The Freebooters of the Wilderness Part 27

A glossy smile had come over Bat's face that is not good to see on man, woman, child or beast; and it is the same kind of smile on all four, not laughter, nor light, not definite enough to be malicious, nor pointed enough to be self accusatory, nor direct enough to be challenged and repudiated; a smile untellably familiar--a Satyr-faced thought looking through a veil, somehow sinuously suggestive, saying nothing at all, yet conveying the physical sensation of pus from an ulcerous thing; and strangely enough, there are blow-fly natures that prefer pus to nectar.

If Brydges had not been so absorbed in the jocularity of his own sensations, he would have observed that his chief remained singularly silent.

"Oh, I don't suppose he's there all this time." Bat rushed to the defence of the absent, (Heaven bless such defenders). "That old Canadian duffer, who seems to have hitched up with him on the Rim Rocks accident, your ranch foreman saw 'em pa.s.s together at noon; tried to telephone 'Herald,' but I choked _that_ off; that old fellow once wrote our paper to know about Canadian settlers here. He recognized Calamity and talked about old North West Rebellion days. It's my theory he's here about something that's been hushed up! Like dad, like daughter,"

Bat p.r.o.nounced.

"It's my theory when MacDonald comes back from the Upper Pa.s.s, Wayland and the old fellow will turn up about the same time. Haven't been able to learn what it is; but I'll bet dollars to doughnuts, they are all absent on the same trail. If we let go a broadside, they'll have to come out with the truth to shut us off; and there is where we are going to get him; see? I've got another theory, too."

"What's that?" asked the Senator, without turning.

"It is, if he sees we're going to involve her, he'll quit."

Moyese didn't answer. He rose from his chair and walked to a rear window, where he stood looking out. Did he credit what he had heard?

Was it a recital of facts, or a distortion of facts through a tainted mind? Did Brydges, himself, believe what he had tried to convey? Or was his job to obtain certain results at any cost: and was this part of the cost? Ask yourself that of the tainted news you read every day.

Ask why those who recognize the lie do not brand it as such; why those who are uncertain do not verify before they repeat and credit; and you will probably have some clue to the little melodrama of dishonor enacted in the office of a legal luminary at Smelter City that sweltering hot July day. When you come to observe it, Bat's recital contained nothing that might not have been posted in eminent respectability on a church warden's door. Like fresh fruit pa.s.sed through a mouldy cellar, the facts came from the medium of the narrator with the unclean contagion of cellar mould. The next narrator would not pa.s.s on the facts. He would pa.s.s on the cellar rot.

"If we served up those two stories together hot," emphasized Bat, "we'd about cut the throat of any opposition to our interests in the Valley?

He'd quit! I'll bet before he'd see her involved, he'd jump his job!"

When the Senator turned his face to the handy man, he was very sober.

He stood looking over the tops of his gla.s.ses boring into Bat's face.

"It's a pity," he said.

"Yes, it's too bad: one hates to have one's faith in human nature all balled out this way; but you never know what kind of a fact you're going ping up against where a woman is concerned." Something in the Senator's look stopped Bat mid-way.

"Brydges, I thought I told you never to meddle with the damphool who makes excuses for what he's going to do. Never do anything, unless you have some end worth while in view; then, if it's worth while, do it, d.a.m.n it, and don't waste time excusing the means! Now, I'll have nothing to do with this; mind that, Brydges. You do it off your own responsibility. If MacDonald were one of our party, I wouldn't make use of it, if it were ten times over and over true. You'll have to be very careful how you use that, at all! It's effective. I don't deny it's very effective; but it's a pity! If you use that at all, you'll have to use it so it's not libelous."

"Libelous?" burst out the handy man wakening up suddenly, scratching his tousled head and trying to make head or tail of orders that said 'do it' and 'don't do it' in one breath. "I can write it without a name so every man in the State will know who it is: give it as a joke; fetch in Calamity as the mother of the whole mess; the call of the blood, you know; reversion to type! They'll have to prove that the intent was malice before they can get a judgment. They'll have to come out with the truth before they can prove libel. It isn't libelous if it's done as a joke without malice."

Moyese had flung himself down in his chair with a blow of his clenched fist on the desk, when the opening of the office door stopped the oath of disgust on his lips; and Eleanor MacDonald stood framed in the yellow light shining in from the hot street. For a moment, the transition from sun to shade blinded her. Then, she saw who was with the Senator. Brydges sprang up waiting to return her recognition. She made no sign. She walked over where he was standing. The Senator had half risen from his desk. Was it the spirit of the ancestral Indian in her eyes; or of the Man with the Iron Hand? Brydges' oily gloss went to tallow under her look. Moyese knew looks that drilled; and Brydges himself could bore behind for motives; but this look was not a drill: it was a Search Light; and the handy man--well, perhaps, it was the heat--the handy man suddenly wilted.

"You can go, Brydges," ordered Moyese.

"All right! See you again about that, Senator!" Brydges grabbed up the loose notes from the desk and bolted, banging the door behind him.

The Senator's face seemed at once to age and trench with lines. He motioned her to the vacated chair and remained bending forward over his desk till she had seated herself. Then, he sat down, suddenly remembered his hat, and laid it off. If she had sunk forward on the desk weeping; if she had made a sign of appeal; he would have gone round and caressed her and petted her and told her she must _stop_ Wayland. His whole manhood went out to comfort her, to stand between her and what? . . . Was it the drive of those wheels of which he was a cog? But when she looked across the desk, the eyes had no appeal, the Search Light had turned on him.

"You must excuse me if you heard what I was saying, when you came in, Miss Eleanor; but it was a G-- doggon lie! I had been angered: I had been angered very much; and that's a bad thing on a hot day." He was slipping back to the usual suavity.

CHAPTER XIX

BALLOTS FOR BULLETS

It was Calamity, who had carried the trouble-making coat across from the Mission Library to the MacDonald Ranch House. Eleanor had found it in the big living room that day after she had read the note saying he was setting out "on the Long Trail, the trail this Nation will have to follow before Democracy arrives; the trail of the Man behind the Thing." Somehow, she lost interest in her reading and her driving, and spent the most of that first week after the funeral in the steamer chair on the Ranch House piazza. Were the topaz gates of the sunset still ajar to a new infinite life; or did satyr faces haunt the shadows of the trail, satyr faces of the Greed that had plotted the b.l.o.o.d.y villainy of the Rim Rocks? She had thought she knew joy before, joy that rapt her from life in a race reverie. Now, she knew joy, tense as pain; and the consciousness never left her. It was there; beside, inside, above, all round, an enveloping atmosphere to everything she thought and said and did. She could not read; for while her eyes pa.s.sed _over_ the lines, that consciousness danced in flames _between_ the lines. She tried to forget herself in her work--in the sorting of the littered shelves, in the mending for the ranch hands absent with her father in the Upper Pa.s.s; but It was there just the same, at her elbow; in behind the commonplace weaving rainbow mists, a shadowy deity of thought all pervasive as ether. Before, she had been as one standing in front of the up-lifted veil. Now, she knew she had pa.s.sed in behind the veil, and could not if she would come out to the former place. Life symbols empty of meaning before, suddenly became allegorical of eternity--the bridal veil, the orange wreaths, the ring typical of the infinite, the vows of service, the angel of the drawn sword on the back trail. Yet she knew she had promised to keep him resolute, standing strong to his work, unflinching because of her.

It was, perhaps, typical of those ancestral traits that fear for him never once entered her thoughts. His work was on the firing line; and had she not _once_ said that a life more or less did not matter? That was before his life had become her life. That is, fear for him did not enter her waking thoughts. It was different when she slept. Then the uncurbed thoughts hovered like the face in the picture of "the Sleeping Warrior." One night as she sat in the steamer chair, a cold wind came down from the Pa.s.s. The cook explained it was because of the snow slide that had filled up the canyon.

"Calamity," she called, "bring me out something to put round my shoulders; don't bring a shawl: I hate shawls!"

And Calamity, perfectly naturally, brought out Wayland's coat. Eleanor did not laugh; for she knew it was only since Calamity had stopped roving the Black Hills that she had exchanged male attire for the Indian woman's insignia of good conduct, a shawl. She waited till Calamity had pattered down to the bas.e.m.e.nt. Then, she slipped into the coat with a queer little laugh that would have played havoc with Wayland's resolutions, and running her hands up the long dangling sleeve ends, lay back to a reverie that could hardly be called thought.

It was consciousness, delirious foolish consciousness, possible only to youth; and the consciousness slipped into a drowse between sleeping and waking. It was--where was it? In the shadow realms of wonderful dream consciousness, his face, the face in "the Happy Warrior"; but not her face: instead was the evil fellow seen that night in the storm on the Rim Rocks clubbing his gun at Fordie's pinto pony through the mists; only he wasn't clubbing it at Fordie; he was aiming at Wayland; and there was the white horse. She wakened herself with her cry. That happened to be the night Wayland had camped in the Desert arroyos.

One afternoon, Sheriff Flood had called to know if her father had come back and what "he intended to do about it." Incidentally, he mentioned that the Forest Ranger had gone through the Pa.s.s that led to the Desert: there had been a snow slide; but he "guessed" the Ranger was "too cute a mountain man to be caught." That night, she shivered as she sat in the steamer chair; and she drew Wayland's coat around her; but it was not to delirious thoughts. When she fell asleep, she saw him lying on his face in the Desert; and she called him, and called him, and never could reach him, and awakened herself with her own calling. Wayland's professional friend, who was a psychologist, explained both incidents as auto suggestion from the coat awakened by the uneasiness of the unconscious fears; an explanation that explains by saying x is y.

At all events, she never again used the coat; and having nothing to conceal, didn't conceal it, which is the most d.a.m.ning evidence you can offer to a tortuous mind. She hung the coat in the apartment off the big living room. Then, the despatch came out about the two bodies found in the Desert. The same mail brought a letter from her father asking her to meet him at Smelter City; and there at the Ranch House gate stood Mr. Bat Brydges, handy man of the Valley, quizzing the ranch hands, quizzing the German cook, quizzing Calamity at the very foot of rustic slab steps that ran up from the bas.e.m.e.nt.

"What is he after, Calamity?"

The half breed woman had dashed up the back stairs to Eleanor's room.

"He want t' know if Waylan--Ranga fellah--has ever stay here, dis house--he ever go back Cabin House--tepee on hill--night dey keel leetle boy?"

Even then, Eleanor did not realize the drift of the handy man's activities. She thought perhaps, he, too, might be anxious about Wayland.

"What did you tell him, Calamity?"

"I tell heem," Calamity dropped her soft patois to a guttural, "I tell heem, y' go h.e.l.l!"

"Ca-lam-ity?" rebuked Eleanor.

But what was it in the gentleman's jaunty air, in the smile of the sleepy tortoise-sh.e.l.l eyes, in the play of a self-conscious dimple round the fat double chin? Eleanor had not pa.s.sed from her own apartment to the big living room before a repulsion that she could not define swept over her in a physical shudder; and Mr. Bat Brydges'

report to the Senator of that interview had been fairly accurate. She did not know that she had not greeted him with the common courtesy due a caller, that she had stood looking past him to the open door, that she had left him standing first on one leg then on the other till Bat had been forced to terminate the interview; and she had not the faintest conception of what her own feeling of repulsion meant. He had scarcely gone before she wished she had asked him about those two bodies found in the Desert. As a matter of fact, she called up the "Smelter City Independent." The editor could give her no details. He asked her very particularly who was inquiring; and having nothing to conceal, she did not conceal it. He allayed her fears in almost the words that the Senator had used to lay Bat's suspicions, if the bodies had been those of Government men, the Ranger's Badge would have been found and the news flashed all over America.

"Oh, thank you, so much! You know the sheep lost on the Rim Rocks belonged to our ranch; and I wouldn't like to think that he had lost his life defending our interests."

Then something odd occurred with the telephone. She distinctly heard the voice at the other end telling somebody that, "Brydges was up there now." Then, the voice was a.s.suring her, "They would let her know if they heard anything more."

Eleanor rang off with a sense of relief; and yet with a sickening feeling, of what? It was the same feeling she had had when Brydges came in with his jaunty air.

She was standing at the Ranch House gate waiting for the stage to Smelter City. Calamity had carried down the yellow suit case. The words came from Eleanor's lips before she thought; or she could never have asked the question:

"Calamity, who was it took your little baby away?"

The suit case fell from the Indian woman's hand.

"D' pries'," she said, "Father Moran."

Eleanor thought a moment, racking her memory in vain for that name in her convent life of Quebec. She was digging her toe in the dust of the road.

"Was that before or after you went to the Black Hills, Calamity?"

But Calamity had gone without a word; and the stage came whipping across the bridge from the Moyese Ranch; a double-tandem stage driven by a bronzed fellow with one arm, whose management of the reins absorbed Eleanor so that she forgot to notice the fat form hoisting her suit case to the roof. Then, she was inside; and the door had swung shut; and the fat form squeezed in next to the door; and she was lost in her own thoughts oblivious of her close packed neighbors till the stage stopped again with a jerk, and the sharp edge of a black cart-wheel-hat decorated with plumes enough for an undertaker's wagon cut a swath that threatened to slice off one of Eleanor's ears.