CHAPTER XIII
SENTIMENT AND NAILS
Vast changes had come over the face of that land in a few days. Everyquarter-section within reach of water for domestic uses had its tent orits dugout in the hillside or its hastily built cabin of planks. Wheremiles of unpeopled desert had stretched lonely and gray a week before,the smoke of three thousand fires rose up each morning now, proclaiminga new domain in the kingdom of husbandry.
On the different levels of that rugged country, men and women hadplanted their tent-poles and their hopes. Unacquainted with its rigors,they were unappalled by the hardships, which lay ahead of them, dimlyunderstood. For that early autumn weather was benignant, and the sun wasmellow on the hills.
Speculation had not turned out as profitable as those who had come topractice it had expected. Outside of the anxiety of Jerry Boyle andothers to get possession of the apparently worthless piece of land uponwhich Dr. Slavens had filed, there were no offers for the relinquishmentof homesteads. That being the case, a great many holders of low numbersfailed to file. They wanted, not homes, but something without muchendeavor, with little investment and no sweat. So they had passed on toprey upon the thrifty somewhere else, leaving the land to those whosehearts were hungry for it because it _was_ land, with the wide horizonof freedom around it, and a place to make home.
And these turned themselves to bravely leveling with road-scrapers andteams the hummocks where the sagebrush grew, bringing in surveyors tostrike the level for them in the river-shore, plotting ditches to carrythe water to their fields. Many of them would falter before the fightwas done; many would lose heart in the face of such great odds beforethe green blessing of alfalfa should rise out of the sullen ground.
Many a widow was there, whose heart was buried in a grave back East, andmany a gray man, making his first independent start. Always the West hasheld up its promise of freedom to men, and the hope of it has led themfarther than the hope of gold.
About midway between Meander and Comanche, Agnes Horton was located onthe land which Smith had selected for her. Smith had retired fromdriving the stage and had established a sort of commercial center on hishomestead, where he had a store for supplying the settlers' needs. Healso had gone into the business of contracting to clear lands ofsagebrush and level them for irrigation, having had a large experiencein that work in other parts of the state.
Agnes had pitched her tent on the river-bank, in a pleasant spot wherethere was plenty of grazing for her horse. Just across her line, andonly a few hundred yards up-stream, a family was encamped, putting up apermanent home, making a reckless inroad among the cottonwoods whichgrew along the river on their land. Across the stream, which wasfordable there, a young man and his younger wife, with the saddle-marksof the city on them, had their white nest. Agnes could hear the bridesinging early in the morning, when the sun came up and poured its meltedgold over that hopeful scene, with never a cloud before its face.
Twenty miles farther along, toward Comanche, Dr. Slavens had pitched histent among the rocks on the high, barren piece of land which he hadselected blindly, guided by Hun Shanklin's figures. He was not a littlesurprised, and at the same time cheered and encouraged, to find, when hecame to locating it, that it was the spot where they had seen Shanklinand another horseman on the afternoon of their stage excursion, when thetwo had been taken by Smith as men of evil intent, and the doctor hadbeen called to the box to handle the lines.
His neighbors in the rich valley below him regarded him with doubt ofhis balance, and that was a current suspicion up and down the riveramong those who did not know the story. But the politicians in Meander,and those who were on hand before the filing began, who knew how JerryBoyle had nursed Axel Peterson, and how he had dropped the Scandinavianwhen the stranger rode up unexpectedly and filed on Number One, believedthat the doctor had held inside information, and that his claim wasworth millions.
But if the quarter-section contained anything of value, there was noevidence of it that Dr. Slavens could find. It was about the crudest andmost unfinished piece of earth that he ever had seen outside theBuckhorn Canyon. It looked as if the materials for making something on atremendous pattern had been assembled there, thrown down promiscuously,and abandoned.
Ledges of red rock, which seemed as if fires had scorched them for ages,stood edgewise in the troubled earth, their seamed faces toward the sky.It was as if nature had put down that job temporarily, to hurry off andfinish the river, or the hills beyond the river, and never had foundtime to come back. Tumbled fragments of stone, huge as houses, showingkinship with nothing in their surroundings, stood here thickly in alittle cup between the seared hills, and balanced there upon the sidesof buttes among the streaks of blue shale.
A little grass grew here and there in carpet-size splotches, now yellowand dry, while that in the valley was at its best. Spiked plants, whichlooked tropical, and which were as green during the rigors of winter asduring the doubtful blessings of summer, stood on the slopes, theirthousand bayonets guarding against trespass where only pressingnecessity could drive a human foot. Sheep-sage, which grew low upon theground, and unostentatious and dun, was found here, where no flocks cameto graze; this was the one life-giving thing which sprang from thatblasted spot.
The lowest elevation on the doctor's claim was several hundred feetabove the river, from which he hauled the water which he drank and usedfor culinary purposes. If there was wealth in the land and rocks, naturehad masked it very well indeed. The pick and the hammer revealednothing; long hours of prying and exploring yielded no gleam of metal toconfirm his fast-shrinking belief that he had pitched on somethinggood.
His only comfort in those first days was the thought of the money whichhe had taken from Shanklin, with the aid of the gambler's own honestlittle die. That cash was now safe in the bank at Meander. There wasenough of it, everything else failing, to take him--and somebody--backto his own place when she was ready to go; enough to do that and get theautomobile, take the world on its vain side, and pull success away fromit. He was able for it now; no doubt of his ability to climb over anyobstacle whatever remained after his wrestling match with the river inthe Buckhorn Canyon. There was no job ahead of him that he could evenimagine, as big as that.
Nobody had come forward to make him an offer for his place. Jerry Boylehad not appeared, nothing had been seen of the man who accosted him atthe window the morning he filed. Although he had remained in Meander twodays after that event, nobody had approached him in regard to the landwhich so many had seemed anxious to get before it came into hisownership. Boyle he had not seen since the evening Dr. Slavens and Agnesmet him in the gorge riding in such anxious haste.
Perhaps the value of the claim, if value lay in it, was the secret of afew, and those few had joined forces to starve out his courage and hope.If nobody came forward with a voluntary offer for the land, it neverwould be worth proving up on and paying the government the price askedfor it. All over that country there was better land to be had withoutcost.
As the days slipped past and nobody appeared with ten thousand dollarsbulging his pockets, Slavens began to talk to himself among thesolitudes of his desert. He called himself a foremost example ofstupidity and thick-headedness for not giving ear to the man who wantedto talk business the day he filed on that outcast corner of the earth.Then, growing stubborn, he would determine to pay the government thepurchase price, clean up on it at once, and take title to it. Then, ifit _had_ the stuff in it, they might come around with some sort of offerin time.
No matter; he would stick to it himself until winter. That always washis final conclusion, influenced, perhaps, by a hope that the roughnessof winter would speedily convince "somebody" that roses and dreams ofroses belonged to the summer. He would have nothing more to pay on thehomestead for a year. And much could happen in a year, in a day; even anhour.
Slavens had a good tent in a sheltered place, which he believed he couldmake comfortable for winter, and he meant to send for some books.Meantime, he had toba
cco to smoke and a rifle to practice with, andprospects ahead, no matter which way the cat might jump.
The doctor's target practice was a strong contributing force to thegeneral belief among his neighbors that he was deranged. They said heimagined that he was repelling invaders from his claim, which would bevaluable, maybe, to a man who wanted to start a rattlesnake farm. ButSlavens had a motive, more weighty than the pastime that this seeminglyidle pursuit afforded. There was a time of settlement ahead between himand Jerry Boyle for the part the Governor's son had borne in hisassault. When the day for that adjustment came, Slavens intended to seekit.
Concerning Shanklin, he was in a degree satisfied with what he had done.The loss of that much money, he believed, was a greater drain on the oldcrook than a gallon of blood. Slavens felt that it hurt Shanklin in thegambler's one sensitive spot. There was a great deal owing to him yetfrom that man, in spite of what he had forced Shanklin to pay, and hemeant to collect the balance before he left that state.
So the rifle practice went ahead, day by day, supplemented by a turn nowand then with Hun Shanklin's old black pistol, which Mackenzie hadturned over to Slavens as part of his lawful spoil.
While Dr. Slavens banged away among his rocks, not knowing whether hewas a victim of his own impetuosity or the peculiarly favored son offortune, Agnes Horton, in her tent beside the river, was undergoing anadjustment of vision which was assisting her to see startlingly thingsexactly as they were. The enchantment of distance had fallen away. Whenshe came to grips with the land, then its wild unfriendliness wasrevealed, and the magnitude of the task ahead of her was madediscouragingly plain.
All over her cultivable strip of land which lay between the river andthe hills, the gray sage grew in clumps, each cluster anchoring the soilaround it in a little mound. Through many years the earth had blown andsifted around the sapless shrubs until they seemed buried to the ears,and hopeless of ever getting out again, but living on their gray life ina gray world, waiting for the best.
All of this ground must be leveled before it could receive the benefitsof irrigation, and the surprising thing to her was how much wood theland yielded during this operation. Each little sagebrush had at leasttwenty times as much timber under the earth as it had above, and eachthick, tough root was a retarding and vexatious obstacle in the way ofscraper and plow. Smith said it was sometimes necessary in that countryto move three acres of land in order to make one.
But Smith was enthusiastically for it. He kept asserting that it paid,and pointed to the small bit of agricultural land that there was in thewhole expanse of that reservation, for an example, to prove his point.There was room for other industries, such as mining and grazing, but theman who could grow food and forage for the others was the one who wouldtake down the money from the hook. That was Smith's contention.
He told Agnes that she could lift enough water with a wheel in the riverto irrigate a garden and more, but there was no need of putting in thewheel until spring. The rains of that season would bring up the seed,and while it was making the most of the moisture in the ground she couldbe setting her wheel.
"A person's got to plan ahead in this country," said Smith. "You mustknow to a skinned knuckle just what you'll need a year, or five years,ahead here, if you ever make it go worth havin'. It ain't like it isback where you come from. There you can go it more or less hit-or-miss,and hit about as often as you miss. Here you've got to know."
Smith was moving to organize the settlers along the river into a companyto put in a canal which would water all their land, the chief capital tobe elbow-grease; the work to be done that fall and winter. Smith wasindeed the head and inspiration of all enterprise in that new place.People to whom that country was strange, and that included nearly all ofthem, looked to him for advice, and regarded with admiration and wonderhis aptness in answering everything.
Agnes was doubtful of the future, in spite of her big, brave talk to Dr.Slavens in the days before the drawing. Now that she had the land, and abetter piece of it than she had hoped for, considering her high number,she felt weakly unfit to take it in hand and break it to the conditionof docility in which it would tolerate fruit-trees, vines, and roses.
It cheered her considerably, and renewed her faith in her sex, to seesome of the women out with their teams, preparing their land for theseeding next spring. More than one of them had no man to lean on, and nomoney to hire one to take the rough edge off for her. In that respectAgnes contrasted her easier situation with theirs. She had the means,slender as they might be, indeed, to employ somebody to do the work inthe field. But the roses she reserved for her own hands, putting themaside as one conceals a poem which one has written, or a hope of whichhe is afraid.
In the first few days of her residence on her land, Agnes experiencedall the changes of mercurial rising and falling of spirits, plans,dreams. Some days she saddled her horse, which she had bought under thedoctor's guidance at Meander, and rode, singing, over the hills, exaltedby the wild beauty of nature entirely unadorned. There was not yet ahouse in the whole of what had been the Indian Reservation, and therenever had been one which could be properly called such.
Here was a country, bigger than any one of several of the far easternstates, as yet unchanged by the art of man. The vastness of it, and theliberty, would lay hold of her at such times with rude power, making herfeel herself a part of it, as old a part of it as its level-toppedbuttes and ramparts of riven stone.
Then again it frightened her, giving her a feeling such as sheremembered once when she found herself alone in a boat upon a greatlake, with the shore left far behind and none in sight beyond the mistyhorizon. She seemed small then, and inadequate for the rough strugglethat lay ahead.
Smith noted this, and read the symptoms like a doctor.
"You've got to keep your nerve," he advised, bluntly kind, "and not letthe lonesomeness git a hold on you, Miss Horton."
"The lonesomeness?" she echoed. It seemed a strange-sounding phrase.
"It's a disease," Smith proceeded, "and I suppose you git it anywhere;but you git it harder here. I've seen men take it, and turn gray andlose their minds, runnin' sheep. After you once git over it you'rebroke. You wouldn't leave this country for a purty on a chain."
"I hope I'll not get it," she laughed. "How do people act when they takethe lonesomeness?"
"Well, some acts one way and some acts another," said Smith. "Some mopesand run holler-eyed, and some kicks and complains and talk about 'God'scountry' till it makes you sick. Just like this wasn't as much God'scountry as any place you can name! It's all His'n when you come down tothe p'int, I reckon. But how a woman acts when she takes it I can't somuch say for I never knew but one that had it. She up and killed aman."
"Oh, that was terrible! Did she lose her mind?"
"Well, I don't know but you could say she did. You see she married asheepman. He brought her out here from Omaha, and left her up there onthe side of the mountain in a little log cabin above Meander while hewent off foolin' around with them sheep, the way them fellers does. Itell you when you git sheep on the brain you don't eat at home more thanonce in three months. You live around in a sheep-wagon, cuttin' tailsoff of lambs, and all such fool things as that."
"Why, do they cut the poor things' tails off?" she asked, getting thenotion that Smith was having a little fun at her expense.
"They all do it," he informed her, "to keep the sand and burrs out of'em. If they let 'em grow long they git so heavy with sand it makes 'empoor to pack 'em, they say, I don't know myself; I'm not a sheepman."
"But why did she shoot a man? Because he cut off lambs' tails?"
"No, she didn't," said Smith. "She went out of her head. The feller sheshot was a storekeeper's son down in Meander, and he got to ridin' upthere to talk to her and cheer her up. The lonesomeness it had such ahold on her, thinkin' about Omaha and houses, and pie-annos playin' inevery one of 'em, that she up and run off with that feller when hepromised to take her back there. They started to cut across to the
U.P.in a wagon--more than a hundred miles. That night she come to her headwhen he got too fresh, and she had to shoot him to make him behave."
"Her husband should have been shot, it seems to me, for leaving her thatway," Agnes said.
"A man orto stick to his wife in this country, specially if she's new toit and not broke," said Smith; "and if I had one, ma'am, I'd _stick_ toher."
Smith looked at her as he said this, with conviction and deepearnestness in his eyes.
"I'm sure you would," she agreed.
"And I'd be kind to her," he declared.
"There's no need to tell me that," she assured him. "You're kind toeverybody."
"And if she didn't like the name," Smith went on significantly, "I'dhave it changed!"
"I'm sure she'd like it--she'd be very ungrateful if she didn't," Agnesreplied, somewhat amused by his earnestness, but afraid to show it. "I'mgoing to order lumber for my house in a day or two."
Smith switched from sentiment to business in a flash.
"Let me sell you the nails," he requested. "I can give 'em to you ascheap as you can git 'em in Meander."