Lee Virginia Wetherford began her return journey into the mountain West with exultation. From the moment she opened her car-window that August morning in Nebraska the plain called to her, sustained her illusions. It was all quite as big, as tawny, as she remembered it—fit arena for the epic deeds in which her father had been a leader bold and free.
Her memories of Roaring Fork and its people were childish and romantic. She recalled, vividly, the stagecoach which used to amble sedately, not to say wheezily, from the railway to the Fork and from the Fork back to the railway, in the days when she had ridden away in it a tearful, despairing, long-limbed girl, and fully expected to find it waiting for her at Sulphur City, with old Tom Quentan still as its driver.
The years of absence had been years of growth, and though she had changed from child to woman in these suns and moons, she could not think of the Fork as anything other than the romantic town she had left—a list wherein spurred and steel-girt cow-men strode lamely over uneven sidewalks, or swooped, like the red nomads of the desert, in mad troops through the starlit night.
The first hint of “the new West” came to her by way of the pretentious Hotel Alma, which stood opposite the station at Sulphur, and to which she was led by a colored porter of most elaborate and kindly manners.
This house, which furnished an excellent dinner and an absorbing mixture of types both American and European, was vaguely disturbing to her. It was plainly not of the old-time West—the West her father had dominated in the days “before the invasion.” It was, indeed, distinctly built for the tourist trade, and was filled with all that might indicate the comfortable nearness of big game and good fishing.
Upon inquiry as to the stage, she was amazed to hear that an automobile now made the journey to the Fork in five hours, and that it left immediately after the midday meal.
This was still more disconcerting than the hotel, but the closer she came to the ride, the more resigned she became, for she began to relive the long hours of torture on the trip outward, during which she had endured clouds of dust and blazing heat. There were some disadvantages in the old stage, romantic as her conception of it had been. Furthermore, the coach had gone; so she made application for her seat at once.
At two o’clock, as the car came to the door, she entered it with a sense of having stepped from one invading chariot of progress to another, so big and shining and up to date was its glittering body, shining with brass and glowing with brave red paint. It was driven, also, by a small, lean young fellow, whom the cowboys on her father’s ranch would have called a “lunger,” so thin and small were his hands and arms. He was quite as far from old Tom Quentan as the car was from the coach on which he used to perch.
The owner of the machine, perceiving under Virginia’s veil a girl’s pretty face, motioned her to the seat with the driver, and rode beside her for a few minutes (standing on the foot-board), to inquire if she were visiting friends in the Fork.
“Yes,” she replied, curtly, “I am.”
Something in her tone discouraged him from further inquiry, and he soon dropped away.
The seats were apparently quite filled with men, when at the last moment a middle-aged woman, with a penetrating, nasal, drawling utterance, inquired if she were expected to be “squoze in betwixt them two strange men on that there back seat.”
Lee Virginia turned, and was about to greet the woman as an old acquaintance when something bold and vulgar in the complaining vixen’s face checked the impulse.
The stage-agent called her “Miss McBride,” and with exaggerated courtesy explained that travel was heavy, and that he had not known that she was intending to go.
One of the men, a slender young fellow, moved to the middle of the seat, and politely said, “You can sit on the outside, madam.”
She clambered in with doleful clamor. “Well, I never rode in one of these pesky things before, and if you git me safe down to the Fork I’ll promise never to jump the brute another time.”
A chuckle went ’round the car; but it soon died out, for the new-comer scarcely left off talking for the next three hours, and Virginia was very glad she had not claimed acquaintanceship.
As they whirled madly down the valley the girl was astonished at the transformation in the hot, dry land. Wire fences ran here and there, enclosing fields of alfalfa and wheat where once only the sage-brush and the grease-wood grew. Painted farm-houses shone on the banks of the creeks, and irrigating ditches flashed across the road with an air of business and decision.
For the first half-hour it seemed as if the dominion of the cattle-man had ended, but as the swift car drew away from the valley of the Bear and climbed the divide toward the north, the free range was disclosed, with few changes, save in the cattle, which were all of the harmless or hornless variety, appearing tame and spiritless in comparison with the old-time half-wild broad-horn breeds.
No horsemen were abroad, and nothing was heard but the whirr of the motor and the steady flow of the garrulous woman behind. Not till the machine was descending the long divide to the west did a single cowboy come into view to remind the girl of the heroic past, and this one but a symbol—a figure of speech. Leaning forward upon his reeling, foaming steed, he spurred along the road as if pursued, casting backward apprehensive glances, as if in the brassy eyes of the car he read his doom—the doom of all his kind.
Some vague perception of this symbolism came into Virginia’s thought as she watched the swift and tireless wheels swallow the shortening distance between the heels of the flying pony and the gilded seat in which she sat. Vain was the attempt to outride progress. The rider pulled out, and as they passed him the girl found still greater significance in the fact that he was one of her father’s old-time cowboys—a grizzled, middle-aged, light-weight centaur whom she would not have recognized had not the driver called him by his quaint well-known nickname.
Soon afterward the motor overhauled and passed the battered stage lumbering along, bereft of its passengers, sunk to the level of carrying the baggage for its contemptuous aristocratic supplanter; and as Lee Virginia looked up at the driver, she caught the glance of a simple-minded farm-boy looking down at her. Tom Quentan no longer guided the plunging, reeling broncos on their swift and perilous way—he had sturdily declined to “play second fiddle to a kerosene tank.”
Lee began to wonder if she should find the Fork much changed—her mother was a bad correspondent.
Her unspoken question, opportunely asked by another, was answered by Mrs. McBride. “Oh, Lord, yes! Summer tourists are crawlin’ all over us sence this otto line began. ’Pears like all the bare-armed boobies and cross-legged little rips in Omaha and Denver has jest got to ride in and look us over. Two of them new hotels in Sulphur don’t do a thing but feed these tenderfeet. I s’pose pro-hi-bition will be the next grandstand-play on the part of our town-lot boomers. We old cow-punchers don’t care whether the town grows or not, but these hyer bankers and truck-farmers are all for raisin’ the price o’ land and taxin’ us quiet fellers out of our boots.”
Virginia winced a little at this, for it flashed over her that all the women with whom she had grown up spoke very much in this fashion—using breeding terms almost as freely as the ranchers themselves. It was natural enough. What else could they do in talking to men who knew nothing but cows? And yet it was no longer wholly excusable even to the men, who laughed openly in reply.
The mountains, too, yielded their disappointment. For the first hour or two they seemed lower and less mysterious than of old. They neither wooed nor threatened—only the plain remained as vast and as majestic as ever. The fences, the occasional farms in the valleys could not subdue its outspread, serene majesty to prettiness. It was still of desert sternness and breadth.
From all these impersonal considerations the girl was brought back to the vital phases of her life by the harsh voice of one of the men. “Lize Wetherford is goin’ to get jumped one o’ these days for sellin’ whiskey without a license. I’ve told her so, too. Everybody knows she’s a-doin’ it, and what beats me is her goin’ along in that way when a little time and money would set her straight with the law.”
The shock of all this lay in the fact that Eliza Wetherford was the mother to whom Lee Virginia was returning after ten years of life in the East, and the significance of the man’s words froze her blood for an instant. There was an accent of blunt truth in his voice, and the mere fact that a charge of such weight could be openly made appalled the girl, although her recollections of her mother were not entirely pleasant.
The young fellow on the back seat slowly said: “I don’t complain of Lize sellin’ bad whiskey, but the grub she sets up is fierce.”
“The grub ain’t so bad; it’s the way she stacks it up,” remarked another. “But, then, these little fly-bit cow-towns are all alike and all bad, so far as hotels are concerned.”
Lee Virginia, crimson and burning hot, was in agony lest they should go further in their criticism.
She knew that her mother kept a boarding-house; and while she was not proud of it, there was nothing precisely disgraceful in it—many widowed women found it the last resort; but this brutal comment on the way in which her business was carried on was like a slash of mud in the face. Her joy in the ride, her impersonal exultant admiration of the mountains was gone, and with flaming cheeks and beating heart she sat, tense and bent, dreading some new and keener thrust.
Happily the conversation turned aside and fell upon the Government’s forest policy, and Sam Gregg, a squat, wide-mouthed, harsh-voiced individual, cursed the action of Ross Cavanagh the ranger in the district above the Fork. “He thinks he’s Secretary of War, but I reckon he won’t after I interview him. He can’t shuffle my sheep around over the hills at his own sweet will.”
The young fellow on the back seat quietly interposed. “You want to be sure you’ve got the cinch on Cavanagh good and square, Sam, or he’ll be a-ridin’ you.”
“He certainly is an arbitrary cuss,” said the old woman. “They say he was one of Teddy’s Rough-riders in the war. He sure can ride and handle a gun. ’Pears like he thinks he’s runnin’ the whole range,” she continued, after a pause. “Cain’t nobody so much as shoot a grouse since he came on, and the Supervisor upholds him in it.”
Lee Virginia wondered about all this supervision, for it was new to her.
Gregg, the sheepman, went on: “As I tell Redfield, I don’t object to the forest policy—it’s a good thing for me; I get my sheep pastured cheaper than I could do any other way, but it makes me hot to have grazing lines run on me and my herders jacked up every time they get over the line. Ross run one bunch off the reservation last Friday. I’m going to find out about that. He’ll learn he can’t get ‘arbitrary’ with me.”
Lee Virginia, glancing back at this man, felt sorry for any one who opposed him, for she recalled him as one of the fiercest of the cattle-men—one ever ready to cut a farmer’s fence or burn a sheep-herder’s wagon.
The old woman chuckled: “’Pears like you’ve changed your tune since ’98, Sam.”
He admitted his conversion shamelessly. “I’m for whatever will pay best. Just now, with a high tariff, sheep are the boys. So long as I can get on the reserve at seven cents a head—lambs free—I’m going to put every dollar I’ve got into sheep.”
“You’re going to get thrown off altogether one of these days,” said the young man on the back seat.
Thereupon a violent discussion arose over the question of the right of a sheepman to claim first grass for his flocks, and Gregg boasted that he cared nothing for “the dead-line.” “I’ll throw my sheep where I please,” he declared. “They’ve tried to run me out of Deer Creek, but I’m there to stay. I have ten thousand more on the way, and the man that tries to stop me will find trouble.”
The car was descending into the valley of the Roaring Fork now, and wire fences and alfalfa fields on either side gave further evidence of the change in the land’s dominion. New houses of frame and old houses in fresh paint shone vividly from the green of the willows and cottonwoods. A ball-ground on the outskirts of the village was another guarantee of progress. The cowboy was no longer the undisputed prince of the country fair.
Down past the court-house, refurbished and deeper sunk in trees, Lee Virginia rode, recalling the wild night when three hundred armed and vengeful cowboys surrounded it, holding three cattle-barons and their hired invaders against all comers, resolute to be their own judge, jury, and hangman. It was all as peaceful as a Sunday afternoon at this moment, with no sign of the fierce passions of the past.
There were new store-buildings and cement walks along the main street of the town, and here and there a real lawn, cut by a lawn-mower; but as the machine buzzed on toward the river the familiar little old battlemented buildings came to view. The Palace Hotel, half log, half battlement, remained on its perilous site beside the river. The triangle where the trails met still held Halsey’s Three Forks Saloon, and next to it stood Markheit’s general store, from which the cowboys and citizens had armed themselves during the ten days’ war of cattle-men and rustlers.
The car crossed the Roaring Fork and drew up before two small shacks, one of which bore a faded sign, “The Wetherford House,” and the other in fresher paint, “The Wetherford Café.” On the sidewalk a group of Indians were sitting, and a half-dozen slouching white men stood waiting at the door.
At sight of her mother’s hotel Virginia forgot every other building, every other object, and when the driver asked, respectfully, “Where will you want to get off, miss?” she did not reply, but rose unsteadily in her seat, blindly reaching for her bag and her wraps. Her slim, gray-robed figure, graceful even in her dismay, appealed to every onlooker, but Gregg was the one to offer a hand.
“Allow me, miss,” he said, with the smile of a wolf.
Declining his aid, she took her bag from the driver and walked briskly up the street as if she were a resident and knew precisely where she wanted to go. “One o’ those Eastern tourists, I reckon?” she heard the old woman say.
As she went past the hotel-porch her heart beat hard and her breath shortened. In a flash she divined the truth. She understood why her mother had discouraged her coming home. It was not merely on account of the money—it was because she knew that her business was wrong.
What a squalid little den it was! How cheap, bald, and petty the whole town seemed of a sudden. Lee Virginia halted and turned. There was only one thing to be done, and that was to make herself known. She retraced her steps, pulled open the broken screen door, and entered the café. It was a low, dingy dining-room filled with the odor of ham and bad coffee. At the tables ten or fifteen men, a motley throng, were busily feeding their voracious jaws, and on her left, behind a showcase filled with cigars, stood her mother, looking old, unkempt, and worried. The changes in her were so great that the girl stood in shocked alarm. At last she raised her veil. “Mother,” she said, “don’t you know me?”
A look of surprise went over the older woman’s flabby face—a glow which brought back something of her other self, as she cried: “Why, Lee Virginny, where did you come from?”
The boarders stopped chewing and stared in absorbed interest, while Virginia kissed her blowsy mother.
“By the Lord, it’s little Virginny!” said one old fellow. “It’s her daughter.”
Upon this a mutter of astonishment arose, and the waiter-girls, giggling, marvelling, and envious, paused, their platters in hand, to exchange comment on the new-comer’s hat and gown. A cowboy at the washing-sink in the corner suspended his face-polishing and gaped over his shoulder in silent ecstasy.
For a full minute, so it seemed, this singular, interesting, absorbed immobility lasted; then a seedy little man rose, and approached the girl. His manner was grotesquely graceful as he said: “We are all glad to greet you home again, Miss Virginia.”
She gave her hand hesitatingly. “It’s Mr. Sifton, isn’t it?”
“It is,” he replied; “the same old ha’penny, only a little more worn—worn, not polished,” he added, with a smile.
She remembered him then—an Englishman, a remittance man, a “lord,” they used to say. His eyes were kind, and his mouth, despite its unshaved stubble of beard, was refined. A harmless little man—his own worst enemy, as the saying goes.
Thereupon others of the men came forward to greet her, and though she had some difficulty in recognizing one or two of them (so hardly had the years of her absence used them), she eventually succeeded in placing them all.
At length her mother led her through the archway which connected the two shanties, thence along a narrow hall into a small bedroom, into which the western sunset fell. It was a shabby place, but as a refuge from the crowd in the restaurant it was grateful.
Lize looked at her daughter critically. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with a girl like you.—Why, you’re purty—purty as a picture. You were skinny as a child—I’m fair dazed. Great snakes, how you have opened out!—You’re the living image of your dad.—What started you back? I told you to stay where you was.”
The girl stared at her helplessly, trying to understand herself and her surroundings. There was, in truth, something singularly alien in her mother’s attitude. She seemed on the defensive, not wishing to be too closely studied. “Her manner is not even affectionate—only friendly. It is as if I were only an embarrassing visitor,” the girl thought. Aloud she said: “I had no place to go after Aunt Celia died. I had to come home.”
“You wrote they was willing to keep you.”
“They were, but I couldn’t ask it of them. I had no right to burden them, and, besides, Mrs. Hall wrote me that you were sick.”
“I am; but I didn’t want you to come back. Lay off your things and come out to supper. We’ll talk afterward.”
The eating-house, the rooms and hallways, were all of that desolate shabbiness which comes from shiftlessness joined with poverty. The carpets were frayed and stained with tobacco-juice, and the dusty windows were littered with dead flies. The curtains were ragged, the paper peeling from the walls, and the plastering cracked into unsightly lines. Everything on which the girl’s eyes fell contrasted strongly with her aunt’s home on the Brandywine—not because that house was large or luxurious, but because it was exquisitely in order, and sweet with flowers and dainty arrangement of color.
She understood now the final warnings uttered by her friends. “You will find everything changed,” they had said, “because you are changed.”
She regretted bitterly that she had ever left her Eastern friends. Her mother, in truth, showed little pleasure at her coming, and almost nothing of the illness of which a neighbor had written. It was, indeed, this letter which had decided her to return to the West. She had come, led by a sense of duty, not by affection, for she had never loved her mother as a daughter should—they were in some way antipathetic—and now she found herself an unwelcome guest.
Then, too, the West had called to her: the West of her childhood, the romantic, chivalrous West, the West of the miner, the cattle-man, the wolf, and the eagle. She had returned, led by a poetic sentiment, and here now she sat realizing as if by a flash of inward light that the West she had known as a child had passed, had suddenly grown old and commonplace—in truth, it had never existed at all!
One of the waitresses, whose elaborately puffed and waved hair set forth her senseless vanity, called from the door: “You can come out now, your ma says! Your supper’s ready!”
With aching head and shaking knees Virginia reentered the dining-room, which was now nearly empty of its “guests,” but was still misty with the steam of food, and swarming with flies. These pests buzzed like bees around the soiled places on the table-cloths, and one of her mother’s first remarks was a fretful apology regarding her trials with those insects. “Seems like you can’t keep ’em out,” she said.
Lee Virginia presented the appearance of some “settlement worker,” some fair lady on a visit to the poor, as she took her seat at the table and gingerly opened the small moist napkin which the waiter dropped before her. Her appetite was gone. Her appetite failed at the very sight of the fried eggs and hot and sputtering bacon, and she turned hastily to her coffee. A fly was in that! She uttered a little choking cry, and buried her face in her handkerchief and sobbed.
Lize turned upon the waitress and lashed her with stinging phrases. “Can’t you serve things better than this? Take that cup away! My God, you make me tired—fumblin’ around here with your eyes on the men! Pay more attention to your work and less to your crimps, and you’ll please me a whole lot better!”
With desperate effort Lee conquered her disgust. “Never mind, I’m tired and a little upset. I don’t need any dinner.”
“The slob will go, just the same. I’ve put up with her because help is scarce, but here’s where she gits off!”
In this moment Virginia perceived that her mother was of the same nature with Mrs. McBride—not one whit more refined—and the gulf between them swiftly widened. Hastily sipping her coffee, she tried hard to keep back the tears, but failed; and no sooner did her mother turn away than she fled to her room, there to sob unrestrainedly her despair and shame. “Oh, I can’t stand it,” she called. “I can’t! I can’t!”
Outside, the mountains deepened in splendor, growing each moment more mysterious and beautiful under the sunset sky, but the girl derived no comfort from them. Her loneliness and her perplexities had closed her eyes to their majestic drama. She felt herself alien and solitary in the land of her birth.
Lize came in half an hour later, pathetic in her attempt at “slicking up.” She was still handsome in a large-featured way, but her gray hair was there, and her face laid with a network of fretful lines. Her color was bad. At the moment her cheeks were yellow and sunken.
She complained of being short of breath and lame and tired. “I’m always tired,” she explained. “’Pears like sometimes I can’t scarcely drag myself around, but I do.”
A pang of comprehending pain shot through Virginia’s heart. If she could not love, she could at least pity and help; and reaching forth her hand, she patted her mother on the knee. “Poor old mammy!” she said. “I’m going to help you.”
Lize was touched by this action of her proud daughter, and smiled sadly. “This is no place for you. It’s nothin’ but a measly little old cow-town gone to seed—and I’m gone to seed with it. I know it. But what is a feller to do? I’m stuck here, and I’ve got to make a living or quit. I can’t quit. I ain’t got the grit to eat a dose, and so I stagger along.”
“I’ve come back to help you, mother. You must let me relieve you of some of the burden.”
“What can you do, child?” Lize asked, gently.
“I can teach.”
“Not in this town you can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Well, there’s a terrible prejudice against—well, against me. And, besides, the places are all filled for the next year. The Wetherfords ain’t among the first circles any more.”
This daunted the girl more than she could express, but she bravely made advance. “But there must be other schools in the country.”
“There are—a few. But I reckon you better pull out and go back, at least, to Sulphur; they don’t know so much about me there, and, besides, they’re a little more like your kind.”
Lee Virginia remembered Gregg’s charge against her mother. “What do you mean by the prejudice against you?” she asked.
Lize was evasive. “Since I took to running this restaurant my old friends kind o’ fell off—but never mind that to-night. Tell me about things back East. I don’t s’pose I’ll ever get as far as Omaha again; I used to go with Ed every time I felt like it. He was good to me, your father. If ever there was a prince of a man, Ed Wetherford was him.”
The girl’s thought was now turned into other half-forgotten channels. “I wish you would tell me more about father. I don’t remember where he was buried.”
“Neither do I, child—I mean I don’t know exactly. You see, after that cattle-war, he went away to Texas.”
“I remember, but it’s all very dim.”
“Well, he never came back and never wrote, and by-and-by word came that he had died and was buried; but I never could go down to see where his grave was at.”
“Didn’t you know the name of the town?”
“Yes; but it was a new place away down in the Pan Handle, and nobody I knew lived there. And I never knew anything more.”
Lee sighed hopelessly. “I hate to think of him lying neglected down there.”
“’Pears like the whole world we lived in in them days has slipped off the map,” replied the older woman; and as the room was darkening, she rose and lighted a dusty electric globe which dangled from the ceiling over the small table. “Well, I must go back into the restaurant; I hain’t got a girl I can trust to count the cash.”
Left alone, Lee Virginia wept no more, but her face settled into an expression of stern sadness. It seemed as if her girlhood had died out of her, and that she was about to begin the same struggle with work and worry which had marked the lives of all the women she had known in her childhood.
Out on the porch a raw youth was playing wailing tunes on a mouth-organ, and in the “parlor” a man was uttering silly jokes to a tittering girl. The smell of cheap cigars filled the hallway and penetrated to her nostrils. Every sight and sound sickened her. “Can it be that the old town, the town of my childhood, was of this character—so sordid, so vulgar?” she asked herself. “And mother—what is the matter with her? She is not even glad to see me!”
Weary with her perplexities, she fastened her door at last, and went to bed, hoping to end—for a few hours, at least—the ache in her heart and the benumbing whirl of her thought.
But this respite was denied her. Almost at once she began to fancy that a multitudinous minute creeping and stirring was going on about her—in her hair, over her neck, across her feet. For a time she explained this by reference to her disordered nerves, but at last some realization of the truth came to her, and she sprang out upon the floor in horror and disgust. Lighting the lamp, she turned to scrutinize her couch. It swarmed with vermin. The ceiling was spattered with them. They raced across the walls in platoons, thin and voracious as wolves.
With a choking, angry, despairing moan she snatched her clothing from the chair and stood at bay. It needed but this touch to complete her disillusionment.
From her makeshift bed in the middle of the floor Lee Virginia was awakened next morning by the passing of some one down the hall calling at each door, “Six o’clock!” She had not slept at all till after one. She was lame, heart-weary, and dismayed, but she rose and dressed herself as neatly as before. She had decided to return to Sulphur. “I cannot endure this,” she had repeated to herself a hundred times. “I will not!”
Hearing the clatter of dishes, she ventured (with desperate courage) into the dining-room, which was again filled with cowboys, coal-miners, ranchers and their tousled families, and certain nondescript town loafers of tramp-like appearance. The flies were nearly as bad as ever—but not quite, for under Mrs. Wetherford’s dragooning the waiters had made a nerveless assault upon them with newspaper bludgeons, and a few of them had been driven out into the street.
Slipping into a seat at the end of the table which offered the cleanest cloth, Lee Virginia glanced round upon her neighbors with shrinking eyes. All were shovelling their food with knife-blades and guzzling their coffee with bent heads; their faces scared her, and she dropped her eyes.
At her left, however, sat two men whose greetings were frank and manly, and whose table-manners betrayed a higher form of life. One of them was a tall man with a lean red face against which his blond mustache lay like a chalk-mark. He wore a corduroy jacket, cut in Norfolk style, and in the collar of his yellow shirt a green tie was loosely knotted. His hands were long and freckled, but were manifestly trained to polite usages.
The other man was younger and browner, and of a compact, athletic figure. On the breast of his olive-green coat hung a silver badge which bore a pine-tree in the centre. His shirt was tan-colored and rough, but his head was handsome. He looked like a young officer in the undress uniform of the regular army. His hands were strong but rather small, and the lines of his shoulders graceful. Most attractive of all were his eyes, so brown, so quietly humorous, and so keen.
In the rumble of cheap and vulgar talk the voices of these men appealed to the troubled girl with great charm. She felt more akin to them than to any one else in the room, and from time to time she raised her eyes to their faces.
They were aware of her also, and their gaze was frankly admiring as well as wondering; and in passing the ham and eggs or the sugar they contrived to show her that they considered her a lady in a rough place, and that they would like to know more about her.
She accepted their civilities with gratitude, and listened to their talk with growing interest. It seemed that the young man had come down from the hills to meet his friend and take him back to his cabin.
“I can’t do it to-day, Ross,” said the older man. “I wish I could, but one meal of this kind is all I can stand these days.”
“You’re getting finicky,” laughed the younger man.
“I’m getting old. Time was when my fell of hair would rise at nothing, not even flies in the butter, but now—”
“That last visit to the ancestral acres is what did it.”
“No, it’s age—age and prosperity. I know now what it is to have broiled steak.”
Mrs. Wetherford, seizing the moment, came down to do the honors. “You fellers ought to know my girl. Virginny, this is Forest Supervisor Redfield, and this is Ross Cavanagh, his forest ranger in this district. You ought to know each other. My girl’s just back from school, and she don’t think much of the Fork. It’s a little too coarse for her.”
Lee flushed under this introduction, and her distress was so evident that both men came to her rescue.
The older man bowed, and said: “I didn’t know you had a daughter, Mrs. Wetherford,” and Cavanagh, with a glance of admiration, added: “We’ve been wondering who you might be.”
Lize went on: “I thought I’d got rid of her. She’s been away now for about ten years. I don’t know but it was a mistake—look’s like she’s grown a little too fine-haired for us doughies out here.”
“So much the worse for us,” replied Redfield.
This little dialogue gave the girl time to recover herself, but as Cavanagh watched the blush fade from her face, leaving it cold and white, he sympathized with her—pitied her from the bottom of his heart. He perceived that he was a chance spectator of the first scene in a painful domestic drama—one that might easily become a tragedy. He wondered what the forces might be which had brought such a daughter to this sloven, this virago. To see a maid of this delicate bloom thrust into such a place as Lize Wetherford’s “hotel” had the reputation of being roused indignation.
“When did you reach town?” he asked, and into his voice his admiration crept.
“Only last night.”
“You find great changes here?”
“Not so great as in my mother. It’s all——” She stopped abruptly, and he understood.
Lize being drawn back to her cash-register, Redfield turned to say: “My dear young lady, I don’t suppose you remember me, but I knew you when you were a tot of five or six. I knew your father very well.”
“Did you?” Her face lighted up.
“Yes, poor fellow, he went away from here rather under a cloud, you know.”
“I remember a little of it. I was here when the shooting took place.”
“So you were. Well, since then much has happened to us all,” he explained to the ranger. “There wasn’t room for a dashing young blood such as Ed Wetherford was in those days.” He turned to Lee. “He was no worse than the men on the other side—it was dog eat dog; but some way the people rather settled on him as a scapegoat. He was forced out, and your mother has borne the brunt of it since. Those were lawless days.”
It was a painful subject, and Redfield’s voice grew lower and more hesitant as he went on. Looking at this charming girl through the smoke of fried ham, with obscene insects buzzing about her fair head, made him feel for the thousandth time, and more keenly than ever before, the amazing combinations in American society. How could she be the issue of Edward and Eliza Wetherford?
More and more Lee Virginia’s heart went out in trust toward these two men. Opposed to the malodorous, unshaven throng which filled the room, they seemed wondrously softened and sympathetic, and in the ranger’s gaze was something else—something which made her troubles somehow less intolerable. She felt that he understood the difficult situation in which she found herself.
Redfield went on. “You find us horribly uncivilized after ten years’ absence?”
“I find this uncivilised,” she replied, with fierce intensity, looking around the room. Then, on the impulse, she added: “I can’t stand it! I came here to live with my mother, but this is too—too horrible!”
“I understand your repulsion,” replied Redfield. “A thousand times I repeat, apropos of this country, ‘Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.’”
“Do you suppose it was as bad ten years ago?” she asked. “Was everything as dirty—as mean? Were the houses then as full of flies and smells?”
“I’m afraid they were. Of course, the country isn’t all like this, and there are neat homes and gentle people in Sulphur; but most cattle-men are—as they’ve always been—a shiftless, happy-go-lucky lot at best—and some of them have been worse, as you know.”
“I never dreamed of finding my mother in such a place,” she went on. “I don’t know what to do or say. She isn’t well. I ought to stay and help her, and yet—oh, it is disheartening!”
Lize tapped Redfield on the shoulder. “Come over here, Reddy, if you’ve finished your breakfast; I want to talk with you.”
Redfield rose and followed his landlady behind the counter, and there sat in earnest conversation while she made change. The tone in which her mother addressed the Supervisor, her action of touching him as one man lays hand upon another, was profoundly revealing to Lee Virginia. She revolted from it without realizing exactly what it meant; and feeling deeply but vaguely the forest ranger’s sympathy, she asked:
“How can you endure this kind of life?”
“I can’t, and I don’t,” he answered, cautiously, for they were being closely observed. “I am seldom in town; my dominion is more than a mile above this level. My cabin is nine thousand feet above the sea. It is clean and quiet up there.”
“Are all the other restaurants in the village like this?”
“Worse. I come here because it is the best.”
She rose. “I can’t stand this air and these flies any longer. They’re too disgusting.”
He followed her into the other house, conscious of the dismay and bitterness which burst forth the instant they were alone. “What am I to do? She is my mother, but I’ve lost all sense of relationship to her. And these people—except you and Mr. Redfield—are all disgusting to me. It isn’t because my mother is poor, it isn’t because she’s keeping boarders; it’s something else.” At this point her voice failed her.
The ranger, deeply moved, stood helplessly silent. What could he say? He knew a great deal better than she the essential depravity of her mother, and he felt keenly the cruelty of fate which had plunged a fine young spirit into this swamp of ill-smelling humanity.
“Let us go out into the air,” he suggested, presently. “The mountain wind will do you good.”
She followed him trustfully, and as she stepped from the squalor of the hotel into the splendor of the morning her head lifted. She drank the clear, crisp wind as one takes water in the desert.
“The air is clean, anyway,” she said.
Cavanagh, to divert her, pointed away to the mountains. “There is my dominion. Up there I am sole ruler. No one can litter the earth with corruption or poison the streams.”
She did not speak, but as she studied the ranger her face cleared. “It is beautiful up there.”
He went on. “I hate all this scrap-heap quite as heartily as you do, but up there is sweetness and sanity. The streams are germless, and the forest cannot be devastated. That is why I am a ranger. I could not endure life in a town like this.”
He turned up the street toward the high hill to the south, and she kept step with him. As she did not speak, he asked: “What did you expect to do out here?”
“I hoped to teach,” she replied, her voice still choked with her emotion. “I expected to find the country much improved.”
“And so it is; but it is still a long way from an Eastern State. Perhaps you will find the people less savage than they appear at first glance.”
“It isn’t the town or the people, it is my mother!” she burst forth again. “Tell me! A woman in the car yesterday accused my mother of selling whiskey unlawfully. Is this so? Tell me!”
She faced him resolutely, and perceiving that she could not be evaded, he made slow answer. “I don’t know that she does, but I’ve heard it charged against her.”
“Who made the charge?”
“One of the clergymen, and then it’s common talk among the rough men of the town.”
“Is that the worst they say of her? Be honest with me—I want to know the worst.”
He was quite decisive as he said: “Yes, that is the worst.”
She looked relieved. “I’m glad to hear you say so. I’ve been imagining all kinds of terrifying things.”
“Then, too, her bad health is some excuse for her housekeeping,” he added, eager to lessen the daughter’s humiliation, “and you must remember her associations are not those which breed scrupulous regard for the proprieties.”
“But she’s my mother!” wailed the girl, coming back to the central fact. “She has sent me money—she has been kind to me—what am I to do? She needs me, and yet the thought of staying here and facing her life frightens me.”
The rotten board walks, the low rookeries, the unshaven, blear-eyed men sitting on the thresholds of the saloons, the slattern squaws wandering abroad like bedraggled hens, made the girl stare with wonder and dismay. She had remembered the town street as a highway filled with splendid cavaliers, a list wherein heroic deeds were done with horse and pistol.
She recognized one of those “knights of the lariat” sitting in the sun, flabby, grizzled, and inert. Another was trying to mount his horse with a bottle in his hand. She recalled him perfectly. He had been her girlish ideal of manly beauty. Now here he was, old and mangy with drink at forty. In a most vivid and appealing sense he measured the change in her as well as the decay of the old-time cowboy. His incoherent salutation as his eyes fell upon her was like the final blasphemous word from the rear-guard of a savage tribe, and she watched him ride away reeling limply in his saddle as one watches a carrion-laden vulture take its flight.
She perceived in the ranger the man of the new order, and with this in her mind she said: “You don’t belong here? You’re not a Western man.”
“Not in the sense of having been born here,” he replied. “I am, in fact, a native of England, though I’ve lived nearly twenty years of my life in the States.”
She glanced at his badge. “How did you come to be a ranger—what does it mean? It’s all new to me.”
“It is new to the West,” he answered, smilingly, glad of a chance to turn her thought from her own personal griefs. “It has all come about since you went East. Uncle Sam has at last become provident, and is now ‘conserving his resources.’ I am one of his representatives with stewardship over some ninety thousand acres of territory—mostly forest.”
She looked at him with eyes of changing light. “You don’t talk like an Englishman, and yet you are not like the men out here.”
“I shouldn’t care to be like some of them,” he answered. “My being here is quite logical. I went into the cattle business like many another, and I went broke. I served under Colonel Roosevelt in the Cuban War, and after my term was out, naturally drifted back. I love the wilderness and have some natural taste for forestry, and I can ride and pack a horse as well as most cowboys, hence my uniform. I’m not the best forest ranger in the service, I’ll admit, but I fancy I’m a fair average.”
“And that is your badge—the pine-tree?”
“Yes, and I am proud of it. Some of the fellows are not, but so far as I am concerned I am glad to be known as a defender of the forest. A tree means much to me. I never mark one for felling without a sense of responsibility to the future.”
Her questions came slowly, like those of a child. “Where do you live?”
“Directly up the South Fork, about twenty miles.”
“What do you do?”