George W. Ogden

“ A man makes his own Fortunate Isles, as that shaggy old gray poet knew so well.
For a moment Mark Thorn was forgotten as Macdonald repeated, in low voice above his breath:
Lo! These are the isles of the watery miles
That God let down from the firmament.
Lo! Duty and Love, and a true man’s trust;
Your forehead to God and your feet in the dust—
Yes, that was his country; it had taken hold of him with that grip which no man ever has shaken his heart free from, no matter how many seas he has placed between its mystic lure and his back-straining soul. ”

“ But Frances Landcraft was not afraid of the night as she rode silently through it with Banjo Gibson at her side. There was no shudder in it for her as there had been on the night that Nola was stolen; it could not have raised up a terror grim enough to turn her back upon the road.
Her one thought was that she must reach Macdonald before Chadron and King could find him, and tell him that the troops were coming, and that he was to be trapped into firing upon them. She knew that many lives depended upon her endurance, courage, and strategy; many lives, but most of all Alan Macdonald’s life. ”

“ The man at the door had entered, and was jangling his spurs through the hall in hasty stride. Chadron stood as if frozen in his boots, his face growing whiter than wounded, blood-drained Macdonald’s on his cot of pain.
Now the sound of the newcomer’s voice rose in the hall, loud and stern. But harsh as it was, and unfriendly to that house, the sound of it made Frances’ heart jump, and something big and warm rise in her and sweep over her; dimming her eyes with tears.
“Where’s my daughter, Chadron, you cutthroat! Where’s Miss Landcraft? If the lightest hair of her head has suffered, by God! ”

“ Fire has but one mood, no matter what it cheers or destroys. It always laughs. There is no melancholy note in it, no drab, dull color of death such as the flood comes tainted with. Even while it eats away our homes and possessions, it has a certain comfort in its touch and glow if we stand far enough away.
Dawn broadened; the watery light came in like cold. Frances got up, shivering a little at the unfriendly look of the morning. She thought she heard a cautious foot stealing away from the window, and turned from it with contemptuous recollection of Chadron’s threat to set spies over her. ”

“ Saul Chadron and his daughter Nola came riding out of the Fort Shakie road, their horses in that tireless, swinging gallop which the animals of that rare atmosphere can maintain for hours. As he rode, Chadron swung his quirt in unison with the horse’s undulations, from side to side across its neck, like a baton. He sat as stiff and solid in his saddle as a carved image. Nola came on neck and neck with him, on the side of the road nearer Macdonald.
Macdonald was carrying a rifle in addition to his side arms, and he was a dusty grim figure to come upon suddenly afoot in the high road. ”

“ Frances held her shivering slim body in her supporting arm, and Nola’s face bent down upon her shoulder. It seemed that her renunciation was complete, her regeneration undeniable. But Frances knew that a great flood of tears was required to put out the fire of passion in a woman’s heart. One spark, one little spark, might live through the deluge to spring into the heat of the past under the breath of memory. ”

“ Stealthily his hand moved toward his revolver, while his wife and daughter, even Frances, struck by a thrill of some undefined terror, leaned and looked as Chadron was looking, toward the open door.
A tall, gaunt, dark shaggy man was standing there, an old flapping hat drooping over his scowling eyes. He was a man with a great branching mustache, and the under lid of one eye was drawn down upon his cheek in a little point, as if caught by a surgical hook and held ready for the knife; a man who bent forward from the middle, as if from long habit of skulking under cover of low-growing shrubs ”

“ Just to think I’ll never hear them songs no more breaks my heart, Banjo—plumb breaks my heart!”
As she passed Banjo she laid her hand on his head in a manner of benediction, and tears were in her eyes.
The sun was out again when they had finished lunch, coaxing autumn on into November at the peril of frosted toes. Mrs. Chadron had brightened considerably, also. Even bereavement and sorrow could not shake her fealty to chili, and now it was rewarding her by a rubbing of her old color in her face as she sat by the window and waited for Banjo to tune his instruments for the parting songs. ”

“ Frances rose out of her sleep with readjusted reasoning; in fear, and in doubt.
She was shocked by the surrender that she had made to that unknown man. Perhaps he was nothing more than a thief, as charged, and this story fixing his identification had been only a fabrication. An honest man would have had no necessity for such haste, such wild insistence of his right to love her. It seemed, in the light of due reflection, the rude way of an outlawed hand.
Then there came the soft pleading of something deeper to answer for Alan Macdonald, and to justify his rash deed. ”

“ IF HE WAS A GENTLEMAN
“Don’t you think we’d better drop it now, Frances, and be good?”
Major King reined his horse near hers as he spoke, and laid his hand on the pommel of her saddle as if he expected to meet other fingers there.
“You puzzle me, Major King,” she returned, not willing to understand.
They were bringing up the rear of the tired procession which was returning to the post from the ball. Already the east was quickening. The stars near the horizon were growing pale; the morning wind was moving, with a warmth in it from the low places, like a tide toward the mountains. ”

“ Frances was chilled with the horror of that brigandish act. Every movement of the wind in the bushes made her skin crinkle and creep; every sound 164 of animals in barn and corral was magnified into some new danger. Mrs. Chadron was in far worse state, with reason, certainly, for being so. Now that the stimulation of her first wild outburst had been exhausted, she stood wilted and weak, shivering with her hands over her eyes, moaning and moaning in piteous low wail.
Frances took the lantern from old Alvino’s shaking hand. ”

“ Her heart was as unstable as mercury, it seemed. Frances despised her for her fickleness, scorned her for the mean face of friendship over the treachery of her soul. Not that she regretted Major King. Nola was free to take him and make the most of him. But she was not to come in as a wedge to rive her from this man.
Let her pay her debt of gratitude in something else than love. Living or dead, Alan Macdonald was not for Nola Chadron. ”

“ Chadron kept up a moaning like an infant whose distress no mind can read, no hand relieve. Now and then she burst into a shrill and sudden cry, and time and again she imagined that she heard Nola calling her, and dashed off along the road with answering shout, to come back to her sad vigil at the gate by and by on Frances’ arm, crushed by this one great and sudden sorrow of her life. ”

“ A hail from the gate startled Macdonald. It was the custom of the homesteaders in that country, carried with them from the hills of Missouri and Arkansas, to sit in their saddles at a neighbor’s gate and call him to the door with a long “hello-o-oh!” It was the password of friendship in that raw land; a cowboy never had been known to stoop to its use. Cowboys rode up to a homesteader’s door when they had anything to say to him, and hammered on it with their guns. ”

“ Feeling, delicacy, in those smeared, smelling creatures! Surliness in excess they might have, but dignity, not at all. Were they not there as beggars to receive bounty from the government’s hand?
“Oh, there’s Mrs. Mathews!” said Nola, with the eagerness of a child who has found a quail’s nest in the grass. She was off at an angle, like a hunter on the scent. Colonel Landcraft and his guest followed with equal rude eagerness, and the others swept after them, Frances alone hanging back. Major King was at Nola’s side. ”

“ Go back to your wild riding, Macdonald, and try to live an honest man.”
Macdonald stood with his head bent, brows gathered in stubborn expression of resistance. Colonel Landcraft could read in his face that there was no surrender, no acknowledgment of defeat, in that wild rider’s heart. The old warrior felt a warming of admiration for him, as one brave man feels for another, no matter what differences lie between them. Now Macdonald lifted his face, and there was that deep movement of laughter in his eyes that Frances had found so marvelous on the day of their first meeting. ”

“ Chadron’s voice was dry-sounding and far up in his throat. He drew his revolver with a quick jerk that seemed nothing more 116 than a slight movement of the shoulder. Quick as he was—and few in the cattlemen’s baronies were ahead of him there—Macdonald was quicker. The muzzle of Chadron’s pistol was still in the leather when Macdonald’s weapon was leveled at his eyes.
“Drop that gun!”
A moment Chadron’s arm hung stiffly in that half-finished movement, while his eyes gave defiance. He had not bent before any man in many a year of growing power. ”

“ Frances slowed her horse as if overcome by a sudden indecision, and turned in her saddle to look back again. Again she had let him go away from her misunderstood, his high pride hurt, his independent heart too lofty to bend down to the mean adjustment to be reached through argument or explanation. One must accept Alan Macdonald for what his face proclaimed him to be. She knew that now. He was not of the mean-spirited who walk among men making apology for their lives. ”

“ The rough-cheeked girls of that high-wind country were well enough for cowboys to swing in their wild dances; just a rung above the squaws on the reservation in the matter of loquacity and of gum. Hardly the sort for a man who had the memory of white gloves and gleaming shoulders, and the traditions of the service to maintain.
Of course there was the exception of Nola Chadron, but she was not of Meander and the railroad’s end, and she came only in flashes of summer 13 brightness, like a swift, gay bird. ”

“ Chadron surrendered again to her keen appreciation of the humor in that situation. Frances felt now that she understood the attitude of the cattlemen toward the homesteaders as she never had even sensed it before. Here was this motherly woman, naturally good at heart and gentle, hardened and blinded by her prejudices until she could discuss murder as a thing desired, and the extirpation of a whole community as a just and righteous deed. ”

“ The white gate was swinging as the invaders had left it, and in the soft ground beyond it they found tracks.
“Only one man!” said Mrs. Chadron, bending over.
“There’s only one track,” said Frances, her breath so feeble, her heart laboring so weakly that she believed that she must die.
Alvino came up, and took the lead in tracking, with the aptness for that trick that goes with primitive minds such as his. Even in the farthest glimmer of the light he could pick up the trail, and soon he led them to the willows where the ravisher’s horse had been concealed. ”

“ Of course, there remained the matter of the glove. A man might have been expected to die before yielding it to another, as she had said, speaking out of a hot heart, he knew. There was a more comfortable thought for Alan Macdonald as he went down the long slope with the western sun on his face; not a thought of dying for a glove, but of living to win the hand that it had covered.
Chadron’s ranchhouse was several miles to the westward of him, although it appeared nearer by the trickery of that clear light. ”

“ No, there was not much over at Meander, at the railroad’s end, to cheer a soldier’s heart. It was an inspiring ride, in these autumn days, to come to Meander, past the little brimming lakes, which seemed to lie without banks in the green meadows where wild elk fed with the shy Indian cattle; over the white hills where the earth gave under the hoofs like new-fallen snow. ”

“ It was the steel of conventionality against the flint of womanly defiance. Major King started in his saddle, as if to reach out and restrain her. It was one of those defiantly foolish little things which women and men—especially women—do in moments of pique, and Frances knew it at the time. But she rode away from the major with a hot flush of insubordination in her cheeks, and Alan Macdonald quickened from his pensive pose when he saw her coming. ”

“ The gloom of the situation bore heavily upon him; he felt the uselessness of his fight. He recalled the words of Frances Landcraft: “There must be millions behind the cattlemen.” He felt that he never had realized the weight of millions, iniquitous millions, before that hour. They formed a barrier which his shoulder seemed destined never to overturn.
There he was, on that broad heath, afoot and alone, hunting, and hunted by a slayer of men, one who stalked him as he would a wolf or a lion for the 92 bounty upon his head. ”