Claim Number One Part 11

"No," she corrected; "I didn't mean that. But perhaps at something else you might get on faster here--business of some kind, I mean."

"If I had the chance!" he exclaimed wearily, flinging his hat to the ground as he sat beside her on a boulder at the river's edge. "I've never had a square and open chance at anything yet."

"I don't know, of course," said she. "But the trouble with most of us, it seems to me, is that we haven't the quickness or the courage to take hold of the chance when it comes. All of us let so many good ones get away."

Dusk had deepened. The star-glow was upon the river, placid there in its serene approach to the rough pa.s.sage beyond. He sat there, the wind lifting the hair upon his forehead, pondering what she had said.

Was it possible that a man could walk blindly by his chances for thirty-five years, only to be grasping, empty-palmed, after them when they had whisked away? For what else did his complainings signify? He had lacked the courage or the quickness, or some essential, as she had said, to lay hold of them before they fled away beyond his reach forever.

There was a chance beside him going to waste tonight--a golden, great chance. Not for lack of courage would he let it pa.s.s, he reflected; but let it pa.s.s he must. He wanted to tell her that he would be a different man if he could remain near her all the rest of his years; he longed to say that he desired dearly to help her smooth the rough land and plant the trees and draw the water in that place which she dreamed of and called home.

But there was nothing in his past to justify her confidence in his future. Women worth having did not marry forlorn hopes in the expectation of making a profit out of them by and by. He had no hearth to offer her; he had no thatch; he had not a rood of land to lead a mountain stream across and set with the emerald and royal purple of alfalfa; not a foot of greensward beside the river, where a yeaning ewe might lie and ease the burden of her pains. He had nothing to offer, nothing to give. If he asked, it must be to receive all and return nothing, except whatever of constancy time might prove out of his heart.

If he had even a plan to lay down before her and ask her to share, it would be something, he thought; or a brave resolve, like her own. But there was emptiness all around him; his feet could not find a square yard of solid earth to shape his future upon. It was not that he believed that she cared for money or the material rewards of success, for she had spoken bitterly of that. The ghosts of money's victims were behind her; she had said as much the first time they had talked of their hopes in that new land.

There must be something in that place for him, as she had said; there must be an unimproved opportunity which Fate had fashioned for his hand.

Hope lifted its resilient head again. Before the morning he must have a plan, and when he had the plan he would speak.

"We'll have to be breaking up camp in a day or two more," Agnes said, disturbing the long silence which had settled between them.

"I suppose so," he responded; "but I don't know what the plans of the others are."

"Mr. Strong is going to Meander in the morning," she told him; "and Horace Bentley is going with him, poor fellow, to look around, he says.

William Bentley told me this evening that he would leave for home in a day or two, and Mrs. Reed and her charges are waiting to hear from a friend of June's who was in school with her--I think she is the Governor's daughter, or maybe he's an ex-governor--about a long-standing invitation to visit her in her summer home, which is near here, as they compute distances in Wyoming."

"And Schaefer is leaving in the morning," reflected the doctor. "That leaves but you and me unaccounted for. Are you going on to Meander soon?"

"Yes; I want to be there to file when my time comes."

"I've thought of going over there to feel things out, too," Dr. Slavens went on. "This place will shrink in a few days like a piece of wet leather in the sun. They'll have nothing left of it but the stores, and no business to sustain them until the country around here is settled.

That may be a long time yet. Still, there may be something around here for me. I'm going to look into the possibilities tomorrow. And we'll have at least another talk before we part?"

"Many more, I hope," she said.

Her answer presented an alluring lead for him to say more, but before he could speak, even if minded to do it, she went on:

"This has been a pleasant experience, this camping in the clean, unused country, and it would be a sort of Persian poet existence if we could go on with it always; but of course we can't."

"It isn't all summer and fair skies here," he reminded her, "any more than it is in--well, Persia. Twenty below in winter sometimes, Smith said. Do you remember?"

"Yes," she sighed. "But it seems impossible."

"You wouldn't believe this little river could turn into a wild and savage torrent, either, a few hundred yards along, if you had nothing to judge it by but this quiet stretch," he returned. "But listen to it down there, crashing against the rocks!"

"There's no news of that rash man who went into the canon for the newspaper?" Agnes asked.

"He must have lodged in there somewhere; they haven't picked him up on the other side," he said, a thoughtful abstraction over him.

"I hope you've given up the thought of trying to explore it?"

"I haven't thought much about it lately," he replied; "but I'm of the same opinion. I believe the difficulties of the canon are greatly exaggerated. In fact, as I told you before, the reward posted by that newspaper looks to me like easy money."

"It wouldn't pay you if the reward were ten times as large," she declared with a little argumentative heat.

"Perhaps not," said he, as if he had but a pa.s.sing and shallow interest in the subject.

Sitting there bareheaded to the wind, which was dropping down coldly from the far mountains, he seemed to be in a brooding humor.

"The moon is late tonight," he noted. "Shall we wait till it rises?"

"Yes," she answered, feeling the great gentleness that there was about him when he was in a serious way.

Why he had not been successful in the profession for which nature plainly had designed him she could not understand; for he was a man to inspire confidence when he was at his best, and unvexed by the memory of the bitter waters which had pa.s.sed his lips. She felt that there would be immeasurable solace in his hand for one who suffered; she knew that he would put down all that he had in life for a friend.

Leaning her chin upon her palm, she looked at him in the last light of the west, which came down to them dimly, as if falling through dun water, from some high-floating clouds. As if following in her thought something that had gone before, she said:

"No; perhaps you should not stay in this big, empty country when there are crowded places in the world that are full of pain, and little children in them dying for the want of such men as you."

He started and turned toward her, putting out his hand as if to place it upon her head.

"How did you know that it's the children that give me the strongest call back to the struggle?" he asked.

"It's in your eyes," said she. And beneath her breath she added: "In your heart."

"About all the success that I ever won I sacrificed for a child," he said, with reminiscent sadness.

"Will you tell me about it?"

"It was a charity case at that," he explained, "a little girl who had been burned in a fire which took all the rest of the family. She needed twenty-two square inches of skin on her breast. One gave all that he could very well part with----"

"That was yourself," she nodded, drawing a little nearer to him quite unconsciously.

"But that was not half enough," he continued as if unaware of the interruption. "I had to get it into the papers and ask for volunteers, for you know that an average of only one in three pieces of cuticle adheres when set into a wound, especially a burn. The papers made a good deal of it, and I couldn't keep my name out, of course. Well, enough school-children came forward to patch up three or four girls, and together we saved her.

"No matter. The medical a.s.sociation of that city jumped me very promptly.

The old chaps said that I had handled the case unprofessionally and had used it merely for an advertis.e.m.e.nt. They charged unprofessional conduct against me; they tried me in their high court and found me guilty. They dug the ground from under my feet and branded me as a quack. They broke me, they tried to have my license to practice revoked.

But they failed in that. That was three years ago. I hung on, but I starved. So when I speak in what may seem a bitter way of the narrow traditions of my profession, you know my reason is fairly well grounded."

"But you saved the little girl!"

It was too dark for him to see her eyes. The tears that lay in them could not drop their balm upon his heart.

"She's as good as new," said he cheerfully, fingering the inner pocket of his coat. "She writes to me right along. Here's a picture-card that followed me here, mailed from the home that the man who gave his tough old hide to mend her found for her when she was well. She lives in Oklahoma now, and her sweet fort.i.tude under her misfortune has been a remembrance to sustain me over many a hungry day."

"But you saved the little girl!" Agnes repeated with unaccountable insistence, as if trying to beat down the injustice of his heavy penance with that argument.

And then he saw her bow her head upon her folded arms like a little child, and weep in great sobs which came rackingly as if torn from the core of her heart.

Dr. Slavens picked up his hat, put it on, got to his feet, and took a stride away from her as if he could not bear the sight of her poignant sympathy. Then he turned, came back, and stooped above her, laying his hand upon her hair.