XXXIII
In Sunrise Gulch
William Starbuck drew the surgeon aside after the first aid had beenrendered, and Smith, still unconscious, had been carried from themakeshift operating-table in the commissary to Williams's cot in theoffice shack.
"How about it, Doc?" asked the mine owner bluntly.
The surgeon shook his head doubtfully.
"I can't say. The arm and the shoulder won't kill him, but that one inthe lung is pretty bad; and he has lost a lot of blood."
"Still, he may pull through?"
"He may--with good care and nursing. But if you want my honest opinion,I'm afraid he won't make it. He'll be rather lucky if he doesn't makeit, won't he?"
Starbuck remembered that the doctor had come out in the auto with thepolice captain and the two plain-clothes men.
"Hackerman has been talking?" he queried.
The surgeon nodded. "He told me on the way out that Smith was afugitive from justice; that he'd be likely to get ten years or more whenthey took him back East. If I were in Smith's place, I'd rather pass outwith a bullet in my lung. Wouldn't you?"
Starbuck was frowning sourly. "Suppose you make it a case of suspendedjudgment, Doc," he suggested. "The few of us here who know anythingabout it are giving John the benefit of the doubt. I've got a fewthousand dollars of my own money that says he isn't guilty; and if hemakes a live of it, they'll have to show me, and half a dozen more ofus, before they can send him over the road."
"He knew they were after him?"
"Sure thing; and he had all the chance he needed to make his get-away.He wouldn't take it; thought he owed a duty to the High Linestockholders. He's a man to tie to, Doc. He was shot while he was tryingto get between and stop the war and keep others from getting killed."
"It's a pity," said the surgeon, glancing across at the police captainto whom Colonel Baldwin was appealing. "They'll put him in the hospitalcell at the jail, and that will cost him whatever slender chance hemight otherwise have to pull through."
Starbuck looked up quickly. "Tell 'em he can't be moved, Doc Dan," heurged suddenly. And then: "You're Dick Maxwell's family physician, andColonel Dexter's, and mine. Surely you can do that much for us?"
"I can, and I will," said the surgeon promptly, and then he went to joinBaldwin and the police captain, who were still arguing. What he said wasbrief and conclusive; and a little later, when the autos summoned fromtown by Sheriff Harding came for their lading of prisoners, Smith wasleft behind, with two of M'Graw's men who were also past moving. In thegeneral clearing of the field Starbuck and Williams stayed behind tocare for the wounded, and one of the plain-clothes men remained to standguard.
* * * * *
Three days after the wholesale arrest at the dam, Brewster gossip hadfairly outworn itself telling and retelling the story of how the HighLine charter had been saved; of how Crawford Stanton's bold ruse ofhiring an ex-train-robber to impersonate a federal-court officer hadfallen through, leaving Stanton and his confederates, ruthlesslyabandoned by their unnamed principals, languishing bailless in jail; ofhow Smith, the hero of all these occasions, was still lying at thepoint of death in the office shack at the construction camp, and DavidKinzie, once more in keen pursuit of the loaves and fishes, was combingthe market for odd shares of the stock which was now climbing swiftlyout of reach. But at this climax of exhaustion--or satiety--came adistinctly new set of thrills, more titillating, if possible, than allthe others combined.
It was on the morning of the third day that the _Herald_ announced thereturn of Mr. Josiah Richlander from the Topaz; and in the marriagenotices of the same issue the breakfast-table readers of the newspaperslearned that the multimillionaire's daughter had been privately marriedthe previous evening to Mr. Tucker Jibbey. Two mining speculators, whohad already made Mr. Jibbey's acquaintance, were chuckling over the newsin the Hophra House grill when a third late breakfaster, a man who hadbeen sharing Stanton's office space as a broker in improved ranch lands,came in to join them.
"What's the joke?" inquired the newcomer; and when he was shown themarriage item he nodded gravely. "That's all right; but the _Herald_ mandidn't get the full flavor of it. It was a sort of runaway match, itseems; the fond parent wasn't invited or consulted. The boys in thelobby tell me that the old man had a fit when he came in this morningand a _Herald_ reporter showed him that notice and asked for more dopeon the subject."
"I don't see that the fond parent has any kick coming," said the one whohad sold Jibbey a promising prospect hole on Topaz Mountain two daysearlier. "The young fellow's got all kinds of money."
"I know," the land broker put in. "But they're whispering it around thatMr. Richlander had other plans for his daughter. They also say thatJibbey wouldn't stay to face the music; that he left on the midnighttrain last night a few hours after the wedding, so as not to be amongthose present when the old man should blow in."
"What?"--in a chorus of two--"left his wife?"
"That's what they say. But that's only one of the new and startlingthings that isn't in the morning papers. Have you heard about Smith?--orhaven't you been up long enough yet?"
"I heard yesterday that he was beginning to mend," replied thebreakfaster on the left; the one who had ordered bacon and eggs, withthe bacon cooked to a cinder.
"You're out of date," this from the dealer in ranches. "You know thestory that was going around about his being an escaped convict, orsomething of that sort? It gets its 'local color' this morning. There'sa sheriff here from back East somewhere--came in on the early train;name's Macauley, and he's got the requisition papers. But Smith's fooledhim good and plenty."
Again the chorus united in an eager query.
"How?"
"He died last night--a little past midnight. They say they're going tobury him out at the dam--on the job that he pulled through and stood onits feet. One of Williams's quarrymen drifted in with the story just alittle while ago. I'm here to bet you even money that the whole towngoes to the funeral."
"Great gosh!" said the man who was crunching the burnt bacon. "Say,that's tough, Bixby! I don't care what he'd run away from back East; hewas a man, right. Harding has been telling everybody how Smith wouldn'tlet the posse open fire on that gang of hold-ups last Friday night; howhe chased across on the dam stagings alone and unarmed to try to servethe warrants on 'em and make 'em stop firing. It was glorious, but itwasn't war."
To this the other mining man added a hard word. "Dead," he gritted; "andonly a few hours earlier the girl had taken snap judgment on him andmarried somebody else! That's the woman of it!"
"Oh, hold on, Stryker," the ranch broker protested. "Don't you get toofierce about that. There are two strings to that bow and the longest andsorriest one runs out to Colonel Baldwin's place on Little Creek, I'mthinking. The Richlander business was only an incident. Stanton told methat much."
As the event proved, the seller of ranch lands would have lost his beton the funeral attendance. For some unknown reason the notice of Smith'sdeath did not appear in the afternoon papers, and only a few people wentout in autos to see the coffin lowered by Williams's workmen into agrave on the mesa behind the construction camp; a grave among otherswhere the victims of an early industrial accident at the dam had beenburied. Those who went out from town came back rather scandalized. Therehad been a most hard-hearted lack of the common formalities, they said;a cheap coffin, no minister, no mourners, not even the poor fellow'sbusiness associates in the company he had fought so hard to save fromdefeat and extinction. It was a shame!
With this report passing from lip to lip in Brewster, another bit ofgossip to the effect that Starbuck and Stillings had gone East with thedisappointed sheriff, "to clear Smith's memory," as the street-talk hadit, called forth no little comment derogatory. As it chanced, the twomining speculators and Bixby, the ranch seller, met again in the HophraHouse cafe at the dinner-table on the evening of the funeral day, andStryker, the captious member of the trio, was loud in his cri
ticisms ofthe High Line people.
"Yes!" he railed; "a couple of 'em will go on a junketing trip East to'clear his memory,' after they've let their 'wops' at the dam bury himlike a yellow dog! I thought better than that of Billy Starbuck, and awhole lot better of Colonel Dexter. And this Richlander woman; they sayshe'd known him ever since he and she were school kids together; shewent down and took the train with her father just about the time theywere planting the poor devil among the sagebrush roots up there on thatbald mesa!"
"I'm disappointed, too," confessed the dealer in improved ranch lands."I certainly thought that if nobody else went, the little girl from theBaldwin place would be out there to tell him good-by. But she wasn't."
* * * * *
Three weeks of the matchless August weather had slipped by withoutincident other than the indictment by the grand jury of CrawfordStanton, Barney M'Graw, and a number of others on a charge ofconspiracy; and Williams, unmolested since the night of the grand_battue_ in which Sheriff Harding had figured as the master of the hunt,had completed the great ditch system and was installing the machinery inthe lately finished power-house.
Over the hills from the northern mountain boundary of the Timanyoni awandering prospector had come with a vague tale of a new strike inSunrise Gulch, a placer district worked out and abandoned twenty yearsearlier in the height of the Red Butte excitement. Questioned closely,the tale-bringer confessed that he had no proof positive of the strike;but in the hills he had found a well-worn trail, lately used, leading tothe old camp, and from one of the deserted cabins in the gulch he hadseen smoke arising.
As to the fact of the trail the wandering tale-bearer was not at fault.On the most perfect of the late-in-August mornings a young woman, cladin serviceable khaki, and keeping her cowboy Stetson and buff top-bootsin good countenance by riding astride in a man's saddle, was pushing hermount up the trail toward Sunrise Gulch. From the top of a little risethe abandoned camp came into view, its heaps of worked-over gravelsprouting thickly with the wild growth of twenty years, and itscrumbling shacks, only one of which seemed to have survived in habitableentirety, scattered among the firs of the gulch.
At the top of the rise the horsewoman drew rein and shaded her eyes witha gauntleted hand. On a bench beside the door of the single tenantedcabin a man was sitting, and she saw him stand to answer her hand-wave.A few minutes later the man, a gaunt young fellow with one arm in asling and the pallor of a long confinement whitening his face and hands,was trying to help the horsewoman to dismount in the cabin dooryard, butshe pushed him aside and swung out of the saddle unaided, laughing athim out of a pair of slate-gray eyes and saying: "How often have I gotto tell you that you simply _can't_ help a woman out of a man's saddle?"
The man smiled at that.
"It's automatic," he returned. "I shall never get over wanting to helpyou, I guess. Have you come to tell me that I can go?"
Flinging the bridle-reins over the head of the wiry little cow-ponywhich was thus left free to crop the short, sweet grass of the creekvalley, the young woman led the man to the house bench and made him sitdown.
"You are frightfully anxious to go and commit suicide, aren't you?" sheteased, sitting beside him. "Every time I come it's always the samething: 'When can I go?' You're not well yet."
"I'm well enough to do what I've got to do, Corona; and until it'sdone.... Besides, there is Jibbey."
"Where is Mr. Jibbey this morning?"
"He has gone up the creek, fishing. I made him go. If I didn't take aclub to him now and then he'd hang over me all the time. There never wasanother man like him, Corona. And at home we used to call him 'the blacksheep' and 'the failure,' and cross the street to dodge him when he'dbeen drinking too much!"
"He says you've made a man of him; that you saved his life when you hadevery reason not to. You never told me that, John."
"No; I didn't mean to tell any one. But to think of his coming out hereto nurse me, leaving Verda on the very night he married her! A brotherof my own blood wouldn't have done it."
The young woman was looking up with a shrewd little smile. "Maybe theblood brother would do even that, if you had just made it possible forhim to marry the girl he'd set his heart on, John."
"Piffle!" growled the man. And then: "Hasn't the time come when you cantell me a little more about what happened to me after the doctor put meto sleep that night at the dam?"
"Yes. The only reason you haven't been told was because we didn't wantyou to worry; we wanted you to have a chance to get well and strongagain."
The man's eyes filled suddenly, and he took no shame. He was still shakyenough in nerve and muscle to excuse it. "Nobody ever had such friends,Corona," he said. "You all knew I'd have to go back to Lawrenceville andfight it out, and you didn't want me to go handicapped and half-dead.But how did they come to let you take me away? I've known Macauley eversince I was in knickers. He is not the man to take any chances."
The young woman's laugh was soundless. "Mr. Macauley wasn't asked. Hethinks you are dead," she said.
"What!"
"It's so. You were not the only one wounded in the fight at the dam.There were two others--two of M'Graw's men. Three days later, just asColonel-daddy and Billy Starbuck were getting ready to steal you away,one of the others died. In some way the report got out that you were theone who died, and that made everything quite easy. The report has neverbeen contradicted, and when Mr. Macauley reached Brewster the policepeople told him that he was too late."
"Good heavens! Does everybody in Brewster think I'm dead?"
"Nearly everybody. But you needn't look so horrified. You're not dead,you know; and there were no obituaries in the newspapers, or anythinglike that."
The man got upon his feet rather unsteadily.
"That's the limit," he said definitively. "I'm a man now, Corona; toomuch of a man, I hope, to hide behind another man's grave. I'm goingback to Brewster, _to-day_!"
The young woman made a quaint little grimace at him. "How are you goingto get there?" she asked. "It's twenty miles, and the walking is awfullybad--in spots."
"But I _must_ go. Can't you see what everybody will say of me?--that Iwas too cowardly to face the music when my time came? Nobody willbelieve that I wasn't a consenting party to this hide-away!"
"Sit down," she commanded calmly; and when he obeyed: "From day to day,since I began coming out here, John, I've been trying to rediscover theman whom I met just once, one evening over a year ago, at Cousin Adda'shouse in Guthrieville: I can't find him--he's gone."
"_Corona!_" he said. "Then you recognized me?"
"Not at first. But after a while little things began to come back; andwhat you told me--about Miss Richlander, you know, and the hint you gaveme of your trouble--did the rest."
"Then you knew--or you thought--I was a criminal?"
She nodded, and her gaze was resting upon the near-by gravel heaps."Cousin Adda wrote me. But that made no difference. I didn't knowwhether you had done the things they said you had, or not. What I didknow was that you had broken your shackles in some way and were tryingto get free. You were, weren't you?"
"I suppose so; in some blind fashion. But it is you who have set mefree, Corona. It began that night in Guthrieville when I stole one ofyour gloves; it wasn't anything you said; it was what you so evidentlybelieved and lived. And out here: I was simply a raw savage when youfirst saw me. I had tumbled headlong into the abyss of the new and theelemental, and if I am trying to scramble out now on the side of honorand clean manhood, it is chiefly because you have shown me the way."
"When did I ever, John?"--with an up-glance of the gray eyes that wasalmost wistful.
"Always; and with a wisdom that makes me almost afraid of you. Forexample, there was the night when I was fairly on the edge of lettingJibbey stay in the mine and go mad if he wanted to: you lashed me withthe one word that made me save his life instead of taking it. How didyou know that was the one word to say?"
"How do we know
anything?" she inquired softly. "The moment brings itsown inspiration. It broke my heart to see what you could be, and tothink that you might not be it, after all. But I came out here thismorning to talk about something else. What are you going to do when youare able to leave Sunrise Gulch?"
"The one straightforward thing there is for me to do. I shall go backto Lawrenceville and take my medicine."
"And after that?"
"That is for you to say, Corona. Would you marry a convict?"
"You are not guilty."
"That is neither here nor there. They will probably send me to prison,just the same, and the stigma will be mine to wear for the remainder ofmy life. I can wear it now, thank God! But to pass it on to you--and toyour children, Corona ... if I could get my own consent to that, youcouldn't get yours."
"Yes, I could, John; I got it the first time Colonel-daddy brought meout here and let me see you. You were out of your head, and you thoughtyou were talking to Billy Starbuck--in the automobile on the night whenyou were going with him to the fight at the dam. It made me go down onmy two knees, John, and kiss your poor, hot hands."
He slipped his one good arm around her and drew her close.
"Now I can go back like a man and fight it through to the end," heexulted soberly. "Jibbey will take me; I know he is wearing himself outtrying to make me believe that he can wait, and that Verda understands,though he won't admit it. And when it is all over, when they have donetheir worst to me----"
With a quick little twist she broke away from the encircling arm.
"John, dear," she said, and her voice was trembling between a laugh anda sob, "I'm the wickedest, _wickedest_ woman that ever lived andbreathed--and the happiest! I knew what you would do, but I couldn'tresist the temptation to make you say it. Listen: this morningColonel-daddy got a night-letter from Billy Starbuck. You have beenwondering why Billy never came out here to see you--it was because heand Mr. Stillings have been in Lawrenceville, trying to clear you. Theyare there now, and the wire says that Watrous Dunham has been arrestedand that he has broken down and confessed. You are a free man, John;you----"
The grass-cropping pony had widened its circle by a full yard, and thewestward-pointing shadows of the firs were growing shorter and moreclearly defined as the August sun swung higher over the summits of theeastern Timanyonis. For the two on the house bench, time, having all itsinterspaces filled with beatific silences, had no measure that was worthrecording. In one of the more coherent intervals it was the man whosaid:
"Some things in this world are very wonderful, Corona. We call themhappenings, and try to account for them as we may by the laws of chance.Was it chance that threw us together at your cousin's house inGuthrieville a year ago last June?"
She laughed happily. "I suppose it was--though I'd like to be romanticenough to believe that it wasn't."
"Debritt would say that it was the Absolute Ego," he said, halfmusingly.
"And who is Mr. Debritt?"
"He is the man I dined with on my last evening in Lawrenceville. He hadbeen joking me about my various little smugnesses--good job, goodclothes, easy life, and all that, and he wound up by warning me to watchout for the Absolute Ego."
"What is the Absolute Ego?" she asked dutifully.
John Montague Smith, with his curling yellow beard three weeksuntrimmed, with his clothes dressing the part of a neglected camper, andwith a steel-jacketed bullet trying to encyst itself under his rightshoulder-blade, grinned exultantly.
"Debritt didn't know, himself; but I know now: it's the primitiveman-soul; the 'I' that is able to refuse to be bound down and tied byenvironment or habit or petty conventions, or any of the things wemisname 'limitations.' It's asleep in most of us; it was asleep in me.You made it sit up and rub its eyes for a minute or two that evening inGuthrieville, but it dozed off again, and there had to be an earthquakeat the last to shake it alive. Do you know the first thing it did whenit took hold and began to drive?"
"No."
"Here is where the law of chances falls to pieces, Corona. Withouttelling me anything about it, this newly emancipated man-soul of minemade a bee-line for the only Absolute Ego woman it had ever known. Andit found her."
Again the young woman laughed happily. "If you are going to call menames, Ego-man, you'll have to make it up to me some other way," shesaid.
Whereupon, the moment being strictly elemental and sacred todemonstrations of the absolute, he did.
THE END
* * * * *
BOOKS BY FRANCIS LYNDE
PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
The Real Man. Illus.
The City of Numbered Days. Illus.
The Honorable Senator Sage-brush.
Scientific Sprague. Illus.
The Price.
The Taming of Red Butte Western.
The King of Arcadia. Illus.
A Romance In Transit.
The Real Man Page 33