The Westerners Part 10

"Yo' smok'?" he inquired, tendering his tobacco.

"Thank you, no," replied the old man with a tone of breeding which Lafond felt but could not define.

The half-breed could not make out the newcomer, and the conversation failed to enlighten him. That was an epoch when all the world turned to the West; but it was a practical world. There one might in time meet all sorts and conditions of men, from the English lord to the turbulent Fenian; from the New York exquisite fallen on hard times to the "bad man" who had never been east of the Mississippi. One never betrayed surprise at anything one might bring ash.o.r.e from this flotsam and jetsam of the human race. But all these odds and ends were at least made of tough material, strong enough to run wherever a rapid current might dash them, capable of supporting hard knocks against one another or the obstructions in the way; while this placid old man seemed to Lafond like a crystal vessel, of rare quality, perhaps, but none the less fragile. At the last he asked bluntly, "What do you here?"

The old man fell silent for a minute or two and gazed into the coals of the dying fire.

"My name is Durand," he said at last, with an infinitude of sorrow in the tones of his voice. "I am an entomologist. I am here to get specimens--b.u.t.terflies; but it is not here that I belong. My place is elsewhere, and that I know. But it is not in my country, and----" he broke off. Lafond looked on curiously, for the dreamy haze had faded from the speaker's eyes. "My friend," Durand went on, "there are times when one cares not to see the face of man except in the bosom of the great nature. I do not know that you understand that. It is with the bitterness of a wrong that such knowledge comes, and with it comes the hate of cities and of the things men do. Some men have had their will of me, and I am come to the wilderness. They called it revenge to drive me here."

"Revenge! But you still live!" repeated Lafond in wonder.

"And is it that you think the taking of life is revenge?" cried Durand, with sudden energy. "They who take their revenge in killing are actually the merciful ones, and they cheat no one but themselves."

"Yes?" asked Lafond, his soul in the question.

The other turned in surprise at his companion's vehemence. He saw a stolid; dark-skinned man gazing impa.s.sively into the fire.

"They are fools," went on Durand bitterly, after a moment; "just fools.

These others were of more ingenuity; they knew what would hurt, what would avenge them better than the killing."

"I do not understand," said the half-breed, feeling his way slowly, for the fear of damming this flow of confidence. He looked away, for his eye glowed, though his voice was steady. "W'at is it? If one kills, if one takes that life, w'at is worse?"

"Worse, worse?" cried Durand, flinging his hands impotently upward. "A thousand things!" He suddenly became calm, and turned to Lafond with impressive forefinger. "Listen, my friend. Life is a little thing.

Anyone can take it who has a gun, or a knife, or even a stone. But the true revenge is in finding out what it is that each man prizes the most, and then taking it from him. And that requires power! power!

power!

"Few there are who have not something they prize more than life," he added gloomily. The fire died from his eye. He became once again the timid old b.u.t.terfly hunter, pushing blindly out into the wilderness, wondering at himself for thus exposing an old wound to a chance pa.s.ser; and yet perhaps feeling in some dim fashion--so inscrutable are the instincts of these half-childish natures--that in so doing he was following for a moment the lines of greater destinies than his own.

And certainly, long after the dipper had swung below the pole star, Lafond sat staring into the ashes of the fire, just as four days since he had stared into the ashes of a brave and chivalrous life. In his history there were the two crucial hours--one after the greatest battle of the plains; the other after a dozen sentences exchanged with a half-crazy old entomologist. From the potent reflections induced by these one hundred and twenty minutes it resulted that Michal Lafond became civilized and a seeker for wealth in the development of the young country. In wealth he saw power; in power the ability to give or take away.

The depriving each man of that which he prizes the most!

XIII

THE DISSOLVING VIEW

While things have gone on, we have conducted our business and returned each evening to our armchairs by the fire. There we have sat at ease and reviewed the world. Events have come to pa.s.s. Diplomats have quarrelled gravely over the wording of a doc.u.ment. From our evening papers we have gathered a languid interest in the controversy. Six months later we pick up the paper and find that the dispute is still going on. A German and an Englishman play a game of chess over the cable. This too is reported in our journal, and we follow its progress with attention through the weeks of its duration. Somebody agitates the establishment of a new industry in our native town. It will raise the value of our real estate, so we attend meetings for some months and talk about it, after which the industry is a.s.sured. Two years later it is in operation and we congratulate ourselves. Friends of our younger days marry; and before we know it their houses are noisy with the shoutings of children. Leisurely we grow older. Our ideas become fixed, often by the most trivial of circ.u.mstances. Africa means tangled forest; India, a jungle; Siberia, broad snow plains; all South America, a dripping stillness of tropical verdure; simply because somewhere, some time, a book or paper, the woodcut of a child's lesson, has so generalized them for us. Against these preconceived notions the events we read about are cast.

In very much this way the constant facts of the West have been to us the Indian and the buffalo. Before our eyes the Master Showman has held insistently this picture. Against the background of the occidental hills or the flat reach of the gra.s.s-nodding prairies has posed in solemn gravity the naked warrior, leaning from his pony upon his feather-bedecked lance; or, in the choking dust of its own progression, has lumbered heavily the buffalo myriad. These have seemed permanent--the man and the beast.

Then, before our protesting conservatism, the scene has dissolved in a mist of strange shapes and violent deeds, only to steady a moment later into a new picture. The mounted figure has disappeared, and in his place, against the glow of sunset, the st.u.r.dy form of the husbandman grasps the shaft of his plough, gazing past the tired horses, and brooding the slow thoughts of his calling. The last rays catch the sheen of grain--a sea of it--and shimmer lightly until they lose themselves in contrast with the square of ruddy light that marks the windows of a farmhouse.

This is the new West. We rub our eyes and wonder. The diplomats still squabble; the chess game dawdles its languid way; the factory is getting ready to pay its first dividend; our friends' children are about to enter the high school. Everything has developed along the usual lines of growth, and yet this greater change has come about in a night. We turn back the files of our paper, and find that it has occupied in the world's history just fifteen years! In that little s.p.a.ce of time the inst.i.tutions of untold ages have been overthrown and new ones subst.i.tuted for them.

Deadwood was founded in 1876. In 1890 Sitting Bull and his tribe were utterly destroyed in the mid-winter fight at Wounded Knee. Between those dates, the Dakotas have manufactured at home an article of quite adequate civilization.

To be sure, the product is perhaps a little crude. Although enormous grain fields attest indubitably that the farmer has tamed the soil, equally enormous Indian reservations as indubitably dispute too sweeping an a.s.sertion of it. Electric railways may be instanced in some towns. The sprightly six-shooter is in others the quickest road to the longest journey. Hot Springs has a modern hotel and an improved bar; a scant thirty miles north is the unsheriffed log-mining camp where the "bad man" terrorizes in all his glory.

These things are true, but they count for little. The great facts remain, and they are these: a cowboy named Tenney tried to la.s.so the last buffalo some years since and got himself yanked over several irregular miles of country; the Sioux are herded nicely on their reservations and shoot at nickels with bows and arrows for the amus.e.m.e.nt of pa.s.sing tourists. The old frontier conditions have gone.

If you want trouble, you must go out to look for it; it no longer comes to you unsought. In a word the broad sea of the wilderness has shrunken to bayous and bays surrounded and intersected by dried areas fit for the cultivation of paper collars and tenderfeet. The frontier still exists, but exists in its isolation only because it is not as commercially desirable as the rest.

This is true of the country at large. It is also true of Pah-sap-pah, the Black Hills. Already a railroad has pushed its way up the main valley. The folders show a map with the usual blood-red artery of mathematical straightness, pa.s.sing through myriads of small-type towns, clinging desperately by their noses to the blessings of commerce, and sundry dignified, large-type cities, standing more aloof on their own merits. It all looks imposing enough on paper; but in reality the line does little more than keep itself warm in the narrow valley of its route. On closer inspection the myriads of towns disappear.

Minnekahta is a station in the midst of a vast plain, Pringles a sawmill, Stony Point just nothing at all. For the Black Hills are great of extent, and one county of the Dakotas could swallow an eastern State.

All this, from border warfare to comparative order--say from Canute to Elizabeth--not in a thousand years, but in the brief age of a man-child growing out from his kindergarten into his college!

To one who has lived with the country, the process has been an education more thorough than that usually vouchsafed men. It has lacked in the graces and accomplishments, perhaps, but it has brought to the highest pitch the two qualities of self-reliance and of power of insight into men's characters. Whatever blunders a frontiersman may commit when visiting his neighbor cities in the East, they are never the bashful blunders of a countryman. Bunco men can clean him out in a gambling joint, but who ever heard of their selling him a gold brick?

He has lived through all this hundreds of years ago, when Wild Bill was killed at Deadwood, or perhaps a century or so later, when, the year following, Alfred took the Caldwells to the Hills and was so nearly rushed by the Sioux. His life has been an epitome. He has met most conditions at one time or another, and is no longer afraid of them.

In a tale dealing with this period of the dissolving view--when in changing from one slide of the lantern to the other the Master Showman has permitted us a little glimpse of hurrying, heroic figures and dazzled us with the clouds of great deeds swiftly done--the teller must adopt one of two methods. He must either generalize, or be content to spend his s.p.a.ce on single episodes. In that period, every day was a book. Men counted as nothing experiences filled with an excitement or a pathos or a beauty intense enough to render significant the whole life of a quiet New Englander. Acts were many, and trod close on one another's heels, yet to each act there was a sequence of motive, of desire, of logical effect, as well capable of being sought out and described as though they were not entangled and confused in the rush of the moments. The story teller could find his task in the dissection of these, and the task would be interesting. But to one who is concerned, not with a period, but a life, this is impossible.

The fifteen years saw a marked change in the fortunes of the half-breed known as Michal Lafond. During all that time he had led an apparently honest and law-abiding life. No man could say that he had been cheated by him or that he had been favored; but one and all with whom the half-breed had come into contact could speak with admiration and fear of the latter's power of seizing the best of the main chance. He had left the child at the Spotted Tail reservation, giving her name as Molly Lafond and making arrangements for her maintenance. He turned some gold claims to advantage, but abandoned that sort of thing as too uncertain. He partic.i.p.ated mildly in the prosperity of several of the mushroom towns of the period, but soon drew out of booms as possessing also too much of the element of luck.

He did the hundreds of other things to which men in a new country can always turn their hands, and in each he made his profit; but in each he found something lacking to the elaborate scheme of power he had builded one evening before a prairie camp fire. Finally he hit upon whisky and dance halls and there he stayed. Abandoning all other enterprises, he gave his individual attention to these two, for he found in them not only the surest and largest monetary returns, but the certain popularity which men accord to those who minister to their pleasures.

From Deadwood to Edgemont there gradually grew up a string of saloons bearing the name of Lafond. Some of them were paying, some on the point of paying, some merely lying latent for the boom which Lafond thought to see in the near future. For, as of old, he delighted in discounting the future. He liked long shots in his investments.

Over each of these various establishments their owner was in the habit of placing a man chosen according to the needs of the place, and this man fell more or less under Lafond's personal supervision according as the exigencies of the case seemed to demand it. The half-breed's policy was to keep in actual touch with the most prosperous, and to give personal effort to the most promising. The others could take care of themselves until their time came. So at Mulberry Gulch, where the camp consisted only of a number of grub stakers, he owned a little log cabin which he had never seen. At Deadwood, an old and prosperous camp, he was proprietor of a begilded and bemirrored splendor so well established that it needed only a periodical supervising visit to keep it running smoothly. At Copper Creek was also nothing but a log-cabin saloon; but Copper Creek bade fair to amount to something. Perhaps the spirit of the three kinds was best indicated by the signs over their counters. Mulberry Gulch exhibited a rudely lettered device informing the public, "Pies, Whisky and Pistols for Sail Here." Deadwood thirsty ones learned that they should "Ask for Our 1860 Old Crow; the Finest on Earth." Copper Creek sententiously remarked: "To Trust is Bust."

All this symbolized nothing more or less than the commercial history of a successful man in the West. It meant nothing except that Lafond had the instinct and the cleverness, and so was getting rich. More interesting than the change of his fortune was the change of the man himself.

In the old days he had been crafty in a subtle way; but he had been impulsive, eager, excitable, inclined to jump at the bidding of his intuitions. Now his character seemed to have expanded and modified. A powder explosion had slightly bent his straight figure, halted his gait, and seamed his face with powder marks. To hide these last, he wore a beard. The effect was one of quiet responsibility, and a certain geniality, though a keen observer might have hesitated to call this geniality kindly.

His manner was very quiet. He never reproved his subordinates or addressed a hasty word to anyone, unless he became thoroughly convinced of the culprit's incapacity. Then his anger was at white heat. He could forgive deliberate attempts to evade his commands or conscious efforts at rascality, for with them he could cope; but mistakes he never condoned. An occasional slight inversion of the natural order of words or phrases was all that remained to him of his old accent.

Altogether he was a personage whose public position was unexceptionable. In the West no man has a past, unless that past is personified and carries a rebuking six-shooter. He had wealth, popularity, an acquaintance as wide as the Hills themselves. All that meant power, especially when combined with a shrewd ability to read men's characters.

But of the old order one thing remained--his religion. In the storm and stress of a period hot with events, his life work was conceived and laid out. The lines of its plan had been seared into his soul by crime. He no longer felt the smart, but the cicatrix was there, and he daily bowed to its symbolism, often without a thought of what it really meant. His was like the future of a boy who has entered the army; his line of conduct was all prearranged, and his independence of it never occurred to him. There was no glowering hate in this; only a certain sense of inevitability. In other words, it was his religion.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "COME ACROSS, OR I'LL..."]

Certain things were to be done. First of all he must become wealthy.

Very well; wealthy he became. He must become popular. Agreed; he cultivated his fellow men. He must know how to read character and to hit upon weaknesses. Exactly; he bent his cleverness to the task.

There was a larger end to which these three were but the means; but that would come later. Just now life meant quiet, earnest compa.s.sing of the three things. Until they were quite within his grasp, he could afford to shut into the background what their ultimate signification should be. Lafond lived tranquilly a perfectly moral existence.

But without his volition the great idea crystallized into some sort of shape. It was always in the background, to be sure; but, after all, a background fills the picture. _That which men hold to be most dear_!

The years had taught him what it was, without his actually demanding it of them. Men hold most dear property, reputation, honor among their fellow men, and the love of women. Women hold most dear virtue and a good name.

About fifteen years after he had quitted the Indians, Lafond suddenly realized that he had gained the power and knew how to use it. Quite dispa.s.sionately he looked ahead to the next step.

There were Jim Buckley, Billy Knapp, Alfred and the doctor's family.

The latter now included only the girl, whom Lafond had himself caused to be raised to young womanhood. Of the others, Jim Buckley and Alfred had long since left the country--Alfred for Arizona, where he had gone into cow punching; Buckley for Montana and Idaho, in whose mountains he was supposed to be prospecting. These two, then, were out of the way for the present. They would never be difficult to find, and in comparison with Billy they had held quite a secondary place at the time of the half-breed's molten state, before he had cooled into the fixed forms of his conduct of life.

The reason for this throws not a little light on Lafond's character.

The feminine streak in him hated Billy Knapp personally, simply because that individual was loud in talk, great in size, and bl.u.s.tering in manner. He could restrain his resentment against the bashful Alfred or the imperturbable Jim; but not that against a man who seemed always, to the high strung half-breed, the potential bully. He would have followed Billy Knapp to China, if necessary.

But it so happened that that individual, after a checkered career, had settled down in the village or camp of Copper Creek, not forty miles from Lafond's headquarters at Rapid. Billy's vicissitudes were those of many of his cla.s.s. Trained in the liberal give and take policy of the early frontier times, he found himself, on their ebb, stranded high and dry without appropriate means of progression. Billy was used to relying on his plainscraft, his courage, his skill with firearms, and his personal strength. Such qualities as economy, accuracy of estimate, frugality, and patience in the overcoming of abstractions would have been, to his early life, practically useless. He came to be a big-hearted, generous fellow, without the slightest idea of the value of money or the burden of debt. He was apt to be seized by many whims, which he was wont to gratify on the spot.