RATHBURN paced the room with noiseless tread, now and then stopping to look at the tossing figure of the boy upon the cot or to listen to the words he spoke in his delirium.
Once he thought he caught the sound of hoofs upon the trail and he halted abruptly as his hand stole beneath the tails of his long English coat.
Mr. Rathburn's nerves were unstrung by the strain imposed upon them by recent and painful events. As he had expressed it to himself half a hundred times that day, “The gentleman who brings me in, whether it's afoot or in a pine box, goes just five thousand dollars to the good,” and each time his thoughts reverted to the powerful inducement the general public had to “bring him in,” his hand had stolen beneath the tails of his long English coat; and the comfort he derived from so doing had enabled him to say, “It won't be the first who tries nor the first six who try, but the seventh gets the pot.”
Mr. Rathburn had left Denver the morning previous in great and pressing haste, and with a careful avoidance of human kind. He had never been a social man and the reward of five thousand dollars that was “out” for the man who would bring him in only served to intensify the natural austerity of his character.
The difficulties that beset Mr. Rathburn arose indirectly out of a quiet little game of poker when the stakes had been high, and when the game had ended (two gentlemen going broke), the tempers of all concerned had been even higher than the stakes.
Mr. Rathburn's honor had been called into question. Certain remarks, chiefly notable because of their extreme brevity and almost brutal frankness, had been directed at him.
What followed was hasty and unpremeditated.
Now that time had given opportunity for reflection, Mr. Rathburn consoled himself with the thought that it was in self-defense. In his view of the matter he stood at variance with that of the public, which was “wilful murder”.
Fear of public sentiment had, however, never been a potent factor in Mr. Rathburn's career, but now, for the first time in his life, this sentiment of disapproval was backed by money, and he was aware that several bands of men were patrolling the country and that the various individuals composing those bands were anxious to get within speaking, or, to be more exact, shooting distance of him.
Rathburn had been making the best of his way over the range that afternoon in the usual unostentatious manner of a man fleeing from justice, when young Gordon saw him from his ranch near the trail and rushed in pursuit. Young Gordon will never know how near he was to death, for Mr. Rathburn turned and faced him, his hand beneath the tails of his long English coat. As a general thing, when people saw Mr. Rathburn's hand disappear behind him, they left precipitately, for that motion and the one that followed it were known to be singularly fatal to human life.
Young Gordon, in ignorance of this fact, had continued his approach, which, after all, was the best and safest thing he could have done, for Rathburn got a view of his face, and being a student of faces, he instantly decided that young Gordon was not looking for trouble.
The news of Mr. Rathburn's latest shooting affray had not reached the Foot Hill Ranch, and young Gordon did not know that the governor of Colorado had deemed it expedient to offer a large reward to the man who would put a check upon Mr. Rathburn's further independent action and hand him over to the proper authorities in Denver. Whether or not Mr. Rathburn was to be turned in alive or dead was left to the taste and judgment of his captor; the prevailing tone of the proclamation suggested, however, that Mr. Rathburn dead was easier to handle than Mr. Rathburn alive, and at present there were bets pending as to the probable appearance Mr. Rathburn would present to the community when on view at the undertaker's shop; for the opinion that he was “a goner” was strong.
Young Gordon's face, white and drawn with sorrow and apprehension, was more eloquent than any words. His brother was sick—dying for all he knew. Would Rathburn remain at the ranch while he went for a doctor? He dared not leave his brother alone. Would Rathburn remain until morning?
Mr. Rathburn had looked down the trail. He was quite sure that somewhere behind him were a number of enterprising gentlemen, and that the reward of five thousand dollars had stimulated a degree of activity that would be his ruin if he lingered. He looked at the mountains beyond, which, when reached, promised safety, and they were very near.
An elevation and generosity of conception characterized many of Mr. Rathburn's acts. Outside of his profession, and when removed from the unworthy and corrupting influence of the flesh, he was not without a certain nobility of soul.
He cast one longing look at the mountains, wavered and was lost.
Just ten minutes later young Gordon was galloping down the trail at breakneck speed, while Mr. Rathburn remained in attendance upon the sick boy.
As long as there was light in the sky he had turned frequently to the window and followed with his eyes the dusty streak of gray across the range that marked the windings of the trail, but from without the distance there came neither sound nor sight of life.
By turns, as the night wore on, Mr. Rathburn was nervous and reflective, now sitting in a chair beside the cot, now pacing the floor restlessly. The present experience was a new one for him. To be sure, at various periods of his eventful and not entirely blameless life he had found it both safe and necessary to deprive certain localities of his presence. Perhaps the necessity would again occur if he succeeded in spite of the delay in making good his escape; but he was not prying into the future, the present was enough for him, quite enough.
It was not long before he had forgotten his own troubles in his interest in the boy upon the cot, and it was borne upon his consciousness that the boy was very sick indeed, that his fever had reached a crisis and that unless a change for the better came before morning he would no longer need the doctor's aid.
The boy was very young, sixteen or seventeen at most.
Mr. Rathburn smoothed his pillow with gentle touch, and seating himself beside the cot, took the boy's hand in his own. The boy tossed to and fro, his eyes open and glassy, his skin hot and burning. Mr. Rathburn placed his disengaged hand upon the boy's brow and set himself to work to control and quiet his ravings by his own force of will.
The hours wore on. One, two, three. The little clock on the shelf beside the door ticked them off; still the boy tossed from side to side. But the watcher noticed that from time to time there came moments of quiet to the sufferer. They grew in length and frequency as the hours passed.
“We are getting the better of it,” murmured Rathburn hopefully. “On the whole I am not sorry I stayed.”
The hands of the clock were pointing to four, and the cold gray of dawn was stealing over the range, shot with rays of light in the east, when Mr. Rathburn pushed back his chair.
The boy was sleeping peacefully, his breath coming soft and regular. For the first time that night Mr. Rathburn discovered that he himself was both tired and sleepy.
He pushed back his chair until he reached the center of the room, then bringing his feet to an equal elevation with his head by means of a table, he, too, slept.
The sunlight was streaming into the room when sounds on the trail aroused him. He awoke with a start. His first glance was at the boy who was still sleeping. Then he arose and walked to the door.
Four men were cautiously approaching the house, while a fifth held the horses of the party.
Mr. Rathburn recognized the sheriff of Arapahoe County and his deputies, and his hand stole beneath the tails of his long English coat.
Then he remembered the sleeping boy upon the cot.
Mr. Rathburn stepped into the yard.
“Don't shoot,” he said softly, “I give myself up.”
IF Miss Caxton's father had been called on to give a detailed account of Miss Caxton's life, he would have described it as a perpetual round of gaiety. By what process of reasoning he arrived at any such conclusion is known only to himself; but from out the depths of his ignorance this belief had sprung, and it bore fruit in an inclination to curtail any pleasure other than the purely domestic in which Miss Caxton might have desired to indulge.
It was his custom to observe that if one had a good home, that home was decidedly the best place for one, and on occasions when he knew Miss Caxton was desirous of spending an evening out, it was his wont to introduce this statement at the supper table, as the moral to sundry fables.
Likewise he manufactured numerous fictitious conversations supposed to have taken place between himself and others, in which Miss Caxton was held up as a shining example of domesticity; then he would light his cigar and saunter downtown to play at whist until a late hour of the night.
That there was anything incongruous in his conduct or any discrepancy between his words and his acts never occurred to him.
Once, when Miss Caxton ventured to point out this apparent difference in word and deed, he had explained that the noise the children made wore upon his nerves—but he was quite sure that no man loved his home more than he did, and that when Thaddeus, Roderick and Leander, the twin, grew up and attained a decent age, he would greatly enjoy spending an evening now and then with his family. Nothing could have induced him to believe that the noise wore upon Miss Caxton's nerves. He knew very well that women liked that sort of thing immensely.
He was not a man of imaginative temperament, or he might have wondered what he would have done had there been no elder sister to look after the children when Miss Caxton's mother followed the youthful Leander's mate out of this world. If this thought ever gained a place in his mind, he had put it aside with the convincing argument that in supplying the little boys with an elder sister he had placed himself beyond reproach. Miss Caxton was a living proof of that forethought that marked the serious operations of his life; nor was Miss Caxton overlooked in this happy adjustment; she had Thaddeus and Roderick, not to mention the twin—and even half a twin was better than no twin at all.
This satisfactory arrangement had continued for some years, when the advent of The Fool upon the scene disturbed the serenity of the Caxton household. Of course The Fool was not the name bestowed upon him by his sponsors in baptism; it was an appellation conferred by Miss Caxton's indignant parent, and he only made use of it in his daughter's hearing. That any one else should slip in and supplant him in his daughter's affection—while he was away playing whist, filled him with indignation. He also was astonished that his daughter should seem to care for The Fool. Though he seldom saw him, he was aware that most of his unoccupied time was spent in Miss Caxton's society, and he also knew that each night, as he came in at one door The Fool was taking his leave of Miss Caxton at another. But the young man's departure was so nicely timed with reference to the charms of whist that he had never actually set eyes upon him in Miss Caxton's presence.
Never before having come in contact with the inevitable, Miss Caxton's father had a poor opinion of it. He began a vigorous campaign, in which he was uniformly worsted. They had Bunker Hill for breakfast, Miss Caxton triumphantly crossed the Delaware for dinner and Cornwallis surrendered at supper time, and withdrew to play whist, leaving Miss Caxton and The Fool in possession of the field.
Miss Caxton's ability to keep her temper and preserve that equanimity which was her most marked characteristic, gave her undoubted eminence in this species of warfare—for the cloud of battle hung forever over the house. Her calmness exasperated her father more than any words could have done.
Under these trying circumstances a man of less fixed habits would have taken to drink as a means of relief—Miss Caxton's father took to abusing the children. The little boys and the twin began to lead a dog's life, particularly the youthful Leander, who seemed to possess a great though unconscious power of enraging his parent far in excess of all endurance. At dinner and supper, the only meals they took with their father, they were barely permitted to speak in whispers, and then only to make known their wants in the most direct English at their command. This had a repressing tendency on youthful spirit.
How long it would have been possible for this happy state of affairs to have continued there is no telling. Miss Caxton saw fit to firing matters to a crisis. One day, in company with The Fool, she left the paternal roof; at the same time she despatched a communication to her father, requesting his immediate presence at home. When he received the summons it had a mystifying effect upon him, but in obedience to the request, he repaired to the scene of his domestic joys. He had no sooner crossed the threshold than something within him corresponding to intuition made manifest to his mind's eye that all was not right. The little boys were not visible; even Leander's voice was hushed. Most assuredly something was wrong.
But what?
Miss Caxton's father inspected the various rooms comprising his establishment. In his own room he found, conspicuously tucked in one corner of his looking-glass, a neatly folded note, directed to himself in Miss Caxton's familiar hand. This evidently was meant to explain the mystery. He tore it open. He read it. Then he read it over.
That the contents of the note were exercising a powerful and not wholly pacifying influence upon him was easy to be seen. Miss Caxton had eloped with The Fool.
She asked him to look after the children until she should return, which would be as soon as she was married. Miss Caxton's father held the note out toward his angry reflection in the glass:
“Here's gratitude for you! Well, she needn't come back home,—I'm done with her!”
Then, being only a man, he swore; and while he swore he made up his mind to a course of action that he intended should very much astonish Miss Caxton, when that young lady returned as Mrs. Some-body-else.
“Does she think I'll stand this? I see myself forgiving her. If I lay my hands on The Fool he'll spend his honeymoon with broken bones!”
Suddenly he bethought him of the little boys. They no doubt had availed themselves of the absence of all restraining force to do as they pleased. As this flashed through his mind he turned a trifle pale. He rather regretted that he had been so severe with Leander, for supposing—
He ran down-stairs and into the yard, only stopping to glance at the kitchen stove with a vague dread lest Leander had crawled into it and been cremated. On reaching the yard he examined the well, and was greatly relieved to find it empty of everything except water.
Then he espied the little boys with the twin between them perched upon the roof of a convenient coal shed in the rear of the house, whither they had withdrawn, knowing that something unusual was about to happen. The instant his eyes fell upon him his habitual acrimony for the twin asserted itself:
“Come down off of that! Do you want to break your necks?” he gasped. “Come down, I say!”
This the little boys were reluctant to do. They knew their father as an exceedingly irate gentleman. Therefore, when they caught sight of him, it begot no special joy in their hearts. Roderick and Thaddeus started to descend from the roof, while the twin, lifting up his voice, howled forth his dismay.
“Hold on to the twin!” called Miss Caxton's father. “Do you wish him to fall?”
What activity the little boys possessed was dispelled by their father's evident anger. They sat upon the ridge of the roof, motionless and speechless. Their parent inspected the premises.
“How in the name of sense did you get up there?”
A sob from Leander was the only answer. Thaddeus and Roderick maintained a discreet silence.
Miss Caxton's father was a very busy man for the next fifteen minutes. He obtained a long pole and poked the little boys off the roof, one at a time, beginning with the twin; then as they rolled from the shed he ran and caught them. A good deal of physical energy was required in the operation, and when Roderick was dislodged, he being the last, Miss Caxton's parent was hot and exhausted; there was also a baleful gleam in his eyes, suggestive of the wrath to come.
He picked up the twin, whose small lungs seemed to distil shrieks, and followed by the little boys who sulked at his side, entered the house. During the next hour or two he gained a larger experience in the pure joys of domestic life than are usually crowded into so brief a period.
He gave Roderick and Thaddeus their supper—and something else as well—and put them to bed. Then he took Leander in hand, and tried to get his faculties into a condition for sleep.
The twin refused to be comforted; he wanted Miss Caxton, and Miss Caxton only. It was the burden of his woes. His father looked at him. In his glance paternal love seemed to be in abeyance.
“You'd better make up your mind to going to bed without her, for she's put you to sleep for the last time.”
Whereat Leander howled afresh.
“If you don't stop and let me have a moment's quiet, I shall punish you. You hear?”
Leander choked down a sob and was silent.
“There,” said his father approvingly, “I guess we can get along all right. Now, you go to sleep—right off.”
Leander's sobs broke forth again.
“What's the matter now?”
More sobs and a howl.
“I thought I told you to keep still. Why don't you?”
Then he grew persuasive.
“Don't you love your papa?”
The twin looked at him with wide eyes.
“I am appealing to his better self,” reflected Miss Caxton's parent. “The instinct of affection that a child has is a most wonderful thing, a wonderful thing.”
Leander dissolved into tears.
“Hang the brat! What's got into him now?”
Miss Caxton's parent arose and paced the floor. Leander's grief continued unchecked. His father regarded him in amazement; the twin's capacity for sorrow was very astonishing; and his anger merged into something akin to wonder.
“He must be very wet inside,” he thought
He addressed the twin in conciliatory tones.
“See here, Leander, do you think it safe to cry like that?”
But Leander, unheeding him, wept on, in a highly original manner. His father grew uneasy.
“Why doesn't he stop? Hush! There! There! To please papa, who loves you so much. Confound you! How long is this going to last—will it be all night?” he asked himself.
His resentment was weakening. Each sob of the twin lessened the enormity of Miss Caxton's crime. Her father was willing to take her back at any price—and The Fool into the bargain. In desperation he brought the sugar bowl and placed it as an offering of peace at Leander's feet.
“That should stop him,” he muttered.
But it didn't. With a guilty blush he went down upon his knees in a vain effort to seduce the twin in the belief that he was a horse. He was in this interesting position when Miss Caxton opened the door and entered, smiling and serene. The Fool was with her, but he was by no means so serene as he could have wished to be and his smile was not an easy one.
Miss Caxton mastered the situation at a glance. Without a word she possessed herself of the twin's small person.
“I am sorry, papa, that you missed your game of whist, but it won't occur again,” she said, as she walked from the room.
When she returned twenty minutes later, after having put Leander to bed, she found her father peacefully drinking cold tea—“to restore the tone to his nervous system,” as he explained—while he gave The Fool a detailed and truthful account of his adventure with the twin.
JOHN LE BO YEN was an Indian half-breed; the son of a whisky-drinking white man and a slovenly whisky-drinking squaw. Fate, which decreed he should have a copper skin, lifted him into temporary and unsavory prominence only as the perpetrator of certain vulgar atrocities, yet because there had been peace on sea and land for a decade, history once paused to give him a brief paragraph. Balancing the books, after another decade, she dropped him out of her record of events.
As a boy, Le Boyen had been taken in hand by the government and sent to school, where he mastered a little reading and less spelling with infinite difficulty. Later he was turned back on his reservation, given land, together with a yearly allowance in supplies, and told to shift for himself.
Now the grazing lands of Le Boyen's reservation were particularly fine and the neighborhood ranchmen rented the range from the Indians for their cattle. All went well until the stockmen sent in a petition to Congress praying that virtuous body to remove the Indians, as they interfered materially with the cattle business. Congress despatched a commission to inquire into the matter.
The tribe had been given their land just fifteen years previous, with the solemn assurance that they should not be molested. They had before that been moved exactly three times. These moves had each involved a little war, and the government had shot a few of the rebellious tribesmen at a cost of several thousand dollars apiece, which was expensive, but had proved profitable in the long run, for, once dead, they cost nothing to maintain. This was indeed the cheapest mode of procedure.
The commissioners came upon the scene and they found the Indian very much in the way. He was dirty, wasteful and not to be tolerated. When they had seen these things, they returned to Washington to deliberate. This last consisted mainly in discussing the next election—the true essence of statesmanship. A month or so later the Indians were informed that the great white father, who had his home toward the rising sun and who was chiefly notable because of his insatiate appetite for land, desired their reservation. The tribe voiced a feeble protest, but the pressure brought to bear upon the white father was rather more than he had the moral backbone to withstand. Troops were massed in the vicinity preparatory to a summary dumping of the Indians farther west.
The threatened calamity had brought the savages together in one corner of the reservation. They buzzed like a swarm of angry bees. The young men danced strange dances, and chanted songs their fathers had chanted when there were buffaloes on the plains; but the old men, the men who had gone out in seventy-three with Captain Jack, shook their heads. They had known the white father to devour whole tribes, simply that he might call a few rods of sage brush and buffalo grass his own.
When night settled down the chiefs gathered around the council fire. After the weak and ineffectual manner of savages, they wished to test the forbearance of the dominant race; they might make a harmless little dash into the cow country and then, before the troops were fairly on their trail, slip back to the agency. Under similar circumstances the white father had been known to display a prodigal generosity in the matter of lean contract steers, which were turned out to be slaughtered and gorged on.
In the midst of these deliberations, a man strode into the circle of light. It was Le Boyen, who silently raised his arm high above his head. The reeking trophies his hand held brought the shadowy figures pressing close about him, while a sullen murmur grew up out of the tense stillness that had fallen on the tribe. The half-breed had precipitated an unexpected crisis. Already mounted men were spurring over the range spreading the news of another Indian outrage. As this sure knowledge took hold of the savages, the murmur swelled into a roar.
All in a second the group resolved itself into a sea of tossing arms and waving hands, and a portion of the straining mob became detached, wrenching and tearing itself away from the rest. In the center of the detached band was Le Boyen. About him were twenty or thirty men who were ready to put their fortunes to the hazard of war, and following them came their wives and children. These fell back unhindered upon the tents, struck camp, got together their horses and rode away. To state the case exactly, Le Boyen, with perhaps thirty men and an equal number of women and children, had taken preliminary steps to declaring war against the United States of America.
During the next ten days he and his followers were a fruitful source of newspaper interest. His experience had taught him, among other things worth remembering, that if you kill a man he is done for. Had his education taught him proportion he would have known it was wasted labor on his part to begin the extermination of sixty odd millions of human beings with the means and men he had at hand. Not appreciating this, he began his ambitious undertaking at once, moving across the plains with no fixed plan or destination, gathering in the settlers along his line of march; and the gathering in was attended by horrors not to be told. Then he took himself off toward the mountains with the most complete and extensive collection of scalps made in many years.
Through all these days of success his interest in the total destruction of the white race never flagged; but certain of his followers were not so constituted that they cherished a lofty ideal purely for the ideal's sake. These, after the first flush of war had paled its glow for them, began to think sadly of consequences. The hard life, the thirst and starvation of the foray, grew stale and tedious; they longed for the ease and sloth of the reservation, where water was plenty and rations had the noble quality of regularity.
Two Indians in particular wished to be taken back into the fold; and as the days came full of effort and hunger, this wish thrived apace, and they agreed that the white father would doubtless pay well for a little information as to Le Boyen's whereabouts. To furnish him with the coveted knowledge it would be necessary for one to remain with the band, while the other deserted. Their plan was no sooner perfected than it was acted upon, and Le Boyen, suspecting the meaning though not the extent of the disaffection, put his people on forced marches. For four days they toiled into the mountains, while the traitor in their midst left his fatal marks on every rod of land they crossed. On the fourth day the band went into camp, that Le Boyen might have time in which to mature plans for the future.
Day had scarcely dawned again when the traitor stole out to inspect his surroundings. All the warriors slept, even to the guards, who, as they sat about the ashes of the fires, nodded over the guns in their laps. The only ones astir were a few Indian mothers, who were already lashing their babies to the travaux strapped to their lean dogs. The traitor had mounted a rugged bluff that overhung the canyon leading back into the valley where the temporary encampment was made, and straining his eyes to the farthest distance he saw what he yearned to see, a long line of mounted men. Rations were destined to be regular and his heart was glad. Without a backward glance toward the camp he started on a run in the direction of the approaching horsemen.
In the valley the band slumbered on. The fagged ponies nipped the grass. The squaws moved quickly to and fro among the tents. Then one of the dozing sentries awoke with a start and stood erect. Black against the crimson disk of the rising sun he saw the solitary figure of a man; and even as he gazed another and another filed into view. He knew they were mounted men, though a rise in the ground hid the horses from his sight. While he stood looking at them in stupid and speechless amazement, they wheeled over the intervening hillock with the sharp clang of steel on stirrup iron, and with a wild hurrah raced down the hill upon the camp. What the savages first knew, roused from their sleep, was that a hundred men were riding furiously among the tents with blazing carbines. The surprise was so complete that the Indians offered no resistance; those who could, men, women and children, rushed toward the ponies, stimulated by a vague hope that they might escape; and as they ran they were shot down.
Foremost among those who strove to reach the horses was Le Boyen. His war pony, saddled and bridled in constant readiness for alarms, grazed apart from the tired mounts of his party. He reached and threw himself astride of it, and with a yell whirled through the ranks of the slaughtering whites. In the stupendous strain of the few short seconds while he was flying through their midst he was absolute master of himself, and in a cloud of dust and smoke, a score of men firing at his half-naked figure, he dashed up the trail unscathed, away from the horror of total annihilation that lurked in the valley.
Ahead of him the trail dipped into a narrow bottom. Crossing this it wound up a steep ascent and disappeared in a rocky gorge. Le Boyen gained the bottom and the partial cover of its timber, when his horse stumbled. He drew it up with a savage jerk. The next instant it collapsed in a heap under him. He cleared his feet from the stirrups and leaped from the saddle, and with his cartridge belt in one hand and his rifle in the other, plunged through the brush toward the ascent. At his back the mounted men came crashing through the timber, and as Le Boyen sprang out of the cover and bounded up the ascent, the bullets of his pursuers flecked up the earth at his feet; but he gained the entrance of the gorge in safety, and threw himself down behind the first shelter that offered, a great square of granite.
He had his revolvers to fall back upon, so he emptied the magazine of his repeater. When the smoke cleared away he saw that his fire had been eminently successful. Two men lay dead at the base of the ascent, and a third, wounded, was endeavoring to crawl away. Le Boyen knew that his case was hopeless. He wondered what was back of him, if it were not possible to enter the gorge farther along. In fancy he saw his own hurried rush for a fresh cover. It would be the last episode in the clenching of a victory destined in point of conclusiveness to be little short of a massacre.
A medley of sounds came from the camp. He heard the voices of the white men; an occasional order given; the piteous yelping of the dogs; now and then a stray shot. A glance in the direction of the valley told him what this last meant: the soldiers were shooting the dogs, who, faithful to their tiny charges, would not allow the white men to approach them. Wary and thoroughly frightened, they circled about the camp, stopping at intervals to howl dismally. An officer had suggested the expedient of shooting the dogs as the only means of saving the babies; but this was not proving successful, for sometimes the dogs moved at the wrong moment or the soldier's aim would prove uncertain, and the baby and not the dog would be shot.
In the timbered bottom a gray-haired colonel was listening to the reports of several soldiers, who, according to the fertility of their imagination, variously estimated that there were from ten to twenty Indians secreted among the rocks.
“Then they are very saving of their ammunition,” commented the colonel dryly. He turned to the-officer at his side: “What do the scouts say, Captain? Is there any way of getting at the rear of the redskins?”
“Yes, Colonel.”
“How long will it take?”
“About two hours.”
“Very well. Detail Lieutenant Brookes and twenty of our men to make the ditour. We'll keep the volunteers here.” The colonel looked annoyed. “I don't like this, Gordon,” he said. “I wish it might have come six months hence, when I shall be retired and growing roses in California with my wife on that bit of a ranch I've told you of.... Do be careful about those dogs; detail two or three of the best shots for that work.”
A bullet from Le Boyen's Winchester cut a leaf from just over the colonel's head.
“Better fall back, Colonel,” suggested Gordon, on the point of turning away.
There was another report from among the rocks, and the colonel sat down very stiffly on the trunk of a fallen tree, the expression of his face one of utter astonishment.
“Are you hit?” cried Gordon.
“I believe I am,” said the colonel in a whisper. He raised his hand to his breast as he spoke; then he coughed, and Gordon saw that there was blood on his lips. Before he could reach him, the colonel had fallen and lay quite still among the tangled underbrush.
They made a place for him on the edge of the timber, and Gordon covered him with his own coat.
“Poor old colonel!” he said sadly to his lieutenant. “He always wanted to grow a garden, poor fellow, and in six months he would have been free to amuse himself in his own way.” There was a pause. “Well, make up the ditour party and get it started; I'll give those redskins something to think of while Brookes is getting to their rear.”
During the next half-hour, from his place of concealment, the half-breed did much excellent shooting, now and again changing his position, while the bullets of the command flattened themselves on the rocks that hid him.
When the lieutenant rejoined his superior after Brookes' departure, he found that Gordon had taken up his station near the spot where the colonel had been killed. It overlooked the edge of the timber where he had stationed his men. The lieutenant, who was fresh from the East, was palpably nervous; while the captain's manner indicated long familiarity with just such affairs as the one in hand.
“Brookes has gone?” he queried, without waiting for the lieutenant to speak.
“Yes, half an hour ago.”
“And there's nothing stirring in the camp back of us? That was a pretty clean sweep. How about Sergeant Porter and the dogs?”
“He thinks he's got them all, sir.”
“That's good; that's very good!”
Gordon took the young man by the arm, and side by side they fell to pacing back and forth. The captain was well pleased with the situation.
“Brookes and his party will soon be behind the redskins,” he observed; “and when they break for fresh cover we shall have a good chance to test the new guns and ammunition.”
The lieutenant smiled. It was not a mirthful smile; but then he was between the captain and the gorge, and anything like enthusiasm over gunshot wounds was beyond him.
“Do you count on the home talent standing if the Indians try for this cover?” he asked.
“Certainly. The cowboys don't have much of an open season in which to shoot Indians. We'll wind 'em up in the open.” Levelling his field-glass, the captain took a hasty survey of the gorge. “I guess they are coming now. Yes, it's Brookes and his men!”
Le Boyen, among the rocks, was also aware of the approach of Brookes. He was also aware that the captain was getting his men in hand. He had found time to roll a boulder or two to the rear of the position he had originally assumed, and now, on the top of one of these, he placed his two revolvers. On the whole, he was not particularly desirous of living since the destruction of his band; but he was desirous of doing as much hurt to his enemies as he could.
The volleys of the men from below and the volleys of the men in his rear now swept his hiding-place. It would have been fatal to expose a hand or an arm even. He would wait until the two parties had advanced so close that they must discontinue their fire, then there would be a brief second or two in which one who was really indifferent about living could do much harm. And so it happened that Brookes and his men were face to face with the rest of the command, scarcely fifty yards separating them, when Le Boyen picked up a revolver in each hand and rose from his lair. Before the startled troopers knew what he meant to do, he was emptying them in their faces.
The captain had been the last man up the ascent, owing to the shortness of his legs. He found Brookes and his men clustered about a solitary figure on the ground, a figure riddled and torn with bullets.
“Humph!” with a glance at the half-breed. “Where are the rest, men?” he added.
“That's all, sir,” said Brookes.
“Nonsense; you don't mean that he stood us off alone?”
The lieutenant looked at the figure on the ground.
“It's just about the right proportion, don't you think?” he ventured.
“Well, I wouldn't say that for the credit of the race,” said the captain. “Poor old colonel; think of getting shot in an affair of this kind!”
THEY say The Pines is a great place to feed. I thought you'd be tickled to death with the assignment!” said Chisholm.
Bentley Ames' glance came back from the dome of the capitol, seen now through the closing mists of a rainy day and the falling twilight, to rest on his chief's face with a lurking suspicion of disfavor.
“I supposed you'd let me cover the convention,” he said. “What's Carveth going down to Little Mountain for?—if he wants the nomination why doesn't he get busy?”
“He's made his canvass. You see, Ames, he runs a factory in one of the western counties,—makes shirts,—the business office gets a thousand a year out of him and the News has got to treat him right.” And the following morning, Ames, the expression of whose face told of the spirit of resignation that possessed him, boarded the train for Little Mountain.
He expected to reach his destination by ten o'clock, but there was a freight wreck on the road. As a result he spent five hours at a sad little way station, and when the line resumed its functions as a common carrier, he took the afternoon train that had just pulled in. He first sought the parlor-car, which he found occupied by three ladies; then in rather low spirits, his mind divided between thoughts of the luncheon he had not had and the dinner he would order at The Pines, he wandered on into the smoker. Near the door were four men playing cards. There next fell under his scrutiny a young fellow of five or six and twenty, who was reading a shabby volume of Emerson. Three seats farther on was the only other passenger in the car, a solidly built man of sixty with a pleasant ruddy face; he was dressed in black broadcloth and wore a high silk hat, and as Ames dropped into the seat opposite him he gave the News man a half smile of friendly recognition. There was something so genial and winning in his very air that Ames smiled in return.
“Sightly, ain't it?” and the silk hat dipped in the direction of the autumn landscape, where the brown fields yielded at intervals to gorgeous reds and russets set in a murky haze. Ames admitted the beauty, and the stranger took the cigar from between his strong even teeth. “Fond of nature?” he inquired.
In a general way Mr. Ames was, but he was not enthusiastic about it; indeed, he was so profoundly sophisticated that sensation of any sort reached him in a very diluted form. The elder man scanned the younger; then he drew from the region of his hip a flat leather pocketbook. It yielded up a square of pasteboard which he passed across the aisle to Ames, who read: “Jeremiah Carveth. Originator Plymouth Rock Dollar Shirt. 'Made on Honor.'.rdquo;
“By Jove!” cried Ames. “You're just the man I want to see, Mr. Carveth. I'm from the News.”
“Are you now?” Mr. Carveth was frankly pleased. “What's your name?”
“Ames—Bentley Ames.”
“Excuse me—” and Mr. Carveth turned in his seat. “Willie, step here!” he called, and the reader of Emerson put aside his book. “Mr. Ames, I want you should know my secretary, W. C. B. McPherson, William Cullen Bryant McPherson,” said Mr. Carveth, when the secretary stood at his elbow. “He's a newspaper boy, too—does the locals on the Marysville Clarion. Mr. Ames, of the Capital City News, Willie.”
W. G. B. McPherson gave Ames an embarrassed smile.
“Not a newspaper man in the sense that Mr. Ames is.” It was evident he stood in awe of this more metropolitan member of the craft.
“I don't know about that,” said Mr. Carveth. “I've always considered the Clarion a mighty clean sheet.”
Ames smiled enigmatically. He was thinking of Mr. Carveth's rival, General Pogue, “Slippery Dick, who lived with his ear next the ground,” and of James Cartwright Smith, who was back of the general. Carveth resumed the conversation.
“Ever been to Marysville? It's named after my wife; my factory's there.”
Ames had not been to Marysville; he admitted, however, that he had heard of the place.
The landscape beyond the car windows had changed its characteristic aspect. The fields had grown smaller, the goldenrod and immortelles waved over heaps of stones in the fence-rows, while the russets and reds and browns had given place to the somber green of pine and hemlock. And now the train drew up at a tiny ornate station. The three men climbed into the coach that was waiting for them and were soon toiling up a winding road, from which they presently emerged upon the single street of a sleepy village. Beyond the village and crowning the mountain's summit they could distinguish the long stone and timber fagade of The Pines in the shadow of the sinking sun.
Ames dined with the candidate and his secretary; afterward he interviewed Mr. Carveth. His story off his hands, he was lounging about the office with only the night clerk for company, when suddenly McPherson appeared; he was in his shirt-sleeves, while his feet were thrust into worsted bed-slippers; in his hand he carried a pitcher. It was evident he did not see the two men in the corner by the news-stand, for after glancing about to get his bearings he disappeared down the corridor leading to the dining-room. A moment later they heard him rattle a locked door, then again the patter of his slippered feet sounded on the tessellated pavement, and he reappeared in the lobby. Ames heard him say “Dang it!” but rather in disappointment than in anger; and then the clerk emitted a shrill cackle of mirth, and McPherson, being thus made aware of the presence of the two men, faced them.
“Excuse me,” he said. “But will you kindly tell me where I'll find the pump?”
Gray shadows invaded the darkness of the pines that clothed the slopes of Little Mountain, and through the open, eastward looking window of his room the morning sun shone in upon the News man. Perhaps he missed the clang of the trolley's gong, the early milk wagon's clatter on the paved street; perhaps it was the silence, scarce disturbed by the song of birds and the murmur of the wind in the pines, that roused him; but Bentley Ames emerged from his slumber and without changing his position, looked from his window into the red eye of the sun. He dressed and slipping out into the hall, tapped on McPherson's door.
“Come in,” called the secretary, and Ames entered the room. McPherson was seated at his table, writing. “Oh, Mr. Ames—” he said. He seemed both pleased and embarrassed.
“Don't get up;” and Ames, establishing himself on the edge of McPherson's bed, began to roll a cigarette. “Suppose you tell me how Mr. Carveth broke into politics,” he suggested.
McPherson's face lighted instantly with enthusiasm.
“There's a wonderful man, Mr. Ames; a splendid type of the American business man! You should go through his factory; you should see the hundreds of busy operators. You would understand then what Mr. Carveth means to Marysville. Marysville,” added the secretary, “is pledged to Mr. Carveth.”
“I dare say.” But Ames was not impressed by the loyalty of Marysville.
“You don't think much of his chances?” ventured McPherson.
“What I think of them wouldn't be fit to print,” said Ames candidly. “Dick Pogue's rather a hot proposition for your man to stack up against, and back of Pogue is J. C. Smith.” Ames slipped off the edge of the bed and took a turn about the room.
“You must admit, Mr. Ames, that nobody has any confidence in either General Pogue or Mr. Smith,” said McPherson.
“They can get along without it,” said Ames with calm cynicism.
“I shouldn't like to think that any public man could go far without the trust of his fellow citizens,” observed McPherson.
“With those ideas you should keep clear of politics. You and Mr. Carveth may as well retire to the classic regions of Susansville.”
“Marysville,” corrected McPherson mildly.
“Marysville, then,” said Ames. He paused by the corner of McPherson's desk. “Well, the occasion will be interesting as a souvenir of public life, eh, McPherson?” and he smiled down pityingly on the top of the secretary's slightly bald head, for McPherson was looking into the pictured face of a young girl whose photograph, framed in red plush, decorated his desk. Ames extended his hand and possessed himself of the photograph, which he proceeded to examine. “Your sister?” he asked, after a moment's silence.
“Miss Carveth,” said W. C. B. McPherson, but his voice had lost much of its agreeable quality.
“I beg your pardon,” said Ames, flushing as he hastily returned the photograph to its place on the desk. McPherson quitted his chair.
“I think we had better go down-stairs,” he observed stiffly.
They found Carveth waiting for them in the office.
“I been lookin' over the paper,” he told Ames, as they seated themselves at the breakfast table. He turned to his secretary. “I can't see that we occupy so darn much space, Willie. The world seems unaware of the fact that Jeremiah Carveth and W. C. B. McPherson are willing to act as a kind providence in shaping the destiny of a freeborn people. I'm getting a sickenin' consciousness that there's tall timber growing for me.” He laughed in McPherson's face, which had gone from white to red. “Cheer up, Willie, cheer up. It's good to be alive, and the rest is dividends. You mayn't land me in office, but what's the odds? Crisp and bright, Willie, crisp and bright!” he urged with kindly concern.
But the thought of defeat was a bitter thing to McPherson, and presently he excused himself and quitted the table.
“I want a meetin'-house talk with you, Ames,” said Carveth, the moment the secretary was out of hearing. “I was all for private life, the privater the better, until Willie smoked me out. It's this way, I got a daughter—” Mr. Carveth paused; in spite of his habitual frankness he was struggling with a sudden sense of diffidence. “We got only the one child, and naturally her mother and I center everything on her; and we've been fortunate, for we've been able to give her a good many advantages. Now Willie's interested in Nellie; and Nellie's interested in Willie. It's a match her ma and I desire; but Willie's chuck-full of pride. He's got nothing but a salary of fifteen dollars a week, and he says he can't regard marriage as a commercial asset; and there you are.” Mr. Carveth gave Ames an expressive smile. “I don't say but what Willie's right. He says if he can get me elected governor he'll feel that he ain't just an experiment. I guess you gather, from what I say, that I'm in politics to oblige Willie; and that's the situation.”
The state convention met on the tenth of the month, and when the morning of the tenth dawned Ames was conscious of a feeling of disquietude. He rather took it out on Mr. Carveth's secretary.
“You'll see what a gilt-edged snap does for a man, Mr. McPherson,” he observed. “Your little delegation and all the other little delegations will be given their little say, then Smith will quietly proceed to nominate his bunch; and it will dawn on a few enlightened minds that the business could have been transacted by just getting him on the phone in the first place.” And having eased himself of this depressing prophecy, Ames began a perusal of the News.
Some two hours later the secretary hurried into the hotel office.
“In strict confidence, Mr. Ames,” he said, and thrust a telegram into Ames' hand. It proved to be from James Cartwright Smith, and requested an immediate interview with Mr. Carveth.
“He'll take the first train to town?” asked Ames.
“I have just sent Mr. Carveth's answer. He will see Mr. Smith—here,” said McPherson.
The next morning, when Smith descended from his car, Ames was on the platform, but as the News man advanced toward him the party leader shook his head.
“Nothing doing, Ames,” he said.
“I didn't know but you'd come down to see Carveth,” insinuated Ames.
“Carveth, Carveth? Oh, yes—merely a coincidence;” and he turned away to enter the coach.
“Interesting, but not true,” murmured Ames. He let the coach drive off and then set out briskly in pursuit.
Reaching the hotel, he hurried up-stairs to a room on the second floor that immediately adjoined the one occupied by Mr. Carveth. There was a connecting door. Over this door was a transom and below the transom Ames had placed a table, on the table a rug, and on the rug a chair.
“I interpreted your wire as signifying your willingness to accept the nomination at the hands of the party organization,” Smith was saying as Ames mounted to his post.
“Well—yes,” answered the creator of the Plymouth Rock Dollar Shirt cautiously.
“We're going to read Dick Pogue out of meeting, Mr. Carveth; he's been fed from the public crib about long enough. I suppose you've seen in the Washington despatches that Senator Burke is ill? One of the first jobs the next governor will have will be to appoint his successor.”
“That's so; but you ain't told me where the hitch comes in.”
“Ain't I?” rasped out the boss. “It's just here: Pogue's got his eye on his brother for the place, yet when Burke was made senator it was agreed I was to follow him. Isn't it plain to you why I came down here? I want your word that I'm to succeed Burke; then I'll shake hands with the next governor.”
“When it's business I'll dicker for anything I can swap, use myself, or give away; but I got a different feeling about politics,” remarked Mr. Carveth.
This came with such a shock to Ames that he almost fell off his seat.
“Quite right, Mr. Carveth,” said Smith pleasantly. “But a few pledges——”
“I won't promise nothin',” said Jeremiah Carveth with sudden stubbornness. “If I go to office I'm going there a free man. Otherwise Marysville's good enough for me.”
“Not pledged in any offensive sense, Mr. Carveth,” Smith urged. “We would never attempt to dictate a course of action to you——”
“I guess you wouldn't—more than once,” said Carveth shortly.
Mr. Smith gasped audibly, and Ames surmised he was hearing the distant roar of the convention, the first rumble of that landslide he had prematurely set going, which was to bury Slippery Dick while it uncovered Jeremiah Carveth.
“I'm offering you the place at the head of the ticket,” began Smith quietly. “That's tantamount to election; all I want is your promise that if Burke dies you'll appoint me to fill out his term——”
“Ain't you read any of my speeches?” asked Carveth. “Haven't you noticed that I take pretty firm ground in the matter of boss rule? Mr. Smith, you're the last man I'd ever think of making senator. I don't want to seem rude, but, well, I've told you Marysville's good enough for me.”
“Don't worry;” said Smith. “I had determined to support you; I could not imagine that you would be so blind to your own interests as not to meet me half-way; but a dozen telegrams will change the program—you'll go back to Marysville all right.”
McPherson had slipped from the room, and Ames abandoned his post and hurried in pursuit. He was just in time to see the secretary's long legs vanishing around a turn in the corridor. Keeping them in sight he descended to the office floor. McPherson was now speaking directly to the clerk.
“Will you go personally to Mr. Carveth's room and interrupt the conference there between him and Mr. Smith? Mr. Smith wishes particularly to catch the eleven-ten train.”
Ames retired to the check-room. As the clerk's footsteps died out in the hall overhead, he heard a chair dragged across the tessellated floor, and peering out from his place of hiding, he saw McPherson by the aid of this chair reach the office clock and resolutely turn the hands back twenty minutes. This accomplished, McPherson took himself into the open air. He raced down the road toward the telegraph office. Here Ames found him fifteen minutes later scribbling away at one corner of the operator's deal table. He glanced up as Ames entered the room.
“Oh, Mr. Ames,” he said, “look from the window and tell me when the coach from the hotel arrives.” Even as he spoke they heard the shriek of the engine's whistle. McPherson sighed softly. “I'm afraid Mr. Smith has missed his train,” he said. “And I think he was quite anxious to catch it.”
Twenty minutes slipped by and there was a hasty step upon the threshold, and James Cartwright Smith burst into the room.
“Here, rush these telegrams!” he roared, and tossed a dozen sheets of paper in front of the operator.
“The wire's busy, Mr. Smith,” said McPherson mildly, so mildly there was almost a touch of sadness in his tone.
The great man turned to the operator.
“Throw this stuff out of the window, or I will, and send those wires.”
McPherson measured the politician with a large prominent eye, then he said in a tone that would have carried conviction to a less excited man than Smith:
“If you do that, you'll go after it, and it's twenty feet to the ground.”
For answer Smith made a grab at the pile of copy in front of the operator. McPherson shot up to his full height of six feet, and extending a long arm, seized him by the wrist.
“It's twenty feet to the ground, Mr. Smith,” he remonstrated. Smith swung about on his heel.
“How can I get away from here, Ames?” he asked.
“You'll have to wait until eleven-ten to-morrow,” said Ames cheerfully. The leader groaned aloud. “Come,” Ames added, “you go to the hotel with me, and we'll be back here after lunch.” But once he had coaxed Smith back to The Pines, he abandoned him and hurried again to the telegraph office.
“See here, McPherson,” he expostulated, “it's all right where Smith is concerned, but how about me?”
“I'd love to oblige you, Mr. Ames; later, perhaps.”
“But that won't do any good,” urged Ames impatiently.
“No, I suppose not, since the News is an evening paper.”
“And what's the Clarion?”
“Semi-weekly,” said the secretary pleasantly.
The secretary wrote telegrams to the Clarion until he wearied of that pastime; then he began to tear pages out of his copy of Emerson. Incidentally he and Ames had passed to a state of siege. It became necessary to spike the office door fast to the jamb to keep out James Cartwright Smith, who, supported by a bell boy and the night watchman from The Pines, had established himself in the narrow hall, where he kept the air thick with threats and curses.
Six o'clock came and McPherson was still flashing the Concord sage's wisdom into Marysville. Mr. Smith was still on the stairs, but the boss no longer swore nor threatened; his tone was one of entreaty, his words abject. Two hours later and he was offering McPherson any sum he chose to name for five minutes' use of the wire. At ten o'clock he was heard to descend the stairs and pass up the road in the direction of The Pines; whereupon Ames knocked the spikes out of the jamb and opened the office door on a sleeping world; then he turned to McPherson.
“I suppose you are going to hold on to your end of the wire until the convention adjourns?” he observed. The secretary nodded and flipped a fresh page of Emerson across the table.
“Wait a bit, boss,” said the operator. “I got to take off a message for you.”
The message was from the leader of the Carveth delegation. As McPherson slowly absorbed its meaning a smile of intense satisfaction overspread his features. He passed it on to Ames, who read: “Carveth nominated. Hip—hip—hurrah!”
“This means a great deal to me, Mr. Ames,” said McPherson softly. “Indeed, it means everything.” Quite unconsciously he had slipped his hand into the breast pocket of his coat, and Ames caught sight of the plush frame that held Miss Carveth's picture.