Claim Number One

by Ogden, George W

  “Yes, I saw it,” said the doctor. “It sounds like one crook knocking another. But it can’t be any worse than this place, anyhow. I think I’ll take a ride over there in a day or so and size it up.”

  “Well, I surrender all pretensions to Claim Number One,” laughed Mrs. Reed, a straining of color in her cheeks.

  June had not demanded fudge once in four days. That alone was enough to raise the colors of courage in her mother’s face, even if there hadn’t been a change in the young lady for the better in other directions. Four days of Wyoming summer sun and wind had made as much difference in June as four days of September blaze make in a peach on the tip of an exposed bough. She was browning and reddening beautifully, and her hair was taking on a trick of wildness, blowing friskily about her eyes.

  It was plain that June had in her all the making of a hummer. That’s what Horace Bentley, the lawyer, owned to himself as he told her mother in confidence that a month of that high country, with its fresh-from-creation air, would be better for the girl’s natural endowments than all the beauty-parlors of Boston or the specialists of Vienna. Horace felt of his early bald spot, half believing that some stubby hairs were starting there already.

  There was still a glow of twilight in the sky when lights appeared in the windowless windows of the church, and the whine of tuning fiddles came out of its open door. Mrs. Reed stiffened as she located the sound, and an expression of outraged sanctity appeared in her face. She turned to Dr. Slavens.

  “Are they going to–to–dance in that building?” she demanded.

  “I’m afraid they are,” said he. “It’s used for dancing, they tell me.”

  “But it’s a church–it’s consecrated!” she gasped.

  “I reckon it’s worn off by this time,” he comforted. “It was a church a long, long time ago–for Comanche. The saloon man across from it told me its history. He considered locating in it, he said, but they wanted too much rent.

  “When Comanche was only a railroad camp–a good while before the rails were laid this far–a traveling preacher struck the town and warmed them up with an old-style revival. They chipped in the money to build the church in the fervor of the passing glow, and the preacher had it put up–just as you see it, belfry and all.

  “They even bought a bell for it, and it used to ding for the sheepmen and railroaders, as long as their religion lasted. When it ran out, the preacher moved on to fresh fields, and a rancher bought the bell to call his hands to dinner. The respectable element of Comanche–that is, the storekeepers, their wives, daughters and sons, and the clerks, and others–hold a dance there now twice a week. That is their only relaxation.”

  “It’s a shame!” declared Mrs. Reed.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” said the doctor easily.

  “I’m so disappointed in it!” said she.

  “Because it represents itself as a church when it’s something else?” inquired the doctor softly. “Well, I shouldn’t be, if I were you. It has really nothing to be ashamed of, for the respectable are mightily in the minority in Comanche, I can tell you, madam–that is, among the regular inhabitants.”

  “Let’s go over and look on,” suggested William Bentley. “It may make some of you gloomy people forget your future troubles for a while.”

  The party soon found that looking on exposed them to the contagion of sociability. They were such wholesome-looking people at the gathering, and their efforts to make the visitors who stood outside the door feel at home and comfortable were so genuine, that reserve dissolved most unaccountably.

  It was not long before June’s mother, her prejudices against such frivolous and worldly use of a church blown away, was pigeoning around with William Bentley. Likewise Mrs. Mann, the miller out of sight and out of mind, stepped lightly with Horace, the lawyer, the sober black bag doubled up and stored in the pocket of his coat, its handles dangling like bridle-reins.

  June alone was left unpaired, in company with the doctor and Miss Horton, who asserted that they did not dance. Her heels were itching to be clicking off that jolly two-step which the Italian fiddlers and harpist played with such enticing swing. The school-teacher and the sergeant were not with them, having gone out on some expedition of their own among the allurements of Comanche.

  But June hadn’t long to bear the itch of impatience, for ladies were not plentiful at the dance. Before anybody had time to be astonished by his boldness, a young man was bowing before June, presenting his crooked elbow, inviting her to the dance with all the polish that could possibly lie on any one man. On account of an unusually enthusiastic clatter of heels at that moment, Dr. Slavens and Miss Horton, a few paces distant, could not hear what he said, but they caught their breaths a little sharply when June took the proffered arm.

  “Surest thing you know,” they heard her eager little voice say as she passed them with a happy, triumphant look behind.

  Dr. Slavens looked at Miss Horton; Miss Horton looked at the doctor. Both laughed.

  “Well, I like that!” she exclaimed.

  “Yes,” he agreed, but apparently from quite a different angle, “so do I. It’s natural and unaffected; it’s coming down to first principles. Well, I don’t see that there’s anything left for you and me to do but use up some of this moonlight in a walk. I’d like to see the river in this light. Come?”

  “Oh, that would be unconventional!” she protested.

  But it was not a strong protest; more of a question perhaps, which left it all to him.

  “This is an unconventional country,” he said. “Look at it, as white as snow under this summer moon.”

  “It’s lovely by night,” she agreed; “but this Comanche is like a sore spot on a clean skin. It’s a blight and a disfigurement, and these noises they make after dark sound like some savage revel.”

  “We’ll put them behind us for two hours or so,” he decided with finality which allowed no further argument.

  As they set off toward the river he did not offer her the support of his arm, for she strode beside him with her hands swinging free, long step to his long step, not a creature of whims and shams, he knew, quite able to bear her own weight on a rougher road than that.

  “Still it is unconventional,” she reflected, looking away over the flat land.

  “That’s the beauty of it,” said he. “Let’s be just natural.”

  They passed beyond the straggling limits of Comanche, where the town blended out into the plain in the tattered tents and road-battered wagons of the most earnest of all the home-seekers, those who had staked everything on the hope of drawing a piece of land which would serve at last as a refuge against the world’s buffeting.

  Under their feet was the low-clinging sheep-sage and the running herbs of yellow and gray which seemed so juiceless and dry to the eye, but which were the provender of thousands of sheep and cattle that never knew the shelter of fold or stable, nor the taste of man-grown grain or fodder, from the day of their birth to the day of their marketing. Winter and summer alike, under the parching sun, under the strangling drifts, that clinging, gray vegetation was the animals’ sole nutriment.

  Behind the couple the noises of Comanche died to murmurs. Ahead of them rose the dark line of cottonwoods which stood upon the river-shore.

  “I want to take another look at the Buckhorn Cañon,” said the doctor, stalking on in his sturdy, farm-bred gait.

  “It makes a fearful roar,” she remarked as they approached the place where the swift river, compressed into the flumelike passage which it had whetted out of the granite, tossed its white mane in the moonlight before plunging into the dark door of the cañon.

  “I’ve been hearing yarns and traditions about that cañon ever since I came here,” he told her. “They say it’s a thousand feet deep in places.”

  “June and I came over here this morning,” said Agnes, “along with Sergeant Schaefer. He said he didn’t believe that June could hike that far. I sat here on the rocks a long time watching it. I never saw so much
mystery and terror in water before.”

  She drew a little nearer to him as she spoke, and he put his hand on her shoulder in an unconscious movement of restraint as she leaned over among the black boulders and peered into the hissing current.

  “Do you suppose anybody ever went in there?” she asked.

  “They say the Indians know some way of getting through,” he replied, “but no white man ever went into the cañon and came out alive. The last one to try it was a representative of a Denver paper who came out here at the beginning of the registration. He went in there with his camera on his back after a story.”

  “Poor fellow! Did he get through–at all?”

  “They haven’t reported him on the other side yet. His paper offers a reward for the solution of the mystery of his disappearance, which is no mystery at all. He didn’t have the right kind of footgear, and he slipped. That’s all there is to it.”

  He felt her shudder under his hand, which remained unaccountably on her warm shoulder after the need of restraint had passed.

  “It’s a forbidding place by day,” said she, “and worse at night. Just think of the despair of that poor man when he felt himself falling down there in the dark!”

  “Moccasins are the things for a job like that,” he declared. “I’ve studied it all out; I believe I could go through there without a scratch.”

  “What in the world would anybody want to do it for? What is there to be gained by it, to the good of anybody?” she wondered.

  “Well, there’s the reward of five hundred dollars offered by the newspaper in Denver,” he answered.

  “It’s a pitiful stake against such odds!” she scorned.

  “And all the old settlers say there’s gold in there–rich pockets of it, washed out of the ledges in the sides of the walls and held by the rocks in the river-bed and along the margins. A nugget is picked up now and then on the other side, so there seems to be ground for the belief that fortune waits for the man who makes a careful exploration.”

  “He couldn’t carry enough of it out to make it worth while,” she objected.

  “But he could go back,” Dr. Slavens reminded her. “It would be easy the second time. Or he might put in effect the scheme a sheep-herder had once.”

  “What was that?” she asked, turning her face up to him from her place on the low stone where she sat, the moonlight glinting in her eyes.

  He laughed a little.

  “Not that it was much of a joke the way it turned out,” he explained. “He went in there to hunt for the gold, leaving two of his companions to labor along the brink of the cañon above and listen for his signal shout in case he came across any gold worth while. Then they were to let a rope down to him and he’d send up the treasure. It was a great scheme, but they never got a chance to try it. If he ever gave any signal they never heard it, for down there a man’s voice strained to its shrillest would be no more than a whisper against a tornado. You can believe that, can’t you, from the way it roars and tears around out here?”

  “All the gold that remains unmined wouldn’t tempt me a hundred feet down that black throat,” she shuddered. “But what became of the adventurer with the scheme?”

  “He came through in time–they caught him at the outlet over there in the mountains. The one pocket that remained in his shredded clothing was full of gold nuggets, they say. So he must have found it, even if he couldn’t make them hear.”

  “What a dismal end for any man!”

  “A man could beat it, though,” said he, leaning forward in thoughtful attitude. “He’d need a strong light, and moccasins, so he could cling to the rocks. I believe it could be done, and I’ve thought a good deal about exploring it myself for a day or two past. If I don’t draw a low number I think I’ll tackle it.”

  “Don’t you attempt it!” she cried, clutching his arm and turning her white face to him affrightedly. “Don’t you ever dare try it!”

  He laughed uneasily, his eyes on the black gash into which the foaming river darted.

  “Oh, I don’t know; I’ve heard of men doing riskier things than that for money,” he returned.

  Agnes Horton’s excitement and concern seemed to pass with his words. She propped her chin in her palms and sat pensively, looking at the broken waters which reared around the barrier of scattered stones in its channel.

  “Yes, men sometimes take big risks for money–even the risk of honor and the everlasting happiness of others,” said she.

  It was like the wind blowing aside a tent-flap as he passed, giving him a glimpse of its intimate interior. That little lifting of her reserve was a glance into the sanctuary of her heart. The melancholy of her eyes was born out of somebody’s escapade with money; he was ready to risk his last guess on that.

  “Besides, there may be nothing to that story of nuggets. That may be just one of these western yarns,” she added.

  “Well, in any case, there’s the five hundred the Denver paper offers, besides what I could make by syndicating the account of my adventure among the Sunday papers. I used to do quite a lot of that when I was in college.”

  “But you don’t need money badly enough to go into that place after it. Nobody ever needed it that badly,” she declared.

  “Don’t I?” he answered, a little biting of bitter sarcasm in his tone. “Well, you don’t know, my lady, how easy that money looks to me compared to my ordinary channels of getting it.”

  “It can’t be so very hard in your profession,” she doubted, as if a bit offended by his attitude of martyrdom before an unappreciative world. “I don’t believe you have half as hard a time of it as some who have too much money.”

  “The hardship of having too much money is one which I never experienced, so I can’t say as to that,” he said, moved to smiles by the humor of it. “But to understand what I mean by hardship you must know how I’ve struggled in the ruts and narrow traditions of my profession, and fought, hoped, and starved. Why, I tell you that black hole over there looks like an open door with a light inside of it compared to some of the things I’ve gone through in the seven years that I’ve been trying to get a start. Money? I’ll tell you how that is, Miss Horton; I’ve thought along that one theme so confounded long that it’s worn a groove in my brain.

  “Here you see me tonight, a piece of driftwood at thirty-five, and all for the want of money enough to buy an automobile and take the darned-fool world by storm on its vain side! You can’t scratch it with a diamond on its reasoning side–I’ve scratched away on it until my nails are gone.

  “I’ve failed, I tell you, I’ve botched it all up! And just for want of money enough to buy an automobile! Brains never took a doctor anywhere–nothing but money and bluff!”

  “I wonder,” she speculated, “what will become of you out here in this raw place, where the need of a doctor seems to be the farthest thing in the world, and you with your nerve all gone?”

  It would have reassured her if she could have seen the fine flush which this charge raised in his face. But she didn’t even look toward him, and couldn’t have noted the change if she had, for the moonlight was not that bright, even in Wyoming.

  “But I haven’t lost my nerve!” he denied warmly.

  “Oh, yes, you have,” she contradicted, “or you wouldn’t admit that you’re a failure, and you wouldn’t talk about money that way. Money doesn’t cut much ice as long as you’ve got nerve.”

  “That’s all right from your view,” said he pettishly. “But you’ve had easy going of it, out of college into a nice home, with a lot of those pink-faced chaps to ride you around in their automobiles, and opera and plays and horse-shows and all that stuff.”

  “Perhaps,” she admitted, a soft sadness in her voice. “But wait until you’ve seen somebody drunk with the passion of too much money and crazy with the hunger for more; wait until you’ve seen a man’s soul grow black from hugging it to his heart, and his conscience atrophy and his manhood wither. And then when it rises up and crushes him, and all t
hat are his with it––”

  He looked at her curiously, waiting for her to round it out with a personal citation. But she said no more.

  “That’s why you’re here, hoping like the rest of us to draw Number One?”

  “Any number up to six hundred will do for me,” she laughed, sitting erect once more and seeming to shake her bitter mood off as she spoke.

  “And what will you do with it? Sell out as soon as the law allows?”

  “I’ll live on it,” dreamily, as if giving words to an old vision which she had warmed in her heart. “I’ll stay there and work through the hope of summer and the bleakness of winter, and make a home. I’ll smooth the wild land and plant trees and green meadows, and roses by the door, and we’ll stay there and it will be–home!”

  “Yes,” he nodded, understanding the feeling better than she knew. “You and mother; you want it just that way.”

  “How did you know it was mother?” she asked, turning to him with a quick, appreciative little start.

  “You’re the kind of a woman who has a mother,” he answered. “Mothers leave their stamp on women like you.”

  “Thank you,” said she.

  “I’ve often wanted to run away from it that way, too,” he owned, “for failure made a coward of me more than once in those hard years. There’s a prospect of independence and peace in the picture you make with those few swift strokes. But I don’t see any–you haven’t put any–any–man in it. Isn’t there one somewhere?”

  “No,” simply and frankly; “there isn’t any man anywhere. He doesn’t belong in the picture, so why should I draw him in?”

  Dr. Slavens sighed.

  “Yes; I’ve wanted to run away from it more than once.”

  “That’s because you’ve lost your nerve,” she charged. “You shouldn’t want to run away from it–a big, broad man like you–and you must not run away. You must stay and fight–and fight–and fight! Why, you talk as if you were seventy instead of a youth of thirty-five!”

  “Don’t rub it in so hard on that failure and nerve business,” he begged, ashamed of his hasty confession.