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

a vast industrial development. The swift action of the early days was to the liking of his robust nature, and the sweep of the cattle trade, sudden and unexpected as it had been, in no wise altered his original intention of remaining as an integer of this community. It needed no great foresight to realize that all this land, now so wild and cheap, could not long remain wild and cheap, but must follow the history of values as it had been written up to the edge of that time and place.

Of law business of an actual sort there was next to none at Ellisville, all the transactions being in wild lands and wild cattle, but, as did all attorneys of the time, Franklin became broker before he grew to be professional man. Fortunate in securing the handling of the railroad lands, he sold block after block of wild land to the pushing men who came out to the "front" in search of farms and cattle ranches. His own profits he invested again in land. Thus he early found himself making much more than a livelihood, and laying the foundation of later fortune. Long since he had "proved up" his claim and moved into town permanently, having office and residence in the great depot hotel which was the citadel of the forces of law and order, of progress and civilization in that land.

The railroad company which founded Ellisville had within its board of directors a so-called "Land and Improvement Company," which latter company naturally had the first knowledge of the proposed locations of the different towns along the advancing line. When the sale of town lots was thrown open to the public, it was always discovered that the Land and Improvement Company had already secured the best of the property in what was to be the business portion of the town. In the case of Ellisville, this inner corporation knew that there was to be located here a railroad-division point, where ultimately there would be car shops and a long pay roll of employees. Such a town was sure to prosper much more than one depending solely upon agriculture for its support, as was to be the later history of many or most of these far Western towns. Franklin, given a hint by a friendly official, invested as he was able in town property in the village of Ellisville, in which truly it required the eye of faith to see any prospect of great enhancement. Betimes he became owner of a quarter-section of land here and there, in course of commissions on sales. He was careful to take only such land as he had personally seen and thought fit for farming, and always he secured land as near to the railroad as was possible. Thus he was in the ranks of those foreseeing men who quietly and rapidly were making plans which were later to place them among those high in the control of affairs. All around were others, less shrewd, who were content to meet matters as they should turn up, forgetting that

        "The hypocritic days
    Bring diadems and fagots in their hands;
    To each they offer gifts after his will."

Everywhere was shown the Anglo-Saxon love of land. Each man had his quarter-section or more. Even Nora, the waitress at the hotel, had "filed on a quarter," and once in perhaps a month or so would "reside" there overnight, a few faint furrows in the soil (done by her devoted admirer, Sam) passing as those legal "improvements" which should later give her title to a portion of the earth. The land was passing into severalty, coming into the hands of the people who had subdued it, who had driven out those who once had been its occupants. The Indians were now cleared away, not only about Ellisville but far to the north and west. The skin-hunters had wiped out the last of the great herds of the buffalo. The face of Nature was changing. The tremendous drama of the West was going on in all its giant action. This torrent of rude life, against which the hands of the law were still so weak and unavailing, had set for it in the ways of things a limit for its flood and a time for its receding.

The West was a noble country, and it asked of each man what nobility there was in his soul. Franklin began to grow. Freed from the dwarfing influences of army life, as well as from the repressing monotony of an old and limited community, he found in the broad horizon of his new surroundings a demand that he also should expand. As he looked beyond the day of cattle and foresaw the time of the plough, so also he gazed far forward into the avenues of his own life, now opening more clearly before him. He rapidly forecast the possibilities of the profession which he had chosen, and with grim self-confidence felt them well within his power. Beyond that, then, he asked himself, in his curious self-questioning manner, what was there to be? What was to be the time of his life when he could fold his hands and say that, no matter whether it was success or failure that he had gained, he had done that which was in his destiny to do? Wherein was he to gain that calmness and that satisfaction which ought to attend each human soul, and entitle it to the words "Well done"? Odd enough were some of these self-searchings which went on betimes in the little office of this plainsman lawyer; and strangest of all to Franklin's mind was the feeling that, as his heart had not yet gained that which was its right, neither had his hand yet fallen upon that which it was to do.

Franklin rebelled from the technical side of the law, not so much by reason of its dry difficulty as through scorn of its admitted weakness, its inability to do more than compromise; through contempt of its pretended beneficences and its frequent inefficiency and harmfulness. In the law he saw plainly the lash of the taskmaster, driving all those yoked together in the horrid compact of society, a master inexorable, stone-faced, cruel. In it he found no comprehension, seeing that it regarded humanity either as a herd of slaves or a pack of wolves, and not as brethren labouring, suffering, performing a common destiny, yielding to a common fate. He saw in the law no actual recognition of the individual, but only the acknowledgment of the social body. Thus, set down in a day miraculously clear, placed among strong characters who had never yet yielded up their souls, witnessing that time which knew the last blaze of the spirit of men absolutely free. Franklin felt his own soul leap into a prayer for the continuance of that day. Seeing then that this might not be, he fell sometimes to the dreaming of how he might some day, if blessed by the pitying and understanding spirit of things, bring out these types, perpetuate these times, and so at last set them lovingly before a world which might at least wonder, though it did not understand. Such were his vague dreams, unformulated; but, happily, meantime he was not content merely to dream.

CHAPTER XX THE HALFWAY HOUSE

"Miss Ma'y Ellen," cried Aunt Lucy, thrusting her head in at the door, "oh, Miss Ma'y Ellen, I wish't you'd come out yer right quick. They's two o' them prai' dogs out yer a-chasin' ouah hens agin—nasty, dirty things!"

"Very well, Lucy," called out a voice in answer. Mary Ellen arose from her seat near the window, whence she had been gazing out over the wide, flat prairie lands and at the blue, unwinking sky. Her step was free and strong, but had no hurry of anxiety. It was no new thing for these "prairie dogs," as Aunt Lucy persisted in calling the coyotes, to chase the chickens boldly up to the very door. These marauding wolves had at first terrified her, but in her life on the prairies she had learned to know them better. Gathering each a bit of stick, she and Aunt Lucy drove away the two grinning daylight thieves, as they had done dozens of times before their kin, all eager for a taste of this new feathered game that had come in upon the range. With plenteous words of admonition, the two corralled the excited but terror-stricken speckled hen, which had been the occasion of the trouble, driving her back within the gates of the inclosure they had found a necessity for the preservation of the fowls of their "hen ranch." Once inside the protecting walls, the erring one raised her feathers in great anger and stalked away in high dudgeon, clucking out anathemas against a country where a law-abiding hen could not venture a quarter of a mile from home, even at the season when bugs were juiciest.

"It's that same Domineck, isn't it, Lucy?" said Mary Ellen, leaning over the fence and gazing at the fowls.

"Yess'm, that same ole hen, blame her fool soul! She's mo' bother'n she's wuf. I 'clare, ever' time I takes them er' chickens out fer a walk that ole Sar' Ann hen, she boun' fer to go off by herse'f somewheres, she's that briggotty; an' first thing I knows, dar she is in trouble again—low down, no 'count thing, I say!"

"Poor old Sarah!" said Mary Ellen. "Why, Aunt Lucy, she's raised more chickens than any hen we've got."

"Thass all right, Miss Ma'y Ellen, thass all right, so she have, but she made twict as much trouble as any hen we got, too. We kin git two dollahs fer her cooked, an' seems like long's she's erlive she boun' fer ter keep me chasin' 'roun' after her. I 'clare, she jest keep the whole lot o' ouah chickens wore down to a frazzle, she traipsin 'roun' all the time, an' them a-follerin' her. Jess like some womenfolks. They gad 'roun' so much they kain't git no flesh ontoe 'em. An', of co'se," she added argumentatively, "we all got to keep up the reppytation o' ouah cookin'. I kain't ask these yer men a dollah a meal—not fer no lean ole hen wif no meat ontoe her bones—no, ma'am."

Aunt Lucy spoke with professional pride and with a certain right to authority. The reputation of the Halfway House ran from the Double Forks of the Brazos north to Abilene, and much of the virtue of the table was dependent upon the resources of this "hen ranch," whose fame was spread abroad throughout the land. Saved by the surpassing grace of pie and "chicken fixings," the halting place chosen for so slight reason by Buford and his family had become a permanent abode, known gratefully to many travellers and productive of more than a living for those who had established it. It was, after all, the financial genius of Aunt Lucy, accustomed all her life to culinary problems, that had foreseen profit in eggs and chickens when she noted the exalted joy with which the hungry cow-punchers fell upon a meal of this sort after a season of salt pork, tough beef, and Dutch-oven bread.

At first Major Buford rebelled at the thought of innkeeping. His family had kept open house before the war, and he came from a land where the thoughts of hospitality and of price were not to be mentioned in the same day. Yet all about him lay the crude conditions of a raw, new country. At best he could get no product from the land for many months, and then but a problematical one. He was in a region where each man did many things, and first that thing which seemed nearest at hand to be done. It was the common sense of old Aunt Lucy which discovered the truth of the commercial proposition that what a man will pay for a given benefit is what he ought to pay. Had Aunt Lucy asked the cow-punchers even twice her tariff for a pie they would have paid it gladly. Had Mary Ellen asked them for their spurs and saddles, the latter would have been laid down.

From the Halfway House south to the Red River there was nothing edible. And over this Red River there came now swarming uncounted thousands of broad-horned cattle, driven by many bodies of hardy, sunburned, beweaponed, hungry men. At Ellisville, now rapidly becoming an important cattle