He did not intend to enter the revolver contest, but it offered so easy to his hand that he went in and won hands down. His arm was lame, but his nerves, not fevered by whisky, swiftly recovered tone. He was careful, however, not to go beyond the limits of the contest as he should have done had his arm possessed all of its proper cunning. He had no real compet.i.tor but Dan, who had been drinking steadily all day and was unfitted for his work. Mose lost nothing in the trial.
That night he put into his pocket one hundred and twenty dollars as the result of his day"s work, and immediately asked to be released of his duties as guard.
The manager of the Express Company said: "I"m sorry you"re leaving us, and I hope you"ll return to us soon. I"ll hold the place open for you, if you say so."
This Mose refused. "I don"t like it," he said. "I don"t think I earn the money. Hire a good driver and he"ll have no trouble. You don"t need me."
Mindful of his promise to eat dinner with the princess, he said to Reynolds: "Don"t wait for me. Go on--I"ll overtake you at Twelve Mile Creek."
The princess had not lost sight of him for a single moment, and the instant he departed from his friends she drove up. "You are to come to my house to-night, remember."
"I must overtake my folks; I can"t stay long," he said lamely.
Her power was augmented by her home. He had expected pictures and fine carpets and a piano and they were there, but there was a great deal more. He perceived a richness of effect which he could not have formulated better than to say, "It was all _fine_." He had expected things to be costly and gay of color, but this mysterious fitness of everything was a marvel to one like himself, used only to the meager ornaments of the homes in Rock River, or the threadbare poverty of the ranches and the squalid hotels of the cow country. The house was a large new frame building, not so much different from other houses with respect to exterior, but as he entered the door he took off his hat to it as he used to do as a lad in the home of Banker Brooks, deacon in his father"s church.
His was a sensitive soul, eye and ear were both acute. He perceived, without accounting for it, that the walls and hangings were complementary in color, that the furniture matched the carpet, and that the pictures on the wall were unusually good. They were not all highly-colored, naked subjects, as he had been led to expect. His respect for Mrs. Raimon rose, for he remembered that Mary"s home, while just as different from this as Mary was different from Mrs. Raimon, had, after all, something in common--both were beautiful to him, though Mary"s home was sweeter, daintier, and homelier. He was in the midst of an a.n.a.lysis of these subtleties when Mrs. Raimon (as he now determined to call her) returned from changing her dress.
He was amazed at the change in her. She wore a dark gray gown with almost no ornament, and looked smaller, older, and paler, but incomparably more winning and womanly than she had ever seemed before.
She appeared to be serious and her voice was gentle and winning.
"Well, boy, here you are--under my roof. Not such an awful den after all, is it?" she said with a smile.
"Beats a holler log in a snowstorm," he replied, looking about the room.
"Must have shipped all this truck from the States, it never was built out here--it would take me a couple of months to earn a whole outfit like this, wouldn"t it?"
She remained serious. "Mose, I want to tell you----"
"Wait a minute," he interrupted; "let"s start fair. My name is Harold Excell, and I"m going to call you Mrs. Raimon."
She thrust out her hand. "Good boy!" He could see she was profoundly pleased. Indeed she could not at once resume. At last she said: "I was going to say, Harold, that you can"t earn a home trailin" around over these mountains year after year with a band of Indians."
He became thoughtful. "I reckon you"re right about that. I"m wasting time; I"ve got to picket old Kintuck somewhere and go to work if I----"
He stopped abruptly and she smiled mournfully. "You needn"t hesitate; tell me all about it."
He sat in silence--a silence that at last became a rebuke. She arose.
"Well, suppose we go out to supper; we can talk all the better there."
He felt out of place and self-conscious, but he gave little outward sign of it as he took his seat at the table opposite her. For reasons of her own she emphasized the domestic side of her life and fairly awed the stern youth by her womanly dignity and grace. The little table was set for two, with pretty dishes. Liquor had no place on the cover, but a shining tea-pot, brought in by a smiling negress, was placed at her right hand. Her talk for a time was of the tea, the food, his taste as to sugar and other things pertaining to her duties as hostess. All his lurid imaginings of her faded into the wind, and a thousand new and old conceptions of wife and home and peaceful middle age came thronging like sober-colored birds. If she were playing a game it was well done and successful. Mose fell often into silence and deep thought.
She respected his introspection, and busying herself with the service and with low-voiced orders to the waitress, left him free for a time.
Suddenly she turned. "You mustn"t judge me by what people say outside.
Judge me by what I am to you. I don"t claim to be a Sunday-school teacher, but I average up pretty well, after all. I appear to a disadvantage. When Raimon died I took hold of his business out here and I"ve made it pay. I have a talent for business, and I like it. I"ve got enough to be silly with if I want to, but I intend to take care of myself--and I may even marry again. I can see you"re deeply involved in a love affair, Mose, and I honestly want to help you--but I shan"t say another word about it--only remember, when you need help you come to Martha Jane Williams Raimon. How is that for a name? It"s mine; my father was Lawrence Todd Williams, Professor of Paleontology at Blank College. Raimon was an actor of the tenth rate--the kind that play leading business in the candlestick circuit. Naturally Doctor Todd objected to an actor as a son-in-law. I eloped. Launt was a good fellow, and we had a happy honeymoon, but he lost his health and came out here and invested in a mine. That brought me. I was always lucky, and we struck it--but the poor fellow didn"t live long enough to enjoy it. You know all," she ended with a curious forced lightness of utterance.
After another characteristic silence, Mose said slowly: "Anyhow, I want you to understand that I"m much obliged for your good will; I"m not worth a cuss at putting things in a smooth way; I think I"m getting worse every day, but you"ve been my friend, and--and there"s no discount on my words when I tell you you"ve made me feel ashamed of myself to-day. From this time on, I take no other man"s judgment of a woman.
You know my life--all there is that would interest you. I don"t know how to talk to a woman--any kind of a woman--but no matter what I say, I don"t mean to do anybody any harm. I"m getting a good deal like an Indian--I talk to make known what"s on my mind. Since I was seventeen years of age I"ve let girls pretty well alone. The kind I meet alongside the trail don"t interest me. When I was a boy I was glib enough, but I know a whole lot less now than I did then--that is about some things.
What I started to say is this: I"m mighty much obliged for what you"ve done for me here--but I"m going to pull out to-night----"
"Not for good?" she said.
"Well--that"s beyond me. All I know is I hit the longest and wildest trail I ever entered. Where it comes out at I don"t know. But I shan"t forget you; you"ve been a good friend to me."
Her voice faltered a little as she said: "I wish you"d write to me and let me know how you are?"
"Oh, don"t expect that of me. I chew my tongue like a ten-year-old kid when I write. I never was any good at it, and I"m clear out of it now.
The chances are I"ll round up in the mountains again; I can"t see how I"d make a living anywhere else. If I come back this way I"ll let you know."
Neither of them was eating now, and the tension was great. She knew that no artifice could keep him, and he was aware of her emotion and was eager to escape.
He pushed back his chair at last, and she arose and came toward him and took his hand, standing so close to him that her bosom almost touched his shoulder.
"I hate to see you go!" she said, and the pa.s.sionate tremor in her voice moved him very deeply. "You"ve brought back my interest in simple things--and life seems worth while when I"m with you."
He shook her hand and then dropped it. "Well, so long."
"So long!" she said, and added, with another attempt at brightness, "and don"t stay away too long, and don"t fail to let me know when you make the circuit."
As he mounted his horse he remembered that there was another good-by to speak, and that was to Cora.
"I wish these women would let a man go without saying good-by at all,"
he thought in irritation, but the patter of Kintuck"s feet set his thought in other directions. As he topped the divide, he drew rein and looked at the great range to the southeast, lit by the dull red light of the sun, which had long since set to the settlers in the valley. His heart was for a moment divided. The joys of the trail--the care-free life--perhaps after all the family life was not for him. Perhaps he was chasing a mirage. He was on the divide of his life. On one side were the mountains, the camps, the cattle, the wild animals--on the other the plains, the cities, and Mary.
The thought of Mary went deep. It took hold of the foundations of his thinking and decided him. Shuddering with the pain and despair of his love he lifted rein and rode down into the deep shadow of the long canon through which roared the swift waters of the North Fork on their long journey to the east and south. Thereafter he had no uncertainties. Like the water of the canon he had but to go downward to the plain.
CHAPTER XIX
THE EAGLE ADVENTURES INTO STRANGE LANDS
It can not be said that the Black Eagle of the Rocky Mountains approached civilization in any heroic disguise. At its best, accompanying a cattle train is not epic in its largeness. To prod cattle by means of a long pole, to pull out smothered sheep, are not in themselves degrading deeds, but they are not picturesque in quality.
They smell of the shambles, not of the hills.
Day by day the train slid down the shining threads of track like a long string of rectangular green and brown and yellow beads. The caboose was filled with cattlemen and their a.s.sistants, who smoked, talked politics, told stories, and slept at all hours of the day, whenever a spare segment of bench offered. Those who were awake saw everything and commented on everything in sight. To some the main questions were when and where they were to get dinner or secure a drink. The train, being a "through freight," ran almost as steadily as a pa.s.senger train, and the thirsty souls became quite depressed or savage at times by lack of opportunities to "wet their whistles."
Mose was singularly silent, for he was reliving his boyish life on the plains and noting the changes which had taken place. The towns had grown gray with the bleach of the weather. Farms had multiplied and fences cut the range into pasture lands. As the mountains sank beneath the level horizon line his heart sank with them. Every hour of travel to the East was to him dangerous, disheartening. On the second day he was ready to leap from the caboose and wave it good-by; but he did not--he merely sat on the back platform and watched the track. He felt as if he were in one of those aerial buckets which descend like eagles from the mines in the Marshall Basin; the engine appeared to proceed eastward of its own weight, impossible to check or turn back.
The uncertainty of finding Mary in the millions of the city weakened his resolution, but as he was aboard, and as the train slid while he pondered, descending, remorselessly, he determined to "stay with it" as he would with a bucking broncho.
Kansas City with its big depot sheds filled with clangor and swarming with emigrants gave him a foretaste of Chicago. Two of his companions proceeded to get drunk and became so offensive that he was forced to cuff them into quiet. This depressed him also--he had no other defense but his hands. His revolvers were put away in his valise where they could not be reached in a hurry. Reynolds had said to him, "Now, Mose, you"re going into a country where they settle things with fists, so leave your guns at home. Keep cool and don"t mix in where there"s no call to mix in. If a man gives you lip--walk off and leave him--don"t hunt your guns."
Mose had also purchased a "hard" hat and shaved off his mustache in Canon City, and Reynolds himself would not have known him as he sauntered about the station room. Every time he lifted his fingers to his mustache he experienced a shock, and coming before a big mirror over the fireplace he stared with amazement--so boyish and so sorrowful did he appear to himself. It seemed as though he were playing a part.
As the train drew out of the town, night was falling and the East grew mysterious as the thitherward side of the river of death. Familiar things were being left behind. Uncertainties thickened like the darkness. All night long the engine hooted and howled and jarred along through the deep darkness, and every time the train stopped the cattle and sheep were inspected. Lanterns held aloft disclosed cattle being trampled to death and sheep smothering. Wild shouting, oaths, broke forth accompanied by thumpings, and the rumbling and creaking of cars as the cattle surged to and fro, and at the end, circles of fire--lanterns signaling "Go ahead"--caused a wild rush for the caboose.