The Preacher of Cedar Mountain Part 25

Who that knows the horse will doubt it? Hartigan's first aim was to convince the black colt that men were not cruel brutes, and that he, Hartigan, was the gentlest and kindest of them all. And this he did by being much with him, by soft talking, by never being abrupt, and by bringing him favourite food. Not in a stable--it was a month before the wild horse would consent to enter a stable--this first period of training was all in a corral. Then came the handling. Midnight was very apt to turn and kick when first a hand was laid on him, but he learned to tolerate, and then to love the hand of his master; and when this treatment was later reinforced with a currycomb, the sensation pleased him mightily. The bridle next went on by degrees--first as a halter, then as a hackimore, last complete with bit. The saddle was the next slow process--a surcingle, a folded blanket and cinch, a double blanket and cinch, a bag of oats and cinch and, finally, the saddle and rider.

It was slow, but it was steadily successful; and whenever the black colt's ears went back or his teeth gave a rebellious snap, Jim knew he was going too fast, and gently avoided a clash. Never once did he fight with that horse; and before three months had pa.s.sed, he was riding the tall black colt; and the colt was responding to his voice and his touch as a "broken" horse will never do.

"Yes," said Kyle, "I know all about that. It costs about twenty-five dollars to learn a horse that way, and it costs about five dollars to break him cowboy way. An average horse is worth only about twenty-five dollars. The cowboy way is good enough for our job, so I don't see any prospect of change till we get a price that will justify the 'training.'"

Belle was an intensely interested spectator of all this Midnight chapter. She wanted Jim to get a good horse that he would love, but oh, how she prayed and hoped he would not happen on another speeder! She knew quite well that it was about one chance in ten thousand; but she also knew that Jim could make a good horse out of mediocre material; and it was with anxiety just the reverse of his that she watched the black colt when first they rode together. He was strong and hard, but, thank heaven, she thought, showed no sign of racing blood.

"Of course, he'll come up a little later, when I get him well in hand,"

Jim explained apologetically.

And Belle added, "I hope not."

"Why?" asked Jim in surprise.

"Because, you might ride away from me." And she meant it.

CHAPTER x.x.xIII

The Sociable

Christmas time with its free days and its social gatherings was at hand; and the Church folk must needs respond to the spirit of the season with a "sociable." In such a meeting, the young minister is king--that is the tradition--and on this occasion it was easier than usual to crown the heir apparent. At least twenty girls were making love to Jim, and he was quite unconscious of it all, except that he thought them a little free, and at length he recited an appropriate couplet from "The Solitude of Alexander Selkirk": "They are so unaccustomed to man, their tameness is shocking to me." He joked and laughed with all; but ever he drifted over toward Belle, to consult, to whisper, to linger.

For such affairs there is a time-honoured and established programme that was fairly well adhered to at least in the early part. They met at the church parlours and gossiped; had a prayer, then more gossip; next followed tea and cakes in a poisonous abundance, and more gossip. Now the older preacher, as expected, read a chapter out of some safe story book, amid gossip--harmless in the main, but still gossip. Next the musical geniuses of the congregation were unchained. A perfectly well-meaning young lady sang, "Be kind to your brother, he may not last long," to an accompaniment of squeaks on the melodeon--and gossip. A boy orator recited "Chatham's speech on American Independence," and received an outburst of applause which, for a moment, overpowered the gossip.

Lou-Jane Hoomer, conspicuous for her intense hair and noisy laugh, had been active in getting up the sociable, and now she contributed of her talents by singing "Home, Sweet Home." About the middle of the second period, according to custom, the preacher should recite "Barbara Frietchie" to a whispering chorus of gossip. But Jim was brought up in a land not reached by Barbara's fame and he made a new departure by giving a Fenian poem--"Shamus...o...b..ien"--with such fervour that, for the moment, the whisperers forgot to gossip.

Belle, as the manager of the affair, was needed everywhere and all the time, but made no contribution to the programme. Lou-Jane scored such a success with "Home, Sweet Home" that she was afterward surrounded by a group of admirers, among them Jim Hartigan.

"Sure," he said, she "was liable to break up the meeting making every one so homesick," and she replied that "it would never break up as long as he was there to attract them all together."

John Higginbotham, with his unfailing insurance eye, pointed out that the stove-pipe wire had sagged, bringing the pipe perilously near the woodwork, and then gossiped about the robberies his company had suffered. A game of rhymes was proposed. In this one person gives a word and the next to him must at once match it with an appropriate rhyme.

This diversion met with little enthusiasm and the party lagged until some one suggested that Jim recite. He chose a poem from Browning, "How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix." He put his very soul in those galloping horses and wondered why the poet said so much about the men and so little about the steeds. Dr. Jebb could not quite "see the lesson," but the fire and power of the rendering gripped the audience.

Dr. Carson said, "Now you're doing real stuff! If you'd cut out all your piffling goody talk and give us life like that, you'd have all the town with you."

Lou-Jane was actually moved, and Belle glowed with pride to see her hero really touching the n.o.bler strings of human emotion--strings that such a community is apt to lose sight of under cobwebs of long disuse but they are there and ready to resound to the strong, true soul that can touch them with music.

But what was it in the trampling horses that stirred some undiscovered depth in his own heart? How came it that those lines drove fogbanks back and showed another height in his soul, a high place never seen before, even by himself? And, as those simple townfolk, stirred they knew not how, all clamoured for another song, he felt the thrill that once was his in the far-off stable yard of Links, when Denny Denard, brandis.h.i.+ng a dung-fork, chanted "The Raiding of Aymal." Now it all came back and Hartigan shouted out the rede:

"Haakon is dead! Haakon is dead!

Haakon of the bronze-hilt sword is dead.

His son's in his stead; Aymal, tall son of Haakon, Swings now the bronze-hilt sword of his father.

He is gone to the High-fielden To the high pasture to possess the twelve mares of his father; Black and bay and yellow, as the herdsman drave them past him; Black and yellow, their manes on the wind; And galloped a colt by the side of each."

So he sang in a chant the saga-singer's tale of the king killing all the colts save one that it might have the nursing of the twelve. His eye sparkled and glowed; his colour mounted; his soul was so stirred with the story that his spirit could fill the gaps where his memory failed.

The sense of power was on him; he told the swinging tale as though it were in verity his own; and the hearers gazed intensely, feeling that he sang of himself. It was no acting, but a king proclaiming himself a king, when he told of the world won by the bronze sword bearer mounted on the twelve-times-nourished stallion colt; and he finished with a royal gesture and injunction:

"Ho! ye, ye seven tall sons of Aymal, Comes there a time when face you many trails; Hear this for wisdom now; Twelve colts had I and all save one I slew.

The twelve-times-nourished charger grew And round the world he bore me And never failed; so all the world was mine And all the world I ruled.

Ho, children of the bronze-hilt sword, Take this for guiding creed: Pick out your one great steed And slay the rest and ride."

And when he smote the table with his fist the folk in that poor, simple hall were hushed with awe. They had no words to clothe the thoughts that came, no experience of their own to match them. There was a pauses--a silence; a slow, uncertain sounding of applause. Carson glared half hypnotized; then said to himself: "This is not Jim Hartigan; this is the royal saga who sang."

What he clearly expressed, the others vaguely but deeply felt. As for Belle, the pa.s.sion and the power of it possessed her. She was deeply moved--and puzzled, too. It was a side of Jim she had not known before.

Later, as they went home together hand on arm, she held on to him very tightly and said softly: "Now I know that you are marked for big things in the world."

CHAPTER x.x.xIV

Springtime

Have you seen the springtime dawn on the Black Hills? No? Then you have never seen a real spring.

For long, dark, silent months the land has lain under a broad white robe, the plains are levelled, hidden, and the whiteness of the high s.p.a.ces sweeps down to meet, on the lower hills, the sudden blackness of the forest pine. And now you know why these are named Black Hills. Full four white moons have waned; the blizzard wind has hissed and stung, till the house-bound wonder if the days of spring will ever come. In March, when the northward-heading crows appear, the sting-wind weakens, halts; the sweet south wind springs up, the snow-robe of the plains turns yellow here and there as the gra.s.s comes through, then lo! comes forth a world of crocus bloom. The white robe shrivels fast now, the brown pursues it up the mountain side till at the last there is nothing left but a high-up snow-cap hiding beneath the pines, slowly dissolving in a million crystal rills to swell the rolling Cheyenne far below. The spring birds fill the air, the little ones that twitter as they pa.s.s, and the great gold-breasted prairie lark that sings and sings: "The Spring, the Spring, the glory of the Spring!" Then all the world is glad, and stronger than the soft new wind, deeper than the impulse of awakening flower bulbs, broader than the brightening tinge of green--is the thrill of a world-wide, sky-wide joy and power, the exquisite tenderness and yearning which if you know, you know; and if you do not know it none can make you understand.

"O G.o.d of the blue and the green and the wind, oh, send me what my spirit craves." That is the prayer, the unspoken prayer, of every sun-wise creature in these days; and the wild things race and seek, and search and race, not knowing what draws them ever on; but they surely know when they find it, and then they are at rest.

And they rode, Belle and Jim, the big square man, and the maid with the age-old light in her eyes, and they rejoiced in the golden plains. They rode with the wild things of the plain, and though they talked of the past and the future there was for them but one thing worth a thought, the golden present in their golden youth.

"Oh, Belle, what fools we are! We talk of the past and of far-off days, of the blessings that are ahead of us, and I know there is no better joy than this, to ride and shout and be alive right now with you!"

Midnight had burgeoned out into a big strong horse; not swift, but staunch and better fitted than the other for a rider of such weight. The wound of losing Blazing Star had healed, and the scar it left was a precious thing to Jim much as the Indian holds his Sun Dance scars as proofs of fort.i.tude unflinching.

Fort Ryan and all the plains were in a rosy light this spring. It was a threefold joy to ride on Midnight, with Belle, and to visit Blazing Star in his stall at the Fort. Hartigan felt a little guilty as the gentle creature would come and nose about for sugar lumps while Midnight would lay back his ears at the approach. Midnight had a temper, as was well known; but it was never let forth, for the master that had so little skill in handling men was adept with the horse.

These were very full days for Jim and Belle, though they took their happiness in very different moods. There never was a grown man more incapable of thought for the morrow than Hartigan; he was alive right now, he would right now enjoy his life and Belle should be the crown.

But in her eyes even his imperception discovered a cloud.

"What is it, Belle? Why do you get that far-off troubled look?"

"Oh, Jim, you big, blind, childish giant; do you never think? You are only a probationer with one year's leave. That year is up on the first of May."

"Why, Belle darling, that's five weeks off. A world of things may happen before that."

"Yes, if we make them happen, and I'm going to try."

"Well, Belle, this thing I know; if you set your mind to it I'd bet--if I weren't a preacher--I'd bet there's not a thing could stand against you."

"I like your faith, Jim; but 'faith without works is dead'; and that means we must get up and rustle."

"What do you suggest?"

"Well, I have been rustling this long while back. I've been working Dr.