Book: In Exile and Other Stories

M >> Mary Hallock Foote >> In Exile and Other Stories




Next morning he was riding along at his usual pace when it struck him how
incredibly the ditch had fallen. The line of silt that marked the water's
normal depth now stood exposed and dry, full two feet above its running,
and the pulse of the current had weakened as though it were ebbing fast.

He put his horse to a run, and lightened ship as he went, casting off his
sack of oats, then his coat and such tools as he could spare; he might
have been traced to the scene of disaster by his impedimenta strewing the
ditch-bank.

The water had had hours the start of him; its work was sickening to behold.
A part of the bank had gone clean out, and the ditch was returning to the
river by way of Solomon Lark's alfalfa fields. The homestead itself was in
danger.

He cut sage-brush and tore up tules by the roots, and piled them as a
wing-dam against the outer bank, and heaped dirt like mad upon the mats;
and as he worked, alone, where forty men were needed, came Nancy, with
glowing face, flying down the ditch-bank, calling the word of exquisite
relief:--

"I've shut off the water. Was that right?"

Right! He had been wishing himself two men, nay, three: one at the bank,
and one at the gates, and one carrying word to Finlayson.

"Can I do anything else?"

"Yes; make Finlayson's camp quick as you can," Travis panted over a
shovelful of dirt he was heaving.

"Yes; what shall I tell him?"

"Tell him to send up everything he has got; every man and team and
scraper."

Nancy was gone, but in a few moments she was back again, wringing her
hands, and as white as a cherry-blossom.

"The water is all down round the house, and father is alone in bed crying
like a child."

"There's nothing to cry about now. You turned off the water; see, it has
almost stopped."

"Can I leave him with you?"

"Great Scott! I'll take care of him! But go, there's a blessed girl. You
will save the ditch."

Nancy went, covering the desert miles as a bird flies; she exulted in this
chance for reparation. But long after Finlayson's forces had arrived and
gone to work, she came lagging wearily homeward, all of a color, herself
and the pony, with the yellow road. She had refused a fresh horse at the
ditch-camp, and, sparing the whip, reached home not until after dark.

Her father's excitement in his hours of loneliness had waxed to a pitch
of childish frenzy. He wept, he cursed, he counted his losses, and when
his daughter said, to comfort him, "Why, father, surely they must pay for
this!" he threw himself about in his bed and gave way to lamentations in
which the secret of his wildness came out. He had done the thing himself;
and he dared not risk suspicion, and the investigation that would follow a
heavy claim for damages.

Nancy could not believe him. "Father, do be quiet; you didn't do any such
thing," she insisted. "How could you, when I know you haven't stirred out
of this bed since night before last? Hush, now; you are dreaming; you are
out of your head."

"I guess I know what I done. I ain't crazy, and I ain't a fool. I made this
hole first, before he caught me at the upper one. I made this one to keep
him busy on his way up, so's the upper one could get a good start. The
upper one wouldn't 'a' hurt us. It's jest like my cussed luck! I knew it
was a-comin', but I didn't think I'd get it like this. It's all his fault,
the great lazy loafer, sleepin' at the bottom of his beat, 'stead o' comin'
up as he'd ought to have done last evening. He wasted the whole night,--and
calls himself a watchman!"


"Well, I'm glad of it," Nancy cried excitedly. "I'm just _glad_ we are
washed out, and I hope this will end it!" and she burst into tears, and ran
out of the room.

She sat by herself, weeping and storming, in the dark little shed-room.

"Nancy!" she heard her father calling, "Nancy, child!... Where's that gal
taken herself off to?... Are you a-settin' up your back on account of that
ditch? If you are, you ain't no child of mine.... I'm dum sorry I let on
a word to her about it. How do I know but she's off with it now, to that
watchman feller. I'll be put in the papers--an old man informed on by his
darter, and he on his last sick bed!... Nancy, I say, where be you a-hidin'
yourself?"

Nancy returned to her forlorn charge, and after a while the old man fell
asleep. She put out the lamp, for she could see to move about the room by
the light of the sage-brush bonfires that flared along the ditch, lighting
the men and teams, all Finlayson's force, at work upon the broken banks.

The sight was wild and alluring; she went out to watch the strange army of
shadows shifting and intermingling against a wall of flame.

There was a distressful space to cross, of sand and slippery mud and
drowned vegetation, including the remains of her garden; the look of
everything was changed. Only the ditch-bank against the reddened sky
supplied the usual landmark. Its crest was black with shovelers, and up
and down in lurid light climbed the scraper-teams; climbed and dumped, and
dropped over the bank to climb again, like figures in a stage procession.
There was a bedlam roar and crackle of pitchy fires, rattle of harness,
clank of scraper-pans, shouts of men to the cattle, oaths and words of
command; and this would go forward unceasingly till the banks held water.
And what was the use of contending?

Nancy felt bitterly the insignificance of such small scattered folk as her
father, pitiful even in their spite. Their vengeance was like the malice of
field-mice or rabbits, which the farmers fenced out of their fields into
the desert where they belonged. What could such as they do either to help
or hinder this invincible march of capital into the country where they,
with untold hardships, had located the first claims? And some of them were
ready enough, for a little temporary relief, to part with their birthright
to these clever sons of Jacob.

"Out we go, to find some other wilderness for them to take away from us! We
are only mossbacks," said the daughter of Esau.

As she spoke, half aloud to herself, a man rushed past her down the bank,
flattened himself on his hands, laid his face to the water, and drank and
paused to pant, and drank again, while she could have counted a score. Then
he lifted his head, sighed, and stretched himself back with a groan of
complete exhaustion.

The firelight touched his face, and showed her Travis: haggard,
hollow-eyed, soaked with ditch-water, and matted with mud, looking as if he
had been dragged bodily through the ditch-bank, like thread through a piece
of cloth.

Nancy did not try to avoid him.

"Oh, is it you?" he marveled, softly smiling up at her. "What a splendid
ride you made! Did nobody thank you? Finlayson said he couldn't find you
when he was leaving camp."

Nancy answered not a word; she was trembling so that she feared to betray
herself by speaking.

"I was coming to say good-by, when I had washed my face," he continued. "I
got my time to-night."

"Your time?"

"My time-check. They are going to put another man in my place. So you
needn't hate me any longer on account of the ditch; you can transfer all
that to the next fellow."

"Isn't that just like them? They never can do anything fair!"

"Like who? Do you suppose I'm going to kick about it? The only wonder is
they kept me on so long."

Every word of Travis's was a knife in Nancy's conscience, to say nothing
of her pride. She hugged her arms in her shawl, and rocked herself to and
fro. Travis crawled up the bank a little way further, and stretched himself
humbly beside her. The dark shadows under his aching eyes started a pang of
pity in the girl's heart, sore beset as she was with troubles of her own.

"I'm glad it's duskish," he remarked, "so you can't see the sweet state I'm
in. I'm all over top-soil. You might rent me to a Chinaman for twenty-five
dollars an acre; and I don't need any irrigating either."

An irresponsible laugh from Nancy was followed by a sob. Then she gathered
herself to speak.

"See here, do you want to stay on this ditch?"

"Of course I do. I wanted to stay till I had straightened out my own
record, and shown what the ditch can do. But no management under heaven
could stand such work as this."

"Then stay, if you want to. You have only to say the word. You said you'd
inform if there was a next time, and there is. Father did it. He made this
break, too; he made them both the same night, and didn't dare to tell of
this one. Now, go and clear yourself and get back your beat."

"Are you sure of this you are telling me?"

"Well, I guess so. It isn't the sort of thing I'd be likely to make up. And
I say you can tell if you want to. I make you a present of the information.
If father isn't willing to take the consequences, I am; and they half
belong to me. I won't have anybody sheltering us, or losing by us. We have
got no quarrel with you."

"That is brave of you. I wish it was something more than brave," sighed
Travis. "But I want it all myself. I can't spare this information to the
company. You didn't do it for them, did you?"

"When I go telling on my father to save a ditch, I guess it will be after
now," said Nancy. "If that rich company, with all its men and watchmen and
teams and money, can't protect itself from one poor old man"--

"Never mind the company," said Travis. "What's mine is mine. This word you
gave to me, it doesn't belong to my employers. You have saved me to myself;
now I shall not go kicking myself for sleeping that night on my beat. It's
not so bad--oh, not half so bad--for me!"

"Then go tell them, and get the credit for it. Don't you mean to?"

She could not see him smile. "When I tell, you will hear of it."

"But you talked about your record."

"I shall have to go to work and make a new record. Ah, if you would be as
kind as you are brave! Was it all just for pride you told me this? Don't
you care, not the least bit, about my part--that I am down and out of
everything?"

"It's your own fault, then. I have told you how you can clear yourself and
stay."

"And lose my chance with you! I was thinking of coming back, some day, to
tell you--what you must know already. Nancy, you do know!"

"You forget," shivered Nancy; "I am the daughter of the man you called"--

"Is that fair--to bring that up now?"

"You mustn't deceive yourself. There are some things that can't be
forgotten."

"How did _I_ know what I was saying? A man isn't always responsible."

"I heard you," said Nancy. "There are things we say when we are raging mad
at a person, and there are things we say when we think them the dirt under
our feet. You kept him down with your dirt-shovel, and you called him--what
I can't ever forget."

"And is this the only hitch between us?"

"I should think it was enough. Who despises my father despises me."

"But I do not despise him," Travis did not scruple to assert. "The quarrel
was not mine; and I'm not a ditch-man any longer. I will apologize to your
father."

"Oh, I know it costs you nothing to apologize. You don't mind father--an
old man like him! You'd take him in, and give him his meals, and pat him on
the head as you would the house-dog that bites because he's old and cross.
Well, I'll let you know I don't want you to forgive him, and apologize, and
all that stuff. I want you to get even with him."

"Be satisfied," said Travis. "The only count I have against your father is
through his daughter. There is no way for me to get even with you. And when
you have spoiled a man's life just for one angry word"--

"Not angry," she interrupted. "I could have forgiven you that."

"For one word, then. And you call it square when you have given me a piece
of information to use for myself, against you! I will go back now and go to
work. They can't say I haven't earned my wages on this beat."

He looked down at her, longing to gather her, with all her thorny
sweetness, to his breast; but her attitude forbade him.

"Can't we shake hands?" he said. They shook hands in silence, and he went
back and finished the night in the ranks of the shovelers,--to work well,
to love well, and to get his discharge at last. Yet Travis was not sorry
that he had taken those five miles below Glenn's Ferry: he had found
something to work for.

The company's officials marveled, as the weeks went by, that nothing was
heard of Solomon Lark. He had ever been the sturdiest beggar for damages on
the ditch. If he lacked an occasion he could invent one; he was known to
be a fanatic on the subject of the small farmers' wrongs: yet now, with a
veritable claim to sue for, the old protestant was dumb. Had Solomon turned
the other cheek? There were jokes about it in the office; they looked to
have some fun with Solomon yet.

In the early autumn the joking ceased. There was a final reason for the
old man's silence,--Solomon was dead. His ranch was rented to a Chinese
vegetable-gardener who bought water from the ditch.

The company, through its officials, was disposed to recognize this unspoken
claim that had perished on the lips of the dead. They made an estimate, and
offered Nancy Lark a fair sum in consideration of her father's losses by
the ditch.

It was unusual for a company to volunteer a settlement of this kind; it
was still more unusual for the indemnity to be refused. Nancy declined, by
letter, first; then the manager asked her to call at the office. She did
not come. He took pains to hunt her up at the house of her friends in town.
He might have delegated the call, but he chose to make it in person, and
was struck by an added dignity, a finer beauty in the saddened face of the
girl whom he remembered as a bit of a rustic coquette.

He went over the business with her. She was perfectly intelligent in the
matter; there had been no misunderstanding. Why then would she not take
what belonged to her? Companies were not in the habit of paying claims that
were claims of sentiment.

"I have made no claim," said Nancy.

"But you have one. You inherited one. We do not propose to rob"--

She put out her hand with a gesture of appeal.

"My father had no claim. He never made one, nor meant to make one. I am
the best judge of what belongs to me. I don't want this money, and I will
never take one cent of it. But there is a claim you can settle, if you are
hunting up claims. It won't cost you anything," she faltered, as if some
unguarded impulse had hurried her into a subject that she hardly knew how
to go on with. She moved her chair back a little from the light.

"There was one of your watchmen, on the Glenn's Ferry beat, who lost his
place on account of those breaks coming one after another"--

"Yes," said the manager; "there were several that did. Which man do you
refer to?"

The name, she thought, was Travis. Then, blushing, she spoke out
courageously:--

"It was Mr. Travis. He was discharged just after the big break. You thought
it was his carelessness, but it was not. I am the only one that can say
so, and I know it. You lost the best watchman you ever had on the ditch
when you took his name off your pay-roll. He worked for more than just his
money's worth, and it hurt him to lose that place."

"Are you aware that he made the worst record of any man on the line?"

"I don't care what his record was; he kept a good watch. It's no concern
of mine to say so," she said. Trembling and red and white, the tears
shining in her honest eyes, she persisted: "He had his reasons for never
explaining, and they were nothing to be ashamed of. I think you might
believe me!"

"I do," said the manager, willing to spare her. "I will attend to the case
of Mr. Travis when I see him. I do not think he has left the country. In
fact, he was inquiring about you only the other day, in the office, and he
seemed very much concerned to hear of your--of the loss you have suffered.
Shall I say that you spoke a good word for him?"

"You need not do that," she answered with spirit. "He knows whether he kept
watch. But you may say that I ask, as a favor, that he will answer all your
questions; and you need not be afraid to question him."

Travis was given back his beat, but no more explicit exoneration would he
accept. The reason of his reinstatement was not made public, and naturally
there was gossip about it among other discharged watchmen who had not been
invited to try again.

Two of these cynic philosophers, popularly known as sore-heads,
foregathered one morning at Glenn's Ferry and began to discuss the
management and the ditch.

"Travis don't seem to have so much trouble with the water this year as he
had last," the first ex-watchman remarked. "Used to get away with him on an
average once a week, so I hear."

"He's married his girl," the other explained sarcastically. "He's got more
time to look after the ditch."

There is no sand, now, in Travis's bread; the prettiest girl on the ditch
makes it for him, and walks beside him when the lights are fair and the
shadows long on the ditch-bank. And it is a pleasure to record that both
Nancy and the ditch are behaving as dutifully as girls and water can be
expected to do, when taken from their self-found paths and committed to the
sober bounds of responsibility.

Flowers bloom upon its banks, heaven is reflected in its waters, fair and
broad are the fertile pastures that lie beyond; but the best-trained ditch
can never be a river, nor the gentlest wife a girl again.

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