by Zane Grey
“Wal, I reckon you made a rake-off,” drawled Larry, as Neale came up. “Lend me some money, pard.”
Neale glanced at Larry and from him to the girl. She dropped her eyes.
“Ruby, do you like Larry?” he queried.
“Sure do,” replied the girl.
“Reddy, do you like Ruby?” went on Neale.
Beauty Stanton smiled her interest. The other woman came back from nowhere to watch Neale. Larry regarded his friend in mild surprise.
“I reckon it was a turrible case of love at fust sight,” he drawled.
“I’ll call your bluff!” flashed Neale. “I’ve just won three thousand dollars. I’ll give it to you. Will you take it and leave Benton—go back—no! go west—begin life over again?”
“Together, you mean!” exclaimed Beauty Stanton, as she rose with a glow on her faded face. No need to wonder why she had been named Beauty.
“Yes, together,” replied Neale, in swift steadiness. “You’ve started bad. But you’re young. It’s never too late. With this money you can buy a ranch—begin all over again.”
“Pard, haven’t you seen too much red liquor?” drawled Larry.
The girl shook her head. “Too late!” she said, softly.
“Why?”
“Larry is bad, but he’s honest. I’m both bad and dishonest.”
“Ruby, I wouldn’t call you dishonest,” returned Neale, bluntly. “Bad—yes. And wild! But if you had a chance?”
“No,” she said.
“You’re both slated for hell. What’s the sense of it?”
“I don’t see that you’re slated for heaven,” retorted Ruby.
“Wal, I shore say echo,” drawled Larry, as he rolled a cigarette. “Pard, you’re drunk this heah minnit.”
“I’m not drunk. I appeal to you, Miss Stanton,” protested Neale.
“You certainly are not drunk,” she replied. “You’re just—”
“Crazy,” interrupted Ruby.
They laughed.
“Maybe I do have queer impulses,” replied Neale, as he felt his face grow white. “Every once in a while I see a flash—of—of I don’t know what. I could do something big—even—now—if my heart wasn’t dead.”
“Mine’s in its grave,” said Ruby, bitterly. “Come, Stanton, let’s get out of this. Find me men who talk of drink and women.”
Neale deliberately reached out and stopped her as she turned away. He faced her.
“You’re no four-flush,” he said. “You’re game. You mean to play this out to a finish.… But you’re no—no maggot like the most. You can think. You’re afraid to talk to me.”
“I’m afraid of no man. But you—you’re a fool—a sky-pilot. You’re—”
“The thing is—it’s not too late.”
“It is too late!” she cried, with trembling lips.
Neale saw and felt his dominance over her.
“It is never too late!” he responded, with all his force. “I can prove that.”
She looked at him mutely. The ghost of another girl stood there instead of the wild Ruby of Benton.
“Pard, you’re drunk shore!” ejaculated Larry, as he towered over them and gave his belt a hitch. The cowboy sensed events.
“I’ve annoyed you more than once,” said Neale. “This’s the last.… So tell me the truth.… Could I take you away from this life?”
“Take me?… How—man?”
“I—I don’t know. But somehow.… I’d hold it—as worthy—to save a girl like you—any girl—from hell.”
“But—how?” she faltered. The bitterness, the irony, the wrong done by her life, was not manifest now.
“You refused my plan with Larry.… Come, let me find a home for you—with good people.”
“My God—he’s not in earnest!” gasped the girl to her women friends.
“I am in earnest,” said Neale.
Then the tension of the girl relaxed. Her face showed a rebirth of soul.
“I can’t accept,” she replied. If she thanked him it was with a look. Assuredly her eyes had never before held that gaze for Neale. Then she left the room, and presently Stanton’s companion followed her. But Beauty Stanton remained. She appeared amazed, even dismayed.
Larry lighted his cigarette. “Shore I’d call thet a square kid,” he said. “Neale, if you get any drunker you’ll lose all thet money.”
“I’ll lose it anyhow,” replied Neale, absent-mindedly.
“Wal, stake me right heah an’ now.”
At that Neale generously and still absent-mindedly delivered to Larry a handful of gold and notes that he did not count.
“Hell! I ain’t no bank,” protested the cowboy.
Hough and Ancliffe joined them and with amusement watched Larry try to find pockets enough for his small fortune.
“Easy come, easy go in Benton,” said the gambler, with a smile. Then his glance, alighting upon the quiet Stanton, grew a little puzzled. “Beauty, what ails you?” he asked.
She was pale and her expressive eyes were fixed upon Neale. Hough’s words startled her.
“What ails me?… Place, I’ve had a forgetful moment—a happy one—and I’m deathly sick!”
Ancliffe stared in surprise. He took her literally.
Beauty Stanton looked at Neale again. “Will you come to see me?” she asked, with sweet directness.
“Thank you—no,” replied Neale. He was annoyed. She had asked him that before, and he had coldly but courteously repelled what he thought were her advances. This time he was scarcely courteous.
The woman flushed. She appeared about to make a quick and passionate reply, in anger and wounded pride, but she controlled the impulse. She left the room with Ancliffe.
“Neale, do you know Stanton is infatuated with you?” asked Hough, thoughtfully.
“Nonsense!” replied Neale.
“She is, though. These women can’t fool me. I told you days ago I suspected that. Now I’ll gamble on it. And you know how I play my cards.”
“She saw me win a pile of money,” said Neale, with scorn.
“I’ll bet you can’t make her take a dollar of it. Any amount you want and any odds.”
Neale would not accept the wager. What was he talking about, anyway? What was this drift of things? His mind did not seem clear. Perhaps he had drunk too much. The eyes of both Ruby and Beauty Stanton troubled him. What had he done to these women?
“Neale, you’re more than usually excited today,” observed Hough. “Probably was the run of luck. And then you spouted to the women.” Neale confessed his offer to Ruby and Larry, and then his own impulse.
“Ruby called me a fool—crazy—a sky-pilot. Maybe I am.”
“Sky-pilot! Well, the little devil!” laughed Hough. “I’ll gamble she called you that before you declared yourself.”
“Before, yes. I tell you, Hough, I have crazy impulses. They’ve grown on me out here. They burst like lightning out of a clear sky. I would have done just that thing for Ruby.… Mad, you say?… Why, man, she’s not hopeless! There was something deep behind that impulse. Strange—not understandable! I’m at the mercy of every hour I spend here. Benton has got into my blood. And I see how Benton is a product of this great advance of progress—of civilization—the U. P. R. We’re only atoms in a force no one can understand.… Look at Reddy King. That cowboy was set—fixed like stone in his character. But Benton has called to the worst and wildest in him. He’ll do something terrible. Mark what I say. We’ll all do something terrible. You, too, Place Hough, with all your cold, implacable control. The moment will come, born out of this abnormal time. I can’t explain, but I feel. There’s a work-shop in this hell of Benton. Invisible, monstrous, and nameless!… Nameless like the new graves dug every day out here on the desert.… How few of the honest toilers dream of the spirit that is working on them. That Irishman, Shane, think of him. He fought while his brains oozed from a hole in his head; I saw, but I didn’t know then. I wanted to take his place. He said, no, h
e wasn’t hurt, and Casey would laugh at him. Aye, Casey would have laughed!.… They are men. There are thousands of them. The U. P. R. goes on. It can’t be stopped. It has the momentum of a great nation pushing it on from behind.… And I, who have lost all I cared for, and you, who are a drone among the bees, and Ruby and Stanton with their kind, poor creatures sucked into the vortex; yes, and that mob of leeches, why we all are so stung by that nameless spirit that we are stirred beyond ourselves and dare both height and depth of impossible things.”
“You must be drunk,” said Place, gravely, “and yet what you say hits me hard. I’m a gambler. But sometimes—there are moments when I might be less or more. There’s mystery in the air. This Benton is a chaos. Those hairy toilers of the rails! I’ve watched them hammer and lift and dig and fight. By day they sweat and they bleed, they sing and joke and quarrel—and go on with the work. By night they are seized by the furies. They fight among themselves while being plundered and murdered by Benton’s wolves. Heroic by day—hellish by night.… And so, spirit or what—they set the pace.”
Next afternoon, when parasitic Benton awoke, it found the girl Ruby dead in her bed.
Her door had to be forced. She had not been murdered. She had destroyed much of the contents of a trunk. She had dressed herself in simple garments that no one in Benton had ever seen. It did not appear what means she had employed to take her life. She was only one of many. More than one girl of Benton’s throng had sought the same short road and cheated life of further pain.
When Neale heard about it, upon his return to Benton, late that afternoon, Ruby was in her grave. It suited him to walk out in the twilight and stand awhile in the silence beside the bare sandy mound. No stone—no mark. Another nameless grave! She had been a child once, with dancing eyes and smiles, loved by someone, surely, and perhaps mourned by someone living. The low hum of Benton’s awakening night life was borne faintly on the wind. The sand seeped; the coyotes wailed; and yet there was silence. Twilight lingered. Out on the desert the shadows deepened.
By some chance the grave of the scarlet woman adjoined that of a laborer who had been killed by a blast. Neale remembered the spot. He had walked out there before. A morbid fascination often drew him to view that ever-increasing row of nameless graves. As the workman had given his life to the road, so had the woman. Neale saw a significance in the parallel.
Neale returned to the town troubled in mind. He remembered the last look Ruby had given him. Had he awakened conscience in her? Upon questioning Hough, he learned that Ruby had absented herself from the dancing-hall and had denied herself to all on that last night of her life.
There was to be one more incident relating to this poor girl before Benton in its mad rush should forget her.
Neale divined the tragedy before it came to pass, but he was as powerless to prevent it as any other spectator in Beauty Stanton’s hall.
Larry King reacted in his own peculiar way to the news of Ruby’s suicide, and the rumored cause. He stalked into that dancing-hall, where his voice stopped the music and the dancers.
“Come out heah!” he shouted to the pale Cordy.
And King spun the man into the center of the hall, where he called him every vile name known to the camp, scorned and slapped and insulted him, shamed him before that breathless crowd, goaded him at last into a desperate reaching for his gun, and killed him as he drew it.
CHAPTER 21
Benton slowed and quieted down a few days before pay-day, to get ready for the great rush. Only the saloons and dance-halls and gambling-hells were active, and even here the difference was manifest.
The railroad-yard was the busiest place in the town, for every train brought huge loads of food, merchandise, and liquor, the transporting of which taxed the teamsters to their utmost.
The day just before pay-day saw the beginning of a singular cycle of change. Gangs of laborers rode in on the work-trains from the grading-camps and the camps at the head of the rails, now miles west of Benton. A rest of several days inevitably followed the visit of the pay-car. It was difficult to keep enough men at work to feed and water the teams, and there would have been sorry protection from the Indians had not the troops been on duty. Pay-days were not off-days for the soldiers.
Steady streams of men flowed toward Benton from east and west; and that night the hum of Benton was merry, subdued, waiting.
Bright and early the town with its added thousands awoke. The morning was clear, rosy, fresh. On the desert the colors changed from soft gray to red and the whirls of dust, riding the wind, resembled little clouds radiant with sunset hues. Silence and solitude and unbroken level reigned outside in infinite contrast to the seething town. Benton resembled an ant-heap at break of day. A thousand songs arose, crude and coarse and loud, but full of joy. Pay-day and vacation were at hand!
“Then drill, my Paddies, drill!
Drill, my heroes, drill!
Drill all day,
No sugar in your tay,
Workin’ on the U. P. Railway.”
Casey was one Irish trooper of thousands who varied the song and tune to suit his taste. The content alone they all held. Drill! They were laborers who could turn into regiments at a word.
They shaved their stubby beards and donned their best—a bronzed, sturdy, cheery army of wild boys. The curse rested but lightly upon their broad shoulders.
Strangely enough, the morning began without the gusty wind so common to that latitude, and the six inches of powdery white dust did not rise. The wind, too, waited. The powers of heaven smiled in the clear, quiet morning, but the powers of hell waited—for the hours to come, the night and the darkness.
At nine o’clock a mob of five thousand men had congregated around the station, most of them out in the open, on the desert side of the track. They were waiting for the pay-train to arrive. This hour was the only orderly one that Benton ever saw. There were laughter, profanity, play—a continuous hum, but compared to Benton’s usual turmoil, it was pleasant. The workmen talked in groups, and, like all crowds of men sober and unexcited, they were given largely to badinage and idle talk.
“Wot was ut I owed ye, Moike?” asked a strapping grader.
Mike scratched his head. “Wor it thorty dollars this toime?”
“It wor,” replied the other. “Moike, yez hev a mimory.”
A big Negro pushed out his huge jaw and blustered at his fellows.
“I’s a-gwine to bust thet yaller nigger’s haid,” he declared.
“Bill, he’s your fr’en’. Cool down, man, cool down,” replied a comrade.
A teamster was writing a letter in lead-pencil, using a board over his knees.
“Jim, you goin’ to send money home?” queried a fellow-laborer.
“I am that, an’ first thing when I get my pay,” was the reply.
“Reminds me, I owe for this suit I’m wearin’. I’ll drop in an’ settle.”
A group of spikers held forth on a little bank above the railroad track, at a point where a few weeks before they had fastened those very rails with lusty blows.
“Well, boys, I think I see the smoke of our pay-dirt, way down the line,” said one.
“Bandy, your eyes are pore,” replied another.
“Yep, she’s comin’,” said another. “’Bout time, for I haven’t two-bits to my name.”
“Boys, no buckin’ the tiger for me today,” declared Bandy.
He was laughed at by all except one quiet comrade who gazed thoughtfully eastward, back over the vast and rolling country. This man was thinking of home, of wife and little girl, of what pay-day meant for them.
Bandy gave him a friendly slap on the shoulder.
“Frank, you got drunk an’ laid out all night, last payday.”
Frank remembered, but he did not say what he had forgotten that last pay-day.
A long and gradual slope led from Benton down across the barren desert toward Medicine Bow. The railroad track split it and narrowed to a mere thread upon the horizon. The
crowd of watching, waiting men saw smoke rise over that horizon line, and a dark, flat, creeping object. Through the big throng ran a restless murmur. The train was in sight. It might have been a harbinger of evil, for a subtle change, nervous, impatient, brooding, visited that multitude. A slow movement closed up the disintegrated crowd and a current of men worked forward to encounter resistance and opposing currents. They had begun to crowd for advantageous positions closer to the pay-car so as to be the first in line.
A fight started somewhere, full of loud curses and dull blows; and then a jostling mass tried the temper of the slow-marching men. Some boss yelled an order from a box-car, and he was hooted. There was no order. When the train whistled for Benton a hoarse and sustained shout ran through the mob, not from all lips, nor from any massed group, but taken up from man to man—a strange sound, the first note of calling Benton.
The train arrived. Troops alighting preserved order near the pay-car; and out of the dense mob a slow stream of men flowed into the car at one end and out again at the other.
Bates, a giant digger and a bully, was the first man in the line, the first to get his little share of the fortunes in gold passing out of the car that day.
Long before half of that mob had received its pay Bates lay dead upon a sanded floor, killed in a drunken brawl.
And the Irishman Mike had received his thirty dollars.
And the big Negro had broken the head of his friend.
And the teamster had forgotten to send money home.
And his comrade had neglected to settle for the suit of clothes he was wearing.
And Bandy, for all his vows, had gone straight for bucking the tiger.
And Frank, who had gotten drunk last pay-day, had been mindful of wife and little girl far away and had done his duty.
As the spirit of the gangs changed with the coming of the gold, so did that of the day.
The wind began to blow, the dust began to fly, the sun began to burn; and the freshness and serenity of the morning passed.
