?"

The old man sat back in his corner. "No, A cannot say A did! A had
left the Company an' was building railway bridges in the Rockies when
your father left Canada."

She felt the hot flush mount.

"Such an absurd thing, Eleanor," Mrs. Williams was explaining. "Mr.
Matthews came by the Holy Cross last night. Mr. Wayland told Calamity
to show him which way to turn; and she sent him the wrong way, to the
cow-boy camp, you know! He had to sleep out all night at our very
door. Such a shame! That put him so late that he missed Mr. Williams.
You know they have gone to the Upper Pass and can't possibly be back
for weeks--excuse me, some of my school people seem to want me," and
she flitted from the room. To Eleanor, her life seemed a constant
flitting at the beck of bootless duties, nagging duties that only an
expert time keeper of Heaven could credit.

"Yes! Sent me a mile along the road in the wrong direction--into a
nest of mid-night birds. A nice bunch o' beauties, too, hatching some
Devil plot to ruin the poor sheepmen! A man in a white vest was there,
who by the same token didn't belong; tho' A'm no so sure he was any
better than his company. They didn't see _me_! A didna' just speak to
_them_, but A heard them plain enough,--'leave for the South at once;'
and 'crowd 'em to beat Hell,' and 'send 'em over without a push' an'
'see that no harm comes to the boy'--Eh, why, what is the matter?"

Eleanor had sprung forward with white lips.

"It's Fordie! He's taking the sheep to the Rim Rocks with the Mexican
herders. Don't frighten his mother! It may not be too late! He may
not have reached the Rim--"

"Let's telephone that Ranger fellow?"


Then, it all dawned on her, the deadly, suave, incredibly malicious
pre-planned thing!

"The wires had been cut since morning," she said.




CHAPTER VII

WHILE LAW MARKS TIME, CRIME SCORES

They did not tell the boy's mother.

The German cook hitched the fastest bronchos to the yellow buckboard
with the front wheel brake; and, the old frontiersman flourishing the
reins, they had whisked off for the Ridge trail before Mrs. Williams
could return to the Mission Parlor.

"The Ranger will be able to tell whether the sheep have passed down the
Ridge," she explained.

The old man caught the light on her face as she spoke the name. It was
like the flash in the dark that betrays a diamond, or the scintilla of
light through the leaves that tells of an Alpine lake; but he made no
comment except to the ponies.

"Go it, little ones! Make time! Split the wind! Show y'r heels!
Tear the air to tatters! there!" And he whirled the whip with the
skill of all the old Adam stirring within him, while the buckboard went
forward with a bounce.

"We can't take the wagon up yon Ridge trail--"

"No, but I can climb straight up and not mind the switch back, if
you'll wait."

He muttered some commonplace about "true Westerner;" and, springing
out, she had gone scrambling up the slope avoiding delay of the zig-zag
by climbing almost straight.

Quizzically, the old man gazed after her; the first hundred feet were
easy, a mossed slope with padded foot-hold. Then came steep ground
slippery with pine needles; but the mountain laurel and ground juniper
gave hand grip; and she swung herself up past the third tier of the
switch back where the Ridge arose a rock face and trees with two
notches and one blaze marked the lower bounds of the National Forests.
Here he saw her run along the bridle trail marked by one notch and one
blaze: then, she was swinging over moraine slopes to the fifth bench of
the trail. There she disappeared round a jut of rock--he remembered a
mountain spring trickled out at this place bridged by spruce poles.
Then he noticed that the cumulous clouds which had been flashing sheet
lightning all afternoon, were massing and darkening and lowering closer
over the Valley, with zig-zag jags of live fire down to the ground and
sounds more like the crack of a whip or splinter of wood than thunder.
The cliff swallows dipped almost to the grass; and the flowers were
hanging their heads in miniature umbrellas. All the trembling poplars
and cotton-woods seemed to be furled waiting. Then, the lower side of
the slate clouds frayed in the edge of a sweepy garment to sheets and
fringes of rain. A little tremor ran through the leaves. The horses
laid back their ears.

"We'll get it," said the old man tightening the reins.


She had paused for breath round the buttress of a gray crag when she
noticed the churn of yeasty blackness blotting out the Valley and felt
the hushed heat of the air. A jack rabbit went whipping past at long
bounds. The last rasp of a jay's scold jangled out from the trees.
Then, she heard from the hushed Valley, the low flute trill of a blue
bird's love song. Ever afterwards, either of those bird notes, the
scurl of the jay or the golden melody of the blue warbler, brought her
joyous, terrible thoughts, too keen to the very quick of being for
either words or tears; for a horseman had turned the crag leading his
broncho. It was the Ranger in his sage green Service suit wearing a
sprig of everlasting in his Alpine hat.

"Why, I've been trying to get you by telephone all day," he said, "but
the wires are cut--"

In the light of the sudden strength on his face, she forgot the
brooding storm, the impending horror.

"Has Fordie brought the sheep down?"

"Yes, ages ago; he passed at noon with the whole bunch, fifteen
thousand of 'em, strung along the trail from the top of the Ridge to
the bottom. Don't you see how they skinned every branch? That's why
the cattlemen hate 'em! Ford will be on the Rim Mesas now. Why;
anything wrong?"

She did not remember till afterwards how it was she had met both his
hands with her own as she repeated the old frontiersman's report. She
knew, if time stopped and storm split the welkin, it would be all the
same. She felt the heat hush come up from the Valley, felt the
quivering pause of the waiting air, the noiseless flutter of the
foliage, the awed quiet, then the exquisite tingling pain of her own
being,--

"Eleanor, look at me! Look in my eyes! Look up at me--"

She felt the rush of her being to meet and blend and fuse in the flame
of his love. Then, she looked up. His eyes drank hers in one poised
moment of delirious recognition, of tempestuous tenderness. The world
swam out of ken. All but the fluted melody of the blue bird; and she
knew they must always sound together, the trill and the rasp, the blue
bird and the jay, the true and the false, love and its counterfeit.

"We go into this fight together," he said very quietly, "And forever!"
He placed the sprig of everlasting in her hand. "You can count me on
the firing line."

Then he had thrown the reins over his broncho's neck, headed the horse
back up the Ridge and was slithering down the steep slope giving her
hand-hold as of steel-springs. So short was the interval, it could not
be measured in time. Yet it had rivetted eternity. She saw the
rolling clouds of ink writhing up the Valley turning everything to
blackness: yet she did not know it. The little flutter of air changed
to whiplashes and puffs of wind that curled the black hair forward over
her unhatted face in a frame. Wayland looked at her and felt his
masterdom going to those same winds; for the pace had painted her ivory
cheeks, not rose color, but the deep flame of the wild flower. Some
day, perhaps,--no matter; he set his teeth and screwed the whipcord
muscles taut; for the moraine stones had begun to roll, and there was a
zig-zag flash of lightning that sent fire balls sizzling over the rock.
He braced her to the leap down the steep sliding moraine, and felt the
frenzy of joy from her touch.

"There! We took the jump together! You didn't push me over the edge
of things," he said, as their feet touched the pine needle slope.

This time, the lightning came with a ripping splintering rocking echo.

"It's like Love and Life racing in the picture," she laughed back and
they bounded into the buckboard, Wayland standing braced behind the
seat, "to stop her kiting down the hill if we break loose," he said;
she, forward with the driver, feet braced to the iron foot-rest, hands
holding the seat-guard. Then, the brim of his felt hat flapping, the
bronchos' ears laid back, necks craned out, the old man whirling the
whip, they were off for the Rim Rocks. The breaking storm, the
whipping winds, the wild pace, the rush of the fringed rain, seemed a
part of the furious exaltation breaking the bounds of her own
consciousness.

"Cross the ford, Sir," shouted the Ranger bending forward, "it's
shorter than the bridge;" and her hair tossed in his face as the
buckboard splashed into the River and bounced up the far side with hind
wheels swaying.

"Are y' all right, there?" called the old driver over his shoulder.

"Stay with it," yelled Wayland, "straight ahead where the road cuts the
Rim Rocks."

"We're splitting the air all right," shouted the old man. "Ye mind y'
talked of sawing air. Split it, man, an' y'll get somewhere."

Up a hummock, down a ravine, over a fallen log with a hurdle jump that
threatened to break the buckboard's back.

"Are ye there yet?" called the old man.

"Split the wind, Sir," shouted Wayland; and the rig went rattling up
the red earth road of the Rim Rocks not a wheel's width from the edge.

"We're leaving the storm behind; look back," she said.

Up the Valley swept the rains in a wall of whipped spray jagged by the
zig-zag streaks of lightning.

"Hold on till we turn the next switch back," warned the Ranger. The
buckboard wheeled a point as he spoke and the bronchos floundered to a
fagged trot. They saw it coming: the rain wall, frayed at the edge to
a fringe, the wind lashing their faces, the red rocks of the
battlements jutting through the cloud wrack spectral and ominous. A
toothed edge of rock above, then a belt of cloud cut by the darting
wings of the countless swallows.

The trees of the Ridge across the Valley seemed to bend and snap.
There was a funnelling roar, sucking up earth and air, trees and
brushwood; whips and lashes and splintering crashes of rain and wind
and jagged light-lines; the bronchos cowering against the inner wall of
the trail. Then the funnelling wind tore the pinnacled rock tops clear
of the billowing mist.

"There goes your hat, Sir," cried Wayland as the black felt went
sailing down the precipice.

"What's that!" demanded the old man, springing from the seat and
pointing upward with his whip.


Over the edge of the sky line, on the rimmed red battlements, jumping,
jumping, jumping; as sheep jump at shearing time from the hot center to
the cool outside, or over the backs of one another in winter cold, when
the outer line jumps to the huddled center; came the herd in a gray
woolly shapeless whirling mass! Shouts, cries, shrill bleatings, storm
muffled bang, bang and thud of guns! Just for an instant, emerged from
the mist on the skyline of the battlements the figure of a man in
sheep-skin chaps, a riderless white horse, shadows of other men, the
sheep in a living torrent pouring over into the nothingness of mist;
then a boy, a little boy, riding hatless, craning far forward over the
neck of his pinto pony, shouting, waving, screaming, trying to head the
sheep back from the precipice edge!

"The dastard coward, blackguard Hell-hatched hounds!" roared the old
man, shaking his impotent fist. Then he funnelled his hands and
shouted the lad's name.

It happened in the twinkling of an eye. The man in the
sheep-skin-chaps clubbed his rifle at the galloping pony. The pinto
reared, flung back, pitched over the edge of the Rim Rocks. Then the
cloud blot, earth and air sponged into the wet blur of a washed slate,
shrieking furies of peltering rain, a roar of the hurricane wind, a
blinding flash, the air torn to tatters! The cloud burst hurled down
in sheets, the red clay road runnelling flood torrents. Wayland had
caught her under shelter of the rock wall. The old man hurtled to the
heads of the shivering bronchos, gripping both bridles. A splintering
crash that rocketted from crag to crag and rumbled below their feet;
and the thing was over quick as it had come. The funnelling whirl of
clouds eddied over the Pass behind the Holy Cross Mountain; the opal
peak radiant and dazzling above the Valley; the air a burst of yellow
sunlight quivering in the smoking rain mist; the red battlement rocks
above dripping and bare; and somewhere a song sparrow trilling to the
tinkle of the subsiding waters. A roil of cloud rolled from below.

The sound came first, smothered and pain-piercing; then the old
frontiersman had uttered something between a curse and a groan. She
sprang from shelter and looked over the edge. Jumbled at the foot of
the pinnacled red rocks heaved a writhing mass, a weltering maimed
horror. On the outer edge, arms under head, face to sky, tossed
backwards, lay the body of the boy beside the pinto pony, the neck of
the horse broken under in the fall, the child pitched beyond the mass
by the double turn of his falling horse.


For a moment none of the three uttered a word. She was trembling so
that she could not speak. There were tears in the old man's eyes. To
Wayland's face had come a look. It was like the blue flash of a pistol
shot. The pupils of his eyes had focussed to pin points of fire. He
moistened his lips.

"May Hell be both deep and hot!" he said.

It was the cry of the primal man beneath all the culture of the schools
that disprove Hell; the cry of human red-blooded manhood against all
the white-corpuscled sickly sentimentality that ever sacrifices
innocence on the altar of guilt.

While the Law marked time, the swift feet of crime had not paused nor
slackened pace. While the Law argued, learnedly, disputatiously, with
the handing up and the handing down of inane decisions, Crime scored;
and Who or What tallied? The men round the fire the night before in
the cow-camp, the men of "the bunco game" had stacked cards and played
trump; but unfortunately, they had jumbled the white-vested fighter's
orders about the boy. The cattlemen had taken care of themselves after
a code not honored by the law of nations.


Also, they had gone into the fight together: the one who saw the right
but did not understand the fight; the one who understood the fight but
sometimes lost his vision of the right; and the one who saw in the
fight for right, not the quarrel of a Valley, or a Faction, or a Ring,
but the saving of the Nation, the repudiation of a world lie, the
welding of right and might into an eternal harmony.




CHAPTER VIII

A VICTIM OF LAW'S DELAY

For years, Eleanor could not let herself remember the details of that
night. We like to persuade ourselves that by some miraculous chance,
some trickery of fate, good may come in a vague somehow out of evil;
contrary to the proofs from the beginning of time that good fruit never
yet grew from evil seed. The girl was too honest for such fetish
faith. She could not turn up the whites of her eyes in a pious
resignation that it had been the will of God evil should triumph. So
she shut out the details of the horror from mind's memory and set her
teeth, knowing well that when lewd horrors triumph it is not because
the God of the Universe is a fool but because the powers for right have
not fought valiant as the powers for evil.

She remembered the Ranger had tossed a revolver to the old frontiersman
and Matthews had gone tearing up the slippery clay of the Mesa road
ripping out oaths of his unregenerate days that he would have "the
scoundrels' scalps if he had to tear them off with his own hands."
Somehow, Wayland had headed the draggled horses round on the narrow Rim
Rock trail.

"Go down and break the news to his mother. I'll get the body," he had
said; and she had driven the buckboard down with her foot on the wheel
brake. Not a soul appeared around the Senator's place as she passed
the white square of fenced buildings. All the mosquito doors were
hooked. Everything looked deserted; branding irons lying in disorder
round the k'raal. The River had swollen too turbulent for fording and
she had crossed the white bridge--she remembered she had crossed at a
gallop contrary to the little notice tacked on the board railing.
Then, the horses steaming from rain had stopped in front of the Mission
gate and Mrs. Williams had come out "wondering about Fordie in the
storm." With her back to the waiting mother, Eleanor had spent an
unconscionable time tying the ponies, trying to control her own
trembling lips and threshing round for some way to tell the untenable.
She remembered the roil of the raging waters, the floating star
blossoms on the muddy swirl, the light sifting in beaten rain dust
through the silver pine needles, the curve and dip of the joyous
swallows. Then, she had followed the little white haired lady into the
Mission Parlor.

Almost hysterically, that saying of an old profane writer came to mind,
"God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb;" and all her inner being was
shouting in rebellion "Does He, Does He?" Then she shut the door. She
knew very well how she ought to have broken the news with the pious
platitudes that everything is for the best, with the whitewashed lies
that every damnable tragedy is a blessing in disguise, that every
devil-dance of fool circumstance is beneficent design, that disease is
really health in a mask and sin a joke, a misnomer, that crime is
really a trump card up Deity's sleeve to play down some wonderful trick
of good; but--was it the Indian strain in her blood back many
generations? She could not mouthe the hollow mockery of such
sophistries in the presence of Death.


"Eleanor--what is it? Why do your eyes look so strange?"

The little woman clasped both the girl's hands and gazed questioningly
up in her face. At the same moment, she began to tremble. She tried
to ask and faltered; a tremor pulsed in the upper lip. Then the
grand-daughter of the man of the iron hand had gathered the little
white haired lady in her arms as if to ward the blow.

"The outlaws drove Fordie over the Rim Rocks with the herd," she said.

"Is he dead? Is he dead?"

The little woman had drawn her body up its full height.

Eleanor tried to answer. The words would not come from her lips. She
nodded. There again she had to shut the door of memory; for, when we
break the news, it isn't the news we break; it's the news breaks us.

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