by Zane Grey
By some chance the grave of the scarlet woman adjoined that of a laborer who had been killed by a blast. Neale remembered the spot. He had walked out there before. A morbid fascination often drew him to view that ever-increasing row of nameless graves. As the workman had given his life to the road, so had the woman. Neale saw a significance in the parallel.
Neale returned to the town troubled in mind. He remembered the last look Ruby had given him. Had he awakened conscience in her? Upon questioning Hough, he learned that Ruby had absented herself from the dancing hall and had denied herself to all that last night of her life.
* * * * *
There was to be one more incident relating to this poor girl before Benton in a mad rush should forget her.
Neale divined it before it came to pass, and he was present and as powerless to prevent it as any other spectator in Beauty Stanton’s hall. King reacted in his own peculiar way to the news of Ruby’s suicide and the rumored cause. He stalked into that dancing hall where his voice stopped the music and the dancers.
“Come out heah!” he shouted to the pale Cordy.
And King spun the man into the center of the hall, where he called him every vile name known to the camp, scorned and slapped and insulted him, shamed him before that breathless crowd, goaded him at last into a desperate reaching for his gun, and killed him as he drew it.
Chapter Twenty-One
Benton slowed and quieted down a few days before pay day to get ready for the great rush. Only the saloons and dance halls and gambling hells were active, and even here the difference was manifest. The railroad yard was the busiest place in the town, for every train brought huge loads of food, merchandise, and liquor, the transporting of which taxed the teamsters to their utmost.
The day just before pay day saw the beginning of a singular cycle of change. Gangs of laborers rode in on the work trains from the grading camps and the camps at the head of the rails, now miles west of Benton. A rest of several days inevitably followed the visit of the pay car. It was difficult to keep enough men at work to feed and water the trains, and they would have sorry protection from the Indians had not the troops been on duty. Pay days were not off days for the soldiers.
Steady streams of men flowed toward Benton from east and west, and that night the hum of Benton was merry, subdued, waiting.
Bright and early the town with its added thousands awoke. The morning was clear, rosy, fresh. On the desert the colors changed from soft gray to red and the whirls of dust riding the wind resembled little clouds with sunset lines. Silence and solitude and unbroken level reigned outside, in infinite contrast to the seething town. Benton resembled an ant heap at break of day. A thousand songs arose, crude and coarse and loud, but full of joy. Pay day and vacation were at hand!
Then drill, my paddies, drill,
Drill, my heroes, drill,
Drill all day,
No sugar in your tay,
Workin’ on the U.P. Railway
Casey was one Irish trooper of thousands who varied the song and tune to suit his taste. The content alone they all held. Drill! They were laborers who would turn into regiments at a word.
They shaved their stubby beards and donned their best—a bronzed, sturdy, cheery army of wild boys. The curse that lurked up under the canvas tents rested but lightly upon their broad shoulders.
Strangely the morning began without the gusty wind so common to that latitude. And the six inches of powdery white dust did not rise. The wind, too, waited. The powers of heaven smiled in the clear quiet morning, but the powers of hell waited for the hours to come—the night and darkness.
At 9:00 a mob of five thousand men had congregated around the station, most of them out in the open, on the desert side of the track. They were waiting for the pay train to arrive. This hour was the only orderly one that Benton ever saw. There was laughter, profanity, play—a continuous hum, but compared to Benton’s usual turmoil it was pleasant. The workmen talked in groups and, like all crowds of men sober and unexcited, were given mostly to badinage and idle talk.
“Wot was ut I owed ye, Moike?” asked a strapping grader.
Mike scratched his head. “Wos it thorty dollars this toime?”
“It war,” replied the other. “Moike, yez hev a memory.”
A big Negro pushed out his huge jaw and blustered at his fellows: “I’se a gwine to bust thet yaller nigger’s haid,” he declared.
“Bill, he’s your fren’. Cool down, man, cool down,” replied a comrade.
A teamster was writing a letter in lead pencil, using a board over his knees.
“Jim, you goin’ to send money home?” queried a fellow laborer.
“I am that, an’ first thing when I get my pay,” was the reply.
“Reminds me, I owe for this suit I’m wearin’. I’ll drop in an’ settle.”
A group of spikers held forth on a little bank above the railroad track, at a point where a few weeks before they had fastened those very rails with lusty blows.
“Well, boys, I think I see the smoke of our pay dirt . . . ’way down the line,” said one.
“Bandy, your eyes are pore,” replied another.
“Yep, she’s comin’,” said another. “’Bout time, for I haven’t two-bits to my name.”
“Boys, no buckin’ the tiger for me today,” declared Bandy.
He was laughed at by all, except the quiet comrade who gazed thoughtfully eastward, back over the vast and rolling country. He was thinking of home, of wife and little girl, of what pay day meant for them.
Bandy gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder. “Frank, you got drunk an’ laid out all night, last pay day.”
Frank remembered, but he did not say what he had forgotten that last pay day.
* * * * *
A long and gradual slope led from Benton down across the barren desert toward Medicine Bow. The railroad track split it and narrowed to a mere thread upon the horizon. The crowd of watching, waiting men saw smoke rise over that horizon line and a dark, flat, creeping object. Through the big throng ran a restless murmur. The train was in sight. It might have been a harbinger of evil for a subtle change—nervous, impatient, brooding—visited that multitude. A slow movement closed the disintegrated crowd and a current of men worked forward to encounter resistance and like currents. They had begun to crowd for advantageous position closer to the pay car to be the first in line.
A fight started somewhere and loud curses and dull blows, and then a jostling mass tried the temper of the slow-marching men. Some boss yelled for order from a boxcar and he was hooted. There was no order. When the train whistled for Benton, a hoarse and sustained shout ran through the mob, not from all lips, not from any massed group, but taken up from man to man—a strange sound, the first note of calling Benton.
The train arrived. Troops alighting preserved order near the pay car, and out of the dense mob a slow stream of men flowed into the car at one end and out at the other.
Bates, a giant digger and a bully, was the first man in the line, the first to get his little share of the fortune in gold passing out of the car that day. Long before half of that mob had received its pay, Bates lay dead upon a sanded floor, killed in a drunken brawl.
And the Irishman Mike had received his $30.
And the big Negro had broken the head of his friend.
And the teamster had forgotten to send money home.
And his comrade had neglected to settle for the suit of clothes he was wearing.
And Bandy for all his vows had gone straight to bucking the tiger.
And Frank, who had gotten drunk last pay day, had been mindful of wife and little girl far away—and had done his duty, which Benton that day made his last!
* * * * *
As the spirit of the gangs changed with the coming of gold, so did that of the day. The wind began to blow, the dust began to fly, the sun began to burn, and the freshness and serenity of the morning passed.
Main Street in Benton became black-streaked w
ith men, white-sheeted with dust. There was a whining whistle in the wind as it swooped down. It complained; it threatened; it strengthened, and from the heating desert it blew in hot. A steady tramp, tramp, tramp rattled the lone boards as the army marched down upon Benton. It moved slowly, the first heave of a great mass getting under way, with increasing momentum. Stores and shops, restaurants and hotels and saloons took toll from these first comers. Benton swallowed up the builders as fast as they marched from the pay train. It had an insatiable maw. The bands played martial airs, and soldiers who had lived through the Rebellion felt the thrill and the quick-step and the call of other days.
Toward afternoon Benton began to hurry. The hour was approaching when crowded halls and tents must make room for fresh and unspent gangs. The swarms of men still marched up the street. Benton was gay and noisy and busy then. White shirts and blue and red and plaid held their brightness despite the dust. Gaudily dressed women passed in and out of the halls. All was excitement, movement, color, merriment, and dust and wind and heat. The crowds moved on because they were pushed on. Music, laughter, shuffling feet, and clinking glass, a steady tramp, voices low and voices loud, the hoarse bawl of the barker—all merged into a roar—a roar that started merry and wore strangely different and swelled to nameless din.
The sun set, the twilight fell, the wind went down, the dust settled—and night mantled Benton. The roar of the day became subdued. It resembled the purr of the gorging hyena. The yellow and glaring torches, the bright lamps, the dim pale lights behind tent walls, all accentuated the blackness of the night and filled space with shadows, like specters. Benton’s streets were full of drunken men, staggering back along the way they had marched in. No woman showed herself. The darkness seemed a cloak, cruel yet pitiful. It hid the flight of a man running from fear; it softened the sounds of brawling and deadened the pistol shot. Under its cover soldiers slunk away sobered and ashamed, and murderous bandits waited in ambush, and brawny porters dragged men by the heels, and young gamblers in the flush of success hurried to new games, and broken wanderers sought some place to rest, and a long line of the vicious, of mixed dialect and different color, filed down in the dark to the tents of lust.
Life indoors that night in Benton was monstrous, wonderful, and hideous.
Every saloon was packed, and every dive and room, with a hoarse, violent mob of furious men. Furious in mirth—furious for drink—furious with wildness, insane and lecherous, spilling gold and blood!
The gold that did not flow over the bars flowed into the greedy hands of the cold, swift gamblers, or into the clutching fingers of wild-eyed women. The big gambling hell had extra lights, extra attendants, extra tables, and there around the great glittering mirror-blazing bar struggled and laughed and shouted a drink-beset mass of humanity. And all through the rest of the big room groups and knots of men stood and bent and sat around tables, intent, absorbed, obsessed, listening with strained ears, watching with wild eyes, reaching with shaking hands—only to grasp and throw down cards and push rolls of gold toward cold-faced gamblers, and lurch up with curse and glare. This was the night of golden harvest for the black-garbed, steel-nerved, cold-eyed cardsharps. They knew the brevity of time and hour and life.
In the dancing halls there was a maddening whirl, an immense and incredible hilarity, a wild fling of unleashed burly men, an honest drunken spree, and the hideous red-eyed drunkenness that did not spring from drink, and the unveiled passion, the brazen lure, the silent obscenity, the raw, corrupt, and terrible presence of bad women in absolute license at a wild and baneful hour. In the madness of that night, which produced sights no sober eye could recall, there was written finality—the end. Benton reached its greatest, wildest, blackest, vilest. But not its deadliest! That must come—later—as an effect. But the height or the depth was reached.
The scene at midnight was unreal, hard, medieval. No savage dance ever equaled that. Dance of cannibals, dance of sun-worshippers, dance of Apaches on the warpath, dance of cliff-dwellers wild over the massacre of a dreaded foe—these might have been comparable to that dance of gold and lust in Beauty Stanton’s parlors.
Benton seemed breathing hard, laboring under its load of evil, dancing toward its close.
Night wore on, and the hour of dawn approached.
The lamps were dead; the tents were dark; the music was stilled; and the low soft roar was a hollow mockery of its earlier strength.
Like specters men staggered slowly and wanderingly through the gray streets. Gray ghosts! All was gray. A vacant laugh pealed out and a strident curse, and then again the low murmur prevailed. Benton was going to rest. Weary, drunken, spent nature sought oblivion—on disordered beds, hard floors, and in dusty corners. An immense and hovering shadow held the tents and halls and streets in obscurity. Through the opaque gloom the silent and the mumbling revelers reeled along. Louder voices broke the spell only for an instant. Death lay in the middle of the main street, in the dust—and no passing man halted. It lay as well down the side streets, in sandy ditches, and on tent floors, and behind the bar of the gambling hell, and in a corner of Beauty Stanton’s parlor. Likewise death had his counterpart in hundreds of prostrate men, who lay in drunken stupor, asleep, insensible to the dust in their faces. No one answered the low moans of the man, who, stabbed and robbed, had crawled so far and could crawl no farther.
But the dawn would not stay back to hide Benton’s hideousness. The gray lifted out of the streets, the shadows lightened, the east kindled, and the sweet soft freshness of a desert dawn came in on the gentle breeze.
And when the sun arose, splendid and golden, with its promise and beauty, it shone upon a ghastly silent motionless Benton asleep.
Chapter Twenty-Two
To Allie Lee, again a prisoner in the clutches of Durade, the days in Benton had been mysterious, the nights dreadful. She listened with throbbing ears in fear and trembling. Footsteps and low voices, ceaseless, as of a passing army—and the strange muffled roar, rising and swelling and dying.
Durade’s caravan had entered Benton in the dark. Allie had gotten an impression of wind and dust, lights and many noisy hurried men, and a crowded jumble of tents. She had lived in a back room of a canvas house. A door opened out into a little yard, fenced high with heavy planks over or through which she could not see. Here she had been allowed to walk. She had seen Durade once, the morning after Fresno and his gang had brought her to Benton, when he had said meals would be brought her and she must stay there until he had secured better quarters. He had blazed with excitement. Allie might have scaled the high fence, but she was afraid of Durade, and more afraid of the unknown peril outside than she was of him.
She listened to the mysterious life of Benton, wondering and fearful, and through the hours there came to her a nameless certainty of something tremendous and terrible that was to happen to her. But spirit and hope were unquenchable. Not prayer nor reason nor ignorance was the source of her sustained and inexplicable courage. A star shone over her destiny, or a good angel hovered near. She sensed in a vague and perplexing way that she must be the center of a mysterious cycle of events. The hours were fraught with strain and suspense, yet they passed fleetingly. A glorious and saving moment was coming—a meeting that would be as terrible as sweet. Her lover Neale was nearby at the railroad compound and she felt his nearness. It was that which kept her alive. She knew with her heart. And while she thrilled at the sound of every step, she also shuddered. For there was Durade with his desperadoes! Blood would be spilled. Somewhere, somehow that meeting would come. Neale would find her. And the cowboy! Allie remembered the red blaze of his face—the singular piercing blue of his eye, his cool easy careless air, his drawling speech—and underneath all his lazy gentleness, a deadliness of blood and iron.
So Allie Lee listened to all sounds, particularly to all footsteps, waiting for that which was to make her heart stand still.
Someone had entered the room adjoining hers—was now fumbling at the rude door that had al
ways been barred from the other side. It opened. Stitt, the mute who attended and guarded her, appeared carrying bundles. Entering, he deposited these upon Allie’s bed. Then he made signs for her to change the garb she wore to what evidently was in the bundles. Further, he gave her to understand she was to hurry—that she was to be taken away. With that he went out, shutting and barring the door after him.
Allie’s hands shook as she opened the packages. The very next hour might bring her freedom! She was surprised to find a complete outfit of women’s apparel of well made and fine material. Benton then had stores and women! Hurriedly she made the change, which was very welcome. The dress did not fit her as well as it might have, but the bonnet and cloak were satisfactory, as were the little boots. She found a long dark veil and wondered if she was expected to put that on.
A knocking at the door preceded a call: “Allie, are you ready?”
“Yes,” she replied.
The door opened. Durade entered. He appeared thinner than she had ever seen him, with more white in or beneath his olive complexion, and there were marks of strain and passion in his face. Allie knew he labored under some strong, suppressed excitement. More and more he seemed to lose something of his old character of the Spanish manner.
“Put that veil on,” he said. “I’m not ready for Benton to see you.”
“Are you . . . taking me away?” she asked.
“Only down the street. I’ve a new place,” he replied. “Come. Stitt will bring your things.”
Allie could not see very well through the heavy veil and she stumbled over the rude thresholds. Durade took hold of her arm and presently led her out into the light. The air was hot, windy, dusty. The street was full of hurrying and lounging men. Allie heard different snatches of speech as she and Durade went on. Some stared and leered at her, at which times Durade’s hold tightened on her arm and his step quickened. She was certain no one looked at Durade. Some man jostled her—another pinched her arm. Her ears tingled with unfamiliar and coarse speech.