The High Calling Part 25

"And the elderly woman who wears gla.s.ses is your sister. She has been so kind to me. I can never repay her."

"Don't try. Yes, Hannah and I have been here at Tolchaco a long time. We have had the fun of our lives here. She does about everything in the house from washing the dishes to converting the heathen. She works for nothing and throws in her time."

"And--and Miss Gray?"

"I thought maybe you might enquire about her, after awhile. Well, Miss Gray is one of the salt of the earth. She's a whole salt mine. She's not been here long, but she's got 'em all going,--Indians, cowboys, traders, gamblers, missionaries, teamsters, everybody. Everybody is in love with her. I've asked her to marry me several times, that is, I've only asked her to marry me once, several times, and I get the same answer every time. She's a graduate of Mt. Holyoke and used to be physical director of the girl's school at Peekskill. That's where she learned to swim and rescue people. She knows several languages and can talk Navajo better than Peshlekietsetti. And she is the friend of every Indian, Navajo or Hopi, between Sunshine and Castle b.u.t.te. And she is not proud a little bit. And cheerful? Well, she is just as cheerful every time she says no to me as if it was the first time. And she can sing--you've heard her Sunday nights. She can sing a rattlesnake out of its skin. Well, there is a lot more, but I consider that much a pretty good introduction. If I had one like it, I'd feel as if the press notices had the performance distanced a mile."

Bauer stared at Clifford, hardly knowing how to take all he said. The German mind was not acclimated to this special kind of humour. But Clifford was so absolutely frank, and happy, so free from any hint of heartbreak or trouble, that the more Bauer listened to him the more he liked him and the more fascinated he became with his peculiar surroundings. He had never known any real Christian people except the Douglas family, and the spectacle of the genuine self sacrifice, the bearing of daily discomfort and pain and wrong, with such cheerfulness and even hilarity, moved him with a feeling of astonishment.

Clifford's description of Miss Gray filled Bauer with wonder that a young woman of such character and attainments was willing to go to such a place and give her life to the seemingly impossible task of Christianising a lot of dirty, superst.i.tious, lazy Indians. That was his definition of her task and of the people whom she had come to serve. But he had not yet learned even the first short lesson of the attractiveness of the missionary call. And he had not even a glimmer of the great fact that the history of missions in every age reveals the beautiful fact that some of earth's choicest spirits have considered missionary work as the most honourable and honouring work in the world, and that no grace or strength of mind or body is too great to pour it all out unstintedly on just such dirty, unattractive beings as Indians. Bauer was destined to begin by pitying a mistake which such a young woman as Miss Gray was making, and end by envying her the place which she had made for herself in the hearts of these neglected people.

He was silent during a period while Clifford was busy with some part of his harness demanding his attention, then Clifford said, after whistling a bar of "Anywhere with Jesus I can safely go":

"Any more of our folks you want ante mortem epitaphs of?"

"Mr. and Mrs. Masters. Of course I've not seen them. I've heard Mr. and Mrs. Douglas speak of them. It was through Mr. Douglas, you know, that I came out here."

"Yes, the Douglases are good friends of the mission. Mr. Douglas sends us two hundred dollars a year and sometimes as high as four hundred and twenty. Wish he'd come out here and bring his family. Hasn't he got a daughter by the name of Helen?"

"Yes," said Bauer. And try as hard as he would he could not conceal his embarra.s.sment.

"Do you know her? Is she a nice girl?"

"Yes," said Bauer, again blushing deeply. And then he hastened to say, quickly for him:

"You were going to tell me about Mr. and Mrs. Masters?"

"Oh, was I? Well, they're the salt of the earth, too. They don't count any cost and the harder the work, the better it seems to suit. Mr.

Masters can live on eighteen dollars a month and board himself. There isn't anything he can't do, from making a windmill out of a bushel of old tin cans to preaching seven times on Sunday. And Mrs. Masters is a prize winner for making trouble feel ashamed of itself. She never complains about anything. One week last summer we had eight days of continuous wind. You never saw a desert wind, did you? Or taste one?

Well, you have one of the times of your life coming to you. The sand cavorts around like spring lamb and peas. You can't shut it out of a hardboiled egg. It drifts into the house and covers the dishes and the beds and the books and the chairs and the floors and does the work of blotting paper while you're writing letters to the Agricultural Department in Washington asking them to irrigate the Little Colorado so we can raise garden truck in the channel between the rainy seasons. At the dinner table the custard pie looks as if it was dusted with pulverised sugar and you eat so much sand that you begin to feel the need of a gizzard like a hen. It fills your pockets, and at night you can shake a pint out of each ear, if your ears are big enough. It drifts up on the porch like snow and sifts through a pane of gla.s.s like a sieve.

"Well, all through that eight-day week, Mrs. Masters was so cheerful it was actually depressing. She couldn't have looked more cheerful if she had been going over to Flagstaff to sit for her photograph on her birthday. The rest of us just groaned and bore it. We lost our temper with one another and never found it again till the wind quit. We were ornery and fractious. We just couldn't help it. But Mrs. Masters went around the house nursing the baby and a toothache and singing so loud you could hear her way out to the graveyard:

"'The sands of Time are sinking, The dawn of heaven breaks, The summer morn I've sighed for, The fair sweet morn awakes.'

"My! I used to think to myself if the man that wrote that hymn knew how the sands of Tolchaco were sinking into our hair and spirits, he'd a written another verse, to cheer us on our sandy way. But any woman that can keep up her spirits during a desert sand storm is more than a half sister to a cherubim. I don't want to know anyone better than that. It would scare me to be in the same room alone with him."

"I'm sure I shall like them both," said Bauer. "It seems to me that all the people here at this mission are pretty near the angels."

"Well, some of us are a little lower, I guess. But we do have some jolly times and no mistake. Barring the heat and the sand and the floods and the drinking water and the wind and the canned goods and the absence of pasture and the high price of hay and the lack of shade and a few other little things, Tolchaco is a great resort all the year around for people that aren't too particular about trifles.

"But you've pumped me dry about us; mind if I ask a few questions about you?"

"No," said Bauer with a smile. "There isn't much for me to tell."

"I take it you're a German to start with?" said Clifford gravely, but he managed in some remarkable manner to work and whistle at the same time he spoke.

"Yes."

"You won't have much use for the language out here, except Miss Gray uses it if she wants to. She's reading a book right now in German, written by a Mr. Goethe. If I had a name like that, I'd have it broken up and set again in a new frame. Mr. Douglas in his letter about you said you were an inventor by trade. But he didn't go into particulars.

What can you invent?"

Bauer started to tell Clifford about his incubator. Clifford grew so interested that he dropped his work and came over on the log by Bauer to listen. He was just eagerly beginning to ask a number of questions when he looked up and exclaimed,

"There's that old white face broke his hobbles again and he's heading for the corn patch. I'll have to head him off."

He started towards the unshackled offender, and Bauer was amused to see the animal, the moment it caught sight of its keeper kick up its heels and make a dash for the 'dobe flats into which it madly galloped, Clifford disappearing in its wake, enveloped in a cloud of dust.

The afternoon sun was pleasantly flecked as it sifted down through the cottonwoods on Bauer, and he sat there going over his talk with Clifford and smiling once in awhile in his own fashion as he recalled a sentence here and there. It was pleasant to be with friends, to feel the strength coming back, to note the response of his lungs to the full drawn breath.

He had not had a hemorrhage since reaching Tolchaco. And in spite of his submersion in the river he had suffered almost no pain. He began to construct some kind of a future, and wonder what he could do while at the mission to help in any way. He was paying for his board, and by the plan arranged between Douglas and Masters they were to provide medical help or nursing if necessary. But Bauer had surprised everyone by his wonderful response to nature's help and it looked now very much as if in less than six months he would be on the road to full recovery. It was now the last of June and the desert heat was pulsing over all the strange land, but Bauer was drinking in health and beginning to yield to the glamour of the place.

"Guide me, Oh, Thou Great Jehovah, Pilgrim through this desert land"--a voice soared up close by, ringing down past Bauer, and he looked up towards the Mission.

Down the slight elevation came a young woman with a group of children following. As they came down near where he sat, Bauer saw it was Miss Gray and half a dozen of her charges who had been left in her care while Miss Clifford and one of the housemaids had driven over to the Canyon to see a sick woman.

She came and sat down on the sand at the side of the old log and said in a perfectly simple and friendly manner, free from all hint of embarra.s.sment:

"I saw you were all alone here, Mr. Bauer, and came down to see if there was anything you needed. If you want to be alone, I'll go away."

"Why, no, I don't need anything, and I don't want you to go away, at least not until I have tried to tell you what is not easy to say, what a wonderful thing that you--that you actually saved my life from that treacherous stream!"

"Oh, I was only too glad to do it, it wasn't any trouble at all, don't think of such a thing," the young woman tried to speak lightly, thinking she detected a note of unnecessary shyness in the German youth.

To her surprise Bauer burst out laughing.

"I beg pardon, Miss Gray, but that is just what Mr. Clifford said you would say if I tried to thank you, and I couldn't help laughing, it sounded so strange."

"What else did Mr. Clifford say?" asked the lifesaver, looking up quickly at Bauer.

Bauer was so taken back he couldn't reply. Miss Gray laughed, the most jolly, contagious laugh Bauer had ever heard.

"Never mind. But isn't Mr. Clifford a character? He's one of the rarest fellows you ever saw. The most self sacrificing and self forgetful man I ever knew. And the bravest. I wish you could have seen him in that tangle with Tracker and the horses. I never expected he would get out alive. Did he tell you about it?"

"He told me about you. How you------"

"Had to strike you in the face? It seems dreadful, doesn't it? But I had to or you would have drowned both of us. You'll forgive that, won't you?"

"Forgive?" murmured Bauer.

"Because you see the Little Colorado is one of the most treacherous streams in the world. It's full of sink holes and they make eddies and whirlpools and when it's in flood as that day, it's carrying down all sorts of drift stuff and you are liable to get hit and pulled down.

Well, Mr. Clifford went clear under twice, carried down by getting caught between the fork branch of an old water log. All the time he was pulling at Tracker and cutting away with his knife at the harness. If he hadn't cut the harness just in time, I couldn't have got you out, for you were caught around the feet with the lines. I suppose you got tangled in them when you fell over. We had a serious time getting Mr.

Clifford back to consciousness. So if you are going to thank anyone it is Mr. Clifford who deserves most of it. I simply towed you to the bank after he had cut you loose."

"Then I owe my life to both of you. That makes you doubly my friends.

You do not know how much it means to me."

"Consider everything said," interrupted Miss Gray with a cheery tone, "and of course you will excuse me for pulling your hair?"

"Pulling my hair," murmured Bauer.