The Freebooters of the Wilderness Part 7

Going to the French window of her bedroom, Eleanor called down to old Calamity's room below. To her surprise, the half-breed woman on the instant poked her head above the balcony railing of the bas.e.m.e.nt quarters.

"Going to the Ridge to-morrow, Calamity?"

"Oui, Mademoiselle, surement," pattered Calamity softly in that Cree patois which is neither French nor Indian.

"Then, take this up to Mr. Wayland, please!"

As she withdrew to her room, Eleanor became conscious that she could not remember a day since she had come back to the Valley when the Cree half-breed had not been within call or sight. The girl suddenly pressed both hands to her eyes. What had Moyese meant?

Once among the pillows, she fell into the life-bathing sleep of the great mountain ozone-world. Was it a dream; or had Calamity come stealing through the French window to stand at the foot of her bed?

Waking to a burst of sunlight across her face, Eleanor could not tell in the least whether the memory of the half-breed woman standing in the shadows were dream or reality. The sun was coming over the Rim Rocks in a fan-shaped s.h.i.+eld of spear shafts; and every single shaft wafted down thoughts that refused to lie quiet. Shafts that have a trick of turning your heart into a target can't be shut out by armor proof.

Daylight restored her poise. Her first instinct was to recall the letter; but Calamity had already set off for the Ridge. The thought hardly took form, but the shadow haunted her. If It were true, he would surely never let her work round the ranch houses of the Valley.

Breakfast pa.s.sed as usual, alone in the big raftered dining room after the ranch hands had gone, the lame German cook for the camp wagons hobbling in and out with the dishes. Stage had pa.s.sed long since and the mail lay at her place, where the German had spread a white square above the oilcloth of the long bench table; but letters and papers remained unopened.

Perhaps, after all, those midnight thoughts had been morbid as midnight thoughts often are. It might be that the Valley was apart from them, not they apart from the Valley. Who were the neighbors from whom her father stood aside? There was the Senator in the white house across the River. Well, the Senator spent the most of his time in Smelter City forty miles away, and in Was.h.i.+ngton. Then, there were the Williams of the Mission House with their only boy and eighty or a hundred Indian children; gentlefolk keeping up the amenities of refined life, spreading the contagion of beautiful example like an irrigation plot widening slowly over arid sage brush. Surely her father was held in esteem by them; and they stood for all that was best in the Valley.

Below the ranch houses came what was known as "the English Colony," a scattering of young bachelors playing at ranching, whose rendezvous was the pretty Swiss chalet known as "the Rookery," where a wonderful little young-old lady with red wig and hectic flush dispensed lavish hospitality and canned music and old port behind the eminent respectability of a stool-pigeon in the person of a card-loving husband. The lady's husband called himself "colonel." The Valley called him one of those "no-good Englishmen"; but the Valley may have been mistaken; for even to the ranch house had come tales of outraged honor in the person of the "no-good husband" bursting in on games of cards with wild charges which only the payment of big money could suppress--suppress you understand, purely for the sake of the lady: outraged honor could accept no atonement. Then the lady would flit for the winter to those beauty doctors of Paris and New York, who operate on wrinkles and lay up muniments for fresh campaigns; and the "colonel"

would betake himself to resorts where balm is accorded wounded honour; while loose-mouthed, simple-eyed young fellows went East for the winter lighter as to purse, wiser as to the ways of paying for pleasure.

Altogether, it was not surprising her father kept apart from "the English Colony," Eleanor reflected. She pa.s.sed out to the piazza spanning all sides of the ranch house.

It was a sun-bathed, sun-kissed, sun-fused world. The River flowed liquid silver jubilant and singing. The morning mists rolled up primrose spangled with jewels, while over all lay such light as hypnotized the senses into a sort of dazzled dream world. Ashes of roses! There were no ashes here. It was the rose, itself; a world veiled in gold mist, wind-blown, flame-fired of joy, little cressets of fire edging every ridge. The sheep browsing in the Valley, the fleece-clouds herding mid the winds of the upper peaks, you hardly knew which shone whiter. The burnished mountain with its silver cross and wings of light, opal about the peaks, melting in fading lines about the base, with the middle distances lost in gashed purple shadows, might have been a thing of airy fancy. So might the dark forested Ridge where the evergreens stood sentinels among wisps of cloud. And everywhere, all pervasive, sifting through the shadows of silvered pine needles and trembling poplars, permeated the cinnamon smell of the barky forest world, resinous of balsam, spicy with the tang of life.

She could see the mountain streams where they laughed down the Ridge in wind-tattered spray. With the gla.s.s, too, she could see a little blue wreath of man-made smoke curling up from the evergreens; and waves of happiness, absurd warm glowing happiness, broke over her, the sheer gladness of being alive. Whatever sinister thing kept her father apart, it was here she belonged--she knew it now--to the great s.p.a.cious life-stimulating West; to the world resinous with imprisoned sunbeams; not to the lands of sky shut out by twenty story roofs and pea-soup fogs and sickly anaemic views of life. Life was good. She drank of it and called it good as in creation's prime.

Once she called Central up on the telephone. Central answered that the Ridge line had been cut. Such duties as men's hands could not do round ranch houses, she finished in a dream, turning with a touch the house into a home; flowers for the middle of the big table, dishes pitchforked down replaced in order, corner cobwebs speared with a duster on a broom, Navajo rugs uncurled and squared, stale cooking expelled from littered shelves, flies pursued to the last ditch, breaks in the mosquito wire round the piazza tacked up, heaps of mended socks and overalls sent out to the bunk house for the ranch hands, milk cans buried--it had always been one of the absurdities she was going to reform, that people used canned milk in a cow country; but, unfortunately, the obstacle to that reform was that cows could not be milked on horseback.

After mid-day meal, she ensconced herself in a steamer chair on the piazza facing the mountain; but her book lay face downward. It was a book on coniferous trees. She had thought the Valley monotonous when she had first come back. Now she knew it never remained the same for two whole hours. The dazzling white of morning had given place to the yellow glow of afternoon. The River that had flowed quicksilver now swept seaward pure amber rilled with gold. The fleece clouds herded by wandering winds had ma.s.sed to towering c.u.mulus where the sheet lightnings played; and the Mountain where the silver snow-cross had glistened in the morning seemed to have changed perspective, to have retreated and withdrawn to a weird upper world. You no longer saw the wind-blown cataracts. Purpling shadows, palpable sabling mournful ghost-forms, folded and wrapped the Ridge with here and there shafts of slant light, yellow as bars of gold. You could no longer hear the rampant roar of streams disimprisoned from snow by mid-day sun. With the slant light came the sibilant hush, the quiet tangible.

She reclined very still in the steamer chair. Life and love and mystery wrapped her round, the great reverie of the race, the ecstasy of devotees that sent to death and crusade in the Middle Ages, the lovelight of life brooding warm and radiant. She no longer saw the s.h.i.+ning pageant of sunlight on the argent fields of an infinite universe; the sparks and spangles of light in silver cataracts; a world veiled in gold mist, flame-fired of joy, little cressets of rose edging every sky-line. She was possessed, obsessed, bathed, enveloped in a flame of new life. If she thought at all, 'twas in the symbol of the old Apostle, "in Him we live and move and have our being." She recalled that G.o.d had been defined in the consciousness of the race as Love. Deep draughts of new existence whelmed her. No longer life coursed somnolent through unconscious veins. Life ran riotous of gladness tingling to a living joy so poignant it became pain. Was it fool-joy born of swifter pulse and time-old inheritance in the flesh?

Was it the rhapsody of self-hypnotism, which ancients would have called vision? Of such dreams does creation spring full born and enfleshed.

Of such dreams does heroism laugh at death. Of such dreams does life invest the daily round with rain-bow mist, with the spectrum gamut of all the colors that blend to the pure white light of daily life. As a lense splits up light, so love had brought out the hidden colors of existence, of eternity; as she dreamed, eternity itself seemed short.

Then came the restlessness that had shaken Wayland on the Ridge the night before, the fire that tests the vessel; and whether the life go to pieces depend on whether the vessel be both strong and clean. Yet she was not afraid. She remembered their talk the night before of the snow flake falling to the same law as the avalanche; and was she not also a part of the Great Law?

She knew he could not be free till six. She must not go up to the Ridge. Last night, she had gone heedlessly. She could never go so again. Then, she realized why the Missionary's wife had linked her fate with Williams'--a frail bit of china putting itself to the coa.r.s.e uses of earthenware--was.h.i.+ng, scrubbing, sandpapering three generations of morals and bodies to make an ideal real. It was Wayland who had first described Mrs. Williams in that metaphor: "a piece of Bisque or Dresden," he had said, "and what those lousy Indians need is a wooden wash tub with lots of soft soap." Then, she wanted to see Mrs.

Williams, to study her with this new knowledge.

A picket fence in imitation of a home in the East ran round the Mission House. Pitiful attempts at gardening lined the gravel entrance, periwinkle dried up in the blazing Western sun, sickly scented geraniums that shrivelled to the night frost, altheas that did better but refused to bloom. "They don't transplant East to West, any better than they do West to East. Better follow the Senator's advice and domesticate our Western ones." Then, the whimsical thought came perhaps that was what her father had done with her.

The drone of a man's voice from the Mission Parlor surprised her; for Mr. Williams had gone off with her father to the Upper Pa.s.s.

"Here is Miss Eleanor, herself! We were just speaking about you, Eleanor! This is an old friend of your father's, Mr. Matthews from Saskatchewan!"

A little woman in gray drew Eleanor inside the Mission Parlor, a little woman with a white transparent skin trenched by lines of care, but somehow, when you looked twice, they were lines of beauty chiseled by time. She was garbed in gray and her hair was almost white, but, from the first time Eleanor had looked at her hands, the girl wanted to kiss and cover them with her own--they were such beautifully kept hands but so gnarled and misshapen with toil. There had been only one child; but there were eighty Indian children in the Mission School. Had the love dream paid toll for such toil--Eleanor had asked herself when first she had seen the Missionary's wife. Now she knew that, whether the love dream paid toll or not, love would do and was doing the same thing time without end and everywhere.

Then, she became aware of the ma.s.sive form of a man topped by an enormous head of white hair rising in links and hinges from a chair in the corner till his figure towered above the little woman.

"So this--is Eleanor--MacDonald? Well, well, well!"

He was shaking hands at each word. "A knew your grandfather well.

Many's the time we have raced the dogtrains down MacKenzie River an'

the canoes down the Saskatchewan! 'Twas your grandfather set the bagpipes skirling when Governor Simpson used to come galloping down the Columbia in the forties with his paddlers splitting the wind, a dark fearsome man, child, but a brave one, tho' his heart was hard as his hand, and his hand was iron--Bras de Fer, Arm of Iron, the Indians called him; for his left hand, he lost in a duel; and his false hand was a true hand of iron metal that made many a lazy voyageur bite the dust. Bless me, but you are a MacDonald to your dainty feet--" holding her off from him at arm's length. "Eyes true to pedigree, and the curly hair, and the short upper lip, the only one of all the MacDonalds that's kept the race type. 'Tis good to see you! A'm right glad to see you! A'm gladder than you know-"

Eleanor did not wait for any second thought. "And did you know my mother's people, too?"

The old man sat back in his corner. "No, A cannot say A did! A had left the Company an' was building railway bridges in the Rockies when your father left Canada."

She felt the hot flush mount.

"Such an absurd thing, Eleanor," Mrs. Williams was explaining. "Mr.

Matthews came by the Holy Cross last night. Mr. Wayland told Calamity to show him which way to turn; and she sent him the wrong way, to the cow-boy camp, you know! He had to sleep out all night at our very door. Such a shame! That put him so late that he missed Mr. Williams.

You know they have gone to the Upper Pa.s.s and can't possibly be back for weeks--excuse me, some of my school people seem to want me," and she flitted from the room. To Eleanor, her life seemed a constant flitting at the beck of bootless duties, nagging duties that only an expert time keeper of Heaven could credit.

"Yes! Sent me a mile along the road in the wrong direction--into a nest of mid-night birds. A nice bunch o' beauties, too, hatching some Devil plot to ruin the poor sheepmen! A man in a white vest was there, who by the same token didn't belong; tho' A'm no so sure he was any better than his company. They didn't see _me_! A didna' just speak to _them_, but A heard them plain enough,--'leave for the South at once;'

and 'crowd 'em to beat h.e.l.l,' and 'send 'em over without a push' an'

'see that no harm comes to the boy'--Eh, why, what is the matter?"

Eleanor had sprung forward with white lips.

"It's Fordie! He's taking the sheep to the Rim Rocks with the Mexican herders. Don't frighten his mother! It may not be too late! He may not have reached the Rim--"

"Let's telephone that Ranger fellow?"

Then, it all dawned on her, the deadly, suave, incredibly malicious pre-planned thing!

"The wires had been cut since morning," she said.

CHAPTER VII

WHILE LAW MARKS TIME, CRIME SCORES

They did not tell the boy's mother.

The German cook hitched the fastest bronchos to the yellow buckboard with the front wheel brake; and, the old frontiersman flouris.h.i.+ng the reins, they had whisked off for the Ridge trail before Mrs. Williams could return to the Mission Parlor.

"The Ranger will be able to tell whether the sheep have pa.s.sed down the Ridge," she explained.

The old man caught the light on her face as she spoke the name. It was like the flash in the dark that betrays a diamond, or the scintilla of light through the leaves that tells of an Alpine lake; but he made no comment except to the ponies.

"Go it, little ones! Make time! Split the wind! Show y'r heels!

Tear the air to tatters! there!" And he whirled the whip with the skill of all the old Adam stirring within him, while the buckboard went forward with a bounce.