The Forbidden Trail, Honoré Willsie [digital e reader TXT] 📗

take care of her and make her happy, I know."

"You know, huh! Yet you remember Elsa's home. All its luxury?"

"Yes, I remember Elsa's home and I remember that Elsa and her mother were high class, unpaid servants in that home."

Papa Wolf jumped to his feet. Ernest laid a hand on his arm.

"Wait now, Papa. You've got the top layer off your chest. Now I'm going to tell you the inside story of what has happened in this desert in the seven or eight months. Light your pipe, Papa. It's going to be a long story."

"Pipe! Pipe! I will not light my pipe!"

"Why not? Nobody's married yet. You've got days and weeks if you wish to argue about that and you'll be liking Dick better all the time you're arguing. Now Elsa's marriage isn't the important matter you've to decide down here, at all. Light your pipe. Papa dear! You always did give me good advice, except about coming down here. Here, take a fresh box of matches."

Papa Wolf, established once more, Ernest took a turn or two up and down the room, coming finally to a stop before the empty fire place. Roger, looking at his chum closely, realized suddenly that Ernest had aged in the past few months. There were lines around his eyes and his lips. Ernest looked from his father to his mother with a little smile.

"Roger and I, in spite of our thirty years, were unsophisticated kids when we came into this country. I think we're grown up now. I think we're pretty certain to go a straight and decent trail to the end. But that I came mighty near to going a forbidden trail as Roger calls it, is your fault, Papa—and yours, Dean Erskine."

He paused and although the Dean and Ernest's father looked at each other in amazement, neither interrupted and the younger man went on.

"I never saw death until I came down here—I never knew love. I never knew real work. But here I have learned all three. We have lived here with an intensity as great as the heat. The—the primal passions have shaken us, Papa—and burned us clean—You know some creeds speak of Christ's hours between the Last Supper and His death as the passion of the cross. Sometimes I feel as if I could call my months down here my passion of the desert."

Again Ernest paused, and those who had lived with him through these months of passion—passion of joy, of fear, of sorrow, of love, of personal grief and of world pain, listened with astonishment that jovial, easy-going Ernest should have felt as deeply as they.

"Mrs. von Minden died first. Roger and Dick found her dead up in a remote canyon. She had thirsted to death. I wrote Elsa of her but not of her death. That would have set you to worrying about me, Mütterchen. She had the little black box with her that I wrote Elsa she had demanded from her husband. Whether she found in it what she wanted no one will ever know. But her death ended one of those strange, feverish life dramas that this trackless desert is always turning up. Next they found Von Minden, alone except for Peter. (You must meet Peter, Papa.) He probably died of heart failure. We don't know how she got the box away from him. Maybe she poisoned him. And next Felicia,—Felicia was exactly as Charley was, Mamma, when she used to come to play with us in the pool."

Ernest looked at Charley—"I've got to talk about her, Charley, to make them understand."

Charley moistened her lips, but nodded and Dick put his hand over his eyes.

"She was like Charley too in that she was the kind of a girl that decent men instinctively love—not with one of these headlong, unreasoning loves, you understand. But with the kind of a deep-seated adoration for beauty and goodness and brain that gets a man where he lives and never leaves him. That's the way I got to caring for Charley and that's the way, in embryo, we all loved Felicia.

"In the meantime, you understand we were all working like the very devil to get the plant up and the alfalfa in. I wrote home of that. How difficult the work here in the desert was is beyond description. And, what made it more difficult, after the Smithsonian turned Roger down, he got to working against time, and though he never said much, he gave an atmosphere of desperate hurry and worry to the camp, that simply got us all strung up to the breaking point. At intervals, too, he lost that famous temper of his. These tempers upset Felicia terribly."

Roger filled his pipe with fingers that trembled a little. But Ernest was staring out the door now, with eyes that saw nothing.

"Dick varied the monotony two or three times by getting drunk. He is an ugly whelp when he's drunk. Once he knocked Charley down and Felicia saw it and Roger and he mixed up over it and Elsa finally straightened it out, and we let him out of Coventry. But the next time he got drunk, Felicia, in her fright, ran away into the desert and was killed by a rattler. Charley and Roger found her. It nearly killed us all. But it cured Dick of drinking—that's one reason why I'm telling you. Don't cry, Mütterchen."

"But you have Charley, Ernie! You have Charley!" sobbed his mother.

"No, I haven't Charley. Roger has Charley. None of us deserved her, but Roger is nearer fit than the rest."

"Don't, Ernest!" pleaded Charley.

"I must, Charley. You'll see in a few moments what I'm getting at. Well, Papa, in the meantime, there was no money and it looked as if there would be no food. Roger's plant didn't work out as we'd planned. I wrote home the difficulties even of hanging a door. You can picture Roger trying to build a new engine out of wire and a string he had tramped ten miles into the ranges to find and steal. The alfalfa was dying for lack of water and there was no adequate pumping system even if we'd had adequate water.

"It was at this point that I decided to go to Washington, Papa, and try the Smithsonian. You would have been the one, naturally, for me to turn to, but even if I'd had the inclination, which I hadn't, Roger absolutely wouldn't stand for the suggestion. So I went to Washington, all sort of strung up, you understand, and in bad mental trim because of—of everything. And in Washington I got a good swift kick. So I went to New York and spent the rest of Elsa's good money on Broadway. It didn't take me very far but when I went broke, I looked up your friend Werner. This is the point where you come in too, Dean Erskine.

"Now I had been brought up at home, naturally, to worship all things German. I liked to think of myself not as an American but as a German. At school, this home influence should have been counteracted if America expects to make real citizens. But it wasn't. The High School taught us German and no other modern language. In college, all things mental centered on the German idea in the majority of the departments. And your department was the worst of all, Dean. You are a Germanophile yourself and you taught your students to be.

"So behold me, calling on Werner and finding that Werner among other activities has been the head of an organized effort on the part of the German government for twenty years to Germanize America—through schools, churches, singing societies—oh, countless ways. And he was deeply worried about our British sympathies. And he wanted my influence in the college and elsewhere and he wanted Roger's big mechanical brain for Germany and so he offered me fifty thousand dollars for the Sun Plant and I took it."

"Fine! Wonderful!" exclaimed Papa Wolf.

"So I thought," said Ernest dryly, "but Roger and the others here thought differently. In fact when Roger found out about Werner, he tried to kill me, and then went away into the mountains with Peter for three days."

"Oh, Ernie! Oh, Roger!" moaned Mamma Wolf.

Papa Wolf's lips tightened. "But why, Roger?" he demanded.

"Wait, Roger! I'm telling the story. Rog tried to kill me for selling out secretly the idea that was bone of his bone. He tried to kill me because I sold it to a government that has gone through Belgium like a Hunnish horde, and because I claimed to admire it for that. Well, he didn't kill me and I was very sore and decided to go to Germany to live. Then Werner came down to settle details with Roger, and Roger told him what was in the black box and made him give back the contract."

"The black box! What black box?" asked Dean Erskine.

"The Von Mindens' black box. When I brought back word that Werner wanted it, Roger and Charley read the contents. It developed that Von Minden was one of a group working for the German government with the idea of making Arizona and New Mexico into German colonies. Gustav—you remember my writing of Gustav—was Werner's spy, keeping Werner informed of our every move and what he could about Von Minden."

"I don't believe a word of it! Not a word! It's all British influence," exclaimed Papa Wolf stoutly.

"You'll have to believe it, because it's true," returned Ernest. "Roger was angry and threw Werner and Gustav out of the camp and made me choose between him and Werner. I chose Roger, because the time had come in my life when I'd got to make a tremendous decision. It's one you've got to make, Papa, and so has the Dean. I wanted you to make it my way. That's why I got you down here to see the things that I'd been up against."

"You don't intend to ask us to break our neutrality, surely, Ernest," protested Dean Erskine.

"I'll develop your job in just a moment, Dean. Papa, what I want is that you repudiate Werner and all his works, and undertake to finance Roger's project."

"My heavens, Ern!" cried Roger.

"Tut! Tut! Rog—you be quiet. Dean, your job is to sell the Plant to my father, after you've both made your decision."

"I cannot understand your talking to me in this manner, Ernest," shouted Papa Wolf, pounding on the table till the belated breakfast dishes rattled.

"I'll explain," said Ernest, imperturbably. "There's love of human beings. There's love of work. There's love of country. They make up a man's life. I had the first two and I thought that they were enough. But lately, I've discovered differently and I think a good many people in this country are finding out the same thing. I never gave the matter any thought until the Werner episode. Then I began to examine this thing called patriotism and I found that it was the very wellspring of a man's usefulness as a citizen. Without it family pride is a travesty. Without it, the impulse to build up sane and humane and lasting governments is lacking. Without it, a man may be ever so learned, ever so rich, yet he lacks any real place in community life. Patriotism is to a man's community life what religion is to his moral life.

"Now I intend to lead a full, normal man's life. I want to love a country, and I couldn't see, when I got down to brass tacks, why that country should be Germany. This is the land that bred me and fed me. Actually I'm a physical part of the soil of America. What do I care how cultured Germany may or may not be? Here in America are the hills and valleys, the rivers and mountains that I know and care for. Here is the kind of government I like.