The Girl at the Halfway House Part 12

Mary Ellen turned toward him slowly at length, and so far from seeming serious, her features bore the traces of a smile. "Do you know," said she, "I think I heard of a stage-driver--wasn't it somewhere out West--who was taking a school-teacher from the railroad to the schoolhouse--and he--well, that is to say--"

"He said things--"

"Yes, that is it. He said things, you know. Now, he had never seen the school-teacher before."

"Yes, I have heard of that story," said Franklin, smiling as he recalled the somewhat different story of Sam and the waiter girl. "I don't just recollect all about it."

"It seems to me that the stage-driver said something--er, like--maybe he said it was 'like forgotten music' to him."

Franklin coloured. "The story was an absurdity, like many others about the West," he said. "But," he brightened, "the stage-driver had never seen the school-teacher before."

"I don't quite understand," said Mary Ellen coldly. "In my country it was not customary for gentlemen to tell ladies when they met for the first time that it was 'like a strain of forgotten music'--not the first time." And in spite of herself she now laughed freely, feeling her feminine advantage and somewhat exulting in spite of herself to see that even here upon the frontier there was opportunity for the employment of woman's ancient craft.

"Music never forgotten, then!" said Franklin impetuously. "This is at least not the first time we have met." In any ordinary duel of small talk this had not been so bad an attack, yet now the results were something which neither could have foreseen. To the mind of the girl the words were shocking, rude, brutal. They brought up again the whole scene of the battlefield. They recalled a music which was indeed not forgotten--the music of that procession which walked across the heart of Louisburg on that far-off fatal day. She shuddered, and upon her face there fell the shadow of an habitual sadness.

"You have spoken of this before, Captain Franklin," said she, "and if what you say is true, and if indeed you did see me--there--at that place--I can see no significance in that, except the lesson that the world is a very small one. I have no recollection of meeting you.

But, Captain Franklin, had we ever really met, and if you really cared to bring up some pleasant thought about the meeting, you surely would never recall the fact that you met me upon that day!"

Franklin felt his heart stop. He looked aside, his face paling as the even tones went on:

"That was the day of all my life the saddest, the most terrible. I have been trying ever since then to forget it. I dare not think of it.

It was the day when--when my life ended--when I lost everything, everything on earth I had."

Franklin turned in mute protest, but she continued:

"Because of that day," said she bitterly, "to which you referred as though it were a curious or pleasant thought, since you say you were there at that time--because of that very day I was left adrift in the world, every hope and every comfort gone. Because of Louisburg--why, this--Ellisville! This is the result of that day! And you refer to it with eagerness."

Poor Franklin groaned at this, but thought of no right words to say until ten hours afterward, which is mostly the human way. "I know--I could have known," he blundered--"I should not be so rude as to suppose that--ah, it was only _you_ that I remembered! The war is past and gone, The world, as you say, is very small. It was only that I was glad--"

"Ah, sir," said Mary Ellen, and her voice now held a plaintiveness which was the stronger from the droop of the tenderly curving lips--"ah, sir, but you must remember! To lose your relatives, even in a war for right and principle--and the South was right!" (this with a flash of the eye late pensive)--"that is hard enough. But for me it was not one thing or another; it was the sum of a thousand misfortunes.

I wonder that I am alive. It seems to me as though I had been in a dream for a long, long time. It is no wonder that those of us left alive went away, anywhere, as far as we could, that we gave up our country--that we came even here!" She waved a hand at the brown monotony visible through the window.

"You blame me as though it were personal!" broke in Franklin; but she ignored him.

"We, our family," she went on, "had lived there for a dozen generations. You say the world is small. It is indeed too small for a family again to take root which has been torn up as ours has been. My father, my mother, my two brothers, nearly every relative I had, killed in the war or by the war--our home destroyed--our property taken by first one army and then the other--you should not wonder if I am bitter! It was the field of Louisburg which cost me everything. I lost all--all--on that day which you wish me to remember. You wish me to remember that you saw me then, that I perhaps saw you. Why, sir, if you wished me to hate you, you could do no better--and I do not wish to hate any one. I wish to have as many friends as we may, here in this new country; but for remembering--why, I can remember nothing else, day or night, but Louisburg!"

"You stood so," said Franklin, doggedly and fatuously, "just as you did last night. You were leaning on the arm of your mother--"

Mary Ellen's eyes dilated. "It was not my mother," said she.

"A friend?" said Franklin, feelingly as he might.

"The mother of a friend," said Mary Ellen, straightening up and speaking with effort. And all the meaning of her words struck Franklin fully as though a dart had sunk home in his bosom.

"We were seeking for my friend, her son," said Mary Ellen. "I--Captain Franklin, I know of no reason why we should speak of such things at all, but it was my--I was to have been married to the man for whom we were seeking, and whom we found! That is what Louisburg means to me.

It means this frontier town, a new, rude life for us. It means meeting you all here--as we are glad and proud to do, sir--but first of all it means--that!"

Franklin bowed his head between his hands and half groaned over the pain which he had cost. Then slowly and crus.h.i.+ngly his own hurt came home to him. Every fibre of his being, which had been exultingly crying out in triumph at the finding of this missing friend--every fibre so keenly strung--now snapped and sprang back at rag ends. In his brain he could feel the parting one by one of the strings which but now sang in unison. Discord, darkness, dismay, sat on all the world.

The leisurely foot of Buford sounded on the stair, and he knocked gaily on the door jam as he entered.

"Well, niece," said he, "Mrs. Buford thinks we ought to be starting back for home right soon now."

Mary Ellen rose and bowed to Franklin as she pa.s.sed to leave the room; but perhaps neither she nor Franklin was fully conscious of the leave-taking. Buford saw nothing out of the way, but turned and held out his hand. "By the way, Captain Franklin," said he, "I'm mighty glad to meet you, sir--mighty glad. We shall want you to come down and see us often. It isn't very far--only about twenty-five miles south.

They call our place the Halfway Ranch, and it's not a bad name, for it's only about halfway as good a place as you and I have always been used to; but it's ours, and you will be welcome there. We'll be up here sometimes, and you must come down. We shall depend on seeing you now and then."

"I trust we shall be friends," mumbled Franklin.

"Friends?" said Butord cheerily, the smiling wrinkles of his own thin face signifying his sincerity; "why, man, here is a place where one needs friends, and where he can have friends. There is time enough and room enough, and--well, you'll come, won't you?" And Franklin, dazed and missing all the light which had recently made glad the earth, was vaguely conscious that he had promised to visit the home of the girl who had certainly given him no invitation to come further into her life, but for whose word of welcome he knew that he should always long.

BOOK III

THE DAY OF THE CATTLE

CHAPTER XVII

ELLISVILLE THE RED

Gourdlike, Ellisville grew up in a night. It was not, and lo! it was.

Many smokes arose, not moving from crest to crest of the hills as in the past, when savage bands of men signalled the one to the other, but rising steadily, in combined volume, a beacon of civilization set far out in the plains, a.s.suring, beckoning. Silently, steadily, the people came to this rallying place, dropping in from every corner of the stars. The long street spun out still longer its string of toylike wooden houses. It broke and doubled back upon itself, giving Ellisville t.i.tle to unique distinction among all the cities of the plains, which rarely boasted more than a single street. The big hotel at the depot sheltered a colony of restless and ambitious life. From the East there came a minister with his wife, both fresh from college.

They remained a week. The Cottage Hotel had long since lost its key, and day and night there went on vast revelry among the men of the wild, wide West, then seeing for the first time what seemed to them the joy and glory of life. Little parties of men continually came up from the South, in search of opportunity to sell their cattle. Little parties of men came from the East, seeking to buy cattle and land. They met at the Cottage, and made merry in large fas.h.i.+on, seeing that this was a large land, and new, and unrestrained.

Land and cattle, cattle and land. These themes were upon the lips of all, and in those days were topics of peace and harmony. The cattleman still stood for the nomadic and untrammelled West, the West of wild and glorious tradition. The man who sought for land was not yet recognised as the homesteader, the man of anch.o.r.ed craft, of settled convictions, of adventures ended. For one brief, glorious season the nomad and the home dweller shook hands in amity, not pausing to consider wherein their interests might differ. For both, this was the West, the free, unbounded, illimitable, exhaustless West--Homeric, t.i.tanic, scornful to metes and bounds, having no scale of little things.

Here and there small, low houses, built of the soil and clinging grimly to the soil, made indistinct dots upon the wide gray plains. Small corrals raised their ragged arms. Each man claimed his herd of kine.

Slowly, swinging up from the far Southwest, whose settlement, slower and still more crude, had gone on scores of years ago when the Spaniards and the horse Indians of the lower plains were finally beaten back from the _rancherias_, there came on the great herds of the gaunt, broad-horned cattle, footsore and slow and weary with their march of more than a thousand miles. These vast herds deployed in turn about the town of Ellisville, the Mecca for which they had made this unprecedented pilgrimage. They trampled down every incipient field, and spread abroad over all the grazing lands, until every towns.h.i.+p held its thousands, crowded by the new thousands continually coming on.

Long train loads of these cattle, wild and fierce, fresh from the chutes into which they were driven after their march across the untracked empire of the range, rolled eastward day after day. Herd after herd pressed still farther north, past Ellisville, going on wearily another thousand miles, to found the Ellisvilles of the upper range, to take the place of the buffalo driven from the ancient feeding grounds. Scattered into hundreds and scores and tens, the local market of the Ellisville settlers took its share also of the cheap cattle from the South, and sent them out over the cheap lands.

It was indeed the beginning of things. Fortune was there for any man.

The town became a loadstone for the restless population ever crowding out upon the uttermost frontier. The men from the farther East dropped their waistcoats and their narrow hats at Ellisville. All the world went under wide felt and bore a jingling spur. Every man was armed.

The pitch of life was high. It was worth death to live a year in such a land! The pettinesses fell away from mankind. The horizon of life was wide. There was no time for small exactness. A newspaper, so called, cost a quarter of a dollar. The postmaster gave no change when one bought a postage stamp. A shave was worth a quarter of a dollar, or a half, or a dollar, as that might be. The price of a single drink was never established, since that was something never called for. For a cowman to spend one hundred dollars at the Cottage bar, and to lose ten thousand dollars at cards later in the same evening, was a feat not phenomenal. There were more cattle, south in Texas. The range-men, acquainted with danger and risk, loving excitement, balked at no hazard. Knowing no settled way of life, ignorant of a roof, careless of the ways of other lands, this town was a toy to them, a jest, just as all life, homeless, womanless, had been a jest. By day and by night, ceaseless, crude, barbaric, there went on a continuous carousal, which would have been joyless backed by a vitality less superb, an experience less young. Money and life--these two things we guard most sacredly in the older societies, the first most jealously, the latter with a lesser care. In Ellisville these were the commodities in least esteem. The philosophy of that land was either more ignorant or more profound than ours. Over all the world, unaided by a sensational press, and as yet without even that non-resident literature which was later to discover the Ellisvilles after the Ellisvilles were gone, there spread the tame of Ellisville the Red, the l.u.s.tful, the unspeakable. Here was a riot of animal intensity of life, a mutiny of physical man, the last outbreak of the innate savagery of primitive man against the day of shackles and subjugation. The men of that rude day lived vehemently. They died, and they escaped. The earth is trampled over their bold hearts, and they have gone back into the earth, the air, the sky, and the wild flowers. Over their graves tread now those who bow the neck and bear the burden and feed the wheels, and know the despair of that civilization which grinds hope from out the heart. The one and the other came, departed, and will depart. The one and the other, the bond and the free, the untamed and the broken, were p.a.w.ns in the iron game of destiny.

The transient population of Ellisville, the cattle sellers and cattle buyers and land seekers, outnumbered three to one the resident or permanent population, which catered to this floating trade, and which supplied its commercial or professional wants. The resident one third was the nucleus of the real Ellisville that was to be. The social compact was still in embryo. Life was very simple. It was the day of the individual, the day before the law.

With this rude setting there was to be enacted a rapid drama of material progress such as the world has never elsewhere seen; but first there must be played the wild prologue of the West, never at any time to have a more lurid scene than here at the Halfway House of a continent, at the intersection of the grand transcontinental trails, the b.l.o.o.d.y angle of the plains. Eight men in a day, a score in a week, met death by violence. The street in the cemetery doubled before that of the town. There were more graves than houses. This superbly wasteful day, how could it presage that which was to come? In this riotous army of invasion, who could have foreseen the population which was to follow, adventurous yet tenacious, resolved first upon independence, and next upon knowledge, and then upon the fruits of knowledge? Nay, perhaps, after all, the prescience of this coming time lay over Ellisville the Red, so that it roared the more tempestuously on through its brief, brazen day.

CHAPTER XVIII

STILL A REBEL

In the swift current of humanity then streaming up and down the cattle range, the reputation of the Halfway House was carried far and near; and for fifty miles east and west, for five hundred miles north and south, the beauty of the girl at the Halfway House was matter of general story. This was a new sort of being, this stranger from another land, and when applied to her, all the standards of the time fell short or wide. About her there grew a saga of the cow range, and she was spoken of with awe from the Brazos to the Blue. Many a rude cowman made long pilgrimage to verify rumours he had heard of the personal beauty, the personal sweetness of nature, the personal kindness of heart, and yet the personal reserve and dignity of this new G.o.ddess, whose like was not to be found in all the wide realms of the range. Such sceptics came in doubt, but they remained silent and departed reverent. Wider and wider grew her circle of devoted friends--wild and desperate men who rarely knew a roof and whose hands stayed at no deed, but who knew with unerring accuracy the value of a real woman.