Peak and Prairie Part 15

Inside, the atmosphere seemed suffocating. The room was so crowded that he did not find Myra's face anywhere. The sheriff was among the dancers, but the fiddles were winding up the set with a last prolonged squeak.

As the sc.r.a.ping ceased, Rankin stood before the sheriff. In the sudden pause of sound and motion his voice sounded distinctly throughout the room.

"I have just killed Dennis Rumpety," he said.

For ten seconds there was absolute silence; then a rough voice growled, "Thunder! But you done a good job!"

Upon that everybody began talking at once, and in the midst of the clamor Ed Rankin, the man who loved freedom better than life, was formally placed under arrest.

His trial came off the next day but one. The coroner's inquest had shown death by apoplexy, caused probably by a paroxysm of rage. The jury rendered a verdict of "involuntary manslaughter." The sentence was the lowest the law allows: namely, one day's imprisonment with hard labor.

This unlooked-for clemency staggered the prisoner. Oblivious of every fact but the terrible one that Dennis Rumpety had died by his hand, he had nerved himself for what he believed would be his death-blow. The tension had been too great; he could not bear its sudden removal.

"Say, your honor," he cried, regardless of court etiquette,--"say, your honor, couldn't you lay it on a little heavier?"

"The court sees no reason for altering its decision," his honor replied, gravely, pa.s.sing on to the delivery of the next sentence.

But after the court had adjourned, the judge stepped up to the prisoner and said, kindly, "I wouldn't take it too hard, if I were you, Rankin.

We all know that there was no murder in your heart."

"Yes, there was, your honor. Yes, there was."

"At any rate, the man's death was clearly not your deed. It was the hand of the Lord that did it."

"I don't know, your honor," Rankin persisted. "It feels to me as though it was me that done it."

The judge and the lookers-on were puzzled by this persistency. It did not seem in character. For the first time in his life, Rankin felt the need of words. The moral perplexity was too great for him to deal with; he was reaching out for something to take hold of, a thing which his self-contained, crudely disciplined nature had never craved before.

"It's an awful thing to send a soul to h.e.l.l," he muttered.

Then, in his extremity, he felt a soft touch upon his arm. Myra Beckwith stood beside him.

"Ed," she said, with the sweet seriousness which had first attracted him, and now at last there was the tone in her voice which he would have given his life to hear,--"Ed, think of the seven souls you have delivered out of h.e.l.l! I was over to see them yesterday."

The consolation of that voice and touch calmed his troubled spirit, restored him to himself; the nightmare of the last two days faded and slid away. He stood a moment in awkward silence, while Myra's hand rested upon his arm; then, before them all, he laid his hand upon it, and, with the solemnity of a priest before the altar, he said, "I guess it was the Lord that done it, after all!"

VI

THE LAME GULCH PROFESSOR.

Simon Amberley had never been able to strike root in life, until, some ten years since, he found a congenial soil in that remote fastness of the Rocky Mountains known as Lame Gulch. From the first moment of his arrival there it was borne in upon him that this was the goal of his long, apparently aimless pilgrimage, and he lost no time in securing to himself a foothold, by the simple and inexpensive method of taking up a ranch.

The land he chose was higher up the Gulch than any of the neighboring ranches, and all that it was rich in was views. It ran up the side of a hill, seen from the top of which, the whole Rocky Mountain Range had the appearance of marshalling itself in one grand, exhaustive cyclorama. On every hand were snowy summits forming a t.i.tanic ring which seemed to concentrate upon Lame Gulch; and much of the sense of aloofness and security which was the chief element in Amberley's content came from the illusion which he carefully guarded, that that wall of giants really was impenetrable. He liked, too, to feel himself at a great alt.i.tude above the lower world where he had so long and vainly toiled.

"Nine thousand feet above sea-level!" he would a.s.sure himself in self-congratulatory mood. "When I come to quit, I sha' n't hev fur to go!" which confidence in the direction his spirit was destined to take, may fairly be accepted as indication of a good conscience.

Amberley had not married, and although he felt the omission to be matter for regret, he had never, as far as his recollection served him, found his wish to do so particularized in favor of any one woman.

"No, I ain't never married," he reluctantly admitted, when Enoch Baker, his next-door neighbor at Lame Gulch, pressed the point.

Enoch lived with his wife just round on the other side of Bear Mountain, only three miles away, and although his now elderly consort was reputed to be unamiable,--not to say cantankerous,--yet her existence, and the existence in the world outside, of many children and grandchildren, conferred upon him the enviable dignity of a man of family. He was a Yankee, and his thirst for information was not to be lightly appeased.

"Disapp'inted?" he asked, knocking the ashes out of his pipe, and pulling out a venerable tobacco-pouch, with a view to "fillin' her up"

again. "Disapp'inted?"

"Yes; ruther,--bein' as I was always fond of children."

Amberley was himself a tall, limp-looking downeaster, with pleasant, unsuspicious eyes, and a guileless spirit. He used to hand his cattle over to Baker once a year, and let him drive them with his own down the long mountain road to Springtown, and it was understood than he did not inquire too curiously in the matter of commissions. The stores and fodder which Enoch delivered over to him in exchange, together with a plausibly varying amount of hard cash, seemed to Simon an ample return for the scrawny cattle he sent to market. And Enoch, for his part, was always willing to testify that Amberley was a pleasant man to deal with.

"What was she like?" Enoch inquired, in the tone of a connoisseur, transfixing Amberley with his shrewd eyes.

"Don't know's I could tell you, neighbor, I kind o' fancied the ones with the snappin' black eyes. But I ruther guess some other kind would ha' done's well, when it come to the pint."

Enoch raised his eyebrows inquiringly.

"Wouldn't ary one on 'em hev you?" he asked.

"Never asked 'em," was the reply. "It was this way," Amberley went on, gathering himself together for the unaccustomed effort of expounding a situation. "I never seemed to feel to hev _gumption_ enough to raise a family."

Enoch's countenance took on a judicial look. "Yet you've got a good eddication," he remarked, after thoughtful consideration of the case.

"You've got book larnin' enough to make your way."

"Wall, yes; the eddication's stayed by me. I ruther guess 'twas the gumption that got knocked out. That was at Antietam."

"Didn't know you was in the war," Enoch exclaimed, with a visible accession of respect. "Was you hit?"

"Wall, yes; in the head. I wa' n't much more 'n a youngster, and when they let me loose the doctors said I was good 's new; 'n I ruther guess I was, all except the gumption. 'T was kind o' curous, too," he went on, warming to his subject, and fumbling at something on the side of his head. "When the bullet ploughed through here, the settin' sun was in my eyes; 'n soon's I got on my feet agin I wanted to go West. I was let go there in Virginia, 'n though I hankered after my own folks as bad as anybody, there was nothin' for it, but to turn toward the settin' sun.

'N fust I went to Ohio, 'n then to Illinois, 'n then to Missouri, 'n so on here. Never could manage to stop more 'n a few years in one place till I come up agin the Rocky Mountings. Since then I've felt kind o'

settled and satisfied."

But Simon's satisfaction was destined to be rudely broken in upon.

One pleasant September day somebody picked up something in the Gulch that looked like a dingy bit of quartz, and carried it down to Springtown, and shortly after that a squad of men appeared upon the scene. The mountains, faithless to their trust, had let them in. They gathered together along the Gulch and on the side of Bear Mountain, where Amberley could see them, little remote groups, sometimes losing themselves among the pine-trees, sometimes showing plain against the sky on the exposed comb of the mountain-side. By and by more men came and rougher ones, bringing mules and oxen with them, and camping in tents which they deserted by day. When the early snow came, Amberley could see, more plainly than before, the doings of the encroaching enemy.

Great black scars were made in the snow; sledges, laden with weird, ungainly ma.s.ses of wood and iron, were hauled up the mountain-side. Here and there a structure appeared, that had a grotesque resemblance to a gallows. The uncouth monsters planted themselves along the hillside, where they breathed forth smoke and emitted strange noises. Amberley could hear the rattling of chains, the creaking of timbers; a hoa.r.s.e shout would sometimes come ringing across the Gulch through the thin frosty air, if the wind was that way.

[Ill.u.s.tration. "A TOWN OF RUDE FRAME HUTS HAD SPRUNG UP IN THE HOLLOW BELOW."]

In September it was that the bit of quartz was carried down to Springtown; before the winter snows had thought of melting, a town of rude frame huts had sprung up in the hollow below, and Lame Gulch was a flourishing mining-camp. All the rough-scuff of the countryside promptly gathered there, and elbowed, with equal indifference, the honest miner, the less honest saloon-keeper, and the capitalist, the degree of whose claim to that laudatory adjective was not to be so easily fixed. No one seemed out of place in the crazy, zigzag streets, no sound seemed foreign to this new, conglomerate atmosphere. The fluent profanity of the mule-driver, the shrill laugh of the dance-hall; the prolonged rattle and final roar of the ore-chute, the steady pick of the laborer at the prospect-hole;--each played its part to burden and stain the pure, high air that had seemed so like the air of Heaven itself.

Amberley stayed on in his lonely lean-to, or roamed over his desecrated acres, bewildered and aggrieved. What were the mountains thinking of to admit these savage hordes! Whither should he go, where should he find a refuge, since his trusted allies had played him false? He loathed it all, loathed most of all Enoch's exultant suggestion that there might be gold on their land.

"But we'll lay low for a while," Enoch said, with an air of profound cunning. "We'll wait till they're plumb crazy, and then we kin git our own price!"

And Amberley stayed on all through that trying winter, simply because he knew of no better place to go to, and the spring came and found him there, unreconciled, to be sure, but leading his usual life. And so it happened that one day, when the snow had disappeared from all the southerly slopes, and the wind was toward the Camp, so that the sounds he hated came dulled and hushed to his ear, Amberley ventured a few rods down the hillside in search of a missing calf. The truant was a pretty, white-nosed creature, a special pet of his master's, with great brown, confiding eyes, and ample ears, and Amberley had named him Simon. Not a usual name for a calf, as Simon was well aware, but somehow it gave the lonely man a peculiar pleasure to know that his name was borne by a cheerful young thing, with frisky tail and active legs, and everything to live for.