Over the Pass

by Frederick Palmer

  Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Mary Meehan, and the Online DistributedProofreading Team.

  OVER THE PASS

  BY FREDERICK PALMER

  AUTHOR OF THE VAGABOND, DANBURY RODD, ETC.

  1912

  CONTENTS

  PART I--AN EASY TRAVELLER

  CHAPTER

  I YOUTH IN SPURS

  II DINOSAUR OR DESPERADO

  III JACK RIDES IN COMPANY

  IV HE CARRIES THE MAIL

  V A SMILE AND A SQUARE CHIN

  VI OBLIVION IS NOT EASY

  VII WHAT HAPPENED AT LANG'S

  VIII ACCORDING TO CODE

  IX THE DEVIL IS OUT

  X MARY EXPLAINS

  XI SENOR DON'T CARE RECEIVES

  XII MARY BRINGS TRIBUTE

  XIII A JOURNEY ON CRUTCHES

  XIV "HOW FAST YOU SEW!"

  XV WHEN THE DESERT BLOOMS

  XVI A CHANGE OF MIND

  XVII THE DOGE SNAPS A RUBBER BAND

  XVIII ANOTHER STRANGER ARRIVES

  XIX LOOKING OVER PRECIPICES

  XX A PUZZLED AMBASSADOR

  XXI "GOOD-BY, LITTLE RIVERS!"

  XXII "LUCK, JACK, LUCK!"

  PART II--HE FINDS HIMSELF

  XXIII LABELLED AND SHIPPED

  XXIV IN THE CITADEL OF THE MILLIONS

  XXV "BUT WITH YOU, YES, SIR!"

  XXVII BY RIGHT OF ANCESTRY

  XXVIII JACK GETS A RAISE

  XXIX A MEETING ON THE AVENUE TRAIL

  XXX WITH THE PHANTOMS

  XXXI PRATHER WOULD NOT WAIT

  XXXII A CRISIS IN THE WINGFIELD LIBRARY

  XXXIII PRATHER SEES THE PORTRAIT

  XXXIV "JOHN WINGFIELD, YOU--"

  PART III--HE FINDS HIS PLACE IN LIFE

  XXXV BACK TO LITTLE RIVERS

  XXXVI AROUND THE WATER-HOLE

  XXXVII THE END OF THE WEAVING

  XXXVIII THEIR SIDE OF THE PASS

  PART I

  AN EASY TRAVELLER

  I

  YOUTH IN SPURS

  Here time was as nothing; here sunset and sunrise were as incidentsof an uncalendared, everlasting day; here chaotic grandeur was thatof the earth's crust when it cooled after the last convulsivemovement of genesis.

  In all the region about the Galeria Pass the silence of the dry Arizonaair seemed luminous and eternal. Whoever climbed to the crotch of that V,cut jagged against the sky for distances yet unreckoned by touristfolders, might have the reward of pitching the tents of his imaginationat the gateway of the clouds.

  Early on a certain afternoon he would have noted to the eastward a speckfar out on a vast basin of sand which was enclosed by a rim of tumblingmountains. Continued observation at long range would have shown the speckto be moving almost imperceptibly, with what seemed the impertinence ofinfinitesimal life in that dead world; and, eventually, it would havetaken the form of a man astride a pony.

  The man was young, fantastically young if you were to judge by his garb,a flamboyant expression of the romantic cowboy style which might haveserved as a sensational exhibit in a shop-window. In place of theconventional blue wool shirt was one of dark blue silk. The_chaparejos_, or "chaps," were of the softest leather, with the fringeat the seams generously long; and the silver spurs at the boot-heelswere chased in antique pattern and ridiculously large. Instead of theconventional handkerchief at the neck was a dark red string tie; whilethe straight-brimmed cowpuncher hat, out of keeping with the generaleffect of newness and laundered freshness, had that tint which onlyexposure to many dewfalls and many blazing mid-days will produce inlight-colored felt.

  There was vagrancy in the smile of his singularly sensitive mouth andvagrancy in the relaxed way that he rode. From the fondness with whichhis gaze swept the naked peaks they might have been cities _en fete_calling him to their festivities. If so, he was in no haste to letrealization overtake anticipation. His reins hung loose. He hummedsnatches of Spanish, French, and English songs. Their cosmopolitanfreedom of variety was as out of keeping with the scene as their lilt,which had the tripping, self-carrying impetus of the sheer joy of living.

  Lapsing into silence, his face went ruminative and then sad. With asudden indrawing of breath he freed himself from his reverie, and bendingover from his saddle patted a buckskin neck in affectionate tattoo. Tawnyears turned backward in appreciative fellowship, but without any break ina plodding dog-trot. Though the rider's aspect might say with the desertthat time was nothing, the pony's expressed a logical purpose. Thus thespeed of their machine-like progress was entirely regulated by theprospect of a measure of oats at the journey's end.

  When they came to the foot-hills and the rider dismounted and led theway, with a following muzzle at times poking the small of his back, upthe tortuous path, rounding pinnacles and skimming the edge of abysses,his leg muscles answered with the readiness of familiarity with climbing.At the top he saw why the pass had received its name of Galeria from theSpanish. A great isosceles of precipitous walls formed a long, naturalgallery, which the heaving of the earth's crust had rent and time haderoded. It lay near the present boundary line of two civilizations: inthe neutral zone of desert expanses, where the Saxon pioneer, with hislips closed on English _s's_, had paused in his progress southward; andthe _conquistadore_, with tongue caressing Castilian vowels, had pausedin his progress northward.

  At the other side the traveller beheld a basin which was a thousandfeet higher than the one behind him. It approached the pass at agentler slope. It must be cooler than the other, its ozone a littlerarer. A sea of quivering and singing light in the afternoon glow, itwas lost in the horizon.

  Not far from the foot-hills floated a patch of foliage, checkered by theroofs of the houses of an irrigation colony, hanging kitelike at the endof the silver thread of a river whose waters had set gardens abloom insterile expanses. There seemed a refusal of intimacy with the one visiblesymbol of its relations with the outer world; for the railroad, with itslines of steel flashing across the gray levels, passed beyond the outeredge of the oasis.

  "This beats any valley I've seen yet," and the traveller spoke with theconfidence of one who is a connoisseur of Arizona valleys.

  He paused for some time in hesitancy to take a farewell of the rapturousvista. A hundred feet lower and the refraction of the light would presentit in different coloring and perspective. With his spell of visualintoxication ran the consciousness of being utterly alone. But the egoismof his isolation in the towering infinite did not endure; for the soundof voices, a man's and a woman's, broke on his ear.

  The man's was strident, disagreeable, persistent. Its timbre was such ashe had heard coming out of the doors of border saloons. The woman's wasquiet and resisting, its quality of youth peculiarly emphasized by itsrestrained emotion.

  Now the easy traveller took stock of his immediate surroundings, whichhad interested him only as a foothold and vantage-point for the panoramathat he had been breathing in. Here, of all conceivable places, he was indanger of becoming eavesdropper to a conversation which was evidentlyvery personal. Rounding the escarpment at his elbow he saw, on a shelf ofdecaying granite, two waiting ponies. One had a Mexican saddle of thecowboy type. The other had an Eastern side-saddle, which struck him asexotic in a land where women mostly ride astride. And what woman,whatever style of riding she chose, should care to come to this pass?

  Judging by the direction from which the voices came, the speakers werehidden by still another turn in the defile. A few more steps brought eyeas well as ear back to the living world with the sight of a girl seatedon a bowlder. H
e could see nothing of her face except the cheek, whichwas brown, and the tip of a chin, which he guessed was oval, and herhair, which was dark under her hatbrim and shimmering with gold where itwas kissed by the rays of the sun. An impression as swift as a flash oflight could not exclude inevitable curiosity as to the full face; acuriosity emphasized by the poised erectness of her slender figure.

  The man was bending over her in a familiar way. He was thirty, perhaps,in the prime of physical vigor, square-jawed, cocksure, a six-shooterslung at his hip. Though she was not giving way before him, her attitude,in its steadiness, reflected distress in a bowstrung tremulousness.Suddenly, at something he said which the easy traveller could not quiteunderstand, she sprang up aflame, her hand flying back against the rockwall behind her for support. Then the man spoke so loud that he wasdistinctly audible.

  "When you get mad like that you're prettier'n ever," he said.

  It was a peculiar situation. It seemed incredible, melodramatic, unreal,in sight of the crawling freight train far out on the levels.

  "Aren't you overplaying your part, sir?" the easy traveller asked.

  The man's hand flew to his six-shooter, while the girl looked around inswift and eager impulse to the interrupting voice. Its owner, the colorscheme of his attire emphasized by the glare of the low sun, expressed inhis pose and the inquiring flicker of a smile purely the element of thecasual. Far from making any movement toward his own six-shooter, heseemed oblivious of any such necessity. With the first glimpse of herface, when he saw the violet flame of her anger go ruddy with surpriseand relief, then fluid and sparkling as a culminating change of emotion,he felt cheap for having asked himself the question--which now seemed sosuperficial--whether she were good-looking or not. She was, undoubtedly,yes, undoubtedly good-looking in a way of her own.

  "What business is it of yours?" demanded the man, evidently under theimpression that he was due to say something, while his fingers stillrested on his holster.

  "None at all, unless she says so," the deliverer answered. "Is it?" heasked her.

  After her first glance at him she had lowered her lashes. Now she raisedthem, sending a direct message beside which her first glance had beendumb indifference. He was seeing into the depths of her eyes in theconsciousness of a privilege rarely bestowed. They gave wing to athousand inquiries. He had the thrill of an explorer who is about toenter on a voyage of discovery. Then the veil was drawn before his shiphad even put out from port. It was a veil woven with fine threads ofappreciative and conventional gratitude.

  "It is!" she said decisively.

  "I'll be going," said the persecutor, with a grimace that seemed mixedpartly of inherent bravado and partly of shame, as his pulse slowed downto normal.

  "As you please," answered that easy traveller. "I had no mind to exertany positive directions over your movements."

  His politeness, his disinterestedness, and his evident disinclination toany kind of vehemence carried an implication more exasperating than anopen challenge. They changed melodrama into comedy. They made hisprotagonist appear a negligible quantity.

  "There's some things I don't do when women are around," the persecutorreturned, grudgingly, and went for his horse; while oppressive silenceprevailed. The easy traveller was not looking at the girl or she at him.He was regarding the other man idly, curiously, though not contemptuouslyas he mounted and started down the trail toward the valley, only to drawrein as he looked back over his shoulder with a glare which took the easytraveller in from head to foot.

  "Huh! You near-silk dude!" he said chokingly, in his rancor which hadgrown with the few minutes he had had for self-communion.

  "If you mean my shirt, it was sold to me for pure silk," the easytraveller returned, in half-diffident correction of the statement.

  "We'll meet again!" came the more definite and articulate defiance.

  "Perhaps. Who can tell? Arizona, though a large place, has so few peoplethat it is humanly very small."

  Now the other man rose in his stirrups, resting the weight of his body onthe palm of the hand which was on the back of his saddle. He was rigid,his voice was shaking with very genuine though dramatic rage drawn to afine point of determination.

  "When we do meet, you better draw! I give you warning!" he called.

  There was no sign that this threat had made the easy traveller tighten asingle muscle. But a trace of scepticism had crept into his smile.

  "Whew!" He drew the exclamation out into a whistle.

  "Whistle--whistle while you can! You won't have many more chances! Draw,you tenderfoot! But it won't do any good--I'll get you!"

  With this challenge the other settled back into the saddle and proceededon his way.

  "Whew!" The second whistle was anything but truculent and anything butapologetic. It had the unconscious and spontaneous quality of the delightof the collector who finds a new specimen in wild places.

  From under her lashes the girl had been watching the easy travellerrather than her persecutor; first, studiously; then, in the confusion ofembarrassment that left her speechless.

  "Well, well," he concluded, "you must take not only your zoology, butyour anthropology as you find it!"

  His drollness, his dry contemplation of the specimen, and hisabsurdly gay and unpractical attire, formed a combination of elementssuddenly grouped into an effect that touched her reflex nerves afterthe strain with the magic of humor. She could not help herself: sheburst out laughing. At this, he looked away from the specimen; lookedaround puzzled, quizzically, and, in sympathetic impulse, beganlaughing himself. Thus a wholly unmodern incident took a whimsicalturn out of a horror which, if farcical in the abstract, was no lesspotent in the concrete.

  "Quite like the Middle Ages, isn't it?" he said.

  "But Walter Scott ceased writing in the thirties!" she returned, quick tofall in with his cue.

  "The swooning age outlasted him--lasted, indeed, into the era ofhoop-skirts; but that, too, is gone."

  "They do give medals," she added.

  "For rescuing the drowning only; and they are a great nuisance to carryaround in one's baggage. Please don't recommend me!"

  Both laughed again softly, looking fairly at each other inunderstanding, twentieth-century fashion. She was not to play theclassic damsel or he the classic rescuer. Yet the fact of a young manfinding a young woman brutally annoyed on the roof of the world, fiveor six miles from a settlement--well, it was a fact. Over the bump oftheir self-introduction, free of the serious impression of herexperience, she could think for him as well as for herself. This struckher with sudden alarm.

  "I fear I have made you a dangerous enemy," she said. "Pete Leddy is theprize ruffian of our community of Little Rivers."

  "I thought that this would be an interesting valley," he returned, inbland appreciation of her contribution of information about the habits ofthe specimen.