CHAPTER V
HARKNESS AND THE SEER
Harkness and Clayton had come to Denver; Clayton to “hold up the hands” of Justin, guessing what he would be called on to encounter, and Harkness to see the “sights” in this time of political turmoil. The cowboys were virtually in a state of revolt. It was not possible that it could be otherwise. When Harkness, enraged and resentful, led them in that rebellion against Ben Davison, ranch discipline was destroyed and he lost control of them himself. Not that he now cared. The impulse which led him to strike Ben to the earth by the ranch house door had guided him since. He knew that the restraining hand of Fogg, who had present interests to serve, alone checked the wrath of Philip Davison. He, and all the other cowboys, must go, as soon as this thing was settled. Nothing else was possible, when such a man as Philip Davison was to be dealt with.
Harkness met Justin on the street in front of the hotel and made straight for him. It was not a bee-line, for Harkness was comfortably intoxicated. He had the cowboy failing. Though he never touched liquor while on the ranch and duty demanded sobriety, he could not resist the temptation to drink with a friend or an acquaintance when he was in the city. He greeted Justin with hilarious familiarity, and the scent of the liquor mingling with the scent of cinnamon drops Justin found almost overpowering.
“Shake!” he cried, reeling as he took Justin’s hand. “Justin, I’m yer friend! Don’t you never fergit it, I’m yer friend! And there ain’t no strings on you! Understand—there ain’t—no—strings—on—you! We fellers elected you 'cause we like you, and 'cause we couldn’t vote for Ben Davison. ‘To hell with Ben Davison,’ says I to the boys,—‘to hell with him; he took my wife’s horse and left her and Helen to burn to death in that fire! I’ll see him damned 'fore—'fore I’ll vote fer him!’ And so I would, Justin; an’ we—we (hic) voted f’r—fer you, see! We voted fer you. Davison’s goin’ to d’scharge me an’ I know it, but let him. I don’t haf to be cowboy, I don’t. Let him d’scharge (hic) and damn to him! Let him d’scharge. But you go right ahead an’ do as you want to. You’re honest, an’ you’re all right, an’ we’re backin’ you.”
When Fogg appeared—he had not yet abandoned hope of Justin—Harkness swayed up to him pugnaciously. He had never liked Fogg, and he liked him less now. Fogg’s oiliness sickened the cowboy stomach.
“Fogg,” he blustered, “Justin’s my friend, see! And there ain’t no strings on him. He’s honest, an’ we’re backin’ him. You want to hear my sentiments? ‘To hell with Ben Davison!’ Them’s my sentiments, an’ I ain’t 'shamed of ’em. Davison’s goin’ to d’scharge me an’ I know it. Le’m d’scharge. Who keers f’r d’scharge? I don’t haf to be cowboy, I don’t. But you treat Justin right. You’ve got to treat (hic) treat him right, fer he’s my friend, see!”
Fogg protested that he had never contemplated treating Justin in any other way, and that Justin was his good friend as well as Harkness’s.
Wandering about Denver that day, “staring like a locoed steer,” as he afterward expressed it, Harkness came to a stand in front of a doorway and looked at a man who had emerged therefrom. The man was William Sanders, but he passed on without observing Harkness.
“What’s he doin’ up here?” Harkness queried, as he watched the familiar figure disappear in the crowd.
Sanders had gone, and to get an answer to his question Harkness stared at the doorway, and the building, a somewhat imposing edifice of brick, situated on one of the principal streets. It was given over to offices of various kinds, he judged; but what fixed his eye was a sign with a painted index-hand pointing to it.
“Madame Manton, Seer, Fortune teller, Palmist, and Clairvoyant. Fortune telling and astrology. The past and the future revealed. Lost articles found, dreams interpreted, lovers re-united.”
There was a statement below this, in much smaller letters, setting forth that Madame Manton, who was a seventh daughter of a seventh daughter and from birth gifted with miraculous second-sight, had just returned to America after a prolonged stay in European capitals, during which she had achieved marvellous successes and had been consulted on important matters by the crowned heads.
Harkness did not know whether to connect the egress of William Sanders from that doorway with this fortune teller or not, but the vagaries of his intellectual condition impelled him to enter. Following the direction of the pointing hand, he was soon climbing a stairway which led to the door of this professed mistress of the black arts. Here another sign, with even more emphatic statements, greeted him. On this door Harkness hammered lustily.
“Come in!” said a voice.
Harkness tried the knob with fumbling fingers, then set his massive shoulders to the panel, and was fairly precipitated into the room where a rosy half-light glowed from a red lamp, and the sunlight, showing through heavy red curtains, conjured queer shadows in the corners. At the farther end of the room sat a woman. She was robed in red, and her chair was red. A reddish veil hid her face. But the hand she extended was small and white, and flashed the fire of diamonds.
Harkness was so taken aback that he was almost on the point of bolting from the room. But that would have savored of a lack of courage, and his drink-buoyed mind resented the imputation. He would not run, even from a red fortune teller. Seeing a chair by the door he dropped into it, stared at the woman, and not knowing what else to do took out his red handkerchief to mop his red face. The odor of cinnamon drops floating out from it combined with that of the whiskey and filled the room.
“If you will be kind enough to close the door!” said the woman.
She was looking at him intently. He closed the door, and dropped back into the chair. He crossed his legs nervously, then uncrossed them, wiped his face again with the scented handkerchief, and finally stuck his big hands into his big pockets to get rid of them. He was dressed in half cowboy garb, and it began to dawn on him that he was “cutting a pretty figure,” sitting there with that fortune teller.
“I suppose you’d like to have your fortune told?” she questioned.
“I dunno 'bout that!” he protested, his big hands burrowing deep into his pockets. “I seen a feller come from this way, and I kinder p’inted my toes in the same direction. Mebbe you was tellin’ his fortune?”
“No one has been here for more than an hour.”
“Then I reckon I was mistook. Do you make up these here fortunes out of your own head, or how?”
“I tell whatever is to be told.”
“Fer coin?”
“Yes, for coin. Even a fortune teller must live. Put five dollars on that tray beside you and I will begin.”
“If you can tag me, I’ll make it ten!”
Harkness put a crisp five dollar bill on the tray. If she had said ten he would have placed that there. Liquor made him generous.
“You do not believe in fortunes?”
“Not any, lady. I stumbled into this game, and I’m simply playin’ it fer the fun of it, same’s I used to go into a game of cards with Ben Davison, when I knowed good and well he’d skin me. I’m goin’ up ag’inst your game, lady, and payin’ before the game begins. It’s cut out fer me to lose, but I’ll double the bet and lose it willin’ if you can put your finger on me an’ tell me whatever about myself. I don’t reckon you can do it.”
A low laugh of amusement came from behind the veil.
“You might as well put down the other five dollars now, to save you the trouble of doing it later.”
Then she leaned forward and stared at him so intently that he felt almost nervous. There was something uncanny in that rigid stare, and in the strained tones of her voice, when she spoke after prolonged silence. He fancied he could see her glowing eyes through the mesh of the veil.
“Your last name begins with an H. Let me see! It is something like Hearing. No, it can’t be that! It’s Hark—Hark—Harkening. No, that can’t be. I can’t get it; but I didn’t promise to tell names. There are a great many cattle where you live. Yes, and you are married. That’s strange, for not many cowboys are married. You have a little girl.”
She put her hand to her head, and was silent a moment.
“That’s very queer. The name of your little girl, her first name, begins with an H.” She uttered a little inarticulate cry. “And, oh, dear, she seems to be surrounded by fire; flames are on all sides of her, and smoke! And she is frightened.”
Harkness started from his chair.
“She ain’t in any fire now?”
The woman dropped back with a sigh.
“No, not now,” she admitted; “that is past. I am telling you things you know about, so that you will see that I have the power I claim. Some one, some one on horseback, is saving her from that fire.”
“And a certain cuss is skedaddlin’ without liftin’ a finger to help her!” said Harkness grimly. “Put that in the picture, fer I ain’t fergittin’ it.”
The disclosures which followed astonished the intoxicated cowboy. He could not have revealed them more clearly himself. The fortune teller took excursions into the future too, in a way to please him; and, as she could tell the past so well, he was glad to believe in her glittering portrayals of delights to come.
Altogether Harkness was bewildered to the point of stupefaction. He was sure he had never seen this woman nor she him, and her knowledge produced in him a half-frightened sensation. Though he always resolutely denied it to himself and to others, he was deeply superstitious. If he began to sing as soon as he rose in the morning, he tried to dissipate the bad luck that foretold by singing the words backward. If he chanced to observe the new moon for the first time over his left shoulder, he turned round in his tracks three times and looked at it over his right. If he saw a pin on the floor with its point toward him he picked it up, for that was a sign of good luck. And he had such a collection of cast-off horseshoes he could have started a shoeing shop on short notice.
Harkness was so well satisfied with the fortune teller that when she concluded he dropped the second five dollar bill on the tray.
“You’re as welcome to it, lady, as if it was water,” he declared. “Five dollars won’t count even a little bit when I come into the fortune you p’inted out to me. You’re a silver-plated seer from the front counties. You’ll find Dicky Carroll jumpin’ into this red boodoir the first time he hits Denver. I’ll tell him about you, and it’ll set him wild.”
Then he plunged down the stairway, fully convinced that he had received the full worth of his money, not at all knowing that he had imparted much more information than he had received.
When he was gone the woman leaned back in her red chair and laughed until the tears came into her eyes. She laid aside the reddish veil, thus revealing the features of Sibyl Dudley, and wiped away the tears with a filmy handkerchief.
Then she began to make an estimate of the value of the information she had received from this intoxicated cowboy, and from William Sanders. It was considerable. She had formed many of her statements so craftily that they were questions, and she had made these men talk about themselves and their affairs in really garrulous fashion.
When a little time had elapsed she ventured into the street, in an entirely different garb and veiled more heavily. Walking across the street she hailed a cab, and was driven home, halting however at a corner to purchase copies of the latest Denver papers. At home she began to absorb their contents.
Sibyl Dudley’s finances were at a low ebb. Mr. Plimpton, the stock broker, had met a reverse of fortune, and criminal proceedings being hinted by men he had fleeced, he had gone into exile. Where he was Sibyl did not know, and if she had known he could not have helped her, for he had now no money. With debts thickening about her, and no new admirer with a plethoric bank account yet appearing, she was being driven to desperate extremities. To tide over this day of evil fortune she had, carefully veiled that no one might know her, become Madame Manton.
All these years she had kept Mary Jasper with her. Her attitude toward Mary may be thought singular. Yet to Sibyl it was entirely natural. She had plucked and worn this fair flower at first that it might add to her attractiveness, as she would have plucked a wild rose to tuck in her corsage on some gay evening when she desired to accentuate her physical attractions in the eyes of men. But the utter simplicity and guilelessness which Mary had worn through all as a protecting armor had touched some hidden spring in this woman’s heart, so that she came at last to cherish a brave desire to stand well in the opinion of this pure girl and maintain firmly her position on that pinnacle of supposed goodness and kindness where Mary had established her. Hence her charities were continued by and by, not to create that inner warmth of which she had spoken, but that Mary might believe her to be charitable. And if any good angel could have done so great a thing as to pull her from that miry clay in which her feet were set Mary Jasper would, all unconsciously, have accomplished even that. Sibyl Dudley, driven back upon herself, had to have some one who could love and respect her; for in spite of all she was a woman, and love was starving in her heart.
But she was not courageous enough to be honest; and, having read through the papers, she sat thinking and planning how she might win money enough to continue her present fight against adverse circumstances. She could not confess to Mary that she was not rich, that she was a pretender, and vile and degraded. No, she could not do that. But to keep up her pretensions she must have money. Fortune telling was an odious and precarious calling. She was sinking deeper into debt. She must have money.
Putting away the papers and going to her mirror she scanned her appearance. In spite of her strenuous fight, Time had the slow-moving years with him, and they bit into heart and face like acid. She brought forth her rouge and her pencils. They had long worked wonders and her slender fingers had not lost their cunning. She was an artist in paint though she never touched brush to canvas.
When Mary came in Sibyl was singing in a light-hearted way and thrusting bits of cake to her canary between the bars of its gilded cage.
CHAPTER VI
THE MOTH AND THE FLAME
Clayton was standing idly in front of his hotel. Sibyl Dudley and Mary Jasper were driving by in the cool bright sunshine of the late afternoon. Sibyl glanced keenly at the well-known figure. Clayton had lost much in trimness and neatness of appearance by his long sojourn in Paradise Valley. His clothing was ill-fitting, and his almost useless left arm appeared to swing more stiffly than ever, as the crowd jostled him. The contrast between the stylishly-dressed woman in the carriage and this man who had once been her husband was marked. Yet the handsome face of the man was still there, almost unseamed, and it revealed kindness and cultured intelligence, as of old.
“It is Doctor Clayton!” she said. “He looks so lonely and is such a stranger here that it will be a kindness if we speak to him. I knew him very well once, you know.”
The horses had trotted on, unnoticed by Clayton. Sibyl spoke now to the driver, and the carriage was turned and driven back to the hotel. The old desire to prove her power over this man possessed her. And she might be able to use him!
“Speak to him,” she said to Mary. “It will please him, I’m sure, to meet some one he knows. And it’s so long since I met him that he may have forgotten me entirely.”
The carriage with the well-groomed horses in their shining harness had drawn up at the curb. Even yet the abstracted doctor had not observed the occupants of the carriage. But now, when Mary addressed him, he looked up, almost startled to hear his name spoken there. He recognized Mary, and his face flushed a deep red when he recognized also the woman who sat smiling beside her.
“It is Doctor Clayton, is it not?” said Sibyl, speaking to him and using her utmost witchery. “It seems so strange to see you away from Paradise Valley. But it is a pleasure.”
He came up to the carriage, hesitating for words. He did not trust this woman, yet he could not forget what she had once been to him. And he had always liked Mary, as he liked her crabbed old father. He had justified himself for not speaking to Sloan Jasper, with the thought that he really knew nothing concerning the life that Sibyl was living. When a man cannot justify his actions he loses self-respect, and Clayton had never lost his self-respect. He had known nothing of Sibyl’s private life from the moment of his plunge into the world-forgotten valley of Paradise. He knew nothing now. As he looked into her eyes, the trepidation and confusion which had produced that hot flush was mingled with pity and a yearning touch of the old love. She had faded, she was garish, yet she was Sibyl, and to him still beautiful; Sibyl, whom he had loved and married, and from whom he had fled.
“You are looking well,” he said to Mary, though she was not looking well, for trouble with Ben had set shadows in her dark eyes. “And you, too Mrs.——”
He hesitated.
“Dudley,” Sibyl supplemented. “We haven’t met for so long that you have actually forgotten my name!” She smiled amiably. “Won’t you take a seat with us for a little spin about the streets? This crowd bores you, I know.”
He still hesitated, hunting for words. He had never felt so awkward, nor had his clothing ever seemed to set so badly or look so mean. He began to realize that in Paradise Valley he had lost something. Where was the neatly-dressed college student, filled with learning and a desire to please? Apparently only the learning and the desire to please remained. And that desire to please, which often took the form of an inability to displease any one, made it impossible for him to refuse this invitation.
Clayton, entering the carriage, found himself by Sibyl’s dexterous manipulation placed in the seat at her side, with Mary in the seat in front of them. He looked at Mary as the carriage started, and he wondered, and his heart smote him. Then he looked at the woman who sat with him.
“She is very happy with me,” said Sibyl, as the horses beat their noisy tattoo through the street, deadening the sound of her voice. “And there isn’t a better girl in the world!” There was a peculiar emphasis on the words. “If you thought differently, you have been much mistaken. She has been as safe with me as that boy Justin has been with you; and I love her as much as you can possibly love him. She is a dear, true, simple-hearted girl, and she thinks everything of me. And I am much better than you have ever thought. So don’t get silly ideas into your head, simply because you see this carriage and I wear a few diamonds. The carriage may be hired and the diamonds paste. It was one of your dogmas, you know, that people should always hold charitable opinions.”
“And I do. I have always thought kindly of you and had charitable opinions of you. One never knows what he would do if put in the position of another. I was hurt, crushed; but I never could have it in my heart to blame you for anything. Sometimes I felt bitter, but even the bitterness has long since worn away.”
Mary turned in her seat and began to speak to them, and the conversation was not taken up until Clayton and Sibyl were alone together in her home, to which they were driven after they had traversed a few streets. Sibyl was anxious to get Clayton to herself, and she therefore cut the drive short, complaining of the chill of approaching night.
Mary, fluttering about the rooms, came into the parlor and went out again at intervals. Sibyl had kindly relieved her of the task of entertaining Clayton. Remembering the story of his broken arm, Mary felt a deep sympathy for him, yet she had never been able to converse with him at length. He was so learned and wise, and at times so strange and silent, that he oppressed her. She revered him, but she could not talk with him. Besides, she had a letter to write to Ben, who was coming to Denver in a day or two, and she wanted to think about Ben and what she should say to him in that letter. The composition of a letter even to Ben was not always an easy thing; and though she still wrote to her father each Sunday, what she said to him was so brief, sometimes, that for all the space required to contain it she might have sprawled it on a postal card.
While Mary thought of Ben and studied for words and sentences before secluding herself to begin the actual work of writing, she gave thought also to Clayton and Sibyl, and was quite sure that Sibyl was kind and charitable in thus seeking to give pleasure to the lonely doctor who had been apparently at a loss in the Denver streets. And then, it came like a flash—what if Clayton should fall in love with Sibyl, and they should marry? It seemed to her that much stranger things had happened. And in contemplating this new and bright suggestion she built up a very pretty little romance, which had a marked resemblance to some of those which Pearl used to read. Romantic ideas fluttered in Mary’s pretty head as thickly as butterflies amid Japanese cherry blossoms.
When she began the composition of her letter, dipping her gold pen in the blue ink which Ben liked, Sibyl was at the piano and singing in a way to disturb the flow of her thoughts.
“But she has a beautiful voice!” thought Mary, laying down the pen and listening with admiration. “Wouldn’t it be strange if they should take a fancy to each other and marry?”
It appeared entirely possible, now that Mr. Plimpton had departed from Denver.
Sibyl was singing one of the old songs that touched the deep springs of the past, and Clayton with inexpressible yearning was wishing that the years between could drop away and he could be her willing slave again. The love that had been dead, though it came forth now bound about with grave-clothes, lived again, and spoke to his heart a familiar language.
“You remember the song?” she said, looking up into his face and smiling. He had come forward to the piano.
“Yes,” he confessed. “I shall never forget it. You sang it the evening you told me you loved me and would be my wife. I wish you had chosen another.”
“Why?”
She looked steadily into his eyes, half veiling her own with their dark lashes.
“There is no need to ask,” he said, and retreated to his chair. “The change since then is too great. I am not the same, and you are not the same.” He glanced at his stiff arm and his ill-fitting clothing. “Nothing can ever be the same again.”
She was studying how she might win him, if only temporarily. Certain plans were no longer fluid, and she believed she could use him.
“That doesn’t sound like you, Curtis.”
“Sibyl,” he threw out his stiff arm with a protesting gesture, “I hope you are not trying to play with me, as a cat with a mouse. You know how I have always felt toward you. You know that even after you sold yourself to that man Plimpton, I——”
She commanded silence by putting her fingers to her lips; and tip-toeing to the door she closed it, that Mary might not by any chance hear his unguarded words.
“Even after that I would have taken you back gladly, and could have forgiven you and loved you, for I was always a fool about you. You will pardon me for speaking so plainly? I don’t want to hurt your feelings. I went away, as you know, and have tried to find peace by burying myself from the world. And I have found peace, of a certain kind. But I am not the same as I was. I hope I am not as weak as I was.”
Yet he knew he had at that moment no more stability than water. If he could have believed any protestation she might make, he would have done so joyfully, and would have gone far to purchase such a belief.
“I have been a great fool in many ways,” she admitted. “But I hope not a bigger fool than the man who pitches himself headlong out of the living world into a desert simply because he and his wife have agreed to a separation. But as you say, all that is past, and there is no need to talk about it. Now I want to forget it and be your friend, if I can’t be anything else.”
“What else would you be?”
He spoke in a hoarse voice.
“At present, just your friend. You need a friend, and I need one. We have been enemies a good while. Let us forget that, and be friends again.”
“Mere friendship with you would never satisfy me, Sibyl. You know that as well as I do. Unless I could be your husband, and hold you heart-true to me as my wife, I could never be anything to you.”
Though shaken by his emotions he spoke with unusual determination. Thoughts of Plimpton aroused whatever militant manhood there was in him. For the instant he felt that he ought to have killed Plimpton, and that his flight had been the flight of a coward. Sibyl saw that she was approaching him from the wrong side.
“Yet mere friendship, as you call it, is a good thing. The friendship between Mary and myself, for instance, and that between you and Justin—you will not say they are worthless. You even came up to Denver, I think, to see Justin, because you could not bear to be separated long from him.”
He looked at her earnestly, with a mental question.
“Don’t put your hands on him!”
“Don’t be a fool!” she said. “Why should I? But I won’t beg for the favor of your friendship. I thought we might be friends, good friends. You could establish yourself here in the city, and we could see each other occasionally, if nothing else. I am a better woman than I used to be, a very much better woman than you will believe me to be. Mary has done that for me. And I suppose you thought I would ruin her? That shows that you never understood me.”
“I couldn’t stay here in Denver!” he protested.
“We might be even more than friends, some time,” she urged sweetly.
“Sibyl,” he seemed about to rise from his chair, but sank back, “if I could believe you!”
Her words, which he knew to be lies, were still sweet. His heart was filled with unutterable longing, not for “the touch of a vanished hand,” but for a vanished past.
“I will be your friend,” he said earnestly, after a moment. “I have never been anything else, except when I was your devoted lover and foolish husband. I should like to be both again, if I could.”
“Even that might be. There is such a thing as forgetting, you know.”
“Not for me.”
“Then a forgiving.”
“Yes. Until to-night I thought I had forgiven, and I was trying to forget. I shall be glad to be your friend, Sibyl. As to establishing myself in Denver, to be near you, I will think about it. If—if there were no such thing as memory, we might still be very happy.”
His under-current of common sense told him that he had again entered a fool’s paradise.
“We can be happy, Curtis. You shall not leave Denver. I need more than your friendship. I need your love. I tossed it away, but I didn’t know what I was doing. I need your love, and I know you will not refuse it. You never refused me anything; whatever I asked, you gave me.”
He had already given her his life!
In his room at the hotel that night Clayton packed and unpacked his valise, in a state of delirious uncertainty. In the mirror he beheld his face, ghastly as that of a dead man. But, slowly, his philosophy came to his aid,
“Lies, and I know it! And I am a coward! The thing for me to do is to get back into the wilderness.”
The next morning he was gone. The letter which came shortly urged Justin, in a shaky hand, to stand for principle, no matter what happened, and explained that the writer felt that he must hurry home.
CHAPTER VII
THE COMPACT
Lemuel Fogg was very much astonished when he received a call from Sibyl Dudley, who invaded the privacy of his room without taking the trouble to announce her coming. Fogg did not know much about Mrs. Dudley, except that she was a friend and patron of Sloan Jasper’s pretty daughter, and lived in Denver. He had once remarked to an acquaintance, as she passed, that she was “a stunning woman.” And he was not ready to withdraw that opinion now, when he saw her before him. Having sallied forth to conquer, she had not neglected anything that would add to her attractiveness in masculine eyes.
It did not take Sibyl long to acquaint Fogg with the nature of her errand. She was tactfully frank, for she knew how to reach such a man.
“Mr. Fogg, I’m horribly in debt,” she announced, looking him in the face without the quiver of an eyelash. “I must have money, five thousand dollars, to be paid to me if I prevent Justin Wingate from giving his vote to the man the irrigationists want for United States senator.”
He stared at her. How handsome she was! And what nerve she displayed! Not one woman in a thousand would have made such a confession, or come at him in that manner. Her idea appealed to him, if there was anything in it.
“Why, what can you do?” he asked. He smoothed his limp mustache, and wondered if his collar set just right; he knew he had forgotten to turn his reversible cuffs that morning! “What can you do, Mrs. Dudley? Everything has been done that can be done already. I’ve begged him, argued with him, prayed with him; and every man on our side who is supposed to have the least influence with him has done the same thing. We have even threatened him. Promises, threats, bribes, nothing will move him.”
Sibyl smiled at him across the little table. She had beautiful teeth.
“It can be done,” she said, with sweet conviction.
So singular and confident was her expression that he was almost tempted to look into her ungloved right hand to see if she clasped a poniard. He saw only the flash of her rings.
“Why, what would you do;” he cried, in sudden amazement; “knife him?”
She gave him a glance of scorn, which melted at once into a captivating smile.
“How absurd you are! Who ever dreamed of such a thing? This isn’t the Back of Beyond.”
“What would you do?”
“Is it worth five thousand dollars to you if Justin Wingate does not vote against the cattlemen’s candidate for senator?”
He regarded her thoughtfully, and jingled the watch chain that lay across his round stomach.
“Yes,” he admitted, “it’s worth every cent of it.”
“Will you agree to pay me that sum if I do keep him from casting that vote? I am in debt and must have money; five thousand dollars is little enough; but if you will satisfy me that you will give me that much money I will prevent that vote.”
“Tell me how you’re going to do it.”
“If I told you I should render my services valueless. You will have to trust everything to me.”
“You want me to sign a note, or promise; I couldn’t do that. It wouldn’t be good politics.”
“Then you will have to pay me something in advance. I must be secured in some manner.”
Lemuel Fogg had never yet bought a pig in a poke, and he did not intend to begin that doubtful practice now. He questioned Sibyl Dudley’s ability to do what she said. She was a very charming woman; he admired her very much; but beautiful women had never the power to make Lemuel Fogg cut his purse-strings. So he refused, very tactfully and graciously, as becomes a man who has to refuse anything to a pretty woman. She saw that it was a refusal, and final.
“What will you do, then?” she asked. “If Justin casts that vote you lose your senator. I can keep him from casting it.”
“If you will be quite frank with me, we’ll get on faster, Mrs. Dudley,” Fogg urged. “You could perhaps tell me something of your plans; I don’t ask to know too much. But five thousand dollars is a big sum of money.”
“It’s a small sum, Mr. Fogg, for what I propose to do. You don’t believe I can prevent Justin from voting against your man. I can see you don’t.”
“Well, I’ll say this much—nobody else could! Everything has been tried that could be thought of. The fellow is a fool, and it’s impossible to reason with a fool.”
“Justin is anything but a fool, but he has an uncomfortable lot of queer notions. I think he must have obtained them from that doctor he has been living with down in Paradise Valley. I chance to know something of the character of Doctor Clayton; and while he is, I suppose, one of the best men in the world, so far as pure goodness goes, he is as foolish and illogical as a cat, or a woman.”
“Yet you are a woman!”
Fogg was beginning to be comfortable again. He would not have to advance money to Mrs. Dudley, and having safely weathered that dangerous cape he felt better.
“All women are not cats or fools. For instance, I am not so foolish as not to know the value of money, and the value of the ability I happen to have. You say you won’t advance me anything; what will you do?”
Fogg looked at her and jingled his watch chain.
“Mrs. Dudley, I’m willing to be as generous as you can expect, conditionally. If that money should be paid I’d have to take a big part of it out of my own pocket. The rest I could probably raise among my friends. I will promise you, as faithfully as a promise can be made that is not put in writing, that if by any means you can induce or force Justin Wingate to vote for our man for United States senator, or even to withhold his vote from the opposition, you shall have the five thousand dollars you named. We could win with his vote, and if he refused to vote at all I think we still could win. Will that promise do?”
“Five thousand dollars is not enough, if I am to have no money in advance. I shall charge you interest; a thousand dollars in interest.” She laughed lightly. “Give me your promise that if Justin refuses to cast his vote for United States senator, or votes for your man, I may draw on you for six thousand dollars through any bank if you do not pay the money at once, and I will demonstrate my ability to control him. Six thousand dollars if I succeed, and not a cent if I fail. That is fair.”
Fogg twisted uneasily in his chair, which was almost too small for his big body.
“You’re trying to drive a hard bargain. Remember that I shall probably have to pay the most of that money myself, if you succeed.”
“If you’re as shrewd as I think you are you will not have to pay a cent of it; you can twist it out of men who are interested in this matter. I feel sure that your candidate for senator, together with his friends and the cattlemen, would raise ten thousand dollars, and not say a word against it, if this thing could be guaranteed. I’ve studied the papers, Mr. Fogg.”
She laughed again lightly.
“Yes, if it could be guaranteed.”
“This is the same; the money can be raised conditionally; you can get it together in some bank, with the understanding that it is to be returned to those who contribute, every cent, if the thing is not accomplished. And another thing, Mr. Fogg; it will be as well not to mention my name in the matter. Political secrets must be kept close, when so many newspaper men are around. If Justin should once get the idea into his head that a deliberate attempt is being made to control him everything would be lost.”
“Yes, I agree with you there.” He put his fat hands on the arms of his chair and settled back heavily. He was running over the list of men from whom money might be secured. “And I think I can raise the money, if necessary. Six thousand dollars to you if Justin Wingate does not vote, or votes for our man; and you can draw on me for it the day after a United States senator is elected, if I fail to pay it. It’s a bargain; and I hope I shall have to pay it.”
“You will have to pay it. Pardon me if I say to you that I didn’t come here on a fool’s errand. I have your promise, and I shall consider it as binding as a note.”
She arose, still looking at him. For a moment she hesitated, then put out her ungloved hand. He had scrambled out of his chair, and he took the hand, giving it a warm pressure.
“Mr. Fogg, now that we know each other, we can help each other!” She fixed her clear dark eyes upon his. On her upturned face he observed a single rouge spot, hastily applied, but it did not trouble him; his thought was that she was very beautiful. The touch of her warm hand tingled in his large one. “And I hope,” she hesitated in a most attractive manner, “that we can be very good friends!”
“I should like to, Mrs. Dudley, I should like to; and I’ll get you that money. You needn’t be afraid that I’ll fail in that. You shall have the whole of it, if I have to pay it myself. I’m very glad that you came to see me in this manner, privately. You’re a woman to know.”
He laughed coarsely.
But when she was gone, when her personality no longer enthralled, and he sat down to think of her visit in cold blood, Lemuel Fogg began to feel that it might not be a good thing for his bank account if he knew Mrs. Dudley too intimately.
“But I’m glad she came,” he thought, as he settled back in his chair, put his feet on the table for comfort, and struck a match to light his cigar; “we must have that note; or at least we must get it away from the opposition, if it can be done. I’ll begin a hustle for that money to-morrow. But I wonder how she expects to control him? By smiling on him, as she did on me?”
CHAPTER VIII
THE THRALL OF THE PAST
Sibyl Dudley searched for both Curtis Clayton and William Sanders. When she could not find them, she reasoned that they had gone back to Paradise Valley, and sent them letters urging them to return to Denver. Ben had arrived, and after a talk with Sibyl, and another with Mary, he had induced Mary to send a pressing invitation to Lucy Davison to visit her for a few days.
Meanwhile, Justin was trying to find himself. The violence and virulence of party and factional feeling astonished him. He had not known that men could be so rabid and unreasonable. He was as bewildered by the discovery, and by the furious assaults made on him by men and newspapers, as he had been by the surprising fact of his election. He could not have been assailed more vindictively if he had been a criminal. To hold an honest opinion honestly seemed to be considered a crime by those whom it antagonized.
Candor had ever been impressed on him as a cardinal virtue. It brought a shock to discover that it was anything but a virtue in this political world to which he was so new. Concealment, duplicity, the accomplishment of a purpose by fair means or foul, these seemed to be the things that had value. It was true that a certain faction in Denver agreed with him, but the agreement was for pecuniary and material reasons. He could see that if their interests lay in the other direction they would oppose him as heartily. Even these men could not keep from pointing out to him how much he was to gain. They thought to stiffen his courage by assuring him that he was on the side that must win. As if that would move him now! No man seemed able to understand that the opinions he held and expressed had no root in a desire to advance himself or enrich himself.
With these discoveries came a temporary weakening of his faith. He was no Sir Oracle, and had never pretended to be, and he began to doubt himself and his conclusions. He wanted to do right, but what was right? Was it an abstraction, after all? He had never before questioned the certainty of those inner feelings on which he had always relied for guidance. Was conscience but a thing of education? A man had told him so but the day before.
As there was no help outwardly he had to burrow for it inwardly. The stimulating wine of memory lay inward, and he drew on it for strength, recalling those hours and even days of quiet thought and talk with Clayton which followed the election. Before him in all its pristine beauty rose that dream of Peter Wingate, that the desert, by which Wingate meant Paradise Valley, should blossom as the rose. Wingate’s hopeful and prophetic sermons had made a deep impression on the plastic mind of the boy who heard them. Though Justin scarcely knew it, that dream of a redeemed desert, working slowly through the years, had become his own. It had long been merely a vague desire, holding at first the form given to it by the minister, that settlers might come in and till the land. But Justin had long since seen that if settlers came in, they must go out again if water was not to be had, and that irrigation alone possessed the transforming power which could make the dream a reality.
The farmers now in Paradise Valley were irrigating as well as they could. They had little money and their devices were of a make-shift character. Yet wherever they could induce water to flow the desert bloomed. Justin had come to sympathize with them in their struggle against adverse conditions the more perhaps because he had so long held that guilty knowledge of the fact that Ben Davison had cut their dam.
In thus surveying the field before him and choosing between the cattlemen and the irrigationists, as they were represented in the valley of Paradise, which was the only world he knew well, Justin had a growing comprehension of that large truth, that if he who makes two blades of grass to grow where but one grew before is a benefactor, a still greater one is the man who changes a cattle range, where ten acres will hardly support a cow, to an irrigated land where five acres will sustain a home. This was the thing indefinitely and faultily foreshadowed in Peter Wingate’s dream.
The conditions in Paradise Valley were duplicated in many places throughout the state. Should the struggling farmers give way to the cattlemen, or should they be assisted? If the farmers held the irrigable lands there would be plenty of range left; for there were millions of acres which could never be touched by water, where cattle could graze undisturbing and undisturbed. But the cattlemen coveted the rich valleys where water could be secured without the expense of pumps and windmills, as well as the dry, bunch-grass uplands.
To hold the land they now occupied but did not own, they had allied themselves with the political party which promised a senator whose influence at Washington should favor them. If the agriculturalists won, the illegal fences stretched on every league of grazing land would have to come down, and that would be a serious if not fatal blow to the ranch industry as it was then conducted. Already there were threats and warnings from Washington.
All this Justin included in his wide survey of the conditions which confronted him. A poll of the votes to be cast had shown that he held in his hand the deciding ballot. If he says it to the cattlemen their candidate for United States senator would be elected, and would use his influence to keep the government from interfering with the illegal fences; the farmers would have to continue their unequal struggle, and perhaps would be forced ultimately out of the country; present ranch conditions would be maintained, and each winter would witness a recurrence, in a greater or less degree, of that terrible tragedy of the unsheltered range, where helpless animals perished by hundreds in the pitiless storms.
Influenced by Clayton and by the circumstances and incidents of his ranch life, Justin could not help feeling that the open range stood for barbarous cruelty, and agriculture for the reverse. He was the thrall of the past. As often as that memory of the unsheltered range came back to him, and out of the swirling snows starving and freezing cattle looked at him with hungry eyes, while his ears caught their low meanings mingled with the death song of the icy wind, he felt that his intuitions were right, and his doubts fled away.
Then would come the conviction that he had been led, until he stood where he was now. Was it not a strange thing, he reflected at such times, that he, who as a boy had sickened at the branding of a calf, who later had suffered heart-ache with Clayton over the tragedies of the range, who from the first had sympathized with the farmers even as Wingate had sympathized with them, should stand where he stood now? In his hand lay great issues. If he proved true, he would become, without design or volition on his part, the sword of the irrigationists. The question which he faced was whether or not he should be true to that dream of a blossoming desert and to the teachings of Clayton.
Harkness had assured him, with much vehemence, that there were “no strings on him;” the cowboys had given him their votes because they desired to testify thus to their admiration of his bravery and their detestation of the conduct of Ben Davison. Yet Justin knew there were “strings on him,”—influences, friendships, feelings, hopes and desires, which he could nether forget nor ignore. No longing for place or power could have moved him now that he had taken his stand, and anything approaching the nature of a bribe would have filled him with indignation. But these other things bade him pause and consider; they even forced him to doubt. And with Justin, doubt weakened the very foundations of the structure of belief which at first he had thought so stable.
CHAPTER IX
SANDERS TELLS HIS STORY
The evening before the day set for the election of United States senator Lemuel Fogg received this message from Sibyl Dudley:
“Remember our agreement. I am prepared to do what I promised. I shall not fail, and you must not.”
At a late hour that same evening a messenger handed Justin a note. It was from Sibyl. She was waiting for him in the lobby, and had a carriage in the street.
“I want to take you home with me,” she said, in her pleasantest manner.
“Is Lucy there?” was his eager question.
“What a mind reader you are!” She laughed playfully. “She is there, and if you are good I will permit you to have a look at her.”
She led the way to the carriage.
“You may see her, after you have seen some one else who is there,” she supplemented, as the carriage moved away from the hotel.
“Who may that be?”
Justin did not desire to see any one else.
“Wait!” she said, mysteriously.
Justin thought of Mary, of Ben, and even of Doctor Clayton. But he thought most of Lucy. But for his desire to see Lucy he would not have gone with Mrs. Dudley.
When he arrived and was shown into the parlor he beheld William Sanders. He could not believe that he had been summoned to meet Sanders, and glanced about the room to ascertain if it held any one else. Sanders was alone. Sibyl, following hard on Justin’s heels, came in while he was greeting Sanders. The latter, having risen to take Justin’s hand, moved his jaws nervously. At home he would have chewed a grass blade or a broom straw. His cunning little eyes glanced away from Justin’s, instead of meeting them squarely.
“I have come upon the strangest piece of information!” said Sibyl, speaking to Justin with simulated sympathy. “I could have brought you the news, or told you about it as we drove up, but I wanted you to hear it from Mr. Sanders himself. It is really the strangest and most romantic thing I ever listened to. I simply couldn’t believe it when Mr. Sanders told it to me first, but when he explained fully I saw that it must be true.”
“And it come about in a mighty curious way; that is, my bein’ hyer did. ’Twas through a fortune teller. I’ve gone to a good many of ’em in my time, but this was the best one I ever found.”
Sanders had dropped back into his chair, where he sat limply, his loose shabby garments contrasting strangely with the furnishings of the room. He clicked his teeth together, with a chewing motion, when he was not speaking, and looked at Justin with shifting gaze. He was not easy in his unfamiliar surroundings, and his manner showed it. Now and then he glanced at Sibyl, as if for help, as he proceeded with his narrative.
“I ain’t been feelin’ jist right toward Philip Davison, as you know, and you an’ me had some trouble one’t; but you know I voted fer ye, er I reckon you know it. Anyway, I did. Well, I come up to Denver not long ago, and this fortune teller I spoke of told me all about that trouble I had with Davison, and about how I was put out that time by you, and everything. She was a clairvoy’nt; went into a trance an’ seen the whole thing, and a lot more that I can’t tell you now, and when she come out of the trance we had a long talk and she give me some good advice. Charged me two dollars, but it was worth ten, and I’d 'a’ paid that ruther than missed it. And when Mrs. Dudley called on her——”
Sibyl affected a very clever confusion.
“I suppose you will think me very foolish, Mr. Wingate, and we women are foolish! I have always refused to believe in fortune tellers, but a friend of mine who had visited this one heard such strange things that——”
“That she went, too,” said Sanders, with an expression of gratification, “and I reckon she’ll be believin’ in fortune tellin’ from this on.”
“Well, it was very strange,” Sibyl admitted with apparent hesitation. “The things she told me caused me to write to Mr. Sanders, and now he is here to tell you what he knows.”
“And it’s a sing’lar story. And not so sing’lar either, when you look it up one side and down t’other. I’d 'a’ told you all about it long ago, but fer certain things that took place.”
Justin, thinking of Lucy and disappointed at not seeing her immediately, had not listened with much attention at first, but now he was becoming interested. It began to dawn on him that this story concerned him. So he looked at Sanders more attentively, with a glance now and then at Sibyl Dudley. He had never admired Mrs. Dudley and he did not admire her now; recalling the things he knew and the things he guessed about her and Clayton, he almost felt at times that he hated her. She was a handsome woman, but even his ignorance discounted the assumed value of rouge and fine raiment. He wondered some times that Clayton could ever have cared for her. He was sure he never could have done so; for, compared with Sibyl, Lucy Davison was as a modest violet to a flaunting tiger lily.
“I set out to ask Doc Clayton some questions about you, the first time I come to his house. You’ll remember that time, fer me and Fogg come together. But Clayton made me mad, when he told me that lie about his crooked arm; instid of answerin’ me, he made fun of me, and I went away without sayin’ anything.”
He chewed energetically on this old memory.
“I didn’t come back fer a good while after that, you’ll reck’lect; I got land at Sumner, an’ farmed there a spell. Finally I sold out, an’ thought I’d take another look at Paradise Valley. I’d been thinkin’ about it all that time, and allowin’ I’d go back when I got ready. I might have writ to you, but I wasn’t any hand to write in them days; and I hadn’t got over bein’ mad at Doc Clayton.”
Sibyl, turning her rings on her shapely fingers, was anxious that he should reach the real point, but she withheld any manifestation of impatience. In the school of experience she had learned to wait. Justin was also anxious, and he had not learned so well how to conceal it. But Sanders went on unheeding, stopping now and then to masticate a fact before proceeding further.
“When I come back, intendin’ to tell you all I knowed, which I’d begun to feel was due ye, I got into that quarrel with Davison about the fence before I could; and then you and me had that trouble. After that I wouldn’t tell; and I wouldn’t tell it now but fer certain things. But I reckon you’d ought to know. I dunno whether you’ll be pleased er not when you do know; but I’m calculatin’ that Davison won’t be pleased, and that suits me. I don’t make any bones of sayin’ that I don’t like Davison; but Davison is your paw!”
After all this slow preliminary, the revelation came like a shot from a rifle. Not realizing this, Sanders twisted round in his chair and began to draw from his hip pocket a grimy memorandum book of ancient appearance. Justin was too astonished to speak. He could hardly believe that he had heard aright, and he was prepared to dispute the assertion, for it seemed incredible.