Claim Number One

by Ogden, George W

  Slavens looked at him severely from the shadow of his battered hat. The man lacked the bearing of one who inspires confidence; Slavens frowned his disapproval of the approach.

  “It means money to you,” pressed the man, stretching out his hand and showing a card with numbers penciled on it.

  Axel Peterson had stood gaping, his card with numbers on it also in his hand, held up at a convenient angle for his eyes. Dr. Slavens had read them as he pushed Peterson aside, and the first two figures on the other man’s card–all that Slavens could hastily glimpse–were the same. And, stranger still, they were the same as Hun Shanklin had recorded in telegraphed reply to the request from Jerry that he repeat them.

  That was enough to show him that there was something afoot worth while, and to fortify him in his determination, strong in his mind every mile of that long night ride, to file on that identical tract of land, come of it what might.

  “I’ll talk to you after a while,” said he.

  Boyle said nothing, although the look he gave the forward man was blasting and not without effect. The fellow fell back; something which looked like a roll of bills passed from Boyle’s hand to Axel Peterson’s, and with a jerk of the shoulder, which might have been intended as a defiance to his rival or as an expression of resignation, Boyle moved back a little into the crowd, where he stood whispering with his friends. Peterson’s face lit up again; he swallowed and stretched his neck, wetting his dry lips with his tongue.

  The preliminaries were gone over again by the clerks with deliberate dignity; the card bearing the doctor’s signature was produced, his identity established, and the chart of the reservation again drawn forward to check off the land as he gave the description.

  “What tract have you selected, Dr. Slavens?” asked the clerk with the blank.

  Dr. Slavens drew from the pocket of his coat a crumpled yellow paper, unfolded it, and spread it on the shelf.

  “The northwest quarter of Section Six, Township Twelve, Range Thirty-three,” he replied, his eyes on Hun Shanklin’s figures.

  Jerry Boyle almost jumped at the first word. As the doctor completed the description of the land he strode forward, cursing in smothered voice.

  “Where did you get that paper?” he demanded, his voice pitched an octave above its ordinary key by the tremulous heat of his anger.

  Dr. Slavens measured him coldly with one long, contemptuous look. He answered nothing, for the answer was obvious to all. It was none of Boyle’s business, and that was as plain as spoken words.

  Boyle seemed to wilt. He turned his back to the winner of Number One, but from that moment he stuck pretty close to Axel Peterson until something passed between them again, this time from Peterson’s hand to Boyle’s. Peterson sighed as he gave it up, for hope went with it.

  Meantime a wave of information was running through the crowd.

  “It’s Number One,” men repeated to each other, passing the word along. “Number One got here!”

  Hurrying to the hotel, Agnes was skirting through the thinner edges of the gathering at the very moment when Dr. Slavens turned from the window, his papers in his hand. As he went to his weary horse and took up the reins, the creature greeted him with a little chuckling whinny, and the people gave him a loud and hearty cheer.

  When the cheering spread to the people around her, Agnes stopped and asked a man why they did that. She spoke a little irritably, for she was out of humor with people who would cheer one man for taking something that belonged to another. That was the way she looked at it, anyhow.

  “Why, haven’t you heard?” asked the man, amazed, but enlarged with importance, because he had the chance of telling somebody. “It’s Number One. He rode up on a horse just in the nick of the second and saved his claim.”

  “Number One!” said she. “A horse!”

  “Sure, ma’am,” said her informant, looking at her queerly. “Here he comes now.”

  Dr. Slavens passed within a few feet of her, leading his horse toward the livery stable. If it had not been that the wind was blowing sharply, turning back the flapping brim of his old hat, she would have repudiated him as an impostor. But there was no mistaking him, in spite of the strange clothing which he wore, in spite of the bloody bandage about his head.

  And at the sight of that bandage her heart felt a strange exultation, a stirring leap of joy, even stronger than her pity and her pain. For it was his vindication; it was the badge of his honor; it was his credentials which put him back in the right place in her life.

  He had come by it in no drunken squabble, she knew; and he had arisen from the sickness of it to mount horse and ride–desperately, as his condition told–to claim his own. Through the leagues of desert he had come, through the unfriendly night, with what dim hope in his breast no man might know. Now, sparing the horse that had borne him to his triumph, he marched past her, his head up, like one who had conquered, even though he limped in the soreness of bruised body.

  People standing near wondered to see the tall, pale woman put out her hands with more than a mother’s pity in her eyes, and open her lips, murmuring a name beneath her breath.

  The Bentleys, who had seen Dr. Slavens arrive, had not been able to force their way to him through the crowd. Now, with scores of others, they followed him, to have a word with him after he had stabled his horse. As they passed Agnes, William made his way to her.

  “He arrived in time!” he cried triumphantly, the sparkle of gladness in his honest eyes. “He has justified your faith, and your trust, and your––”

  She put out both her hands, tears in her eyes, as he halted there, leaving unsaid what there was no need to say.

  “I’ll tell him where to find you,” said he, passing on.

  In her room at the hotel Agnes sat down to wait. Peace had come into her soul again; its fevered alarms were quiet. Expectancy trembled in her bosom, where no fear foreshadowed what remained for him to say. Her confidence was so complete in him, now that he had come, that she would have been satisfied, so she believed at that hour, if he had said:

  “I was unable to come sooner; I am sorry.”

  For love is content with little while it is young.

  Agnes thought of her prettiest dress, tucked away in the little steamer-trunk, and brought it out. It was not extremely gay, but it was light in color and fabric, and gave a softness to the lines of the body, and a freshness of youth. And one needs to look carefully to that when one is seven-and-twenty, she reflected.

  Her fingers fluttered over her hair; she swayed and turned before the glass, bringing the lines of her neck into critical inspection. There was the turn of youth there yet, it comforted her to see, and some degree of comeliness. He would come soon, and she must be at her best, to show him that she believed in him, and give him to understand that she was celebrating his triumph over the contrary forces which he had whipped like a man.

  Faith, thought she, as she sat by the window and looked down upon the crowd which still hung about the land-office, was a sustaining food. Without it the business of all the world would cease. She had found need to draw heavily upon it in her years, which she passed in fleeting review as she looked pensively upon the crowd, which seemed floundering aimlessly in the sun.

  All at once the crowd seemed to resolve into one personality, or to become but the incidental background for one man; a tall man with a slight stoop, whose heavy eyebrows met above his nose like two black caterpillars which had clinched in a combat to contest the passage. Here and there he moved as if seeking somebody, familiarly greeted, familiarly returning the salutations.

  That morning she had seen him at the head of the line of men waiting to file on land, close beside Peterson, who believed himself to be Number One. She had wondered then what his interest might be, and it was largely due to a desire to avoid being seen by him that she had hurried away. Now he turned as if her thoughts had burned upon his back like a sunglass, looked directly toward her window, lifted his hat, and smiled.

 
As if his quest had come to an end at the sight of her, he pushed across the street and came toward the hotel. She left the window, closing it hurriedly, a shadow of fear in her face, her hand pressed to her bosom, as if that meeting of eyes had broken the lethargy of some old pain. She waited, standing in the center of the room, as if for a summons which she dreaded to hear.

  The hotel at Meander had not at that day come to such modern contrivances as telephones and baths. If a patron wanted to talk out on the one wire that connected Meander with the world and the railroad, he had to go to the stage-office; if he wanted a bath he must make a trip to the steam laundry, where they maintained tubs for that purpose. But these slight inconveniences were not all on one side of the house. For if a message came to the office for a guest in his room, there was nothing for the clerk to do but trot up with it.

  And so it came that when Agnes opened her door to the summons, her bearing had no touch of fear or timidity. In the hall she faced the panting clerk, who had leaped up the stairs and was in a hurry to leap down again.

  “Mr. Jerry Boyle asks if he may have the pleasure of seeing you in the parlor, Miss Horton,” said the clerk.

  “Tell Mr. Boyle,” she answered with what steadiness she could command, “that I have an appointment in a few minutes. I’m afraid that I shall not be able to see him before–before–tomorrow afternoon.”

  That was enough for the clerk, no matter how near or how far it came to satisfying the desires of Jerry Boyle. He gave her a stubby bow and heeled it off downstairs again, kicking up quite a dust in his rapid flight over the carpet in the hall.

  As if numbed or dreaming, Agnes walked slowly about her room, touching here or there a familiar article of apparel, and seeking thus to recall herself to a state of conscious reasoning. The events of the morning–the scene before the land-office, her start back to the hotel, the passing of that worn, wounded, and jaded man–seemed to have drawn far into the perspective of the past.

  In a little while William Bentley came up for his bag–for in that hotel every man was his own porter–and called her to the door. He was off with Horace on the eleven o’clock stage for Comanche. Next morning he would take a train for the East. Dr. Slavens sent word that he would come to the hotel as soon as he could make himself presentable with a new outfit.

  “Horace will stay at Comanche a while to look around,” said William, giving her his card with his home address. “If there’s anything that I can do for you any time, don’t wait to write if you can reach a telegraph-wire.”

  If there was pain in his eyes she did not see it, or the yearning of hope in his voice, she did not hear. She only realized that the man who filled her life was coming soon, and that she must light again the fires of faith in her eyes to greet him.

  * * *

  CHAPTER XII

  THE OTHER MAN

  Dr. Slavens stood at the door of the parlor to meet her as she came toward him, a little tremor of weakness in her limbs, a subconscious confession of mastery which the active feminine mind might have denied with blushing show of indignation.

  The clothiers of Meander had fitted Slavens out with a very good serge suit. Tan oxfords replaced his old battered shoes. A physician had dressed the cut on his forehead, where adhesive plaster, neatly holding gauze over the cut, took away the aspect of grimness and gravity which the bloody bandage of the morning had imparted. For all his hard fight, he was quite a freshened-up man; but there was a questioning hesitation in his manner as he offered his hand.

  Her greeting removed whatever doubt that William Bentley’s assurance of her fidelity might have left. She took his hand between both her own and held it so a little while, looking into his eyes without the reservation of suspicion or distrust.

  “We believed you’d come in time all along,” said she.

  “You believed it,” he replied softly, not the faintest light of a smile on his serious face; “and I cannot weigh my gratitude in words. There is an explanation to be made, and I have saved it for you. I’m a beast to think of food just now, perhaps, but I haven’t eaten anything since yesterday evening.”

  “You can tell me afterward, if you wish,” she said.

  Through the meal they talked of the others, of who had come to Meander, who had gone home; of June and her mother and the miller’s wife. Nothing was said of the cause of his absence nor of his spectacular arrival just in the second remaining to him to save his chance.

  “I noticed a road running up toward the mountain,” said he when they had finished. “Shall we walk up that way?”

  Out past the little cultivated gardens, where stunted corn was growing in the futile hope that it might come to ear, they followed the road which led into the mountain gorge. A rod-wide stream came plunging down beside the way, bursting its current upon a thousand stones here and there, falling into green pools in which the trout that breasted its roaring torrent might find a place to pant.

  Here, in an acre of valley, some remnant of glacier had melted after its slow-plowing progress of ten million years. The smooth, round stones which it had dropped when it vanished in the sun lay there as thickly strewn as seeds from a gigantic poppy-boll. And then, as the gorge-wedge narrowed, there were great, polished boulders, like up-peeping skulls, and riven ledges against which Indian hunters had made their fires in the old days. And on the tipping land of the mountainside, and the little strips where soil lodged between the rocks, the quaking-asp grew thick and tall.

  There in a little nook among the trees, where trampling tourists had eaten their luncheon upon a flat stone and left the bags and pickle-bottles behind them, they sat down. At that altitude the sunshine of an afternoon in late August was welcome. A man whipping the stream for trout caught his tackle in some low branches not ten feet from where they sat, and swore as he disentangled it. He passed on without seeing them.

  “That goes to illustrate how near a man may be to something, and not know it,” said the doctor, a smile quickening his grave face for a moment. “This time yesterday I was kicking over the rubbish where a gambling-tent had stood in Comanche, in the hope of finding a dime.”

  He stopped, looked away down the soft-tinted gorge as if wrapped in reminiscent thought. She caught her breath quickly, turning to him with a little start and gazing at his set face, upon which a new, strange somberness had fallen in those unaccounted days.

  “Did you find it?” she asked.

  “No, I didn’t,” he answered, coming out of his dream. “At that hour I knew nothing about having drawn the first number, and I didn’t know that I was the lucky man until past midnight. I had just a running jump at the chance then, and I took it.”

  “And you won!” she cried, admiration in her eyes.

  “I hope so,” said he, gazing earnestly into her face.

  Her eyes would not stand; they retreated, and a rush of blood spread over her cheeks like the reserve of an army covering its withdrawal from the field.

  “I feel like I had just begun to live,” he declared.

  “I didn’t see you arrive this morning,” she told him, “for I turned and went away from the land-office when they opened the window. I couldn’t stand it to see that man Peterson take what belonged to you.”

  He looked at her curiously.

  “But you don’t ask me where I was those two days,” said he.

  “You’ll tell me–if you want me to know,” she smiled.

  “When I returned to the Hotel Metropole, even more ragged and discreditable-appearing than I was when you saw me this morning,” he resumed, “the proprietor’s wife asked me where I’d been. I told her I had been on a trip to hell, and the farther that experience is behind me the stronger my conviction that I defined it right.

  “When I left you that night after we came back from the river, I went out to look for young Walker, all blazing up, in my old-time way of grabbing at things like a bullfrog at a piece of flannel, over what you had said about a man not always having the sense and the courage to take hold of
his chances when they presented.

  “Walker had talked to me about going in with him on his sheep-ranch, under the impression, I suppose, that I had money to invest. Well, I hadn’t any, as you know, but I got the notion that Walker might set me up with a flock of sheep, like they do in this country, to take care of on shares. I had recovered entirely from my disappointment in failing to draw a claim, as I thought, knowing nothing about the mistake in telephoning the names over.

  “I used to be quick to get over things that were based on hope that way,” he smiled, turning to her for a second and scarcely noting how she leaned forward to listen. “Just then I was all sheep. I had it planned out ten years ahead in that twenty minutes. When a man never has had anything to speculate in but dreams he’s terribly extravagant of them, you know. I was recklessly so.

  “Well, I was going along with my head in the clouds, and I made a short cut to go in the back way of the biggest gambling-tent, where I thought Walker might be watching the games. Right there the machinery of my recollection jumps a space. Something hit me, and a volcano burst before my eyes.”

  “Oh, I knew it! I knew it!” she cried, poignant anguish in her wailing voice. “I told that chief of police that; I told him that very thing!”

  “Did you go to that brute?” he asked, clutching her almost roughly by the wrist.

  “William Bentley and I,” she nodded. “The chief wouldn’t help. He told us that you were in no danger in Comanche.”

  “What else?” he asked.

  “Go on with the story,” said she.

  “Yes. I came back to semiconsciousness with that floating sensation which men had described to me, but which I never experienced before, and heard voices, and felt light on my closed eyes, which I hadn’t the power to open. But the first thing that I was conscious of, even before the voices and the light, was the smell of whisky-barrels.

  “Nothing smells like a whisky-barrel. It’s neither whisky nor barrel, but whisky-barrel. Once you have smelled it you never forget. I used to pass a distillery warehouse on my way to school twice a day, and the smell of whisky-barrels was part of my early education; so I knew.