The Western Romance MEGAPACK ®: 20 Classic Tales

by Zane Grey

  “You would think every day Sunday if you had had as good a time as I have for six weeks.”

  “The doctor does say you’re doing beautifully. I asked him yesterday how soon you would be well and he said you never had been so well since he knew you. But what is to-morrow?”

  “Thanksgiving.”

  “Thanksgiving, indeed! Yes, every day is Thanksgiving for us. But it’s not especially that.”

  “Christmas.”

  “Nonsense! To-morrow is the second anniversary of our engagement.”

  “My Lord, Gertrude, have we been engaged two years? Why, at that rate I can’t possibly marry you till I’m forty-four.”

  “It isn’t two years, it’s two months. And to-night they have their memorial services for poor Paddy McGraw. And, do you know, your friend Mr. Foley has our engine now? Yes; he came up the other day to ask about you, but in reality to tell me he had been promoted. I think he ought to have been, after I spoke myself to Mr. Archibald about it. But what touched me was, the poor fellow asked if I wouldn’t see about getting some flowers for the memorial at the engineer’s lodge to-night—and he didn’t want his wife to know anything about it, because she would scold him for spending his money—see what you are coming to! So I suggested he should let me provide his flowers and ours together, and when I tried to find out what he wanted, he asked if a throttle made of flowers would be all right.”

  “Your heart would not let you say no?”

  “I told him it would be lovely, and to leave it all to me.”

  She brought forward the box she was opening. “See how they have laid this throttle-bar of violets across these Galax leaves—and latched it with a rose. Here, Solomon,” she exiled the boy from an adjoining room, “take this very carefully. No. There isn’t any card. Oh,” she exclaimed, as he left, and she clasped her lifted hands, “I am glad, I am glad we are leaving these mountains. Do you know papa is to be here to-morrow? And that your speech must be ready? He isn’t going to give his consent without being asked.”

  “I suppose not,” said Glover, dejectedly.

  “What are you going to say?”

  “I shall say that I consider him worthy of my confidence and esteem.”

  “I think you would make more headway, dearest, if you should tell him you considered yourself worthy of his confidence and esteem.”

  “But, hang it, I don’t.”

  “Well, couldn’t you, for once, fib a little? Oh, Ab; I’ll tell you what I wish you could do.”

  “Pray what?”

  “Talk a little business to him. I feel sure, if you could only talk business awhile, papa would be all right.”

  “Business! If it’s only a question of talking business, the thing’s as good as done. I can’t talk anything but business.”

  “Can’t you, indeed! I like that. Pray what did you talk to me on the platform of my father’s own car?”

  “Business.”

  “You talked the silliest stuff I ever listened to—”

  “Not reflecting on anyone present, of course.”

  “And, Ab—”

  “Yes.”

  “If you could take him aback somehow—nothing would give him such an idea of you. I think that was what—well, I was so completely overcome by your audacity—”

  “You seemed so,” commented Glover, rather grimly. “Very well, if you want him taken aback, I will take him aback, even if I have to resort to force.” He withdrew his right arm from its sling and began unwrapping the bandages and throwing the splints Into the fire.

  “What in the world are you doing?” asked Gertrude, in consternation.

  “There’s no use carrying these things any longer. My right arm is just as strong as it ever was—and to tell the truth—”

  “Now keep your distance, if you please.”

  “To tell the truth, I never could play ball left-handed, anyway, Gertrude. Now, let’s begin easy. Just shake hands with me.”

  “I’ll do nothing of the sort. It’s bad form, anyway. You may just shake hands with yourself. All things considered, I think you have good reason to.”

  “I understand you were chief engineer of this system at one time,” began Mr. Brock, at the very outset of the dreaded interview.

  “I was,” answered Glover.

  “And that you resigned voluntarily to take an inferior position on the Mountain Division?”

  “That is true.”

  “Railroad men with ambition,” commented Mr. Brock, dryly, “don’t usually turn their faces from responsibility in that way. They look higher, and not lower.”

  “I thought I was looking higher when I came to the mountains.”

  “That may do for a joke, but I am talking business.”

  “I, too; and since I am, let me explain to you why I resigned a higher position for a lower one. The fact is well known; the reason isn’t. I came to this road at the call of your second vice-president, Mr. Bucks. I have always enjoyed a large measure of his confidence. We saw some years ago that a reorganization was inevitable, and spent many nights discussing the different features of it. This is what we determined: That the key to this whole system with its eight thousand miles of main line and branches is this Mountain Division. To operate the system economically and successfully means that the grades must be reduced and the curvature reduced on this division. Surely, with you, I need not dwell on the A B C’s of twentieth century railroading. It is the road that can handle the tonnage cheapest that will survive. All this we knew, and I told him to put me out on this division. It was during the receivership and there was no room for frills.

  “I have worked here on a small salary and done everything but maul spikes to keep down expenses on the division, because we had to make some showing to whoever wanted to buy our junk. In this way I took a roving commission and packed my bag from an office where I could acquire nothing I did not already know to a position where I could get hold of the problem of mountain transportation and cut the coal bills of the road in two.”

  “Have you done it?”

  “Have I cut the coal bills in two? No; but I have learned how. It will cost money to do that—”

  “How much money?”

  “Thirty millions of dollars.”

  “A good deal of money.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. Don’t let us be afraid to face figures. You will spend a hundred millions before you quit, Mr. Brock, and you will make another hundred millions in doing it. To put it bluntly, the mountains must be brought to terms. For three years I have eaten and lived and slept with them. I know every grade, curve, tunnel, and culvert from here to Bear Dance—yes, to the coast. The day of heavy gradients and curves for transcontinental tonnage is gone by. If I ever get a chance, I will rip this right of way open from end to end and make it possible to send freight through these ranges at a cost undreamed of in the estimates of to-day. But that was not my only object in coming to the mountains.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Mr. Bucks and the men he has gathered around him—Callahan, Blood and the rest of us—are railroad men. Railroading is our business; we know nothing else. There was an embarrassing chance that when our buyer came he might be hostile to the present management. Happily,” Glover bowed to the Pittsburg magnate, “he isn’t; but he might have been—”

  “I see.”

  “We were prepared for that.”

  “How?”

  “I shouldn’t speak of this if I did not know you were Mr. Bucks’ closest friend. Even he doesn’t know it, but six months of my own time—not the company’s—I put in on a matter that concerned my friends and myself, and I have the notes for a new line to parallel this if it were needed—and Blood and I have the only pass within three hundred miles nort
h or south to run it over. These were some of the reasons, Mr. Brock, why I came to the mountains.”

  “I understand. I understand perfectly. Mr. Glover, what is your age, sir?”

  The time seemed ripe to put Gertrude’s second hint into play.

  “That is a subject I never discuss with anyone, Mr. Brock.”

  He waited just a moment to let the magnate get his breath, and continued, “May I tell you why? When the road went into the receivership, I was named as one of the receivers on behalf of the Government. The President, when I first met him during my term, asked for my father, thinking he was the man that had been recommended to him. He wouldn’t believe me when I assured him I was his appointee. ‘If I had known how young you were, Glover,’ said he to me, afterward, ‘I never should have dared appoint you.’ The position paid me twenty-five thousand dollars a year for four years; but the incident paid me better than that, for it taught me never to discuss my age.”

  “I see. I see. A fine point. You have taught me something. By the way, about the pass you spoke of—I suppose you understand the importance of getting hold of a strategic point like that to—a—forestall—competition?”

  “I have hold of it.”

  “I do not mind saying to you, under all the circumstances, that there has been a little friction with the Harrison people. Do you see? And, for reasons that may suggest themselves, there may be more. They might conclude to run a line to the coast themselves. The young man has, I believe, been turned down—”

  “I understood the—the slate had been—changed slightly,” stammered Glover, coloring.

  “There might be resentment, that’s all. Blood is loyal to us, I presume.”

  “There’s no taint anywhere in Morris Blood. He is loyalty itself.”

  “What would you think of him as General Manager? Callahan goes to the river as Traffic Manager. Mr. Bucks, you know, is the new President; these are his recommendations. What do you think of them?”

  “No better men on earth for the positions, and I’m mighty glad to see them get what they deserve.”

  “Our idea is to leave you right here in the mountains.” It was hard to be left completely out of the new deal, but Glover did not visibly wince. “With the title,” added Mr. Brock, after he knew his arrow had gone home, “with the title of Second Vice-president, which Mr. Bucks now holds. That will give you full swing in your plans for the rebuilding of the system. I want to see them carried out as the estimates I’ve been studying this winter show. Don’t thank me. I did not know till yesterday they were entirely your plans. You can have every dollar you need; it will rest with you to produce the results. I guess that’s all. No, stop. I want you to go East with us next week for a month or two as our guest. You can forward your work the faster when you get back, and I should like you to meet the men whose money you are to spend. Were you waiting to see Gertrude?”

  “Why—yes, sir—I—”

  “I’ll see whether she’s around.”

  Gertrude did not appear for some moments, then she half ran and half glided in, radiant. “I couldn’t get away!” she exclaimed. “He’s talking about you yet to Aunt Jane and Marie. He says you’re charged with dynamite—I knew that—a most remarkable young man. How did you ever convince him you knew anything? I am confident you don’t. You must have taken him somehow aback, didn’t you?”

  “If you want to give your father a touch of asthma,” suggested Glover, “ask him how old I am; but he had me scared once or twice,” admitted the engineer, wiping the cold sweat from his wrists.

  “Did he give his consent?”

  “Why—hang it—I—we got to talking business and I forgot to—”

  “So like you, dear. However, it must be all right, for he said he should need your help in buying the coast branches and The Short Line.”

  “The Short Line,” gasped Glover. “Well, I haven’t inventoried lately. If we marry in June—”

  “Don’t worry about that, for we sha’n’t marry in June, my love.”

  “But when we do, we shall need some money for a wedding-trip—”

  “We certainly shall; a lot of it, dearie.”

  “I may have ten or twelve hundred left after that is provided for. But my confidence in your father’s judgment is very great, and if he’s going to make up a pool, my money is at his service, as far as it will go, to buy The Short Line—or any other line he may take a fancy to.”

  “Why, he’s just telling Marie about your making a hundred thousand dollars in four years by being wonderfully shrewd—”

  “But that confounded mine that I told you about—”

  “You dear old stupid. Never mind, you have made a real strike to-day. But if you ever again delude papa into thinking you know more than I do, I shall expose you without mercy.”

  The train, a private car special, carrying Mr. Brock, chairman of the board, and his family, the new president and the second vice-president elect, was pulling slowly across the long, high spans of the Spider bridge. Glover and Gertrude had gone back to the observation platform. Leaning on his arm, she was looking across the big valley and into the west. The sun, setting clear, tinged with gold the far snows of the mountains.

  “It is less than a year,” she was murmuring, “since I crossed this bridge; think of it. And what bridges have I not crossed since! See. Your mountains are fading away—”

  “My mountains faded away, dear heart, don’t you know, when you told me I might love you. As for those”—his eyes turned from the distant ranges back to her eyes—“after all, they brought me you.”

  THE DESERT VALLEY, by Jackson Gregory

  The Desert

  Over many wide regions of the south-western desert country of Arizona and New Mexico lies an eternal spell of silence and mystery. Across the sand-ridges come many foreign things, both animate and inanimate, which are engulfed in its immensity, which frequently disappear for all time from the sight of men, blotted out like a bird which flies free from a lighted room into the outside darkness. As though in compensation for that which it has taken, the desert from time to time allows new marvels, riven from its vitals, to emerge.

  Though death-still, it has a voice which calls ceaselessly to those human hearts tuned to its messages: hostile and harsh, it draws and urges; repellent, it profligately awards health and wealth; inviting, it kills. And always it keeps its own counsel; it is without peer in its lonesomeness, and without confidants; it heaps its sand over its secrets to hide them from its flashing stars.

  You see the bobbing ears of a pack-animal and the dusty hat and stoop shoulders of a man. They are symbols of mystery. They rise briefly against the skyline, they are gone into the grey distance. Something beckons or something drives. They are lost to human sight, perhaps to human memory, like a couple of chips drifting out into the ocean. Patient time may witness their return; it is still likely that soon another incarnation will have closed for man and beast, that they will have left to mark their passing a few glisteningly white bones, polished untiringly by tiny sand-chisels in the grip of the desert winds. They may find gold, but they may not come in time to water. The desert is equally conversant with the actions of men mad with gold and mad with thirst.

  To push out along into this immensity is to evince the heart of a brave man or the brain of a fool. The endeavour to traverse the forbidden garden of silence implies on the part of the agent an adventurous nature. Hence it would seem no great task to catalogue those human beings who set their backs to the gentler world and press forward into the naked embrace of this merciless land. Yet as many sorts and conditions come here each year as are to be found outside.

  Silence, ruthlessness, mystery—these are the attributes of the desert. True, it has its softer phases—veiled dawns and dusks, rainbow hues, moon and stars. But these are but tender blossoms from a spiked, poisonous
stalk, like the flowers of the cactus. They are brief and evanescent; the iron parent is everlasting.

  CHAPTER I

  A Bluebird’s Feather

  In the dusk a pack-horse crested a low-lying sand-ridge, put up its head and sniffed, pushed forward eagerly, its nostrils twitching as it turned a little more toward the north, going straight toward the water-hole. The pack was slipping as far to one side as it had listed to the other half an hour ago; in the restraining rope there were a dozen intricate knots where one would have amply sufficed. The horse broke into a trot, blazing its own trail through the mesquite; a parcel slipped; the slack rope grew slacker because of the subsequent readjustment; half a dozen bundles dropped after the first. A voice, thin and irritable, shouted ‘Whoa!’ and the man in turn was briefly outlined against the pale sky as he scrambled up the ridge. He was a little man and plainly weary; he walked as though his boots hurt him; he carried a wide, new hat in one hand; the skin was peeling from his blistered face. From his other hand trailed a big handkerchief. He was perhaps fifty or sixty. He called ‘Whoa!’ again, and made what haste he could after his horse.

  A moment later a second horse appeared against the sky, following the man, topping the ridge, passing on. In silhouette it appeared no normal animal but some weird monstrosity, a misshapen body covered everywhere with odd wart-like excrescences. Close by, these unique growths resolved themselves into at least a score of canteens and water-bottles of many shapes and sizes, strung together with bits of rope. Undoubtedly the hand which had tied the other knots had constructed these. This horse in turn sniffed and went forward with a quickened pace.

  Finally came the fourth figure of the procession. This was a girl. Like the man, she was booted; like him, she carried a broad hat in her hand. Here the similarity ended. She wore an outdoor costume, a little thing appropriate enough for her environment. And yet it was peculiarly appropriate to femininity. It disclosed the pleasing lines of a pretty figure. Her fatigue seemed less than the man’s. Her youth was pronounced, assertive. She alone of the four paused more than an instant upon the slight eminence; she put back her head and looked up at the few stars that were shining; she listened to the hushed voice of the desert. She drew a scarf away from her neck and let the cooling air breathe upon her throat. The throat was round; no doubt it was soft and white, and, like her whole small self, seductively feminine.