Many a widow was there, whose heart was buried in a grave back East, and many a gray man, making his first independent start. Always the West has held up its promise of freedom to men, and the hope of it has led them farther than the hope of gold.
About midway between Meander and Comanche, Agnes Horton was located on the land which Smith had selected for her. Smith had retired from driving the stage and had established a sort of commercial center on his homestead, where he had a store for supplying the settlers’ needs. He also had gone into the business of contracting to clear lands of sagebrush and level them for irrigation, having had a large experience in that work in other parts of the state.
Agnes had pitched her tent on the river-bank, in a pleasant spot where there was plenty of grazing for her horse. Just across her line, and only a few hundred yards up-stream, a family was encamped, putting up a permanent home, making a reckless inroad among the cottonwoods which grew along the river on their land. Across the stream, which was fordable there, a young man and his younger wife, with the saddle-marks of the city on them, had their white nest. Agnes could hear the bride singing early in the morning, when the sun came up and poured its melted gold over that hopeful scene, with never a cloud before its face.
Twenty miles farther along, toward Comanche, Dr. Slavens had pitched his tent among the rocks on the high, barren piece of land which he had selected blindly, guided by Hun Shanklin’s figures. He was not a little surprised, and at the same time cheered and encouraged, to find, when he came to locating it, that it was the spot where they had seen Shanklin and another horseman on the afternoon of their stage excursion, when the two had been taken by Smith as men of evil intent, and the doctor had been called to the box to handle the lines.
His neighbors in the rich valley below him regarded him with doubt of his balance, and that was a current suspicion up and down the river among those who did not know the story. But the politicians in Meander, and those who were on hand before the filing began, who knew how Jerry Boyle had nursed Axel Peterson, and how he had dropped the Scandinavian when the stranger rode up unexpectedly and filed on Number One, believed that the doctor had held inside information, and that his claim was worth millions.
But if the quarter-section contained anything of value, there was no evidence of it that Dr. Slavens could find. It was about the crudest and most unfinished piece of earth that he ever had seen outside the Buckhorn Cañon. It looked as if the materials for making something on a tremendous pattern had been assembled there, thrown down promiscuously, and abandoned.
Ledges of red rock, which seemed as if fires had scorched them for ages, stood edgewise in the troubled earth, their seamed faces toward the sky. It was as if nature had put down that job temporarily, to hurry off and finish the river, or the hills beyond the river, and never had found time to come back. Tumbled fragments of stone, huge as houses, showing kinship with nothing in their surroundings, stood here thickly in a little cup between the seared hills, and balanced there upon the sides of buttes among the streaks of blue shale.
A little grass grew here and there in carpet-size splotches, now yellow and dry, while that in the valley was at its best. Spiked plants, which looked tropical, and which were as green during the rigors of winter as during the doubtful blessings of summer, stood on the slopes, their thousand bayonets guarding against trespass where only pressing necessity could drive a human foot. Sheep-sage, which grew low upon the ground, and unostentatious and dun, was found here, where no flocks came to graze; this was the one life-giving thing which sprang from that blasted spot.
The lowest elevation on the doctor’s claim was several hundred feet above the river, from which he hauled the water which he drank and used for culinary purposes. If there was wealth in the land and rocks, nature had masked it very well indeed. The pick and the hammer revealed nothing; long hours of prying and exploring yielded no gleam of metal to confirm his fast-shrinking belief that he had pitched on something good.
His only comfort in those first days was the thought of the money which he had taken from Shanklin, with the aid of the gambler’s own honest little die. That cash was now safe in the bank at Meander. There was enough of it, everything else failing, to take him–and somebody–back to his own place when she was ready to go; enough to do that and get the automobile, take the world on its vain side, and pull success away from it. He was able for it now; no doubt of his ability to climb over any obstacle whatever remained after his wrestling match with the river in the Buckhorn Cañon. There was no job ahead of him that he could even imagine, as big as that.
Nobody had come forward to make him an offer for his place. Jerry Boyle had not appeared, nothing had been seen of the man who accosted him at the window the morning he filed. Although he had remained in Meander two days after that event, nobody had approached him in regard to the land which so many had seemed anxious to get before it came into his ownership. Boyle he had not seen since the evening Dr. Slavens and Agnes met him in the gorge riding in such anxious haste.
Perhaps the value of the claim, if value lay in it, was the secret of a few, and those few had joined forces to starve out his courage and hope. If nobody came forward with a voluntary offer for the land, it never would be worth proving up on and paying the government the price asked for it. All over that country there was better land to be had without cost.
As the days slipped past and nobody appeared with ten thousand dollars bulging his pockets, Slavens began to talk to himself among the solitudes of his desert. He called himself a foremost example of stupidity and thick-headedness for not giving ear to the man who wanted to talk business the day he filed on that outcast corner of the earth. Then, growing stubborn, he would determine to pay the government the purchase price, clean up on it at once, and take title to it. Then, if it had the stuff in it, they might come around with some sort of offer in time.
No matter; he would stick to it himself until winter. That always was his final conclusion, influenced, perhaps, by a hope that the roughness of winter would speedily convince “somebody” that roses and dreams of roses belonged to the summer. He would have nothing more to pay on the homestead for a year. And much could happen in a year, in a day; even an hour.
Slavens had a good tent in a sheltered place, which he believed he could make comfortable for winter, and he meant to send for some books. Meantime, he had tobacco to smoke and a rifle to practice with, and prospects ahead, no matter which way the cat might jump.
The doctor’s target practice was a strong contributing force to the general belief among his neighbors that he was deranged. They said he imagined that he was repelling invaders from his claim, which would be valuable, maybe, to a man who wanted to start a rattlesnake farm. But Slavens had a motive, more weighty than the pastime that this seemingly idle pursuit afforded. There was a time of settlement ahead between him and Jerry Boyle for the part the Governor’s son had borne in his assault. When the day for that adjustment came, Slavens intended to seek it.
Concerning Shanklin, he was in a degree satisfied with what he had done. The loss of that much money, he believed, was a greater drain on the old crook than a gallon of blood. Slavens felt that it hurt Shanklin in the gambler’s one sensitive spot. There was a great deal owing to him yet from that man, in spite of what he had forced Shanklin to pay, and he meant to collect the balance before he left that state.
So the rifle practice went ahead, day by day, supplemented by a turn now and then with Hun Shanklin’s old black pistol, which Mackenzie had turned over to Slavens as part of his lawful spoil.
While Dr. Slavens banged away among his rocks, not knowing whether he was a victim of his own impetuosity or the peculiarly favored son of fortune, Agnes Horton, in her tent beside the river, was undergoing an adjustment of vision which was assisting her to see startlingly things exactly as they were. The enchantment of distance had fallen away. When she came to grips with the land, then its wild unfriendliness was revealed, and the magnitude of the task ahead
of her was made discouragingly plain.
All over her cultivable strip of land which lay between the river and the hills, the gray sage grew in clumps, each cluster anchoring the soil around it in a little mound. Through many years the earth had blown and sifted around the sapless shrubs until they seemed buried to the ears, and hopeless of ever getting out again, but living on their gray life in a gray world, waiting for the best.
All of this ground must be leveled before it could receive the benefits of irrigation, and the surprising thing to her was how much wood the land yielded during this operation. Each little sagebrush had at least twenty times as much timber under the earth as it had above, and each thick, tough root was a retarding and vexatious obstacle in the way of scraper and plow. Smith said it was sometimes necessary in that country to move three acres of land in order to make one.
But Smith was enthusiastically for it. He kept asserting that it paid, and pointed to the small bit of agricultural land that there was in the whole expanse of that reservation, for an example, to prove his point. There was room for other industries, such as mining and grazing, but the man who could grow food and forage for the others was the one who would take down the money from the hook. That was Smith’s contention.
He told Agnes that she could lift enough water with a wheel in the river to irrigate a garden and more, but there was no need of putting in the wheel until spring. The rains of that season would bring up the seed, and while it was making the most of the moisture in the ground she could be setting her wheel.
“A person’s got to plan ahead in this country,” said Smith. “You must know to a skinned knuckle just what you’ll need a year, or five years, ahead here, if you ever make it go worth havin’. It ain’t like it is back where you come from. There you can go it more or less hit-or-miss, and hit about as often as you miss. Here you’ve got to know.”
Smith was moving to organize the settlers along the river into a company to put in a canal which would water all their land, the chief capital to be elbow-grease; the work to be done that fall and winter. Smith was indeed the head and inspiration of all enterprise in that new place. People to whom that country was strange, and that included nearly all of them, looked to him for advice, and regarded with admiration and wonder his aptness in answering everything.
Agnes was doubtful of the future, in spite of her big, brave talk to Dr. Slavens in the days before the drawing. Now that she had the land, and a better piece of it than she had hoped for, considering her high number, she felt weakly unfit to take it in hand and break it to the condition of docility in which it would tolerate fruit-trees, vines, and roses.
It cheered her considerably, and renewed her faith in her sex, to see some of the women out with their teams, preparing their land for the seeding next spring. More than one of them had no man to lean on, and no money to hire one to take the rough edge off for her. In that respect Agnes contrasted her easier situation with theirs. She had the means, slender as they might be, indeed, to employ somebody to do the work in the field. But the roses she reserved for her own hands, putting them aside as one conceals a poem which one has written, or a hope of which he is afraid.
In the first few days of her residence on her land, Agnes experienced all the changes of mercurial rising and falling of spirits, plans, dreams. Some days she saddled her horse, which she had bought under the doctor’s guidance at Meander, and rode, singing, over the hills, exalted by the wild beauty of nature entirely unadorned. There was not yet a house in the whole of what had been the Indian Reservation, and there never had been one which could be properly called such.
Here was a country, bigger than any one of several of the far eastern states, as yet unchanged by the art of man. The vastness of it, and the liberty, would lay hold of her at such times with rude power, making her feel herself a part of it, as old a part of it as its level-topped buttes and ramparts of riven stone.
Then again it frightened her, giving her a feeling such as she remembered once when she found herself alone in a boat upon a great lake, with the shore left far behind and none in sight beyond the misty horizon. She seemed small then, and inadequate for the rough struggle that lay ahead.
Smith noted this, and read the symptoms like a doctor.
“You’ve got to keep your nerve,” he advised, bluntly kind, “and not let the lonesomeness git a hold on you, Miss Horton.”
“The lonesomeness?” she echoed. It seemed a strange-sounding phrase.
“It’s a disease,” Smith proceeded, “and I suppose you git it anywhere; but you git it harder here. I’ve seen men take it, and turn gray and lose their minds, runnin’ sheep. After you once git over it you’re broke. You wouldn’t leave this country for a purty on a chain.”
“I hope I’ll not get it,” she laughed. “How do people act when they take the lonesomeness?”
“Well, some acts one way and some acts another,” said Smith. “Some mopes and run holler-eyed, and some kicks and complains and talk about ‘God’s country’ till it makes you sick. Just like this wasn’t as much God’s country as any place you can name! It’s all His’n when you come down to the p’int, I reckon. But how a woman acts when she takes it I can’t so much say for I never knew but one that had it. She up and killed a man.”
“Oh, that was terrible! Did she lose her mind?”
“Well, I don’t know but you could say she did. You see she married a sheepman. He brought her out here from Omaha, and left her up there on the side of the mountain in a little log cabin above Meander while he went off foolin’ around with them sheep, the way them fellers does. I tell you when you git sheep on the brain you don’t eat at home more than once in three months. You live around in a sheep-wagon, cuttin’ tails off of lambs, and all such fool things as that.”
“Why, do they cut the poor things’ tails off?” she asked, getting the notion that Smith was having a little fun at her expense.
“They all do it,” he informed her, “to keep the sand and burrs out of ’em. If they let ’em.grow long they git so heavy with sand it makes ’em.poor to pack ’em. they say, I don’t know myself; I’m not a sheepman.”
“But why did she shoot a man? Because he cut off lambs’ tails?”
“No, she didn’t,” said Smith. “She went out of her head. The feller she shot was a storekeeper’s son down in Meander, and he got to ridin’ up there to talk to her and cheer her up. The lonesomeness it had such a hold on her, thinkin’ about Omaha and houses, and pie-annos playin’ in every one of ’em, that she up and run off with that feller when he promised to take her back there. They started to cut across to the U.P. in a wagon–more than a hundred miles. That night she come to her head when he got too fresh, and she had to shoot him to make him behave.”
“Her husband should have been shot, it seems to me, for leaving her that way,” Agnes said.
“A man orto stick to his wife in this country, specially if she’s new to it and not broke,” said Smith; “and if I had one, ma’am, I’d stick to her.”
Smith looked at her as he said this, with conviction and deep earnestness in his eyes.
“I’m sure you would,” she agreed.
“And I’d be kind to her,” he declared.
“There’s no need to tell me that,” she assured him. “You’re kind to everybody.”
“And if she didn’t like the name,” Smith went on significantly, “I’d have it changed!”
“I’m sure she’d like it–she’d be very ungrateful if she didn’t,” Agnes replied, somewhat amused by his earnestness, but afraid to show it. “I’m going to order lumber for my house in a day or two.”
Smith switched from sentiment to business in a flash.
“Let me sell you the nails,” he requested. “I can give ’em to you as cheap as you can git ’em in Meander.”
* * *
CHAPTER XIV
“LIKE A WOLF”
Agnes had been on her homestead almost a week. She was making a brave “stagger,” as Smith d
escribed all amateurish efforts, toward cutting up some dry cottonwood limbs into stove-lengths before her tent on the afternoon that Jerry Boyle rode across the ford.
While she had not forgotten him, she had begun to hope that he had gone back to Comanche, and his sudden appearance there gave her an unpleasant shock. He drew up near her with a friendly word, and dismounted with a cowboy swing to his long body and legs.
“Well, Agnes, you dodged me in Meander,” said he. “You’ve located quite a piece up the river and off the stage-road, haven’t you?”
“But not far enough, it seems,” she answered, a little weariness in her voice, as of one who turns unwillingly to face at last something which has been put away for an evil day.
“No need for us to take up old quarrels, Agnes,” he chided with a show of gentleness.
“I don’t want to quarrel with you, Jerry; I never did quarrel with you,” she disclaimed.
“‘Misunderstandings’ would be a better word then, I suppose,” he corrected. “But you could have knocked me over with a feather when you repudiated me over there at Comanche that day. I suppose I should have known that you were under an alias before I made that break, but I didn’t know it, Agnes, believe me.”
“How could you?” she said, irritably. “That was nothing; let it rest. But you understand that it was for the sake of others that the alias was–and is–used; not for my own.”
“Of course, Agnes. But what do you want to be wasting yourself on this rough country for? There are more suitable places in Wyoming for you than this lonesome spot. What’s the object, anyhow?”
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