Claim Number One Part 23

"I was unable to come sooner; I am sorry."

For love is content with little while it is young.

Agnes thought of her prettiest dress, tucked away in the little steamer-trunk, and brought it out. It was not extremely gay, but it was light in color and fabric, and gave a softness to the lines of the body, and a freshness of youth. And one needs to look carefully to that when one is seven-and-twenty, she reflected.

Her fingers fluttered over her hair; she swayed and turned before the gla.s.s, bringing the lines of her neck into critical inspection. There was the turn of youth there yet, it comforted her to see, and some degree of comeliness. He would come soon, and she must be at her best, to show him that she believed in him, and give him to understand that she was celebrating his triumph over the contrary forces which he had whipped like a man.

Faith, thought she, as she sat by the window and looked down upon the crowd which still hung about the land-office, was a sustaining food.

Without it the business of all the world would cease. She had found need to draw heavily upon it in her years, which she pa.s.sed in fleeting review as she looked pensively upon the crowd, which seemed floundering aimlessly in the sun.

All at once the crowd seemed to resolve into one personality, or to become but the incidental background for one man; a tall man with a slight stoop, whose heavy eyebrows met above his nose like two black caterpillars which had clinched in a combat to contest the pa.s.sage. Here and there he moved as if seeking somebody, familiarly greeted, familiarly returning the salutations.

That morning she had seen him at the head of the line of men waiting to file on land, close beside Peterson, who believed himself to be Number One. She had wondered then what his interest might be, and it was largely due to a desire to avoid being seen by him that she had hurried away. Now he turned as if her thoughts had burned upon his back like a sungla.s.s, looked directly toward her window, lifted his hat, and smiled.

As if his quest had come to an end at the sight of her, he pushed across the street and came toward the hotel. She left the window, closing it hurriedly, a shadow of fear in her face, her hand pressed to her bosom, as if that meeting of eyes had broken the lethargy of some old pain. She waited, standing in the center of the room, as if for a summons which she dreaded to hear.

The hotel at Meander had not at that day come to such modern contrivances as telephones and baths. If a patron wanted to talk out on the one wire that connected Meander with the world and the railroad, he had to go to the stage-office; if he wanted a bath he must make a trip to the steam laundry, where they maintained tubs for that purpose. But these slight inconveniences were not all on one side of the house. For if a message came to the office for a guest in his room, there was nothing for the clerk to do but trot up with it.

And so it came that when Agnes opened her door to the summons, her bearing had no touch of fear or timidity. In the hall she faced the panting clerk, who had leaped up the stairs and was in a hurry to leap down again.

"Mr. Jerry Boyle asks if he may have the pleasure of seeing you in the parlor, Miss Horton," said the clerk.

"Tell Mr. Boyle," she answered with what steadiness she could command, "that I have an appointment in a few minutes. I'm afraid that I shall not be able to see him before--before--tomorrow afternoon."

That was enough for the clerk, no matter how near or how far it came to satisfying the desires of Jerry Boyle. He gave her a stubby bow and heeled it off downstairs again, kicking up quite a dust in his rapid flight over the carpet in the hall.

As if numbed or dreaming, Agnes walked slowly about her room, touching here or there a familiar article of apparel, and seeking thus to recall herself to a state of conscious reasoning. The events of the morning--the scene before the land-office, her start back to the hotel, the pa.s.sing of that worn, wounded, and jaded man--seemed to have drawn far into the perspective of the past.

In a little while William Bentley came up for his bag--for in that hotel every man was his own porter--and called her to the door. He was off with Horace on the eleven o'clock stage for Comanche. Next morning he would take a train for the East. Dr. Slavens sent word that he would come to the hotel as soon as he could make himself presentable with a new outfit.

"Horace will stay at Comanche a while to look around," said William, giving her his card with his home address. "If there's anything that I can do for you any time, don't wait to write if you can reach a telegraph-wire."

If there was pain in his eyes she did not see it, or the yearning of hope in his voice, she did not hear. She only realized that the man who filled her life was coming soon, and that she must light again the fires of faith in her eyes to greet him.

CHAPTER XII

THE OTHER MAN

Dr. Slavens stood at the door of the parlor to meet her as she came toward him, a little tremor of weakness in her limbs, a subconscious confession of mastery which the active feminine mind might have denied with blushing show of indignation.

The clothiers of Meander had fitted Slavens out with a very good serge suit. Tan oxfords replaced his old battered shoes. A physician had dressed the cut on his forehead, where adhesive plaster, neatly holding gauze over the cut, took away the aspect of grimness and gravity which the b.l.o.o.d.y bandage of the morning had imparted. For all his hard fight, he was quite a freshened-up man; but there was a questioning hesitation in his manner as he offered his hand.

Her greeting removed whatever doubt that William Bentley's a.s.surance of her fidelity might have left. She took his hand between both her own and held it so a little while, looking into his eyes without the reservation of suspicion or distrust.

"We believed you'd come in time all along," said she.

"You believed it," he replied softly, not the faintest light of a smile on his serious face; "and I cannot weigh my grat.i.tude in words. There is an explanation to be made, and I have saved it for you. I'm a beast to think of food just now, perhaps, but I haven't eaten anything since yesterday evening."

"You can tell me afterward, if you wish," she said.

Through the meal they talked of the others, of who had come to Meander, who had gone home; of June and her mother and the miller's wife. Nothing was said of the cause of his absence nor of his spectacular arrival just in the second remaining to him to save his chance.

"I noticed a road running up toward the mountain," said he when they had finished. "Shall we walk up that way?"

Out past the little cultivated gardens, where stunted corn was growing in the futile hope that it might come to ear, they followed the road which led into the mountain gorge. A rod-wide stream came plunging down beside the way, bursting its current upon a thousand stones here and there, falling into green pools in which the trout that breasted its roaring torrent might find a place to pant.

Here, in an acre of valley, some remnant of glacier had melted after its slow-plowing progress of ten million years. The smooth, round stones which it had dropped when it vanished in the sun lay there as thickly strewn as seeds from a gigantic poppy-boll. And then, as the gorge-wedge narrowed, there were great, polished boulders, like up-peeping skulls, and riven ledges against which Indian hunters had made their fires in the old days. And on the tipping land of the mountainside, and the little strips where soil lodged between the rocks, the quaking-asp grew thick and tall.

There in a little nook among the trees, where trampling tourists had eaten their luncheon upon a flat stone and left the bags and pickle-bottles behind them, they sat down. At that alt.i.tude the sunshine of an afternoon in late August was welcome. A man whipping the stream for trout caught his tackle in some low branches not ten feet from where they sat, and swore as he disentangled it. He pa.s.sed on without seeing them.

"That goes to ill.u.s.trate how near a man may be to something, and not know it," said the doctor, a smile quickening his grave face for a moment. "This time yesterday I was kicking over the rubbish where a gambling-tent had stood in Comanche, in the hope of finding a dime."

He stopped, looked away down the soft-tinted gorge as if wrapped in reminiscent thought. She caught her breath quickly, turning to him with a little start and gazing at his set face, upon which a new, strange somberness had fallen in those unaccounted days.

"Did you find it?" she asked.

"No, I didn't," he answered, coming out of his dream. "At that hour I knew nothing about having drawn the first number, and I didn't know that I was the lucky man until past midnight. I had just a running jump at the chance then, and I took it."

"And you won!" she cried, admiration in her eyes.

"I hope so," said he, gazing earnestly into her face.

Her eyes would not stand; they retreated, and a rush of blood spread over her cheeks like the reserve of an army covering its withdrawal from the field.

"I feel like I had just begun to live," he declared.

"I didn't see you arrive this morning," she told him, "for I turned and went away from the land-office when they opened the window. I couldn't stand it to see that man Peterson take what belonged to you."

He looked at her curiously.

"But you don't ask me where I was those two days," said he.

"You'll tell me--if you want me to know," she smiled.

"When I returned to the Hotel Metropole, even more ragged and discreditable-appearing than I was when you saw me this morning," he resumed, "the proprietor's wife asked me where I'd been. I told her I had been on a trip to h.e.l.l, and the farther that experience is behind me the stronger my conviction that I defined it right.

"When I left you that night after we came back from the river, I went out to look for young Walker, all blazing up, in my old-time way of grabbing at things like a bullfrog at a piece of flannel, over what you had said about a man not always having the sense and the courage to take hold of his chances when they presented.

"Walker had talked to me about going in with him on his sheep-ranch, under the impression, I suppose, that I had money to invest. Well, I hadn't any, as you know, but I got the notion that Walker might set me up with a flock of sheep, like they do in this country, to take care of on shares. I had recovered entirely from my disappointment in failing to draw a claim, as I thought, knowing nothing about the mistake in telephoning the names over.

"I used to be quick to get over things that were based on hope that way," he smiled, turning to her for a second and scarcely noting how she leaned forward to listen. "Just then I was all sheep. I had it planned out ten years ahead in that twenty minutes. When a man never has had anything to speculate in but dreams he's terribly extravagant of them, you know. I was recklessly so.

"Well, I was going along with my head in the clouds, and I made a short cut to go in the back way of the biggest gambling-tent, where I thought Walker might be watching the games. Right there the machinery of my recollection jumps a s.p.a.ce. Something hit me, and a volcano burst before my eyes."