Read Ebook: The Cow Puncher by Stead Robert J C

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Ebook has 802 lines and 54895 words, and 17 pages

"And I was five when--when Jack died," she went on. "Jack was my brother, you know. He was seven, and a great boy for his daddy. Most boys run to their mother with their hurts, but Jack was different. When father was at the office Jack would save up his little hurts until evening. . . Well, we were playing, and I stood on the car tracks, signalling the motorman, to make him ring his bell. On came the car, with the bell clanging, and the man in blue looking very cross. Jack must have thought I was waiting too long, for he suddenly rushed on the track to pull me off." She stopped, and sat looking at the rushing water.

"I heard him cry, 'Oh Daddy, Daddy,' above the screech of the brakes," she continued, in a dry voice.

"Sorrow is a strange thing," she went on, after a pause. "I don't pretend to understand, but it seems to have its place in life. I fancy this would soon be a pretty degenerate world if there were no sorrow in it. I have been told that sometimes fruit trees refuse to bear until they have met with adversity. Then the gardener bores a hole in them, or something like that, and, behold, next season they bear. Sounds silly, but they say it's a fact. I guess it's natural law. Well--" She paused again, and when she spoke it was in a lower, more confidential note.

"I shouldn't tell you this, Dave. I shouldn't know it myself. But before that things hadn't been, well, just as good as they might in our home. . . They've been different since."

The shock of her words brought him upright. To him it seemed that Mr. and Mrs. Duncan were the ideal father and mother. It was impossible to associate them with a home where things "hadn't been just as good as they might." But her half confession left no room for remark.

"Mother told me," she went on, after a long silence, and without looking at him. "A few years ago, 'If some one had only told me, when I was your age,' she said."

"Why do you tell me this?" he suddenly demanded.

It was his turn to pause. "Yes," he confessed, at length.

"Then tell me."

So he led her down through the tragedy of his youth and the lonely rudderless course of his boyhood. She followed sympathetically to the day when Dr. Hardy and his daughter Irene became guests at the Elden ranch. And then her interest manifested something deeper than sympathy. But he had become engrossed in his narrative. . . The September day had drawn to a close, and the dusk was thick about them, ere he reached the end. But before the end he stopped. Should he tell her all? Why not? She had opened her life to him. So he told her of that last evening with Irene, and the compact under the trees and the moon. Her hand had fallen into his as they talked, but here he felt it slowly withdrawn. But he was fired with the flame of love which had sprung up in the breath of his reminiscence. . . And Edith was his friend and his chum.

"And you have been true?" she said, but her voice was distant and strained.

"Yes."

"And you are waiting for her?"

"Yes, I am waiting. . . It must be so." . . .

"It is cold," she said. "Let us go home."

But just at this time another incident occurred which was to turn the flood of his life into strange channels. Dave had been promoted to the distinction of a private office--a little six-by-six "box stall," as the sports editor described it--but none the less a distinction shared only with the managing editor and Bert Morrison, compiler of the woman's page. Her name was Roberta, but she was masculine to the tips, and everybody called her Bert. The remainder of the staff occupied a big, dingy room, with walls pasted with specimen headings, comic cartoons, and racy pictures, and floor carpeted deeply with exchanges. Dave, however, had established some sort of order in his den, and had installed at his own cost a spring lock to prevent depredations upon his paste pot or sudden raids upon his select file of time copy.

Into this sanctuary one afternoon in October came Conward. It was such an afternoon as to set every office-worker at war with the gods; the glories of the foothill October are known only in the foothill country, and Dave, married though he was to his work, felt the call of the sunshine and the open spaces. This was a time for fallen leaves and brown grass and splashes of colour everywhere--nature's autumn colours, bright, glorious, unsubdued. Only Dave knew how his blood leaped to that suggestion. But the world must go on.

Conward's habitual cigarette hung from its accustomed short tooth, and his round, florid face seemed puffier than usual. His aversion to any exercise more vigorous than offered by a billiard cue was beginning to reflect itself in a premature rotundity of figure. But his soft, sedulous voice had not lost the note of friendly confidence which had attracted Dave, perhaps against his better judgment, on the night of their first meeting.

"'Lo, Dave," he said. "Alone?"

"Almost," said Dave, without looking up from his typewriter. Then, turning, he kicked the door shut with his heel and said, "Shoot."

"This strenuous life is spoiling your good manners, Dave, my boy," said Conward, lazily exhaling a thin cloud of smoke. "If work made a man rich you'd die a millionaire. But it isn't work that makes men rich. Ever think of that?"

"If a man does not become rich by work he has no right to become rich at all," Dave retorted.

"What do you mean by that word 'right,' Dave? Define it."

"Haven't time. We go to press at four."

"That's the trouble with fellows like you," Conward continued. "You haven't time. You stick too close to your jobs. You never see the better chances lying all around. Now suppose you let them go to press without you to-day, and you listen to me for a while."

Dave was about to throw him out when a gust of yearning for the open spaces swept over him again. It was true enough. He was giving his whole life to his paper. Promotion was slow, and there was no prospect of a really big position at any time. He remembered Mr. Duncan's remarks about newspaper training being the best preparation for something else. With a sudden decision he closed his desk. "Shoot," he said again, but this time with less impatience.

"That's better," said Conward. "Have you ever thought of the future of this town?"

"Well, I can't say that I have. I've been busy with its present."

"That's what I supposed. You've been too busy with the details of your little job to give attention to bigger things. Now, let me pass you a few pieces of information--things you must know, but you have never put them together before. What are the natural elements which make a country or city a desirable place to live? I'll tell you. Climate, transportation, good water, variety of landscape, opportunity of independence. Given these conditions, everything else can be added. Now, our climate--of course it is misunderstood in the South and East, but misunderstanding doesn't ruffle it. You and I know what it is. This is a white man's climate. Follow our latitude into Europe if you want to find the seats of power and success. London and Berlin are north of us; Paris very little south."

"Where did you get this stuff?" Dave interjected. "Sounds like the prelude of an address before a boomsters' club."

"I've been thinking, while you've been too busy to think," Conward retorted. "Then there's transportation. This is one of the few centres in America which has a north and south trade equal to its east and west trade. We're on the cross-roads. Every settler who goes into the North--and it is a mighty North--means more north and south trade. The development of the Pacific Coast, the industrialization of Asia, the opening of the Panama Canal--these mean east and west trade. Every railway that taps this country must come to this city, because we have the start, and are too big to be ignored."

"'City' is good," said Dave.

"All right. Scoff as much as you like. Have your joke before it turns on you. There'll be a quarter of a million people here before you're dead, if you play fair with the life insurance people."

"Go on."

"Then there's the soil--the richest soil in the world. Just dry enough to keep it from leaching. Natural possibilities for irrigation wherever necessary--"

"I'm not sure about it as a grain country," interrupted Dave, with a touch of antagonism.

"That is because you were brought up on a ranch, and are a rancher at heart," Conward shot back. "No rancher is ever sure of any country being a grain country. All he is sure of is that if the farmer comes it is good-bye to the open range. Just as the fur-trader blackguarded the climate to keep the stockman out, so is the stockman blackguarding the climate to keep the farmer out. But they're coming. They can't be stopped. It's only a case of education--of advertising.

"I tell you, Dave, the movement is on now, and before long it'll hit us like a tidal wave. I've been a bit of a gambler all my life, but this is the biggest jack-pot ever was, and I'm going to sit in. How about you?"

"I'd like to think it over. Promotion doesn't come very fast on this job, that's sure."

"Yes, and while you are thinking it over chances are slipping by. Don't think it over--put it over. I tell you, Dave, there are big things in the air. They are beginning to move already. Have you noticed the strangers in town of late? That's the advance guard--"

"Advance guard of a real estate boom?"

"Hish! That's a bad word. Get away from it. Say 'Industrial development.'"

"All right,--industrial development. And do we have to have an advance guard of strangers to bring about 'industrial development?'"

"Sure. That's the only way. You never heard of the old-timers in a town booming it--the term goes between us--did you? Never. The old resident is always deader than the town, no matter how dead the town may be. And this business is a science. The right gang can spring it anywhere, and almost any time.

"Of course, it's a little different in this case, because there really is something in the way of natural advantages to support it. It's not all hot air. That'll make the event just so much bigger.

"Now, Dave, I've been dipping in a little already, and it struck me we might work together on this deal. Your paper has considerable weight, and if that weight falls the right way you won't find me stingy. For instance, an item that this property"--he produced a slip with some legal descriptions--"has been sold for ten thousand dollars to eastern investors--very conservative investors from the East, don't forget that--might help to turn another deal that's just hanging. Sorry to keep you so long, but perhaps you can catch the press yet." And, with one of his friendly mannerisms, Conward departed.

Dave sat for some minutes in a quandary. He was discouraged with his salary, or, rather, with the lack of prospect of any increase in his salary. Conward's words had been very unsettling. They pulled in opposite directions. They fired him with a new enthusiasm for his city, and they intimated that a gang of professional land-gamblers was soon to perpetrate an enormous theft, leaving the public holding the sack. Still there must be a middle course somewhere.

He walked to his little window and looked across the warm prairie. No buildings cut his view from the brown hillsides where the lazy mists of autumn beckoned to be out and free. It was a sleepy cow-town still, and yet, as he now recalled, a new pulse had been throbbing its arteries of late. The proportion of strangers--men in white collars and street shoes--at the hotels was steadily growing. Rents were going up. It was the first low wave--and Conward's ear had caught it. . .

During the following days Dave had a keener eye than usual for evidences of 'industrial development.' He found them on every hand. Old properties, long considered unsalable, were changing owners. Handsomely furnished offices had been opened on principal corners for the sale of city and country property. Hotels were crowded, bar-rooms were jammed. The preponderance of the male population had never been so pronounced, and every incoming train added to it. Money moved easily; wages were stiffening; tradesmen were in demand. There was material for many good stories in his investigations. He began writing features on the city's prosperity and prospects. The rival paper did the same, and there was soon started between them a competition of optimism. The great word became "boost." It stood, apparently, for any action or attitude that would increase prices. The virus was now in the veins of the community; pulsing through every street and by-way of the little city. Dave marvelled, and wondered how he had failed to read these signs until Conward had laid their portent bare before him. But as yet it was only his news sense that responded; his delight in the strange and the sensational. He was not yet inoculated with the poison of easy wealth.

His nights were busy with his investigations, but on Sundays, as usual, he went out to Duncans'. He had developed the habit of attending morning service; he loved the music, and it was customary for Edith to sing a morning solo. Her voice, which had enraptured him when they first met, had developed wonderfully. It filled the morning air like the clear tolling of silver bells. For its sake he gladly endured the sermons, and even in the sermon he sometimes found common ground with the preacher. They could meet on any faith that postulated the brotherhood of man. But the reverend speaker touched such a subject warily. It seemed to Dave he would gladly have gone further, but was held in restraint by a sense of the orthodoxy of his congregation. Too literal an interpretation of the brotherhood of man might carry the taint of Socialism, and the congregation represented the wealth of the city. It was safer to preach learnedly on abstractions of belief.

This morning Edith had not been in her place, and the service was flat. In the afternoon she was not at her home. Mrs. Duncan explained that Edith had gone to visit a girl friend in the country; would be away for some time. Dave felt a foolish annoyance that she should have left town. She might at least have called him up. Why should she call him up? Of course not. Still, the town was very empty. He drove with Mrs. Duncan in the afternoon, and at night took a long walk by the river. He had a vague but oppressive sense of loneliness. He had not realized what part of his life these Sunday afternoons with Edith had come to be. He had no man friends; his nature held him apart from his own sex. And yet he had a strange capacity for making friends quickly, if he tried. But he didn't try. He didn't feel the need. But he felt lost without Edith.

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