by Zane Grey
Lenta’s voice trailed off and she dropped into the land of her dreams.
Harriet lay awake, gratefully aware of Lenta’s warm cheek and trustful hand in hers, and of the fitful firelight on the walls, the cold stars blinking, the moving clouds, the moaning wind, and the wild voices of the beasts of the night.
She wanted to think over the last day of their never-to-be-forgotten ride, and especially of their arrival at the monstrous place that had to be made home, and of what had already transpired. But physical sensations dominated her. No longer were her feet dead weights of ice, but living, glowing, tingling members of her anatomy! She felt a drowsy fullness of the well-fed animal. The cold wind that whipped in rather invigorated than otherwise. The fire crackled, blazed up, died down, and always there was that steady musical murmuring of flowing water in her ears. Voices, too, came dully, and an occasional rasp or bump, and the grate of wheels. After a while all these sensations went blank.
* * * * *
When Harriet opened her eyes she saw azure-blue sky behind a great rounded thin mass of cottonwood foliage, still tiny leafed and delicately green. Wonderingly she asked herself where she was? And instantly she knew, though all appeared different.
Lenta lay wrapped in deep slumber, purring like a kitten, her cheeks rosy, her hair tousled. Florence likewise was asleep, and more beautiful even than in wakeful hours. Her opal-hued face was turned toward Lenta, and she had a hand under her cheek. Her long black lashes hid her dreams and contrasted wonderfully with her golden hair. Never had Hallie been so stirred by Lenta’s dependency or Florence’s beauty. Soon these beloved sisters would awaken to this new life in the West and they were going to need their elder sister. Hallie prayed that she would not fail them.
The sun was high in the heavens and dazzlingly bright. There appeared to be a bustling activity around the courtyard, punctuated by a sing-song rollicking voice and the sound of hammers. Hallie felt ashamed that she had not been up to help initiate the home-building. But as she essayed to move she got a twinge like the stab of a blade. That roused her combativeness and she manfully struggled out of bed, careful not to awaken her sisters. With boots and coat in hand she crawled over the bags to get outside. There she espied a nice little fire of red coals, boiling water in a queer black iron pot, shiny tin basins on a slab of rock, and a bucket of water.
“Thoughtful of somebody,” soliloquized Hallie, and she gazed around the strange courtyard, at the upheaved mound of boulders in the center, at the magnificent old cottonwoods, and the gray walls of stone above the slanting remains of wooden roofs. She heard Jud whistling over in his cook-shack, and she smelled things that instantly made her hungry. She had forgotten the bag that contained her toilet articles, so she crawled back to get it, this time disturbing Lenta, who murmured, “Don’t leave me, Hallie.”
In a few moments Hallie had put on her skirt, stockings, boots, had washed her face and brushed her hair, after which she made haste to warm her hands over the fire. She had neglected to use the hot water. At this juncture Lonesome came along. Without his woolly chaps he appeared smaller and his bow-legs were less prominent. His smile positively eliminated his homeliness.
“Mornin’, Miss Hallie. I sure am glad to see you up. Near on to ten o’clock! You should see the work we’ve done. Wagons on the way back to town, wood all stacked outside, stores packed, an’ now we’re stowin’ away furniture an’ such. That Laramie Nelson is a wonder, once he gets goin’. An’ I never seen him goin’ so good.”
“Good-morning, Lonesome. I think you all must be wonders. Thanks awfully for the fire and water. You are very thoughtful.”
Lonesome scratched his head dubiously, so that his sombrero tilted.
“Dog-gone-it, I wisht I’d been that thoughtful. But no use lyin’. You got Laramie to thank. . . . How’re your sisters ridin’ this mornin’ — I mean, feelin’? Sure they’re awake? It’s powerful late, an’ I want to give you a hunch. Jud is the best ever, but he hates to keep meals hot.”
“I’ll look,” replied Hallie, and took a peep over the rampart of bags. Flo was indeed wrapped in slumber, but Hallie had a suspicion that Lenta was only pretending. Her flushed face bore too innocent a cast.
“They’re asleep, lazy girls,” replied Hallie. “Take a peek, Lonesome. Aren’t they the babes in the woods?”
Lonesome rested his hands on the bags and slowly, as if impelled beyond his bashful fears, peered over. It certainly was a picture that greeted his eyes — Florence in her exquisite beauty and Lenta so young, so fresh, so rosy and innocent. Lonesome drew back as if his gaze were sacrilege.
“My Gawd! To think the West is goin’ to have two such girls! . . . An’ you, too, Miss Hallie. . . . It just ought to make honest men out of a lot of no-good range-riders!” And wagging his head he slouched back across the court, a queer, funny, sturdy, somehow impressive little figure. Hallie found herself liking him, hoping for him, with a birth of what must have been maternal interest.
“Lent. Wake up,” she called.
“Ah-huh. . . . Wh-e-re — am I? — Ooooo!”
“The world has changed overnight. . . . Florence. Wake up.”
“Oh-h! — Is that you, Hallie?” replied Flo, in her lazy contralto.
“Yes. Get up. Your night of dreams is over.”
“Lord! Did I talk in my sleep?”
“Did you? — Well, you had better be good. . . . Nice little fire out here, and hot water.” Hallie found her mother stirring, vastly a different being from the preceding night. “Morning, daughter,” she said, brightly. “Isn’t the sun gorgeous. How thankful I am! What do you think? Father is still sleeping like a baby. And he did not cough one single time!”
“Oh, I’m glad,” cried Harriet, and stepped up on the porch to take a peep at him. How pale and drawn he looked — how quiet!
“Last night after you went to bed that Nelson man came over and said: “Boss, heah’s a drink me an’ Jud fixed up for yu. We’ll have yu understand we don’t do this for everybody. Drink this firewater, go to bed, an’ in the mawnin’ yu’ll have hair on yore chest!”
All Harriet could ejaculate was, “Well!”
“They didn’t happen to see me, as I was in the wagon. Father grinned, and taking the thing — it was a good-sized dipper — he said, ‘Here’s to my foreman and cook!’ And he drank it down, quick, as if he had an idea it would be unpleasant. It must have been some kind of explosive; you never heard such sputterings. Father gasped: ‘My God! what was that?’ And Mr. Nelson replied: ‘Just a little dose Jud an’ I brewed. No man never needs but one.’”
“Mother, do you suppose it could have been a trick?” queried Harriet, in shocked voice. “These Westerners are not to be trusted.”
“I don’t care what it was,” declared Mrs. Lindsay. “The blessed truth is John never coughed a single time last night. Think of that! . . . Hallie, come out of your old shell. These Westerners may be sudden and rough. But they’ve won me.”
“Mother, I — I’m glad of that, too,” faltered Harriet, in her surprise.
“Look at your brother. Neale Lindsay! Up with the sun! Breakfast long ago! Working for hours, crippled as he is!”
“Indeed! Miracles are happening. What, forsooth, induced all this astounding transformation?”
“I don’t know, unless it was that Nelson man, who gave Neale a dig, waking him. ‘Pile out, son. The day’s busted. I’m countin’ on yu a lot. Yu see there’s only yu, me, Ted an’ Lonesome, beside Jud, an’ we got a man’s job on hand, mebbe includin’ a fight with this Arlidge outfit. So buckle on yore gun an’ line up with us.’”
“Mercy!” gasped Harriet.
“Hallie, that was my first thought,” replied Mrs. Lindsay. “I had to choke back a scream. I’ve always babied Neale. And I vowed, after that lecture John gave me in Garden City, I’d never baby him again. It almost kills me to think of — Neale sweating, swearing, fighting maybe, drinking and smoking, with these Wild Westerners. But I’ve had an illumin
ation of mind. This Nelson is not what he looks. You can’t fool me on men. He’s a Godsend. He’ll cure your father and make a man of your brother.”
“God bless him, then,” murmured Harriet, with emotion, not all of which was surprise and gratitude.
Her sense of fairness, as well as an eagerness to pass on anything hopeful, prompted her to go back to the girls and tell them, word for word, what her mother had said.
“How perfectly splendid!” exclaimed Florence, her eyes flashing magnificently.
“What did I tell you, Hal Lindsay?” burst out Lenta.
But Harriet fled down the court, laughingly calling back that she would meet them at breakfast presently. She crossed to the mound of boulders. Old flagstones, worn hollow in the center by years of footsteps, led winding up to an open space, at the back of which from under great mossy rocks flowed the most marvelous spring Hallie had ever seen. It was a fountain. What a tremendous volume of sparkling water! Where it flowed from the well to a deep pool, before it took its first leap, there was a faint bluish, cloudy cast to the water. She wondered what caused that. An aged green drinking-cup, iron, she thought, hung on a chain. Hallie dipped it in the spring and lifted it to drink. Cold as ice! Tasteless, pure as the rain from heaven! She gazed around. Flagstones and moss, boulders and the spreading cottonwoods all betokened age. Straightway she fell in love with that place, and Laramie’s extravagant hyperbole came back to her. But was it hyperbole? She followed the little brook by the stepping-stones that kept pace with the miniature waterfalls, down to the courtyard, and out to the gateway. There she became aware of the labor going on at that end of the court. But she did not pause to look. The open called her. What would greet her outside that wide portal?
She expected to see a bleak barren gray waste of land. She forgot that a fog of rain and snow had obscured the landscape for the whole of the two days’ journey into Colorado. Wherefore she was not prepared for grass and green growths which escorted the brook in its evident leap down a hill. Harriet paused. How brilliant the sunlight! How cold, sweet, intoxicating the air! Frost glistened like diamonds on rocks near by, on the long grass. Just to the right of the gateway a road led out toward a brushy ridge, beyond which she could not see. Directly in front of her there appeared to be a gulf that ran on into the blue of sky. She gazed mystified. Was she standing upon a mountain top? Below the blue the dim gray shapes and streaks took form, until it dawned upon her that the streaked gray must be land — distant range on range.
Whereupon Harriet strode out along the brook to the verge where it leaped down with murmur and splash. There was unconscious defiance in her action. By some strange circumstances she had not yet seen any extensive or formidable section of the West. Only monotonous Kansas prairie lands from the window of a railroad coach!
Suddenly the ground fell away from her feet. A V-shaped gully, all grass-benched and thicket-sloped, opened before her, to widen and descend to a colorful valley that spread out to merge into purple range. Pastures full of cattle, and log-fenced bare spots of land, and cabins nestling among the cottonwoods, and a silver stream winding parallel with a yellow road, arrested her gaze while seeming to lead it onward to an immensity of space out there. But Harriet attended to what lay close at hand and intimate enough to grasp. This valley constituted part of the ranch. Harriet had to concede its astounding fertility, beauty, and tranquillity. Cows were mooing, calves were bawling, horses were neighing, and above all sounded a raucous bray. A rollicking masculine voice, young and strong, floated up from the green. She saw a mounted rider cross an open patch. Beyond the valley spread the range, rolling and purple, ridged and swaled, dotted with cattle in the foreground and gradually merging into boundless expanse. League upon league stretched down to what she realized was the descent to the Great Plains. She was confounded. No landscape had ever approached this. It dwarfed Lake Erie from the highest hill. She began dimly to grasp its meaning.
To south and north stretched infinitude, the same purple sea of rolling verdure, on and on to uneven horizon. Her view of the west was obstructed by the wide stone structure. So she walked back to the gateway, crossed the brook, and went on to the opposite corner.
Gray-sloped, twin-peaked, snow-capped mountains apparently loomed right over her. These must be the Spanish Peaks from which the ranch derived its name. They were her first sight of high mountains and the effect seemed stunning. But they were only a beginning. Beyond rose a wall of black and white which she had imagined was cloud. Suddenly she realized that she was gazing at the magnificent eastern front of the Rocky Mountains. Pure and white, remote and insurmountable, rose the glistening peaks high into the blue sky, and then extended, like the teeth of a saw, beyond her range of vision.
Harriet stared. Greater than amaze and ecstasy something had birth in her. The thing she had waited for all her life seemed to be coming — the awakening of a deeper elementary self. A vague, sweet, intangible feeling of familiarity smote her. But where and when could she ever have seen such a glorious spectacle? Perhaps pictures haunted her. This scene, however, was vivid, real, marvelous, elevating. Lonely and wild and grand — this Colorado!
She put a hand to her breast. And on the moment, startling to her, she remembered Emery and the blighted romance of her early twenties. Strange that she thought of it then, and stranger that she was not loth to do so! How long ago and far away! The millions of wheel-turnings that had fetched her here and seemed to have lengthened the past, as well as the distance back to the old home. In that moment Harriet realized poignantly how the old home and all which pertained to it belonged to the past. Here began a new life. Deep in her heart a sore and hidden knot swelled and seemed to burst with a pang. That pain was release. It had come to her from these far-off glooming mountains, so vast, so apparently eternal. The strength she had prayed for flowed to her mysteriously. Her ailing father, her mother, the dreamy Florence and the coquettish Lenta, and Neale, callow, vain, overindulged but still with good in him — how they all would need her, and how desperately she would need strength! It was there. She sensed it in the purple beckoning range and in this up-flung white-capped world. Her heart went out to meet them. Something before unknown welled up in her.
Tears dimmed Harriet’s eyes and shrouded the scene, and she walked out into the open lest some one passed to notice her. Stunted little trees that looked as if they had endured hardships to survive grew there, and grass, and a fragrant gray bush pleasant to the eye, and tiny pink-blossomed flowers, and everywhere gray stones large and small. Harriet sat down. When her sight cleared she was further surprised to see that the whole panorama had subtly changed and was, if anything, more arresting and beautiful. The magnitude of the West thus unfolded to her gaze, the tremendous sense of solitude, distance, wildness, and loneliness all grew with every moment of watching. And all of a sudden she felt glad that they had come, for their own sakes now, as well as her father’s.
From where she sat the house appeared a rough-walled portholed fort, as indeed it must have been during the Indian days. It could never be made a thing of beauty on the outside, but within there were limitless possibilities. She returned to the courtyard, with courage now to look about the inside and to speculate upon what could be made of it. Before she got far, however, Lonesome Mulhall hailed her:
“Lady, everybody’s been callin’ you. Jud’s roarin’ how he’ll throw the ham an’ eggs out if you don’t come.”
Harriet replied gaily that she would run, and she did, not, however, without becoming aware of muscle-bound and stiff legs. The girls did not greet her, for the reason that they were too gastronomically busy. Her father sat up, attended by her mother, and he asked: “Hallie, where have you been?”
“Good-morning, father,” she replied. “I have been seeing Colorado for the first time. And once was enough!”
“What for? I’d hoped against hope you — —”
“Enough to fall in love with it,” she interrupted. The girls laughed incredulously, to the peril
of choking over their food. Her father brightened perceptibly. He looked worn to exhaustion.
“Hallie, Jud left your breakfast on the fire. He’s a funny little fellow. Fussed and fumed because you girls didn’t get up early. Says Nelson was a slave-driver and that it was tough to be blacksmith, carpenter, mason, wagon-builder, and I don’t remember what else, besides being cook. I’m bound to admit he can cook. And clean as any housekeeper!”
While Harriet was verifying her mother’s praise, and agreeing with it, Nelson came up to them with some kind of a tool in hand. He was in his shirt sleeves and he still wore that ugly gun bumping his thigh. What a lithe, virile man he looked, young too, in the morning light, and Hallie had to acknowledge, singularly attractive! She hardly recognized in this genial, smiling man the sinister one of last night.
“Mawnin’, girls. It shore is good to see yu up again. I was afraid maybe yu was daid,” he drawled. “An’ how yu ridin’, boss?” he inquired of Lindsay.
“Not so good, Nelson. Sit down and talk a little,” replied the other. “I slept like a log, though. Never coughed once. But this morning my breast hurts and my ears ring. And my legs feel dead.”
“Nothin’ but the altitude. Yu see it’s plumb high heah. Thet’ll pass, boss.”
Mrs. Lindsay intercepted her husband as he was about to reply: “Nelson, I’ll tell you if he won’t. It’s worry as much as ill health that’s pulled him down.”
“I reckon,” replied the rider, solicitously. “Wal, there’s nothin’ to worry about now, Lindsay. Yu’re heah, an’ in pretty good shape, considerin’.”
“I believe I am, by jingo!” rejoined Lindsay, who manifestly could not resist Nelson’s persuasive speeches. “I ought to have croaked, if all Doc Hurd and our friends prophesied had come true. Honest, Mom, I’d feel free — if I wasn’t scared, or worried. It’s just wonderful to be here.”