Langford of the Three Bars Part 7

To her surprise, Gordon, though he laughed softly for a moment, answered rather gravely.

"If my somewhat n.i.g.g.ardly fate should grant me that good fortune, that I may do something for you, I ask that you be not afraid to trust to my help. It would not be half-hearted-I a.s.sure you."

She looked up at him gratefully. His shoulders, slightly stooped, betokening the grind at college and the burden-bearing in later years, instead of suggesting any inherent weakness in the man, rather inspired her with an intuitive faith in their quiet, unswerving, utter trustworthiness.

"Thank you," she said, simply. "I am so glad they did not hurt you much that day in the court-room. We worried-Mary and I."

"Thank you. There was not the least danger. They were merely venting their spite on me. They would not have dared more."

There is always a crowd at the Velpen station for outgoing or incoming trains. This meeting of trains is one of the dissipations of its people-and an eminently respectable dissipation. It was early-the eastbound leaves at something past eight-yet there were many people on the platform who did not seem to be going anywhere. They were after such stray worms as always fell to the lot of the proverbial early bird. The particular worm in question that morning was the new girl court reporter, homeward bound. Many were making the excuse of mailing belated letters. Mary was standing guard over the suit-case and umbrella near the last car. She seemed strangely alone and aloof standing there, the gravity of the silent prairie a palpable atmosphere about her.

"There's my brakeman," said Louise, when she and Gordon had found a seat near the rear. Mary had gone and a brakeman had swung onto the last car as it glided past the platform, and came down the aisle with a grin of recognition for his "little white lamb."

"How nice it all seems, just as if I had been gone months instead of days and was coming home again. It would be funny if I should be homesick for the range when I get to Wind City, wouldn't it?"

"Let us pray a.s.siduously that it may be so," answered Gordon, with one of his rare smiles. He busied himself a moment in stowing away her belongings to the best advantage. "It gets in one's blood,-how or when, one never knows."

They rode in silence for a while.

"Tell me about your big fight," said Louise, presently. The road-bed was fairly good, and they were spinning along on a down grade. He must needs bend closer to hear her.

She was good to look at, fair and sweet, and it had been weary years since women had come close to Gordon's life. In the old college days, before this hard, disappointing, unequal fight against the dominant forces of greed, against tolerance of might overcoming right, had begun to sap his vitality, he had gone too deeply into his studies to have much time left for the gayeties and gallantries of the social side in university life. He had not been popular with women. They did not know him. Yet, though dubbed a "dig" by his fellow-collegians, the men liked him. They liked him for his trustworthiness, admired him for his rugged honesty, desired his friendship for the inspiration of his high ideals.

The memory of these friendships with men had been an ever-present source of strength and comfort to him in these later years of his busy life.

Yet of late he had felt himself growing calloused and tired. The enthusiasm of his younger manhood was falling from him somewhat, and he had been but six years out of the university. But it was all so hopeless, so bitterly futile, this moral fight of one man to stay the mind-bewildering and heart-sickening ceaseless round of wheels of open crime and official chicanery. Was the river bridged? And what of the straw? His name was a joke in the cattle country, a joke to horse thief, a joke to sheriff. Its synonym was impotency among the law-abiders who were yet political cowards. What was the use? What could a man do-one man, when a fair jury was a dream, when ballots were so folded that the clerk, drawing, might know which to select in order to obtain a jury that would stand pat with the cattle rustlers? Much brain and brawn had been thrown away in the unequal struggle. Let it pa.s.s. Was there any further use?

Then a woman came to him in his dark hour. His was a stubborn and fighting blood, a blood that would never cry "enough" till it ceased to flow. Yet what a comforting thing it was that this woman, Louise, should be beside him, this woman who knew and who understood. For when she lifted those tender gray eyes and asked him of his big fight, he knew she understood. There was no need of explanation, of apology, for all the failure of all these years. A warm grat.i.tude swept across his heart.

And she was so neat and sweet and fair, unspoiled by constant contact with, and intimate knowledge of, the life of the under world; rather was she touched to a wonderful sympathy of understanding. It was good to know such a woman; it would be better to be a friend of such a woman; it would be best of all to love such a woman-if one dared.

"What shall I talk about, Miss Dale? It is all very prosaic and uninteresting, I'm afraid; shockingly primitive, glaringly new."

"I breakfasted with a stanch friend of yours this morning," answered Louise, somewhat irrelevantly. She had a feeling-a woman's feeling-that this earnest, hard-working, reserved man would never blurt out things about himself with the bland self-centredness of most men. She must use all her woman's wit to draw him out. She did not know yet that he was starved for sympathy-for understanding. She could not know yet that two affinities had drifted through s.p.a.ce-near together. A feathery zephyr, blowing where it listed, might widen the s.p.a.ce between to an infinity of distance so that they might never know how nearly they had once met; or it might, as its whim dictated, blow them together so that for weal or for woe they would know each the other.

"Mrs. Higgins, at the Bon Ami," she continued, smiling. "I was so hungry when we got to Velpen, though I had eaten a tremendous breakfast at the Lazy S. But five o'clock is an unholy hour at which to eat one's breakfast, isn't it, and I just couldn't help getting hungry all over again. So I persuaded Mary to stop for another cup of coffee. It is ridiculous the way I eat in your country."

"It is a good country," he said, soberly.

"It must be-if you can say so."

"Because I have failed, shall I cry out that law cannot be enforced in Kemah County? Sometimes-may it be soon-there will come a man big enough to make the law triumphant. He will not be I."

He was still smarting from his many set-backs. He had worked hard and had accomplished nothing. At the last term of court, though many cases were tried, he had not secured one conviction.

"We shall see," said Louise, softly. Her look, straight into his eyes, was a glint of sunlight in dark places. Then she laughed.

"Mrs. Higgins said to me: 'Jimmie Mac hain't got the sense he was born with. His little, dried-up brain 'd rattle 'round in a mustard seed and he's gettin' shet o' that little so fast it makes my head swim.' She was telling about times when he hadn't acted just fair to you. I am glad-from all I hear-that this was taken out of his hands."

"I can count my friends, the real ones, on one hand, I'm afraid," said Gordon, with a good-humored smile; "and Mrs. Higgins surely is the thumb."

"I am glad you smiled," said Louise. "That would have sounded so bitter if you had not."

"I couldn't help smiling. You-you have such a way, Miss Dale."

It was blunt but it rang true.

"It is true, though, about my friends. If I could convict-Jesse Black, for instance,-a million friends would call me blessed. But I can't do it alone. They will not do it; they will not help me do it; they despise me because I can't do it, and swear at me because I try to do it-and there you have the whole situation in a nutsh.e.l.l, Miss Dale."

The sun struck across her face. He reached over and lowered the blind.

"Thank you. But it is "vantage in' now, is it not? You will get justice before Uncle Hammond."

Unconsciously his shoulders straightened.

"Yes, Miss Dale, it is "vantage in.' One of two things will come to pa.s.s. I shall send Jesse Black over or-" he paused. His eyes, unseeing, were fixed on the gliding landscape as it appeared in rectangular spots through the window in front of them.

"Yes. Or-" prompted Louise, softly.

"Never mind. It is of no consequence," he said, abruptly. "No fear of Judge Dale. Juries are my Waterloo."

"Is it, then, such a nest of cowards?" cried Louise, intense scorn in her clear voice.

"Yes," deliberately. "Men are afraid of retaliation-those who are not actually blood-guilty, as you might say. And who can say who is and who is not? But he will be sent over this time. Paul Langford is on his trail. Give me two men like Langford and that anachronism-an honest man west of the river-Williston, and you can have the rest, sheriff and all."

"Mr. Williston-he has been unfortunate, has he not? He is such a gentleman, and a scholar, surely."

"Surely. He is one of the finest fellows I know. A man of the most sensitive honor. If such a thing can be, I should say he is too honest, for his own good. A man can be, you know. There is nothing in the world that cannot be overdone."

She looked at him earnestly. His eyes did not shift. She was satisfied.

"Your work belies your words," she said, quietly.

Dust and cinders drifted in between the slats of the closed blind.

Putting her handkerchief to her lips, Louise looked at the dark streaks on it with reproach.

"Your South Dakota dirt is so-black," she said, whimsically.

"Better black than yellow," he retorted. "It looks cleaner, now, doesn't it?"

"Maybe you think my home a fit dwelling place for John Chinaman," pouted Louise.

"Yes-if that will persuade you that South Dakota is infinitely better.

Are you open to conviction?"

"Never! I should die if I had to stay here."

"You will be going back-soon?"

"Some day, sure! Soon? Maybe. Oh, I wish I could. That part of me which is like Uncle Hammond says, 'Stay.' But that other part of me which is like the rest of us, says, 'What's the use? Go back to your kind. You're happier there. Why should you want to be different? What does it all amount to?' I am afraid I shall be weak enough and foolish enough to go back and-stay."