XXV
The Mountain's Top
There is little to add; nothing, perhaps, if the literary unities onlywere to be considered. The trials and tribulations have all been livedthrough; the man and the woman have found each other; the villains havebeen given--if not altogether a full measure of their just dues, atleast a sufficient approach to it; and virtue--but no, here the figurebreaks down; virtue hasn't been rewarded. There wasn't any especialvirtue, since there is little credit in merely enduring what cannot becured.
Of what happened after our return to Colorado only a few things standout as being at all worthy of note. For one, Barrett and I, withBenedict's help, took up the case of one Dorgan, _alias_ MichaelMurphey, _alias_ No. 3126, whom we found still preserving his incognitoin a dam-building camp in Idaho. Appealing to the Governor and Boardof Pardons of my home State, we made it appear that Dorgan was areformed man and no longer a menace to society, and in due time had thesatisfaction of seeing him set legally free.
As another act of pure justice, tempered with a good bit of filial andfraternal affection--Polly was the prime mover in this--my mother andsister were brought to Colorado, and a home was built for them inColorado Springs, where my sister, ignoring a bank account which wouldhave enabled her to sit with folded hands for the remainder of herdays, promptly gathered a group of little girls about her and beganteaching them the mysteries of the three "R's."
A third outreaching--and this, also, was Polly's idea--was in thealtruistic field. A fund was set apart out of the lavish yieldings ofthe Little Clean-Up, the income from which provides in perpetuity thatat the doors of at least one prison of the many in our land theoutcoming convict shall be met and helped to stand upon his own feet,if so be he has any feet to stand upon.
Gray granite peaks and valleys fallow-dun under the westering autumnsun; vistas of inspiring horizons leading the eye to vanishing levelsremote and vaguely deliminating earth and sky, or soaring with it toshimmering heights dark-green or bald; these infinities were spreadbefore us in celestial array one afternoon in the first year of peaceand joy when we--my good angel and I--clambered together to the summitof the mountain behind the Little Clean-Up.
After the little interval of reverent adoration which is claimed by alltrue lovers of the mountain infinities at the opening of theillimitable doors, we fell to talking of the past--my past--as we saton a projecting shelf of the summit rock.
"No," I said. "I can't admit that there is anything regenerative inpunishment. If I had been the thief that everybody believed I was, Ishould have come out of prison still a thief--with an added grudgeagainst society. While I was treated well, as a whole, nothing wasdone to arouse the better man in me, or even to ascertain if theremight possibly be a better man in me."
There was what I have learned to call the light of all-wisdom inPolly's eyes when she answered.
"Oh, if one must lean altogether upon sheer logic and the purematerialism of this divided by that and multiplied by something else,"she returned. "But there are two kinds of regeneration, Jimmie, dear;the kind which involves a radical change in the life-motive, and theother which is merely a stripping of the husks from a strong soul thatnever needed changing."
"Your love would put me where I don't belong," I protested humbly.
"No; not my love: what you are, and what you have done."
"What I am, you have made me; and what I have done you have suggested.No; the injustice, the prison, the brand of the convict, the dodgingand evading, the knowledge that, if the truth were to be blazonedabroad, I could never hope to recross the chasm which Judge Haskins'ssentence had opened between me and the world at large; these thingsmade a shuddering coward of me--which I was not in the beginning. Itwas this prison-bred cowardice that made me potentially Kellow'smurderer, willing in heart and mind, and waiting only for the firingspark of provocation. It was the same cowardice that made me AgathaGeddis's slave, and very nearly her murderer. Worse still, it sent meto you with sealed lips when I should have told you all that you had aright to know."
"Well? If you will have it so, what then?"
"Only this: that the brand which the law put upon the man wasn't anysign of the cross to make a new creature of him, as you have beentrying to make me believe. That's all."
Polly's smile is a thing to make any man tingle to the roots of hishair. "As if the past, or anything in it, could make any difference tous now!" she chided. "Haven't we learned to say:
'Not heaven itself upon the past has power, But what has been, has been, and I have had my hour'?
Beloved man, I'm hungry; and it's miles and miles to dinner. Shall wego?"
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