The Tempting of Tavernake Part 61

The syndicate will be expecting to hear from us. Besides, we've reports enough already. It's time something was decided about that oil country.

We've done some grand work there, Tavernake."

Tavernake nodded. He was lying on his side and his eyes were fixed wistfully southward, over the glimmering moonlit valley, over the great wilderness of virgin pine woods which hung from the mountains on the other side, away through the cleft in the hills to the plains beyond, chaotic, a world unseen.

"If you like to go on for a bit," Pritchard suggested, slowly, "there's no reason why you shouldn't take McCleod and Richardson with you, and Pete and half the horses, and strike for the tin country on the other side of the Yolite Hills. So long as we are here, it's quite worth it, if you can stick it out."

Tavernake drew a long breath.

"I'd like to go," he admitted, simply. "I know McCleod is keen about prospecting further south. You see, most of our finds so far have been among the oil fields."

"Settled," Pritchard declared. "To-morrow, then, we part. I'm for the valley, and I reckon I'll strike the railway to Chicago in a week. Gee whiz! New York will seem good!"

"You think that the syndicate will be satisfied with what we have done so far?" Tavernake asked.

His companion smiled.

"If they aren't, they'll be fools. I reckon there's enough oil fields here for seven companies. There'll be a bit for us, too, Tavernake, I guess. Don't you want to come back to New York and spend it?"

Tavernake laughed once more, but this time his laugh was not wholly natural.

"Spend it!" he repeated. "What is there to spend it on? Uncomfortable clothes, false plays, drinks that are bad for you, food that's half poisoned, atmosphere that stifles. My G.o.d, Pritchard, is there anything in the world like this! Stretch out your arms, man. Lie on your back, look up at the stars, let that wind blow over your face. Listen."

They listened, and again they heard nothing, yet again there seemed to be that peculiar quality about the silence which spoke of the vastness of s.p.a.ce.

Pritchard rose to his feet.

"New York and the fleshpots for me," he declared. "Keep in touch, and good luck old man!"

Next day at dawn they parted, and Tavernake, with his three companions, set his face towards an almost undiscovered tract of land. Their progress was slow, for they were all the time in a country rich with possibilities. For weeks they climbed, climbed till they reached the snows and the wind stung their faces and they s.h.i.+vered in their rugs at night. They came to a land of spa.r.s.er vegetation, of fewer and wilder animals, where they heard the baying of wolves at night, and saw the eyes of strange animals glisten through the thicket as the flames of their evening fire shot up toward the sky. Then the long descent began, the long descent to the great plain. Now their faces were bronzed with a sun ever hotter, ever more powerful. No longer the snow flakes beat their cheeks. They came slowly down into a land which seemed to Tavernake like the biblical land of Canaan. Three times in ten days they had to halt and make a camp, while Tavernake prepared a geographical survey of likely-looking land.

McCleod came up to Tavernake one day with a dull-looking lump in his hand, glistening in places.

"Copper," he announced, shortly. "It's what I've been looking for all the time. No end to it. There's something bigger than oil here."

They spent a month in the locality, and every day McCleod became more enthusiastic. After that it was hard work to keep him from heading homeward at once.

"I tell you, sir," he explained to Tavernake, "there's millions there, millions between those four stakes of yours. What's the good of more prospecting? There's enough there in a square acre to pay the expenses of our expedition a thousand times over. Let's get back and make reports. We can strike the railway in ten days from here--perhaps sooner."

"You go," Tavernake said. "Leave me Pete and two of the horses."

The man stared at him in surprise.

"What's the good of going on alone?" he asked. "You're not a mining expert or an oil man. You can't go prospecting by yourself."

"I can't help it," Tavernake answered. "It's something in my blood, I suppose. I am going on. Think! You'll strike that railway and in a month you will be back in New York. Don't you imagine, when you're there, when you hear the clatter and turmoil of it, when you see the pale crowds chivvying one another about to pick the dollars from each other's pockets,--don't you believe you'll long for these solitudes, the big empty places, great possibilities, the silence? Think of it, man. What is there beyond those mountains, I wonder?"

McCleod sighed.

"You're right," he said. "One may never get so far out again. Our fortunes will keep, I suppose, and anyhow we ought to strike a telegraph station in about a fortnight. We'll go right ahead, then."

In ten days they dropped ten thousand feet. They came to a land where their throats were always dry, where the trees and shrubs seemed like property affairs from a theatre, where they plunged their heads into every pool that came to wash their noses and mouths from the red dust that seemed to choke them up. They found tin and oil and more copper.

Then, by slow stages, they pa.s.sed on to a land of great gra.s.sy plains, of blue gra.s.s, miles and miles of it, and suddenly one day they came to the telegraph posts, rough pine trees unstripped of their bark, with a few sagging wires. Tavernake looked at them as Robinson Crusoe might have looked at Man Friday's footsteps. It was the first sign of human life which they had seen for months.

"It's a real world we are in, after all!" he sighed. "Somehow or other, I thought--I thought we'd escaped."

CHAPTER VIII. BACK TO CIVILIZATION

Pritchard, trim and neat, a New Yorker from the careful arrangement of his tie to the tips of his patent boots, gazed with something like amazement at the man whom he had come to meet at the Grand Central Station. Tavernake looked, indeed, like some splendid bushman whose life has been spent in the kingdom of the winds and the sun and the rain.

He was inches broader round the chest, and carried himself with a new freedom. His face was bronzed right down to the neck. His beard was fullgrown, his clothes travel-stained and worn. He seemed like a breath of real life in the great New York depot, surrounded by streams of black-coated, pale-cheeked men.

Pritchard laughed softly as he pa.s.sed his arm through his friend's.

"Come, my Briton," he said, "my primitive man, I have rooms for you in a hotel close here. A bath and a mint julep, then I'll take you to a tailor's. What about the big country? It's better than your salt marshes, eh? Better than your little fis.h.i.+ng village? Better than building boats?"

"You know it," Tavernake answered. "I feel as though I'd been drawing in life for month after month. Have I got to wear boots like yours--patent?"

"Got to be done," Pritchard declared.

"And the hat--oh, my Heavens!" Tavernake groaned. "I'll never become civilized again."

"We'll see," Pritchard laughed. "Say, Tavernake, it was a great trip of ours. Everything's turning out marvelously. The oil and the copper are big, man--big, I tell you. I reckon your five thousand dollars will be well on the way to half a million. I'm pretty near there myself."

It was not until later on, when he was alone, that Tavernake realized with how little interest he listened to his companion's talk of their success. It was so short a time ago since the building up of a fortune had been the one aim upon which every nerve of his body was centered.

Curiously enough, now he seemed to take it as a matter of course.

"On second thoughts, I'll send a tailor round to the hotel," Pritchard declared. "I've rooms myself next yours. We can go out and buy boots and the other things afterwards."

By nightfall, Tavernake's wardrobe was complete. Even Pritchard regarded him with a certain surprise. He seemed, somehow, to have gained a new dignity.

"Say, but you look great!" he exclaimed. "They won't believe it at the meeting to-morrow that you are the man who crossed the Yolite Mountains and swam the Peraneek River. That's a wonderful country you were in, Tavernake, after you left the tracks."

They were in Broadway, with the roar of the city in their ears, and Tavernake, lifting his face starwards, suddenly seemed to feel the silence once more, the perfume of the pine woods, the scent of nature herself, freed through all these generations of any presence of man.

"I'll never keep away from it," he said, softly. "I'll have to go back."

Pritchard smiled.

"When your report's in shape and the dollars are being scooped in, they'll send you back fast enough--that is, if you still want to go," he remarked. "I tell you, Leonard Tavernake, our city men here are out for the dollars. Over on your side, a man makes a million or so and he's had enough. One fortune here only seems to whet the appet.i.te of a New Yorker. By the way," he added, after a moment's hesitation, "does it interest you to know that an old friend of yours is in New York?"

Tavernake's head went round swiftly.

"Who is it?" he asked.

"Mrs. Wenham Gardner."