Shadow on the Land

by Wayne D. Overholser

  Hanna whirled, recognized him, and smiled. “It’s just lucky for you I wasn’t carrying my gun. I shoot men who come up behind me and scare me.”

  “I hope you’re staying in town,” he said. “I owe you a meal or two.”

  She nodded guardedly. “It’s a long way back to the ranch.”

  “Then let’s have supper at the inn. They keep trout on the table every day, and that’s something I never had enough of in my life until I came to Bend.” He showed her the flies he had bought. “I’m learning to fish, but when I catch one, it’s because of something I accidentally do right. Now . . . about supper?”

  She hesitated a moment, and Lee, watching her, sensed that she was thinking about the time on the Inland Belle when he’d left her standing beside the rail and had gone to search for Deborah Haig. Then she smiled, as if putting it out of her mind, and said: “Why yes, if you like.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “At the Bend Hotel.”

  “I’ll meet you in the lobby at six.” He lifted his hat, nodded, and left the store.

  Lee was surprised how much his running into her had lifted his spirits. Five o’clock found him in his room putting on his best suit, and he was waiting in the lobby fifteen minutes before the hour. When she came down the stairs, she looked at him, noting his careful grooming, and said ruefully: “No fair. I didn’t come to town prepared to make myself beautiful.”

  They sat beside an open window in the dining room. Sunlight laced by the shadows of pine needles fell on Hanna’s hair, painting a golden glow upon her head. Lee, watching her and seeing the keenness of the quick expressions that crossed her face, felt a rising admiration for this girl, so alive and utterly honest. And for this hour she was the focal point of all his interests.

  “Always the rainbows,” Lee murmured, and passed the platter of trout to her.

  “I wish I could make up my mind about you,” Hanna said.

  “I’m no puzzle,” he said quickly.

  She lifted a trout to her plate. “You are to me. Perhaps it’s because we live in different worlds. Highpockets was talking about you the other day, and he thinks you’re the biggest man who ever walked.”

  He looked at her in sharp surprise. “Thanks. I’ll tell you something nice someday.”

  “You’re a man’s man. And a woman’s man in a way that sort of scares me. Life seems to be a series of rooms to you. You have such a good time in each one, and then rush madly into the next one.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “Lee, you’re missing a great deal in not having a room of your own, a room that echoes your yesterdays, and all your tomorrows.”

  He shook his head, dry amusement curving his lips in a smile. Again this sharp-minded, pretty girl was talking in a way he had never heard a woman talk. “I’m afraid I’d feel cooped up in that room.”

  Hanna smiled. “Have some more trout, Mister Dawes. I guess you’ll spend your life rushing through other men’s rooms.”

  When they had eaten, he said: “Let’s have a look at the river.”

  She nodded her agreement, and, circling the inn, they found a place among the pines on the riverbank. Lee filled his pipe, finding the tension that had gripped him since Stevens’s visit completely gone.

  “What will you do when this is over?” Hanna asked suddenly.

  “Hadn’t thought about it.” He wondered why she took such pleasure in dissecting him. “I guess there’ll always be railroads to build. Mexico. Maybe China.”

  “The Mexican señoritas would appeal to you,” she said lightly.

  He chuckled as he thumbed tobacco tightly into his pipe. “They’re a tempestuous lot. Quinn and I were together in Nicaragua.”

  “Was that where you knew him?”

  “It goes back further than that.” He lit his pipe, and said between puffs: “I’m not trying to start another argument, but my boss mentioned forcing a right of way through your property. I talked him out of it for the moment.”

  “I’m sorry, Lee,” she said flatly. “I made a sort of promise to my father when they brought his body in from the Trail Crossing bridge.”

  “I respect him and you, Hanna, but I can’t see why it should be a matter of principle.”

  She placed her hands, palm down, on the needled ground behind her and leaned back, eyes on the Cascades, where snow peaks flamed in the dying light of the sun. “It’s something you feel, Lee, a kind of workaday religion. This state has taken such a kicking around from big railroad interests. Your Jim Hill once asked . . . ‘What must we do to be fed?’ Have you ever thought about the countless people who have come here trying to answer that question? I have, Lee, because I’ve seen them. Everything they owned in a covered wagon that was held together by rope and bailing wire. Sometimes they’ve starved and moved on, but lots of them make a living, which means they’ve lived through the vastness and silence and terror of the desert trying to answer Hill’s question. Hill doesn’t give them any answer . . . not to my little people. And the Harriman Fence has kept out other railroads. That’s why Jepson says the Lord gave us a bright land, but there are man-made shadows upon it.”

  “The Oregon Trunk is breaking down that fence, Hanna.”

  Her eyes were on him gravely. “What will it be after you’ve broken it down?”

  He was getting nowhere, and he saw that emotions had set her attitudes strongly. He said: “If we condemn through your property, you’ve lost.”

  “Losing and giving up are two different things, Lee. There will be so many opportunities for a man like you here. Why don’t you stay?”

  “I’m afraid Horace Greeley’s advice was not aimed at me.”

  “But this is the last frontier, Lee.”

  He shook his head. “No. There’ll always be a frontier. Somewhere. There are a lot of hills to climb.”

  “So you can see on the other side. So many things yet for you to do, a lot of women to love, a lot of liquor to drink, and a lot of fights with Mike Quinn.”

  “I guess that’s right.”

  “Not what I’d call a frontier.”

  Suddenly he was irritated. It seemed to him that she was like a little boy who had stumbled upon a new clock, and was bound to take it apart to see what made it run. Then she was equally determined to put it back together again and gear it to operate at a different speed and in a different direction. He said with more sharpness than he intended: “Someday you’ll forget yourself, and have a good time.”

  She rose, and stood looking down at him, slim and small and shapely. And desirable. “Perhaps someday I will,” she said softly, and, whirling, walked rapidly away.

  Lee caught up with her, knowing he had made another mistake. Lee Dawes, expert with women, had been given this job because a woman held a crucial position, and he had fumbled it again because he knew nothing at all about Hanna Racine. He walked in silence beside her to the Bend Hotel, reaching into his mind for something to restore that spirit of warm understanding that he had thoughtlessly destroyed.

  He stood in front of the hotel, facing her, and said more humbly than was his habit: “I’ve got a cousin who’s a bull. Once he got into a china shop.”

  She smiled. “I heard about that cousin.”

  “Maybe I’ll change someday.”

  “And maybe someday I’ll forget myself.” She stood with the light from the hotel lobby cutting directly across her face, and Lee saw that her cheeks were bright with color. Then she shook her head, sobering. “I don’t think people ever really change, Lee,” she said. “Good night.”

  * * * * *

  Lee left Bend the next day, spent some time in Madras buying right of way in the Agency Plains, then took the stage north to Shaniko when he received a letter from Stevens instructing him to get in touch with Johnson Porter at Grass Valley.

  He had watched the newspapers for railroad news, and the pattern was shaping rapidly. Twohy Brothers was to build for Harriman’s Deschutes Railroad. Six office
rooms had been rented and field headquarters established in the town. A warehouse had been secured for a commissary, and was rapidly being filled with supplies for men and horses. And a large cellar for storing blasting powder had been built.

  Lee grinned when he read an editorial in the Madras Pioneer inspired by this sudden mobilization of Harriman forces. The Pioneer offered an opinion that the Oregon Trunk now appeared to be a dead project, and Lee wondered what the editor would think when the Hill forces drew up, as they would now any day.

  Reaching Shaniko, Lee saw in graphic swiftness what the railroads would do to central Oregon. He got the last room in the Columbia Southern Hotel; he had to wait in line for a chair in the dining room. Later in the evening he found the saloons so packed that he had to reach over a man’s shoulder to lift his drink from the bar. He cruised along the sidewalk, noting the campfires around the town, the distant and plaintive cry of a baby, the shrill and nagging tone of a woman scolding her husband.

  They were all here: freighters, railroad laborers and camp followers, sheepmen, cowboys, land locators and hungry-eyed, pinched faced farming families from Iowa, Illinois, the Dakotas, Minnesota, seeking their own land, bound for the high desert east of Bend or the Fort Rock and Silver Lake country farther east and south. This was the last big chance for free homes, 320 acres that the government said was wheat land. It was to be their own—to till and work, to fence and build upon. They were here to claim that heritage that had been an American farmer’s from the early days of settlement.

  Their land, Lee thought as he saw them talking in knots along the crowded streets, theirs to dream about and starve upon. Conscience stirred in him momentarily, for many of these people would not be here if the railroad companies had not advertised this homestead country and offered colonists’ rates. Then he shrugged and went back to his hotel room, thinking that for an instant he had seen it from the eyes of Hanna Racine and wondering at this.

  Lee got out the map Stevens had sent him and studied the lower end of the Deschutes cañon. It twisted northward to the Columbia, not more than five or six miles from Grass Valley, which was thirty miles or so below Shaniko. Harriman’s Deschutes Railroad was located on the east side of the river, the Oregon Trunk on the west. The Harriman people would get their supplies from points like Moro and Grass Valley on the Columbia Southern without having to ferry the Deschutes, and their problem of transportation would be far simpler than Porter Brothers’.

  It was while brooding over this advantage to the Harriman construction outfits that an idea began churning in Lee’s mind, and the more he studied the situation, the more excited he became. The newspapers had reported that Twohy Brothers had gathered men and equipment to build a wagon road from Grass Valley into the cañon. It was generally believed that the Harriman men had decided to seize the strategic points without waiting for the courts to decide the conflicts at such locations.

  Lying west of the little town of Grass Valley, Horseshoe Bend was such a point, a long, looping curve providing only one good roadbed. Already Lee had heard enough to believe that a Harriman camp was being established there with the hope of applying the principle of first construction and use it in the court struggle over the site. He remembered Stevens mentioning that an Oregon Trunk camp would be there, too, and Deborah had made a slip-tongue remark about Quinn heading this way, the night he had interrupted a nice little interlude. Lee folded the map, knowing that his idea was either a stroke of genius or nothing at all, depending on whether the Harriman people had carefully nailed down all the loose ends.

  The train deposited Lee in Moro at 9:10 the following morning. He went directly to the clerk in the Sherman County Courthouse atop the hill. Half an hour later he hired a livery rig and returned to Grass Valley, elation running a swift stream through him. What he was doing would either offset his lack of progress with Hanna Racine or cost him his job.

  He had noted it briefly as the train passed through earlier that morning, but aground now in Grass Valley he was astonished at the change that had come over the sleepy little town. Mainly it was the influx of people, but the freight yards were tightly crammed with flats and gondolas and boxcars packed tightly with construction equipment and materials, outfitting for the tremendous camps to be established and food supplies for men and animals. All along the fringes of the town, knocked-down wagons were being assembled to go into the staggering haul; horse teams and pack mules churned the dust into a choking haze. Still on the cars and scattered far and wide on vacant lots and in the fields were scrapers, work cars, lumber, camp ranges, tenting, steel, drilling machinery, and tremendous heaps of commissary stores.

  Lee spent some time making inquiries in Grass Valley, called at the French and Downing store, and hired another rig to take him into the country between Grass Valley and the cañon. Here, too, there was a tremendous change. Hordes of workers, largely Italians, having come to Grass Valley on the train and finding no means of transportation, were moving on foot to the first construction camps. Dust boiled everywhere along the way from freshly cut roads, rising behind four- and six-horse freight wagons, behind hacks and buggies and occasional automobiles.

  It was mid-afternoon before Lee returned to town. He went directly to Porter Brothers’ office. He was told that Johnson Porter was busy with a reporter, and was asked to wait. When the reporter left, a tall man came to the doorway of the inner office. He looked at Lee, and asked: “Were you waiting to see me?” Then a smile broke across his face. “Why, how are you, Dawes?”

  “How are you, Mister Porter?” Lee shook the tall man’s hand and, when Porter stepped inside, went on into the office. There he stopped in surprise. John Stevens was sitting in the corner, a broad grin on his face.

  “Glad to see you, Dawes,” Stevens said, and waved toward a chair.

  Porter had closed the door behind Lee. Now he asked: “How’s our miracle man?”

  “Out of miracles right now,” Lee answered dryly, “but I have a proposition to make.”

  “A red herring to make us forget a certain Hanna Racine,” Stevens murmured. “Go ahead.”

  “We’re a long way from laying steel across Hanna Racine’s place,” Lee said, excitement running high in him. The next few minutes would make or break him with John Stevens. “It strikes me that our problem with Hanna will not press us for several months, but there is a ten thousand dollar wagon road the Twohys built that’s important right now. You said once, Mister Stevens, we’d have a camp at Horseshoe Bend. I was wondering how you were planning to get supplies to that camp?”

  Stevens and Porter exchanged glances. Then Stevens said soberly: “That’s a question we haven’t answered.”

  “I suggest we use the road the Twohys built.”

  “They’d like that,” Stevens snorted. “A practical suggestion, Dawes.”

  “I think it is.” Lee grinned. “You see, the Twohys forgot to nail down everything.” He saw that he had aroused quick interest in both men, and he went on: “They got permission from the owners of the land to build their roads, and apparently they figured that was enough, but they failed to take deeds to a roadway or to sign an agreement as to the use of the land. The titles were still in the names of Fred Girt, French and Downing, and Roy J. Baker. Why don’t we buy their places?”

  There was a breathless moment while Stevens and Porter thought about this suggestion. Then Johnson Porter said softly: “Why don’t we?”

  “We can’t close off their road forever,” Lee went on, “and we’ll get some heads cracked. We’ll probably wind up in court, but I’ll guarantee one thing . . . the Twohys won’t be building Mister Harriman’s road as fast as they’d planned.”

  “What if the owners won’t sell?” Stevens asked.

  “They will.” Lee drew some papers from his coat pocket and handed them to Stevens. “I’ve already closed the deal.”

  Stevens stared at Lee in wide-eyed amazement. He looked at Porter, who had started to laugh, and back at Lee. Then he got up and walke
d across the room. Suddenly Stevens began to laugh, the loudest and longest laugh Lee had ever heard come from him. He wiped his eyes, and winked at Porter. “Maybe we have got a miracle man, Johnson. I was afraid he’d lost his touch.” He nodded at Lee. “I guess this buys you a little more time with the Racine girl.”

  “I think a little time is the answer, Mister Stevens.”

  “I hope you didn’t bankrupt us buying those ranches.”

  “These are contracts of sale, and the price was reasonable.” Lee smiled. “Later we can complete the purchase, or let them go back. Now I’ll get over to Moro and file them with the county clerk.”

  Johnson Porter was still laughing. “I’d like to see Judge Twohy’s face when he hears about this. Nobody ever gets as mad as the judge. Nobody ever gets as mad as an Irishman, anyhow, and Judge Twohy is all Irish.” He looked at Stevens. “How about letting me keep this man? There’ll be plenty of spots where I can use him.”

  “You can have him,” Stevens agreed, “as long as he can keep working on the two assignments I gave him. I may have other chores later, but right now he’d better handle this hornet’s nest he just kicked over.” He was sober now, eyes pinned on Lee. “You’ll have hornets buzzing in all directions, son.”

  “I’ll duck ’em.” Lee’s grin was a quick break across his lean face. He swung to face Porter. “I’ll need a few men. We’ll get a couple of gates across Mister Harriman’s ten thousand dollar road, and I’ll want padlocks. Big ones.”

  “You’ll get them,” Johnson Porter promised.

  “One more thing.” Lee swung back to face Stevens. “I’d like to put a man named Highpockets Magoon on the payroll. He’s done me a lot of good already, and he knows everybody from Shaniko to Bend. Besides, he’s an old friend of Hanna Racine.”

  “Write your own ticket, Lee.” Stevens glanced at his watch. “I’ve got to get back to The Dalles. You’d better tend to filing those sales contracts, Johnson, and let Lee get out on the job.” The line head grinned, an eye closing momentarily in a wink. “And, Lee, don’t play too rough.”