Justin Wingate, Ranchman

“Go into the house, Ben,” he commanded; “I’ll see you later.”

When Ben was gone he turned to Justin.

“I’ve tried to do right by you, Justin, and I’ve liked your work; but you must remember that Ben is my son. I can’t think that you had any good reason to strike him.”

“I didn’t intend to strike him,” Justin urged, “and I shouldn’t have done so if he hadn’t struck me first.”

“Well, I won’t have you two quarreling and fighting. Just remember that, will you?”

“He struck me first!” said Justin, sturdily, though deeply troubled by the knowledge that he had offended Philip Davison.

Davison followed Ben into the house, leaving Justin weak and bewildered. He had smothered his sudden explosive rage, yet he still felt its influence. That he could have struck Ben in that way seemed incredible; yet he tried to justify the deed to himself. He was about to walk away, when Ben reappeared and came up to him.

“Justin, you’re a brick, to stand by a fellow that way! You knocked me down, but I don’t hold it against you, for you can keep your mouth shut.”

“You still have that money?”

“Of course.”

“I haven’t changed my opinion about that!”

Ben’s face reddened again.

“What if I did keep it? You’re fussy, and you’re a fool! What is my father’s is mine, or it will be mine some day; I just took a little of it ahead of time, that’s all. It will all be mine, when he goes over the divide.”

Justin was horrified. Ben had expressed reckless and defiant views on many subjects, but nothing like this flippant speculation concerning his father’s death.

“I won’t listen to you when you talk that way,” he declared; and he moved away.

CHAPTER X

PIPINGS OF PAN

The result of this quarrel was that Justin was banished temporarily from the ranch, though it was not assigned as the reason for his exile. Fogg had been forced to take a flock of sheep in payment for a debt owed him by a sheepman. The sheep were already in Paradise Valley, and were to be sent at once into the mountains. Davison ordered Justin to take charge of these sheep, and hurried shepherd and flock into the hills, while Lucy was temporarily away from home. Justin could not rebel against this order except mentally, if he wished to remain in Davison’s employment and retain, or regain, his good-will.

Before setting forth he left a letter for Lucy with Pearl Newcome, and was sure she would get it. Yet he departed from the ranch with a heavy heart; and as he went on his way he questioned why he and not another had been selected for this life of lonely exile in the mountains. He was almost sure it was because of his trouble with Ben.

Justin was assisted in driving the sheep to the high altitudes, where they were to graze until cold weather would make it advisable to bring them into the lower foot-hills. A sufficient supply of food for a month or more was taken along, and he was helped in the work of erecting a brush-and-pole house.

He was well up among the pines and aspens, where the nights are always cool, with often a sharp frost even in mid-summer. Snow banks were in sight, and here and there streams and small lakes of the purest ice water. Occasionally a lordly elk crashed through a grove, or came out with such suddenness on the lonely herder and his woolly charges that it whistled and fled in astonishment. Black-tailed deer passed frequently on the slopes, and now and then Justin came upon the track of a bear. The only animals he could not love were the worthless coyotes, that made life a burden to him and murdered sleep in their efforts to slay the sheep.

Of all, the sheep were the most vexatious and stupid, having no originality of impulse, and being maddeningly, monotonously alike. When hungry, in the earlier part of the day, they exhausted his strength and that of his dog, as he followed them, while they swarmed everywhere, nibbling, nibbling, with a continual, nerve-racking “baa-a-a! baa-a-a!” Justin could not wonder that sheep-herders often go mad. The sheep were more than two thousand in number; and to keep anything like a count of them, so that he might be sure that the flock was not being devastated by the sly coyotes, was trying work.

But there were other times when he was given hours of lazy ease, when he could lie with the faithful dog on the cool grass and look up into the cool sky; could listen to the foaming plunge of the mountain stream, to the fluttered whisperings of the aspens and the meanings of the pines, and could watch the flirting flight of the magpies, or the gambolings of playful deer.

So Justin had much opportunity for thought; and his thoughts and imaginings ran wide and far, with Lucy Davison and Doctor Clayton not very far from both center and periphery wherever they ran or flew. That he had been forced to come away without a parting word with Lucy troubled him sorely.

He had his mother’s little Bible with him, containing the wisp of brown hair, and the written flyleaf:

“Justin, my baby-boy, is now six months old. May God bless and preserve him and may he become a good man.”

He read in it much, in his leisure; and studied that writing many, many times, thinking of his mother, and wondering about his father. And he questioned as to what his life probably would have been if his mother had lived, or if he had known of his father. Yet he was very well satisfied to have it as it had been ordered. It had brought to him Lucy Davison; and he might have missed her, if fate had not led him to Paradise Valley and kept him there.

He was quite sure that no father could have done more for him than Clayton, nor loved him with a more unselfish love. To the missionary preacher, Peter Wingate, and to Curtis Clayton, he acknowledged that he owed all he was or could ever be. He thought very lovingly of Clayton, as he lay on the cool slopes looking into the cool sky.

And, indeed, the lonely doctor had been wondrously kind to the boy whose life and future had been so strangely committed to his keeping. Without intending anything in particular beyond the impartation of knowledge, he had rounded, on the foundation laid by Peter Wingate, a structure of character that combined singular sweetness with great nobility and strength, for Justin had inherited from his mother certain qualities of sturdy resolution which Clayton himself lacked. The one great blemish, or fault, was a quick and inflammable temper, that almost resisted control.

Utterly unaware of the fact himself, as he lay thus among his sheep, while his thoughts ranged far and wide, Justin was like that ruddy David, youthful son of Jesse, with whose life story, told in his mother’s little Bible, he was so familiar, or like Saul in his boyhood days. His lusty youth, his length of limb, his shapely head covered with its heavy masses of hair, his tanned strong face with its kindly, clear-cut profile, and his steady unwinking eyes that looked into the blue skies with color as blue, all spoke of unrecognized power.

He dreamed of the future, as well as of the past, building cloud castles as unsubstantial as the changing clouds that floated above him. He knew that many of them were but dreams. Others it seemed to him might be made to come true, with Lucy Davison to help him. He did not intend to remain either cowboy or sheep-herder, he was sure of that; and he did not think he would care to become a doctor, like Clayton. He would like to accomplish great things; yet if he could not, he would like to accomplish the small things possible to him in a manner that should be great. Not for his own sake—he felt sure it was not for his own sake—but for Lucy and Clayton! He wanted to be worthy of them both.

It must be confessed that his wandering thoughts were chiefly occupied with Lucy Davison. He delighted to recall those happy moments under the cottonwoods. Always in his dreams she was true to him, as he was to her; and she was longing for his letters, as he was for hers.

Naturally, other things and people were often in Justin’s thoughts. He thought of Philip Davison, of Ben, with whom he had quarreled, and of Mary Jasper and her father. With a keen sense of sympathy he pictured Sloan Jasper plodding his slow rounds, trying to satisfy with his horses and his cows that desire for loving companionship which only the presence of his daughter could satisfy. He marveled that Mary could leave her father to that life of loneliness for even the gayeties of Denver. And thinking thus, he pitied Mary.

Often Justin lay under the night sky, rolled in his blankets, when the coyotes were most annoying, ready to leap up at the first alarm given by the dog. He carried a revolver for use in defending the sheep against the coyotes. This was a case in which, as he knew, even Curtis Clayton would approve of slaying. He began to see clearly, too, in this warfare with the coyotes, that nature, instead of being uniformly kind, as Clayton liked to think, is often pitilessly cruel, and seems to be in a state of armed combat in which there is never the flutter of the white flag of truce.

It was the visualizing to him of that age-old conflict in which only the fittest survive. As he looked out upon this warring world, all the animals, with few exceptions, seemed to be trying to devour all the others. The coyotes slew the sheep, the mountain lions pulled down the deer, the wild cats devoured the birds, and for all the fluttering, flying insect life the birds made of the glorious turquoise skies an endless hell of fear.

Often there came to Justin under the night sky rare glimpses of the wild life of the mountains. Playful antelopes gamboled by, all unconscious of his presence, frisking and leaping in the light of early morning, or scampering in wild rushes of fright when they discovered his presence or the dog gave tongue; bucks clattered at each other with antlered horns, or called across the empty spaces; wild cat and cougar leaped the rocks with padded footfalls and occasionally pierced the still air with screams as startling in their suddenness as the staccato, Indian-like clamor of the coyotes. Always wild cat, cougar and coyote brought Justin from beneath his blankets with every sense alert, and sent the dog scurrying into the gloom in the direction of the sound.

Clayton’s habits of study and writing had not been lost on Justin, and now and then he tried to set down in his little note book some description of the things that moved him. He composed letters, too, to Lucy, many letters which he never meant to send. In them he told her of his life with the sheep, and of how much he loved her. Often these letters were composed, but not written at all.

In one of those letters to Lucy which were not intended to be sent he incorporated some of his thoughts concerning the farmers of the valley, together with a bit of verse. The old hope of Peter Wingate had come back to him for the moment, and he saw the valley as Wingate saw it in his dream of the future:

“The crooking plumes of the rice-corn,The sorghum’s emerald spear,The rustle of blue alfalfa,Out on this wild frontier,Whisper of coming thousands,Whose hurrying, eager treadShall change this mould into kerneled goldAnd give to the millions bread.“Tis now but a dream prophetic;The plover tilts by the stream,The coyote calls from the hilltop,And the–”

Justin got no further. The impossibility of the fulfillment of that dream had come to him as he sought to picture the present.

When the driver of the “grub wagon” came with supplies and the news of the ranch, he brought a letter from Lucy; and he took away a letter for her, when he departed. The news from home was cheering. Outwardly at least matters had not changed there. No one had come, and no one had gone, and the usual work was going on.

More than once the driver came, and each time Justin saw him depart with unspoken longing. He would have given much to be privileged to go back with him. Yet Justin was not and had not been lonely in the ordinary meaning of that word; he was lonely for the companionship of Lucy Davison, for the glance of her brown eyes, for the music of her words; but, possessing that inner light of the mind in which Clayton believed, it brightened his isolation as with a sacred fire, filled the wooded slopes and craggy heights with life and beauty, and suggested deep thoughts and deeper imaginings.

Filled with dreams and work, with desire and accomplishment, the slow months rolled by. With the descent of the snow-line on the high peaks the sheep were driven into the foot-hills, and then on down into the plain itself, where not only grass, but the various sages—black, white, salt and bud sage—together with shad-scale and browse, furnished an abundance of the food they liked.

Then they were taken away, their summer herding having been a good investment for Fogg; and Justin returned to Paradise Valley, clear-eyed, sturdy, and handsomer even than before. He had learned well the to him necessary lesson of patience, and had tasted the joy of duty well done. More than all, he had begun to find himself, and to know that childhood and youth had fallen from him, and that he was a man.

CHAPTER XI

THE TRAGEDY OF THE RANGE

Justin was startled by the changes which had come to Paradise Valley in the closing weeks of his long isolation in the mountains. Steve Harkness and Pearl Newcome were married, and Lucy Davison had been sent East to school. The latter filled him almost with a feeling of dismay. Among the other changes to be noted was that William Sanders had written letters to a number of farmers, some of whom were now in the valley and had taken government land or purchased mortgaged quarter-sections.

Justin discovered, in talks with them, that these men had been neighbors of Sanders on the irrigated lands at Sumner. They had sold out there, as Sanders had done, and having heard from him of the possibilities of Paradise Valley, they had moved to it, with their families and belongings. Others, it was reported, were coming. Some of them brought a few cows, as well as horses; and before the winter storms came they erected cheap dug-outs for themselves, and prepared flimsy shelters and cut wild hay for their stock. It was their intention to try irrigation.

Justin soothed his disappointment at not seeing Lucy Davison by writing many letters to her, to which she replied sparingly. He was away from home much of the time, riding lonely lines with other cowboys. Whenever he came home and found no letter from Lucy he felt discouraged; when one was there, he returned to his work cheered and comforted. As for Ben, Justin saw little of him. Davison kept them well apart, by giving them separate assignments.

In the severest of the winter storms, when the grass of the range had been covered with snow for many days, the cattle breached the fences, and mingling with cattle from other ranches they began to roam over the mesas and valley, a terror to the settlers, and as destructive as the locusts of Egypt. The cowboys could do nothing with them; could not hold them on the open lines, and could not repair the broken fences in the bitter cold and the blinding snow. It was a repetition in miniature of the days when the whole of the Great Plains was an open range, and cattle, shelterless and without food, wandered in the winter storms in pitiable distress, dying by thousands.

As it was useless and perilous to try to ride any line, Justin and the other cowboys came home. Justin’s feet and hands were frosted, and he went to Clayton’s, where he remained, to have the benefit of Clayton’s medical skill as well as his companionship.

Clayton was so troubled by the sufferings of the cattle that he could talk of little else. From his frost-covered windows weary bands of the starving animals could be seen ploughing through the drifts. In each band the largest and strongest were usually in the lead, breaking a way through the snow; the others followed, moving slowly and weakly, in single file, across the white wastes, their legs raw and bleeding from contact with the cutting snow-crust. Their hair was so filled with fine snow beaten in and compacted that often they resembled snow banks, and they were wild-eyed, and gaunt to emaciation.

Now and then a band would turn on its course and move back along the path it had broken, eating the frozen grass which the trampling had uncovered. Nothing in the way of food came amiss. The dry pods and stalks of the milk-weed and the heads of thistles protruding through the snow were hungrily snatched at. Unfenced stacks of wild hay prepared by the farmers and settlers for their own stock, disappeared like snow drifts in the spring sun, unless the owners were vigilant and courageous enough to beat back the desperate foragers. Many wild combats took place between the cattle and the exasperated farmers, and more than one man escaped narrowly the impaling horns of some infuriated steer. It seemed cruel to drive the cattle from the food they so much needed, but the farmers were forced to it.

Even Clayton and Justin found it necessary to issue forth, armed with prodding pitchforks, and fight with the famishing cattle for the stack of hay which Clayton had in store for his horse. He had fenced it in, but the cattle breached the fence and he could not repair it perfectly while the storm lasted.

“The cattle business as it is carried on in this country is certainly one of the most cruel forms of cruelty to animals,” Clayton declared, as he came in exhausted by one of these rights for the preservation of his little haystack. “The cattlemen provide no feed or shelter; in fact, with their immense herds that would be an impossible thing; and you see the result. Their method works well enough when the winters are mild, but more than half of them are not mild. Yet,” he continued sarcastically, “the cattlemen will tell you that it pays! If they do not lose over twenty per cent, in any one year the business can stand it. Think of it! A deliberate, coldblooded calculation which admits that twenty out of every hundred head of cattle may be sacrificed in this method of raising cattle on the open range! And the owners of the cattle will stand up and talk to you mildly about such heartless cruelty, and dare to call themselves men! Even Fogg will do it. As for Davison, I suppose he was born and bred to the business and doesn’t know any better. But it’s a burning shame.”

Justin was stirred as deeply. Clayton’s viewpoint had become his own. It lashed his conscience to feel that he was in some slight measure responsible for the condition he was witnessing. He was connected with the Davison ranch, if only as an employee. As for holding the cattle behind the fences and the open lines, that had not been possible; yet, if it could have been done, their condition would have been worse. By breaking away they were given more land to roam over, and that meant more milk-weed pods and thistle heads, and more slopes where a bit of frosted grass was bared by the knife-like winds, to say nothing of the stacks of hay now and then encountered.

Yes, it was a burning shame. Justin felt it; and he grew sick at heart as day by day he watched that tragedy of the unsheltered range, where hundreds of hapless cattle were yielding up their lives.

CHAPTER XII

WITH SIBYL AND MARY

On her way home for a brief visit at the close of the summer, which she had spent in the East, Lucy Davison stopped in Denver, to visit Mary Jasper, from whom she had received glowing letters. Mary had not written for several weeks, and Lucy was surprised to find her ill; an illness resulting from the unaccustomed excitement of the Denver life she led under the guidance of Sibyl Dudley and the too sudden transition from the quiet of Paradise Valley. She was not seriously ill, however, and looked very attractive, as she lay propped about with cushions and pillows, her dark hair framing her face and her dark eyes alight with eagerness when Lucy appeared. Lucy was almost envious, as she contemplated Mary’s undeniable beauty.

Sibyl lavished attention and care on her charge, and she greeted Lucy with every evidence of delight and affection.

“My dear, you are tired!” she said. “Let me have some cakes and tea brought up for you at once. A little wine, or some champagne, would be good for you. You wouldn’t care for it? Then we’ll have the tea and cakes. And Mary may sit up in bed a few minutes, just in honor of this visit. It was so good of you to stop off in Denver to see her.”

Sibyl was very beautiful herself, quite as beautiful as Mary, though very much older. Lucy thought she had not aged a day in appearance since she had first met her, in the home of that acquaintance in the little town at the entrance to Paradise Valley. Sibyl was past-master of that wonderful preservative art which defies wrinkles and gray hairs and the noiseless flight of that foe of all beautiful women, Time. She defied Time, as she defied everything, except the small conventionalities of life, and the changing fashions. She made friends with these, and they served her well.

While talking with Lucy, and nibbling at the cake or sipping the tea, she stopped now and then to caress with coaxing tones her canary, which she had brought into the room and hung in its gilded cage at the window to brighten the place for Mary. She possessed naturally, or had cultivated, that soft, low voice which a Great Poet has declared to be an excellent thing in a woman, and she had assiduously cultivated an outward appearance of much kindness; so that altogether she was very charming, even in the eyes of Lucy Davison, and a most agreeable hostess. Mary was delighted with her.

“Do you know,” said Mary, in a burst of confidence, which a favorable opportunity brought, “she is so good! And she is as kind to the poor as she can be. I know of two old women, and one old man, whom she nearly supports. Of course it isn’t really any sacrifice for her to do it, for she is wealthy. It’s the funniest thing, the way she speaks about it. She says she gives things to poor people just because the giving makes her feel good. ‘Give a quarter to a beggar,’ she says, ‘and you will feel warm inside all day. It is a cheap way to purchase comfort.’”

In that same conversation Mary chanced to mention Curtis Clayton.

“I spoke of him to Mrs. Dudley one day, and I asked her if she knew him.”

“‘Oh, yes, I know him,’ she said; ‘he is a fool, a poor fool!’

“‘He looks so comical,’ I said to her, ‘swinging that stiff arm!’

“Then she looked at me—oh, I can’t tell you how funny her eyes were then, just as if coals were shining behind them, and she said, awfully quiet:

“‘I happen to know how he got that—it was by doing a brave and unselfish deed! He was in love with a beautiful but silly girl, whom I knew.’

“Then she told me the story. He was with this girl on his vacation. He was in Yale then, and she was the daughter of a worthless hotel-keeper. He first met her at the hotel while he was spending a summer in the mountains. She knew that he loved her, and she was vain of it, and she wanted to make him show it. There was a flower growing in a cleft of a cañon, and she asked him to get it for her. He descended. It was dangerous; and she, looking over and pointing out the flower, lost her footing and fell. She was caught by some bushes, but she had a good fall, and landed at a point where she could not get up. The fright that he got by seeing her fall caused him to lose his footing, and he slipped and broke his left arm. To get her up he had to reach down with one hand and hold to an aspen with the other. He could only hold with his right hand, for his left arm was broken; so he dangled his broken left arm over for her to clutch; and she, frightened and selfish, gripped the hand, and after a great effort scrambled up. He held on until she was safe, and then (he had already turned white as death) he fainted. He revived after a time, and they got out of there, forgetting the flower; and though the doctors did what they could, he has had a stiff arm ever since.”

Mary shivered a little, sympathetically.

“I can’t ever think of Doctor Clayton now without seeing him with that girl, dragging her out of that place with his broken arm. I asked Mrs. Dudley if the girl married him after all that; and she said yes, but it would have been better for him if she hadn’t, if she had gone to her death in the cañon that day, for she wasn’t a girl who could ever make any man happy. And do you know, I think it must have been that girl who caused him to live the life he is living!”