SHADOW ON
THE LAND
A WESTERN STORY
by
WAYNE D. OVERHOLSER
SKYHORSE PUBLISHING
SHADOW ON THE LAND
First Skyhorse Publishing edition published 2014 by arrangement with Golden West Literary Agency
Copyright © 2009 by the Estate of Wayne D. Overholser
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eISBN: 978-1-62873-846-9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.
ISBN: 978-1-62087-829-3
Printed in the United States of America
SHADOW ON THE LAND
Chapter One
The dark girl was not to be found. Lee Dawes had already taken two unsuccessful turns around the deck, and now he started again through the main cabin of the Inland Belle, which was pushing its way up the broad and winding Columbia gorge between Cascade Locks and The Dalles. The hot air of the interior washed around him as he entered the cabin, his features carefully masked against the curious stares.
He had made no effort to conceal his pursuit of the girl. A man had the right to seek what he wanted, and Lee Dawes knew what he wanted. Pausing near the bulkhead, he let his gaze run restlessly, disappointment a sharp blade in him.
He went on. At this hour on a river packet, languor reached its peak. Points of departure and destination were of no immediate importance. A good luncheon, such as only a luxury packet served, was nearly digested, the cabin was warm and pleasant, and the Columbia lay under a mild spring sun.
Men were predominant everywhere in the main cabin, their square-cut coats with short lapels, unbuttoned, high choker collars cutting into well-fed jowls or dissolving beneath beards. Most of them seemed unaware of Lee, but the few women in the group, elegant in their spring finery, made a quick, pleased appraisal of this man with the frown and the searching brown eyes.
“It’s a shame,” one of them was remarking. “The river’s so romantic, and the railroads will spoil it all.”
Lee found himself admitting that she had a point. He had expected to dislike river travel, as a good railroad man should, but it had not been so. He liked the ease and space, the good fellowship. The packet had the life that man has given mechanical things, unrushed and functioning perfectly. He could hear the pant of the steam engines below decks; he felt the beat of it in the soles of his feet through the high-piled carpeting and his well-shined boots. The only urgency was in a bell’s loud clanging, signals to engine room and crew, which became insistent and quick in the rapids, while the thump of steam in the big chests grew fierce.
The need of motion was a prod in Lee Dawes. Wheeling impatiently, he moved across to the archway of the bar. Someone was playing the piano—loudly and without skill—and a fat man in a checked suit was roused from his nap long enough to glare and curse angrily. Lee had remembered seeing him walk a small and unhappy dog on the Portland dock, rough and bitter with the task. Studying the bar, he saw the man’s wife, a heavy woman wearing too much jewelry, and paying avid attention to the gray-bearded man with whom she was seated at one of the small tables.
“Honest to goodness, Frank,” she was saying, “you get off the funniest things!”
Deborah was not here, and he could have admitted the fact with far less study. She would have stood out in this crowd as Mount Hood towered above the long, ragged skyline of the sweeping Cascades through which they were passing. He had not actually expected to find her, but he had hoped. And persistence was a strong characteristic of Lee Dawes.
Something close to anger began to rise in Lee. She was playing a deliberate game of hide-and-seek, leaving the seeking to him, and he was reaching the end of his patience. He had tried earlier to find her stateroom, but the purser had been more concerned about company rules than generous tips and a younger man’s inner urgings. With a sense of failure, Lee turned out onto the starboard passage, stopping to lean thoughtfully against the railing.
The Inland Belle was pressing patiently on. It was just above the towns of Hood River and White Salmon, the last landings before The Dalles. The thought of reaching The Dalles without accomplishing his private purpose set up its worry in him. This interior country was broad and deep, and, if a man couldn’t find a girl on a river packet, he would be more helpless there.
Lee faced the Oregon shore, a broken line where gigantic masses of earth and stone rose boldly against the softly brightened sky, clad thickly here in pine, there bare and tawny and studded with outcrops of basalt. He considered this gorge, with which he had become familiar in the North Bank fight, to be geometry gone mad. Ruled lines rose sheer, to break in pure right angles close under the heavens; again, sweeping curves sprang mightily above the water and bent upward. Nature, never thrifty, had given way to utter abandon when she fashioned this.
Lee drummed his fingers on the rail. He had to see Deborah Haig before he went for his final talk with John F. Stevens. He’d had his first glimpse of her while the Inland Belle was loading in Portland. He and Stevens had come aboard separately, to travel as strangers, at Stevens’s request. So, idling on deck and watching the figures coming up the gangplank, Lee had a good look at her in his first glance.
Deborah Haig was tall, but she wore the bit of extra height regally. Inner confidence was mirrored in the severely tailored suit that set off the long, clean lines of her body, the dark, exotic beauty of her face, which held a hint of fire even in repose. Something had happened inside Lee Dawes that was different from anything that had ever happened to him before. Her gaze had met his and passed on, but it had left a stirring memory in him, a warm and persistent pull that had remained.
He had seen her on deck after that, keeping always to herself. But at Cascade Locks he had cornered her on the fantail. She had been willing to talk—bright, relaxed, totally impersonal talk. She was going to The Dalles. She didn’t know if she would remain there. There was this vagueness, but beneath it was something definite, something unspoken between them, and he was certain that she felt it, too.
Her voice was low, rather husky. Her eyes, like his own, were dark brown. Her fine, black hair swept upward from a pert and heart-like face. Her red lips were full and sensitive, giving her words an inner meaning as she parried him expertly. There had been that moment, a too short moment, and he had got exactly nowhere.
The thing that brought him close to panic was the fact that The Dalles would be only a way point for him. Time was precious and fleeting, yet Deborah Haig was flinging these precious seconds away. He could not tell, even now, whether it was her plan to avoid or madden him.
Events were scheduled to break along the Deschutes River, like thunder crackling across a burned summer sky, and Lee was to have a main part on the firing line. But Deborah Haig would not know that. Now, Lee knew he had to make certain of this girl, for he felt that he would love her with as much fiery devotion as he would love this ne
w battle for which those two giants, James J. Hill and Edward H. Harriman, were girding.
Lee crossed to port and lingered there, scanning the Washington shore. It had been the site of the Hill-Harriman fight—a fight that now, years later, still made robust talk in railroad circles. Here timbered slopes rose from the river, while frequent bare slants seemed to fall from the sky, brown and rubble-strewn and dropping like a tilted wall into the Columbia.
Movement stirred Lee, and he glanced along the passage, only to look away in pretended indifference. A girl had stepped from the main cabin and was coming toward him, a slight girl, pretty and attractively dressed, but not the right one. Talking to her earlier, he had learned that she was Hanna Racine, from a ranch south of Madras, out to Portland on business and now going home.
She smiled as she passed him and went on along the passage to stand by the rail. Unlike most women he had known, he had an idea that she was totally unaware of the picture she made there, was no longer conscious of him. Wind played with her light brown hair and deepened the color of her cheeks, as her eyes somberly studied the muddy current against which the packet moved, the tiny whitecaps that ran swiftly and unpredictably, the bits of driftwood that bobbed by.
Suddenly she turned from the rail, her eyes searching the row of stateroom doors. Lee swung in the same instant. A shrill, penetrating sound, totally foreign to a river packet, had broken through his thoughts. Then he realized that it was the insistent whine of a dog. Puzzled, Lee moved forward, and the girl came his way, too.
“Is it the machinery?” she asked.
“No machine could get that much distress into a squeal.” Lee looked again along the passage and saw it, a shaggy head and pair of forepaws that leaped into view behind a window, falling and leaping again to the accompaniment of urgent whines. He grinned. “There he is, and two guesses.”
The girl looked worried. “One’s enough. People who don’t take care of dogs shouldn’t have them.”
It was the dog he had seen with the fat man in the checked suit. Willie, he remembered, was the dog’s name. Without thinking, he tried the knob, and found that the door was unlocked. He looked hesitantly at Hanna. “Would this be breaking and entering?”
“Go ahead,” she urged. “I’ll hire a lawyer for you.”
“It wouldn’t do any good to go after them. Fatso’s dreaming about prettier women than mamma, and mamma’s having herself some dreams with a richer man than fatso.”
Quickly Lee opened the door. Willie was out in two long bounds, a black, shaggy creature whose mongrel body surged with new-found affection. Lee stilled the ecstasy and, scratching the floppy ears, looked up at the girl. “The problem is still unsolved.”
Her cheeks had colored, but she smiled. “If you’ll go for a stroll, I think the pup will take care of the problem.”
A leash was hanging over a chair near the door, and Lee snatched it up, hastily pulling the door shut. He snapped the strap onto Willie’s collar. “Two turns, Willie. Wait here, Miss Racine. I may need a witness before I get him back.”
“I’ll swear to the necessity.”
Two turns around the deck, and Lee knew that Willie was not going to do the rest. Thinking that privacy was a requisite, he took the dog to the freight deck. Willie prospected. He whimpered. He trembled. But his training days were still fresh in his memory. The cuffs had taught him that wooden floors are inviolable. And the Inland Belle afforded nothing but unending wooden deck.
With the leash wrapping around his legs, Lee searched his brain. He scratched the woolly ears again. “For five bucks maybe we could get the pilot to stop at the next island.”
They went disconsolately up the companionway to the passenger deck. Hanna turned inquiringly from the rail, but Lee shook his head. “Willie’s baffled. All floors.”
She frowned thoughtfully. “Willie, you show poor taste in your choice of owners.”
“But good taste when it comes to picking friends.”
She met his eyes, smiling. “That’s right, and we can’t let him down. What’s in the main cabin that might attract him?”
“Why, nothing . . .” Then a quick grin broke across his lean face. “Artificial palm trees.” He shook his head. “No good. The purser would come charging out of his office with a horse pistol.”
“I can handle him.” Assurance gleamed in Hanna’s eyes. “Give me three minutes.”
It took three minutes for Lee to screw up his courage. He made a turn around the fantail and came back to the Oregon side of the boat. With Willie on short leash and his overcoat spread, Lee turned quickly into the main cabin. Briefly he noted that Hanna was at the purser’s wicket across the way, and there was little doubt that at the moment the boat officer was wishing himself twenty years younger. Willie made no sound, and no eyes turned curiously to Lee. Nor was anyone at the piano. They cut from sight. When they emerged again, turning quickly into the deck, man and dog walked easier.
They met Hanna before the door of the stateroom that was Willie’s prison. Lee opened the door and pushed the dog in, closing his ears to the protesting whimpers.
“That was a nice thing to do, Mister Dawes.”
A warm feeling washed through Lee. For a moment he almost wished there was no dark-eyed distraction aboard the packet. This was a nice girl, a warm and sympathetic girl—and a pretty one.
They stood together for a time, eyes on the Washington hills, feeling the mutual bond that comes to people when they have done a good job together. Lee’s mind turned back over the past few years, and for the moment he forgot Hanna and the dog. To him the Columbia Gorge represented a battleground, reminding him of the days when he had fought down it as a special agent for James Jerome Hill, mentor of the Great Northern. It was a reminder of a triumph, for it was a fight they had won as decisively as they would win the struggle now shaping.
The Columbia had no duplicate. Originating in the wilds of Canada, it twisted down through the bare, brown flats of Eastern Washington, turning westward through Wallula Gap, carving a deep course through the basalt here in the gorge, and rolling on in massive power to the Pacific. It was wild terrain, over which many had puzzled and fought, from the time the Indians had first told stories of a great river in the West, stories that drifted across the continent to restless men ever dreaming of an empire—and a channel of empire it had become.
He saw it again in a swift flow of pageantry. Lewis and Clark. The mountain men, buckskinned and bearded, fortitude and long rifles their weapons, beaver plews and adventure their prize. Hudson’s Bay Company and the voyageurs, beribboned and singing, as their paddles cut the river. Missionaries preaching of peace, and unwittingly bringing a racial war. Ox trains plodding to the vast Oregon country, driven by stout men who cried for elbow room. The ’Forty-Niners crossing a continent in their lust for gold. These were the beats of empire that the river had known and pondered without change as it rolled westward!
Then the steel bands, and the empire was endowed with speed. No longer would land-seekers pile up east of the Big Muddy, or raise dust plumes on the plains, or leave in that vast emptiness the whitened bones and steel and hickory skeletons of wrecked Conestogas.
The wheel ruts dimmed. Steel glistened with use. Bright, this land to the westward, and giants were reaching to claim it. Struggle had come here in the gorge, and it was coming again along the Deschutes. The North Bank fight had been bitter and ruthless. For reasons clear only to the industrial giants of Wall Street, the thriving city of Portland had been slow to come under serious consideration as a major Western rail terminal. Only belatedly had it been linked with San Francisco by a coastwise section of the Southern Pacific. Henry Villard had built a line westward through the Columbia Gorge, and later the Union Pacific had extended its system from Ogden to Baker, and the long-sought link was fitted into place. Thus, by 1909, Portland and the state of Oregon were dominated by the Harriman enterprises.
It was at a Lewis and Clark Exposition banquet in Portland, in 1905, that
James J. Hill had first declared his intention of entering and developing the state that had so long remained largely an island of transportation enclosed by rails. Hill’s first move was to propose a branch line of his Great Northern, swinging down from Spokane and reaching Portland by the north bank of the Columbia. Harriman rose to beat off the challenger. Mile by mile, foot by foot, these giants of the twin rails had fought for possession of the North Bank. The federal courts became a battleground. They carried the fight into the gorge and at times into the water, laborers resorting to pick handles, crowbars, and lusty profanity as the conflict was fought out to its bitter end. Hill had triumphed and built his line, and now the rivalry between the two was keen and constant.
Lee felt a stab of pain as he remembered the personal cost of this fight. Somewhere in that sound and fury his warmest friend had become a bitter enemy. Mike Quinn was a better man to fight beside than against, a man to travel with, yet a man whose brittle temper and instinctive rivalry, so far as Lee Dawes was concerned, had made that impossible.
Wondering where Quinn was now, Lee visualized the rugged face, thought briefly about their years together. He had not heard of Quinn for nearly two years, and he thought grimly that this battle about to break out along a hundred-mile stretch of cañon would seem strange without Quinn on one side or the other.
“It’s beautiful here,” Hanna said, her voice breaking into Lee’s abstraction. “Man destroys a lot of things, but he will never destroy this.”
“It’s strange that this country was overlooked so long,” Lee murmured.
“People have different ideas about that. Some of us think we’re living in a world that has grown old and crowded, and are glad that it still has a few places like this for the hungry to go to. Others think there is nothing here except another field for them to exploit.”
He stared at the seriousness that was in her. There was a personal inflection to her words, a bitterness that he did not understand. He said: “Sounds like you had a grudge against somebody.”
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