The Vision of Elijah Berl

Uncle Sid's face was wreathed in smiles.

"I want to beg your pardon, Senner. You make me think of these prickly pears out here. They're mighty fine eatin' when you get the spines off 'em."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

The fact that the way of the transgressor is hard, was being ground into the shrinking soul of Elijah. As yet, the grinding was of no avail because he refused to recognize that he was a transgressor. For years he had dreamed, and worked, and planned, and in it all he had been alone. Men would have called it alone, but not so Elijah. The Lord was with him. At least this was his fanatical belief. Alone, or with the still, small voice, not always interpreted aright, he had with infinite patience dreamed his dreams, wrought out his tasks as they came to him, and still alone, he had seen them shaping to a definite end. He had, like a solitary player, shuffled his cards, had dealt them and played in strict accordance with the game or modified them at will, and there was no one to say him nay. Even Amy had strengthened this growing habit of looking upon himself, his will and his desires as infallible.

Unconsciously he had carried this inflexible attitude of mind into the game, when necessity had compelled him to admit partners. He resented the insistence of others, that they should be considered as having rights equal to his own. He demanded unconditional surrender, implicit obedience to his will. He reasoned with a sophistical show of right that the great idea was his, that what he gave was given in the fullness of his heart, and that it was only base ingratitude that prompted the recipients to oppose and thwart him.

Winston had opposed and thwarted him in a thousand details, and though Elijah had outwardly yielded, he had not essentially changed, though he was learning many lessons. He had learned to distinguish between what Winston would accept and what he would reject, but involuntarily and unconsciously there was growing up within him a burning hatred of Ralph Winston. There was a seeming lack of sympathy in the rugged integrity of Winston that clove through the heart of things. Winston knew only north and south. If a needle swung to these points, it was right; if it did not, it was wrong, and he had no use for it.

Elijah was growing jealous of Winston. He said nothing, but he noticed that, in the field especially, and to a certain extent in the office, details were more and more referred to Winston, even by Helen. Winston's name was on every tongue. It seemed to Elijah as if profit, and honor, and prestige were slipping from him and falling upon Winston. He was being defrauded. It never occurred to him that Winston's complete surrender of heart, and soul and mind to the successful fulfilment of his dreams, all testified far more strongly than honeyed words of praise to the worthiness of the idea which he had conceived.

He had turned to Helen Lonsdale. With no less rugged ideas of right and wrong, they had been clouded in Helen with the dangerous sympathy of a woman's heart. With sympathy, Helen had softened the blows she had dealt him. To a certain extent she had kept him right, but because the blows had not pained, they lacked a compelling power. Her intuition, stimulated by her belief in him, in his essential greatness, had been quick to detect every changing mood; in her womanly sympathy, her efforts to soothe and comfort had been unstinted.

In spite of all condemning appearances, these influences were having an unconscious effect for good upon Elijah, until the advent of Mrs. MacGregor. She nursed his sense of wrong, stimulated his belief in himself, fed his morbidly craving soul with honeyed food that fattened it for the hand of the slayer.

Yet Mrs. MacGregor had missed her mark. She had counted upon a possible sometime awakening of Elijah, but before the awakening she had intended to have him fully in her power. She had not reckoned at its full value the impatient greed of Elijah; she had not reckoned on the womanhood of Helen Lonsdale which, though struggling in a fog of sinister influences, never lost consciousness of its own identity.

When, on the morning of his declaration to Helen, Elijah left the office, it was as one stricken with a numbing wound. He was not conscious of its meaning, only of the sickening absence of pain which, coupled with the knowledge of the wound, filled him with an unknown terror. As the meaning of it all slowly dawned upon him, the stinging, biting pain played full upon every tingling nerve. He became filled with blind, ungovernable, impotent rage. He raged against himself, against Helen, against Mrs. MacGregor. He would have returned to the office at once; what darker crime he might have committed, only imagination can suggest, but return was impossible. When the thought came to him, he was far beyond Ysleta, surrounded by desert sands that dragged at his feet till physical exertion was no longer possible. Burning with thirst, weakened by hunger, he threw himself upon the hot sands and watched with unconscious eyes the fierce sun sink into the Pacific.

It was here that a wandering vaquero chanced upon him. The simple Mexican knew naught of the delirium born of a frenzied mind, but he knew the delirium of blood thirst that lack of water brings upon the desert wanderer. With this knowledge and belief, he carried Elijah to his hut and nursed him back to life. If the strange señor chose to call upon the names of men and women whom he knew not, that was the señor's privilege, and it was his duty as a host to patter softly with bare feet on the dirt floor, and to bind the hot forehead with herbs which the desert gave. It was his duty as a host to bind with thongs the raving señor to his raw-hide couch, lest he should once more go out into the desert before his strength had returned.

As consciousness began to return to Elijah, his sense of injury took another form. He had been for several days in the Mexican's hut and no one had called for him or inquired. After all he had done for others, they had left him, turned from him in heartless ingratitude, in this his hour of need. He raged against Helen especially, but his rage changed first to an intense longing, then to a determination to see her again.

Toward the evening of the fifth day, he prevailed upon the Mexican to drive him to Ysleta. At the Rio Vista, having gone to his room, he called a servant and sent him with a message to Helen. She was not to be found. At the office he learned that Helen had gone out to the works and would be absent for several days. He would have followed, but he dared not. Her last words, the last look that he remembered so clearly, these told him only too plainly that she would not be forced, that – he dared think no further. He must work on her sympathy through an appeal. He returned to his room at the hotel and found what he had overlooked before, a package of papers on his table. They had been sent over from the office. A slip of paper in Helen's writing, "Elijah Berl, Rio Vista." He tore the string from the bundle in feverish haste. His fingers trembled as he shuffled the letters one by one. Not one was in Helen's hand. Again and again he went over them, then he gave up in despair.

With infinite patience, the Almighty has taught us by precept and example, that our destinies are in our own hands; that the punishment for failure that comes to us, is self-inflicted, and not from him, when in blind despair, we thrust aside a redemption that is waiting to make us whole. The smitten rock that quenched the thirst of Israel, the parted sea that gave them a way to safety, the column of smoke that reached into the day, the pillar of fire that made the darkness light, these may be fables; but they speak with a voice that cannot be stilled, telling us that in ages past, as in the present, an eye that sleeps not, watches over us; that hope is for us if we will.

Among the discarded letters, was one from Winston. It told of the plucked fangs of Mellin, of Uncle Sid's restoration of the stolen money, of the meeting with Seymour. It ended, "Come back, old man, we want you."

Late as was the hour when Elijah at last turned from his unopened letters, he rang for a servant and ordered a carriage to take him to his ranch. He could not go to the dam; the thought of idly waiting at the hotel was unendurable. He wanted to see some one, he must see some one. He had deliberately put Amy from him; but she did not know this. The black heartlessness of his proposed action did not once occur to him. Before leaving the hotel he wrote an appeal to Helen. He told her where he was going and that he would wait her answer.

At the ranch, he found Amy as of old. Eager, questioning hope leaped to her eyes as they rested on his face; then the hope died out to the dumb, patient waiting; the dumb, patient suffering of an animal that endures without question, without resentment. Through the long days that followed, she did her best to draw him from himself, from the fires that were consuming him. It was in vain. In vain, when she found him seated with his eyes fastened on the dusty trail from Ysleta, she slipped her hand in his and nestled close to him, inviting confidences that were never given, tendering sympathy that was not accepted, assuring him of unswerving confidence that nothing and no one could destroy.

He let no opportunity pass to send other appeals to Helen, but these too were unanswered. One day a messenger came. Elijah did not wait, but rushed to meet him. The message was not from Helen. Instead, a telegram. Mechanically he signed the receipt which the messenger held out; then he opened the envelope. The message was in cipher, but he knew each symbol. The messenger looked at him inquiringly. Elijah shook his head, "No answer," and the messenger rode away.

It did not matter to Elijah that the message was over a week old; the message itself was sufficient. "Have failed to raise the money. I start for California tomorrow."

Elijah felt that his return to Ysleta was hopelessly barred. Mrs. MacGregor was there now, Seymour was there, Helen was there. Like sneaking jackals, they were ready to fall upon him, wounded to the death. They would not leave him in peace. They would not leave him in peace even with what was his own. Nothing was left him but vengeance; how could he compass it?

Like the white flash of a thunderbolt, the transaction with Mellin came to him. Its sinister condition – "within three months after the water shall have been turned into the main canal of the Las Graces" – danced before his eyes. The words were clear and minatory, but there was a hidden meaning that he could not catch, that was pointing the way of deliverance. He strained forward as if to listen more clearly. The swollen veins on his forehead throbbed and beat; then he sprang to his feet —

"As God lives, that water shall not be turned on!"

The sun had set and darkness was falling, but day and night were alike to Elijah now. He was at the gates of the canal at the mouth of the cañon. The roar of the Sangre de Cristo was gone, only a trickle of water slipped by blackened boulders and gurgled as it fell into tiny pools, then wimpled and slid out toward the desert. Up through the trail that led to the dam, darkened by dense evergreens to a deeper shadow, he rode wildly. In the shadow of a great rock, he looked down upon the still rising water, black with depth. He saw the great tubes let in at the base, the wheels by which the gates were controlled, the wide, rock-paved waste weir that, leading from the reservoir, gave into the cañon below. He noted the broken earth, the clinging trees that hung over the weir. His eyes, calculating, merciless, rested on the trees. A gleam of triumph came to them. If the wheels were broken, the gates could not be opened, and the water was even now trickling over the weir. In a day or two, the whole volume of the Sangre de Cristo would pour through it. Just a little powder behind the retaining wall, and the whole bank would fall and choke the weir. Just a few hours and, the weir choked, the gates unopened, the whole volume of the river would creep over the coping of the dam, pick out grain by grain the unprotected earth, till the dam weakened, the mighty mass of stored water would rush in devastating waves down through the cañon, and the canal would be as if it had never been. The dream of a life, the labor of years, these lay in the hollow of his hand.

Why should he pity others who were pitiless to him? What mattered it, if, like Samson of old, he should drag down the very pillars of the structure he had raised? What mattered it, if he too should perish in the ruins?

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

The party that had gathered to see the last stone of the great Sangre de Cristo dam swung into position was far larger than Winston had expected. Elijah was not among them. Winston had spared no effort to find Elijah and to deliver to him another message to the effect that he was once more a free man. Messengers had been sent to his ranch; but he had left home and Amy had not seen him for several days; she supposed him to be in Ysleta. Parties had scoured the mountain in the vicinity of the dam, but in vain. It was clear that Elijah was purposely in hiding and that the exercises at the dam must be carried on without him.

Ysleta was largely represented. Winston was at first surprised, then deeply grateful for the genuine interest which even the wildest boomers displayed in his work. As, one by one, in pairs or in groups, they took him cordially by the hand, congratulated him on the successful completion of a great piece of work, compared the lasting utility of his work with their own ephemeral and selfish efforts, a wave of self-reproach swept over him. These were the people whom, in season and out, he had condemned as greedy, selfish, unprincipled sharks. For the first time in his life, he began to realize the fact that, even in the worst of humanity, there is a soul of goodness, a soul that is only obscured, never extinguished. In deep contrition, he reviewed his attitude of mind toward Elijah. He saw him in a new light, the light of kindliness that was radiating from those whose hearts he had condemned as black with unscrupulous greed. He pictured Elijah, shunning his fellow men like a hunted animal, the warmth of his good intentions changed to the biting flame of bitter resentment against those who were to profit by his success, and who had turned from him at sight of the first shadow that had fallen upon him. He reproached himself for not having gone directly to Elijah on the first suspicion of defalcation, for not having pointed out to him his error, for not having pleaded with him to face the consequences of his wrong doing, to endeavor to set himself right. He contrasted his self-righteous conduct with that of Helen Lonsdale, her readiness to stand by Elijah, to assume her own share of blame for Elijah's mistaken actions. He had assumed that, because certain of Elijah's actions had been criminal, Elijah was a criminal by instinct, and he, a friend, an intimate business associate, had treated him as one, but made no effort at reclamation.

Winston's was not an emotional nature, but the circumstances in which he was placed, played upon his calmly balanced mind, until he saw his own self-righteous errors and condemned himself as sharply as he had condemned Elijah. He was recalled to himself by the proffered hand of one of the most successful and as he deemed him, one of the most heartless of Ysleta's boomers.

"Say, Ralph, old man, I want to do myself the honor of shaking hands with the real thing. This work," he swept his hand with a comprehensive gesture which included the dam, the canal, and the waiting hillsides, "makes us feel like thirty cents Mexican. It don't come with the real plunk from us, you know, but it's real just the same. Ysleta wasn't worth whooping for, but we whooped. We whooped for cash. Some of us got it; but what we got, others lost, and we knew it. But you fellows have helped us to make good. With this thing in working order," he again pointed to the dam, "Ysleta will make good in time."

"I know it," Winston's voice was regretful, "but the beginning, end and middle of this whole business, is a hunted man who dares not show his face, even to those whom he had every reason to believe were his friends."

The man looked sharply at Winston.

"You mean 'Lige Berl?"

"Yes, the best man of us all."

"You're right there. And say, Ralph, you just listen. We all know about this Pacific business. It was a mistake on 'Lige's part, that's all. He'll make good, if he gets a chance, and by God, we're going to stand by and see that he gets it."

Winston's grasp tightened on the hand he held.

"It's all straightened out now, if we only knew where he was."

The work at the dam called for Winston's attention. As he passed through a bowing, smiling group, he came face to face with Helen. She was laughing and chatting with some Ysleta acquaintances. She darted an eager, inquiring look at Winston as he came towards her. In obedience to an unvoiced bidding, she joined Winston as he passed by. Beyond the hearing of the group, her look changed to one of anxiety.

"Have you seen anything of Elijah?" she asked.

"Not a thing. Helen, I'm worried about Elijah. He has been home, but has gone again and I can't find him in the mountains. I have sent men everywhere."

There were tears in Helen's eyes. They did not fall; they only softened and intensified their depths.

"I hoped to see him here. If we could only get word to him about Seymour." After a moment's hesitation, she added: "I have had several strange letters from him, but no clue as to where they were sent from."

Winston's glance wandered to the group of Ysleta men.

"It just crushes me, Helen, to think that these men are actually truer to Elijah than I have been."

"No, don't blame yourself too much. I know more now than I did when you and Uncle Sid held me up that day in the office, and – Oh, I cannot talk about it, Ralph! It is all unspeakably awful."

Helen turned abruptly away and joined Uncle Sid at the foot of the great derrick which was to swing the last stone into place.

Winston glanced quickly at her, but she was talking eagerly with Uncle Sid, her somber mood apparently quite gone. He turned inquiringly to the foreman, who nodded his head in reply.

"Come, Helen; they are ready for us." He took Helen by the arm to steady her, and together they started out over the foot-way on the crest of the dam, Helen a little in advance of Winston.

"Don't look down," he continued, "it may make you dizzy."

"Dizzy!" she repeated derisively, "why I could walk a slack rope. It's great! I don't wonder that you are an engineer."