Not all the soldiers in the service were of this large mold, I admit, but many of those I had met did possess precisely the qualities I have outlined. Ready, cheerful, undaunted in the face of danger, some of them had the capacity for lonely action which rendered them as admirable in their way as any of the long line of frontiersmen who had made the winning of the West an epic of singular hardihood. To fight cold and snow and loneliness during long months, with no one looking on, calls for stern resolution. Such work is directly antithetic to that of the city fireman who goes to his duties with a crowd looking on. The ranger has only his own conscience as spectator. For many weeks he does not even see his supervisor.
To the writing of Cavanagh I came, therefore, in the spirit of one who had discovered not only a new hero but the reverse side of the squatter's shield. Just as in my studies for The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop, I had come upon the seamy side of the cattleman's activity, so now I perceived that many of the men who had settled on the national forests were merely adventurers trying to get something for nothing. To filch Uncle Sam's gold, to pasture on his grass, to dig his coal and seize his water-power—these were the real designs of the claim-holders, while the ranger was in effect a federal policeman, the guardian of a domain whose wealth was the heritage of us all. He was the prophet of a new order, the evangel of a new faith.
The actual composition of Cavanagh began as I was riding the glorious trails around Cloud Peak in the Big Horn Mountains of northern Wyoming in the summer of 1908, one of the most beautiful of all my outings, for while the Big Horns are low and tame compared to the Wind River Range, yet the play of their lights and shadows, their clouds, and their mist was as romantic as anything I had ever encountered.
I recall riding alone down the eastern slope one afternoon, while prodigious rivers of cloud—white as wool and soundless as light—descended the cañon on my right and spread above the foothills, forming a level sea out of which the high dark peaks rose like rocky islands. This flood came so swiftly, flowed so marvelously and enveloped my world so silently that the granite ledges appeared to melt beneath my horse's feet.
At times the vapor closed densely round me, shutting out even the rocks of the trail and as I cautiously descended, I almost bumped astonished steers whose heads burst from the mist as if through a covered hoop. The high granite crags on the opposite side of the ravine took on the shapes of ruined castles seated on sloping shores by foaming seas, their smooth lawns reaching to the foam.
At one point, as I came out upon a ledge which overlooked the valley, I perceived my horse's shadow floating on the phantom ocean far below me, a dark equestrian statue encircled with a triple-ringed halo of fire. In all my mountain experiences I had never seen anything so marvelous.
At another time while riding up the trail, I perceived above my head a far-stretching roof of seamless cloud. As I rose, coming closer and closer to it, it seemed a ceiling just above my reach, then my head merged in it. A kind of dry mist surrounded me—and for ten or fifteen minutes I mounted through this luminous, strangely shrouding, all pervasive, mountain cloud. My horse, feeling his way with cautious care, steadily mounted and soon we burst out into the clear sunlight above. While still the mist curled about my horse's hoofs, I looked across a shoreless ocean with only Cloud Peak and its granite crags looming above its surface.
I describe these two spectacular effects out of many others merely to suggest the splendors which inspired me, and which, as I imagined, enriched the daily walk of the forest guard. "To get into my story some part of this glory, my hero must be something of a nature lover—as many rangers are," I argued, and this was true. Before a man will consent to ride the lonely road which leads to his cabin high in the forest, he must not only have a heart which thrills to the wonder of the lonely places, he must be self-sufficing and fearless. I rode with several such men and out of my experiences with them I composed the character of Ross Cavanagh.
The actual writing of this novel was begun on my forty-ninth birthday at my desk in the old Homestead, and I started off with enthusiasm notwithstanding the fact that Fuller, who was visiting me at the time, expressed only a tepid interest in my "theme." "Why concern yourself with forestry?" he asked. "No one wants to read about the ranger and his problems. Grapple with Chicago—or New York. That's the only way to do a 'best seller.'"
Henry always amused me but never so much as when tolerating rural joys. He was the exact opposite of my Cavanagh. Everything pastoral wearied him or irritated him. The "yelping" of the robins, the "drone" of the katydids, the "eternal twitter" of the sparrows infuriated him. The "accursed roosters" unseasonably wakened him in the morning, the "silly cackle" of the chickens prevented him from writing. Flowers bored him and the weather was always too cold or too hot, too damp or too dusty. Butterflies filled him with pessimistic forebodings of generations of cabbage worms. Moths suggested ruined coat collars—only at night, before our fire, with nature safely and firmly shut out, did he regain his customary and charming humor.
He belonged to the brick pavement, the electric-car line. He did not mind being awakened by the "twitter" of a milk cart. The "yelp" of the ice man, the snort of a six o'clock switch engine and the "cackle" of a laundry wagon formed for him a pleasant morning symphony. The clatter of an elevated train was with him the normal accompaniment of dawn, but the poetry of the pastoral—well, it didn't exist, that's all—except in "maudlin verses of lying sentimentalists." "I'm like George Ade's clerk: I never enjoy my vacation till I get back to the city."
To all such diatribes Zulime and I gave delighted ear. We rejoiced in his comment, for we did not believe a word of it, it was all a part of Henry's delightful perversity.
For six consecutive weeks I bent to the work of writing my novel undisturbed. A peaceful season which I shall long remember, for almost every afternoon, when the weather permitted, we joined the Dudleys and McKees and drove to some lovely spot on the river bank or sought out some half-hidden spring at the far end of a coulee and there, while the children picked nuts or apples and the women read magazines or stitched, George Dudley and I lighted our fire and broiled our steak. Nothing could be simpler, homelier, more wholesome, than this life, and I was able to do nearly half my story before a return to Chicago became necessary.
Practically all of the spring months of 1910 were given to revising and proof-reading Cavanagh, Forest Ranger, which had genuinely interested me and which should have been as important in my scheme of delineating the West as The Captain of the Gray Horse Troop, but it wasn't. It was too controversial, and besides I did not give it time enough. I should have taken another year to it—but I didn't. I permitted myself to be hurried by Duneka, who was (like most publishers) enslaved to a program. By April it was off my hands.
After the last page of this proof was returned to the printer a sense of weakness, of age, a feeling altogether new to me, led me to say to Fuller, "I shall never do another book. I have finished what I started out to do, I have pictured certain broad phases of the West as I know it, and I'm done. I am out of commission."
Fuller, who had been of this mood for several years, was not content to have me assume a despairing attitude. "You're just tired, that's all," he insisted. "You'll come to a new theme soon."
Movement is swift on the Border. Nothing endures for more than a generation. No family really takes root. Every man is on his way. Cities come and builders go. Unfinished edifices are left behind in order that something new and grander may be started. Some other field is better than the one we are reaping. I do not condemn this, I believe in it. It is America's genius. We are all experimenters, pioneers, progressives.
For years I had in mind to write a book to be called The Winds of Destiny, in which I should take up one by one the differing careers of my classmates and friends who had found our little prairie town too narrow and too poor to afford them fullest action. I never got to it, but from time to time I found some new material for it—material which, alas! I can not now find im
agination enough to vitalize.
For example: One morning during a stay in New York, I found among my letters a note from an almost forgotten school-fellow, inviting me to dine with himself and wife at the Ritzdorf. The name on this note-head developed on the negative plate of my memory, the picture of two shock-headed, slender-legged schoolboys pacing solemnly, regularly, morning after morning, into the campus of the Seminary in Osage, Iowa. Their arms were always laden with books, their big brows bulging with thought. Invariably marching side by side like a faithful team of horses, turning aside neither to fight nor to play, they provoked laughter.
They were the sons of a farmer (a man of small means, who lived a mile or two from the village), and although they were familiar figures in the school they could hardly be said to be a part of it. Their poverty, their homespun trousers which were usually too short and too tight, and their poverty together with a natural shyness, kept them out of school affairs, although they were always at the top of their classes. To me they were worthy—though a bit grotesque.
My letter of invitation was from the younger of these boys, and having accepted his invitation, I was a bit in doubt as to what I should wear, for he had written, "with Mrs. Roberts and myself," and something in the tone of the letter had decided me to play safe. I put on evening dress, and it was well I did, for Ben met me in irreproachable dinner coat and presented his wife, a handsome and beautifully gowned woman, quite in the manner of a city-bred host. No one looking at us as we sat at our flower-decked table would have imagined that he or I had ever been plow-boys of the Middle Border.
As the dinner went on I lost all my conviction that the preternaturally solemn, heavy-footed lad of 1880 was in any way connected with this rich middle-aged inventor, but then he was probably having the same difficulty relating me with the beardless senior of 1881.
On the surface our dinner was a pleasant and rather conventional meeting, and yet the more it is dwelt upon the more significant it becomes. Starting from almost the same point, with somewhat similar handicaps, we two had "arrived," though at widely separated goals. Each of our courses was characteristically American, and each was in demonstration—for the millionth time—of the magic power of the open lands.
In the free air of the Middle Border, this man's genius for inventing had full power of expansion, and in result he was in possession of a fortune, whilst I, in my literary way, had won what my kindest critics called success—by another kind of service. My position though less secure and far less remunerative, was none the less honorable—that I shall insist on saying even though I must admit that in the eyes of my Seminary classmates the inventor made the handsomer showing. As the owner of a patent bringing in many thousands of dollars per year in royalty he had certain very definite claims to respect which I lacked. My home in contrast with his would have seemed very humble. Measured by material things, his imagination had proved enormously more potent than mine.
This meeting not only led me to re-value my own achievement, it brought up to me with peculiar pathos the career of another classmate, my comrade Burton Babcock, whom I (in 1898) had left standing on the bank of the Stickeen River in Alaska. He, too, was characteristically American. He had carried out his plan. After leading his pack train across the divide to the upper waters of the Yukon, he had built a raft and floated down the Hotalinqua. He had been frozen in, and had spent the winter in a windowless hut in the deep snow of an arctic landscape—and when, after incredible hardships, he had reached the Klondike, he had found himself almost as far from a gold claim as ever. All the mines were monopolized.
For the next four years he had alternately worked for wages and prospected for himself. One year he had "mushed" in the Copper River Country and later in the Tanana. In these explorations he went alone, and once he sledged far within the Arctic circle with only two dogs to keep him company. He became one of the most daring and persistent prospectors and yet he had always been just a little too late. He had never shared in any of the big strikes.
At last, after five years of this disheartening life, he had succeeded in breaking away from the fatal lure of the North. Returning to Anacortes on Puget Sound, he had taken up the threads of his life at the point where he had dropped them, to meet me, at Ashcroft, in '98, and on my little daughter's wrist was a bracelet, a string of nuggets, which represented all that he had been able to win from the desolate North.
He left his youth in Alaska. He was an old and broken man when he landed in Seattle, a silent, gray and introspective philosopher. Seeking out the cabin he had built on the Skagit River, he resumed his residence there, solitary and somber. In winter he cooked for a nearby lumber camp, in summer he served as watchman for an electric power company, patient, faithful, brooding over his books, austere, taciturn, mystical.
He read much on occult subjects, and corresponded ceaselessly with a certain school of esoteric philosophy, reaching at last a lofty serenity which approached content. He wrote me that the men of the lumber camp spoke of him as a "queer old cuss," but that disturbed him not at all. To me, however, he uttered his mind freely, and as I followed him thus, in imagination, remembering him as he once was, my graceful companion on the bright Iowa prairie, my sense of something futile in his whole life was deepened into pain.
His letters contained no complaint. He dwelt mainly upon his trips into the forest (occasional vacations from repulsive labor), but I was able to infer from a word here and there, his detestation of the coarse jests and senseless arguments of his "Siwash" companions. His philosophy prevented repining; but he could not entirely conceal his moods of loneliness, of defeat.
My heart ached as I thought of him, wearing his life away in the solitude of the forest, or in waiting on a crowd of unthinking lumber jacks, but I could do little to aid him. I had sent him books and loaned him money whenever he would accept it (which was seldom), and I had offered each year to bring him back to the Middle West and put him on a farm; but to all these suggestions he continued to repeat, "I can't bring myself to it. I can't return, a defeated explorer."
Like my uncle David, he preferred to walk the path he had chosen, no matter to what depth it might descend.
Not long after this meeting with Ben and while I was still absorbed in youthful memories, dreaming of my prairie comrades, a letter came to me from Blanche Babcock, telling me that her brother Burton, my boyhood chum, my companion on The Long Trail to the Yukon, had crossed the Wide Dark River, and with this news, a sense of heavy loss darkened my day. It was as if a part, and no small part, of my life had slipped away from me, irrecoverably, into a soundless abyss.
For more than forty years this singular soul had been a subject of my care (at times he had been closer to me than my own brother), and now he had vanished from the tangible realities of his mountain home into the unmapped region whose blind trails we had so often manfully discussed.
By all the laws which his family recognized, his life was a failure. To Ben Roberts he was a derelict—and yet to me a kind of elemental dignity lay in the attitude he had maintained when surrounded by coarse and ignorant workmen. He remained unmoved, uncontaminated. His mind inhabited a calm inner region beyond the reach of any coarse word or mocking phrase. Growing ever more mystical as he grew older he had gone his lonely way bent and gray and silent, a student of the forest and the stream. So far as I know he never uttered a bitter or despairing word, and when the final great boundary river confronted him he entered it with the same courage with which he ferried the Yukon or crossed the ice fields of Iskoot.
It happened that on the day this news came to me one of my Chicago friends sent their beautiful motor car to fetch Zulime and me to the opera, and as the children saw us in our evening dress, they cried out, "Oh papa, mama is a queen and you look like a king!" Thus it happened that I rode away in a luxury which I had not earned at the very moment when my faithful trail-mate, after toiling all his life, was passing to his grave wifeless, childless and unknown.
"I wish I could have sha
red just a little of my good fortune with him," I said to Zulime, who really was as stately as a queen. But the best of all my possessions I would not, could not, share with any one—I mean the adoration of my little daughters to whom I possessed the majesty of an emperor.
"Here his trail ends. Here by the landing I wait the
same oar—the slow, silent one.
We each go alone—no man with another,
Each into the gloom of the swift, black flood.
Burt, it is hard, but here we must sever.
The gray boatman waits, and you—you go first.
All is dark over there where the dim boat is rocking,
But that is no matter—no trailer need fear,
For clearly we're told, the powers which lead us,
Will govern the game till the end of the day.
Good-by!—Here the trail ends!"
* * *
Christmas came this year with special significance. Two pairs of eager eyes now peered at all bundles which came into the house. The faith and love and eager hope of my daughters made amends for the world's lack of interest in my writings. They and their mother were my wealth, their love compensated me for the slender dribble of my royalties.
"Our Christmas shall be as happy as that of any millionaire," was the thought which actuated me in the purchase and decoration of our tree. Wealth was highly desirable, but absurd as it may seem I had no desire to change places with any merchant or banker. The foolish notion that something historical in my work made it worth while, supported me in my toil. It was a hazy kind of comfort, I will concede, but I wrapped myself in it, and stole away out into the street to buy and sneak a Christmas tree up the back stairs. It was a noble tree, warranted to reach the ceiling of our library.
Father came down from Wisconsin and Franklin came up from Oklahoma to help me decorate it, and when, on Christmas morning, they both rose with me, and went down to light the candles, they were almost as gleeful as I. Mary Isabel was awake and piping from the top of the stairs, "Is it time, papa? Can we come now, papa?" and at last when the tower of glory was alight I called back, "Yes, now you may all come."
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