Whispering Smith

  CHAPTER V

  THE CRAWLING STONE

  Where the mountain chains of North America have been flung up into acontinental divide, the country in many of its aspects is stillterrible. In extent alone this mountain empire is grandiose. Theswiftest transcontinental trains approaching its boundaries at nightfind night falling again before they have fairly penetrated it.Geologically severe, this region in geological store is the richest ofthe continent; physically forbidding beyond all other stretches ofNorth America, the Barren Land alone excepted, in this region lie itsgentlest valleys. Here the desert is most grotesque, and here arepastoral retreats the most secluded. It is the home of the Archeangranite, and its basins are of a fathomless dust. Under its sagebrushwastes the skeletons of earth's hugest mammals lie beside behemoth andthe monsters of the deep. The eternal snow, the granite peak, thesandstone butte, the lava-bed, the gray desert, the far horizon arefamiliar here. With the sunniest and bluest of skies, this is therange of the deadliest storms, and its delightful summers contrastwith the dreadest cold.

  Here the desert of death simulates a field of cooling snow, greenhills lie black in the dazzling light of day, limpid waters run greenover arsenic stone, and sunset betricks the fantastic rock with columnand capital and dome. Clouds burst here above arid wastes, and wheredew is precious the skies are most prodigal in their downpour. If thetorrent bed is dry, distrust it.

  This vast mountain shed parts rivers whose waters find two oceans, andtheir valleys are the natural highways up which railroads wind to thecrest of the continent. To the mountain engineer the waterway is thesphinx that holds in its silence the riddle of his success; with himlies the problem of providing a railway across ranges which often defythe hoofs of a horse.

  The construction engineer studies the course of the mountain water.The water is both his ally and his enemy--ally because it alone hasmade possible his undertakings; enemy because it fights to destroy hispuny work, just as it fights to level the barriers that oppose him.Like acid spread on copperplate, water etches the canyons in themountain slopes and spreads wide the valleys through the plains. Amongthese scarcely known ranges of the Rocky Mountain chain the Westernrivers have their beginnings. When white men crowded the Indian fromthe plains he retreated to the mountains, and in their valleys madehis final stand against the aggressor. The scroll of this invasion ofthe mountain West by the white man has been unrolled, read, and putaway within a hundred years, and of the agencies that made possiblethe swiftness of the story transportation overshadows all others. Thefirst railroad put across those mountains cost twenty-five thousandmiles of reconnaissances and fifteen thousand miles of instrumentsurveys. Since the day of that undertaking a generation of men haspassed, and in the interval the wilderness that those men penetratedhas been transformed. The Indian no longer extorts terms from his foe:he is not.

  Where the tepee stood the rodman drives his stakes, and the country ofthe great Indian rivers, save one, has been opened for years to therailroad. That one is the Crawling Stone. The valley of Crawling StoneRiver marked for more than a decade the dead line between the OverlandRoute of the white man and the last country of the Sioux. It was longafter the building of the first line before even an engineer'sreconnaissance was made in the Crawling Stone country. Then, withinten years, three surveys were made, two on the north side of the riverand one on the south side, by interests seeking a coast outlet. Threereports made in this way gave varying estimates of the expense ofputting a line up the valley, but the three coincided in this, thatthe cost would be prohibitive. Engineers of reputation had in thisrespect agreed, but Glover, who looked after such work for Bucks,remained unconvinced, and before McCloud was put into the operatingdepartment on the Short Line he was asked by Glover to run apreliminary up Crawling Stone Valley. Before the date of his reportthe conclusions reached by other engineers had stood unchallenged.

  The valley was not unknown to McCloud. His first year in themountains, in which, fitted as thoroughly as he could fit himself forhis profession, he had come West and found himself unable to get work,had been spent hunting, fishing, and wandering, often cold and oftenhungry, in the upper Crawling Stone country. The valley in itselfoffers to a constructionist no insuperable obstacles; the difficultyis presented in the canyon where the river bursts through the ElbowMountains. South of this canyon, McCloud, one day on a hunting trip,found himself with two Indians pocketed in the rough country, and wasplanning how to escape passing a night away from camp when hiscompanions led him past a vertical wall of rock a thousand feet high,split into a narrow defile down which they rode, as it broadened out,for miles. They emerged upon an open country that led without a breakinto the valley of the Crawling Stone below the canyon. Afterward,when he had become a railroad man, McCloud, sitting at a camp-firewith Glover and Morris Blood, heard them discussing the coveted andimpossible line up the valley. He had been taken into the circle ofconstructionists and was told of the earlier reports against the line.He thought he knew something about the Elbow Mountains, and disputedthe findings, offering in two days' ride to take the men before him tothe pass called by the Indians The Box, and to take them through it.Glover called it a find, and a big one, and though more immediatematters in the strategy of territorial control then came before him,the preliminary was ordered and McCloud's findings were approved.McCloud himself was soon afterward engrossed in the problems ofoperating the mountain division; but the dream of his life was tobuild the Crawling Stone Line with a maximum grade of eight tenthsthrough The Box.

  The prettiest stretch of Crawling Stone Valley lies within twentymiles of Medicine Bend. There it lies widest, and has the pick ofwater and grass between Medicine Bend and the Mission Mountains.Cattlemen went into the Crawling Stone country before the Indians hadwholly left it. The first house in the valley was the Stone Ranch,built by Richard Dunning, and it still stands overlooking the town ofDunning at the junction of the Frenchman Creek with the CrawlingStone. The Frenchman is fed by unfailing springs, and when by summersun and wind every smaller stream in the middle basin has been lickeddry, the Frenchman runs cold and swift between its russet hills.Richard Dunning, being on the border of the Indian country, built forhis ranch-house a rambling stone fortress. He had chosen, it afterwardproved, the choice spot in the valley, and he stocked it with cattlewhen yearlings could be picked up in Medicine Bend at ten dollars ahead. He got together a great body of valley land when it could be hadfor the asking, and became the rich man of the Long Range.

  The Dunnings were Kentuckians. Richard was a bridge engineer andbuilder, and under Brodie built some of the first bridges on themountain division, notably the great wooden bridge at Smoky Creek.Richard brought out his nephew, Lance Dunning. He taught Lancebridge-building, and Murray Sinclair, who began as a cowboy on theStone Ranch, learned bridge-building from Richard Dunning. TheDunnings both came West, though at different times, as young men andunmarried, and, as far as Western women were concerned, might alwayshave remained so. But a Kentucky cousin, Betty, one of the FairfieldDunnings, related to Richard within the sixth or eighth degree, cameto the mountains for her health. Betty's mother had brought Richard upas a boy, and Betty, when he left Fairfield, was a baby. But Dick--asthey knew him at home--and the mother wrote back and forth, and hepersuaded her to send Betty out for a trip, promising he would sendher back in a year a well woman.

  Betty came with only her colored maid, old Puss Dunning, who had takenher from the nurse's arms when she was born and taken care of her eversince. The two--the tall Kentucky girl and the bent mammy--arrived atthe Stone Ranch one day in June, and Richard, done then with bridgesand looking after his ranch interests, had already fallen violently inlove with Betty. She was delicate, but, if those in Medicine Bend whoremembered her said true, a lovely creature. Remaining in themountains was the last thing Betty had ever thought of, but no one,man or woman, could withstand Dick Dunning. She fell quite in lovewith him the first time she set eyes on him in Medicine Bend, for hewas very handsome in the saddle, and Be
tty was fairly wild abouthorses. So Dick Dunning wooed a fond mistress and married her andburied her, and all within hardly more than a year.

  But in that year they were very happy, never two happier, and when sheslept away her suffering she left him, as a legacy, a tiny baby girl.Puss brought the mite of a creature in its swaddling-clothes to thesick mother,--very, very sick then,--and poor Betty turned her darkeyes on it, kissed it, looked at her husband and whispered "Dicksie,"and died. Dicksie had been Betty's pet name for her mountain lover, sothe father said the child's name should be Dicksie and nothing else;and his heart broke and soon he died. Nothing else, storm or flood,death or disaster, had ever moved Dick Dunning; then a single blowkilled him. He rode once in a while over the ranch, a great tract bythat time of twenty thousand acres, all in one body, all under fence,up and down both sides of the big river, in part irrigated, swarmingwith cattle--none of it stirred Dick! and with little Dicksie in hisarms he slept away his suffering.

  So Dicksie was left, as her mother had been, to Puss, while Lancelooked after the ranch, swore at the price of cattle, and played cardsat Medicine Bend. At ten, Dicksie, as thoroughly spoiled as a pet babycould be by a fool mammy, a fond cousin, and a galaxy of devotedcowboys, was sent, in spite of crying and flinging, to a far-awayconvent--her father had planned everything--where in many tears shelearned that there were other things in the world besides cattle andmountains and sunshine and tall, broad-hatted horsemen to swing fromtheir stirrups and pick her hat from the ground--just to see littleDicksie laugh--when they swooped past the house to the corrals. Whenshe came back from Kentucky, her grandmother dead and her schooldaysfinished, all the land she could see in the valley was hers, and allthe living creatures in the fields. It seemed perfectly natural,because since childhood even the distant mountains and their snows hadbeen Dicksie's.