CHAPTER XIII

THANKSGIVING

“Well, if I’m not going to school this winter I might as well be busy.” Dawn was pecking at the typewriter, copying botanical notes. Her school books were spread on the long bare table around her; a fire was burning in the fireplace. Frost had already touched the aspens, turning them into little silver trees with golden leaves. The mountain side was a glory of yellow and copper.

Hal Benty sat on the swing seat and ate piñons contentedly. “Gee, I’m glad we live up here, Dawn. Folks down in town are havin’ an awful time. My aunt’s husband is a butcher and now that meat’s so cheap he says you can’t give it away. Nobody will buy it. They’re awful poor.”

“Did your ma’s summer boarders all pay up?” Dawn questioned sympathetically.

Hal shook his head gloomily. “Some of ’em had to borrow money from her to get back to town. She figgered it would be cheaper to let ’em go than to keep ’em and feed ’em. So they went. Never have heard from them two boys that was the cause of the fire creepin’ up on me.”

“Oh, you will, I think,” Dawn consoled. “They were good kids. They’re just broke. When they get some money they’ll remember your mother. How about the Perrys?”

“Oh, yes, they settled up nearly everything before they left. Perry sent Ma a check for the last week’s balance, the eggs and canned goods, after they got back. Say, that reminds me. Do you ever hear from Jack Perry?” Hal put his question slyly, he thought. In fact he had been leading up to it all afternoon. He had arrived at the stage where he got red in the face and grinned foolishly at the least provocation in Dawn’s presence.

Dawn did not answer. Hal went on, “That reminds me, Dawn, here’s a letter from Kansas City, and it says J. Perry on the back. It came this morning. I brought it up to you.”

“So I see,” Dawn replied calmly. “Well, why didn’t you give it to me then?” She reached out a hand for the letter.

What was in it? She laid it down on the table, looking at the unformed scrawly boy handwriting. Somehow she didn’t want to read a letter from Jack now. She picked it up and held it before the fire, ready to toss it in; then laid it slowly down again, between the leaves of her study book. If she opened it Hal would want to know what was in it.

Damon had gone over to the Amarillo Ridge to look at the burned-over area for his final report. Dawn would not go. She could not bear to look at it now. It was but two weeks until Thanksgiving, when Garen would come. When Dad had come home from town, on the trip after the cloudburst, he had been downcast. His sample of ore, treasured for so many years, had been assayed, and showed up wonderfully well. The silver deposit would run three hundred and fifty ounces to the ton easily. But he could get no one interested in a silver mine. Why, the state was flat, suffering under the worst depression it had ever known! There had never been such hard times. Even mining men handed the sample back to him regretfully. “Nothing doing, O’Neill, I’m afraid.”

As he sat in the dusty red plush seat of the train on his way back home Damon told himself that he was an impractical fool, not fitted for the world. He was tired, discouraged. Just because he had wanted so much to send Dawn to school this winter, in spite of the bank failure, he had thought he would be able to wrest money from his claim. Even yet it was hard to give up. Damon was full of visions and tenacious. Dawn had done her part; she’d found the witness tree. Why couldn’t he do his?

He brooded all the way up the grade. Last winter he’d had an offer to be forester for a big private lumber company in California. He knew how to grow trees; a good farmer he was. They offered him a fine salary. But he had just laughed. He and Dawn had money in the bank then; why, they wouldn’t think of leaving the mountain and the Service. Then last spring there had been another offer from an Oregon concern—wood pulp. To superintend the cutting on a million acres! Perhaps he had been a fool not to accept such offers. They would probably never come again. Great forest tracts were, after all, getting scarce.

Dawn was nearing seventeen; she was so well grown. She didn’t want schooling so much for her self, but Damon wanted it passionately for her. She had never known anything but the mountain, but he, after all, could never forget the ambitions of his youth. Dawn should have a taste of life _beyond_ the mountains; then she would return to them with even greater affection. It never occurred to him that Dawn might ever be wooed away from the life she loved. He knew better than that.

He had stepped out of Benty’s old mountain rig on to the stoop of the aspen-log cabin, feeling dirty and silly in his town clothes. But Dawn’s arms about his neck had restored him. They sat for hours before the fire, and Dawn listened sympathetically, the shining pebble in her palm, turning it this way and that in the firelight.

“Don’t mind, Dad. We’ll work the claim ourselves if no one wants it!” She laughed with delight at the idea. “Can’t you see me in overalls, my face dirty, a miner’s candle on my forehead? No, Dad, when this bank failure has cleared up we’ll be able to sell the mine all right, or get the cash to operate it maybe—on a small scale.”

“But who knows when that will be, child? It might be five years. School can’t wait forever.”

“Yes, it can, Dad; as far as I’m concerned it can wait a long time,” Dawn asserted stoutly. But in the days that followed this talk, she turned with more than her old interest and fervor to her books. Garen Shepherd sent her a box of his own favorite books and one or two new ones for which he’d paid quite a penny. Dawn had finished a classified list of the trees of their mountain. She had gathered rare data on seventy-five birds. What she needed was a good camera. Her own had been ruined last summer when she had attempted to swim the lake with the camera held aloft in her left hand. That was all right, but when she had tried to snap a picture of a kingfisher, treading water meanwhile, she had got a ducking and so had the camera. The camera had never recovered.

“Your notes are excellent,” Garen wrote her, “and the snaps are good, the illustrations extraordinary. Did you really draw them yourself? I showed them all to Mrs. Stearn—you remember, the wife of my chief, who entertained us—and she was immensely interested.”

Dawn was enchanted. Garen’s interest stimulated her, pushed her forward. She had gathered her material from love of it, but had made no attempt at orderly and complete data. Accurate classification she had insisted on. Damon had used much of Dawn’s findings in his reports and had secretly hoped that in some way the Forest Service would sponsor the publication of a book on Rocky Mountain flowers when Dawn had completed her collection. It was almost ready now. She had but to mount the specimens gathered in the summer and drying now between sheets of blotting-paper.

He did not himself realize how much she knew about birds until one evening after the cloudburst, when Garen had challenged the statement of how early the golden eagle nested. With the first week of February, at over eight thousand feet altitude, too, she had _seen_ eggs, Dawn told them. She knew far more about the feathered inhabitants of the forest than the ranger did.

Garen was amazed and filled with admiration. “What a contribution to the Biological Survey all this personal observation would be!” he exclaimed. “Why, I know their bird expert is dying for just such data as you can roll off your tongue, the actual observation of an eyewitness of the habits of the birds in all the various zones in this state.”

Dawn flushed with resentment. “I wouldn’t tell him a word,” she fired, “if he begged me on his knees. Not if he’s one of the Biological Survey gang.”

And nothing he could say would change her. She’d keep her facts to herself and thank Mr. Garen Shepherd to mind his own affairs. “Little spitfire,” he grinned. A wild cat herself. Nevertheless Garen gave the idea that had come to him a good deal of thought.

And Dawn gave Garen a good deal of thought. She wanted him to be proud of her. Ever since the visit to the dam and the glimpse of another world, she had thought seriously of Garen. That nice lady had liked him; he was very smart. He knew figures. She had acquired a vast respect for figures. Everything he did had to be worked out by arithmetic, she suspected. But she knew more about the mountain than he did. Ah, that was something! Well, she’d just show him how much she did know. So from six to ten every long evening since the great rain, she had burned the old student-lamp while Dad dozed before the fire, read a bit, or worked at his desk. Painstakingly Dawn wrote out all that was stored back of her level brows and in her loving heart. Enthusiasm for her task possessed her; she could remember all sorts of things that she’d seen and known ever since she could remember at all on the Cascada.

She could see that Damon had set his heart on doing something with the Silverstake claim. She could see that he brooded. Well, perhaps she could sell it for him. She knew there must be money somewhere else than in this state. A silver mine was a silver mine. One day she wrote a letter. Hal Benty took it down for her to the weekly mail that left from the village at the foot of the valley. Damon was in truth having a bad attack of depression and resentment over the loss of his money, but he would not speak of it to Dawn. He did not need to; she knew him too well. Damon could not part with the slow savings of years without a pang, or some effort to recover or replace the loss.

But when the opportunity came and father and daughter sat in the big room of the aspen-log cabin, opposite Gershwin, on a Monday before Thanksgiving, they were silent. Neither reached out to grasp the dazzling chance. Gershwin was patient. He thought he understood them.

“I don’t think you will do better than that, Mr. O’Neill,” he said with an air of openness and candor. “You understand that this particular proposition will require capital. It will have to be developed on a big scale.” Developed? Dawn shuddered. Gershwin went on unheeding. “Your former claim, and the new claim you’ve made, cover the only direct outcroppings of ore.

“I had the ground gone over last summer by expert mining engineers. The mountain is full of faulted veins, and the risk of locating the mother vein would be too much of a venture. You might sink a million and not strike ore. There’s enough exposed on your claims, however, to justify following the vein along, although it will take capital to cover the initial investment: shafts, tracks, engines, and so on.”

He waited again for three, five minutes. “Well, what do you say? I’ll make you an offer—” he spoke slowly, letting out each word impressively and as though testing its effect. “I’ll make you an offer—of—” He named a sum far beyond their wildest dreams, twenty-five thousand dollars, fifteen thousand down and ten more in the next six months. Damon almost put his head in his hands. The agony of indecision was terrible. Dawn did not speak. She was waiting to hear what her father would say.

Damon got up and paced the floor. School, travel, comfort, security, luxuries. Finally he looked at Dawn. “What do you think, daughter?”

She shook her head. “We won’t sell,” she said simply. Gershwin looked at her in astonishment. His wolfish intelligence was off guard. Sheer surprise overtook him, anger. They wouldn’t sell? Surely that wasn’t final? They’d live to regret it—that he could prophesy. It would take this country twelve years to recover from the financial blow it had suffered this summer. It would take it fifteen or twenty to begin to recover from the overgrazed condition of its ranges.

Here was a chance for them to bring in some outside capital. It would help develop the state—develop it. At that word Dawn’s eyebrows pricked. Her lips set in a stubborn line. No, they would hold on to their claims just the same. Fifteen or twenty years to recover. She looked at Damon; Damon looked at her. Before them a vision of the fire-swept heights above Snow Lake materialized; in another five years the barren slopes beyond would have grown into golden glades of aspen and cool stretches of blue spruce. Others might take up the work, some one else labor in the vineyard. Some one else? On this part of the forest? Never. Never so long as Dawn and Damon lived. She caught her lip between her teeth; stinging tears came.

Suppose Damon should decide to sell and to send her away? Sometimes he got stubborn and held to a notion, and then she knew that after all he would have his way. But Damon was thinking too.

“Why are you so greedy?” Dawn cried to Gershwin. “Didn’t this summer teach you a lesson? Must every one begin again right away? Can’t you wait to start in wrecking the forest? I’d rather live right here the rest of my life than anywhere. I don’t want to hear engines snorting, whistles screeching, under the Three Sister Peaks. I don’t want to see one tree cut on the most perfect spot on the mountain. If the fire spared it that’s the least that we can do.”

“I thought last summer that you were a very sensible young woman.” Gershwin glared, rolling his big cigar betweeen his lips. “But now you are behaving foolishly.

“Well, O’Neill, if you change your mind in the next ten days let me know. The offer won’t be open indefinitely.” Gershwin got into the mountain wagon, which sagged perilously from his great girth, and it rolled down the hill, forded the Cascada, and disappeared through the trees.

Dawn heaved a great sigh. Another peril had passed them by. “Dad,” she said, pushing Damon into a chair and piling on to his lap like a young colt trying to dispose of its legs, “Dad, it’s rather fun just having a silver mine for a hobby, isn’t it?”

Damon could not speak. After all these years, what had he done, sentimental visionary that he was! But the spirit of the mountain that had brooded above the peaks in the shape of the soaring golden eagle still flowed about the two in the cabin on the Cascada.

“Order is Heaven’s first law,” he said at last. “Let us see how we have followed it on earth. Do you know that we had more range this summer, my girl, than for seven years past?”

The first snow of the season had fallen on the mountain two nights before Thanksgiving. The thermometer stood at zero at noon. Yet it did not seem cold, for there was no wind. By night the thermometer had dropped to ten below, and on the deep silence of the dark Dawn could hear once more the wolf song, the cry of the hungry wild under the moon. She bolted the door securely, having kissed Piñon on his cool velvet nose and petted Little Sorrel. “I’d let you sleep indoors, darling, but Daddy wouldn’t like it,” she murmured into each pricked ear.

Back in the cabin she pored over the work spread out under the student-lamp. She must get it finished before Garen came up tomorrow. It was midnight before the last slip was pasted into place, and Dawn’s eyes were a deep violet with unaccustomed fatigue. “Come, my girl,” Damon said at length, “you mustn’t keep at that any longer.” But the task was done. The beautiful book was set on the shelf and Dawn tumbled into bed. Tomorrow would be a great day. Garen Shepherd reached the cabin on the Cascada about three o’clock. He brought with him many good things that did not suggest hard times. Cigars of the finest for Damon, the red wine he had promised, candy for Dawn, and dainties she’d never eaten in her life. Last of all he pulled a letter from his pocket. It was from Mrs. Stearn, their hostess of last summer; an invitation for Dawn to visit the Stearns in Washington that winter. Couldn’t she leave New Mexico after Christmas and stay in Washington as Mrs. Stearn’s guest throughout the winter? They would be in New York a while.

“Will you go?” Garen asked, his face beaming.

“Must I, Daddy? Oh, I scarcely know, Garen. But what a wonderful sound it has.”

“Mrs. Stearn also invites you to come down to the dam next June and be her guest at the official opening. And”—here Garen paused impressively—“I am allowed to inform you that you will be officially asked to inaugurate the ceremony, baptize the dam. You’ll do it, won’t you?” Garen seized her hands boyishly.

“Do it?” Her eyes were solemn and reverent as she raised them to his. “Why, I think it’s perfectly wonderful, Garen! Of course I will.” He was radiant. Garen had long cherished a vision of Dawn dressed in white, standing on the summit of the dam above the blue water, drawing the cord that would let the water through the dam—the symbolical figure of the mountains.

“You know,” he said, “I’ve always told you that you were the guardian of the water. Well, I told the chief too all about you, and he suggested you for the baptism and said it would typify the union of the mountain and desert. Sort of poetic thing, you know? The wedding of the mountain and the plain—”

“Is weddin’s bein’ talked of?” Hinray D’Orsay interrupted. Hinray came in through the kitchen door and dumped his bulging sack on the hearth. Garen shrugged hopelessly.

“I have something else still to tell you, Dawn,” he said later, sitting down to talk seriously, “some grand news. Your flower and bird material can be made into a book; I’ve talked with some publishers who will bring it out. What do you think? Could you work on it this winter, get enough in shape to show them by spring?”

She got the leather binder from the shelf, its sides bulging with the mounted cards and the typewritten sheets, and laid it in his lap. A white envelope from Kansas City fell to the floor unnoticed. Garen opened the book with delight. It was wonderful. She had done this in two months! He was astounded with the book’s skill and beauty. Could he take it with him? Would she trust him?

She would. “Providing—” They both burst into laughter at memory of Dawn’s animosities. Then he must hear all about Gershwin. But the tale was soon told. Oh, yes, Garen said, fellows like that were already trying to buy up the dam reclamation facilities. Today there was no time for anything but themselves, and this vast, silent, frozen world. Twilight fell too early now, but in the morning they would snowshoe across the divide to the Silverstake pine.

The Thanksgiving dinner would be late in the afternoon, and Damon would watch the turkey roasting; Hinray would be on hand as assistant cook too. They would have wild turkey, stuffed with piñons, red wine from Pecos grapes, wild berry jelly, rice and canned vegetables. Mrs. Benty would send them mince pies, and Dawn would make a plum pudding, which she would deck with holly, and around which she would burn the brandy Dad had been saving since last year. The McGuires had promised them a large pumpkin from their fields and a sack of beans, and Hal James had sent them a kid and two young pigs, scarcely larger than shoats, for their winter larder. They were squealing and rooting now in a new corral out back on the hillside.

Hinray had brought in for his contribution some wild honey, found in the mountains, and promised them a haunch of venison too. That would be good, for Dawn was tired of rabbit stew. They had had a lean cupboard all fall. Provisions were hard to get up here, and prices in town had gone up. Thinking of the good food they would have soon, Dawn did not mind living on beans and cornbread, with an occasional chicken. They hadn’t had butter in three weeks, and she’d used the last of the lard in the biscuits and beans last night.

The bird must be stuffed tonight; so Damon tied on an apron and set himself to the task of plucking out pinfeathers while Dawn and Garen cracked piñon nuts for the stuffing and jokes for the sauce.

Fresh snow fell during the night, and when they left the cabin stoop the next morning the little snowshoe cottontail flopped before them, leaving its unguarded spoor clear as day. “It knows that it has nothing to be afraid of,” said Dawn, “with that turkey and a haunch of venison inside.”

It was no easy hike that Dawn took Garen on. He was fairly winded when they reached the top of the hills above McGuire’s valley. Swiftly they shot down the slopes, along the ridge from which Dawn had watched the fire in the early fall. They reached the shore of Snow Lake, frozen now, and climbed to a seat on a boulder.

“Do you know where we are?” Dawn asked. Would he ever forget?

It was the stone on which he had sat when he watched Dawn swim Piñon across the lake so long ago last summer. The snow covered the scarred bank now, but the dead trees stood exquisitely etched against the drifts. Yet the world was glistening and white, lovely as a bride. Here they had sat in the summer, and here Garen had carried Dawn when he pulled her from the water on the night of the fire. They sat for a while, resting, then made for the top of the ridge. The sun would be going down early.

Indeed, it was already dropping in a fiery disk below the western mountain. Hand in hand Garen and Dawn stood on the top of the ridge, bathed in glowing color, that waxed and waned and reappeared again on the slopes of the Coronado Peaks. As the rich afterglow crept up their granite flanks the two snowshoers dug their staffs into the snow and sped along the ridge, down the slopes, and into the deepening twilight of the Canyon of the Cascada.