Two Wyoming Girls and Their Homestead Claim Part 5

I had purposely refrained from telling my story until now. Now I told it, to the consternation of my auditors. Jessie could scarcely credit the evidence of her senses, and Mrs. Horton said feelingly:

"Thank G.o.d that you have a brave heart and good sense, Leslie! If you hadn't thought of that clause in the homestead law in time, and had gone away last night, I tell you this settlement would have been in mourning this morning! Seems to me that I just couldn't bear for you children to lose this place now--this place that your poor pa had set his heart on! And to think that such an accident should take place so near the time of your proving up makes it so much the worse, for, if the house had gone, I don't believe you could have got your t.i.tle. No, not if you had taken down a dozen witnesses to testify to the burning.

The law is strict. I doubt if the agent would have the power to give you a deed unless there was a house standing on the land at the moment that the deed was issued, no matter if he wanted to ever so badly."

She was full of sympathy and kindness, poor soul, and, listening to her exclamations and condolences, I was sorry for her. Jessie was right: there were no jack oaks in the ravine down which Mr. Horton must have pa.s.sed on the way from the north pasture to his home.

CHAPTER VII

SURMISES

Mrs. Horton and Jessie walked around the house to the bed-room window, and stood surveying the pile of rubbish beneath it, wondering greatly why a fire should break out in that place.

"The only way I can account for it is that a spark from the chimney must have fallen into this pile and set it afire," Mrs. Horton observed, turning bits of the pile in question over with the toe of her shoe. "I'm not blaming you, Leslie, but it is true that young folks can't be too careful with fire. I wouldn't be a mite surprised now, if you just filled the kitchen stove full of dry stuff and set it off when you built a fire to get your supper."

"Leslie always does use lots of kindling," interposed Jessie, who was, it must be admitted, more careful about small savings than I.

"You may depend on it, then, that that's just how it happened," Mrs.

Horton went on, while I remained silent. "You see, when you start a fire like that, lots of live sparks are carried up the chimney, and it's just a mercy that there are not more houses burned than there are on account of it. I say it for your good, Leslie, when I say that I hope this will be a lesson to you; you've had a narrow escape. My! but it makes me shudder to think of it!"

As she stopped talking to shudder more effectively I ventured to make an observation that, it was strange, had occurred to neither Jessie nor herself:

"It took that spark--supposing the fire was started by a spark from the chimney--a long time to fall, didn't it? It was after twelve when the fire broke out, and I had supper at six, besides--" but there I checked myself. The more I thought the matter over, the more desirable it seemed that I should keep to myself the dreadful certainty that I felt in regard to the origin of the fire. If people liked to believe that it was caused by some negligence or carelessness of mine, it would only complicate matters, beside robbing them of a comfortable conviction, for me to tell that I had had no fire on the previous evening. Yet such was the case. I had made my solitary meal of bread and milk.

"What a girl you are, to be sure!" Mrs. Horton exclaimed, in genuine admiration, as we turned back into the house. "Now, why couldn't Jessie or I think of that! Twelve hours to fall! No, it would have been six hours falling, wouldn't it? You said the fire broke out about midnight. Well, you can think of more things and keep more quiet about them than any ten men that ever I saw. When I think of anything I like to tell of it, and I expect likely that's the reason that I never think of real smart things; I don't hold on to them long enough; I pick them before they're ripe."

Jessie went to the stove and lifted a lid to peep inquiringly into the fire-box. "I'm not so sure that the fire wasn't started as Mrs. Horton says," she declared. "This stove holds fire for a long time, you know, Leslie. A gust of wind might have come up and made such a draft that the embers started to burning again."

"If all the world were apple-pie, and all the sea were ink, and all the trees were bread and cheese, what should we have to drink?" was my not irrelevant thought. In strict accordance, however, with the character for sagacity that Mrs. Horton had just given me, I said nothing; but Mrs. Horton a.s.sented to the proposition with energy enough for both. Ralph was giving unmistakable signs of sleepiness.

Mrs. Horton sat down and took him on her lap; the small head drooped on her shoulder while she went on to the creaking accompaniment of the old rocking chair. "I've just thought of another way in which that fire might have been started"--she evidently had it upon her conscience to furnish a satisfactory solution of the mystery--"I have been noticing that you keep matches in that china saucer over the mantel-piece, and it's right alongside the window-sill. Now, girls, I don't want to seem to find fault with any of your arrangements; but I do like an iron match safe, with a heavy lid, better myself; then there's no danger of their getting out, and you can't be too careful about such things. Suppose, now, that one of those mountain rats that are always prying around, getting into every crack and crevice that they can wedge themselves into--suppose one of them had come into the house, and crept out again with a lot of matches--they'll eat anything--and suppose that rat went through the rubbish pile and rubbed against--"

But this line of reasoning proved too much for Jessie, who, with good cause, prided herself upon her housekeeping.

"There isn't a hole big enough for a rat to crawl through in the house!" she declared, with some warmth.

The rooms were all lathed and plastered. Mrs. Horton looked around.

"One might come in at a window," she suggested, with less confidence.

Knowing the truth, and having in my possession the means of proving it, if need be, I took a somewhat wicked pleasure in this game of wild conjecture. It was, at all events, a satisfaction to be able to veto this last proposition.

"There were only two windows open, Mrs. Horton, and they were open only a few inches at the top," I said.

"A rat might climb up the side of the window, and come in that way,"

was the reply to this. "But"--her face suddenly brightening as a new solution of the mystery flashed upon her mind--"I don't think it was a rat, after all, and I'll warrant I know now just how it happened. Last night was Wednesday night, you know, and they always have those dancing-parties out at Morley's tavern, beyond the Eastern Slope, of a Wednesday night. Lots of those Crusoe miners go to them, and they all smoke. Now what'll you chance that as one of them was coming home--they have to go right past here--he didn't light a match for his cigar, and when he was through with it, fling the match right down against the house, or, maybe, he threw the stub of a cigar down?"

"It might be, I suppose," Jessie admitted, rather reluctantly. She was evidently disposed to abide by her own theory of reviving embers and falling sparks.

"Oh, I'm well-nigh sure, now that I think of it, that that was the way it happened," Mrs. Horton insisted, pausing to brush Ralph's damp curls back from his forehead. "You see, I wouldn't feel so positive that it was done in just that way if it wasn't for an experience that we had, here in the valley a long spell ago."

"You refer to the time when the great forest was burned?" Jessie inquired rather absently. She had seated herself at the sewing machine and was busily running up the seams of Ralph's new kilt.

"Yes; that's the time. It was before you came here. And the fire was set in the way I spoke of. A couple of young men--they weren't much more than boys--came up from town, and they were just at that age when they thought it a smart thing to be able to smoke a cigar without turning sick after it. They were staying at the hotel, and one day they went with a party from there up to see the marble quarries.

There'd been an awful dry spell; it had lasted for weeks, and everything was just as dry as touch-wood. There were notices posted all along the roads and trails, forbidding folks building camp-fires, or anything of that kind. The boys, after they had been to the quarries, started home ahead of the others, and on foot. I don't reckon that they'd got above a quarter of a mile from the quarries when they pulled out some cigars and matches, intending, of course, to have a smoke. Well, they had it, but it wasn't just the kind they'd expected. First one, then the other, threw down their lighted matches, after they'd got their cigars to going. The wind was blowing hard in their faces and toward the quarry, as it happened, and the next thing they knew they heard a great roaring, and as they said afterward, two pillars of flame seemed to spring right out of the ground, one on either side of the trail, and to reach so high that they almost touched the tree-tops. In less time than I'm taking in telling of it they had reached the tree-tops, and then the two little pillars of fire became a great blazing ocean of fire up in mid-air. You know how 'tis with pine needles and cones; they make a blaze as if the end of the world had come. No wonder the poor boys were scared! It was right in the thickest part of the woods, and what with the fire roaring away before the wind on either side of them, and the clouds of smoke and sparks roaring away above the burning tree-tops, it must have been an awful sight. They were in no particular danger themselves, because the fire was going away from them, but as they stood there, blistering in the heat, they thought of their parents--their parents, who were right in the path of the flames, and in the way they acted up to that thought, you may see the difference in folks. One of them--d.i.c.k Adams, his name was--pulled his hat down over his eyes, shook out his handkerchief and tied it over his mouth to save his lungs, and said to the other, 'If anything happens to our folks we are the ones to blame for it; come on and help;' and with that he gave a leap down the trail as if he would overtake the fire itself. But the other boy, he wasn't made of that kind of stuff. He just turned and ran the other way, and folks did say that he never stopped running until he reached town, twenty miles away. When poor d.i.c.k, blackened with grime and smoke, with his hair singed and his burnt shoes dropping off his feet, staggered into the open s.p.a.ce about the quarry, there were the folks, and even the horses, all safe. They hadn't started when they saw the fire coming, and so, knowing that they were safe where they were, they stayed. The fire swept past them on either side, and all they had to do was to wait till the trail got cool enough to travel over. There was no great damage done after all, though a great many trees were destroyed, but so were acres and acres of underbrush, and that was a big help to stockmen. d.i.c.k was pretty well done up, but he didn't care for any more cigars, and his father paid the fine that the township's trustees a.s.sessed against him, cheerful on that account, though he said he was sorry he couldn't save the timber. Now, Leslie,"

she concluded her story, abruptly, "if you'll just move those hats a little I'll lay the baby on the bed."

After I had complied, and Ralph's head was on a pillow instead of her arm, she came to Jessie's side and stood regarding her work thoughtfully.

"You're real spry on the machine, aren't you?" she at length remarked, admiringly. "Now me, I'm as slow!" She looked around the room and continued, with seeming irrelevance: "I s'pose the furnishings must have cost you a good deal?" Her tone was very gentle.

"Yes," Jessie returned, comprehending her meaning with the quick intuition that grief gives. "Yes; they did."

"Well, he's at rest. You can visit his grave. They're worth all they cost and more, but I was thinking now if you felt like taking in a little sewing to help along until--"

"Why, I'd like to do it, dear Mrs. Horton!" Jessie interrupted, looking up with sparkling eyes. "I've never thought of it before, but if I could get it to do I would be so glad! Every little toward the proving up is just so much gained."

"That is what I was thinking. I can let you have quite a little work myself, and I know there are others who will be glad of a chance to get sewing done. I declare, I'm glad I thought of it! It will be so nice for you to do something to help out right here at home. And," she went on, her kind eyes shining, "maybe you can learn to be a dressmaker--"

"No, no!" interposed Jessie, who had her future comfortably mapped out in her mind. "I mean to be a teacher."

"Do you? That's a good, respectable trade, too, and a teacher you shall be if I can do anything to help you get a school."

Jessie smiled up at her gratefully. Mrs. Horton might not, perhaps, have great influence in educational circles, but the highest authority among them could not have had a kinder heart. But something that Mrs.

Horton had said set me thinking of quite another matter.

"If you were here so long ago," I observed, suspending my task of sh.e.l.ling peas, and looking earnestly at our visitor, "why didn't Mr.

Horton take up some land? He could have taken anything, almost then, and I--we--I have sometimes thought that he kind of wanted this place," I concluded, weakly.

Mrs. Horton's gentle face flushed; she was really fond of her husband, who, to be sure, was very careful not to let any knowledge of his underhanded doings come to her ears.

"To tell the truth, Leslie," she said, "I've thought now and again myself that Jake was looking after this place. It's a beautiful place; there isn't another as pretty in the valley, but when we first came here folks were not thinking of taking up land--no, indeed. Cattle ranges were what they were after, and they couldn't abide the settler that put up fences. No; Jake let his chance of taking the place slip, and your father took it up; and that was right; he wasn't a cattleman, and he needed the land to work. Don't you fret about Jake's wanting it. He don't need it, for one thing, for we're real well to do, if I do say it, and it would be a pretty unneighborly thing for him to grudge the place to you now. You see, Jake's ways are different. He makes folks think, often, I make no doubt, that he's set on getting things when he isn't, really. I expect he'd feel quite hurt if you were to lose this place."

"Unless he got it himself," was my silent amendment.

"We could buy the ranch where we are," Mrs. Horton went on, "and I wish Jake was willing to do it; I'm like your father was; I want a home of my own, but Jake says he doesn't like that place as well as he does another that he has in mind."

"What place is that?" asked Jessie.

"I don't know, really, Jake's no hand to talk over business matters with me; no hand at all, and so I don't worry him. I just let him take his own gait." And a very bad gait it was, if she had but known it, poor woman!

No more was said about the land, the remainder of the day pa.s.sed pleasantly, and it was nearly night-fall when Mrs. Horton again climbed into the wagon-seat and headed the horses toward home.

Good-bys had been exchanged when, suddenly, she drew in the restless horses to say: "You tell old Joe, when he comes back, how that fire got started; tell him that he must be more careful, these dry times, how he lets such a lot of dry stuff get lodged against the house."

And, with that admonition, she was gone.