by Zane Grey
Helen gave him her hand, while they walked the horses homeward in the long sunset shadows. In the fullness of that happy hour she had time for a grateful wonder at the keen penetration of the cowboy Carmichael. Dale had saved her life, but it was Las Vegas who had saved her happiness.
Not many days later, when again the afternoon shadows were slanting low, Helen rode out upon the promontory where the dim trail zigzagged far above Paradise Park.
Roy was singing as he drove the pack-burros down the slope; Bo and Las Vegas were trying to ride the trail two abreast, so they could hold hands; Dale had dismounted to stand beside Helen’s horse, as she gazed down the shaggy black slopes to the beautiful wild park with its gray meadows and shining ribbons of brooks.
It was July, and there were no golden-red glorious flames and blazes of color such as lingered in Helen’s memory. Black spruce slopes and green pines and white streaks of aspens and lacy waterfall of foam and dark outcroppings of rock—these colors and forms greeted her gaze with all the old enchantment. Wildness, beauty, and loneliness were there, the same as ever, immutable, like the spirit of those heights.
Helen would fain have lingered longer, but the others called, and Ranger impatiently snorted his sense of the grass and water far below. And she knew that when she climbed there again to the wide outlook she would be another woman.
“Nell, come on,” said Dale, as he led on. “It’s better to look up.”
The sun had just sunk behind the ragged fringe of mountain-rim when those three strong and efficient men of the open had pitched camp and had prepared a bountiful supper. Then Roy Beeman took out the little worn Bible which Helen had given him to use when he married Bo, and as he opened it a light changed his dark face.
“Come, Helen an’ Dale,” he said.
They arose to stand before him. And he married them there under the great, stately pines, with the fragrant blue smoke curling upward, and the wind singing through the branches, while the waterfall murmured its low, soft, dreamy music, and from the dark slope came the wild, lonely cry of a wolf, full of the hunger for life and a mate.
“Let us pray,” said Roy, as he closed the Bible, and knelt with them.
“There is only one God, an’ Him I beseech in my humble office for the woman an’ man I have just wedded in holy bonds. Bless them an’ watch them an’ keep them through all the comin’ years. Bless the sons of this strong man of the woods an’ make them like him, with love an’ understandin’ of the source from which life comes. Bless the daughters of this woman an’ send with them more of her love an’ soul, which must be the softenin’ an’ the salvation of the hard West. O Lord, blaze the dim, dark trail for them through the unknown forest of life! O Lord, lead the way across the naked range of the future no mortal knows! We ask in Thy name! Amen.”
When the preacher stood up again and raised the couple from their kneeling posture, it seemed that a grave and solemn personage had left him. This young man was again the dark-faced, clear-eyed Roy, droll and dry, with the enigmatic smile on his lips.
“Mrs. Dale,” he said, taking her hands, “I wish you joy.… An’ now, after this here, my crownin’ service in your behalf—I reckon I’ll claim a reward.”
Then he kissed her. Bo came next with her warm and loving felicitations, and the cowboy, with characteristic action, also made at Helen.
“Nell, shore it’s the only chance I’ll ever have to kiss you,” he drawled. “Because when this heah big Indian once finds out what kissin’ is—!”
Las Vegas then proved how swift and hearty he could be upon occasions. All this left Helen red and confused and unutterably happy. She appreciated Dale’s state. His eyes reflected the precious treasure which manifestly he saw, but realization of ownership had not yet become demonstrable.
Then with gay speech and happy laugh and silent look these five partook of the supper. When it was finished Roy made known his intention to leave. They all protested and coaxed, but to no avail. He only laughed and went on saddling his horse.
“Roy, please stay,” implored Helen. “The day’s almost ended. You’re tired.”
“Nope. I’ll never be no third party when there’s only two.”
“But there are four of us.”
“Didn’t I just make you an’ Dale one?… An’, Mrs. Dale, you forget I’ve been married more ’n once.”
Helen found herself confronted by an unanswerable side of the argument. Las Vegas rolled on the grass in his mirth. Dale looked strange.
“Roy, then that’s why you’re so nice,” said Bo, with a little devil in her eyes. “Do you know I had my mind made up if Tom hadn’t come around I was going to make up to you, Roy.… I sure was. What number wife would I have been?”
It always took Bo to turn the tables on anybody. Roy looked mightily embarrassed. And the laugh was on him. He did not face them again until he had mounted.
“Las Vegas, I’ve done my best for you—hitched you to thet blue-eyed girl the best I know how,” he declared. “But I shore ain’t guaranteein’ nothin’. You’d better build a corral for her.”
“Why, Roy, you shore don’t savvy the way to break these wild ones,” drawled Las Vegas. “Bo will be eatin’ out of my hand in about a week.”
Bo’s blue eyes expressed an eloquent doubt as to this extraordinary claim.
“Good-by, friends,” said Roy, and rode away to disappear in the spruces.
Thereupon Bo and Las Vegas forgot Roy, and Dale and Helen, the camp chores to be done, and everything else except themselves. Helen’s first wifely duty was to insist that she should and could and would help her husband with the work of cleaning up after the sumptuous supper. Before they had finished a sound startled them. It came from Roy, evidently high on the darkening slope, and was a long, mellow pealing halloo, that rang on the cool air, burst the dreamy silence, and rapped across from slope to slope and cliff to cliff, to lose its power and die away hauntingly in the distant recesses.
Dale shook his head as if he did not care to attempt a reply to that beautiful call. Silence once again enfolded the park, and twilight seemed to be born of the air, drifting downward.
“Nell, do you miss anythin’?” asked Dale.
“No. Nothing in all the world,” she murmured. “I am happier than I ever dared pray to be.”
“I don’t mean people or things. I mean my pets.”
“Ah! I had forgotten.… Milt, where are they?”
“Gone back to the wild,” he said. “They had to live in my absence. An’ I’ve been away long.”
Just then the brooding silence, with its soft murmur of falling water and faint sigh of wind in the pines, was broken by a piercing scream, high, quivering, like that of a woman in exquisite agony.
“That’s Tom!” exclaimed Dale.
“Oh—I was so—so frightened!” whispered Helen.
Bo came running, with Las Vegas at her heels.
“Milt, that was your tame cougar,” cried Bo, excitedly. “Oh, I’ll never forget him! I’ll hear those cries in my dreams!”
“Yes, it was Tom,” said Dale, thoughtfully. “But I never heard him cry just like that.”
“Oh, call him in!”
Dale whistled and called, but Tom did not come. Then the hunter stalked off in the gloom to call from different points under the slope. After a while he returned without the cougar. And at that moment, from far up the dark ravine, drifted down the same wild cry, only changed by distance, strange and tragic in its meaning.
“He scented us. He remembers. But he’ll never come back,” said Dale.
Helen felt stirred anew with the convictions of Dale’s deep knowledge of life and nature. And her imagination seemed to have wings. How full and perfect her trust, her happiness in the realization that her love and her future, her children, and perhaps grandchildren, would come under the guidance of such a man! Only a little had she begun to comprehend the secrets of good and ill in their relation to the laws of nature. Ages before men had lived on the earth
there had been the creatures of the wilderness, and the holes of the rocks, and the nests of the trees, and rain, frost, heat, dew, sunlight and night, storm and calm, the honey of the wildflower and the instinct of the bee—all the beautiful and multiple forms of life with their inscrutable design. To know something of them and to love them was to be close to the kingdom of earth—perhaps to the greater kingdom of heaven. For whatever breathed and moved was a part of that creation. The coo of the dove, the lichen on the mossy rock, the mourn of a hunting wolf, and the murmur of the waterfall, the ever-green and growing tips of the spruces, and the thunderbolts along the battlements of the heights—these one and all must be actuated by the great spirit—that incalculable thing in the universe which had produced man and soul.
And there in the starlight, under the wide-gnarled pines, sighing low with the wind, Helen sat with Dale on the old stone that an avalanche of a million years past had flung from the rampart above to serve as camp-table and bench for lovers in the wilderness; the sweet scent of spruce mingled with the fragrance of wood-smoke blown in their faces. How white the stars, and calm and true! How they blazed their single task! A coyote yelped off on the south slope, dark now as midnight. A bit of weathered rock rolled and tapped from shelf to shelf. And the wind moaned. Helen felt all the sadness and mystery and nobility of this lonely fastness, and full on her heart rested the supreme consciousness that all would some day be well with the troubled world beyond.
“Nell, I’ll homestead this park,” said Dale. “Then it’ll always be ours.”
“Homestead! What’s that?” murmured Helen, dreamily. The word sounded sweet.
“The government will give land to men who locate an’ build,” replied Dale. “We’ll run up a log cabin.”
“And come here often.… Paradise Park!” whispered Helen.
Dale’s first kisses were on her lips then, hard and cool and clean, like the life of the man, singularly exalting to her, completing her woman’s strange and unutterable joy of the hour, and rendering her mute.
Bo’s melodious laugh, and her voice with its old mockery of torment, drifted softly on the night breeze. And the cowboy’s “Aw, Bo,” drawling his reproach and longing, was all that the tranquil, waiting silence needed.
Paradise Park was living again one of its romances. Love was no stranger to that lonely fastness. Helen heard in the whisper of the wind through the pine the old-earth story, beautiful, ever new, and yet eternal. She thrilled to her depths. The spar-pointed spruces stood up black and clear against the noble stars. All that vast solitude breathed and waited, charged full with its secret, ready to reveal itself to her tremulous soul.
THE REDHEADED OUTFIELD (1920)
There was Delaney’s red-haired trio—Red Gilbat, left fielder; Reddy Clammer, right fielder, and Reddie Ray, center fielder, composing the most remarkable outfield ever developed in minor league baseball. It was Delaney’s pride, as it was also his trouble.
Red Gilbat was nutty—and his batting average was .371. Any student of baseball could weigh these two facts against each other and understand something of Delaney’s trouble. It was not possible to camp on Red Gilbat’s trail. The man was a jack-o’-lantern, a will-o’-the-wisp, a weird, long-legged, long-armed, red-haired illusive phantom. When the gong rang at the ball grounds there were ten chances to one that Red would not be present. He had been discovered with small boys peeping through knotholes at the vacant left field he was supposed to inhabit during play.
Of course what Red did off the ball grounds was not so important as what he did on. And there was absolutely no telling what under the sun he might do then except once out of every three times at bat he could be counted on to knock the cover off the ball.
Reddy Clammer was a grand-stand player—the kind all managers hated—and he was hitting .305. He made circus catches, circus stops, circus throws, circus steals—but particularly circus catches. That is to say, he made easy plays appear difficult. He was always strutting, posing, talking, arguing, quarreling—when he was not engaged in making a grand-stand play. Reddy Clammer used every possible incident and artifice to bring himself into the limelight.
Reddie Ray had been the intercollegiate champion in the sprints and a famous college ball player. After a few months of professional ball he was hitting over .400 and leading the league both at bat and on the bases. It was a beautiful and a thrilling sight to see him run. He was so quick to start, so marvelously swift, so keen of judgment, that neither Delaney nor any player could ever tell the hit that he was not going to get. That was why Reddie Ray was a whole game in himself.
Delaney’s Rochester Stars and the Providence Grays were tied for first place. Of the present series each team had won a game. Rivalry had always been keen, and as the teams were about to enter the long homestretch for the pennant there was battle in the New England air.
The September day was perfect. The stands were half full and the bleachers packed with a white-sleeved mass. And the field was beautifully level and green. The Grays were practicing and the Stars were on their bench.
“We’re up against it,” Delaney was saying. “This new umpire, Fuller, hasn’t got it in for us. Oh, no, not at all! Believe me, he’s a robber. But Scott is pitchin’ well. Won his last three games. He’ll bother ’em. And the three Reds have broken loose. They’re on the rampage. They’ll burn up this place today.”
Somebody noted the absence of Gilbat.
Delaney gave a sudden start. “Why, Gil was here,” he said slowly. “Lord!—he’s about due for a nutty stunt.”
Whereupon Delaney sent boys and players scurrying about to find Gilbat, and Delaney went himself to ask the Providence manager to hold back the gong for a few minutes.
Presently somebody brought Delaney a telephone message that Red Gilbat was playing ball with some boys in a lot four blocks down the street. When at length a couple of players marched up to the bench with Red in tow Delaney uttered an immense sigh of relief and then, after a close scrutiny of Red’s face, he whispered, “Lock the gates!”
Then the gong rang. The Grays trooped in. The Stars ran out, except Gilbat, who ambled like a giraffe. The hum of conversation in the grand stand quickened for a moment with the scraping of chairs, and then grew quiet. The bleachers sent up the rollicking cry of expectancy. The umpire threw out a white ball with his stentorian “Play!” and Blake of the Grays strode to the plate.
Hitting safely, he started the game with a rush. With Dorr up, the Star infield played for a bunt. Like clockwork Dorr dumped the first ball as Blake got his flying start for second base. Morrissey tore in for the ball, got it on the run and snapped it underhand to Healy, beating the runner by an inch. The fast Blake, with a long slide, made third base. The stands stamped. The bleachers howled. White, next man up, batted a high fly to left field. This was a sun field and the hardest to play in the league. Red Gilbat was the only man who ever played it well. He judged the fly, waited under it, took a step hack, then forward, and deliberately caught the ball in his gloved hand. A throw-in to catch the runner scoring from third base would have been futile, but it was not like Red Gilbat to fail to try. He tossed the ball to O’Brien. And Blake scored amid applause.
“What do you know about that?” ejaculated Delaney, wiping his moist face. “I never before saw our nutty Redhead pull off a play like that.”
Some of the players yelled at Red, “This is a two-handed league, you bat!”
The first five players on the list for the Grays were left-handed batters, and against a right-handed pitcher whose most effective ball for them was a high fast one over the outer corner they would naturally hit toward left field. It was no surprise to see Hanley bat a skyscraper out to left. Red had to run to get under it. He braced himself rather unusually for a fielder. He tried to catch the ball in his bare right hand and muffed it, Hanley got to second on the play while the audience roared. When they got through there was some roaring among the Rochester players. Scott and Captain Healy roared at Red, and Red r
oared back at them.
“It’s all off. Red never did that before,” cried Delaney in despair. “He’s gone clean bughouse now.”
Babcock was the next man up and he likewise hit to left. It was a low, twisting ball—half fly, half liner—and a difficult one to field. Gilbat ran with great bounds, and though he might have got two hands on the ball he did not try, but this time caught it in his right, retiring the side.
The Stars trotted in, Scott and Healy and Kane, all veterans, looking like thunderclouds. Red ambled in the last and he seemed very nonchalant.
“By Gosh, I’d ’a’ ketched that one I muffed if I’d had time to change hands,” he said with a grin, and he exposed a handful of peanuts. He had refused to drop the peanuts to make the catch with two hands. That explained the mystery. It was funny, yet nobody laughed. There was that run chalked up against the Stars, and this game had to be won.
“Red, I—I want to take the team home in the lead,” said Delaney, and it was plain that he suppressed strong feeling. “You didn’t play the game, you know.”
Red appeared mightily ashamed.
“Del, I’ll git that run back,” he said.
Then he strode to the plate, swinging his wagon-tongue bat. For all his awkward position in the box he looked what he was—a formidable hitter. He seemed to tower over the pitcher—Red was six feet one—and he scowled and shook his bat at Wehying and called, “Put one over—you wienerwurst!” Wehying was anything but red-headed, and he wasted so many balls on Red that it looked as if he might pass him. He would have passed him, too, if Red had not stepped over on the fourth ball and swung on it. White at second base leaped high for the stinging hit, and failed to reach it. The ball struck and bounded for the fence. When Babcock fielded it in, Red was standing on third base, and the bleachers groaned.
Whereupon Chesty Reddy Clammer proceeded to draw attention to himself, and incidentally delay the game, by assorting the bats as if the audience and the game might gladly wait years to see him make a choice.