The Girl at the Halfway House Part 26

likewise the Hon. Cubberd Allen Wiggit-Galt, Etcetera. There's two of me now, an' it's twice the amount I must be dhrinkin'. I swear, I feel a thirst risin' that minds me o' Ingy in the hills, an' the mess o' the Rile Irish wance again."

"You'll be going away," said Franklin, sadly, as he rose and took Battersleigh by the hand. "You'll be going away and leaving me here alone--awfully alone."

"Ned," said the tall Irishman, rising and laying, a hand upon his shoulder, "don't ye belave I'll be lavin' ye. I've seen the worrld, an' I must see it again, but wance in a while I'll be comin' around here to see the best man's country on the globe, an' to meet agin the best man I ivver knew. I'll not till why I belave it, for that I can not do, but shure I do belave it, this is the land for you. There'll be workin' an' thinkin' here afther you an' Batty are gone, an' maybe they'll work out the joy an' sorrow of ut here. Don't be restless, but abide, an' take ye root here. For Batty, it's no odds. He's seen the worrld."

Battersleigh's words caused Franklin's face to grow still more grave, and his friend saw and suspected the real cause. "Tut, tut! me boy,"

he said, "I well know how your wishes lie. It's a n.o.ble gyurl ye've chosen, as a n.o.ble man should do. She may change her thought to-morrow. It's change is the wan thing shure about a woman."

Franklin shook his head mutely, but Battersleigh showed only impatience with him. "Go on with your plans, man," said he, "an' pay no attintion to the gyurl! Make ready the house and prepare the bridal gyarments.

Talk with her raysonable, an' thin thry unraysonable, and if she won't love ye peaceful, thin thry force; an' she'll folly ye thin, to the ind of the earth, an' love ye like a lamb. It's Batty has studied the s.e.x.

Now, wance there was a gyurl--but no; I'll not yet thrust mesilf to spake o' that. G.o.d rist her asy ivermore!"

"Yes," said Franklin sadly, "that is it. That is what my own answer has been. She tells me that there was once another, who no longer lives--that no one else--"

Battersleigh's face grew grave in turn. "There's no style of a.s.sault more difficult than that same," said he. "Yet she's young; she must have been very young. With all respect, it's the nature o' the race o'

women to yield to the livin', breathin' man above the dead an'

honoured."

"I had my hopes," said Franklin, "but they're gone. They've been doing well at the Halfway House, and I've been doing well here. I've made more money than I ever thought I should, and I presume I may make still more. I presume that's all there is--just to make money, and then more, if you can. Let it go that way. I'll not wear my heart on my sleeve--not for any woman in the world."

Franklin's jaws set in fashion still more stern than their usual cast, yet there had come, as Battersleigh did not fail to notice, an older droop to the corners of his mouth, and a loss of the old brilliance of the eye.

"Spoken like a man," said Battersleigh, "an' if ye'll stick to that ye're the more like to win. Nivver chance follyin' too close in a campaign ag'inst a woman. Parallel an' mine, but don't uncover your forces. If ye advance, do so by rushes, an' not feelin' o' the way.

But tin to wan, if ye lie still under cover, she'll be sendin' out skirmishers to see where ye are an' what ye are doin'. Now, ye love the gyurl, I know, an' so do I, an' so does ivery man that ivver saw her, for she's the sort min can't help adorin'. But, mind me, kape away. Don't write to her. Don't make poetry about her--G.o.d forbid!

Don't do the act o' serrynadin' in anny way whativver. Make no complaint--if ye do she'll hate ye, like as not; for when a gyurl has wronged a man she hates him for it. Merely kape still. Ye've met your first reverse, an' ye've had your outposts cut up a bit, an' ye think the ind o' the worrld has come. Now, mind me, ould Batty, who's seen the lands; only do ye attind to dhrill an' sinthry-go an' commissariat, till in time ye find your forces in thrim again. By thin luk out fer heads stickin' up over the hills on the side o' the inimy, who'll be wonderin' what's goin' on. 'Go 'way,' she says to you, an' you go.

'Come back,' she whispers to herself, an' you don't hear it. Yet all the time she's wonderin' pfwhy you don't!"

Franklin smiled in spite of himself. "Battersleigh's Tactics and Manual of Strategy," he murmured. "All right, old man. I thank you just the same. I presume I'll live, at the worst. And there's a bit in life besides what we want for ourselves, you know."

"There's naught in life but what we're ready to take for oursilves!"

cried Battersleigh. "I'll talk no fable of other fishes in the say for ye. Take what ye want, if ye'll have it. An' hearken; there's more to Ned Franklin than bein' a land agent and a petty lawyer. It's not for ye yersilf to sit an' mope, neyther to spind your life diggin' in a musty desk. Ye're to grow, man; ye're to grow! Do ye not feel the day an' hour? Man, did ye nivver think o' Destiny?"

"I've never been able not to believe in it," said Franklin. "To some men all things come easily, while others get on only by the hardest knocks; and some go always close to success, but die just short of the parapet. I haven't myself cla.s.sified, just yet."

"Ye have your dreams, boy?"

"Yes; I have my dreams."

"All colours are alike," said Battersleigh. "Now, whut is my young Injun savage doin', when he goes out alone, on top of some high hill, an' builds him a little fire, an' talks with his familiar spirits, which he calls here his 'drame'? Isn't he searchin' an' feelin' o'

himsilf, same as the haythin in far-away Ingy? Git your nose up, Ned, or you'll be unwittin' cla.s.sifyin' yersilf with the great slave cla.s.s which we lift behind not long ago, but which is follyin' us hard and far. Git your nose up, fer it's Batty has been thinkin' ye've Destiny inside your skin. Listen to Batty the Fool, and search your sowl.

I'll tell ye this: I've the feelin' that I'll be hearin' of ye, in all the marrches o' the worrld. Don't disappoint me, Ned, for the ould man has belaved in ye--more than ye've belaved in yersilf. As to the gyurl--bah!--go marry her some day, av ye've nothin' more importhant on yer hands.

"But, me dear boy, spakin' o' importhant things, I ralely must be goin'

now. I've certain importhant preparations that are essintial before I get dhrunk this avenin'--"

"O Battersleigh, do be sensible," said Franklin, "and do give up this talk of getting drunk. Come over here this evening and talk with me.

It's much better than getting drunk."

Battersleigh's hand was on the door k.n.o.b. "The consate o' you!" he said. "Thrue, ye're a fine boy, Ned, an' I know of no conversayshun more entertainin' than yer own, but I tale that if I didn't get dhrunk like a gintleman this avenin', I'd be violatin' me juty to me own conscience, as well as settin' at naught the thraditions o' the Rile Irish. An' so, if ye'll just excuse me, I'll say good-bye till, say, to-morrow noon."

CHAPTER x.x.xII

THE CALLING

And now there still fared on the swift, sane empire of the West. The rapid changes, the strivings, the accomplishments, the pretensions and the failures of the new town blended in the product of human progress.

Each man fell into his place in the community as though appointed thereto, and the eyes of all were set forward. There was no retrospection, there were no imaginings, no fears, no disbeliefs. The people were as ants, busy building their hill, underletting it with galleries, furnishing it with chambers, storing it with riches, providing it with defences; yet no individual ant looked beyond his own antennae, or dreamed that there might be significance in the tiny footprints which he left. There were no philosophers to tell these busy actors that they were puppets in a great game, ants in a giant hill. They lived, loved, and multiplied; which, after all, is Life.

To Franklin the days and months and years went by unpunctuated, his life settling gradually into the routine of an unhappy calm. He neglected too much the social side of life, and rather held to his old friends than busied himself with the search for new. Battersleigh was gone, swiftly and mysteriously gone, though with the promise to return and with the reiteration of his advice and his well wishes. Curly was gone--gone up the Trail into a far and mysterious country, though he, too, promised to remember Ellisville, and had given hostage for his promise. His friends of the Halfway House were gone, for though he heard of them and knew them to be prosperous, he felt himself, by reason of Mary Ellen's decision, in propriety practically withdrawn from their personal acquaintance. Of the kaleidoscope of the oncoming civilization his eye caught but little. There had again fallen upon his life a season of blight, or self-distrust, of dull dissatisfaction with the world and with living. As in earlier years he had felt unrest and known the lack of settled purpose, so now, after having seen all things apparently set in order before him for progressive accomplishment, he had fallen back once more into that state of disbelief, of that hopeless and desperate awakening properly reserved only for old age, when the individual realizes that what he does is of itself of no consequence, and that what he is or is not stops no single star an atom in its flight, no blade of gra.s.s an iota in its growing.

Paralysis of the energies too often follows upon such self-revelations; and indeed it seemed to Franklin that he had suffered some deep and deadly benumbing of his faculties. He could not welcome the new days.

His memory was set rather on the old days, so recent and in some way so dear. He loved the forgotten thunder of the buffalo, but in his heart there rose no exultation at the rumble of the wheels. Still conscientious, he plodded, nor did he cease to aspire even in his own restricted avocations. Because of his level common sense, which is the main ingredient in the success-portion, he went easily into the first councils of the community. Joylessly painstaking and exact, he still prospered in what simple practice of the law there offered, acting as counsel for the railway, defending a rare criminal case, collecting accounts, carrying on t.i.tle contests and "adverse" suits in the many cases before the Register of the Land Office, and performing all the simple humdrum of the busy country lawyer. He made more and more money, since at that time one of his position and opportunities could hardly avoid doing so. His place in the business world was a.s.sured.

He had no occasion for concern.

For most men this would have been prosperity sufficient; yet never did Edward Franklin lie down with the long breath of the man content; and ever in his dreams there came the vague beckoning of a hand still half unseen. Once this disturbing summons to his life was merely disquieting and unformulated, but gradually now it a.s.sumed a shape more urgent and more definite. Haunting him with the sense of the unfulfilled, the face of Mary Ellen was ever in the shadow; of Mary Ellen, who had sent him away forever; of Mary Ellen, who was wasting her life on a prairie ranch, with naught to inspire and none to witness the flowering of her soul. That this rare plant should thus fail and wither seemed to him a crime quite outside his own personal concern.

This unreal Mary Ellen, this daily phantom, which hung faces on bare walls and put words between the lines of law books, seemed to have some message for him. Yet had he not had his final message from the actual Mary Ellen? And, after all, did anything really matter any more?

So much for the half-morbid frame of mind due for the most part to the reflex of a body made sick by an irregular and irrational life. This much, too, Franklin could have established of his own philosophy. Yet this was not all, nor was the total so easily to be explained away.

Steadily, and with an insistence somewhat horrible, there came to Franklin's mind a feeling that this career which he saw before him would not always serve to satisfy him. Losing no touch of the democratic loyalty to his fellow-men, he none the less clearly saw himself in certain ways becoming inexorably separated from his average fellow-man. The executive instinct was still as strong within him, but he felt it more creative, and he longed for finer material than the seamy side of man's petty strifes with man, made possible under those artificial laws which marked man's compromise with Nature. He found no solace and no science in the study of the great or the small crimes of an artificial system which did not touch individual humanity, and which was careless of humanity's joys or sorrowings. Longing for the satisfying, for the n.o.ble things, he found himself irresistibly facing toward the past, and irresistibly convinced that in that past, as in the swiftly marching present, there might be some lesson, not ign.o.ble and not uncomforting. Horrified that he could not rest in the way that he had chosen, distracted at these intangible desires, he doubted at times his perfect sanity; for though it seemed there was within him the impulse to teach and to create, he could not say to himself what or how was to be the form, whether mental or material, of the thing created, the thing typified, the thing which he would teach.

Of such travail, of such mould, have come great architects, great engineers, great writers, musicians, painters, indeed great men of affairs, beings who stand by the head and shoulders above other men as leaders. The nature of such men is not always at the first a.s.sured, the imprimitive seal not always surely set on, so that of one thus tormented of his inner self it may be mere accident which shall determine whether it is to be great artist or great artisan that is to be born again.

To Franklin, dreaming as he woke or slept, there sometimes waved a hand, there sometimes sounded a Voice, as that which of old summoned the prophet in the watches of the night. Neither in his waking nor his sleeping hours could he call this spirit into materialization, however much he longed to wrestle with it finally. It remained only to haunt him vaguely, to join with the shade of Mary Ellen the Cruel to set misery on a life which he had thought happily a.s.sured.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

THE GREAT COLD

The land lay trusting and defenceless under a cynical sky, which was unthreatening but mocking. Dotting a stretch of country thirty miles on either side of the railway, and extending as far to the east and west along its line, there were scattered hundreds of homes, though often these were separated one from the other by many miles of open prairie. Fences and fields appeared, and low stacks of hay and straw here and there stood up above the vast gray surface of the old buffalo and cattle range. Some of these houses were board "shacks," while others were of sods, and yet others, these among the earliest established on the plains, the useful dugout, half above and half beneath the ground. Yet each building, squat or tall, small or less small, was none the less a home. Most of them contained families. Men had brought hither their wives and children--little children, sometimes babes, tender, needful of warmth and care. For these stood guardian the gaunt coal chutes of the town, with the demands of a population of twenty-five hundred, to say nothing of the settlers round about, a hundred tons for a thousand families, scattered, dwelling out along breaks and _coulees_, and on worn hillsides, and at the ends of long, faint, wandering trails, which the first whirl of snow would softly and cruelly wipe away.

Yet there was no snow. There had been none the winter before. The trappers and skin-hunters said that the winter was rarely severe. The railroad men had ranged west all the winter, throats exposed and coats left at the wagons. It was a mild country, a gentle, tender country.

In this laughing sky who could see any cynicism? The wind was cold, and the wild fowl flew clamouring south from the sheeted pools, but the great hares did not change their colour, and the grouse stayed brown, and the prairie dogs barked joyously. No harm could come to any one.

The women and children were safe. Besides, was there not coal at the town? Quite outside of this, might not one burn coa.r.s.e gra.s.s if necessary, or stalks of corn, or even ears of corn? No tree showed in scores of miles, and often from smoke to tiny smoke it was farther than one could see, even in the clear blue mocking morn; yet the little houses were low and warm, and each had its makeshift for fuel, and in each the husband ate, and the wife sewed, and the babes wept and prattled as they have in generations past; and none looked on the sky to call it treacherous.

One morning the sun rose with a swift bound into a cloudless field.

The air was mild, dead, absolutely silent and motionless. The wires along the railway alone sang loudly, as though in warning--a warning unfounded and without apparent cause. Yet the sighing in the short gra.s.s was gone. In the still air the smokes of the town rose directly upright; and answering to them faint, thin spires rose here and there far out over the prairies, all straight, unswerving, ominous, terrible.

There was a great hush, a calm, a pause upon all things. The sky was blue and cloudless, but at last it could not conceal the mockery it bore upon its face, so that when men looked at it and listened to the singing of the wires they stopped, and without conscious plan hurried on, silent, to the nearest company.

Somewhere, high up in the air, unheralded, invisible, there were pa.s.sing some thin inarticulate sounds, far above the tops of the tallest smoke spires, as though some t.i.tan blew a far jest across the continent to another near the sea, who answered with a gusty laugh, sardonic, grim, foreknowing. Every horse free on the range came into the _coulees_ that morning, and those which were fenced in ran up and down excitedly. Men ate and smoked, and women darned, and babes played. In a thousand homes there was content with this new land, so wild at one time, but now so quickly tamed, so calm, so gentle, so thoroughly subdued.

The sun came on, valiantly stripped bare, knowing what was to be.

Still louder rose the requiem of the wire. The sky smiled on. There was no token to strike with alarm these human beings, their faculties dulled by a thousand years of differentiation. "Peace and goodwill,"

said men; for now it was coming on to Christmastide. But the wire was seeking to betray the secret of the sky, which was resolved to carry war, to sweep these beings from the old range that once was tenantless!