Cavanagh: Forest Ranger
I
THE DESERT CHARIOT
Lee Virginia Wetherford began her return journey into the mountain Westwith exultation. From the moment she opened her car-window that Augustmorning in Nebraska the plain called to her, sustained her illusions. Itwas all quite as big, as tawny, as she remembered it--fit arena for theepic deeds in which her father had been a leader bold and free.
Her memories of Roaring Fork and its people were childish and romantic.She recalled, vividly, the stagecoach which used to amble sedately, not tosay wheezily, from the railway to the Fork and from the Fork back to therailway, in the days when she had ridden away in it a tearful, despairing,long-limbed girl, and fully expected to find it waiting for her at SulphurCity, with old Tom Quentan still as its driver.
The years of absence had been years of growth, and though she had changedfrom child to woman in these suns and moons, she could not think of theFork as anything other than the romantic town she had left--a list whereinspurred and steel-girt cow-men strode lamely over uneven sidewalks, orswooped, like the red nomads of the desert, in mad troops through thestarlit night.
The first hint of "the new West" came to her by way of the pretentiousHotel Alma, which stood opposite the station at Sulphur, and to which shewas led by a colored porter of most elaborate and kindly manners.
This house, which furnished an excellent dinner and an absorbing mixtureof types both American and European, was vaguely disturbing to her. It wasplainly not of the old-time West--the West her father had dominated in thedays "before the invasion." It was, indeed, distinctly built for thetourist trade, and was filled with all that might indicate the comfortablenearness of big game and good fishing.
Upon inquiry as to the stage, she was amazed to hear that an automobilenow made the journey to the Fork in five hours, and that it leftimmediately after the midday meal.
This was still more disconcerting than the hotel, but the closer she cameto the ride, the more resigned she became, for she began to relive thelong hours of torture on the trip outward, during which she had enduredclouds of dust and blazing heat. There were some disadvantages in the oldstage, romantic as her conception of it had been. Furthermore, the coachhad gone; so she made application for her seat at once.
At two o'clock, as the car came to the door, she entered it with a senseof having stepped from one invading chariot of progress to another, so bigand shining and up to date was its glittering body, shining with brass andglowing with brave red paint. It was driven, also, by a small, lean youngfellow, whom the cowboys on her father's ranch would have called a"lunger," so thin and small were his hands and arms. He was quite as farfrom old Tom Quentan as the car was from the coach on which he used toperch.
The owner of the machine, perceiving under Virginia's veil a girl's prettyface, motioned her to the seat with the driver, and rode beside her for afew minutes (standing on the foot-board), to inquire if she were visitingfriends in the Fork.
"Yes," she replied, curtly, "I am."
Something in her tone discouraged him from further inquiry, and he soondropped away.
The seats were apparently quite filled with men, when at the last moment amiddle-aged woman, with a penetrating, nasal, drawling utterance, inquiredif she were expected to be "squoze in betwixt them two strange men on thatthere back seat."
Lee Virginia turned, and was about to greet the woman as an oldacquaintance when something bold and vulgar in the complaining vixen'sface checked the impulse.
The stage-agent called her "Miss McBride," and with exaggerated courtesyexplained that travel was heavy, and that he had not known that she wasintending to go.
One of the men, a slender young fellow, moved to the middle of the seat,and politely said, "You can sit on the outside, madam."
She clambered in with doleful clamor. "Well, I never rode in one of thesepesky things before, and if you git me safe down to the Fork I'll promisenever to jump the brute another time."
A chuckle went 'round the car; but it soon died out, for the new-comerscarcely left off talking for the next three hours, and Virginia was veryglad she had not claimed acquaintanceship.
As they whirled madly down the valley the girl was astonished at thetransformation in the hot, dry land. Wire fences ran here and there,enclosing fields of alfalfa and wheat where once only the sage-brush andthe grease-wood grew. Painted farm-houses shone on the banks of thecreeks, and irrigating ditches flashed across the road with an air ofbusiness and decision.
For the first half-hour it seemed as if the dominion of the cattle-man hadended, but as the swift car drew away from the valley of the Bear andclimbed the divide toward the north, the free range was disclosed, withfew changes, save in the cattle, which were all of the harmless orhornless variety, appearing tame and spiritless in comparison with theold-time half-wild broad-horn breeds.
No horsemen were abroad, and nothing was heard but the whirr of the motorand the steady flow of the garrulous woman behind. Not till the machinewas descending the long divide to the west did a single cowboy come intoview to remind the girl of the heroic past, and this one but a symbol--afigure of speech. Leaning forward upon his reeling, foaming steed, hespurred along the road as if pursued, casting backward apprehensiveglances, as if in the brassy eyes of the car he read his doom--the doom ofall his kind.
Some vague perception of this symbolism came into Virginia's thought asshe watched the swift and tireless wheels swallow the shortening distancebetween the heels of the flying pony and the gilded seat in which she sat.Vain was the attempt to outride progress. The rider pulled out, and asthey passed him the girl found still greater significance in the fact thathe was one of her father's old-time cowboys--a grizzled, middle-aged,light-weight centaur whom she would not have recognized had not the drivercalled him by his quaint well-known nickname.
Soon afterward the motor overhauled and passed the battered stagelumbering along, bereft of its passengers, sunk to the level of carryingthe baggage for its contemptuous aristocratic supplanter; and as LeeVirginia looked up at the driver, she caught the glance of a simple-mindedfarm-boy looking down at her. Tom Quentan no longer guided the plunging,reeling broncos on their swift and perilous way--he had sturdily declinedto "play second fiddle to a kerosene tank."
Lee began to wonder if she should find the Fork much changed--her motherwas a bad correspondent.
Her unspoken question, opportunely asked by another, was answered by Mrs.McBride. "Oh, Lord, yes! Summer tourists are crawlin' all over us sencethis otto line began. 'Pears like all the bare-armed boobies andcross-legged little rips in Omaha and Denver has jest got to ride in andlook us over. Two of them new hotels in Sulphur don't do a thing but feedthese tenderfeet. I s'pose pro-hi-bition will be the next grandstand-playon the part of our town-lot boomers. We old cow-punchers don't carewhether the town grows or not, but these hyer bankers and truck-farmersare all for raisin' the price o' land and taxin' us quiet fellers out ofour boots."
Virginia winced a little at this, for it flashed over her that all thewomen with whom she had grown up spoke very much in this fashion--usingbreeding terms almost as freely as the ranchers themselves. It was naturalenough. What else could they do in talking to men who knew nothing butcows? And yet it was no longer wholly excusable even to the men, wholaughed openly in reply.
The mountains, too, yielded their disappointment. For the first hour ortwo they seemed lower and less mysterious than of old. They neither wooednor threatened--only the plain remained as vast and as majestic as ever.The fences, the occasional farms in the valleys could not subdue itsoutspread, serene majesty to prettiness. It was still of desert sternnessand breadth.
From all these impersonal considerations the girl was brought back to thevital phases of her life by the harsh voice of one of the men. "LizeWetherford is goin' to get jumped one o' these days for sellin' whiskeywithout a license. I've told her so, too. Everybody knows she's a-doin'it, and what beats me is her goin' along in that way when a little
timeand money would set her straight with the law."
The shock of all this lay in the fact that Eliza Wetherford was the motherto whom Lee Virginia was returning after ten years of life in the East,and the significance of the man's words froze her blood for an instant.There was an accent of blunt truth in his voice, and the mere fact that acharge of such weight could be openly made appalled the girl, although herrecollections of her mother were not entirely pleasant.
The young fellow on the back seat slowly said: "I don't complain of Lizesellin' bad whiskey, but the grub she sets up is fierce."
"The grub ain't so bad; it's the way she stacks it up," remarked another."But, then, these little fly-bit cow-towns are all alike and all bad, sofar as hotels are concerned."
Lee Virginia, crimson and burning hot, was in agony lest they should gofurther in their criticism.
She knew that her mother kept a boarding-house; and while she was notproud of it, there was nothing precisely disgraceful in it--many widowedwomen found it the last resort; but this brutal comment on the way inwhich her business was carried on was like a slash of mud in the face. Herjoy in the ride, her impersonal exultant admiration of the mountains wasgone, and with flaming cheeks and beating heart she sat, tense and bent,dreading some new and keener thrust.
Happily the conversation turned aside and fell upon the Government'sforest policy, and Sam Gregg, a squat, wide-mouthed, harsh-voicedindividual, cursed the action of Ross Cavanagh the ranger in the districtabove the Fork. "He thinks he's Secretary of War, but I reckon he won'tafter I interview him. He can't shuffle my sheep around over the hills athis own sweet will."
The young fellow on the back seat quietly interposed. "You want to be sureyou've got the cinch on Cavanagh good and square, Sam, or he'll bea-ridin' _you_."
"He certainly is an arbitrary cuss," said the old woman. "They say he wasone of Teddy's Rough-riders in the war. He sure can ride and handle a gun.'Pears like he thinks he's runnin' the whole range," she continued, aftera pause. "Cain't nobody so much as shoot a grouse since he came on, andthe Supervisor upholds him in it."
Lee Virginia wondered about all this supervision, for it was new to her.
Gregg, the sheepman, went on: "As I tell Redfield, I don't object to theforest policy--it's a good thing for me; I get my sheep pastured cheaperthan I could do any other way, but it makes me hot to have grazing linesrun on me and my herders jacked up every time they get over the line. Rossrun one bunch off the reservation last Friday. I'm going to find out aboutthat. He'll learn he can't get 'arbitrary' with me."
Lee Virginia, glancing back at this man, felt sorry for any one whoopposed him, for she recalled him as one of the fiercest of thecattle-men--one ever ready to cut a farmer's fence or burn asheep-herder's wagon.
The old woman chuckled: "'Pears like you've changed your tune since '98,Sam."
He admitted his conversion shamelessly. "I'm for whatever will pay best.Just now, with a high tariff, sheep are the boys. So long as I can get onthe reserve at seven cents a head--lambs free--I'm going to put everydollar I've got into sheep."
"You're going to get thrown off altogether one of these days," said theyoung man on the back seat.
Thereupon a violent discussion arose over the question of the right of asheepman to claim first grass for his flocks, and Gregg boasted that hecared nothing for "the dead-line." "I'll throw my sheep where I please,"he declared. "They've tried to run me out of Deer Creek, but I'm there tostay. I have ten thousand more on the way, and the man that tries to stopme will find trouble."
The car was descending into the valley of the Roaring Fork now, and wirefences and alfalfa fields on either side gave further evidence of thechange in the land's dominion. New houses of frame and old houses in freshpaint shone vividly from the green of the willows and cottonwoods. Aball-ground on the outskirts of the village was another guarantee ofprogress. The cowboy was no longer the undisputed prince of the countryfair.
Down past the court-house, refurbished and deeper sunk in trees, LeeVirginia rode, recalling the wild night when three hundred armed andvengeful cowboys surrounded it, holding three cattle-barons and theirhired invaders against all comers, resolute to be their own judge, jury,and hangman. It was all as peaceful as a Sunday afternoon at this moment,with no sign of the fierce passions of the past.
There were new store-buildings and cement walks along the main street ofthe town, and here and there a real lawn, cut by a lawn-mower; but as themachine buzzed on toward the river the familiar little old battlementedbuildings came to view. The Palace Hotel, half log, half battlement,remained on its perilous site beside the river. The triangle where thetrails met still held Halsey's Three Forks Saloon, and next to it stoodMarkheit's general store, from which the cowboys and citizens had armedthemselves during the ten days' war of cattle-men and rustlers.
The car crossed the Roaring Fork and drew up before two small shacks, oneof which bore a faded sign, "The Wetherford House," and the other infresher paint, "The Wetherford Cafe." On the sidewalk a group of Indianswere sitting, and a half-dozen slouching white men stood waiting at thedoor.
At sight of her mother's hotel Virginia forgot every other building, everyother object, and when the driver asked, respectfully, "Where will youwant to get off, miss?" she did not reply, but rose unsteadily in herseat, blindly reaching for her bag and her wraps. Her slim, gray-robedfigure, graceful even in her dismay, appealed to every onlooker, but Greggwas the one to offer a hand.
"Allow me, miss," he said, with the smile of a wolf.
Declining his aid, she took her bag from the driver and walked briskly upthe street as if she were a resident and knew precisely where she wantedto go. "One o' those Eastern tourists, I reckon?" she heard the old womansay.
As she went past the hotel-porch her heart beat hard and her breathshortened. In a flash she divined the truth. She understood why her motherhad discouraged her coming home. It was not merely on account of themoney--it was because she knew that her business was wrong.
What a squalid little den it was! How cheap, bald, and petty the wholetown seemed of a sudden. Lee Virginia halted and turned. There was onlyone thing to be done, and that was to make herself known. She retraced hersteps, pulled open the broken screen door, and entered the cafe. It was alow, dingy dining-room filled with the odor of ham and bad coffee. At thetables ten or fifteen men, a motley throng, were busily feeding theirvoracious jaws, and on her left, behind a showcase filled with cigars,stood her mother, looking old, unkempt, and worried. The changes in herwere so great that the girl stood in shocked alarm. At last she raised herveil. "Mother," she said, "don't you know me?"
A look of surprise went over the older woman's flabby face--a glow whichbrought back something of her other self, as she cried: "Why, LeeVirginny, where did you come from?"
The boarders stopped chewing and stared in absorbed interest, whileVirginia kissed her blowsy mother.
"By the Lord, it's little Virginny!" said one old fellow. "It's herdaughter."
Upon this a mutter of astonishment arose, and the waiter-girls, giggling,marvelling, and envious, paused, their platters in hand, to exchangecomment on the new-comer's hat and gown. A cowboy at the washing-sink inthe corner suspended his face-polishing and gaped over his shoulder insilent ecstasy.
For a full minute, so it seemed, this singular, interesting, absorbedimmobility lasted; then a seedy little man rose, and approached the girl.His manner was grotesquely graceful as he said: "We are all glad to greetyou home again, Miss Virginia."
She gave her hand hesitatingly. "It's Mr. Sifton, isn't it?"
"It is," he replied; "the same old ha'penny, only a little moreworn--worn, not polished," he added, with a smile.
She remembered him then--an Englishman, a remittance man, a "lord," theyused to say. His eyes were kind, and his mouth, despite its unshavedstubble of beard, was refined. A harmless little man--his own worst enemy,as the saying goes.
Thereupon others of the men came forward to greet her, and thoug
h she hadsome difficulty in recognizing one or two of them (so hardly had the yearsof her absence used them), she eventually succeeded in placing them all.
At length her mother led her through the archway which connected the twoshanties, thence along a narrow hall into a small bedroom, into which thewestern sunset fell. It was a shabby place, but as a refuge from the crowdin the restaurant it was grateful.
Lize looked at her daughter critically. "I don't know what I'm going to dowith a girl like you.--Why, you're purty--purty as a picture. You wereskinny as a child--I'm fair dazed. Great snakes, how you have openedout!--You're the living image of your dad.--What started you back? I toldyou to stay where you was."
The girl stared at her helplessly, trying to understand herself and hersurroundings. There was, in truth, something singularly alien in hermother's attitude. She seemed on the defensive, not wishing to be tooclosely studied. "Her manner is not even affectionate--only friendly. Itis as if I were only an embarrassing visitor," the girl thought. Aloud shesaid: "I had no place to go after Aunt Celia died. I had to come home."
"You wrote they was willing to keep you."
"They were, but I couldn't ask it of them. I had no right to burden them,and, besides, Mrs. Hall wrote me that you were sick."
"I am; but I didn't want you to come back. Lay off your things and comeout to supper. We'll talk afterward."
The eating-house, the rooms and hallways, were all of that desolateshabbiness which comes from shiftlessness joined with poverty. The carpetswere frayed and stained with tobacco-juice, and the dusty windows werelittered with dead flies. The curtains were ragged, the paper peeling fromthe walls, and the plastering cracked into unsightly lines. Everything onwhich the girl's eyes fell contrasted strongly with her aunt's home on theBrandywine--not because that house was large or luxurious, but because itwas exquisitely in order, and sweet with flowers and dainty arrangement ofcolor.
She understood now the final warnings uttered by her friends. "You willfind everything changed," they had said, "because you are changed."
She regretted bitterly that she had ever left her Eastern friends. Hermother, in truth, showed little pleasure at her coming, and almost nothingof the illness of which a neighbor had written. It was, indeed, thisletter which had decided her to return to the West. She had come, led by asense of duty, not by affection, for she had never loved her mother as adaughter should--they were in some way antipathetic--and now she foundherself an unwelcome guest.
Then, too, the West had called to her: the West of her childhood, theromantic, chivalrous West, the West of the miner, the cattle-man, thewolf, and the eagle. She had returned, led by a poetic sentiment, and herenow she sat realizing as if by a flash of inward light that the West shehad known as a child had passed, had suddenly grown old andcommonplace--in truth, it had never existed at all!
One of the waitresses, whose elaborately puffed and waved hair set forthher senseless vanity, called from the door: "You can come out now, your masays! Your supper's ready!"
With aching head and shaking knees Virginia reentered the dining-room,which was now nearly empty of its "guests," but was still misty with thesteam of food, and swarming with flies. These pests buzzed like beesaround the soiled places on the table-cloths, and one of her mother'sfirst remarks was a fretful apology regarding her trials with thoseinsects. "Seems like you can't keep 'em out," she said.
Lee Virginia presented the appearance of some "settlement worker," somefair lady on a visit to the poor, as she took her seat at the table andgingerly opened the small moist napkin which the waiter dropped beforeher. Her appetite was gone. Her appetite failed at the very sight of thefried eggs and hot and sputtering bacon, and she turned hastily to hercoffee. A fly was in that! She uttered a little choking cry, and buriedher face in her handkerchief and sobbed.
Lize turned upon the waitress and lashed her with stinging phrases. "Can'tyou serve things better than this? Take that cup away! My God, you make metired--fumblin' around here with your eyes on the men! Pay more attentionto your work and less to your crimps, and you'll please me a whole lotbetter!"
With desperate effort Lee conquered her disgust. "Never mind, I'm tiredand a little upset. I don't need any dinner."
"The slob will go, just the same. I've put up with her because help isscarce, but here's where she gits off!"
In this moment Virginia perceived that her mother was of the same naturewith Mrs. McBride--not one whit more refined--and the gulf between themswiftly widened. Hastily sipping her coffee, she tried hard to keep backthe tears, but failed; and no sooner did her mother turn away than shefled to her room, there to sob unrestrainedly her despair and shame. "Oh,I can't stand it," she called. "I can't! I can't!"
Outside, the mountains deepened in splendor, growing each moment moremysterious and beautiful under the sunset sky, but the girl derived nocomfort from them. Her loneliness and her perplexities had closed her eyesto their majestic drama. She felt herself alien and solitary in the landof her birth.
Lize came in half an hour later, pathetic in her attempt at "slicking up."She was still handsome in a large-featured way, but her gray hair wasthere, and her face laid with a network of fretful lines. Her color wasbad. At the moment her cheeks were yellow and sunken.
She complained of being short of breath and lame and tired. "I'm alwaystired," she explained. "'Pears like sometimes I can't scarcely drag myselfaround, but I do."
A pang of comprehending pain shot through Virginia's heart. If she couldnot love, she could at least pity and help; and reaching forth her hand,she patted her mother on the knee. "Poor old mammy!" she said. "I'm goingto help you."
Lize was touched by this action of her proud daughter, and smiled sadly."This is no place for you. It's nothin' but a measly little old cow-towngone to seed--and I'm gone to seed with it. I know it. But what is afeller to do? I'm stuck here, and I've got to make a living or quit. Ican't quit. I ain't got the grit to eat a dose, and so I stagger along."
"I've come back to help you, mother. You must let me relieve you of someof the burden."
"What can you do, child?" Lize asked, gently.
"I can teach."
"Not in this town you can't."
"Why not?"
"Well, there's a terrible prejudice against--well, against me. And,besides, the places are all filled for the next year. The Wetherfordsain't among the first circles any more."
This daunted the girl more than she could express, but she bravely madeadvance. "But there must be other schools in the country."
"There are--a few. But I reckon you better pull out and go back, at least,to Sulphur; they don't know so much about me there, and, besides, they'rea little more like your kind."
Lee Virginia remembered Gregg's charge against her mother. "What do youmean by the prejudice against you?" she asked.
Lize was evasive. "Since I took to running this restaurant my old friendskind o' fell off--but never mind that to-night. Tell me about things backEast. I don't s'pose I'll ever get as far as Omaha again; I used to gowith Ed every time I felt like it. He was good to me, your father. If everthere was a prince of a man, Ed Wetherford was him."
The girl's thought was now turned into other half-forgotten channels. "Iwish you would tell me more about father. I don't remember where he wasburied."
"Neither do I, child--I mean I don't know exactly. You see, after thatcattle-war, he went away to Texas."
"I remember, but it's all very dim."
"Well, he never came back and never wrote, and by-and-by word came that hehad died and was buried; but I never could go down to see where his gravewas at."
"Didn't you know the name of the town?"
"Yes; but it was a new place away down in the Pan Handle, and nobody Iknew lived there. And I never knew anything more."
Lee sighed hopelessly. "I hate to think of him lying neglected downthere."
"'Pears like the whole world we lived in in them days has slipped off themap," replied the older woman; and as the room
was darkening, she rose andlighted a dusty electric globe which dangled from the ceiling over thesmall table. "Well, I must go back into the restaurant; I hain't got agirl I can trust to count the cash."
Left alone, Lee Virginia wept no more, but her face settled into anexpression of stern sadness. It seemed as if her girlhood had died out ofher, and that she was about to begin the same struggle with work and worrywhich had marked the lives of all the women she had known in herchildhood.
Out on the porch a raw youth was playing wailing tunes on a mouth-organ,and in the "parlor" a man was uttering silly jokes to a tittering girl.The smell of cheap cigars filled the hallway and penetrated to hernostrils. Every sight and sound sickened her. "Can it be that the oldtown, the town of my childhood, was of this character--so sordid, sovulgar?" she asked herself. "And mother--what is the matter with her? Sheis not even glad to see me!"
Weary with her perplexities, she fastened her door at last, and went tobed, hoping to end--for a few hours, at least--the ache in her heart andthe benumbing whirl of her thought.
But this respite was denied her. Almost at once she began to fancy that amultitudinous minute creeping and stirring was going on about her--in herhair, over her neck, across her feet. For a time she explained this byreference to her disordered nerves, but at last some realization of thetruth came to her, and she sprang out upon the floor in horror anddisgust. Lighting the lamp, she turned to scrutinize her couch. It swarmedwith vermin. The ceiling was spattered with them. They raced across thewalls in platoons, thin and voracious as wolves.
With a choking, angry, despairing moan she snatched her clothing from thechair and stood at bay. It needed but this touch to complete herdisillusionment.