Book: The Freebooters of the Wilderness

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After what seemed an interminable quiet, Mrs. Williams was asking
through dry tearless sobs:

"What does it all mean? Have we not given our whole lives to God? How
could this thing happen--to an innocent child? There isn't any justice
or right in this whole world."

"We must _not_ be quiescent any more, Mrs. Williams. We must fight.
We have such a habit of letting things go, and things let go--go wrong.
It isn't God's fault at all: it's us--us humans: it's our fault. Every
one of us ought to have been ready to die to prevent crime; and we've
been letting things go. We mustn't be quiescent any more. We must
fight wrongs and evils. And much more;" the girl in tears, the little
woman fevered, red-eyed, gazing with glazed look into dark spaces,
kneading her clasped hands together. Once the door opened and the
shawled head of the old half-breed woman poked in.

"Ford?" Calamity asked.

"Go 'way, Calamity," whispered Eleanor.

She saw the little woman rise slowly.

"He is murdered," Mrs. Williams said, "he is murdered just as truly as
if Moyese had cut his throat with his own hand." It was not for months
after, that Eleanor recalled the look on Calamity's face as the Indian
woman heard those frenzied words. Then Mrs. Williams broke in
uncontrollable sobbing. "Leave me! Go out--all of you. Leave me
alone!"

Eleanor shut the door and led the dazed Indian children from the outer
hall. In the Library, opposite the Mission Parlor, she found old
Calamity sitting on the floor with the shawl over her head. The
half-breed woman sat peering through the shawl as Eleanor lighted the
hanging lamp. No Indian will mention the name of the dead. She
fastened her eyes on Eleanor, snakily, sinister, never shifting her
glance.

"What is it, Calamity?"

"Is dat true? Senator man he keel heem--keel leetle boy?" she asked
slowly.

Eleanor thought a moment.

"Yes, it is entirely true," she said, never heeding the import of her
words to the superstitious mind of the Indian woman.

A little hiss of breath came from the crouching form. She rose, drew
the shawl round her head and at the door, turned.

"Dey take mine," she said, "and now dey keel heem, an' white man, he
yappy--yappy--yappy; not do--not do any t'ing! He send for Mount'
P'lice, mabee no do anyt'ing unless Indian man . . . he keel." The
little hiss of breath again and a cunning mad look in the eyes.

"Go 'way Calamity! Go home to our ranch house!"

By and by, came Wayland. She knew why he had come after dark, carrying
the slender body against his shoulder. A white handkerchief had been
thrown over the face; and she saw that he held the arms tightly to hide
the fact that both had been broken in the fall. The rains had matted
the curly hair and brought a strange rose glow to the cheeks. There
again--Eleanor had to shut the doors of memory; for they had carried
him in together. The wind was not tempered to the shorn lamb; and it
is the living, not the dead, who beat against the Portals of Death.

They kept watch together, she and Wayland, in the Library across from
the closed door of the Mission. Parlor, black-eyed Indian urchins
peeping furtively from the head of the stairs till bells rang lights
out. Then silence fell, stabbed by the creak of floor, the swing of
door, the click and rustle of the cotton wood leaves outside.

There was a slight patter of rain-drip from the eaves somewhere. A
gate swung to the wind; and, from across the hall, they could hear the
driven footsteps pacing up and down the parlor. Then, the
drip,--drip,--was broken by longer blanks, and stopped. The cotton
wood leaves ceased to rustle and flutter. Only the twang of the night
hawk's wing hummed through the stillness; and the distracted tread no
longer paced the Mission Parlor. When Eleanor came back from across
the hall, she shut the Library door softly.

"She is praying," she said.

Wayland had been extemporizing a morris chair into a lounge with his
Service coat for a pillow. He threw a navajo rug across. Then, he
faced her. The look of masterdom had both hardened and softened. She
did not know that the hunger-light of her own face hardened that
hardness; and she gazed through the darkened window to hide her tears.
He stood beside her with his arms folded. A convulsive shudder shook
her frame. Wayland tightened his folded arms. Sympathy is so easy.
The sense of her nearness, of her trust, of the warm living fire of her
love was pushing him not over the precipice but into the battle, out
beyond the firing line. What did one man matter in this big fight
anyway? They heard the sibilant hush of the River flood-tide; and the
warm June dark enveloped them as in a caress. They could see the sheet
lightning glimmer on the bank of cumulous clouds behind the Holy Cross.
The humming night-hawk, up in the indigo of mid-heaven, uttered a
lonely, far, fading call, as of life in flight; and a rustle of wind,
faint as the brushing of moth wings, passed whispering into silence.

"You don't really think death is the end of all, do you?" she asked.

Wayland could not answer. If she had looked, she would have seen his
face white and his eyes shining with a strange new light. He drew back
a little in the dark of the window casement, with his hand on the sill.
It touched hers and closed over it. Then, somewhere from the dark came
a night-sound heard only in June, the broken dream-trill of a bird in
its sleep. When she spoke, her voice was low, keyed as the dream-voice
from the dark.

"Where did the spray of flowers you gave me come from?"

"Sprig I'd stuck in my hat band."

"Was that all? Didn't you mean to tell me more?"

"It's a pearl everlasting blossom," answered Wayland.

She waited. He heard the slow ticking of his own watch.

"I was dreaming of your face," he blundered out, "and when I wakened,
the thing had blown down on--the hammock." It was a clumsy subterfuge;
and he knew that her thought meeting his half-way divined his dream.

The wind passed whispering into silence. He felt the quiver of the
pine needles outside, trembling to the touch of wind and night. The
sense of her nearness, of her trust, of the warm living fire of her
love swept over him unstemmed; and, when she turned and looked in his
eyes, he caught her in his arms and held her there with a fierce
tenderness, her face thrown back, the veins of her throat pulsing to
the touch of wind and night, her lips parted, her lashes hiding her
eyes.

"Tell me that you are mine," he whispered.

She did not answer for a moment. Then she lifted her eyes. He drank
their light as a thirsty man might drink waters of life. Neither
spoke. The rustling wind passed whispering. The June dark enveloped
them in the warm caress of the night. By the dim flare of the library
lamp he saw her lips trembling.

"Tell me," he commanded.

"Do I need to tell you?"

"Yes, yes! I must have a seal of memory for the dark future," and his
tongue poured forth such utterances as he had not dreamed men could use
but in prayer. "I must know from your own lips."

He felt the tremor, felt the two hands rise to frame his face, felt the
catch and take of breath, heard the broken notes of gold.

"Then, take it," she said.

He bent over her lips in an exquisite torture that could neither give
nor take enough till she struggled to free herself, when he crushed her
the closer, and kissed the closed eyes and the forehead and the hair
and the pulsing throat. Then he opened his arms.

She sank on the morris chair and hid her face in her hands. They
neither of them spoke nor heard very much but the pounding of their own
hearts. Wayland gazed out in the dark at the shiny flood-tides of the
river. She had not meant--she had meant always to be free; she had not
meant to mingle her life currents in the destiny of others.

The door opened suddenly. It was old Calamity, red-shawled and
stooping.

"Missa Vellam say not for vait no longer, Mademoiselle! She aw' right.
She say t'ank you now for to go home!"

Eleanor rose with a shuddering sigh

"Come then, Calamity," she said.

Wayland walked with her to the ranch house, the old half-breed woman
pattering behind. The gray dawn-light lay on the river mistily. At
the gate, she turned.

"Has Mr. Matthews come back yet, Calamity?"

Calamity gave a vigorous shake of her head.

"I am going up to the Rim Rocks at once to see what's become of him.
Go on in, Calamity; I want to speak to Miss MacDonald! Forgive me," he
pleaded. "I had no right. I have no right to anything till I have
cleaned up this damnable hell-work. I must not leave duty till I have
fought this thing out; and I must not drag you in; but I wanted--" he
paused; "I couldn't help it."

She trembled, but she took refuge in neither the subterfuge nor the
pretence of the Eastern woman.

"It was yours," she said.

Wayland's eyes flashed their gratitude. "It's so God-blessed
beautiful, Eleanor; it's so wonderfully beautiful I mustn't spoil it
with my man hands! I couldn't believe it true without the memory
you've given me; but you must keep me in line! Now that I have that
memory in my heart I'll drink it, and hike for the firing line! My
place isn't here; you must never let me break my resolution again."

"I never will," interrupted Eleanor.

"We've got to fight this thing to the last ditch! If the innocent may
be done to death by our law makers; if murder can be planned and
carried out unpunished; there's an end to our democracy! Last year it
was a little school teacher strangled down in the Desert; nobody
punished, because that would have interfered with a voting gang on
election day. This year, it's Fordie. _If these crimes had been
committed under a monarchy, the people would have tanned the hide of
the king into boot leather_! Last year it was the little school
teacher. This year it's Fordie. Tomorrow, it may be any man, woman or
child in the Valley. If they'd keep their crimes among their own kind,
there would be some excuse for this let-alone policy; but when freedom
to do what a man likes means freedom to push crime into your life and
mine, freedom to deprive others of freedom, it's time the Nation jumped
on somebody! We've got to fight this damnable thing to the last ditch,
Eleanor!"

"Good luck and God speed," she said without looking up; and she turned
without once looking back, and walked up the slab steps of the rustic
entrance to the ranch house.




CHAPTER IX

RIGHT INTO MIGHT

Don't wait for Mr. Matthews and me. We are setting out on the Long
Trail. It is the Long Trail this Nation will have to travel before
Democracy arrives. It is the Trail of the Man behind the Thing; and
we'll not quit till we get him. You remember what our old visitor said
about "splitting the air to get somewhere." We are going to quit
"sawing the air" and "split it to get somewhere." We are going to set
out after the Man; the little codger first, as a foot print on the Long
Trail to the lair of the Man Higher Up.

You cannot stab a lot of things to life as you did last night and the
night before, and then expect them to lie quiet and be the same. You
have sent me forth on the Long Trail, Eleanor; and I shall hunt the
better because you have stabbed me alive and will never let me go to
sleep again. I thank you; and yet, I can't thank you, mine _Alder
Liefest_--look up and see what that means in old Saxon--Yours in Life
and Death and Always and Out Beyond.

Dick.


I have ordered a wreath from Smelter City for Fordie. Find it hard to
stop writing and go from you; but the darned old Mountain doesn't look
the same; it's all draped out in such "dam-phool 'appiness" that I am
glad in the shadow of Death.

Dick. (2nd)


Don't forget every day dawn and sunset, I come to renew the Seal. Ever
study Algebra in college? Then look up what this means.

Dick. (nth)


And because she had graduated from girl to woman between sunset and
daydawn of that Death Watch, she kissed the last signature, right in
the midst of the German cook's dishes, set all higgeldy-piggeldy on the
oilcloth top instead of the linen cover, owing to the distraction of
the night's tragedy. It was his first love letter; and because it was
his first, he did not know it was a love letter. He had written it on
the pages of a field note book. On the reverse side, were figures of
triangulations and scaled timbers, which Eleanor fingered lovingly
because the dumb signs seemed to connect her life with his
before--before what? Ask those who know!

The note was lying at her breakfast place when she came out from a
sleepless night, a night that seemed to pass swinging between the gates
of Life and the gates of Death, with phantoms on the trail between, of
Love so terrible its glory blinded her, of Crime so dark its shadow
obscured her faith in God. For hours, she had lain quivering to the
consciousness of that moment when Life leaped up to meet and blend with
Life in Love. For hours, she had lain quivering to the consciousness
of Crime stalking satyr-faced amid the shadows of Life, Greed and
Murder and Lust, hiding beneath suave words, behind conventionality,
draped in all the broad phalacteries of law, ready to leap fanged at
the throat of Innocence in a Land of Let-Alone; and she emerged from
the conflict of these two forces no longer what would be called a
Christian, no longer a Quiescent, no longer a Let Alone. She emerged
knowing that Democracy must become a joke, and Christianity the
laughing stock of the ages, unless Right could be made over into Might.

Then, she found the Ranger's note at her late breakfast--it was a
shockingly late breakfast, it was after the noon hour--the note saying
that he had set out on the Long Trail that the Nation must travel, the
trail of the Man behind the Thing, the Man Higher Up. It was as it had
been from the first with him, the meeting half-way of their thoughts
from different beginnings; and she kissed the signature with a gesture
that played havoc with the breakfast dishes and sent Calamity
snivelling and muttering from the kitchen. The ignorant half-breed's
knowledge of life among the miners of the Black Hills and the shingle
men of the Bitter Boot saw-mills didn't admit explanations of love that
kissed signatures and impelled tears.


And yet while revolution convulsed two souls you could have gone from
end to end of the Valley that week or to every cabin on the Homestead
Claim of the Ridge and not heard a living soul speak one word of the
tragedy on the Rim Rocks. Were they moral cowards? I don't think so.
Wasn't it more of that spirit of Let Alone? If you had mentioned the
terrible episode to a casual settler, he would have given you a blank
look and remarked "that he hadn't heard."

The story set down here, I could not myself have learned if a chance
ramble over the foot hills of the Rim Rocks had not led one day to a
solitary little grave, surrounded by a picket fence marked by the
figure of a kneeling child carved in rough sand stone. As the guest of
the Mission School, I made the mistake of asking the mother, herself,
whose grave that was. Women, who are neither politicians nor politic,
have a plain way of uttering harsh facts. She did not speak about the
author of her boy's death in soft words, that little white haired
mother. She used a term oftener heard in the purlieus of criminal
courts. "To think," she exclaimed bitterly, "to think that Fordie,
descended from generations of Williams who have pioneered and fought
for and built up this country since ever the first Williams landed in
Boston in 1666, was done to death by this murderer, this truckster,
this political trickster, this outcast from the European gutters, this
huckster of lazaretto morals and bawd houses, who is overturning our
Nation with his oiled villainies and peddler ways! No, we have never
taken Government aid and we never shall! I like to know that my Indian
girls are safe." What more she added, I do not relate; for an angered
mother has a way of uttering terrible truths.

To-day, if you visit that grave on the crest of the saddle back, you
will find it flanked by two others, a man's on one side with the figure
of a trader carved in sandstone by the Indians; on the other, old
Calamity's with a plain granite slab; though I have heard strict people
say her body ought not to have been laid there because of the vagrant
character of her early life.


Indian boys from the school had shaped the coffin and carved the figure
for the stone. A girlish teacher read the Church Services for the
dead; and the children's voices rose a thin tremulous treble in the
funeral hymn around the grave. Wild flowers covered the casket, pearl
everlasting and the wind flower and the white Canada violet and the
painter's brush vari-colored as a flame; and a wreath had come up from
Smelter City.

Sights and sounds that have been a setting for sorrow, haunt the mind.
After that day, Eleanor could never hear the hammer of the woodpecker,
the lone cry of circling hawk, the whistling of the solitary mountain
marmot, without hearing also the thin treble of the Indian pupils
breaking and silencing on that funeral hymn till only the mother's
voice sang clarion to the end. She heard the low melting trill of the
blue bird and the wrangling rasp of the jay--true and counterfeit,
peace and discord--had God put right and wrong in the world for the
friction of the conflict between, to develop souls? Had one been set
over against the other, like light and shadow, to train the spiritual
eye to know?


Then, the Indian boys began to lower the casket. One young pall bearer
faltered and slipped his hold; it was the little white haired mother's
hand steadied the rope that lowered, and slowly lowered, out of sight
for ever. Then one of the girl teachers dropped in a great bunch of
mountain laurel. Eleanor succeeded in leading the mother away.

Were the amethyst portals still ajar to the infinite life; or did the
shadow of the Cross, of the time-old ever-recurring crucifixion, darken
the vista of a glad future? The Indian children filed in through the
gate of the Mission school. At the gate, the mother looked up the
Saddle back. She had no time for the pampered luxury of self conscious
grief. She had directed the making of the coffin and the carving of
the sandstone and had led the funeral hymn to the end; but now she
looked back. Ashes of roses across the sky, creeping phantom shadows,
and in her heart, the sombre presence of the after-desolation which
neither faith nor fortitude casts out. She would go to sleep dull with
the woe of it and dream depressed of its loneliness, to waken heavy
with the memory. Then, by and by, would come the peace that the dead
send, which is not forgetfulness. But now she looked back, looked back
with the wrench that was the tearing of flesh and spirit asunder.
Above the new-made grave, across those topaz sunset gates, stood the
figure of the native woman, shawl thrown from her head reaving the long
black hair; and from the hill crest came such a long low cry as might
have been a ghost echo of all the age-old world sorrows. Eleanor felt
the quick twitch on her arm. Without a word, without a tear, the boy's
mother had fainted.

"We ought to have looked out for that," explained one of the girl
teachers from the school. "We ought to have left Calamity home. She
has always done that since they took her child away."

"Had she a child?" asked Eleanor.

"Yes; and they took it away when she went insane."

Eleanor slept with the leaves of the field-book under her pillow that
night; but she slept the heavy dreamless sleep of baffled hope.




CHAPTER X

THE HANDY MAN GETS BUSY

If you think the Senator had had anything to do with the terrible
events of the Rim Rocks, you are jumping to conclusions and must surely
have failed to follow the activities of Mr. Bat Brydges the morning
after the tragedy.

The first newspaper office that the handy man visited was owned by the
Senator. That was easy. Bat went into the reporters' long room where
the typewriters usually clicked. This morning they were silent. The
men were out on their assignments. The news editor was taking a
message over the telephone. Bat sat down on the table and waited. The
news editor was thin-faced and nervous and alert and immaculately
groomed. Bat was round-faced and sleepy-eyed--tortoise-shell eyes--and
all that prevented his suit from looking positively slovenly was that
his own ample avoirdupois filled every wrinkle.

The news editor adjusted his glasses to his nose and answered, "Yes,
Yes," impatiently over the telephone.

"It's a parson," he explained with an irritable snap of his black eyes
towards Bat.

Bat smiled sleepily. "Thinks you're hungering and thirsting for news
of his flock, does he?"

"No, blank it," snapped the news editor.

"It's another kind of flock that's worrying us this morning."

Bat's smile faded to a sly haze in his sleepy eyes.

"What has the old boy got to say?"

"How do you know he is old?" snapped the news editor.

Bat didn't volunteer on that point.

"Ask him what his name is," suggested Brydges.

"What did you say the name was? Matthews--Matthews--is that it? Wait,
please!" The news-editor put his hand over the mouth piece of the
telephone.

"Know anything about him, Bat?"

"I should say I do! Choke it off! He's staying with Missionary
Williams at the Indian School, and you know about how much love is lost
between Williams and Moyese."

"But we can't possibly suppress this, Bat. It will be all over the
country."

"Better see whose ox is gored," advised Brydges.

"But we've got to get this, Brydges! The stage driver's told one of my
men, already! Every bar-room buffer in the country side will know it
by night."

"Then you had better get it straight," advised Bat.

The news-man looked in space through eyes narrowed to an arrow. Bat
watched sleepily. "If we choke this old chap's account off, can you
give one to us?"

"Got it in my pocket! I've just come in on the stage!"

"I thought you came down in a motor with the Senator? Didn't he take
the morning limited for Washington?"

"Well, the darn thing broke down so often it was bad as the stage.
Anyway, I've got the story for you--"

"Senator O. K. it?" The news-man hung the telephone receiver up, still
keeping his hand over the mouth piece.

"Lord, no!" Bat slid off the table, tore the sheets from his note book
and handed the story of the Rim Rocks across to the editor.

"What do you take the Senator for? He knows nothing about it; but it's
in his constituency, and I guess his own paper should see that the
account which goes in is straight."

The news-editor hoisted his foot to the seat of a chair and stood
racing his eyes through sheet after sheet of Brydges's copy. Bat
lighted a cigar, put his hands in his pockets and pivoted on his heels.
There was the squeak, squeak, squeak of a child's new boots coming up
the first flight of stairs; and a squeak, squeak, squeak up the second
flight of stairs; and a little girl, not twelve years old, resplendent
in such tawdry finery as might have stepped out of an East End London
pawn shop, presented herself framed in the doorway of the reporter's
room. She plainly belonged to the immigrant section of Smelter City.
The news-editor never took his eyes from Bat's copy. They were eyes
made for drilling holes into the motives behind facts. Bat emitted a
whistle that was a laugh.

"Hullo," he said. "I knew they were coming on younger every year; but
I didn't know we had gone into the kindergarten business yet. You
don't want a job? Now don't tell me you want a job?"

The little person lifted a pair of very sober eyes beneath the brim of
some faded plush headgear.

"Is thus th' rha-porther's room?"

"Sure! you bet!" Bat wheeled on both heels. The little person looked
at him very steadily and solemnly.

"A' wannt," she said in that mongrel dialect of German-American and
Cockney-English, "A wawnt an iteem."

"Sure," says Bat, "nothing easier."

"Wull thur be eny chaarge?"

"Not for ladies," says Bat, saluting, hand to hat, and grinning more
sleepily than ever.

"Then, A wull guve it t' y': wull y' write it, sor?"

"Sure!" Bat squared himself to one of the reporters' high desks.

"Mestriss Leez-y O'Fannigan," dictated the little publicity agent.

"Miss O'Funny Girl," with a look to his fat cheeks as of a bag blown
full of air.

"No Sor, O'Fan-ni-gan-"

"Perhaps," said Bat, "You'd like to know we're in the same boat, except
that you're seeking exactly what I'm trying to avoid, Miss O'Finnigan?"

"Wull dance t' night--" continued the little publicity seeker.

"Will she dance in her copper-toe boots?" asks Bat.

"Wull dance at the H---- i-o-f lodge meetin' at--"

"That'll do, get her out of this," ordered the news-man. "It grows
worse every day. Every damphool thinks the world is aching for an
interview with himself, from the mining fakirs to the Shanty Town
brats: it's seeped down to the kids. You go home, kid, and tell your
mother to spank you special extra--"

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