The Shepherd of the Hills Part 16

And so the winter pa.s.sed, and the spring came again; came, with its soft beauty of tender green; its wealth of blossoms, and sweet fragrance of growing things. Then came the summer; that terrible summer, when all the promises of spring were broken; when no rain fell for weary months, and the settlers, in the total failure of their crops, faced certain ruin.

CHAPTER XIX.

THE DROUGHT.

It began to be serious by the time corn was waist high. When the growing grain lost its rich color and the long blades rustled dryly in the hot air, the settlers looked anxiously for signs of coming rain. The one topic of conversation at the mill was the condition of the crops. The stories were all of past drought or tales of hards.h.i.+p and want.

The moon changed and still the same hot dry sky, with only now and then a shred of cloud floating lazily across the blue. The gra.s.s in the glades grew parched and harsh; the trees rattled their shriveled leaves; creek beds lay glaring white and dusty in the sun; and all the wild things in the woods sought the distant river bottom. In the Mutton Hollow neighborhood, only the spring below the Matthews place held water; and all day the stock on the range, crowding around the little pool, tramped out the narrow fringe of green gra.s.s about its edge, and churned its bright life into mud in their struggle.

Fall came and there was no relief. Crops were a total failure.

Many people were without means to buy food for themselves and their stock for the coming winter and the months until another crop could be grown and harvested. Family after family loaded their few household goods into the big covered wagons, and, deserting their homes, set out to seek relief in more fortunate or more wealthy portions of the country.

The day came at last when Sammy found the shepherd in the little grove, near the deer lick, and told him that she and her father were going to move.

"Father says there is nothing else to do. Even if we could squeeze through the winter, we couldn't hold out until he could make another crop."

Throwing herself on the ground, she picked a big yellow daisy from a cl.u.s.ter, that, finding a little moisture oozing from a dirt- filled crevice of the rock, had managed to live, and began pulling it to pieces.

In silence the old man watched her. He had not before realized how much the companions.h.i.+p of this girl was to him. To the refined and cultivated scholar, whose lot had been cast so strangely with the rude people of the mountain wilderness, the companions.h.i.+p of such a spirit and mind was a necessity. Unconsciously Sammy had supplied the one thing lacking, and by her demands upon his thought had kept the shepherd from mental stagnation and morbid brooding. Day after day she had grown into his life--his intellectual and spiritual child, and though she had dropped the rude speech of the native, she persisted still in calling him by his backwoods t.i.tle, "Dad." But the little word had come to hold a new meaning for them both. He saw now, all at once, what he would lose when she went away.

One by one, the petals from the big daisy fell from the girl's hand, dull splashes of gold against her dress and on the gra.s.s.

"Where will you go?" he asked at last.

Sammy shook her head without looking up; "Don't know; anywhere that Daddy can earn a livin'--I mean living--for us."

"And when do you start?"

"Pretty soon now; there ain't nothin'--there is nothing to stay for now. Father told me when he went away day before yesterday that we would go as soon as he returned. He promised to be home sometime this evening. I--I couldn't tell you before, Dad, but I guess you knew."

The shepherd did know. For weeks they had both avoided the subject.

Sammy continued; "I--I've just been over to the Matthews place.

Uncle Matt has been gone three days now. I guess you know about that, too. Aunt Mollie told me all about it. Oh, I wish, I wish I could help them." She reached for another daisy and two big tears rolled from under the long lashes to fall with the golden petals.

"We'll come back in the spring when it's time to plant again, but what if you're not here?"

Her teacher could not answer for a time; then he said, in an odd, hesitating way, "Have you heard from Ollie lately?"

The girl raised her head, her quick, rare instinct divining his unspoken thought, and something she saw in her old friend's face brought just a hint of a smile to her own tearful eyes. She knew him so well. "You don't mean that, Dad," she said. "We just couldn't do that. I had a letter from him yesterday offering us money, but you know we could not accept it from him." And there the subject was dropped.

They spent the afternoon together, and in the evening, at Sammy's Lookout on the shoulder of Dewey, she bade him good-night, and left him alone with his flocks in the soft twilight.

That same evening Mr. Matthews returned from his trip to the settlement.

CHAPTER XX.

THE SHEPHERD WRITES A LETTER.

To purchase the sheep and the ranch in the Hollow, Mr. Matthews placed a heavy mortgage not only upon the ranch land but upon the homestead as well. In the loss of his stock the woodsman would lose all he had won in years of toil from the mountain wilderness.

When the total failure of the crops became a certainty, and it was clear that the country could not produce enough feed to carry his flock through the winter until the spring gra.s.s, Mr. Matthews went to the settlement hoping to get help from the bank there, where he was known.

He found the little town in confusion and the doors of the bank closed. The night before a band of men had entered the building, and, forcing the safe, had escaped to the mountains with their booty.

Old Matt's interview with the bank official was brief. "It is simply impossible, Mr. Matthews," said the man; "as it is, we shall do well to keep our own heads above water."

Then the mountaineer had come the long way home. As he rode slowly up the last hill, the giant form stooped with a weariness unusual, and the rugged face looked so worn and hopelessly sad, that Aunt Mollie, who was waiting at the gate, did not need words to tell her of his failure. The old man got stiffly down from his horse, and when he had removed saddle and bridle, and had turned the animal into the lot, the two walked toward the house. But they did not enter the building. Without a word they turned aside from the steps and followed the little path to the graves in the rude enclosure beneath the pines, where the suns.h.i.+ne fell only in patches here and there.

That night after supper Mr. Matthews went down into the Hollow to see the shepherd. "It's goin' to be mighty hard on Mollie and me a leavin' the old place up yonder," said the big man, when he had told of his unsuccessful trip. "It won't matter so much to the boy, 'cause he's young yet, but we've worked hard, Mr. Howitt, for that home--Mollie and me has. She's up there now a sittin' on the porch and a livin' it all over again, like she does when there ain't no one around, with her face turned toward them pines west of the house. It's mighty nigh a breakin' her heart just to think of leavin', but she'll hide it all from me when I go up there, thinkin' not to worry me--as if I didn't know. An' it's goin to be mighty hard to part with you, too, Mr. Howitt. I don't reckon you'll ever know, sir, how much you done for us; for me most of all."

The shepherd made as if to interrupt, but the big man continued; "Don't you suppose we can see, sir, how you've made over the whole neighborhood. There ain't a family for ten miles that don't come to you when they're in trouble. An' there's Sammy Lane a readin', an' talkin' just about the same as you do yourself, fit to hold up her end with anybody what's got education, and Jim himself's changed something wonderful. Same old Jim in lots of ways, but something more, somehow, though I can't tell it. Then there's my boy, Grant. I know right well what he'd been if it wasn't for you to show him what the best kind of a man's like. He'd a sure never knowed it from me. I don't mean as he'd a ever been a bad man like Wash Gibbs, or a no account triflin' one, like them Thompsons, but he couldn't never a been what he is now, through and through, if he hadn't a known you. There's a heap more, too, all over the country that you've talked to a Sunday, when the parson wasn't here. As for me, you--you sure been a G.o.d's blessin' to me and Mollie, Mr. Howitt."

Again the shepherd moved uneasily, as if to protest, but his big friend made a gesture of silence; "Let me say it while I got a chance, Dad." And the other bowed his head while Old Matt continued; "I can't tell how it is, an' I don't reckon you'd understand any way, but stayin' as you have after our talk that first night you come, an' livin' down here on this spot alone, after what you know, it's--it's just like I was a little kid, an'

you was a standin' big and strong like between me an' a great blackness that was somethin' awful. I reckon it looks foolish, me a talkin' this way. Maybe it's because I'm gettin' old, but anyhow I wanted you to know."

The shepherd raised his head and his face was aglow with a glad triumphant light, while his deep voice was full of meaning as he said gently, "It has been more to me, too, than you think, Mr.

Matthews. I ought to tell you--I--I will tell you--" he checked himself and added, "some day." Then he changed the topic quickly.

"Are you sure there is no one who can help you over this hard time? Is there NO way?"

The mountaineer shook his head. "I've gone over it all again an'

again. Williams at the bank is the only man I know who had the money, an' he's done for now by this robbery. You see I can't go to strangers, Dad; I ain't got nothin' left for security."

"But, could you not sell the sheep for enough to save the homestead?"

"Who could buy? or who would buy, if they could, in this country, without a bit of feed? And then look at 'em, they're so poor an'

weak, now, they couldn't stand the drivin' to the s.h.i.+ppin' place.

They'd die all along the road. They're just skin an' bones, Dad; ain't no butcher would pay freight on 'em, even."

Mr. Howitt sat with knitted brow, staring into the shadows. Then he said slowly, "There is that old mine. If this man Dewey were only here, do you suppose--?"

Again the mountaineer shook his head. "Colonel Dewey would be a mighty old man now, Dad, even if he were livin.' 'Tain't likely he'll ever come back, nor tain't likely the mine will ever be found without him. I studied all that out on the way home."

As he finished speaking, he rose to go, and the dog, springing up, dashed out of the cabin and across the clearing toward the bluff by the corral, barking furiously.

The two men looked at each other. "A rabbit," said Mr. Howitt. But they both knew that the well trained shepherd dog never tracked a rabbit, and Old Matt's face was white when he mounted to ride away up the trail.

Long the shepherd stood in the doorway looking out into the night, listening to the voices of the wilderness. In his life in the hills he had found a little brightness, while in the old mountaineer's words that evening, he had glimpsed a future happiness, of which he had scarcely dared to dream. With the single exception of that one wild night, his life had been an unbroken calm. Now he was to leave it all. And for what?