Agnes C. Laut

“ Sights and sounds that have been a setting for sorrow, haunt the mind. After that day, Eleanor could never hear the hammer of the woodpecker, the lone cry of circling hawk, the whistling of the solitary mountain marmot, without hearing also the thin treble of the Indian pupils breaking and silencing on that funeral hymn till only the mother's voice sang clarion to the end. She heard the low melting trill of the blue bird and the wrangling rasp of the jay—true and counterfeit, peace and discord—had God put right and wrong in the world for the friction of the conflict between, to develop souls? ”

“ Chuck those damfool theories, Wayland! Chuck them, I tell you! Get down to business, man! What are you howling about timber for posterity for? If you don't look alive, you'll go lean frying fat for posterity! Oh, rot, the thing makes me so tired I can't talk about it! Come down to my ranch. I want a thorough man! I want a man who can fight like the devil if he has to and handle that gang in the cow camp with branding irons! I want 'em run out, do you hear? They're blackguards! I want a man that's a man; and, for pay, you can name your own price. I'll want a partner as I grow older. ”

“ The same lanes of gold-sifted light leading over the edge of the world through the aisled evergreens, but at the end a glint as of emerald, the sheen of water with the metal glister of green enamel, water marbled like onyx or malachite, with the reflection of a snow cross and dun gray shadows—shadows of deer standing motionless at the opening of the aisled trees—come out from the forest at sundown to their drinking place. Lane of light? It had been a lane of delight; and that was what all life might be but for the Satyr shadows lurking along the trail. ”

“ The sun was coming up over the Rim Rocks in a half fan of fire; and the light was on the Ridge; and all the silver cataracts tossing down the sheer wall shone wind-blown spray against the evergreens. The Valley widened as it dropped to the leap and fume and swirl of the foaming river; and the double tandem grays kept step with a proud chacking up of heads and bristling of arched necks and movement of thigh and shoulder muscles under satin skin like shuttles.
"You must be very proud of your beautiful horses," she said to the driver. ”

“ He had vowed himself to a life apart and then his humanity, his weakness, his need had sealed the vow of renunciation in the fires that forged eternally their beings into one. But this, this was the Hand from Outside on which we never reckon and which always comes; the Destiny Thing which Man's Will denies, wrenching the forging asunder. Was it right for him to risk their lives farther in the Desert now; it affected her life now; and that was exactly what his common sense had foreseen: the fighter must fight alone. Love might send forth; but love must not be suffered to draw back. ”

“ Of such dreams does creation spring full born and enfleshed. Of such dreams does heroism laugh at death. Of such dreams does life invest the daily round with rain-bow mist, with the spectrum gamut of all the colors that blend to the pure white light of daily life. As a lense splits up light, so love had brought out the hidden colors of existence, of eternity; as she dreamed, eternity itself seemed short.
Then came the restlessness that had shaken Wayland on the Ridge the night before, the fire that tests the vessel ”

“ They worked slowly to the crest of the sand roll, zig-zagging to break the steepness. An ash-colored shadow skulked along the tracks of the outlaw trail. The little mule gave a squealing hind kick. The shadow looked back: it was a coyote, scenting the tracks of the drovers' lame horse. It went loping over the sand a blurr of gray.
"Curious thing that, Wayland! Notice the antics of the mule? Always see that in a range bred beast, centuries of ham stringing."
The Ranger did not answer. The sand was no longer heaving in waves. It was running, sliding like the glossy surface of the sea. ”

“ Personally, I am a great deal more interested in the modern tussle for a promised land than in those old time frays for a fertile patch in a sterile wilderness; and I see the same call for the hero's fighting edge; and I like the MacDonalds, who jump out from behind the Safety Line to fight for right, though it bring but the bloody bullet holes in the soft of the temple; and I like the Waylands, who take up the game trail to run down crime though it bring the sword of dismissal dangling over their own heads ”

“ Where the cut-way widened and lost itself in an alkali sink, the hoof prints of the fugitives' horses led out again to the open country of gray torrid earth dotted by sage brush and greasewood. The yellow sky met the ochre panting earth in a tremulous heat mist of wavering purple; and against that sky line, a swirl of dust marked the receding figures of the riders.
"There they go, Wayland! It's a case of who lasts out now! If we can only keep pushing them ahead, this heat wull do the rest." ”

“ Wayland stopped pacing. He almost stopped thinking. The consciousness, the realizing sense of her presence, of her touch, of a something more than her touch, of her being enveloping his in some ethereal fire, went over the Ranger in fiercely tender flood tides; this time, not in tumultuous confused desire, but in waves of strength, in visions from which the mists had vanished, daring that laughed with gladness over life. There were no longer two Waylands in conflict, with one sneering and looking on. "A house divided against itself shall fall." ”

“ As if one man, as if one generation of men, could stay the workings of the laws of eternal righteousness by refusing to heed, any more than one man's will could stop an avalanche by refusing to heed the law of the snowflake!
Calamity, the little withered half-breed woman, slipped in and out of the Forester's cabin tidying up bachelor confusion. The wind suffed through the evergreens in dream voices, pansy-soft to the touch. The slow-swaying evergreens rocked to a rhythm old as Eternity, Druid priests standing guard over the sacrament of love and night. ”

“ The mule stood munching near. The old frontiersman slept heavily, his face troubled and upturned to the sky. Wayland noticed the livid tinge of the lips, the shadows round the eye sockets, the protuberance of veins on the backs of the old man's hands. The sky seemed to come down lower as the red twilight darkened; and he could hear not a sound but the crunch of the grazing mule and the slow drop, drop, drop of the water seeping from the terra cotta ledge. The stars were beginning to prick through the indigo darkness. In another hour, it would be bright enough to travel by starlight ”

“ The old man had been like the storm wind of the mountains hurling off the dead leaves of thought. Wayland paused in his pacing. The opal peak emerged from pearl gray cloud wrack; a silver cross, translucent, unreal, luminous, a thing of dreams winged with silver light beneath a solitary star, eternal as God. And the night wind through the pines, that had sounded so doleful but a moment before, became the jubilant clicking of countless castanets, the castanets of the long pine needles, sounding a triumphant chant to the touch of invisible hands. ”

“ Across the mesas, the silt dust and sand drift still whirled in fitful gusts; but the air no longer carried the scorch of burning oil. The sky that had blazed all day in fiery brass darkened and closed near to earth, a throbbing thing of the Desert night brooding over life: a oneness of space rimmed round by the red sky line.
"Hullo," exclaimed Wayland, pointing to the bank. "We are not so far behind: there is the freshly opened cache."
Where the cutway caved to a hollow lay a hole littered with empty cans and canvas bags. ”

“ On the instant, the hollow chasm of the canyon split to the crash of a rifle shot that rocketted and quaked and repeated in splintering echoes; and a bullet pinged at Wayland's feet.
"That's splitting the air for you—Wayland."
"Drop down, Sir," urged the Ranger, pulling the old frontiersman to shelter of the upper rocks. "They have come out above. They have heard that cursed stone. That's only a chance shot to learn where we are. They can't come behind. ”

“ Then she thought of the Senator and his genial smile and his voice soft as a woman's, and his love of flowers. He, too, must have his vein of heroism, if one could only find it. She thought and thought as the tandem grays arched their necks at the sound of the tramway bells in the nearing city; thought and thought, vague wordless thoughts full of hope; vague womanish thoughts that women have thought since time began of finding that magic vein of heroism in the Man that is to transmute slag into gold, hog into human, and greed into generosity, and lust into love ”

“ There was almost a smile on the lips; and one hand hung as if fallen from the windlass handle. A suspicion flashed through Wayland's mind. He could hardly give it credence. It was preposterous, unbelievable, like a page from the lawlessness of the frontier a hundred years ago! Yet hadn't this thing happened in California, and happened in Alaska? They would never dare to murder a man conducting an investigation ordered by the great Government of the greatest Nation on earth! ”

“ While the old man still pondered mazed and dumb, the Ranger dabbled the cups and plates in the River and recinched the pack saddle, the little mule blowing out his sides and groaning to ease the girth, the bronchos wisely eating to the process of reharnessing. The Britisher's reverence for law dies hard. Wayland saw the wrestle and kept silent. A deep low boom rolled dully through the earth in smothered rumblings and tremblings like distant thunder. ”

“ The Ranger stooped and pressed his lips to the blood-blotched back of the faithful shrivelled old hand. He did not shed a tear. We weep only when we are half hurt.
Wayland seized the Service axe and uncased his own rifle. Then in words that were not worshipful, not bending his knees, but standing with his hat off, he uttered what may have been a prayer, or may have been blasphemy. I leave you to judge: "By God, if there is a God, why doesn't He waken up? If there is a God, does He stand for right? Is there such a thing as Right; or is Right the dream of fools? I want to know! ”

“ The mule no longer ambled ahead with ears pointed. He shuffled through the ash with dragging steps; and the sage brush crackled brittle where the trail led out from the silt across the baked earth. The heat waves writhed and throbbed through the atmosphere, a flame through a sieve, with a scorch of burning from the ground and clouds of dust like smoke.
"I think I'll get off and walk," said Wayland, suiting the action to the word. "I hope those blackguards are counting on camping at a spring to-night." ”

“ Every mile was a mile deeper into the eternity of her love . . . he knew that; but he also knew that the fulfilment of duty meant renunciation. Was it the cry of the flesh? Wayland scoffed the thought. Flesh in the frontier West doesn't take the trouble to wear fig-leaf signs. It is blazoning, bold, unashamed, known for what it is; but there is no confusion of values. He who wills takes what he wills and wears the mark. Wayland had been long enough away from the confused values of more civilized lands to know belladonna eyes from starlight; and he knew what his being craved was not carrion. ”

“ Wayland had once asked Bat Brydges these questions. Bat had looked pained at the Ranger's obtuseness.
"Wayland," he had exclaimed, "who is Uncle Sam? I am Uncle Sam! You are Uncle Sam! We are all Uncle Sam! That's the beauty of democracy! This property you are howling about is yours and mine; and when we go in and develop it, we are only taking what is our own."
"What about the fellow who isn't in on a share?"
"Share? Quit talking Socialism," Bat had commanded with a grand gesture, leaving Wayland wondering who were the real Socialists in the Nation. ”

“ Mobocracy versus Plutocracy! I'm only a cog in the wheel, myself, a mere marker for the big counters, my boy; but if I have to put up with the tyranny of one or t'other, I'm damned if I don't prefer the tyranny of the rich to the tyranny of the poor, any day! Why, is any man poor in this country, Brydges? Because he's a damned incompetent unfit swinish hog, too lazy to plant and hoe his own row; so he gets the husks of the corn while the competent man gets the cob—the cob with the corn on, you bet, number one, Silver King, Hard, seventy cents a bushel! ”

“ Would this struggle open the doors to a new life; or would the powers that stood for law and right go on marking time inside the firing line, while the powers that stood for wrong and outrage held their course rampant, unchecked; straining the law not to protect right but to extend wrong; perverting the courts; stealing where they chose to steal; killing where they chose to kill; deluging the land with anarchy by sweeping away law, just as surely as the removal of the sluice gates would set loose flood waters? ”

“ Coming back, they struck across to the Western Desert road, and travelled from belt to belt of the irrigation farms, with their orange-green cottonwood groves and bluish-green alfalfa fields and little match box houses stuck out of sight among peach orchards. The parched-earth, burnt-oil smell gave place to the minty odor of hay in wind rows, with the cool water tang of the big irrigation ditch flowing liquid gold in the yellow August light. ”

“ The workmen who vote own those trees! Do you know the Smelter Lumber Company takes all for nothing, half a million of it a year? Do you know that Smelter, itself, is built on two-thousand acres of coal lands—stolen—stolen from the Government as clearly as if the Smelter teams had hauled it from a Government coal pit? Do you know there isn't a man in the Land Office who hasn't urged and urged and urged the Government to sue for restitution of that steal, and headquarters pretend to be doubtful so that the Statute of Limitations will intervene? ”

“ Wayland laid the old head on the pillowed pack trees, fitting rest for frontiersman of the wilderness; then he stood up to think! A terrible passion of tenderness, of question, of defiance to God, rushed through his thoughts. The animals take their tragedies dumb and uncomplaining. Man alone has not learned the futility of shouting impotent reproaches at a brazen sky.
The Ranger unsaddled the pony. Then he tethered the mule and broncho by separate ropes to the boulders. ”

“ If the light died from her eye, it would die from his life. He was not a Silenus to guzzle hog-like over husks when the life had gone. Besides—Wayland laughed aloud—the idea of her nature permitting a Silenus near enough to breathe the same atmosphere that she breathed was inconceivable. There was one chance—one chance only—Get the issue before the People, squarely, fairly, openly before the People; awaken the People; mass the law of the snow flake to the mighty rush of the avalanche; let the People know, force the People to pronounce the verdict. ”

“ The old frontiersman had picked up coat and boots flung aside the night before. He stood holding by his horse's mane looking down. "And this is a white man's land," he said. "To this have y' prostituted freedom bought by th' blood of saints an' martyrs? Not in th' heat o' passion, but for filthy gain, has a free people come to this? The heads o' kings fell on the bloody block for less crime in days not so soft spoken as these. Is y'r freedom, freedom to right or to wrong? Is it to send y'r Nation smash over the precipice? Wayland, is this Democracy?" ”

“ The man in the sheep-skin-chaps clubbed his rifle at the galloping pony. The pinto reared, flung back, pitched over the edge of the Rim Rocks. Then the cloud blot, earth and air sponged into the wet blur of a washed slate, shrieking furies of peltering rain, a roar of the hurricane wind, a blinding flash, the air torn to tatters! The cloud burst hurled down in sheets, the red clay road runnelling flood torrents. ”

“ Besides, memory that merged to conscious realization was playing in lambent flames through his whole being round the form of the figure against the skyline of the Ridge.
The light of the cow-boy camp blinked through the lilac mist of the Valley. A veil impalpable as dreams hovered over the River. The boom and roll of a snow cornice falling somewhere in the Gorge behind the Holy Cross came in dull rolling muffled thunder through the spruce forests. ”