The Girl at the Halfway House, Emerson Hough [best summer books .TXT] 📗

that the world is a very small one. I have no recollection of meeting you. But, Captain Franklin, had we ever really met, and if you really cared to bring up some pleasant thought about the meeting, you surely would never recall the fact that you met me upon that day!"

Franklin felt his heart stop. He looked aside, his face paling as the even tones went on:

"That was the day of all my life the saddest, the most terrible. I have been trying ever since then to forget it. I dare not think of it. It was the day when—when my life ended—when I lost everything, everything on earth I had."

Franklin turned in mute protest, but she continued:

"Because of that day," said she bitterly, "to which you referred as though it were a curious or pleasant thought, since you say you were there at that time—because of that very day I was left adrift in the world, every hope and every comfort gone. Because of Louisburg—why, this—Ellisville! This is the result of that day! And you refer to it with eagerness."

Poor Franklin groaned at this, but thought of no right words to say until ten hours afterward, which is mostly the human way. "I know—I could have known," he blundered—"I should not be so rude as to suppose that—ah, it was only you that I remembered! The war is past and gone, The world, as you say, is very small. It was only that I was glad—"

"Ah, sir," said Mary Ellen, and her voice now held a plaintiveness which was the stronger from the droop of the tenderly curving lips—"ah, sir, but you must remember! To lose your relatives, even in a war for right and principle—and the South was right!" (this with a flash of the eye late pensive)—"that is hard enough. But for me it was not one thing or another; it was the sum of a thousand misfortunes. I wonder that I am alive. It seems to me as though I had been in a dream for a long, long time. It is no wonder that those of us left alive went away, anywhere, as far as we could, that we gave up our country—that we came even here!" She waved a hand at the brown monotony visible through the window.

"You blame me as though it were personal!" broke in Franklin; but she ignored him.

"We, our family," she went on, "had lived there for a dozen generations. You say the world is small. It is indeed too small for a family again to take root which has been torn up as ours has been. My father, my mother, my two brothers, nearly every relative I had, killed in the war or by the war—our home destroyed—our property taken by first one army and then the other—you should not wonder if I am bitter! It was the field of Louisburg which cost me everything. I lost all—all—on that day which you wish me to remember. You wish me to remember that you saw me then, that I perhaps saw you. Why, sir, if you wished me to hate you, you could do no better—and I do not wish to hate any one. I wish to have as many friends as we may, here in this new country; but for remembering—why, I can remember nothing else, day or night, but Louisburg!"

"You stood so," said Franklin, doggedly and fatuously, "just as you did last night. You were leaning on the arm of your mother—"

Mary Ellen's eyes dilated. "It was not my mother," said she.

"A friend?" said Franklin, feelingly as he might.

"The mother of a friend," said Mary Ellen, straightening up and speaking with effort. And all the meaning of her words struck Franklin fully as though a dart had sunk home in his bosom.

"We were seeking for my friend, her son," said Mary Ellen. "I—Captain Franklin, I know of no reason why we should speak of such things at all, but it was my—I was to have been married to the man for whom we were seeking, and whom we found! That is what Louisburg means to me. It means this frontier town, a new, rude life for us. It means meeting you all here—as we are glad and proud to do, sir—but first of all it means—that!"

Franklin bowed his head between his hands and half groaned over the pain which he had cost. Then slowly and crushingly his own hurt came home to him. Every fibre of his being, which had been exultingly crying out in triumph at the finding of this missing friend—every fibre so keenly strung—now snapped and sprang back at rag ends. In his brain he could feel the parting one by one of the strings which but now sang in unison. Discord, darkness, dismay, sat on all the world.

The leisurely foot of Buford sounded on the stair, and he knocked gaily on the door jam as he entered.

"Well, niece," said he, "Mrs. Buford thinks we ought to be starting back for home right soon now."

Mary Ellen rose and bowed to Franklin as she passed to leave the room; but perhaps neither she nor Franklin was fully conscious of the leave-taking. Buford saw nothing out of the way, but turned and held out his hand. "By the way, Captain Franklin," said he, "I'm mighty glad to meet you, sir—mighty glad. We shall want you to come down and see us often. It isn't very far—only about twenty-five miles south. They call our place the Halfway Ranch, and it's not a bad name, for it's only about halfway as good a place as you and I have always been used to; but it's ours, and you will be welcome there. We'll be up here sometimes, and you must come down. We shall depend on seeing you now and then."

"I trust we shall be friends," mumbled Franklin.

"Friends?" said Butord cheerily, the smiling wrinkles of his own thin face signifying his sincerity; "why, man, here is a place where one needs friends, and where he can have friends. There is time enough and room enough, and—well, you'll come, won't you?" And Franklin, dazed and missing all the light which had recently made glad the earth, was vaguely conscious that he had promised to visit the home of the girl who had certainly given him no invitation to come further into her life, but for whose word of welcome he knew that he should always long.

BOOK III THE DAY OF THE CATTLE CHAPTER XVII ELLISVILLE THE RED

Gourdlike, Ellisville grew up in a night. It was not, and lo! it was. Many smokes arose, not moving from crest to crest of the hills as in the past, when savage bands of men signalled the one to the other, but rising steadily, in combined volume, a beacon of civilization set far out in the plains, assuring, beckoning. Silently, steadily, the people came to this rallying place, dropping in from every corner of the stars. The long street spun out still longer its string of toylike wooden houses. It broke and doubled back upon itself, giving Ellisville title to unique distinction among all the cities of the plains, which rarely boasted more than a single street. The big hotel at the depot sheltered a colony of restless and ambitious life. From the East there came a minister with his wife, both fresh from college. They remained a week. The Cottage Hotel had long since lost its key, and day and night there went on vast revelry among the men of the wild, wide West, then seeing for the first time what seemed to them the joy and glory of life. Little parties of men continually came up from the South, in search of opportunity to sell their cattle. Little parties of men came from the East, seeking to buy cattle and land. They met at the Cottage, and made merry in large fashion, seeing that this was a large land, and new, and unrestrained.

Land and cattle, cattle and land. These themes were upon the lips of all, and in those days were topics of peace and harmony. The cattleman still stood for the nomadic and untrammelled West, the West of wild and glorious tradition. The man who sought for land was not yet recognised as the homesteader, the man of anchored craft, of settled convictions, of adventures ended. For one brief, glorious season the nomad and the home dweller shook hands in amity, not pausing to consider wherein their interests might differ. For both, this was the West, the free, unbounded, illimitable, exhaustless West—Homeric, Titanic, scornful to metes and bounds, having no scale of little things.

Here and there small, low houses, built of the soil and clinging grimly to the soil, made indistinct dots upon the wide gray plains. Small corrals raised their ragged arms. Each man claimed his herd of kine. Slowly, swinging up from the far Southwest, whose settlement, slower and still more crude, had gone on scores of years ago when the Spaniards and the horse Indians of the lower plains were finally beaten back from the rancherias, there came on the great herds of the gaunt, broad-horned cattle, footsore and slow and weary with their march of more than a thousand miles. These vast herds deployed in turn about the town of Ellisville, the Mecca for which they had made this unprecedented pilgrimage. They trampled down every incipient field, and spread abroad over all the grazing lands, until every township held its thousands, crowded by the new thousands continually coming on. Long train loads of these cattle, wild and fierce, fresh from the chutes into which they were driven after their march across the untracked empire of the range, rolled eastward day after day. Herd after herd pressed still farther north, past Ellisville, going on wearily another thousand miles, to found the Ellisvilles of the upper range, to take the place of the buffalo driven from the ancient feeding grounds. Scattered into hundreds and scores and tens, the local market of the Ellisville settlers took its share also of the cheap cattle from the South, and sent them out over the cheap lands.

It was indeed the beginning of things. Fortune was there for any man. The town became a loadstone for the restless population ever crowding out upon the uttermost frontier. The men from the farther East dropped their waistcoats and their narrow hats at Ellisville. All the world went under wide felt and bore a jingling spur. Every man was armed. The pitch of life was high. It was worth death to live a year in such a land! The pettinesses fell away from mankind. The horizon of life was wide. There was no time for small exactness. A newspaper, so called, cost a quarter of a dollar. The postmaster gave no change when one bought a postage stamp. A shave was worth a quarter of a dollar, or a half, or a dollar, as that might be. The price of a single drink was never established, since that was something never called for. For a cowman to spend one hundred dollars at the Cottage bar, and to lose ten thousand dollars at cards later in the same evening, was a feat not phenomenal. There were more cattle, south in Texas. The range-men, acquainted with danger and risk, loving excitement, balked at no hazard. Knowing no settled way of life, ignorant of a roof, careless of the ways of other lands, this town was a toy to them, a jest, just as all life, homeless, womanless, had been a jest. By day and by night, ceaseless, crude, barbaric, there went on a continuous carousal, which would have been joyless backed by a vitality less superb, an experience less young. Money and life—these two things we guard most sacredly in the older societies, the first most jealously, the latter with a lesser care. In Ellisville these were the commodities in least esteem. The philosophy of that land was either more ignorant or more profound than ours. Over all the world, unaided by a sensational press, and as yet without even that non-resident literature which was later to discover the Ellisvilles after the Ellisvilles were gone, there spread the tame of