Claim Number One

by Ogden, George W

  “From the noise of voices and the smell of the barrels I judged that I must be behind the stage of the variety-theater tent, where they kept the stock of whisky for the bar. In a little while I was able to pick up the identity of one of the voices. The other one–there were two of them near me–belonged to a man I didn’t know. You have heard us speak, when we were back in camp, of Hun Shanklin, the gambler?”

  She nodded, her face white, her lips parted, her breath hanging between them as by a thread.

  “It was his voice that I heard; I was coming stronger every second. I made out that they were talking of my undesirable presence in that community. Shanklin owed me a grudge on account of a push that I gave his table one night when he was robbing a young fool with more money than brains by his downright crooked game. That shove laid the old rascal’s scheme bare and kept him out of several thousand dollars that night.

  “I supposed until last night that his sole object in assaulting me in the dark was to pay off this score; but there was another and more important side to it than that. Shanklin and the fellow with him, whoever it was, knew that I was the winner of Number One, and they wanted me out of the way.

  “I’m not clear yet in my mind just why; but they must have had some inside information ahead of others in Comanche that I, and not Peterson, was the lucky man, as reported first. For that extra wasn’t out then.”

  “It was all a swindle, the extra,” she hastened to explain. “That editor knew all the time who Number One was. He held your name back just so he might sell a lot more papers. We found out about it after we came here.”

  “Of course Shanklin was in with him some way. They’re all crooks,” the doctor commented.

  “Perhaps the other man was that wicked chief of police,” said she. “I wouldn’t consider him above it.”

  “Nor I,” Slavens admitted. “But I don’t know; I never heard him speak. I thought I heard that other voice this morning here in Meander, but I’m not sure. I’ll be listening. I must get on with my yarn, and I warn you now that I’m going to tax your credulity and try your confidence before I’m through.

  “I lay there gathering strength while they talked about putting me away, like a man who had been choked. I couldn’t see them when I opened my eyes, for they were back of me somewhere, moving the barrels and boxes around. There was a lantern standing on the ground near my head, and the thought came to me that if I could knock it over and put it out I might make a stagger for the outside and get clear of them. So I upset it.

  “The thing didn’t go out. It lay on its side, burning away the same as ever, but the move I had made tipped it off to them that I wasn’t all in. I heard Shanklin swearing as he came toward me, and I picked up what strength I had, intending to make a fight for it. I wasn’t as brisk as I believed myself to be, unluckily, and I had only made it to my knees when they piled on to me from behind. I suppose one of them hit me with a board or something. There’s a welt back there on my head, but it don’t amount to anything.”

  “The cowards!” she breathed, panting in indignation.

  “I wish we could find a name in some language that would describe them,” said he; “I’ve not been able to satisfy myself with anything that English offers. No matter. The next thing that I knew I was being drenched with icy water. It was splashing over my head and running down my face, and the restorative qualities of it has not been overrated by young ladies who write stories about fainting beauties for the magazines, I can hereby testify. It brought me around speedily, although I was almost deaf on account of a roaring, which I attributed to the return circulation in my battered head, and sickened by an undulating, swirling motion by which I seemed to be carried along.

  “I felt myself cramped, knees against my chin, and struggled to adjust my position more comfortably. I couldn’t move anything but my hands, and exploration with them quickly showed me that I was in a box, rather tight on sides and bottom–one of those tongue-and-groove cases such as they ship dry goods in–with the top rather open, as if it had been nailed up with scraps. The water was splashing through it and drenching me, and I knew in a flash, as well as if they had told me what they were going to do, what they had done. They had carted me to the river and thrown me in.”

  “The cañon! The cañon!” said she, shuddering and covering her face with her hands. “Oh, that terrible water–that awful place!”

  “But I am here, sitting beside you, with the sun, which I never hoped to see again, shining on my face,” he smiled, stroking her hair comfortingly, as one might assuage the terror of a child.

  Agnes lifted her head in wondering admiration.

  “You can speak of it calmly!” she wondered, “and you went through it, while it gives me a chill of fear even to think about it! Did you–come to shore before you entered the cañon?”

  “No; I went through it from end to end. I don’t know how far the river carried me in that box. It seemed miles. But the cañon is only two miles long, they say. The box floated upright mainly, being pretty well balanced by my weight in the bottom, but at times it was submerged and caught against rocks, where the current held it and the water poured in until I thought I should be drowned that way.

  “I was working to break the boards off the top, and did get one off, when the whole thing went to pieces against a rock. I was rolled and beaten and smashed about a good bit just then. Arms were useless. The current was so powerful that I couldn’t make a swimming-stroke. My chief recollection of those few troubled moments is of my arms being stretched out above my head, as if they were roped there with the weight of my body swinging on them. I supposed that was my finish.”

  “But you went through!” she whispered, touching him softly on the arm as if to recall him from the memory of that despairing time.

  “I came up against a rock like a dead fish,” said he, “my head above water, luckily. The current pinned me there and held me from slipping down. That saved me, for I hadn’t strength to catch hold. The pressure almost finished me, but a few gasps cleared my lungs of water, and that helped some.

  “There is no need for me to pretend that I know how I got on that rock, for I don’t know. A man loses the conscious relation with life in such a poignant crisis. He does heroic things, and overcomes tremendous odds, fighting to save what the Almighty has lent him for a little while. But I got on that rock. I lay there with just as little life in me as could kindle and warm under the ashes again. I might have perished of the chill of that place if it hadn’t been that the rock was a big one, big enough for me to tramp up and down a few feet and warm myself when I was able.

  “I don’t know how far along the cañon I was, or how long it was after day broke over the world outside before the gray light sifted down to me. It revealed to me the fact that my rock of refuge was about midway of the stream, which was peculiarly free of obstructions just there. It seemed to me that the hand of Providence must have dashed me against it, and from that gleam I gathered the conviction that it was not ordained for me to perish there. I could not see daylight out of either end of the cañon, for its walls are winding, and of course I had nothing but a guess as to how far I had come.

  “There was no foothold in the cliffs on either hand that I could see, and the pounding of that heavy volume of water down the fall of the cañon seemed to make the cliffs tremble. I had to get ashore against the cliff-side, somehow, if I ever intended to get out, and I intended to get out, no two ways about it. I might drown if I plunged in, but I might not. And I was certain to starve if I stuck to the rock. So I took off my coat, which the river had spared me, and let myself down from the lower end of the rock. I had that rolling and thrashing experience all over again, still not quite so bad, for there was daylight to cheer me every time my head got clear of the water.

  “There’s no use pulling the story out. I made it. I landed, and I found that I could work my way along the side of the cliff and over the fallen masses by the waterside. It wasn’t so bad after that.

 
“My hope was that I might find a place where a breach in the cliff would offer me escape that way, but there was none. The strip of sky that I could see looked no wider than my hand. I saw the light at the mouth of the cañon when it was beginning to fall dusk in there. I suppose it was along the middle of the afternoon.”

  “We were over there about then,” said she, “thinking you might have gone in to try for that reward. If we only had known!”

  “You could have come over to the other end with a blanket,” said he, touching her hand in a little communicative expression of thankfulness for her interest. “There is a little gravelly strand bordering the river at that end. After its wild plunge it comes out quite docile, and not half so noisy as it goes in. I reached that strip of easy going just as it was growing too dark for safe groping over the rocks, and when I got there my legs bent like hot candles.

  “I crawled the rest of the way; when I got out I must have been a sight to see. I know that I almost frightened out of his remaining wits a sheep-herder who was watering his flock. He didn’t believe that I came through the cañon; he didn’t believe anything I said, not even when I told him that I was cold and hungry.”

  “The unfeeling beast!”

  “Oh, no; he was just about an average man. He had a camp close by, and let me warm and dry myself by his fire; gave me some coffee and food when he saw that I wasn’t going to hurt him, but I don’t believe he shut an eye that entire night. He was so anxious to get rid of me in the morning that he gave me an old hat and coat, and that was the rig I wore when I returned to Comanche.”

  “The hotel-keeper gave you the message that we left?” she asked.

  “He was surly and ungracious, said he didn’t know where you were. I was of the opinion that you had turned my baggage over to him, and that he found it convenient to forget all about it.”

  “We brought it here–it’s in my room now; and we told him when we left where we were going, Mr. Bentley and I.”

  “Well, what little money I had was in my instrument-case,” said he. “So I was up against it right. I knew there was no use in lodging a complaint against Shanklin, for I had no proof against him, and never could convince a jury that I was in my right mind if I should tell my story in court. So I let that pass.”

  “It was a miraculous deliverance from death!” Agnes exclaimed, taking her breath freely again. Tears mounted to her eyes as she measured Dr. Slavens’ rugged frame as if with a new interest in beholding a common pattern which had withstood so much.

  He told her of meeting Mackenzie, and of finding the lost die; of the raid they had made by means of it on Shanklin’s money; of his discovery of the midnight extra in the pockets of the gambler’s coat.

  “So there you have it all,” said he, smiling in embarrassment as if the relation of so much about himself seemed inexcusable. “Anyway, all of the first part of the story. The rest is all on dry land, and not interesting at all.”

  “But you hadn’t had time to look over the land; you didn’t know the good locations from the worthless,” said she. “How did you pick out the claim you filed on?”

  “Well, there’s a little more of the story, it seems, after all. There was a plot between Shanklin and another to file Peterson on a certain tract and then buy him out, I suppose.”

  He told her of the telegram signed “Jerry,” and of Shanklin’s reply.

  “So I concluded,” he said, “that if the land described by their numbers was valuable to them it would be valuable to me. That my guess was good, I had proof when I filed. The chap who was piloting Peterson up to the window, and who I suspect was the ‘Jerry’ of the message, wanted to know where I got the figures. He wasn’t a bit nice about it, either.”

  A swift pallor overspread Agnes Horton’s face; a look of fright stood in her eyes.

  “Was he a tall man, dark, with heavy eyebrows?” she inquired, waiting his answer with parted lips.

  “That fits him,” said he. “Do you know him?”

  “It’s Jerry Boyle, the Governor’s son. He is Walker’s friend; Walker brought him to camp the day after you disappeared. He had an invitation for Mrs. Reed and her party from his mother–you know they had been expecting it. And he said–he said––”

  “He said––”

  “That is, he told Walker that he saw you–drunk at two o’clock that morning.”

  “Hum-m,” rumbled the doctor, running his hands through his hair. “Hum-m! I thought I knew that voice!”

  He got to his feet in his agitation. Agnes rose quickly, placing her hand on his arm.

  “Was he the other man?” she asked.

  “Well, it’s a serious charge to lay against the Governor’s son,” he replied, “but I’m afraid he was the other man.”

  There was such a look of consternation in her face that he sought to calm her.

  “He’s not likely to go any further with it, though,” Slavens added.

  “Oh, you don’t know him. You don’t know him!” Agnes protested earnestly.

  He searched her face with a quick glance.

  “Do you?” he asked, calmly.

  “There is something bad in his face–something hiding, it seems to me,” she said, without show of conscious evasion.

  “I’ll call him, no matter what move he makes,” Slavens declared, looking speculatively across the gorge. “Look how high the sun is up the wall over yonder. I think we’d better be going back.”

  “Oh, I’ve kept you too long,” she cried in self-reproach. “And to think you were in the saddle all night.”

  “Yes; I lost the trail and rode a good many miles out of the way,” said he. “But for that I’d have been on hand an hour sooner.”

  “Well, you were in time, anyway.”

  “And I’ve drawn blindly,” he laughed. “I’ve got a piece of land marked ‘Grazing,’ on the chart. It may be worth a fortune, and it may be worth twenty cents an acre. But I’m going to see it through. When are you going to file?”

  “My number comes on the fifth day, but lapses may bring me in line tomorrow,” she answered. “Smith, the stage-driver, knows of a piece adjoining the one he has selected for himself, if nobody ‘beats him to it,’ as he says. He has given me the numbers, and I’m going to take his word for it. About half of it can be irrigated, and it fronts on the river. The rest is on the hills.”

  “I hope you may get it. Smith ought to know what’s good in this country and what isn’t. When you have it you’ll lead on the water and plant the rose?”

  “And plant the rose,” she repeated softly.

  “Don’t you think,” he asked, taking her hand tenderly as she walked by his side, “that you’d better let me do the rough work for you now?”

  “You are too generous, and too trusting in one unknown,” she faltered.

  The beat of hoofs around the sharp turn in the road where it led out into the valley in which Meander lay, fell sharp and sudden on their ears. There the way was close-hemmed with great boulders, among which it turned and wound, and they scarcely had time to find a standing-place between two riven shoulders of stone when the horseman swept around the turn at a gallop.

  He rode crouching in his saddle as if to reach forward and seize some fleeing object of pursuit, holding his animal in such slack control that he surely must have ridden them down if they had not given him the entire way. His hat was blown back from his dark face, which bore a scowl, and his lips were moving as if he muttered as he rode. Abreast of the pair he saw them where they stood, and touched his hat in salute.

  In the dust that he left behind they resumed their way. Dr. Slavens had drawn Agnes Horton’s hand through his arm; he felt that it was cold and trembling. He looked at her, perplexity in his kind eyes.

  “That’s the man who stood with Peterson at the head of the line,” he said.

  “Yes; Jerry Boyle,” she whispered, looking behind her fearfully. “Let’s hurry on! I’m afraid,” she added with the ineffectiveness of dissimulation, “that I’ve
kept you from your sleep too long. Together with your awful experience and that long ride, you must be shattered for the want of rest.”

  “Yet I could stand up under a good deal more,” he rejoined, his thoughts trailing Jerry Boyle up the shadowy gorge. “But I was asking you, before that fellow broke in––”

  She raised her hand appealingly.

  “Don’t, please. Please–not now!”

  * * *

  CHAPTER XIII

  SENTIMENT AND NAILS

  Vast changes had come over the face of that land in a few days. Every quarter-section within reach of water for domestic uses had its tent or its dugout in the hillside or its hastily built cabin of planks. Where miles of unpeopled desert had stretched lonely and gray a week before, the smoke of three thousand fires rose up each morning now, proclaiming a new domain in the kingdom of husbandry.

  On the different levels of that rugged country, men and women had planted their tent-poles and their hopes. Unacquainted with its rigors, they were unappalled by the hardships, which lay ahead of them, dimly understood. For that early autumn weather was benignant, and the sun was mellow on the hills.

  Speculation had not turned out as profitable as those who had come to practice it had expected. Outside of the anxiety of Jerry Boyle and others to get possession of the apparently worthless piece of land upon which Dr. Slavens had filed, there were no offers for the relinquishment of homesteads. That being the case, a great many holders of low numbers failed to file. They wanted, not homes, but something without much endeavor, with little investment and no sweat. So they had passed on to prey upon the thrifty somewhere else, leaving the land to those whose hearts were hungry for it because it was land, with the wide horizon of freedom around it, and a place to make home.

  And these turned themselves to bravely leveling with road-scrapers and teams the hummocks where the sagebrush grew, bringing in surveyors to strike the level for them in the river-shore, plotting ditches to carry the water to their fields. Many of them would falter before the fight was done; many would lose heart in the face of such great odds before the green blessing of alfalfa should rise out of the sullen ground.