The Freebooters of the Wilderness Part 6

"That's all right, Colonel. I understand! We'll crowd 'em to beat h.e.l.l; and they'll go it blind. If it's coming dark, they'll shut their eyes and go over blind. I defy Sheriff Flood, himself, if he's standing on the spot to make a case--"

"You need have no fear of Sheriff Flood _ever_ being on the spot.

He'll be busy under his bed that night; but look out for these Federal puppy-boy Forest Ranger fellows! Finish up off the confounded National Range. Finish up before they reach the National Range."

"And the Mexican herders?" asked the sheep skin chaps with a flourish of his band above the fire that showed the flash of a diamond on the little finger.

The white vest spread deprecating hands.

"That's your business, Jim! Make a clean sweep of the herd; but see that no harm comes to the boy."

The old frontiersman headed his broncho silently back on the trail.

"Night birds hatching snake eggs. A'm really between two minds to go back and crack their addled heads."

CHAPTER V

THE CHOICE THAT COMES TO ALL MEN

"Did you notice anything?" demanded Brydges, as the old stranger went down the Ridge trail. "She knows English as well as you do; and she is a French breed. Why did she put on to be Mexican? What did she sneak for? Whole thing cussed queer. What do you make of it? Matthews?

Matthews? I recall that name. Fellow by that name wrote our paper to know if any Canadian settlers had come here! Say, Wayland, the old man p.r.i.c.ked up his ears at MacDonald's name--spoke of Rebellion Days."

"Oh, shut it off, Bat! What in the world has a travelling half-cracked ranting old evangelist to do with the MacDonald family? He'll land on the Mission for a week or two free like the rest of 'em! He'll likely preach h.e.l.l-fire to Indians, who'll not know a word of what he says till Mr. Williams gives him a call to move on--"

"All the same," retorted Bat, disappearing inside the cabin.

Wayland pa.s.sed a bad night, the worst he had known on the Holy Cross, contending with what comes to all lives, and to many lives many times.

The Ranger had absorbed the average amount of Sunday school pabulum that floats round in the mental atmosphere of all youth, that, if you keep on doing right and doing it hard, things will turn out all right in the end. Well, he told himself bluntly, he _had_ been doing right and doing it hard, just as hundreds of the Land Office field men and Land Office attorneys had been doing right in their vain endeavour to stop public loot;--and things had turned out all wrong. What did his four years' fight stand for, anyway? Marking time, that was all.

Nothing accomplished except the wasting of four years of his own life; and, while that may be small enough in the sum total of things, where a thousand seeds go to waste for one that bears fruit, it is overwhelmingly big to the individual man. If he had been the one and only failure of the Civil Service workers, he could have accused himself and taken the Senator's advice to "chuck" the fool-theory of men in public service fighting for right; but he was only one of a mult.i.tude of men, paid public money to prevent the looting of public property; whose work was blocked, non-suited, pigeon-holed, bluffed, hampered, or, worst of all, carried up to investigating committees whose sole purpose was to conceal and wear the public out with interminable wrangles over technicalities that were irrelevant.

Better men than he had fought doggedly only to be downed. There was the Land Office man in Oregon dismissed for the slip of a wrong entry in his field book because he had quite unintentionally unearthed the frauds of a member of the land-loot ring who happened to be a congressman. There was the Federal attorney hounded from his home city because he prosecuted bribe-givers and objected to being shot while on duty in the court room. There was that other Federal Law man, shot at the shaft of a coal mine stolen from public lands. There was the Army Engineer demoted from his life work because he fought for a free harbor for a great city and offended the railroad fighting to keep that harbor closed. There were the two Forest Service men dismissed for giving facts to the public. Then, there was the Alaska Case--Wayland laughed; and the laugh was a little bitter. Surely the crowning farce of all: that had gone up easily to investigation with a blare of trumpets and a flare of news headlines. That was the easiest of all.

It made good politics, yet--it was so involved in technicalities, while it offered a bit of by-play to the gallery, that there had never from the first, even for the fraction of an instant, been the faintest hope of anything but confusion emerging from the investigation; but it played into the game without hurting anybody. If they had really wanted to investigate, why didn't they take a case in which there were no technicalities of law, the looted red-lands of California, for instance; or the half-million of timber openly stolen each year for a certain smelting ring; or the two thousand acres of coal where Smelter City itself was built; or the shooting of the Federal Law Officer down at that other coal mine? These cases involved no "twilight zone" of dispute as to law, in which the "system" and the "ring" could hide.

Every Government man knew the evidence was plain and complete in these cases: yet they were pigeon-holed, let lapse for the Statute of Limitations to bar action. Why?

Wayland sat down on the slab seat, and the personal reasons came trooping against his resolutions like the scouts of an oncoming host.

To begin with, he could make more money outside the Service. The Government men were paid less than foreign ditch-diggers; but then, which of the men remained in the Service for money? He ran his mind over half a dozen fellows in the Agricultural Department who had increased the nation's wealth by hundreds of millions a year. They were working at salaries less than a Wall Street Junior clerk or office girl. The question of salary didn't come in as an argument. That could be dismissed. But there was the bitter fact, he was accomplis.h.i.+ng absolutely nothing by continuing the struggle, nothing more than a woman yoked to a Silenus hoping to reform him when he daily grew worse under her eyes. The Government had blocked him. The party had blocked him. What was the pith of it all, anyway? _Should those who had the power be given the legal right to take what they cared to seize_? It was the same old question that had split every country up into revolution. And closest of all, keenest of all arguments, the new influence that had come into his life, possessing it, obsessing it. He might put her out of his thoughts as a possibility. That would not dull the edge of his own hunger. By staying on he barred all possibility of ultimate happiness, perhaps her happiness: yet, if he abandoned the fight for right, he would be unworthy of her. Sooner or later she would know, and, though she might remain mute, was she the one to make semblance of what she did not feel? If the light died from her eye, it would die from his life. He was not a Silenus to guzzle hog-like over husks when the life had gone. Besides--Wayland laughed aloud--the idea of her nature permitting a Silenus near enough to breathe the same atmosphere that she breathed was inconceivable. There was one chance--one chance only--Get the issue before the People, squarely, fairly, openly before the People; awaken the People; ma.s.s the law of the snow flake to the mighty rush of the avalanche; let the People know, force the People to p.r.o.nounce the verdict. Wayland thought of Bat inside the cabin--, and laughed bitterly. He rose and began pacing the edge of the Ridge. There he was, back in the old hopeless circle.

Her touch had wrapped him in a vision world; but across the clearness of the vision now somehow obtruded the quiet cynicism, the genial scoff of the Senator's arguments, leaving fierce physical unrest and confused cross-currents of desire. A mist seemed to blurr all life. The hemlocks no longer chanted riotous gladness. There was a dirge to-night of futility, monotonous age-old eons of useless effort, the useless fall of the forest giant to the dry rot of slug and insect. It was as if Wayland's spirit stood back and listened to the conflicting contentions of two other men, the one who wanted to breast the stream and the one who wanted to go with the current; one full of blind, red-blood courage, the other full of cold white-corpuscled argument; one a zealous sportsman playing the game for the game's zest, the other a quitter because he foresaw no gain.

Not a doubt of it; it was a doleful business, this being stuck half-way up between heaven and earth cut off from everything but renunciation.

_Why_, was he doing it? What was to be gained? It would have surprised Wayland if he had disentangled out of his own weltering thoughts the fact that he had never weighed _gain_ as an argument before Moyese talked. He had never known the coward's fear of loss.

What was it they had said to him? 'Blocked at every turn,'--'Has your boasted Federal Government taken any action?'--'This is the Service you are loyal to,'--'Who of the public gives one d.a.m.n for right or wrong?'

Had it really come to that? Was that the seat of the trouble? Did the public care? 'Go lean frying fat for posterity?' All those voices strident, scoffing; then, part of the night's voiceless voices, that other undertone--'Nothing accomplished without somebody fighting a losing battle,'--'What so heroic about a fighter more or less going down beaten?' It was nothing heroic at all unless you happened to be the fighter. And what was the sense of accepting a challenge to a losing battle? 'I want a man who can fight like the Devil.' Well, that was what the whole world wanted--always had needed and wanted; and he and hundreds of other Government fellows were applicants for just such a fighting job. What was it that comical old sermonizing duffer had ranted about? Oh, yes! If the Devil (of course, there wasn't a Devil), if the Devil came tempting to-day 'twould be such a place as this.' 'Etches, he would proffer as of old,' 'the biggest gamble of all,' 'play for the biggest stake outside of h.e.l.l,' 'The Fate . . . of the Land . . . with all Time looking on . . . since ever Time began,'

'all the World looking on . . . asking . . . keep sacred as the Covenant of G.o.d . . . The stakes I'd play for . . . if I were young . . . I'd up . . . I'd up . . . I'd up . . . stripped naked of very hold-back . . . I'd hurl the lie in the teeth of a scoffing world. I'd hurl y'r traitor leaders huckstering the land's good for silver. . . . Fight . . . right . . . might . . . I'd paint the words in letters of blood till they awakened the land. . . . I'd fight . . .

fight . . . fight till they had to kill every man of my kind before I'd down . . .'

The old man had been like the storm wind of the mountains hurling off the dead leaves of thought. Wayland paused in his pacing. The opal peak emerged from pearl gray cloud wrack; a silver cross, translucent, unreal, luminous, a thing of dreams winged with silver light beneath a solitary star, eternal as G.o.d. And the night wind through the pines, that had sounded so doleful but a moment before, became the jubilant clicking of countless castanets, the castanets of the long pine needles, sounding a triumphant chant to the touch of invisible hands.

Wayland stopped pacing. He almost stopped thinking. The consciousness, the realizing sense of her presence, of her touch, of a something more than her touch, of her being enveloping his in some ethereal fire, went over the Ranger in fiercely tender flood tides; this time, not in tumultuous confused desire, but in waves of strength, in visions from which the mists had vanished, daring that laughed with gladness over life. There were no longer two Waylands in conflict, with one sneering and looking on. "A house divided against itself shall fall." There was only one, with the blood of mothers in his veins, whelmed by a consciousness that reached back far as the consciousness of the race. Somehow, his simple manhood, the inheritance in his blood of men and women, who had loved, fused the conflict of his nature to a singleness of purpose and won peace now.

What he said was: "Come on, my friend, the enemy! I'm right here on the job; nailed, you bet, long as she does it! Just to come alive is worth being crucified."

"Hullo," bawled a towsled head through the cabin window. "Aren't you going to turn in? It's exactly twelve o'clock! Darn it all! Don't make a sleep-walking Lady Macbeth tragedy out of it! Chuck the bally thing and come on down to the Valley! Why do you waste your life pretending you are Providence steering the whole earth? Chuck it, d.i.c.kie! If you were in town, I'd give you a c.o.c.ktail! Got anything up here?"

Wayland went to sleep to dream one of those dreams that envelop day with rain-bow mist. He dreamed that the amethyst gates of the sun had swung ajar flooding life with countless charioteers each carrying a golden spear, and as they advanced over the clouds to earth, all the little purple heather bells that had hung their heads during the night to keep out the dew, all the waxy chalices of the winter-greens pale and faint with pa.s.sion, all the bells nodding to the wind, began ringing--ringing ten thousand golden bells; and the painter's brush, multicolored dazzling knee-deep in the Alpine meadows, flaunted countless torches of carmine flame to welcome back the day. Then, suddenly, it wasn't a sound of bells at all. It was her voice, her voice with the golden note and the liquid break that came when he had surprised Love in her eyes; and it wasn't the warmth of the Sun's fan-shaped shafts at all; it was the warmth of her lips in the face of the picture she had promised--the face above "the Warrior." When he awakened, a sprig of everlasting that he had stuck in the band of his Alpine hat had blown across his face.

CHAPTER VI

WHEREIN ONE PLAYS AN UNCONSCIOUS PART

Watch a snow flake as it falls! Gentle is too rough a word for the motion. It floats, a crystal cob-web shot with the glint of sun-jewels; tangible but melting to your touch, evanescent and translucent as light; conceived of the wind that bloweth where it listeth and the gossamer clouds of a vague somewhere.

Waveringly, noiselessly, so noiselessly it comes that you do not catch the rustling flutter with your ear, but with a sixth sense of motion.

And it transforms, bewitches, beautifies what it touches. I suppose if such an evanescent thing were told that it and it alone had been the age-old, time-immemorial sculptor of the granite rocks; that it and it alone--to paraphrase the words of the scientists--had rolled away the door from the sepulchers of the eternal rocks and turned a planet into a sensate earth pulsing with growth--I suppose if a snow flake were told such heresy, it would die of its own amaze.

This, _apropos_ of nothing in particular, unless you happen to understand from the catagory of your own experiences.

It was her first love-letter; and, because she did not know she was writing a love-letter she wrote out of the fulness of an overflowing heart. Also the hour was the precise hour when consciousness of her presence had gone over Wayland in flood tides of fierce tenderness.

That may have been a mere coincidence. I set it down because such coincidences daily touch life.

Here is the letter.

_Twelve O'clock_.

Are you a 'vision fugitive,' O Ranger Man? Do you know that I have seen you less than ten times and really known you less than a month?

Is it a dream? What happened? I did not mean to do it. I did not want it. I did not ask it. Why has it come? You said 'best gifts came unasked; perhaps, they also go unsent!' This one can never go, d.i.c.k. I've been weaving it in and out for three whole hours, (no, not _thinking_, I _think_ of other people,) weaving it in and out of every strand of me. I know now I have been waiting for it a billion years; ages and ages ago when you and I were cave people or desert runners like the 20,000 B. C. skeleton in the British Museum; and in the shuffle of atoms, we got apart. We shall never stray again; for I have locked last night in my heart. Yesterday I could look up at the Mountain, and what I saw was the snow cross, cold and far away.

To-night I look up. The Mountain is still there but not the same--what I feel is--_you_; and you are not far away. I am warm with happiness, delirious when I let myself _stop_ thinking.

I have tried to sleep but cannot. Your old Mountain has been talking again. I can see the Cross here from my window and the lone star above the peak; and I know that you see too. If I touched the telephone, I might speak to you; but I can write more frankly than I'd ever have courage to speak, and I must say it. It is all tumult. I do not understand, but Hope is strumming her strings--I hear them every time the wind comes down from the Ridge. Here is the Watts' 'Happy Warrior,' and d.i.c.k--listen--I didn't mean it as a token when I offered to send it up. I meant it as a rallying cry; but now that you take it as a token, I can't say that it isn't; only I really didn't mean to push you over the edge of things as I did. I didn't mean to go over the edge myself. If I had heard Senator Moyese talk, I couldn't have been so childish and ignorant. It was like urging you to jump a precipice and break your neck. I know now what the fight means. It isn't just the Valley. It's the Nation. I hadn't any right to let my (here a word was crossed and blotted) feeling shove you over. Yet if you jump yourself, I'll not pull a gossamer thread to draw back. I haven't any right.

You know how it has always been with me--whisked away to the convent at Quebec when I was four, sent to that New York finis.h.i.+ng school to get what Father called 'world-sense knocked into my religion.' Well, they were knocks all right. Then England and Switzerland and my Father's orders to come back, and how lonely and apart he always seems. I don't understand. What did Moyese mean to-night when he spoke of 'bow-and-arrow aristocracy'? Will you believe me that is the first I have ever heard of it? Who is Calamity? Will you tell me if you know?

Why are we so apart from all the people of the Valley? What is a 'squaw man'? When I think, I am afraid for having let you become so interwoven. I did not mean to. It is wholly my fault. The thoughts I hardly knew myself must have been weaving up into this. They often do.

Father and Mr. Williams leave at daybreak for the Upper Pa.s.s. I did not mean to write so much, but our old Mountain has come from under a cloud. Anyway, I had to explain, no, I mean write. Explanations never do explain; but here's the picture of 'The Warrior.'

"E. MacD."