CHAPTER XXV

ON THE ROCKY ROAD TO RAGTOWN

FOR over two hours Joshua Cole and Shanty Madge drove their mules along the north shore of Stirrup Lake, then turned up through the unbroken sweep of sagebrush toward Spyglass Mountain. They saw several camps as they passed along, and it appeared that a colony of homesteaders had just come in from somewhere outside the country. Tents had been pitched and stock stood about and nibbled hay in the wagon beds.

The sage, though breast-high in places, broke easily before the passage of the mules, and the wagons crackled their way up the slope, breaking a trail which afterward was to become a road. Joshua drove to the _sienega_ on Mrs. Mundy’s claim. Here they climbed down, hurriedly attended to their stock, and went at the pitching of tents and the arrangement of various articles necessary to a temporary camp.

Evening was coming on, for at an early hour the sun sank beyond Saddle Mountain, and somber shadows were even now stealing over the placid lake. Elizabeth Mundy ceased her work and watched the reflection of the sun-bathed clouds on the surface of the water. The lake lost its bluish tinge and took on a giddy yellow, which quickly changed it to a lake of fire so dazzling as to hurt the eyes. Darker tones crept in--orange, cerise and orange, then orange splotched with crimson, then crimson for a minute, which brought forth cries of delight from the women. Gradually the crimson deepened, and once more the natural blue came back to blend with the crimson and lend to the waters a bold violet tone. Then strident purple, then blue again, then deep indigo, then velvet black.

Far to the south and west loomed lofty mountains, timber-clad to the line of perpetual snow, dazzling white above. A soft, fresh breeze blew from the lake and told stories in the branches of the fragrant junipers. Red-breasted linnets, songful until now, went twitteringly to sleep in the juniper tops, and the water gurgled a chanty song to the pool below the spring. Back of them Spyglass Mountain upreared itself, its summit gilded with the sun, and at its base great grotesque rocks stood grimly silent, sentinels there since the days when the earth was young.

A long sigh escaped the lips of Elizabeth Mundy as she turned from the blue-black lake. “It will be home,” she said, “when you’ve built a fire, Joshua.”

And as the flames leaped up and licked at the black kettle hung over them to boil, the drunken laughter of two coyotes floated down from some haunted fastness of Spyglass Mountain.

Later they sat on the ground and ate fried bacon and boiled potatoes as the cold black mountain night gathered round them. Away to the east the twinkling lights of Ragtown threw serpentine swords across the lake like the blade in the hand of the angel who stood before Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Here and there on the sagebrush slope between them and the water other campfires gleamed. Down there the little dabchicks clucked as they fed on tender water growths, and the mudhens scolded one another for greediness.

Then Joshua lighted his pipe, and Shanty Madge asked him about the young man with the resplendent green vest, who had leaned against the saloon in Ragtown and never removed his eyes from them throughout the altercation with Lee Sweet. So Joshua told her of his meeting with Slim Wolfgang and The Whimperer, and put it up to her to solve the strange riddle of the connection between the pair.

“But, Joshua,” the girl exclaimed, “you never were actually that tramp’s road-kid, were you?”

“Well,” he replied, “not in the strict sense of the term, perhaps. He tried to boss me at first, but I was physically a little too much for him. Still, it took a long time to shake him, and it has always been a mystery to me just why I couldn’t. He seemed to have an uncanny luck in trailing me up. I guess he would have been with me to-day if my telescope hadn’t tempted him. I’ll bet he had a glorious jag after he’d peddled it!”

“It’s the strangest thing on earth,” Madge mused, “that you should encounter these two here in Ragtown. And the fact that The Whimperer ran through this Wolfgang’s tent proves to me that there _is_ some bond between them. But I can’t fathom the mystery.”

They gave it up finally and began planning their future activities on their homesteads. They decided that next day Madge and her mother would make themselves comfortable in a semi-permanent camp, and Joshua would start out of the mountains for lumber. He would take one team and drive to Spur. A single team would be sufficient to haul the load to the foot of the mountains, and there Shanty Madge would meet him with the other team, and they would drive four-up to the summit.

Madge was doing most of the planning. Her mother sat on a camp stool lost in thought. Joshua, stretched on the ground, looked across the campfire at Madge and watched the play of the firelight on the girl’s bronze hair.

She too lay prone on the ground, her supple body relaxed, her hands locked behind her head, her eyes gazing up at the stars and the black sky.

Cole of Spyglass Mountain was dreaming dreams. From boyhood he had been an individualist, a loather of the commonplace in life. Here, then, was a situation that made distinct appeal to him, and here was a girl that appealed. All about was the mountain stillness, for, somehow, the lover of the outdoors does not estimate the sounds of nature in terms of noise. The breath of the sage was sweet. There came from the blackness that welled about the little circle the sound of the crunching molars of the mules as they ate their hay. Here indeed was the beginning of an adventure far from the commonplace, and a girl far from commonplace was the nucleus of it. What a girl was Shanty Madge, dethroned gypo queen--a girl who knew more about horses and mules and wagons, and the ways of rough, hard men than he did. Yet what a picture of feminine beauty she made as she lazed beside the campfire, all woman, all rounded curves of loveliness! And he--Joshua Cole--had sought for her and found her out in the West of his boyhood dreams--and she was here with him, with only a flickering blaze between them--and, in a measure, her happiness was in his hands.

And so with her picture in his heart he arose, said good-night softly, and trailed away through the blackness toward his own little tent.

He was away at dawn behind one of the teams of mules, his wagon rumbling musically through the weird silence of the infancy of another day. The shavetails topped the summit, wound their way down the mountain, around Hairpin Curve and Shirt-tail Bend, across Yucca Flat and Cactus Slope, and down to the yellow desert--to Wild Woman Springs and Box-R Ranch, to Bobcat Point, and on through the rocky pass to Spur. Two days later he was returning over the sandy waste, with a groaning load of lumber under him. And when he reached the foot of the mountains, late in the evening of the second day, he found Madge Mundy awaiting him with the helper span of mules.

He had not expected her that night. The plan had been for him to camp at the beginning of the grade whenever he reached it, and to wait there for the coming of the girl next day. But to save time and get an early morning start, Madge placidly informed him, she had decided to come that afternoon and camp with him that night.

She noted the color and the worried look in his face, and laughed without a blush.

“Chaperons mean nothing in my young life, Joshua,” she said. “I’ve been a railroader, associated with all sorts of men too many years to give room to any old-maid ideas like that. But I might have known you would be a prude. About all that you know of life you have learned from books. Isn’t that true? Now don’t stand there looking bashful. Throw the leather off ’em and feed and water ’em, while I dig greasewood roots for a fire. I’m hungry as a wolf.”

“Your--er--your mother--she approved?”

“About all that she had to remark on the subject was that you wouldn’t. But I told her I’d make you. Pioneers can’t afford to observe the stupid niceties of society at large; they have work to do. Let’s get busy, then. Night’s coming on.”

“I was only thinking of you,” Joshua defended.

“Don’t, then.”

Joshua, his head in a dizzy whirl over this unexpected development and the guilty delight it gave him, went at the unharnessing of his team. Shanty Madge, her hat off and her sleeves rolled above her elbows, took a mattock from his wagon and trudged away to the nearest greasewood bush. By the time that he had attended to the mules she returned with an armful of roots. She built a fire while he took the camp kit from the wagon and sorted out the grub.

And soon they were once more seated one on either side of a cheery campfire--but this time Joshua was alone with the girl of the frizzly bronze-gold hair and the Pocahontas coloring and the topaz eyes that had brought him West.

As the campers ate their ham and eggs coyotes yodeled off in the dimly outlined foothills. The camp was by a foothill spring, where a watering trough had been set up; and over it tall cottonwoods spread their leafy comfort. To the east, and slightly below them, the night wind rehearsed the never finished dramas of the wastelands in the daggers of the yucca palms. Above them towered the mountains, the old men of the earth, symbols of wisdom and understanding, forbidding and grim to those who love them not, friendly and tolerant to those who do. And over all lay that uncompromising hush that throttles the souls of men who cannot think, but which, to those who are masters of their minds, is like the touch of a mother’s hand at bedtime.

They were silent, these two who sat beside the tiny greasewood fire. They felt their insignificance and lack of power, and still were unafraid. The fire was not between them now, for the Adam had risen to offer the weary mules more water, and when he returned he sat beside the Eve. And then, somehow, his arm stole round her and he buried his lips in her bronze-gold hair.

“Shanty Madge,” he whispered, “I love you.”

“I know it,” said Madge. “But--but I didn’t ride down here for this. You--you shouldn’t have taken advantage, Joshua. No other man with your natural refinement would have taken this situation to broach such a subject. I might have known. It’s because you’re so--well, I guess innocent is the word--no, unsophisticated.”

“But this is the first time I’ve been alone with you,” he pleaded naïvely. “It was the night, and the mountains, and the desert. They--they made me say it. They told me that you and I were the only people in the world. What could I do?... Madge, you love me, don’t you?”

A long silence set in after his words. Unseen bullbats, sailing about in the air above them, swooped down on luckless insects and their wings went _bur-r-r-r_. A frog, coldly comfortable in the drip under the water trough, croaked his approbation of all things earthly. A mule, his stomach stuffed with hay, lay down with a thump, and heaved a sigh of satisfaction.

“Sometimes I think I do,” said Shanty Madge. “And then again I think I don’t. All women are like that, I guess. I--I-- Really, Joshua, you shouldn’t have--have told me that--to-night.”

“I know it,” he replied. “But I couldn’t help it, Madge. Do you think you’ll love me when you know me better? I’ve loved you since you were eleven years old. Do you think you will, Madge?”

“I--perhaps. I think so. I mean I don’t know. You must--you must take your arm away, Joshua. I’m going to take my blankets over there on the hillside and go to bed.”

Obediently he released her and stood erect.

“If you’d only forget your foolish astronomy, Joshua. I can’t think about--well, about what you just said--until you do. When I think of your spending two thousand dollars for that telescope, Joshua, why, I--I’m almost afraid you’re crazy! I can’t live in the mountains always. I’ve seen too much of life. I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you must make money, dear boy. If we were--well, now--married, we’d have to have money. And you can’t make it up there--that is, unless the land proves to be good, and things turn out all right, and you work your claim for all that’s in it. There isn’t a living on Spyglass Mountain, Joshua.”

“Why, I can make a living for us, Madge. I mean to work my claim, of course. But I can’t give up my astronomy.”

“It will take all of your time,”--her tones were positive. “And besides, I consider that land only a stepping stone to something better. I mean to develop it and then sell out to some one who hadn’t the nerve to pioneer as we intend to.”

“Does Jack Montgomery want to marry you?” he asked abruptly.

“Should you have asked that, Joshua? You’re _so_ unsophisticated!”

“Why not?”--his voice was boyishly belligerent.

“Well--he’s asked me to.”

“Do you love him?”

“I don’t like your tone, Joshua!”

“Do you?”

“No! That is, I don’t know. Sometimes I think I do. If he’d only--well, knock ’em in the collar a little harder. I can’t tolerate a drone. But he’s promised to go to work with his father’s company if I’ll--well, you understand, marry him.”

“You could never love him, Madge.”

“Perhaps not. But he can give me what I want.”

“Money, eh?”

“The things money will buy, at any rate. And above all, he’ll be somebody if he ever puts his mind to something. He has brains.”

“And I haven’t.”

“I didn’t intimate any such thing, Joshua Cole! You have more than he has, perhaps, but your mind has a different trend. But his brains are the brains that’ll count in this world’s struggle. You’re a--a-- Now, I don’t want to hurt you, but you’re a dreamer, Joshua.”

For a long time Joshua proved that he was a dreamer, for he gazed unseeingly into the dying coals and said not a word. But when he looked up his lips were straight, and in his eyes was that look of firm determination that had kept him true to his trust from boyhood, against all odds. Yet those grave gray eyes were tolerant and smiling as they looked at her.

“Yes, I’m a dreamer,” he admitted. “And I’m going to make a dreamer of you, too, Shanty Madge. Listen: Do you know this one, by John Boyle O’Reilly?

“I am tired of planning and toiling In the crowded haunts of men; Heart-weary of building and spoiling, And spoiling and building again. And I long for the dear old river Where I dreamed my life away; For a dreamer lives forever, And a toiler dies in a day.

* * * * *

“I can find no pride, but pity, For the burdens the rich endure; There is nothing sweet in the city But the patient lives of the poor. Oh, the little hands too skillful, And the child mind choked with weeds; And the daughter’s heart grown willful, And the father’s heart that bleeds.

“No, no, from the street’s rude bustle, From the trophies of mart and stage, I would fly to the woods’ low rustle, And the meadows’ kindly page. Let me dream, as of old, by the river, And be loved for the dream alway; For a dreamer lives forever, And the toiler dies in a day.”

The bronze eyelashes hid the eyes of Shanty Madge as Joshua’s voice ceased. She looked up presently, to smile back at him despite herself.

“I know that,” she told him, “and I like it. I--I fight it--sometimes.”

Joshua turned abruptly to the wagon.

“Which room have you picked for yourself?” he asked. “Point it out and I’ll carry your bedding there.”

Then suddenly, from close at hand, came the tread of many hoofs on the rocky road to Ragtown.