Claim Number One

by Ogden, George W

  For all the news that came to Comanche over the telephone-wire that day must come through the office of The Chieftain. There was but one telephone in the town; that was in the office of the stage-line, and by arrangement with its owners, the editor had bottled up the slightest chance of a leak.

  There would be no bulletins, the editor announced. Anyone desiring news of the drawing must pay twenty-five cents for a copy of the paper containing it. It was the editor’s one great chance for graft, and he meant to work it until it was winded.

  The lottery was to open in Meander at ten o’clock; but long before that hour the quivering excitement which shook the fabric of Comanche had reached the tent where Mrs. Reed mothered it over the company of adventurers. The lumberman and insurance agent were away early; Sergeant Schaefer and Milo Strong followed them to the newspaper office very shortly; and the others sat out in front, watching the long shadows contract toward the peg that June had driven in the ground the day before at the line of ten o’clock.

  “Well, this is the day,” said William Bentley. “What will you take for your chance, Doctor?”

  “Well, it wouldn’t take very much to get it this morning,” Dr. Slavens replied, peering thoughtfully at the ground, “for it’s one of those things that grow smaller and smaller the nearer you approach.”

  “I’d say twenty-five hundred for mine,” offered Horace.

  “Great lands!” exclaimed Mrs. Reed, blinking, as she looked out across the open toward the river. “If anybody will give me three dollars for my chance he can take it, and welcome.”

  “Then you’d feel cheap if you won,” June put in. “It’s worth more than that even up in the thousands; isn’t it, Mr. Walker?”

  Walker was warm in his declaration that it would be a mighty small and poor piece of Wyoming that wouldn’t be worth more than that.

  “We haven’t heard from you, Miss Horton,” said William Bentley.

  “I’m afraid nothing would tempt me to part with my chance,” Agnes replied. “I hold it just the reverse of Dr. Slavens. The longer I look at it the bigger it gets.”

  The doctor was the only one present who understood fully how much she had built around that chance. Their eyes met as he looked across at her; he remembered what she had said of planting trees, and having roses beside her door.

  “It’s almost there!” cried June, looking at her stake.

  “Twenty minutes yet,” announced Horace, who sat with his watch in his palm.

  They were all bonneted and booted, ready for an expedition, although they had none in sight. It was as if they expected Number One to come flying through the town, to be caught and held by the swiftest of foot, the one alert and ready to spring up and dash after it.

  “Shall we go over to the newspaper office?” asked the doctor, looking across again and catching Agnes’ eyes.

  June jumped up and accepted the proposal for all.

  “Oh, let’s do!” she exclaimed. “Let’s be there to get the very first word!”

  On the part of the ladies there was a dash into the tent to adjust their headgear before glasses and to renew the powder on their noses. While they were gone Horace Bentley, the lawyer, stood with his watch exposed to his impatient eye.

  “In five minutes,” he announced as the ladies rejoined them, “they will draw the first name from the wheel at Meander. I hope that it may be the name of someone in this party.”

  “I hope it will be yours,” said Dr. Slavens’ eyes as he looked earnestly at Agnes; and: “Number Two would do very well for me in case your name came first,” her eyes seemed to answer him.

  But there was none by who knew what had passed between them of their hopes, so none could read the messages, even if there had been any so curious as to try.

  Mrs. Mann was humming a little song as they started away toward the newspaper office, for she was tiring of Wyoming, where she had not seen a single cowboy yet; and the prospect of returning to the miller was growing dear to her heart. There was a quiet over Comanche that morning which seemed different from the usual comparative peace of that portion of the day–a strained and fevered quiet, as of hushed winds before a gale. It took hold of even June as the party passed through the main street, joining the stream of traffic which pressed in one direction only.

  They could not arrive within a square of the newspaper-tent, for the crowd around it was packed and dense; so they stopped where there was breathing-space among groups of men who stood with their gripsacks between their feet, waiting for the first word.

  At five minutes past ten the editor of The Chieftain handed his printer a slip of paper, and the name of the winner of Claim Number One was put in type. The news was carried by one who pushed through the throng, his hat on the back of his head, sweat drenching his face. The man was in a buck-ague over the prospect of that name being his own, it seemed, and thought only of drawing away from the sudden glare of fortune until he could collect his wits.

  Some people are that way–the timid ones of the earth. They go through life leaving a string of baited traps behind them, lacking courage to go back and see what they have caught.

  More than two hundred names were in the first extra run off The Chieftain’s press at half-past ten. The name of the winner of Number One was Axel Peterson; his home in Meander, right where he could step across the street and file without losing a minute.

  Milo Strong, the schoolmaster from Iowa, drew Number Thirty-Seven. None of the others in the colony at the Hotel Metropole figured in the first returns.

  They went back as silently as they had come, the doctor carrying the list in his hand. Before the tent stood the lumberman and the insurance agent, their bags in their hands.

  “We’ve got just six minutes to catch the first train out,” said the insurance agent, his big smile just as wide as ever. “Good luck to you all, and hope we meet again.”

  The lumberman waved his farewell as he ran. For them the gamble was off. They had staked on coming in below one hundred, and they had lost. There was nothing more to hang around Comanche for, and it is supposed that they caught the train, for they were seen there no more.

  There were several hundred others in that quick-coming and quick-going population whose hopes were dispersed by the printed list. And so the town suffered a heavy drain with the departure of the first train for the East. The railroad company, foreseeing the desire to be gone, had arranged a long string of coaches, with two engines hitched up and panting to set out. The train pulled away with every inch of space occupied.

  All day the enterprising editor printed and sold extras. His press, run by an impertinent little gasoline engine, could turn out eighteen hundred of those single-sheet dodgers in an hour, but it couldn’t turn them out fast enough. Every time Editor Mong looked out of his tent and saw two men reading one paper he cursed his limited vision which had stood in the way of putting sixty dollars more into a press of twice that capacity. As it was, the day’s work brought him nearly three thousand dollars, money on the spot; no back subscriptions to worry over, no cabbage or cordwood in exchange.

  When the drawing closed for the day and the last extra was off, more than three thousand numbers had been taken from the wheel at Meander. The only one among the Metropole colony to draw after the first published list was Agnes Horton. Claim Number Nine Hundred and Five fell to her lot.

  Claims that high were useless, and everybody knew it; so interest dropped away, the little gasoline engine popped its last impertinent pop and subsided, and the crowds drifted off to get ready to depart as fast as trains could be made up to haul them. Sergeant Schaefer, having failed of his expectations, felt a revival of interest in the military life, and announced that he would leave on the first train out next morning.

  That night the price of cots suffered a dispiriting drop. Fifty cents would hire the most exclusive bed in the phantom city of Comanche.

  As for Dr. Slavens, the day’s events had left him with a dazed feeling of insecurity. His air was cleared of h
ope; he could not touch a stable bit of footing as far around him as he could reach. He had counted a good deal on drawing something along in the early hundreds; and as the day wore along to his disappointment in that hope he thought that he might come tagging in at the end, in the mean way that his cross-grained luck had of humiliating him and of forcing the fact that he was more or less a failure before his eyes.

  No matter what he drew under three thousand, he said, he’d take it and be thankful for it. If he could locate on a trickle of water somewhere and start out with a dozen ewes and a ram, he’d bury himself away in the desert and pull the edges of it up around him to keep out the disappointments of the world. A man might come out of it in a few years with enough money–that impenetrable armor which gives security even to fools–to buy a high place for himself, if he couldn’t win it otherwise. Men had done well on small beginnings with sheep; that country was full of them; and it was a poor one, indeed, that wasn’t able to buy up any ten doctors he could name.

  So Dr. Slavens ran on, following the lead of a fresh dream, which had its foundation on the sands of despair. When the drawing had passed the high numbers which he had set as his possible lowest, he felt like sneaking away, whipped, to hide his discouragement where there was no one to see. His confounded luck wouldn’t even grant him the opportunity of burying himself out there in that gray sea of blowing dust!

  There was no use in trying to disguise the fact any longer; he was a fizzle. Some men were designed from the beginning for failures, and he was one of the plainest patterns that ever was made. There was a place for Axel Peterson, the alien, but there was no place for him.

  In spite of his age and experience, he did not understand that the world values men according to the resistance they interpose against it; according to the stamping down of feet and the presenting of shoulders and the squaring arms to take its blows. Cowards make a front before it and get on with amazing success; droves of poltroons bluster and storm, with empty shells of hearts inside their ribs, and kick up a fine dust in the arena, under the cloud of which they snatch down many of the laurels which have been hung up for worthier men. Success lies principally in understanding that the whole game is a bluff on the world’s part, and that the biggest bluffer in the ring takes down the purse.

  But the timid hearts of the earth never learn this; the sentimentalists and the poets do not understand it. You can’t go along sweeping a clear path for your feet with a bunch of flowers. What you need is a good, sound club. When a hairy shin impedes, whack it, or make a feint and a bluff. You’ll be surprised how easily the terrifying hulks of adversity are charmed out of the highway ahead of you by a little impertinence, a little ginger, and a little gall.

  Many a man remains a coward all his life because somebody cowed him when he was a boy. Dr. Slavens had put his hands down, and had stood with his shoulders hunched, taking the world’s thumps without striking back, for so many years in his melancholy life that his natural resistance had shrunk. On that day he was not as nature had intended him, but as circumstances had made him.

  It had become the friendly fashion in camp for the doctor and Agnes to take a walk after supper. June’s mother had frowned on the boldness of it, whispering to June’s aunt. But the miller’s wife, more liberal and romantic, wouldn’t hear of whisperings. She said their conduct was as irreproachable in that country as eating peas with a spoon.

  “I wish I was in her place!” she sighed.

  “Dorothy Ann!” gasped Mrs. Reed. “Remember your husband, Dorothy Ann!”

  “I do,” sighed the miller’s wife.

  “Well, if you were in her place you’d ask somebody to accompany you on your moonlight strolls, I hope. I hope that’s what you’d do, Dorothy Ann.”

  “No,” answered the miller’s wife thoughtfully. “I’d propose. She’ll lose him if she doesn’t.”

  On the evening of that day of blasted hopes the two of them walked away in the gloaming toward the river, with few words between them until they left the lights of Comanche behind.

  “Mr. Strong is considerably elated over his luck,” said Agnes at last, after many sidling glances at his gloomy profile.

  “That’s the way it goes,” Dr. Slavens sighed. “I don’t believe that chance is blind; I think it’s just perverse. I should say, not counting myself, that Strong is the least deserving of any man in the crowd of us. Look at old Horace Bentley, the lawyer. He doesn’t say anything, but you can see that his heart is aching with disappointment.”

  “I have noticed it,” she agreed. “He hasn’t said ten words since the last extra.”

  “When a man like that dreams, he dreams hard–and deep,” the doctor continued. “But how about yourself?”

  She laughed, and placed a restraining hand upon his arm.

  “You’re going too fast,” she panted. “I’ll be winded before we get to the river.”

  “I guess I was trying to overtake my hopes,” said he. “I’m sorry; we’ll go slower–in all things–the rest of the way.”

  She looked at him quickly, a little curiously, but there was no explanation in his eyes, fixed on the graying landscape beyond the river.

  “It looks like ashes,” said he softly, with a motion of the hand toward the naked hills. “There is no life in it; there is nothing of the dead. It is a cenotaph of dreams. But how about your claim?”

  “It’s a little farther up than I had expected,” she admitted, but with a cheerful show of courage which she did not altogether feel.

  “Yes; it puts you out of the chance of drawing any agricultural land, throws you into the grazing and mineral,” said he.

  “Unless there are a great many lapses,” she suggested.

  “There will be hundreds, in my opinion,” he declared. “But in case there are not enough to bring you down to the claim worth having–one upon which you could plant trees and roses and such things?”

  “I’ll stick to it anyhow,” said she determinedly.

  “So this is going to be home?” he asked.

  “Home,” she answered with a caressing touch upon the word. “I came here to make it; I sha’n’t go away without it. I don’t know just how long it will take me, nor how hard it will be, but I’m going to collect interest on my hopes from this country before I turn my back.”

  “You seem to believe in it,” said he.

  “Perhaps I believe more in myself,” she answered thoughtfully. “Have you determined what you are going to do?”

  He laughed–a short, harsh expression of ironical bitterness.

  “I’ve gone through the mill today of heat and cold,” said he. “First, I was going to sell my relinquishment for ten thousand dollars as soon as the law would allow, but by noon I had come down to five hundred. After that I took up the notion of sheep stronger than Milo, from Iowa, ever thought of it. It took just one more extra to put that fire out, and now the ashes of it aren’t even warm. Just what my next phantasy will be I can’t say.”

  “But you’re going to stay here, aren’t you?”

  “I’ve thought of that, too. I’ve thought of making another try at it in a professional way. But this is a big, empty country. Few people live in it and fewer die. I don’t know.”

  “Well, you’re a doctor, not an undertaker, anyhow,” she reminded him.

  “Yes; I missed my calling,” he laughed, with the bitterness of defeat.

  “No,” she corrected; “I didn’t mean that. But perhaps at something else you might get on faster here–business of some kind, I mean.”

  “If I had the chance!” he exclaimed wearily, flinging his hat to the ground as he sat beside her on a boulder at the river’s edge. “I’ve never had a square and open chance at anything yet.”

  “I don’t know, of course,” said she. “But the trouble with most of us, it seems to me, is that we haven’t the quickness or the courage to take hold of the chance when it comes. All of us let so many good ones get away.”

  Dusk had deepened. The star-glow was
upon the river, placid there in its serene approach to the rough passage beyond. He sat there, the wind lifting the hair upon his forehead, pondering what she had said.

  Was it possible that a man could walk blindly by his chances for thirty-five years, only to be grasping, empty-palmed, after them when they had whisked away? For what else did his complainings signify? He had lacked the courage or the quickness, or some essential, as she had said, to lay hold of them before they fled away beyond his reach forever.

  There was a chance beside him going to waste tonight–a golden, great chance. Not for lack of courage would he let it pass, he reflected; but let it pass he must. He wanted to tell her that he would be a different man if he could remain near her all the rest of his years; he longed to say that he desired dearly to help her smooth the rough land and plant the trees and draw the water in that place which she dreamed of and called home.

  But there was nothing in his past to justify her confidence in his future. Women worth having did not marry forlorn hopes in the expectation of making a profit out of them by and by. He had no hearth to offer her; he had no thatch; he had not a rood of land to lead a mountain stream across and set with the emerald and royal purple of alfalfa; not a foot of greensward beside the river, where a yeaning ewe might lie and ease the burden of her pains. He had nothing to offer, nothing to give. If he asked, it must be to receive all and return nothing, except whatever of constancy time might prove out of his heart.

  If he had even a plan to lay down before her and ask her to share, it would be something, he thought; or a brave resolve, like her own. But there was emptiness all around him; his feet could not find a square yard of solid earth to shape his future upon. It was not that he believed that she cared for money or the material rewards of success, for she had spoken bitterly of that. The ghosts of money’s victims were behind her; she had said as much the first time they had talked of their hopes in that new land.