by Grey, Zane
During the ride that night she had moaned and shuddered, and had clasped Allie close; but when the flight had come to a forced end she grew silent.
Allie was young and hopeful. She kept whispering to her mother that the soldiers would come in time.
"That brave fellow in buckskin; he'll save us," said Allie.
"Child, I feel I'll never see home again," finally whispered Mrs. Durade.
"Mother!"
"Allie, I must tell you; I must!" cried Mrs. Durade, very low and fiercely. She clung to her daughter.
"Tell me what?" whispered Allie.
"The truth; the truth! Oh, I've deceived you all your life!"
"Deceived me! Oh, mother! Then tell me; now."
"Child; you'll forgive me; and never; hate me?" cried the mother, brokenly.
"Mother, how can you talk so! I love you." And Allie clasped the shaking form closer. Then followed a silence during which Mrs. Durade recovered her composure.
"Allie, I ran off with Durade before you were born," began the mother, swiftly, as if she must hurry out her secret. "Durade is not your father.... Your name is
Lee. Your father is Allison Lee. I've heard he's a rich man now.... Oh, I want to get back; to give you to him; to beg his forgiveness.... We were married in New
Orleans in 1847. My father made me marry him. I never loved Allison Lee. He was not a kind man; not the sort I admired.... I met Durade. He was a Spaniard; a blue-blooded adventurer. I ran off with him. We joined the gold-seekers traveling to California. You were born out there in 1850.... It has been a hard life. But I taught you; I did all I could for you. I kept my secret from you; and his! ... Lately I could endure it no longer. I've run off from Durade."
"Oh, mother, I knew we were running off from him!" cried Allie, breathlessly.
"And I know he will follow us."
"Indeed, I fear he will," replied the mother. "But Lord spare me his revenge!"
"Mother! Oh, it is terrible! ... He is not my father. I never loved him. I couldn't.... But, mother, you must have loved him!"
"Child, I was Durade's slave," she replied, sadly.
"Then why did you run away? He was kind; good to us."
"Allie, listen. Durade was a gambler; a man crazy to stake all on the fall of a card. He did not love gold. But he loved games of chance. It was a terrible passion with him. Once he meant to gamble my honor away. But that other gambler was too much of a man. There are gamblers who are men! ... I think I began to hate Durade from that time.... He was a dishonest gambler. He made me share in his guilt. My face lured miners to his dens.... My face; for I was beautiful once! ... Oh, I sunk so low! But he forced me.... Thank God I left him; before it was too late; too late for you."
"Mother, he will follow us!" cried Allie.
"But he shall never have you. I'll kill him before I let him get you," replied the mother.
"He'd never harm me, mother, whatever he is," murmured Allie.
"Child, he would use you exactly as he used me. He wanted me to let him have you; already. He wanted to train you; he said you'd be beautiful some day."
"Mother!" gasped Allie, "is THAT what he meant?"
"Forget him, child. And forget your mother's guilt! ... I've suffered. I've repented.... All I ask of God is to take you safely home to Allison Lee; the father whom you have never known."
The night hour before dawn grew colder and blacker. A great silence seemed wedged down between the ebony hills. The stars were wan. No cry of wolf or moan of wind disturbed the stillness. And the stars grew warmer. The black east changed and paled. Dawn was at hand. An opaque and obscure grayness filled the world; all had changed, except that strange, oppressive, and vast silence of the wild.
That silence was broken by the screeching, blood-curdling yell of the Sioux.
At times these bloody savages attacked without warning and in the silence of the grave; again they sent out their war-cries, chilling the hearts of the bravest.
Perhaps that warning yell was given only when doom was certain.
Horn realized the dread omen and accepted it. He called the fugitives to him and, choosing the best-protected spot among the rocks and wagons, put the women in the center.
"Now, men; if it's the last for us; let it be fight! Mebbe we can hold out till the troops come."
Then in the gray gloom of dawn he took a shovel; prying up a piece of sod, he laid it aside and began to dig. And while he dug he listened for another war-screech and gazed often and intently into the gloom. But there was no sound and nothing to see. When he had dug a hole several feet deep he carried an armful of heavy leather bags and deposited them in it. Then he went back to the wagon for another armful. The men, gray-faced as the gloom, watched him fill up the hole, carefully replace the sod, and stamp it down.
He stood for an instant gazing down, as if he had buried the best of his life.
Then he laughed grim and hard.
"There's my gold! If any man wins through this he can have it!"
Bill Horn divined that he would never live to touch his treasure again. He who had slaved for gold and had risked all for it cared no more what might become of it. Gripping his rifle, he turned to await the inevitable.
Moments of awful suspense passed. Nothing but the fitful beating of hearts came to the ears of the fugitives; ears that strained to the stealthy approach of the red foe; ears that throbbed prayerfully for the tramp of the troopers' horses.
But only silence ensued, a horrible silence, more nerve-racking than the clash of swift, sure death.
Then out of the gray gloom burst jets of red flame; rifles cracked, and the air suddenly filled with hideous clamor. The men began to shoot at gliding shadows, grayer than the gloom. And every shot brought a volley in return. Smoke mingled with the gloom. In the slight intervals between rifleshots there were swift, rustling sounds and sharp thuds from arrows. Then the shrill strife of sound became continuous; it came from all around and closed in upon the doomed caravan. It swelled and rolled away and again there was silence.
Chapter 4
In 1865, just after the war, a party of engineers was at work in the Wyoming hills on a survey as hazardous as it was problematical. They had charge of the laying out of the Union Pacific Railroad.
This party, escorted by a company of United States troops under Colonel Dillon, had encountered difficulties almost insurmountable. And now, having penetrated the wild hills to the eastern slope of the Rockies they were halted by a seemingly impassable barrier; a gorge too deep to fill, too wide to bridge.
General Lodge, chief engineer of the corps, gave an order to one of his assistants. "Put young Neale on the job. If we ever survey a line through this awful place we'll owe it to him."
The assistant, Baxter, told an Irishman standing by and smoking a short, black pipe to find Neale and give him the chief's orders. The Irishman, Casey by name, was raw-boned, red-faced, and hard- featured, a man inured to exposure and rough life. His expression was one of extreme and fixed good humor, as if his face had been set, mask-like, during a grin. He removed the pipe from his lips.
"Gineral, the flag I've been holdin' fer thot dom' young surveyor is the wrong color. I want a green flag."
Baxter waved the Irishman to his errand, but General Lodge looked up from the maps and plans before him with a faint smile. He had a dark, stern face and the bearing of a soldier.
"Casey, you can have any color you like," he said. "Maybe green would change our luck."
"Gineral, we'll niver git no railroad built, an' if we do it'll be the Irish thot builds it," responded Casey, and went his way.
Truly only one hope remained; that the agile and daring Neale, with his eye of a mountaineer and his genius for estimating distance and grade, might run a line around the gorge.
While waiting for Neale the engineers went over the maps and drawings again and again, with the earnestness of men who could not be beaten.
Lodge had been a major-general in the Civil War just ended, and befor
e that he had traveled through this part of the West many times, and always with the mighty project of a railroad looming in his mind. It had taken years to evolve the plan of a continental railroad, and it came to fruition at last through many men and devious ways, through plots and counterplots. The wonderful idea of uniting East and West by a railroad originated in one man's brain; he lived for it, and finally he died for it. But the seeds he had sown were fruitful. One by one other men divined and believed, despite doubt and fear, until the day arrived when Congress put the Government of the United States, the army, a group of frock-coated directors, and unlimited gold back of General Lodge, and bade him build the road.
In all the length and breadth of the land no men but the chief engineer and his assistants knew the difficulty, the peril of that undertaking. The outside world was interested, the nation waited, mostly in doubt. But Lodge and his engineers had been seized by the spirit of some great thing to be, in the making of which were adventure, fortune, fame, and that strange call of life which foreordained a heritage for future generations. They were grim; they were indomitable.
Warren Neale came hurrying up. He was a New Englander of poor family, self-educated, wild for adventure, keen for achievement, eager, ardent, bronze-faced, and keen-eyed, under six feet in height, built like a wedge, but not heavy; a young man of twenty- three with strong latent possibilities of character.
General Lodge himself explained the difficulties of the situation and what the young surveyor was expected to do. Neale flushed with pride; his eyes flashed; his jaw set. But he said little while the engineers led him out to the scene of the latest barrier. It was a rugged gorge, old and yellow and crumbled, cedar-fringed at the top, bare and white at the bottom. The approach to it was through a break in the walls, so that the gorge really extended both above and below this vantage-point.
"This is the only pass through these foot-hills," said Engineer Henney, the eldest of Lodge's corps.
The passage ended where the break in the walls fronted abruptly upon the gorge.
It was a wild scene. Only inspired and dauntless men could have entertained any hope of building a railroad through such a place. The mouth of the break was narrow; a rugged slope led up to the left; to the right a huge buttress of stone wall bulged over the gorge; across stood out the seamed and cracked cliffs, and below yawned the abyss. The nearer side of the gorge could only be guessed at.
Neale crawled to the extreme edge of the precipice, and, lying flat, he tried to discover what lay beneath. Evidently he did not see much, for upon getting up he shook his head. Then he gazed at the bulging wall.
"The side of that can be blown off," he muttered.
"But what's around the corner? If it's straight stone wall for miles and miles we are done," said Boone, another of the engineers.
"The opposite wall is just that," added Henney. "A straight stone wall."
General Lodge gazed at the baffling gorge. His face became grimmer, harder. "It seems impossible to go on, but we must go on!" he said.
A short silence ensued. The engineers faced one another like men confronted by a last and crowning hindrance. Then Neale laughed. He appeared cool and confident.
"It only looks bad," he said. "We'll climb to the top and I'll go down over the wall on a rope."
Neale had been let down over many precipices in those stony hills. He had been the luckiest, the most daring and successful of all the men picked out and put to perilous tasks. No one spoke of the accidents that had happened, or even the fatal fall of a lineman who a few weeks before had ventured once too often.
Every rod of road surveyed made the engineers sterner at their task, just as it made them keener to attain final success.
The climb to the top of the bluff was long and arduous. The whole corps went, and also some of the troopers.
"I'll need a long rope," Neale had said to King, his lineman.
It was this order that made King take so much time in ascending the bluff.
Besides, he was a cowboy, used to riding, and could not climb well.
"Wal; I; shore; rustled; all the line; aboot heah," he drawled, pantingly, as he threw lassoes and coils of rope at Neale's feet.
Neale picked up some of the worn pieces. He looked dubious. "Is this all you could get?" he asked.
"Shore is. An' thet includes what Casey rustled from the soldiers."
"Help me knot these," went on Neale.
"Wal, I reckon this heah time I'll go down before you," drawled King.
Neale laughed and looked curiously at his lineman. Back somewhere in Nebraska this cowboy from Texas had attached himself to Neale. They worked together; they had become friends. Larry Red King made no bones of the fact that Texas had grown too hot for him. He had been born with an itch to shoot. To Neale it seemed that King made too much of a service Neale had rendered; the mere matter of a helping hand. Still, there had been danger.
"Go down before me!" exclaimed Neale.
"I reckon," replied King.
"You will not," rejoined the other, bluntly. "I may not need you at all. What's the sense of useless risk?"
"Wal, I'm goin'; else I throw up my job."
"Oh, hell!" burst out Neale as he strained hard on a knot. Again he looked at his lineman, this time with something warmer than curiosity in his glance.
Larry Red King was tall, slim, hard as iron, and yet undeniably graceful in outline; a singularly handsome and picturesque cowboy with flaming hair and smooth, red face and eyes of flashing blue. From his belt swung a sheath holding a heavy gun.
"Wal, go ahaid," added Neale, mimicking his comrade. "An' I shore hope thet this heah time you-all get aboot enough of your job."
One by one the engineers returned from different points along the wall, and they joined the group around Neale and King.
"Test that rope," ordered General Lodge.
The long rope appeared to be amply strong. When King fastened one end round his body under his arms the question arose among the engineers, just as it had arisen for Neale, whether or not it was needful to let the lineman down before the surveyor. Henney, who superintended this sort of work, decided it was not necessary.
"I reckon I'll go ahaid," said King. Like all Texans of his type, Larry King was slow, easy, cool, careless. Moreover, he gave a singular impression of latent nerve, wildness, violence.
There seemed every assurance of a deadlock when General Lodge stepped forward and addressed his inquiry to Neale.
"Larry thinks the rope will break. So he wants to go first," replied Neale.
There were broad smiles forthcoming, yet no one laughed. This was one of the thousands of strange human incidents that must be enacted in the building of the railroad. It might have been humorous, but it was big. It fixed the spirit and it foreshadowed events.
General Lodge's stern face relaxed, but he spoke firmly. "Obey orders," he admonished Larry King.
The loop was taken from Larry's waist and transferred to Neale's. Then all was made ready to let the daring surveyor with his instrument down over the wall.
Neale took one more look at the rugged front of the cliff. When he straightened up the ruddy bronze had left his face.
"There's a bulge of rock. I can't see what's below it," he said. "No use for signals. I'll go down the length of the rope and trust to find a footing. I can't be hauled up."
They all conceded this silently.
Then Neale sat down, let his legs dangle over the wall, firmly grasped his instrument, and said to the troopers who held the rope, "All right!"
They lowered him foot by foot.
It was windy and the dust blew up from under the wall. Black canon swifts, like swallows, darted out with rustling wings, uttering frightened twitterings. The engineers leaned over, watching Neale's progress. Larry King did not look over the precipice. He watched the slowly slipping rope as knot by knot it passed over. It fascinated him.
"He's reached the bulge of rock," called Baxter, craning his neck.
&nbs
p; "There, he's down; out of sight!" exclaimed Henney.
Casey, the flagman, leaned farther out than any other. "Phwat a dom' sthrange way to build a railroad, I sez," he remarked.
The gorge lay asleep in the westering sun, silent, full of blue haze. Seen from this height, far above the break where the engineers had first halted, it had the dignity and dimensions of a canon. Its walls had begun to change color in the sunset light.
Foot by foot the soldiers let the rope slip, until probably two hundred had been let out, and there were scarcely a hundred feet left. By this time all that part of the cable which had been made of lassoes had passed over; the remainder consisted of pieces of worn and knotted and frayed rope, at which the engineers began to gaze fearfully.
"I don't like this," said Henney, nervously. "Neale surely ought to have found a ledge or bench or slope by now."
Instinctively the soldiers held back, reluctantly yielding inches where before they had slacked away feet. But intent as was their gaze, it could not rival that of the cowboy.
"Hold!" he yelled, suddenly pointing to where the strained rope curved over the edge of the wall.
The troopers held hard. The rope ceased to pay out. The strain seemed to increase. Larry King pointed with a lean hand.
"It's a-goin' to break!"
His voice, hoarse and swift, checked the forward movement of the engineers. He plunged to his knees before the rope and reached clutchingly, as if he wanted to grasp it, yet dared not.
"Ropes was my job! Old an' rotten! It's breakin'!"
Even as he spoke the rope snapped. The troopers, thrown off their balance, fell backward. Baxter groaned; Boone and Henney cried out in horror; General Lodge stood aghast, dazed. Then they all froze rigid in the position of intense listening.
A dull sound puffed up from the gorge, a low crash, then a slow- rising roar and rattle of sliding earth and rock. It diminished and ceased with the hollow cracking of stone against stone.
Casey broke the silence among the listening men with a curse. Larry Red King rose from his knees, holding the end of the snapped rope, which he threw from him with passionate violence. Then with action just as violent he unbuckled his belt and pulled it tighter and buckled it again. His eyes were blazing with blue lightning; they seemed to accuse the agitated engineers of deliberate murder.
