The Settler

If roughly expressed, their sympathy was at least genuine; it eased the parting so that she was able to lean out and give them a last smile as the train rolled by the water-tank with long, easy clickings, carrying her away beyond their tough pale. Good enough as a farewell, it was not, however, a success as a smile, and the woe behind its wanness formed the subject of an indignant caucus that convened as soon as Jenny left the platform.

"I can't figure out jes' what Carter means," the storekeeper fretfully exclaimed. "Granted that she throwed him that onct – the charivari? – that business at the revival? If it had been my wife, I'd been smelling round for – "

"Blood!" the agent interjected; and though he had intended "trouble," the store-keeper accepted the amendment.

"What's the man looking for?" the doctor roared. "She has beauty, amiability, intelligence, almost every quality that a man can desire in a wife, yet he goes off in a pout because she falls short of the angels. He's a damned fool. He ought to be – "

"Aisy, aisy wid ye." Flynn stemmed the tide of wrath. "'Tis no throuble at all to condimn whin a purty girl's at t'other ind of the argymint. She's sweet, an' I'll break the face av the man as says she isn't good. But – give the man toime. Let be till we know that he's heard av the rhuctions. Thin, if he does nothing – "

"Well," the doctor interrupted, "he'll hear, all right – from me, this very night."

"Me, too," the store-keeper added.

"An' don't forget to give him partickler h – l!" the agent called after as they strolled away.

Nor did they. Dipping his pen in scorn, the doctor opened his epistle with a timely question as to the exact number and kinds of fool that Carter considered himself, and finished with a spirit that transcended even Glaves's difficult requirements. Equally thorough in his beginnings, a rush of business prevented the store-keeper from making an end that evening; but his default had its advantages in that he was thus enabled to deliver the remainder, viva voce, to Carter himself, when he stepped off the train next morning. Served hot, with good frontier adjectives sizzling among the nouns and articles, his opinion gained the admiring attention of Hooper, the agent, who stood ready to offer advice and assistance.

For his part, Carter listened quietly until the storekeeper paused for breath. Then he turned to the agent. "If you'd like five minutes with my character and attainments, don't be bashful! I've got it coming. After that please oblige with a little information on this charivari? I only heard yesterday morning of that revival through Bender's coming into camp."

As he listened, his natural sternness deepened to dark austerity, then fluxed in sad pity as the store-keeper told of Helen's departure. Murmuring "Poor thing! – poor little thing!" he asked for her address.

His face fell when the store-keeper answered: "You'll have to go to Glaves for that. The doc' might have it, but him an' Miss Jenny went north this morning to settle up her father's affairs." Noting Carter's disappointment, he kindly added: "You kin drive my sorrels. They're a third faster than the livery teams. On'y, remember they're fresh off the grass."

"I'll try not to misuse them," Carter answered, brightening, a remark that plentifully illustrates his impatient feeling.

Agent and store-keeper helped him hitch; and as he headed the sorrels out on the Silver Creek trail – the trail that for him, as for Helen, was one long heartache – the agent drew a deduction from his sombre sternness.

"I heard that MacCloud an' Cummings were back. Je-hosh-a-phat! There'll be something doing if they cross his track."

Stepping out of his stable, after feeding the noon oats next day, Glaves "lifted up his eyes," in biblical phrase, and saw Carter "a long way off." A hot morning at the hay, and the loss of two sections of his mower-sickle by impact with a willow snag, did not tend to alleviate his natural crustiness. As he recognized the tall figure behind the sorrels, the hoar of his fifty winters seemed to settle in the lines of his weathered visage; his eye took the steely sparkle of river ice; his nod, when Carter reined in opposite, was curt as his answer.

"Your wife's address? Yes, I know it."

Forewarned by the store-keeper of the old man's bitterness, Carter was not surprised. "Meaning that you won't give it to me?"

"Not till I know as she wants you to have it."

Tone and manner were superlatively irritating, but the man had taken blood on his soul in Helen's defence, and Carter spoke quietly. "Don't you allow that she's a right to decide for herself?"

"Now, ain't that exac'ly what I said?"

It was not, but contradiction would merely inflame his obstinacy. At a loss how to proceed, Carter switched the heads, one by one, from a patch of tall brown pig-weeds, using his left hand, for the right was roughly tied up in his handkerchief. On his part Glaves looked steadily past him.

It was a beautiful day – sensuous, soft, one of the golden days when warm winds flirt among rustling grasses breathing the incense of smiling flowers. Heat hung in quivering waves along the horizon like an emanation from the hot, prolific earth over whose bosom birds, bumblebees, the little beasts of the prairies, came and went on errands of love and business with songs and twitterings. And there, in the midst of this joy of life, the grim old man bent frowning brows on Carter, who was lost in bitter meditation.

He was laboring under an unhappy sense of error, for his contumacy, determined absence, was not altogether a product of hurt pride. As he himself had dissolved their relations, it was Helen's privilege to renew them, and he had waited, yearning for her word. But now that he was dragged under the harrows of remorse, in an agony of pity for her, he stood before Glaves as in the presence of Nemesis, convicted of a huge mistake.

The initiative, after all, had lain with him. If he had owned to his fault, had apologized for his summary desertion, she could have been trusted to do the rest. Now he doubted that he was too late, for it was but reasonable to suppose that the trustee's determined opposition had origin with her. He squared his big shoulders to this burden of his own packing.

"Will you forward a letter?"

Frowning, Glaves answered without looking at him, "You kin leave your address."'

"But you will forward it?"

"If she wants it."

Carter flushed, but checked a sharp answer. "You ain't extending too much grace to a sinner."

"Any less than you extended her? What d' you expect of me that saw her name dragged in the mud, herself insulted – that took a life to save her body from violence? G – d d – you!" His pent-up feelings exploded, and for three minutes thereafter hot speech bubbled like vitriol through his clinched teeth in scathing denunciation of Carter's remissness.

"Part of what you say being true, we'll pass the rest," the latter said, when the trustee had drained his phials of wrath. "Now – without conceding your right to withhold her address – will you forward some money?"

Glaves stared. He had expected a blow, a violent quarrel, at least; nay, had lusted for it. But he was too much of a man himself to mistake a just imperturbability for fear, while the mention of money checked his anger by switching his ideas. Jealous for her honor, he looked his suspicion. "Whose money?" But if accent and tone declared against the acceptance of favors, he took the proffered greenbacks after Carter explained that they covered her share of the cattle he and Morrill had owned in common – took them, that is, with a proviso.

"Let me see," he mused, counting five of ten bills of one-hundred-dollar denomination. "You'd forty head of stock when Morrill died. Five hundred covers her share. Take these back." And to further argument he sternly answered, "I don't allow that she's looking for any presents from you."

"No, I don't allow that she is."

Sadness of look and tone caused Glaves to glance up quickly, but he did not relax in his grimness up to the moment that, having left his address, Carter drove away. Then a shade of doubt crept into his steel eyes. "If it had been myself – " he muttered; then as Helen's parting smile recurred in memory, he added: "No, damn him! Let him suffer!" But this was not the end. Pausing in his doorway as he went in to dinner, he saw the buckboard, small as a fly, crawl over a distant knoll, and by some association of ideas remembered Carter's hand and wondered why it was bandaged. And when he learned from Poole and Danvers, who called round for their mail that evening, his first small doubt was raised almost to the dimension of regret.

Since the charivari, Glaves's opinion of the remittance-man – as a fighting animal, at least – had risen above zero, and he lent first an indulgent, then a rapt ear to the boys' story. As he himself had prophesied, the piracy of the five-acre swamp brought Shinn out from his hiding, but the latter's evil fate arranged matters so that as he descended upon the remittance buccaneers from one end of the swamp, Carter appeared on the Lone Tree trail which cat-a-cornered the other. The result bubbled forth from the mouth of first one boy, then the other, in eager interruptions.

"Shade of my granny!" Danvers swore. "You never saw such a fight!"

"No preliminaries," Poole declared. "Carter just leaped from his buggy and went for him like a cat after a mouse."

"And little good it did him. He might have been a gopher in the paws of a grizzly."

"Lay like a dead man for a long half-hour – "

"And looked like a snake that had mixed with a streak of lightning."

"Blind, battered, bruised, we carried him home on his shield – that is, on our hay-rake – "

"And that poor squalid wife of his looked rather disgusted when she found that he wasn't dead."

While they thus poured the tale of Shinn's discomfiture into Glaves's thirsty ears, Carter rattled steadily on towards Lone Tree. Passing Flynn's, he had been tempted to put in, but remembered that the Irishman would be out at the hay, and so ran on and by the one person who could have furnished an approximation of Helen's address. For she had merely promised to write Jenny as soon as she was settled, as he had learned when he met the doctor, back-trailing alone, early that morning.

"But you'll surely find her at one of the hotels!" the agent called to him, on the platform of the freight-train that carried him away at midnight.

But Helen had gone straight to the trustee's sister. And having wasted two days scanning hotel registers, wandering the streets, he concluded that perhaps she had changed her mind and gone straight through to her friends back East. Charging his friends and financial backers to keep on with the search, however, he returned to his labors in that unenviable condition of mind which romanticist writers describe as "broken-hearted."

In a city of twenty thousand it ought not to be so very difficult to locate a young lady whose style and beauty drew the eyes of the street. But if the search failed, the cause inhered in other reasons than lack of diligence – in a reason that largely accounted for Glaves's reluctance to give her address. Sick at heart, hopeless for the future, she had sunk her surname with the bitter past; resumed her maiden name while keeping the married title. Even with Glaves's sister, a big, good-natured woman, she passed as a widow.

XXV

THE SUNKEN GRADE