Rawley

“ The first twelve years of his life had thoroughly accustomed Rawley to the sight of the fierce old man with long hair and his legs cut off at his knees, who sometimes appeared in a wheel chair on a porch of the west wing, attended by an Indian who looked savage enough to scalp a little boy if he ventured too close; a ferocious Indian who scowled and wore his hair parted from forehead to neck and braided in two long braids over his shoulder, and who padded stealthily about the place in beautifully beaded moccasins and fringed buckskin leggings. ”

“ RAWLEY READS THE BIBLE
In his room again, Rawley unlocked his desk and got the two books which were his “legacy.” He was young, and for all his technical training the spirit of romance called to his youth. There was something particularly important, something urgent in the admonition that he should read the Scriptures. Rawley’s training was all against vague speculations. Your mining engineer fights guesswork at every stage of his profession. ”

“ Rawley stated challengingly. “A bit old-fashioned, maybe—a man couldn’t live in a wheel chair for fifty years or so, shut away from all companionship as he has been, and keep his ideas right up to the minute. If you ask me, I’ll say he’d make a corking old pal. Full of pep—or would be if he weren’t crippled. It’s a darned shame I never busted through the feud before. Why, fifty years ago he was all through Nevada—think of that! ”

“ There was a silence, in which the gross impostor shifted heavily in his seat, while a hand twitched across the mouth, and then caught at the breast of the threadbare black coat abstractedly.
Rawley leaned forward, one elbow on a knee, the cheroot in his fingers. He spoke almost confidentially, as to some ignorant and misguided savage—as he had talked to Indian chiefs in his time, when searching for the truth regarding some crime:
“I’ve had a lot of revelations in my time. A lawyer and a doctor always do. ”

“ Rawley was petrified. He knew the forgotten story of James Clifton Welldon, the specialist, turned gambler, who had almost ruined his own brother—the father of Dan and Diana—at cards and dice, and had then ruined himself and disappeared. Here, where his brother had died, he had come years ago and practised medicine as a quack. ”

“ Rawley was finding it rather difficult even yet to bridge the silence of a lifetime.
“You grew up thinking I was crazy, most likely. Easy to say the old man’s touched in the head—when they don’t want to bother with a cripple. You’re a King. Maybe you can guess what it means to be a hulk in a wheel chair. And the Kings never ran after anybody; nor the Rawlinses, your grandmother’s people. Two good names—glad you carry ’em both. If you live up to ’em both you’ll go far. Take care of those two books, boy. Remember what I said—they’re your legacy from King, of the Mounted. ”

“ In an access of enthusiasm over the visit of Garibaldi, Miss Rawley's father died, leaving her the greater part of his fortune and the house in Gordon Square. Miss Rawley was now thirty-four, and her married sisters, aggrieved at the favour shown to her in her father's will, reported that she was thirty-seven, and that she enamelled. This caused some friction, but Miss Rawley's only regret was that she was thus prevented from visiting the houses of her married sisters, and taking toys to her young nieces and nephews; she had a fondness for children that increased with time. ”

“ Flood Rawley called her the Pied Piper of Jansen, and indeed she had a voice that fluted and piped, and yet had so whimsical a note, that the hardest faces softened at the sound of it; and she did not keep its best notes for the few. She was impartial, almost impersonal; no woman was her enemy, and every man was her friend—and nothing more. She had never had an accepted lover since the day her Playmates left her. Every man except one had given up hope that he might win her ”

“ Here. You take these—they’re yours, and all the good you can get out of them. Read ’em both. Read ’em till you get the good that’s in ’em. If you’re a King, you’ll do it.”
He held out two worn little books. Rawley took them, eyeing them queerly. One was a Bible, the old-fashioned, leather-bound pocket size edition, with a metal clasp. The other book was smaller; a diary, evidently, with a leather band going around, the end slipping under a flap to hold it secure.
“I will—you bet!” Rawley made his voice as hearty as his puzzlement would permit. “Thanks, Grandfather.” ”

“ Nevada, when pressed, admitted that she loved pretty things—“And then, the world is so full of people who want to be helped!”
Rawley nodded. “I know. I’ve felt that.”
“And if there is gold to be had, so that they can be helped, I think it’s wicked not to use every ounce of energy we possess to get it, so that we can use it,” she declared with more enthusiasm than Rawley had ever seen her show. “When it’s fought for, just for sake of self-indulgence, it ought to be fought for in the interests of good. ”

“ Rawley’s boot toe struck against something in the loose gravel,—a child’s shoe with the toe worn to a gaping mouth, the heel worn down to the last on the outer edge: dry as a bleached bone, warped by many a storm, blackened, doleful. Even a young man setting out in quest of his fortune, with a picturesque secret code in his pocket, may be forgiven for sending a thought after the child who had scuffed that coarse little shoe down here in El Dorado. ”

“ Any girl would listen to a man like you—a man who's done the things you've done.”
Rawley was no more susceptible to flattery than any nice person ought to be, but this hardly seemed credible. “She probably never heard my name,” he answered.
“Oh, yes, she has. I've talked about you to her—she knows all about what you did in the Caucasus. Tell her what you just said about taking me or leaving me. You could make the African trip sound much more wonderful than I could.” ”

“ But Johnny Buffalo’s life might be hanging on Rawley’s haste. However beautiful, however much she might attract his interest, no girl could tempt him from the chief issue.
By the time she returned with Pickles, Rawley had retrieved Deacon and was gone down the trail with him. She came up in time to help him lift Johnny Buffalo on the burro and tie him there with the pack rope. She was efficient as a man, and almost as strong, Rawley observed. And although she treated the squaw with careful deference, she was plainly the head of their little expedition,—and the shoulders and the brains. ”

“ He became instantly a partisan of the young man, whom, just a moment before, he had thought of as a rather weak, feeble creature—but even as a partisan he wished to be fair. “Has anything happened to change her?” he asked.
The boy shook his head. “We've been engaged three months—perfectly happy—at least I've been. No one can understand it—not even her own mother.”
Rawley sat down beside the boy with an air of brisk decision. He was thought by many people to be a hard man, but by a few to be ridiculously kind and soft-hearted. ”

“ Never before had Rawley seen Young Jess in a rage. A surly, ignorant fellow he knew him to be, and not too intelligent. A dangerous fellow, Rawley believed him; quite capable of killing any man who thwarted him or roused his fury. But Rawley did not move or attempt to placate him. He had learned that some natures must blow up a great storm before they can yield. He hoped that this was the case with Young Jess.
The old vulture craned his neck forward, his eyes piercingly malevolent.
“Think I’ve waited fifty year fer that gold, t’ be robbed of it now? ”

“ I want two thousand dollars to help a friend in a hole, and I mean to have it—if you think your neck’s worth it.”
Teeth, wonderfully white, showed through the shaggy beard. “If I had to go to prison—or swing, as you say, do you think I’d go with my mouth shut? I’d not pay up alone. The West would crack—holy Heaven, I know enough to make it sick. Go on and see! I’ve got the West in my hand.” He opened and shut his fingers with a grimace of cruelty which shook Rawley in spite of himself. ”

“ They reached the head of that gulch, climbed a steep, high ridge where they must use hands as well as feet in the climbing, and dug heels into the earth in a descent even steeper. Rawley told himself once that he would just as soon start out to follow a crow through this country as to follow Johnny Buffalo. One word had evidently been omitted from the Indian’s English education by Grandfather King,—the word “detour.” Rawley thought of the straight-forward march of locusts he had once read about and wondered if Johnny Buffalo had taken lessons from them in his youth. ”

“ While he and Young Jess think I’m a Cramer, they will listen to me. I can keep things straight here. If they knew the truth, I’d probably have to leave.” He lighted the cigarette, and Rawley watched his face revealed for a moment by the flare of the match.
“Boy,” he went on, turning toward Rawley, “I’ve got to stay. I’ve grown up, I’ve spent my whole life dreaming of the dam. It isn’t what we’ll get out of it, altogether, though it’s human and natural to want the gold, too. It’s the dam. ”

“ THE EAGLE LOOKS UPON A GREAT RIVER
Rawley drove down El Dorado Canyon, now silent in mid-afternoon, with not a sound of stamp mill or compressor or the mingled voices of men at work. Techatticup stood forlorn, deserted save by one old man who bore himself proudly because he was the guardian there. The war, the labor question, the slump in metals, had done their work. It seemed to Rawley as if the nation were taking a long breath, making ready to go forward again more resistlessly than before. He missed Johnny Buffalo terribly ”

“ Rawley was rolling the nuggets in his hand, staring at them abstractedly.
“It’s queer—the whole thing,” he said finally. “I feel a sort of leaning toward Grandfather. It was something in his eyes. You know, Mother, it must be darned tough to have both legs chopped off at the knees when you’re a young husky over six feet in your socks and full of pep. I—believe I can understand Grandfather King. ‘A hunk of meat in a wheel chair’—that’s what he called himself. ”

“ He started when Johnny Buffalo spoke at his elbow. How the Indian had reached that spot unheard and unseen Rawley did not know. Johnny Buffalo was pointing to the north.
“I think that high mountain is where we must go,” he said. “It is one day’s travel. We can go to-day when the sun is behind the mountains, and we can walk until the stars are here. Very early in the morning we can walk again, and before it is too hot we can reach the trees where it will be cool.”
“We have a lot of grub and things in the car,” Rawley objected. ”

“ He’s been saving every grain he could scrape together, for fifty years, Rawley. And it’s a good claim—group of claims, rather. No one in the country has ever dreamed that we’ve done more than scratch a living here. Some day, when your arm is well, I’ll show you. Yes, he has his million.
“For a long time, now—several years—we’ve been getting ready for the dam. That tunnel you saw is part of the work. When you’re better, I’d like to take you through our workings and see what we’ve done and what we expect to do. ”

“ If you spend a fortune throwing rock into the river and fail to dam the flow so that you can carry on whatever operations you have in mind on the river bed below, you will be worse off than if you had not started. Therefore, I’m going to tell you how I think you should do it.”
“In other words, ‘Don’t do it—but if you do do it, do it this way,’” Nevada murmured mischievously.
“Something like that,” Rawley grinned. “In the first place, your work is far from finished. You will have to put in relievers, to break the rock between your crosscuts and the face. ”

“ And the fact that the stream flowed right into the Colorado may have given him his first idea of gathering the gold that had washed on into the river. If you come with me, I’ll show you.”
“I can’t be too long,” said Rawley. “Johnny Buffalo’s up on top, waiting for me to come back with my pockets full of gold. It’s going to be hard on the old man, especially since Grandfather’s gold went into the clutches of Old Jess. I don’t know that I’d better tell him. At the same time,” he mused aloud, “I can’t tell him that there isn’t any gold; he is so firmly convinced that his sergeant told the truth. ”

“ Rawley laid his fingers on Nevada’s hand, where she held Pickles by the bridle. He looked straight into her eyes, bright with anger. His own eyes pleaded with her.
“Miss Macalister, please don’t be obstinate. To let you go back up that trail is unthinkable. I am going, and some one must be with my partner. I can make the trip well under two hours; there is heavy stuff in that ditch which needs a man’s shoulder under it, getting it back into the trail. Please stay with Johnny Buffalo, won’t you?” ”

“ Rawley continued; “and you’ve kept a lot of people in the West from passing in their cheques before their time. You’ve rooked ‘em, chiselled ‘em out of a lot of cash, too. There was old Lamson—fifteen hundred for the goitre on his neck; and Mrs. Gilligan for the cancer—two thousand, wasn’t it? Tincture of Lebanon leaves you called the medicine, didn’t you? You must have made fifty thousand or so in the last ten years.”
“What I’ve made I’ll keep,” was the guttural answer, and the talon-like fingers clawed the table.
“You’ve made people pay high for curing them, saving them sometimes ”

“ I love—nobody. I jus’ laugh all time—when them so’jers make the love. Then I see—Jawge—my Sah-geant King. He is king to me. Tall—big—strong—all time laughing—making love with blue eyes—like you—all time make love—with eyes—to Nevada. I know them eyes—I have lived—to look—in them eyes.”
“I don’t do anything of the kind,” Rawley protested, confusion crimsoning his face. “I’ve always tried—”
“Eyes like them eyes—no tell lies. Woman eyes see—things they tell. ”