The Desert and the Sown Part 20

"You'll be getting a large hump on yourself, Han, me boy. 'T is a cash crowd we have here--and a lady, by me sowl!" Thus Jimmy exhorted his household. Times were looking up. They would be a summer resort before the Ditch went through; it should be mentioned in the Ditch company's prospectus. Jimmy had put his savings into land-office fees and had a hopeful interest in the Ditch.

A spur in the head is worth two in the heel. Without a word from "the boss" Han had found time to shave and powder and polish his brown forehead and put on his whitest raiment over his baggiest trousers.

There was loud panic among the fowls in the corral. The cat had disappeared; the jealous dogs hung about the doors and were pushed out of the way by friends of other days.

Seated by the office fire, Paul was conferring with Jimmy, who was happy with a fresh pipe and a long story to tell to a patient and paying listener. He rubbed the red curls back from his shining forehead, took the pipe from his teeth, and guided a puff of smoke away from his auditor.

"I seen him settin' over there on his blankets,"--he pointed with his pipe to the opposite sh.o.r.e plainly visible through the office windows,--"but he niver hailed me, so I knowed he was broke. Some, whin they're broke, they holler all the louder. Ye would think they had an appointment wit' the Governor and he sint his car'iage to meet them. But he was as humble, he was, as a yaller dog.--Out! Git out from here--the pack of yez! Han, shut the dure an' drive thim b.l.o.o.d.y curs off the piazzy. They're trackin' up the whole place.--As I was sayin', sor, there he stayed hunched up in the wind, waitin' on the chanst of a team comin', and I seen he was an ould daddy. I stud the sight of him as long as I cud, me comin' and goin'. He fair wore me out. So I tuk the boat over for 'im. One of his arrums he couldn't lift from the shoulder, and I give him a h'ist wit' his bundle. Faith, it was light! 'Twinty years a-getherin',' he cackles, slappin' it. 'Ye've had harrud luck,' I says.

''T is not much of a sheaf ye are packin' home.' 'That's as ye look at it,' he says.

"I axed him what way was he goin'. He was thinking to get a lift as far as Oriana, if the stages was runnin' on that road. 'Then ye 'll have to bide here till morning,' I says, 'for ye must have met the stage goin' the other way.' 'I met nothing,' says he; 'I come be way of the bluffs,'--which is a strange way for one man travelin' afoot.

"The grub was on the table, and I says, 'Sit by and fill yourself up.'

His cheeks was fallin' in wit' the hunger. With that his poor ould eye begun to water. 'Twas one weak eye he had that was weepin' all the time.

'I've got out of the habit of reg'lar aitin',' he says. 'It don't take much to kape me goin'.' 'Niver desave yourself, sor! 'T is betther feed three hungry men than wan "no occasion."' His appet.i.te it grew on him wit' every mouthful. There was a boundless emptiness to him. He lay there on the bench and slep' the rest of the evening, and I left him there wit' a big fire at night. And the next day at noon we h'isted him up beside of Joe Stratton. A rip-snorter of a wind was blowin' off the Silver City peaks. His face was drawed like a winter apple, but he wint off happy. I think he was warm inside of himself."

"Did you ask him his name?"

"Sure. Why not? John Treagar he called himself."

"Treagar? Hagar, you mean!"

"It was Treagar he said."

"John Hagar is the man I am looking for."

"Treagar--Hagar? 'T is comin' pretty close to it."

"About what height and build was he?"

"He was not to say a tall man; and he wasn't so turrible short neither.

His back was as round as a Bible. A kind of pepper and saltish beard he had, and his hair was blacker than his beard but white in streaks."

"A _dark_ man, was he?"

"He would be a _dark_ man if he was younger."

"The man I want is blue-eyed."

"His eyes was blue--a kind of washed-out gray that maybe was blue wanst; and one of them always weepin' wit' the cold."

"And light brown hair mixed with gray, like sand and ashes--mostly ashes; and a thin straggling beard, thinner on the cheeks? A high head and a tall stooping figure--six feet at least; hands with large joints and a habit of picking at them when"--

"Ye are goin' too fast for me now, sor. He was not that description of a man, nayther the height nor the hair of him. Sure't is a pity for ye comin' this far, and him not the man at all. Faith, I wish I was the man meself! I wonder at Joe Stratton anyhow! He's a very hasty man, is Joe.

He jumps in wit' both feet, so he does. I could have told ye that."

Moya, always helplessly natural, and now very tired as well, when Paul described with his usual gravity this anti-climax, fell below all the dignities at once in a burst of childish giggling. Paul looked on with an embarra.s.sed smile, like a puzzled affectionate dog at the incomprehensible mirth of humans. Paul was certainly deficient in humor and therefore in breadth. But what woman ever loved her lover the less for having discovered his limitations? Humor runs in families of the intenser cultivation. The son of the soil remains serious in the face of life's and nature's ironies.

XVIII

THE STAR IN THE EAST

So the search paused, while the searchers rested and revised their plans. Spring opened in the valley as if for them alone. There were mornings "proud and sweet," when the humblest imagination could have pictured Aurora and her train in the jocund clouds that trooped along the sky,--wind-built processions which the wind dispersed. Wild flowers spread so fast they might have been spilled from the rainbow scarf of Iris fleeting overhead. The river was in flood, digging its elbows into its muddy banks. The willow and wild-rose thickets stooped and washed their spring garments in its tide.

Primeval life and love were all around them. Meadow larks flung their brief jets of song into the sunlight; the copses rustled with wings; wood-doves cooed from the warm sunny hollows, and the soft booming of their throaty call was like a beating in the air,--the pulse of spring.

They had found their Garden. Humanity in the valley pa.s.sed before them in forms as interesting and as alien as the brother beasts to Adam: the handsome driver of the jerky, Joe Stratton's successor, who sat at dinner opposite and combed his flowing mustache with his fork in a lazy, dandified way; the darkened faces of sheep-herders enameled by sun and wind, their hair like the winter coats of animals; the slow-eyed farmers with the appet.i.tes of horses; the spring recruits for the ranks of labor footing it to distant ranches, each with his back-load of bedding, and the dust of three counties on his garments.

The sweet forces of Nature shut out, for a season, Paul's _cri du coeur_. One may keep a chamber sacred to one's sadder obligations and yet the house be filled with joy. Further ramifications of the search were mapped out with Jimmy's indifferent a.s.sistance. For good reasons of his own, Jimmy did little to encourage an early start. He would explain that his maps were of ancient date and full of misinformation as to stage routes. "See that now! The stages was pulled off that line five year ago, on account of the railroad cuttin' in on them. Ye couldn't make it wid'out ye took a camp outfit. There's ne'er a station left, and when ye come to it, it's ruins ye'll find. A chimbly and a few rails, if the mule-skinners hasn't burned them. 'Tis a country very devoid of fuel; sagebrush and grease-wood, and a wind, bedad! that blows the gra.s.s-seeds into the next county."

When these camping-trips were proposed to Moya, she hesitated and responded languidly; but when Paul suggested leaving her even for a day, her fears fluttered across his path and wiled him another way. Vaguely he felt that she was unlike herself--less buoyant, though often restless; and sometimes he fancied she was pale underneath her sun-burned color like that of rose-hips in October. Various causes kept him inert, while strength mounted in his veins, and life seemed made for the pure joy of living.

The moon of May in that valley is the moon of roses, for the heats once due come on apace. The young people gave up their all-day horseback rides and took morning walks instead, following the sh.o.r.e-paths lazily to shaded coverts dedicated to those happy silences which it takes two to make. Or, they climbed the bluffs and gazed at the impenetrable vast horizon, and thought perhaps of their errand with that pang of self-reproach which, when shared, becomes a subtler form of self-indulgence.

But at night, all the teeming life of the plain rushed up into the sky and blazed there in a million friendly stars. After the languor of the sleepy afternoons, it was like a fresh awakening--the dawn of those white May nights. The wide plain stirred softly through all its miles of sage. The river's cadenced roar paused beyond the bend and outbroke again. All that was eerie and furtive in the wild dark found a curdling voice in the coyote's hunting-call.

In a hollow concealed by sage, not ten minutes' walk from the Ferry inn, unknown to the map-maker and innocent of all use, lay a perfect floor for evening pacing with one's eyes upon the stars. It was the death mask of an ancient lake, done in purest alkali silt, and needing only the shadows cast by a low moon to make the illusion almost unbelievable.

Slow precipitation, season after season, as the water dried, had left the lake bed smooth as a cast in plaster. Subsequent warpings had lifted the alkali crust into thin-lipped wavelets. But once upon the floor itself the resemblance to water vanished. The warpings and Grumblings took the shape of earth as made by water and baked by fire. Moya compared it to a bit of the dead moon fallen to show us what we are coming to. They paced it soft-footed in tennis shoes lest they should crumble its talc-like whiteness. But they read no horoscopes, for they were shy of the future in speaking to each other,--and they made no plans.

One evening Moya had said to Paul: "I can understand your mother so much better now that I am a wife. I think most women have a tendency towards the state of being _un_married. And if one had--children, it would increase upon one very fast. A widow and a mother--for twenty years. How could she be a wife again?"

Paul made no reply to this speech which long continued to haunt him; especially as Moya wrote more frequently to his mother and did not offer to show him her letters. In their evening walks she seemed distrait, and during the day more restless.

One night of their nightly pacings she stopped and stood long, her head thrown back, her eyes fixed upon the dizzy star-deeps. Paul waited a step behind her, touching her shoulders with his hands. Suddenly she reeled and sank backwards into his arms. He held her, watching her lovely face grow whiter; her eyelids closed. She breathed slowly, leaning her whole weight upon him.

Coming to herself, she smiled and said it was nothing. She had been that way before. "But--we must go home. We must have a home--somewhere.

I want to see your mother. Paul, be good to her--forgive her--for my sake!"

XIX

PILGRIMS AND STRANGERS

Aunt Polly Lewis was disappointed in the latest of her beneficiaries.

It was nine years since her husband had locked up his savings in the Mud Springs ranch, a neglected little health-plant at the mouth of the Bruneau. If you were troubled with rheumatism, or a crick in the back, or your "pancrees" didn't act or your blood was "out o' fix, why, you'd better go up to Looanders' for a spell and soak yourself in that blue mud and let aunt Polly diet ye and dost ye with yerb tea."

When Leander courted aunt Polly in the interests of his sanitarium, she was reputed the best nurse in Ada County. The widow--by desertion--of a notorious quack doctor of those parts: it was an open question whether his medicine had killed or her nursing had cured the greater number of confiding sick folk. Leander drove fifty miles to catechise this notable woman, and finding her sound on the theory of packs hot and cold, and skilled in the practice of rubbing,--and having made the incidental discovery that she was a person not without magnetism,--he decided on the spot to add her to the other attractions of Mud Springs ranch; and she drove home with him next day, her trunk in the back of his wagon.

The place was no sinecure. Bricks without straw were a child's pastime to the cures aunt Polly and the Springs effected without a pretense to the comforts of life in health, to say nothing of sickness. Modern conveniences are costly, and how are you to get the facilities for "pay patients" when you have no patients that pay! Prosperity had overlooked the Bruneau, or had made false starts there, through detrimental schemes that gave the valley a bad name with investors. The railroad was still fifty miles away, and the invalid public would not seek life itself, in these days of luxurious travel, at the cost of a twelve hours'

stage-ride. However, as long as the couple had a roof over their heads and the Springs continued to plop and vomit their strange, chameleon-colored slime, Leander would continue to bring home the sick and the suffering for Polly and the Springs to practice on. Health became his hobby, and in time, with isolation thrown in, it began to invade his common sense. He tried in succession all the diet fads of the day and wound up a convert to the "Ralston" school of eating. Aunt Polly had clung a little longer to the flesh-pots, but the charms of a system that abolished half the labor of cooking prevailed with her at last, and in the end she kept a sharper eye upon Leander at mealtime than ever he had upon her.

The ignorant gorgings of their neighbors were a head-shaking and a warning to them, and more than once Leander's person was in jeopardy through his zealous but unappreciated concern for the brother who eats in darkness.