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

Ellisville the Red, the lustful, the unspeakable. Here was a riot of animal intensity of life, a mutiny of physical man, the last outbreak of the innate savagery of primitive man against the day of shackles and subjugation. The men of that rude day lived vehemently. They died, and they escaped. The earth is trampled over their bold hearts, and they have gone back into the earth, the air, the sky, and the wild flowers. Over their graves tread now those who bow the neck and bear the burden and feed the wheels, and know the despair of that civilization which grinds hope from out the heart. The one and the other came, departed, and will depart. The one and the other, the bond and the free, the untamed and the broken, were pawns in the iron game of destiny.

The transient population of Ellisville, the cattle sellers and cattle buyers and land seekers, outnumbered three to one the resident or permanent population, which catered to this floating trade, and which supplied its commercial or professional wants. The resident one third was the nucleus of the real Ellisville that was to be. The social compact was still in embryo. Life was very simple. It was the day of the individual, the day before the law.

With this rude setting there was to be enacted a rapid drama of material progress such as the world has never elsewhere seen; but first there must be played the wild prologue of the West, never at any time to have a more lurid scene than here at the Halfway House of a continent, at the intersection of the grand transcontinental trails, the bloody angle of the plains. Eight men in a day, a score in a week, met death by violence. The street in the cemetery doubled before that of the town. There were more graves than houses. This superbly wasteful day, how could it presage that which was to come? In this riotous army of invasion, who could have foreseen the population which was to follow, adventurous yet tenacious, resolved first upon independence, and next upon knowledge, and then upon the fruits of knowledge? Nay, perhaps, after all, the prescience of this coming time lay over Ellisville the Red, so that it roared the more tempestuously on through its brief, brazen day.

CHAPTER XVIII STILL A REBEL

In the swift current of humanity then streaming up and down the cattle range, the reputation of the Halfway House was carried far and near; and for fifty miles east and west, for five hundred miles north and south, the beauty of the girl at the Halfway House was matter of general story. This was a new sort of being, this stranger from another land, and when applied to her, all the standards of the time fell short or wide. About her there grew a saga of the cow range, and she was spoken of with awe from the Brazos to the Blue. Many a rude cowman made long pilgrimage to verify rumours he had heard of the personal beauty, the personal sweetness of nature, the personal kindness of heart, and yet the personal reserve and dignity of this new goddess, whose like was not to be found in all the wide realms of the range. Such sceptics came in doubt, but they remained silent and departed reverent. Wider and wider grew her circle of devoted friends—wild and desperate men who rarely knew a roof and whose hands stayed at no deed, but who knew with unerring accuracy the value of a real woman.

For each of these rude, silent, awkward range riders, who stammered in all speech except to men or horses, and who stumbled in all locomotion but that of the saddle, Mary Ellen had a kind spot in her soul, never ceasing to wonder as she did at the customs and traditions of their life. Pinky Smith, laid up at the Halfway House with a broken leg (with which he had come in the saddle for over fifty miles), was blither in bed than he had ever been at table. Ike Wallace, down with a fever at the same place, got reeling into saddle at dawn of a cheerless day, and rode himself and a horse to death that day in stopping a stampede. Pain they knew not, fear they had not, and duty was their only god. They told her, simply as children, of deeds which now caused a shudder, now set tingling the full blood of enthusiasm, and opened up unconsciously to her view a rude field of knight-errantry, whose principles sat strangely close with the best traditions of her own earlier land and time. They were knights-errant, and for all on the Ellisville trail there was but one lady. So hopeless was the case of each that they forbore to argue among themselves.

"No broadhorn there," said Pinky Smith, after he got well, and assumed the envied position of oracle on matters at the Halfway House. "That ain't no range stock, I want to tell you all. What in h——l she doin' out yer I give it up, but you can mark it down she ain't no common sort."

"Oh, she like enough got some beau back in the States," said another, grumblingly.

"Yes, er up to Ellis," said Pinky, sagely. "Thet lawyer feller up there, he come down to the ranch twict when I was there, and I 'low he's shinin' round some."

"Well, I dunno," said the other, argumentatively, as though to classify lawyers and cow-punchers in much the same category.

"But, pshaw!" continued Pinky. "He don't seem to hold no edge neither, fur's I could see. It was him that was a-doin' all the guessin'. She just a-standin' pat all the time, same fer him as fer everybody else. Reckon she ain't got no beau, an' don't want none."

"Beau be d——d!" said his friend. "Who said anything about beau?
First thing, feller's got to be fitten. Who's fitten?"

"That's right," said Pinky. "Yet I shore hope she's located yer fer keeps. Feller says, 'They's no place like home,' and it's several mile to another ranch like that'n', er to another gal like her."

"D——n the lawyer!" said the other, after a time of silence, as they rode on together; and Pinky made understanding reply.

"That's what!" said he. "D——n him, anyhow!"

As for Edward Franklin himself, he could not in his moments of wildest egotism assign himself to a place any better than that accorded each member of the clans who rallied about this Southern lady transplanted to the Western plains. Repulsed in his first unskilled, impetuous advance; hurt, stung, cut to the quick as much at his own clumsiness and failure to make himself understood as at the actual rebuff received. Franklin none the less in time recovered sufficient equanimity to seek to avail himself of such advantages as still remained; and he resolved grimly that he would persist until at least he had been accepted as something better than a blundering boor. Under Major Buford's invitation he called now and again at the Halfway Ranch, and the major was gladder each time to see him, for he valued the society of one whose experiences ran somewhat parallel with his own, and whose preferences were kindred to those of his natural class; and, moreover, there was always a strange comradery among those whose problems were the same, the "neighbours" of the sparsely settled West. Mrs. Buford also received Franklin with pleasure, and Mary Ellen certainly always with politeness. Yet, fatal sign, Mary Ellen never ran for her mirror when she knew that Franklin was coming. He was but one of the many who came to the Halfway House; and Franklin, after more than one quiet repulse, began to know that this was an indifference grounded deeper than the strange haughtiness which came to be assumed by so many women of the almost womanless West, who found themselves in a land where the irreverent law of supply and demand assigned to them a sudden value.

Of lovers Mary Ellen would hear of none, and this was Franklin's sole consolation. Yet all day as he laboured there was present in his subconsciousness the personality of this proud and sweet-faced girl. Her name was spelled large upon the sky, was voiced by all the birds. It was indeed her face that looked up from the printed page. He dared not hope, and yet shrunk from the thought that he must not, knowing what lethargy must else ingulf his soul. By day a sweet, compelling image followed him, until he sought relief in sleep. At night she was again the shadowy image of his dreams. Reason as well as instinct framed excuses for him, and he caught himself again arguing with the world that here was destiny, here was fate! Wandering blindly over all the weary intervening miles, weak and in need of strength to shelter her, tender and noble and gentle, worthy of love and needing love and care in these rude conditions for which she was so unfit—surely the stars had straightened out his life for him and told him what to do! He heard so clearly the sweet, imperious summons which is the second command put upon animate nature: First, to prevail, to live; second, to love, to survive! Life and love, the first worthless without the latter, barren, flowerless, shorn of fruitage, branded with the mark of the unattained. As tree whispers unto tree, as flower yearns to flower, so came the mandate to his being in that undying speech that knows no change from the beginning to the end of time.

Against this overwhelming desire of an impetuous love there was raised but one barrier—the enduring resistance of a woman's will, silent, not strenuous, unprotesting, but unchanged. To all his renewed pleadings the girl said simply that she had no heart to give, that her hope of happiness lay buried on the field of Louisburg, in the far-off land that she had known in younger and less troubled days. Leaving that land, orphaned, penniless, her life crushed down at the very portal of womanhood, her friends scattered, her family broken and destroyed, her whole world overturned, she had left also all hope of a later happiness. There remained to her only the memory of a past, the honour that she prized, the traditions which she must maintain. She was "unreconstructed," as she admitted bitterly. Moreover, so she said, even could it lie in her heart ever to prove unfaithful to her lover who had died upon the field of duty, never could it happen that she would care for one of those who had murdered him, who had murdered her happiness, who had ruined her home, destroyed her people, and banished her in this far wandering from the land that bore her.

"Providence did not bring me here to marry you," she said to Franklin keenly, "but to tell you that I would never marry you—never, not even though I loved you, as I do not. I am still a Southerner, am still a 'rebel.' Moreover, I have learned my lesson. I shall never love again."

CHAPTER XIX THAT WHICH HE WOULD

Poor medicine as it is, work was ever the best salve known for a hurting heart. Franklin betook him to his daily work, and he saw success attend his labours. Already against the frank barbarity of the cattle days there began to push the hand of the "law-and-order" element, steadily increasing in power. Although all the primitive savage in him answered to the summons of those white-hot days to every virile, daring nature, Franklin none the less felt growing in his heart the stubbornness of the man of property, the landholding man, the man who even unconsciously plans a home, resolved to cling to that which he has taken of the earth's surface for his own. Heredity, civilization, that which we call common sense, won the victory. Though he saw his own face in the primeval mirror here held up to him, Franklin turned away. It was sure to him that he must set his influence against this unorganized day of waste and riotousness. He knew that this perfervid time could not endure, knew that the sweep of American civilization must occupy all this land as it had all the lands from the Alleghenies to the plains. He foresaw in this crude new region the scene of a great material activity,