elbow-room for the three Johns.
They met by accident in Hamilton at the land-office. John Henderson, fresh from
Cincinnati, manifestly unused to the ways of the country, looked at John Gillispie with a lurking smile. Gillispie wore a sombrero, fresh, white, and expansive. His boots had high heels, and were of elegant leather and finely arched at the instep. His corduroys disappeared in them half-way up the thigh. About his waist a sash of blue held a laced shirt of the same color in place. Hender- son puffed at his cigarette, and continued to look a trifle quizzical.
Suddenly Gillispie walked up to him and said, in a voice of complete suavity, “Damn yeh, smoke a pipe!”
“Eh?” said Henderson, stupidly.
“Smoke a pipe,” said the other. “That thing you have is bad for your complexion.”
“I can take care of my complexion,” said Henderson, firmly.
The two looked each other straight in the eye.
“You don’t go on smoking that thing till you have apologized for that grin you had on your phiz a moment ago.”
“I laugh when I please, and I smoke
what I please,” said Henderson, hotly, his face flaming as he realized that he was in for his first “row.”
That was how it began. How it would
have ended is not known — probably there would have been only one John — if it had not been for the almost miraculous appear- ance at this moment of the third John. For just then the two belligerents found them- selves prostrate, their pistols only half-cocked, and between them stood a man all gnarled and squat, like one of those wind-torn oaks which grow on the arid heights. He was
no older than the others, but the lines in his face were deep, and his large mouth
twitched as he said: —
“Hold on here, yeh fools! There’s too much blood in you to spill. You’ll spile th’ floor, and waste good stuff. We need blood out here!”
Gillispie bounced to his feet. Henderson arose suspiciously, keeping his eyes on his assailants.
“Oh, get up!” cried the intercessor.
“We don’t shoot men hereabouts till they git on their feet in fightin’ trim.”
“What do you know about what we do
here?” interrupted Gillispie. “This is the first time I ever saw you around.”
“That’s so,” the other admitted. “I’m just down from Montana. Came to take up
a quarter section. Where I come from we give men a show, an’ I thought perhaps yeh did th’ same here.”
“Why, yes,” admitted Gillispie, “we do. But I don’t want folks to laugh too much — not when I’m around — unless they tell me what the joke is. I was just mentioning it to the gentleman,” he added, dryly.
“So I saw,” said the other; “you’re kind a emphatic in yer remarks. Yeh ought to
give the gentleman a chance to git used to the ways of th’ country. He’ll be as tough as th’ rest of us if you’ll give him a chance. I kin see it in him.”
“Thank you,” said Henderson. “I’m
glad you do me justice. I wish you wouldn’t let daylight through me till I’ve had a chance to get my quarter section. I’m going to
be one of you, either as a live man or a corpse. But I prefer a hundred and sixty acres of land to six feet of it.”
“There, now!” triumphantly cried the
squat man. “Didn’t I tell yeh? Give him a show! ‘Tain’t no fault of his that he’s a tenderfoot. He’ll get over that.”
Gillispie shook hands with first one and then the other of the men. “It’s a square deal from this on,” he said. “Come and
have a drink.”
That’s how they met — John Henderson, John Gillispie, and John Waite. And a week later they were putting up a shanty together for common use, which overlapped each of their reservations, and satisfied the law with its sociable subterfuge.
The life wasn’t bad, Henderson decided; and he adopted all the ways of the country in an astonishingly short space of time. There was a freedom about it all which was certainly complete. The three alternated in the night watch. Once a week one of
them went to town for provisions. They were not good at the making of bread, so they contented themselves with hot cakes. Then there was salt pork for a staple, and prunes. They slept in straw-lined bunks, with warm blankets for a covering. They
made a point of bringing reading-matter back from town every week, and there were always cards to fall back on, and Waite sang songs for them with natural dramatic talent.
Nevertheless, in spite of their content- ment, none of them was sorry when the
opportunity offered for going to town. There was always a bit of stirring gossip to be picked up, and now and then there was a “show” at the “opera-house,” in which, it is almost unnecessary to say, no opera had ever been sung. Then there was the
hotel, at which one not only got good fare, but a chat with the three daughters of Jim O’Neal, the proprietor — girls with the acci- dent of two Irish parents, who were, not- withstanding, as typically American as they well could be. A half-hour’s talk with these cheerful young women was all the more to be desired for the reason that within riding distance of the three Johns’ ranch there were only two other women. One was Minerva
Fitch, who had gone out from Michigan accompanied by an oil-stove and a knowl- edge of the English grammar, with the
intention of teaching school, but who had been unable to carry these good intentions into execution for the reason that there were no children to teach, — at least, none but Bow-legged Joe. He was a sad little fellow, who looked like a prairie-dog, and who had very much the same sort of an outlook on life. The other woman was the brisk and efficient wife of Mr. Bill Deems, of “Missourah.”
Mr. Deems had never in his life done any- thing, not even so much as bring in a basket of buffalo chips to supply the scanty fire. That is to say, he had done nothing strictly utilitarian. Yet he filled his place. He was the most accomplished story-teller in the whole valley, and this accomplishment of his was held in as high esteem as the improvisa- tions of a Welsh minstrel were among his reverencing people. His wife alone depre- cated his skill, and interrupted his spirited narratives with sarcastic allusions concerning the empty cupboard, and the “state of her back,” to which, as she confided to any who would listen, “there was not a rag fit to wear.”
These two ladies had not, as may be
surmised, any particular attraction for John Henderson. Truth to tell, Henderson had
not come West with the intention of lik- ing women, but rather with a determina-
tion to see and think as little of them as possible. Yet even the most confirmed
misogynist must admit that it is a good thing to see a woman now and then, and for this reason Henderson found it amusing to converse with the amiable Misses O’Neal. At twenty-five one cannot be unyielding in one’s avoidance of the sex.
Henderson, with his pony at a fine lope, was on his way to town one day, in that
comfortable frame of mind adduced by an absence of any ideas whatever, when he
suddenly became conscious of a shiver that seemed to run from his legs to the pony, and back again. The animal gave a startled leap, and lifted his ears. There was a stir- ring in the coarse grasses; the sky, which a moment before had been like sapphire,
dulled with an indescribable grayness.
Then came a little singing afar off, as if from a distant convocation of cicadæ, and before Henderson could guess what it meant, a cloud of dust was upon him, blinding and bewildering, pricking with sharp particles at eyes and nostrils. The pony was an ugly fellow, and when Henderson felt him put his forefeet together, he knew what that meant, and braced himself for the struggle. But it was useless; he had not yet acquired the knack of staying on the back of a bucking bronco, and the next moment he was on
the ground, and around him whirled that saffron chaos of dust. The temperature
lowered every moment. Henderson in- stinctively felt that this was but the begin- ning of the storm. He picked himself up
without useless regrets for his pony, and made his way on.
The saffron hue turned to blackness, and then out of the murk shot a living green ball of fire, and ploughed into the earth. Then sheets of water, that seemed to come simultaneously from earth and sky, swept the prairie, and in the midst of it struggled Henderson, weak as a little child, half bereft of sense by the strange numbness of head and dullness of eye. Another of those green balls fell and burst, as it actually appeared to him, before his horrified eyes, and the bellow and blare of the explosion made him cry out in a madness of fright and physical pain. In the illumination he had seen a
cabin only a few feet in front of him, and toward it he made frantically, with an ani- mal’s instinctive desire for shelter.
The door did not yield at once to his pressure, and in the panic of his fear he threw his weight against it. There was a cry from within, a fall, and Henderson flung himself in the cabin and closed the door.
In the dusk of the storm he saw a woman half prostrate. It was she whom he had
pushed from the door. He caught the hook in its staple, and turned to raise her. She was not trembling as much as he, but, like himself, she was dizzy with the shock of the lightning. In the midst of all the
clamor Henderson heard a shrill crying, and looking toward the side of the room, he
dimly perceived three tiny forms crouched in one of the bunks. The woman took the
smallest of the children in her arms, and kissed and soothed it; and Henderson, after he had thrown a blanket at the bottom of the door to keep out the drifting rain, sat with his back to it, bracing it against the wind, lest the frail staple should give way. He managed some way to reach out and lay hold of the other little ones, and got them in his arms, — a boy, so tiny he seemed hardly human, and a girl somewhat sturdier. They cuddled in his arms, and clutched his clothes with their frantic little hands, and the three sat so while the earth and the heavens seemed to be meeting in angry
combat.
And back and forth, back and forth, in the dimness swayed the body of the woman, hushing her babe.
Almost as suddenly as the darkness had fallen, it lifted. The lightning ceased to threaten, and almost frolicked, — little way- ward flashes of white and yellow dancing in mid-air. The wind wailed less frequently, like a child who sobs in its sleep. And at last Henderson could make his voice heard.
“Is there anything to build a fire with?” he shouted. “The children are shiver-
ing so.”
The woman pointed to a basket of buffalo chips in the corner, and he wrapped his
little companions up in a blanket while he made a fire in the cooking-stove. The baby was sleeping by this time, and the woman began tidying the cabin, and when the
fire was burning brightly, she put some coffee on.
“I wish I had some clothes to offer you,” she said, when the wind had subsided suffi- ciently to make talking possible. “I’m
afraid you’ll have to let them get dry on you.”
“Oh, that’s of no consequence at all! We’re lucky to get off with our lives. I never saw anything so terrible. Fancy!
half an hour ago it was summer; now it is winter!”
“It seems rather sudden when you’re not used to it,” the woman admitted. “I’ve
lived in the West six years now; you can’t frighten me any more. We never die out
here before our time comes.”
“You seem to know that I haven’t been here long,” said Henderson, with some
chagrin.
“Yes,” admitted the woman; “you have
the ear-marks of a man from the East.”
She was a tall woman, with large blue eyes, and a remarkable quantity of yellow hair braided on top of her head. Her gown was of calico, of such a pattern as a widow might wear.
“I haven’t been out of town a week yet,” she said. “We’re not half settled. Not
having any one to help makes it harder; and the baby is rather fretful.”
“But you’re not alone with all these little codgers?” cried Henderson, in dismay.
The woman turned toward him with a sort of defiance. “Yes, I am,” she said; “and I’m as strong as a horse, and I mean to get through all right. Here were the three
children in my arms, you may say, and no way to get in a cent. I wasn’t going to
stand it just to please other folk. I said, let them talk if they want to, but I’m going to hold down a claim, and be accumulating something while the children are getting up a bit. Oh, I’m not afraid!”
In spite of this bold assertion of bravery, there was a sort of break in her voice. She was putting dishes on the table as she talked, and turned some ham in the skillet, and got the children up before the fire, and dropped some eggs in water, — all with a rapidity that bewildered Henderson.
“How long have you been alone?” he
asked, softly.
“Three months before baby was born,
and he’s five months old now. I — I — you think I can get on here, don’t you? There was nothing else to do.”
She was folding another blanket over the sleeping baby now, and the action brought to her guest the recollection of a thousand tender moments of his dimly remembered
youth.
“You’ll get on if we have anything to do with it,” he cried, suppressing an oath with difficulty, just from pure emotion.
And he told her about the three Johns’ ranch, and found it was only three miles distant, and that both were on the same
road; only her cabin, having been put up during the past week, had of course been unknown to him. So it ended in a sort of compact that they were to help each other in such ways as they could. Meanwhile the fire got genial, and the coffee filled the cabin with its comfortable scent, and all of them ate together quite merrily, Henderson cut- ting up the ham for the youngsters; and he told how he chanced to come out; and she entertained him with stories of what she thought at first when she was brought a
bride to Hamilton, the adjacent village, and convulsed him with stories of the people, whom she saw with humorous eyes.
Henderson marvelled how she could in
those few minutes have rescued the cabin from the desolation in which the storm had plunged it. Out of the window he could
see the stricken grasses dripping cold moist- ure, and the sky still angrily plunging for- ward like a disturbed sea. Not a tree or a house broke the view. The desolation of it swept over him as it never had before. But within the little ones were chattering to themselves in odd baby dialect, and the
mother was laughing with them.
“Women aren’t always useless,” she said, at parting; “and you tell your chums that when they get hungry for a slice of home- made bread they can get it here. And the next time they go by, I want them to stop in and look at the children. It’ll do them good. They may think they won’t enjoy
themselves, but they will.”
“Oh, I’ll answer for that!” cried he, shaking hands with her. “I’ll tell them we have just the right sort of a neighbor.”
“Thank you,” said she, heartily. “And you may tell them that her name is Cathe- rine Ford.”
Once at home, he told his story.
“H’m!” said Gillispie, “I guess I’ll have to go to town myself to-morrow.”
Henderson looked at him blackly. “She’s a woman alone, Gillispie,” said he, severely, “trying to make her way with handicaps — “
“Shet up, can’t ye, ye darned fool?”
roared Gillispie. “What do yeh take me fur?”
Waite was putting on his rubber coat
preparatory to going out for his night with the cattle. “Guess you’re makin’ a mistake, my boy,” he said, gently. “There ain’t no danger of any woman bein’ treated rude in these parts.”
“I know it, by Jove!” cried Henderson, in quick contriteness.
“All right,” grunted Gillispie, in tacit acceptance of this apology. “I guess you thought you was in civilized parts.”
Two days after this Waite came in late to his supper. “Well, I seen her,” he
announced.
“Oh! did you?” cried Henderson, know- ing perfectly well whom he meant. “What
was she doing?”
“Killin’ snakes, b’gosh! She says th’ baby’s crazy fur um, an’ so she takes aroun’ a hoe on her shoulder wherever she goes, an’ when she sees a snake, she has it out with ‘im then an’ there. I says to ‘er, ‘Yer don’t expec’ t’ git all th’ snakes outen this here country, d’ yeh?’ ‘Well,’ she says, ‘I’m as good a man as St. Patrick any day.’ She is a jolly one, Henderson. She tuk
me in an’ showed me th’ kids, and give me a loaf of gingerbread to bring home. Here it is; see?”
“Hu!” said Gillispie. “I’m not in it.” But for all of his scorn he was not above eating the gingerbread.
It was gardening time, and the three
Johns were putting in every spare moment in the little paling made of willow twigs behind the house. It was little enough
time they had, though, for the cattle were new to each other and to the country, and they were hard to manage. It was generally conceded that Waite had a genius for herd- ing, and he could take the “mad” out of a fractious animal in a way that the others looked on as little less than superhuman. Thus it was that one day, when the clay had been well turned, and the seeds arranged on the kitchen table, and all things prepared for an afternoon of busy planting, that Waite and Henderson, who were needed out with
the cattle, felt no little irritation at the inex- plicable absence of Gillispie, who was to look after the garden. It was quite night- fall when he at last returned. Supper was ready, although it had been Gillispie’s turn to prepare it.
Henderson was sore from his saddle, and cross at having to do more than his share of the work. “Damn yeh!” he cried, as
Gillispie appeared. “Where yeh been?”
“Making garden,” responded Gillispie, slowly.
“Making garden!” Henderson indulged
in some more harmless oaths.
Just then Gillispie drew from under his coat a large and friendly looking apple-pie. “Yes,” he said, with emphasis; “I’ve bin a-makin’ garden fur Mis’ Ford.”
And so it came about that the three Johns knew her and served her, and that she never had a need that they were not ready to
supply if they could. Not one of them would have thought of going to town with- out stopping to inquire what was needed
at the village. As for Catherine Ford, she was fighting her way with native pluck and maternal unselfishness. If she had feared solitude she did not suffer from it. The activity of her life stifled her fresh sorrow. She was pleasantly excited by the rumors that a railroad was soon to be built near the place, which would raise the value of the claim she was “holding down” many thou-
sand dollars.
It is marvellous how sorrow shrinks when one is very healthy and very much occupied. Although poverty was her close companion, Catherine had no thought of it in this prim- itive manner of living. She had come out there, with the independence and determi- nation of a Western woman, for the purpose of living at the least possible expense, and making the most she could while the baby was “getting out of her arms.” That process has its pleasures, which every mother feels in spite of burdens, and the mind is happily dulled by nature’s merciful provision. With a little child tugging at the breast, care and fret vanish, not because of the happiness so much as because of a certain mammal
complacency, which is not at all intellectual, but serves its purpose better than the pro- foundest method of reasoning.
So without any very unbearable misery at her recent widowhood, this healthy young woman worked in field and house, cared for her little ones, milked the two cows out in the corral, sewed, sang, rode, baked, and was happy for very wholesomeness. Some-
times she reproached herself that she was not more miserable, remembering that long grave back in the unkempt little prairie cemetery, and she sat down to coax her
sorrow into proper prominence. But the baby cooing at her from its bunk, the low of the cattle from the corral begging her to relieve their heavy bags, the familiar call of one of her neighbors from without, even the burning sky of the summer dawns, broke the spell of this conjured sorrow, and in spite of herself she was again a very hearty and happy young woman. Besides, if one
has a liking for comedy, it is impossible to be dull on a Nebraska prairie. The people are a merrier divertissement than the theatre with its hackneyed stories. Catherine Ford laughed a good deal, and she took the three Johns into her confidence, and they laughed with her. There was Minerva Fitch, who
insisted on coming over to tell Catherine how to raise her children, and who was
almost offended that the children wouldn’t die of sunstroke when she predicted. And there was Bob Ackerman, who had inflam-
matory rheumatism and a Past, and who confided the latter to Mrs. Ford while she doctored the former with homoeopathic
medicines. And there were all the strange visionaries who came out prospecting, and quite naturally drifted to Mrs. Ford’s cabin for a meal, and paid her in compliments of a peculiarly Western type. And there were the three Johns themselves. Catherine con- sidered it no treason to laugh at them a little.
Yet at Waite she did not laugh much.
There had come to be something pathetic in the constant service he rendered her. The beginning of his more particular devotion had started in a particular way. Malaria was very bad in the country. It had carried off some of the most vigorous on the prairie, and twice that summer Catherine herself had laid out the cold forms of her neighbors on ironing-boards, and, with the assistance of Bill Deems of Missourah, had read the
burial service over them. She had averted several other fatal runs of fever by the con- tents of her little medicine-case. These remedies she dealt out with an intelligence that astonished her patients, until it was learned that she was studying medicine at the time that she met her late husband, and was persuaded to assume the responsibilities of matrimony instead of those of the medi- cal profession.
One day in midsummer, when the sun
was focussing itself on the raw pine boards of her shanty, and Catherine had the shades drawn for coolness and the water-pitcher swathed in wet rags, East Indian fashion, she heard the familiar halloo of Waite down the road. This greeting, which was usually sent to her from the point where the dip- ping road lifted itself into the first view of the house, did not contain its usual note of cheerfulness. Catherine, wiping her hands on her checked apron, ran out to wave a
welcome; and Waite, his squat body looking more distorted than ever, his huge shoulders lurching as he walked, came fairly plung- ing down the hill.
“It’s all up with Henderson!” he cried, as Catherine approached. “He’s got the
malery, an’ he says he’s dyin’.”
“That’s no sign he’s dying, because he says so,” retorted Catherine.
“He wants to see yeh,” panted Waite,
mopping his big ugly head. “I think he’s got somethin’ particular to say.”
“How long has he been down?”
“Three days; an’ yeh wouldn’t know
‘im.”
The children were playing on the floor at that side of the house where it was least hot. Catherine poured out three bowls of milk, and cut some bread, meanwhile telling Kitty how to feed the baby.
“She’s a sensible thing, is the little daughter,” said Catherine, as she tied on her sunbonnet and packed a little basket with things from the cupboard. She kissed the babies tenderly, flung her hoe — her only weapon of defence — over her shoulder, and the two started off.
They did not speak, for their throats were soon too parched. The prairie was burned brown with the sun; the grasses curled as if they had been on a gridiron. A strong wind was blowing; but it brought no com- fort, for it was heavy with a scorching heat. The skin smarted and blistered under it, and the eyes felt as if they were filled with sand. The sun seemed to swing but a little way above the earth, and though the sky was
intensest blue, around about this burning ball there was a halo of copper, as if the very ether were being consumed in yellow fire.
Waite put some big burdock-leaves on
Catherine’s head under her bonnet, and now and then he took a bottle of water from his pocket and made her swallow a mouthful.
She staggered often as she walked, and the road was black before her. Still, it was not very long before the oddly shaped shack of the three Johns came in sight; and as he caught a glimpse of it, Waite quickened his footsteps.
“What if he should be gone?” he said, under his breath.
“Oh, come off!” said Catherine, angrily. “He’s not gone. You make me tired!”
But she was trembling when she stopped just before the door to compose herself for a moment. Indeed, she trembled so very
much that Waite put out his sprawling hand to steady her. She gently felt the pressure tightening, and Waite whispered in her ear:
“I guess I’d stand by him as well as any- body, excep’ you, Mis’ Ford. He’s been
my bes’ friend. But I guess you like him better, eh?”
Catherine raised her finger. She could hear Henderson’s voice within; it was
pitiably querulous. He was half sitting up in his bunk, and Gillispie had just handed him a plate on which two cakes were swim- ming in black molasses and pork gravy.
Henderson looked at it a moment; then over his face came a look of utter despair. He dropped his head in his arms and broke into uncontrolled crying.
“Oh, my God, Gillispie,” he sobbed, “I shall die out here in this wretched hole! I want my mother. Great God, Gillispie, am I going to die without ever seeing my
mother?”
Gillispie, maddened at this anguish, which he could in no way alleviate, sought comfort by first lighting his pipe and then taking his revolver out of his hip-pocket and playing with it. Henderson continued to shake with sobs, and Catherine, who had never before in her life heard a man cry, leaned against the door for a moment to gather courage. Then she ran into the house quickly, laugh- ing as she came. She took Henderson’s
arms away from his face and laid him back on the pillow, and she stooped over him
and kissed his forehead in the most matter- of-fact way.
“That’s what your mother would do if she were here,” she cried, merrily. “Where’s the water?”
She washed his face and hands a long
time, till they were cool and his convulsive sobs had ceased. Then she took a slice of thin bread from her basket and a spoonful of amber jelly. She beat an egg into some milk and dropped a little liquor within it, and served them together on the first clean napkin that had been in the cabin of the three Johns since it was built
At this the great fool on the bed cried again, only quietly, tears of weak happi- ness running from his feverish eyes. And Catherine straightened the disorderly cabin. She came every day for two weeks, and by that time Henderson, very uncertain as to the strength of his legs, but once more accoutred in his native pluck, sat up in a chair, for which she had made clean soft cushions,
writing a letter to his mother. The floor was scrubbed; the cabin had taken to itself cupboards made of packing-boxes; it had
clothes-presses and shelves; curtains at the windows; boxes for all sort of necessaries, from flour to tobacco; and a cook-book on the wall, with an inscription within which was more appropriate than respectful.
The day that she announced that she
would have no further call to come back, Waite, who was looking after the house
while Gillispie was afield, made a little speech.
“After this here,” he said, “we four
stands er falls together. Now look here, there’s lots of things can happen to a person on this cussed praira, and no one be none th’ wiser. So see here, Mis’ Ford, every night one of us is a-goin’ to th’ roof of this shack. From there we can see your place. If anything is th’ matter — it don’t signify how little er how big — you hang a lantern on th’ stick that I’ll put alongside th’ house to-morrow. Yeh can h’ist th’ light up with a string, and every mornin’ before we go out we’ll look too, and a white rag’ll bring us quick as we can git there. We don’t say
nothin’ about what we owe yeh, fur that ain’t our way, but we sticks to each other from this on.”
Catherine’s eyes were moist. She looked at Henderson. His face had no expression in it at all. He did not even say good-by to her, and she turned, with the tears sud- denly dried under her lids, and walked
down the road in the twilight.
Weeks went by, and though Gillispie and Waite were often at Catherine’s, Henderson never came. Gillispie gave it out as his opinion that Henderson was an ungrateful puppy; but Waite said nothing. This
strange man, who seemed like a mere unto- ward accident of nature, had changed dur- ing the summer. His big ill-shaped body
had grown more gaunt; his deep-set gray eyes had sunk deeper; the gentleness which had distinguished him even on the wild
ranges of Montana became more marked. Late in August he volunteered to take on himself the entire charge of the night
watch.
“It’s nicer to be out at night,” he said to Catherine. “Then you don’t keep look- ing off at things; you can look inside;” and he struck his breast with his splay hand.
Cattle are timorous under the stars. The vastness of the plains, the sweep of the wind under the unbroken arch, frighten them;
they are made for the close comforts of the barn-yard; and the apprehension is con-
tagious, as every ranchman knows. Waite realized the need of becoming good friends with his animals. Night after night, riding up and down in the twilight of the stars, or dozing, rolled in his blanket, in the shelter of a knoll, he would hear a low roar; it was the cry of the alarmist. Then from
every direction the cattle would rise with trembling awkwardness on their knees, and answer, giving out sullen bellowings. Some of them would begin to move from place to place, spreading the baseless alarm, and then came the time for action, else over the plain in mere fruitless frenzy would go the whole frantic band, lashed to madness by their own fears, trampling each other, heed- less of any obstacle, in pitiable, deadly rout. Waite knew the premonitory signs well, and at the first warning bellow he was on his feet, alert and determined, his energy
nerved for a struggle in which he always conquered.
Waite had a secret which he told to none, knowing, in his unanalytical fashion, that it would not be believed in. But soon as ever the dark heads of the cattle began to lift themselves, he sent a resonant voice out into the stillness. The songs he sang were hymns, and he made them into a sort of
imperative lullaby. Waite let his lungs and soul fill with the breath of the night; he gave himself up to the exaltation of
mastering those trembling brutes. Mount- ing, melodious, with even and powerful
swing he let his full notes fall on the air in the confidence of power, and one by one the reassured cattle would lie down again, lowing in soft contentment, and so fall
asleep with noses stretched out in mute attention, till their presence could hardly be guessed except for the sweet aroma of their cuds.
One night in the early dusk, he saw Cath- erine Ford hastening across the prairie with Bill Deems. He sent a halloo out to them, which they both answered as they ran on. Waite knew on what errand of mercy Cath- erine was bent, and he thought of the chil- dren over at the cabin alone. The cattle were quiet, the night beautiful, and he con- cluded that it was safe enough, since he was on his pony, to ride down there about mid- night and see that the little ones were safe.
The dark sky, pricked with points of in- tensest light, hung over him so beneficently that in his heart there leaped a joy which even his ever-present sorrow could not dis- turb. This sorrow Waite openly admitted
not only to himself, but to others. He had said to Catherine: “You see, I’ll always hev to love yeh. An’ yeh’ll not git cross with me; I’m not goin’ to be in th’ way.” And Catherine had told him, with tears in her eyes, that his love could never be but a com- fort to any woman. And these words, which the poor fellow had in no sense mistaken, comforted him always, became part of his joy as he rode there, under those piercing stars, to look after her little ones. He found them sleeping in their bunks, the baby tight in Kitty’s arms, the little boy above them in the upper bunk, with his hand in the long hair of his brown spaniel. Waite softly
kissed each of them, so Kitty, who was half waking, told her mother afterwards, and
then, bethinking him that Catherine might not be able to return in time for their break- fast, found the milk and bread, and set it for them on the table. Catherine had been
writing, and her unfinished letter lay open beside the ink. He took up the pen and
wrote,
“The childdren was all asleep at twelv.
“J. W.”
He had not more than got on his pony
again before he heard an ominous sound that made his heart leap. It was a frantic dull pounding of hoofs. He knew in a
second what it meant. There was a stam- pede among the cattle. If the animals had all been his, he would not have lost his sense of judgment. But the realization that he had voluntarily undertaken the care of them, and that the larger part of them belonged to his friends, put him in a passion of appre- hension that, as a ranchman, was almost in- explicable. He did the very thing of all others that no cattle-man in his right senses would think of doing. Gillispie and Hender- son, talking it over afterward, were never able to understand it. It is possible — just barely possible — that Waite, still drunk on his solitary dreams, knew what he was doing, and chose to bring his little chapter to an end while the lines were pleasant. At any rate, he rode straight forward, shouting and waving his arms in an insane endeavor to head off that frantic mob. The noise woke the children, and they peered from the
window as the pawing and bellowing herd plunged by, trampling the young steers
under their feet.
In the early morning, Catherine Ford, spent both in mind and body, came walking slowly home. In her heart was a prayer of thanks- giving. Mary Deems lay sleeping back in
her comfortless shack, with her little son by her side.
“The wonder of God is in it,” said Cath- erine to herself as she walked home. “All the ministers of all the world could not have preached me such a sermon as I’ve had
to-night.”
So dim had been the light and so per- turbed her mind that she had not noticed how torn and trampled was the road. But
suddenly a bulk in her pathway startled her. It was the dead and mangled body of a steer. She stooped over it to read the brand on its flank. “It’s one of the three Johns’,” she cried out, looking anxiously about her.
“How could that have happened?”
The direction which the cattle had taken was toward her house, and she hastened
homeward. And not a quarter of a mile from her door she found the body of Waite beside that of his pony, crushed out of its familiar form into something unspeakably shapeless. In her excitement she half
dragged, half carried that mutilated body home, and then ran up her signal of alarm on the stick that Waite himself had erected for her convenience. She thought it would be a long time before any one reached her, but she had hardly had time to bathe the disfigured face and straighten the disfigured body before Henderson was pounding at her door. Outside stood his pony panting from its terrific exertions. Henderson had not seen her before for six weeks. Now he
stared at her with frightened eyes.
“What is it? What is it?” he cried.
“What has happened to you, my — my love?”
At least afterward, thinking it over as she worked by day or tossed in her narrow bunk at night, it seemed to Catherine that those were the words he spoke. Yet she could
never feel sure; nothing in his manner after that justified the impassioned anxiety of his manner in those first few uncertain moments; for a second later he saw the body of his friend and learned the little that Catherine knew. They buried him the next day in a
little hollow where there was a spring and some wild aspens.
“He never liked the prairie,” Catherine said, when she selected the spot. “And I want him to lie as sheltered as possible.”
After he had been laid at rest, and she was back, busy with tidying her neglected shack, she fell to crying so that the children were scared.
“There’s no one left to care what becomes of us,” she told them, bitterly. “We might starve out here for all that any one cares.”
And all through the night her tears fell, and she told herself that they were all for the man whose last thought was for her and her babies; she told herself over and over again that her tears were all for him. After this the autumn began to hurry on, and the snow fell capriciously, days of biting cold giving place to retrospective glances at summer. The last of the vegetables were taken out of the garden and buried in the cellar; and a few tons of coal — dear almost as diamonds — were brought out to provide against the severest weather. Ordinarily buffalo chips were the fuel. Catherine was alarmed at
the way her wretched little store of money began to vanish. The baby was fretful with its teething, and was really more care than when she nursed it. The days shortened,
and it seemed to her that she was forever working by lamp-light The prairies were
brown and forbidding, the sky often a mere gray pall. The monotony of the life began to seem terrible. Sometimes her ears ached for a sound. For a time in the summer so many had seemed to need her that she had been happy in spite of her poverty and her loneliness. Now, suddenly, no one wanted her. She could find no source of inspiration. She wondered how she was going to live
through the winter, and keep her patience and her good-nature.
“You’ll love me,” she said, almost fiercely, one night to the children — “you’ll love mamma, no matter how cross and homely
she gets, won’t you?”
The cold grew day by day. A strong
winter was setting in. Catherine took up her study of medicine again, and sat over her books till midnight. It occurred to her that she might fit herself for nursing by spring, and that the children could be put with some one — she did not dare to think with whom. But this was the only solution she could find to her problem of existence.
November settled down drearily. Few
passed the shack. Catherine, who had no one to speak with excepting the children, continually devised amusements for them. They got to living in a world of fantasy, and were never themselves, but always wild Indians, or arctic explorers, or Robinson Crusoes. Kitty and Roderick, young as
they were, found a never-ending source of amusement in these little grotesque dreams and dramas. The fund of money was get-
ting so low that Catherine was obliged to economize even in the necessities. If it had not been for her two cows, she would hardly have known how to find food for her little ones. But she had a wonderful way of mak- ing things with eggs and milk, and she kept her little table always inviting. The day before Thanksgiving she determined that
they should all have a frolic.
“By Christmas,” she said to Kitty, “the snow may be so bad that I cannot get
to town. We’ll have our high old time now.”
There is no denying that Catherine used slang even in talking to the children. The little pony had been sold long ago, and
going to town meant a walk of twelve miles. But Catherine started out early in the
morning, and was back by nightfall, not so very much the worse, and carrying in
her arms bundles which might have fatigued a bronco.
The next morning she was up early, and was as happy and ridiculously excited over the prospect of the day’s merrymaking as if she had been Kitty. Busy as she was,
she noticed a peculiar oppression in the air, which intensified as the day went on. The sky seemed to hang but a little way above the rolling stretch of frost-bitten grass. But Kitty laughing over her new doll, Roderick startling the sullen silence with his drum, the smell of the chicken, slaughtered to make a prairie holiday, browning in the
oven, drove all apprehensions from Cath- erine’s mind. She was a common creature. Such very little things could make her happy. She sang as she worked; and what with the drumming of her boy, and the little exulting shrieks of her baby, the shack was filled with a deafening and exhilarating din.
It was a little past noon, when she became conscious that there was sweeping down on her a gray sheet of snow and ice, and not till then did she realize what those lowering clouds had signified. For one moment she stood half paralyzed. She thought of every- thing, — of the cattle, of the chance for being buried in this drift, of the stock of provi- sions, of the power of endurance of the
children. While she was still thinking, the first ice-needles of the blizzard came pepper- ing the windows. The cattle ran bellowing to the lee side of the house and crouched there, and the chickens scurried for the coop. Catherine seized such blankets and bits of carpet as she could find, and crammed them at windows and doors. Then she piled coal on the fire, and clothed the children in all they had that was warmest, their out-door gar- ments included; and with them close about her, she sat and waited. The wind seemed to push steadily at the walls of the house. The howling became horrible. She could
see that the children were crying with fright, but she could not hear them. The air was dusky; the cold, in spite of the fire, intol- erable. In every crevice of the wretched structure the ice and snow made their way. It came through the roof, and began piling up in little pointed strips under the crevices. Catherine put the children all together in one bunk, covered them with all the bed- clothes she had, and then stood before them defiantly, facing the west, from whence the wind was driving. Not suddenly, but by
steady pressure, at length the window-sash yielded, and the next moment that whirlwind was in the house, — a maddening tumult of ice and wind, leaving no room for resistance; a killing cold, against which it was futile to fight. Catherine threw the bedclothes over the heads of the children, and then threw herself across the bunk, gasping and chok- ing for breath. Her body would not have
yielded to the suffering yet, so strongly made and sustained was it; but her dismay stifled her. She saw in one horrified moment the frozen forms of her babies, now so pink and pleasant to the sense; and oblivion came to save her from further misery.
She was alive — just barely alive — when Gillispie and Henderson got there, three hours later, the very balls of their eyes almost frozen into blindness. But for an instinct stronger than reason they would never have been able to have found their way across that trackless stretch. The chil- dren lying unconscious under their coverings were neither dead nor actually frozen, al- though the men putting their hands on their little hearts could not at first discover the beating. Stiff and suffering as these young fellows were, it was no easy matter to get the window back into place and re-light the fire. They had tied flasks of liquor about their waists; and this beneficent fluid they used with that sense of appreciation which only a pioneer can feel toward whiskey. It was hours before Catherine rewarded them with a gleam of consciousness. Her body
had been frozen in many places. Her arms, outstretched over her children and holding the clothes down about them, were rigid. But consciousness came at length, dimly
struggling up through her brain; and over her she saw her friends rubbing and rubbing those strong firm arms of hers with snow.
She half raised her head, with a horror of comprehension in her eyes, and listened. A cry answered her, — a cry of dull pain from the baby. Henderson dropped on his knees beside her.
“They are all safe,” he said. “And we will never leave you again. I have been
afraid to tell you how I love you. I thought I might offend you. I thought I ought to wait — you know why. But I will never let you run the risks of this awful life alone again. You must rename the baby. From
this day his name is John. And we will have the three Johns again back at the old ranch. It doesn’t matter whether you love me or not, Catherine, I am going to take care of you just the same. Gillispie agrees with me.”
“Damme, yes,” muttered Gillispie, feeling of his hip-pocket for consolation in his old manner.
Catherine struggled to find her voice, but it would not come.
“Do not speak,” whispered John. “Tell me with your eyes whether you will come
as my wife or only as our sister.”
Catherine told him.
“This is Thanksgiving day,” said he.
“And we don’t know much about praying, but I guess we all have something in our hearts that does just as well.”
“Damme, yes,” said Gillispie, again, as he pensively cocked and uncocked his re- volver.
A Resuscitation
AFTER being dead twenty years, he
walked out into the sunshine.
It was as if the bones of a bleached skele- ton should join themselves on some forgotten plain, and look about them for the vanished flesh.
To be dead it is not necessary to be in the grave. There are places where the
worms creep about the heart instead of the body.
The penitentiary is one of these.
David Culross had been in the penitentiary twenty years. Now, with that worm-eaten
heart, he came out into liberty and looked about him for the habiliments with which he had formerly clothed himself, — for
hope, self-respect, courage, pugnacity, and industry.
But they had vanished and left no trace, like the flesh of the dead men on the plains, and so, morally unapparelled, in the hideous skeleton of his manhood, he walked on down the street under the mid-June sunshine.
You can understand, can you not, how a skeleton might wish to get back into its comfortable grave? David Culross had not walked two blocks before he was seized
with an almost uncontrollable desire to beg to be shielded once more in that safe and shameful retreat from which he had just
been released. A horrible perception of the largeness of the world swept over him.
Space and eternity could seem no larger to the usual man than earth — that snug and insignificant planet — looked to David Culross.
“If I go back,” he cried, despairingly, looking up to the great building that arose above the stony hills, “they will not take me in.” He was absolutely without a refuge, utterly without a destination; he did not have a hope. There was nothing he desired except the surrounding of those four narrow walls between which he had lain at night and dreamed those ever-recurring dreams, — dreams which were never prophecies or
promises, but always the hackneyed history of what he had sacrificed by his crime, and relinquished by his pride.
The men who passed him looked at him
with mingled amusement and pity. They knew the “prison look,” and they knew the prison clothes. For though the State gives to its discharged convicts clothes which are like those of other men, it makes a hundred suits from the same sort of cloth. The
police know the fabric, and even the citizens recognize it. But, then, were each man
dressed in different garb he could not be disguised. Every one knows in what dull
school that sidelong glance is learned, that aimless drooping of the shoulders, that
rhythmic lifting of the heavy foot.
David Culross wondered if his will were dead. He put it to the test. He lifted up his head to a position which it had not held for many miserable years. He put his hands in his pockets in a pitiful attempt at non- chalance, and walked down the street with a step which was meant to be brisk, but
which was in fact only uncertain. In his pocket were ten dollars. This much the
State equips a man with when it sends him out of its penal halls. It gives him also transportation to any point within reasonable distance that he may desire to reach. Cul- ross had requested a ticket to Chicago. He naturally said Chicago. In the long color- less days it had been in Chicago that all those endlessly repeated scenes had been laid. Walking up the street now with that wavering ineffectual gait, these scenes came back to surge in his brain like waters cease- lessly tossed in a wind-swept basin.
There was the office, bare and clean, where the young stoop-shouldered clerks sat writ- ing. In their faces was a strange resem- blance, just as there was in the backs of the ledgers, and in the endless bills on the spindles. If one of them laughed, it was not with gayety, but with gratification at the discomfiture of another. None of them ate well. None of them were rested after sleep. All of them rode on the stuffy one- horse cars to and from their work. Sun-
days they lay in bed very late, and ate more dinner than they could digest. There was a certain fellowship among them, — such fel- lowship as a band of captives among canni- bals might feel, each of them waiting with vital curiosity to see who was the next to be eaten. But of that fellowship that plans in unison, suffers in sympathy, enjoys vicari- ously, strengthens into friendship and com- munion of soul they knew nothing. Indeed, such camaraderie would have been disap-
proved of by the Head Clerk. He would have looked on an emotion with exactly the same displeasure that he would on an error in the footing of the year’s accounts. It was tacitly understood that one reached the
proud position of Head Clerk by having no emotions whatever.
Culross did not remember having been
born with a pen in his hand, or even with one behind his ear; but certainly from the day he had been let out of knickerbockers his con- stant companion had been that greatly over- estimated article. His father dying at a time that cut short David’s school-days, he went out armed with his new knowledge of double- entry, determined to make a fortune and a commercial name. Meantime, he lived in a suite of three rooms on West Madison Street with his mother, who was a good woman,
and lived where she did that she might be near her favorite meeting-house. She
prayed, and cooked bad dinners, principally composed of dispiriting pastry. Her idea of house-keeping was to keep the shades
down, whatever happened; and when David left home in the evening for any purpose of pleasure, she wept. David persuaded him- self that he despised amusement, and went to bed each night at half-past nine in a folding bedstead in the front room, and, by becoming absolutely stolid from mere vege- tation, imagined that he was almost fit to be a Head Clerk.
Walking down the street now after the twenty years, thinking of these dead but inno- cent days, this was the picture he saw; and as he reflected upon it, even the despoiled and desolate years just passed seemed richer by contrast.
He reached the station thus dreaming, and found, as he had been told when the warden bade him good-by, that a train was to be at hand directly bound to the city. A few
moments later he was on that train. Well back in the shadow, and out of sight of the other passengers, he gave himself up to the enjoyment of the comfortable cushion. He would willingly have looked from the win- dow, — green fields were new and wonderful; drifting clouds a marvel; men, houses, horses, farms, all a revelation, — but those haunting visions were at him again, and would not leave brain or eye free for other things.
But the next scene had warmer tints. It was the interior of a rich room, — crimson and amber fabrics, flowers, the gleam of a statue beyond the drapings; the sound of a tender piano unflinging a familiar melody, and a woman. She was just a part of all the luxury.
He himself, very timid and conscious of his awkwardness, sat near, trying barrenly to get some of his thoughts out of his brain on to his tongue.
“Strange, isn’t it,” the woman broke in on her own music, “that we have seen each other so very often and never spoken? I’ve often thought introductions were ridiculous. Fancy seeing a person year in and year
out, and really knowing all about him, and being perfectly acquainted with his name — at least his or her name, you know — and then never speaking! Some one comes
along, and says, ‘Miss Le Baron, this is Mr. Culross,’ just as if one didn’t know that all the time! And there you are! You cease
to be dumb folks, and fall to talking, and say a lot of things neither of you care about, and after five or six weeks of time and sun- dry meetings, get down to honestly saying what you mean. I’m so glad we’ve got
through with that first stage, and can say what we think and tell what we really like.”
Then the playing began again, — a harp- like intermingling of soft sounds. Zoe Le Baron’s hands were very girlish. Every-
thing about her was unformed. Even her mind was so. But all promised a full com- pletion. The voice, the shoulders, the smile, the words, the lips, the arms, the whole mind and body, were rounding to maturity.
“Why do you never come to church in
the morning?” asks Miss Le Baron, wheel- ing around on her piano-stool suddenly.
“You are only there at night, with your mother.”
“I go only on her account,” replies David, truthfully. “In the morning I am so tired with the week’s work that I rest at home. I ought to go, I know.”
“Yes, you ought,” returns the young
woman, gravely. “It doesn’t really rest one to lie in bed like that. I’ve tried it at boarding-school. It was no good whatever.”
“Should you advise me,” asks David,
in a confiding tone, “to arise early on Sunday?”
The girl blushes a little. “By all means!” she cries, her eyes twinkling, “and — and come to church. Our morning sermons are
really very much better than those in the evening.” And she plays a waltz, and what with the music and the warmth of the room and the perfume of the roses, a something nameless and mystical steals over the poor clerk, and swathes him about like the fumes of opium. They are alone. The silence is made deeper by that rhythmic unswelling
of sound. As the painter flushes the bare wall into splendor, these emotions illumi- nated his soul, and gave to it that high cour- age that comes when men or women suddenly realize that each life has its significance, — their own lives no less than the lives of others.
The man sitting there in the shadow in that noisy train saw in his vision how the lad arose and moved, like one under a spell, toward the piano. He felt again the en-
chantment of the music-ridden quiet, of the perfume, and the presence of the woman.
“Knowing you and speaking with you
have not made much difference with me,” he whispers, drunk on the new wine of
passion, “for I have loved you since I saw you first. And though it is so sweet to hear you speak, your voice is no more beautiful than I thought it would be. I have loved you a long time, and I want to know –“
The broken man in the shadow remem-
bered how the lad stopped, astonished at his boldness and his fluency, overcome suddenly at the thought of what he was saying. The music stopped with a discord. The girl
arose, trembling and scarlet.
“I would not have believed it of you,” she cries, “to take advantage of me like this, when I am alone — and — everything. You know very well that nothing but trouble could come to either of us from your telling me a thing like that.”
He puts his hands up to his face to keep off her anger. He is trembling with
confusion.
Then she broke in penitently, trying to pull his hands away from his hot face:
“Never mind! I know you didn’t mean anything. Be good, do, and don’t spoil the lovely times we have together. You know
very well father and mother wouldn’t let us see each other at all if they — if they thought you were saying anything such as you said just now.”
“Oh, but I can’t help it!” cries the boy, despairingly. “I have never loved anybody at all till now. I don’t mean not another girl, you know. But you are the first being I ever cared for. I sometimes think mother cares for me because I pay the rent. And the office — you can’t imagine what that is like. The men in it are moving corpses.
They’re proud to be that way, and so was I till I knew you and learned what life was like. All the happy moments I have had have
been here. Now, if you tell me that we are not to care for each other –“
There was some one coming down the
hall. The curtain lifted. A middle-aged man stood there looking at him.
“Culross,” said he, “I’m disappointed in you. I didn’t mean to listen, but I couldn’t help hearing what you said just now. I
don’t blame you particularly. Young men will be fools. And I do not in any way
mean to insult you when I tell you to stop your coming here. I don’t want to see you inside this door again, and after a while you will thank me for it. You have taken a
very unfair advantage of my invitation. I make allowances for your youth.”
He held back the curtain for the lad to pass out. David threw a miserable glance at the girl. She was standing looking at her father with an expression that David could not fathom. He went into the hall, picked up his hat, and walked out in
silence.
David wondered that night, walking the chilly streets after he quitted the house, and often, often afterward, if that comfortable and prosperous gentleman, safe beyond the perturbations of youth, had any idea of
what he had done. How COULD he know anything of the black monotony of the life of the man he turned from his door? The
“desk’s dead wood” and all its hateful slavery, the dull darkened rooms where his mother prosed through endless evenings,
the bookless, joyless, hopeless existence that had cramped him all his days rose up before him, as a stretch of unbroken plain may rise before a lost man till it maddens him.
The bowed man in the car-seat remem-
bered with a flush of reminiscent misery how the lad turned suddenly in his walk
and entered the door of a drinking-room that stood open. It was very comfortable within. The screens kept out the chill of the autumn night, the sawdust-sprinkled
floor was clean, the tables placed near together, the bar glittering, the attendants white-aproned and brisk.
David liked the place, and he liked better still the laughter that came from a room within. It had a note in it a little different from anything he had ever heard before in his life, and one that echoed his mood. He ventured to ask if he might go into the
farther room.
It does not mean much when most young men go to a place like this. They take
their bit of unwholesome dissipation quietly enough, and are a little coarser and more careless each time they indulge in it, perhaps. But certainly their acts, whatever gradual deterioration they may indicate, bespeak no sudden moral revolution. With this young clerk it was different. He was a worse man from the moment he entered the door, for he did violence to his principles; he killed his self-respect.
He had been paid at the office that night, and he had the money — a week’s miserable pittance — in his pocket. His every action revealed the fact that he was a novice in recklessness. His innocent face piqued the men within. They gave him a welcome
that amazed him. Of course the rest of the evening was a chaos to him. The throat
down which he poured the liquor was as tender as a child’s. The men turned his
head with their ironical compliments. Their boisterous good-fellowship was as intoxicat- ing to this poor young recluse as the liquor.
It was the revulsion from this feeling, when he came to a consciousness that the men were laughing at him and not with
him, that wrecked his life. He had gone from beer to whiskey, and from whiskey to brandy, by this time, at the suggestion of the men, and was making awkward lunges
with a billiard cue, spurred on by the mock- ing applause of the others. One young
fellow was particularly hilarious at his expense. His jokes became insults, or so they seemed to David.
A quarrel followed, half a jest on the part of the other, all serious as far as David was concerned. And then — Well, who could
tell how it happened? The billiard cue was in David’s hand, and the skull of the jester was split, a horrible gaping thing, revolt- ingly animal.
David never saw his home again. His
mother gave it out in church that her heart was broken, and she wrote a letter to David begging him to reform. She said she
would never cease to pray for him, that he might return to grace. He had an
attorney, an impecunious and very aged gentleman, whose life was a venerable
failure, and who talked so much about his personal inconveniences from indigestion that he forgot to take a very keen interest in the concerns of his client. David’s trial made no sensation. He did not even have
the cheap sympathy of the morbid. The court-room was almost empty the dull
spring day when the east wind beat against the window, jangling the loose panes all through the reading of the verdict.
Twenty years!
Twenty years in the penitentiary!
David looked up at the judge and smiled. Men have been known to smile that way
when the car-wheel crashes over their legs, or a bullet lets the air through their lungs.
All that followed would have seemed
more terrible if it had not appeared to be so remote. David had to assure himself
over and over that it was really he who was put in that disgraceful dress, and locked in that shameful walk from corridor to work- room, from work-room to chapel. The work was not much more monotonous than that
to which he had been accustomed in the office. Here, as there, one was reproved for not doing the required amount, but never praised for extraordinary efforts. Here, as there, the workers regarded each other with dislike and suspicion. Here, as there, work was a penalty and not a pleasure.
It is the nights that are to be dreaded in a penitentiary. Speech eases the brain of free men; but the man condemned to eter- nal silence is bound to endure torments. Thought, which might be a diversion, be- comes a curse; it is a painful disease which becomes chronic. It does not take long to forget the days of the week and the months of the year when time brings no variance. David drugged himself on dreams. He
knew it was weakness, but it was the wine of forgetfulness, and he indulged in it. He went over and over, in endless repetition, every scene in which Zoe Le Baron had
figured.
He learned by a paper that she had gone to Europe. He was glad of that. For there were hours in which he imagined that his fate might have caused her distress — not much, of course, but perhaps an occasional hour of sympathetic regret. But it was
pleasanter not to think of that. He pre- ferred to remember the hours they had
spent together while she was teaching him the joy of life.
How lovely her gray eyes were! Deep,
yet bright, and full of silent little speeches. The rooms in which he imagined her as
moving were always splendid; the gowns she wore were of rustling silk. He never in any dream, waking or sleeping, associated her with poverty or sorrow or pain. Gay
and beautiful, she moved from city to city, in these visions of David’s, looking always at wonderful things, and finding laughter in every happening.
It was six months after his entrance into his silent abode that a letter came for him.
“By rights, Culross,” said the warden, “I should not give this letter to you. It isn’t the sort we approve of. But you’re in for a good spell, and if there is anything that can make life seem more tolerable, I don’t know but you’re entitled to it. At least, I’m not the man to deny it to you.”
This was the letter: —
“MY DEAR FRIEND, — I hope you do not think that all these months, when you have been suffering so terribly, I have been think- ing of other things! But I am sure you
know the truth. You know that I could not send you word or come to see you, or I would have done it. When I first heard of what you had done, I saw it all as it hap- pened, — that dreadful scene, I mean, in the saloon. I am sure I have imagined every- thing just as it was. I begged papa to help you, but he was very angry. You see,
papa was so peculiar. He thought more of the appearances of things, perhaps, than of facts. It infuriated him to think of me as being concerned about you or with you. I did not know he could be so angry, and his anger did not die, but for days it cast such a shadow over me that I used to wish I was dead. Only I would not disobey him, and now I am glad of that. We were in
France three months, and then, coming home, papa died. It was on the voyage. I wish
he had asked me to forgive him, for then I think I could have remembered him with more tenderness. But he did nothing of
the kind. He did not seem to think he had done wrong in any way, though I feel that some way we might have saved you. I am
back here in Chicago in the old home. But I shall not stay in this house. It is so large and lonesome, and I always see you and
father facing each other angrily there in the parlor when I enter it. So I am going to get me some cosey rooms in another part of the city, and take my aunt, who is a sweet old lady, to live with me; and I am going to devote my time — all of it — and all of my brains to getting you out of that terrible place. What is the use of telling me that you are a murderer? Do I not know you
could not be brought to hurt anything? I suppose you must have killed that poor man, but then it was not you, it was that dreadful drink — it was Me! That is what continually haunts me. If I had been a
braver girl, and spoken the words that were in my heart, you would not have gone into that place. You would be innocent to-day. It was I who was responsible for it all. I let father kill your heart right there before me, and never said a word. Yet I knew
how it was with you, and — this is what I ought to have said then, and what I must say now — and all the time I felt just as you did. I thought I should die when I
saw you go away, and knew you would never come back again. Only I was so
selfish, I was so wicked, I would say nothing.
“I have no right to be comfortable and hopeful, and to have friends, with you shut up from liberty and happiness. I will not have those comfortable rooms, after all. I will live as you do. I will live alone in a bare room. For it is I who am guilty! And then I will feel that I also am being punished.
“Do you hate me? Perhaps my telling
you now all these things, and that I felt toward you just as you did toward me, will not make you happy. For it may be that
you despise me.
“Anyway, I have told you the truth now. I will go as soon as I hear from you to a lawyer, and try to find out how you may be liberated. I am sure it can be done when the facts are known.
“Poor boy! How I do hope you have
known in your heart that I was not for- getting you. Indeed, day or night, I have thought of nothing else. Now I am free to help you. And be sure, whatever happens, that I am working for you.
“ZOE LE BARON.”
That was all. Just a girlish, constrained letter, hardly hinting at the hot tears that had been shed for many weary nights, coyly telling of the impatient young love and all the maidenly shame.
David permitted himself to read it only once. Then a sudden resolution was born — a heroic one. Before he got the letter he was a crushed and unsophisticated boy;
when he had read it, and absorbed its full significance, he became suddenly a man,
capable of a great sacrifice.
“I return your letter,” he wrote, without superscription, “and thank you for your
anxiety about me. But the truth is, I had forgotten all about you in my trouble. You were not in the least to blame for what hap- pened. I might have known I would come
to such an end. You thought I was good, of course; but it is not easy to find out the life of a young man. It is rather mortifying to have a private letter sent here, because the warden reads them all. I hope you will enjoy yourself this winter, and hasten to forget one who had certainly forgotten you till reminded by your letter, which I return.
“Respectfully,
“DAVID CULROSS.”
That night some deep lines came into
his face which never left it, and which made him look like a man of middle age.
He never doubted that his plan would
succeed; that, piqued and indignant at his ingratitude, she would hate him, and in a little time forget he ever lived, or remember him only to blush with shame at her past association with him. He saw her happy,
loved, living the usual life of women, with all those things that make life rich.
For there in the solitude an understand- ing of deep things came to him. He who
thought never to have a wife grew to know what the joy of it must be. He perceived all the subtle rapture of wedded souls. He learned what the love of children was, the pride of home, the unselfish ambition for success that spurs men on. All the emo-
tions passed in procession at night before him, tricked out in palpable forms.
A burst of girlish tears would dissipate whatever lingering pity Zoe felt for him. How often he said that! With her sensi-
tiveness she would be sure to hate a man who had mortified her.
So he fell to dreaming of her again as moving among happy and luxurious scenes, exquisitely clothed, with flowers on her bosom and jewels on her neck; and he saw men loving her, and was glad, and saw her at last loving the best of them, and told himself in the silence of the night that it was as he wished.
Yet always, always, from weary week to weary week, he rehearsed the scenes. They were his theatre, his opera, his library, his lecture hall.
He rehearsed them again there on the
cars. He never wearied of them. To be sure, other thoughts had come to him at
night. Much that to most men seems com- plex and puzzling had grown to appear
simple to him. In a way his brain had quickened and deepened through the years of solitude. He had thought out a great
many things. He had read a few good books and digested them, and the visions in his heart had kept him from being bitter.
Yet, suddenly confronted with liberty, turned loose like a pastured colt, without master or rein, he felt only confusion and dismay. He might be expected to feel ex- ultation. He experienced only fright. It is precisely the same with the liberated colt.
The train pulled into a bustling station, in which the multitudinous noises were
thrown back again from the arched iron roof. The relentless haste of all the people was inexpressibly cruel to the man who
looked from the window wondering whither he would go, and if, among all the thousands that made up that vast and throbbing city, he would ever find a friend.
For a moment David longed even for
that unmaternal mother who had forgotten him in the hour of his distress; but she had been dead for many years.
The train stopped. Every one got out. David forced himself to his feet and followed. He had been driven back into the world.
It would have seemed less terrible to have been driven into a desert. He walked
toward the great iron gates, seeing the people and hearing the noises confusedly.
As he entered the space beyond the grat- ing some one caught him by the arm. It
was a little middle-aged woman in plain clothes, and with sad gray eyes.
“Is this David?” said she.
He did not speak, but his face answered her.
“I knew you were coming to-day. I’ve
waited all these years, David. You didn’t think I believed what you said in that letter did you? This way, David, — this is the way home.”
Two Pioneers
IT was the year of the small-pox. The Pawnees had died in their cold tepees