CHAPTER VII
ON GHOST MOUNTAIN
The snake, represented by Hollister, was scotched. Whether its backbone was broken, Sheridan doubted. At all events it would not disturb the Eden of the Hidden Homestead, now doubly protected, and that, aside from Quong, was the main issue.
Quong went on the even tenor of his way, cooking meticulously from the recipes in the book and scoring success after success. He never mentioned his rescue nor did Sheridan refer to it. But he sensed that the Chinaman had a lively appreciation of what had been done for him and was waiting, in his mysterious, Oriental way, for the moment in which to show his gratitude. Why such a man had isolated himself on Chico Mesa remained an unanswered and constant query. That it was done from no idle whim, that Metzal had been deliberately selected, Sheridan was convinced. The man was far removed from a coolie. His personal habits, his manners, more those of a diplomat than a cook, his reserved poise that held the liking of the rollicking cowboys while it prevented them from playing upon him the practical jokes they loved, proved that.
Sheridan kept in touch with the outside world by certain magazines, which, with the exception of journals dealing with cattle breeding and irrigation, ultimately found their way to Ghost Mountain. Quong read many of these. The Literary Digest he perused from cover to cover, gravely and methodically, and Sheridan had a feeling that Quong got more out of the consensus of world's news than he did. But again and again the question he had asked himself on the platform at Metzal depot reverted: "What the devil was Quong doing in this valley?" He seemed contented, but one could never guess at what worked back of his smooth forehead, his gemlike eyes set in their unwrinkled, hoodlike lids. After a while Sheridan gave it up, sure that the riddle would unfold itself in time.
The cowboys of the Diamond W and his own outfit had gleefully herded Hollister's lynching party into cactus thickets and ridden through to Metzal, where they had spread an account of the night's doings that caused the limping Hollisterites to be greeted with jeers and the ridicule that emphasizes defeat. Hollister had taken himself and his tarred visage to his ranch, where he sulked while the pitch wore off.
The Pioche Plainsman had got hold of the incident and its star reporter had wallowed in headlines and facetious paragraphs that referred to "Tar and Tartars" in a manner that rubbed in the lesson. Sympathy had veered to Quong. Hollister had gone too far. The voice of Law and Order was sounded grandiloquently in a Plainsman editorial and copied by the Metzal Branding Iron.
It promised well for the time when the mesa would be quit of its undesirable citizens. Meantime Sheridan went on with his proselyting of the cattle breeders. Developments here were not so encouraging. He encountered the surly hostility or apathy of those who feared—and sometimes fought blindly any change that might bring about some possible benefit to the neighbors they chose to think of as rivals. More and more he saw that he must develop the project alone to the point where he was able to deliver water for the various purposes of development for Chico Mesa. Some of them he did stir up to the cultivation of patches of alfalfa, limited to those who had wells, but most of them chanced the nourishment of the native mesa feed, succulent grasses that had a wonderful faculty for outliving the rains in lucky seasons. When the grass failed, the cattlemen shipped—and the commission men ate up the bulk of the profits. They saw the differences in price between steers on the hoof and meat in the market and groaned, bewailing the hard fate of the cattle rancher, but unwilling to fall into line. If it was going to be good for them, what must it not be going to do for Sheridan? Rumors that Eastern capital was back of him spread, rumors that he looked for the big end of the deal. It was hard work and discouraging. But Mary Burrows helped.
The more he saw of her the more he marveled. Brought up by a dreaming naturalist and a romantic, invalid mother in a remote New England village, without liberal education, without reading, without contact with the world, she showed a grasp of things that astonished him. The fighting spirit that had brought her to the wilderness, that promised with the aid of Thora ultimately to turn the Hidden Homestead into a paying ranch, he could understand. It was transmitted to her from clean-blooded, vigorous stock. And he could only think that the same attributes furnished her with a brain so well nourished that she was able to see things with a clear, wide vision. He did not flatter himself that her sight might be stimulated by a personal interest in Peter Sheridan.
But he found several occasions to ride over to Ghost Mountain, usually at the end of the afternoon. Jackson invariably accompanied him. And, while Sheridan gazed with an amused eye upon the wooing of Thora by the cowboy—for there was no mistaking the thrall laid upon Red by the Amazon, who appeared none too eager to respond beyond friendship—he did not turn that eyesight inwards nor consider that he might be rowing in the same boat with Jackson. His project held him.
Goats, the beginning of a lusty Angora herd, appeared from Pioche. Fruit trees were set out. The place was well managed. The goats were fenced off in sections with movable hog fencing, set to eat the brush and fertilize the land for better crops. And the two women did it alone. They would not hear of help from the Circle S.
"When we can afford to hire a hand, we may do so," said Mary Burrows definitely, as they sat one evening after supper on their favorite perch, a saddle between two fanglike crags, overlooking the mesa at sunset. "But until we do so we shall get along by ourselves. Are we not doing well?"
"Excellently, but—"
"That, sir, is a forbidden word in the Hidden Homestead. We have eliminated another, distinctly feminine—'because'—or I would use it to end the argument. Tell me about the project."
"Don't you want to open your letters?" Sheridan had been to Pioche on business and had brought back two letters from the General Delivery, despite the girl's assertion that she did not expect any mail.
She produced them from the pocket of her gown.
"One is not important," she laughed. "I would like to look at the other."
She showed him the one, an advertisement from Pioche's biggest store, an announcement of a Grand Millinery Opening with styles direct from Paris and New York.
"I'd look well wearing a Paris hat and gown up here, wouldn't I?" she asked him with a flash of the small, perfect teeth in the smile that he had become so eager to provoke. And he fell to wondering just how well she would look in such furbelows.
She handed him the other communication with a little cry of joy.
"Our furniture has come—at last," she said. "Now we can have a little home that will seem real. You will like some of the things."
It was always the unselfish "we," he noticed. Thora was always included equally. Mary Burrows was a true democrat.
"I'm sending over to Pioche," he said, "to-morrow. The team will be coming back with an empty wagon. Can't I bring them?"
"No, sir. It's all arranged for and paid for."
"But they'll have to be toted up through the tunnel."
"Have you any one more capable of doing that than Thora? Besides, I intend to have them all arranged as a surprise party for you. When we are ready I'll send you the first heliographic invitation. I've been practicing and I can send—isn't that the term?—quite well."
"I haven't seen any flashes." It was an acknowledgment that he had been watching, hoping perhaps, for some message and she flushed a trifle.
"I've been sending them across the valley, not the mesa. I won't have you laughing at my jerky trials. And you are not going to have anything to do with my house-moving arrangements, only to admire the result."
"It is an order." He admired her independence. It was an essential part of her.
"And here is another. How about the project? How does it go?"
He launched into it. His disappointments diminished as he spoke. Now and then she put in a word of approval, of understanding.
"I dream far ahead, you see," he said. "Too far, except for a dream, perhaps. But ultimately I hope to do away with the commission men, perhaps to establish our own markets. Fair profits and fair prices."
"You will have to be a dictator, if what you say about the cattlemen of Chico Mesa is not tinged with essimism."
"Oh, there are enough good men to form our own board and committees. The rest will join the procession when they see their own benefit. But it will take a lot of money."
"And you will not admit Capital. You mustn't ignore it. Can you?"
"It can't be ignored. But I hope to do without it. Capital is all right. Here is the way I look at it, in my scheme of socialism. Capital has its uses. It must be used for world development. But it has got into the wrong hands in many instances. It came out of the land. It is as much a product of the soil as wheat, cattle. It is the fluid that floats enterprise. But, instead of being a living stream, an artery of the body civic, it has got into pools, been impounded. Those who control it want too much for the use of it. The ratio is false. Most of the owners never earned it. Therefore they set a false value on it.
"Of course there are not many places like Chico Mesa where the country can provide everything for its own development. But, if we do it, others may see their way."
"A good thing, that is an unselfish thing," she said softly, "is bound to succeed. That is Progress, isn't it? And it can't be stopped."
He straightened his shoulders.
"No, it can't be stopped. The deserts must go. And the semi-deserts. Of course my horizons are limited. I am a cattleman and I do not vex myself with problems outside my personal touch and comprehension. But the principle is true."
"How about labor? Isn't it sadly twisted? Will the same principle work?"
"I don't pretend to know. I am a bit of a specialist in my way, after all. But this is how I look at that. Perhaps we have really all got to come back to the soil, to begin over again, after some terrible revolution. Yet it would not be progress to demolish all that has been done in labor-saving devices, to crush manufacture and commerce.
"But, there are forty million farmers to four million labormen. The latter are organized. The farmers are beginning to think about it. They have been ignored too long in great national questions. Like the coal strike. They have yet to begin to know their own strength. And they can begin right. When they organize they must do it fairly to all. They must have sympathy extending beyond the mere scale of their produce to the consumer. They can live well themselves and help others to live well by giving them their best at a fair rate. They are still the backbone of the nation. They can eliminate the middlemen, they can show that they are fair. They can slay the Big Dragon—Graft!"
"A farmer President?" she queried.
"Why not? It takes as much brains to run a big holding, agricultural, horticultural, cattle, horses, sheep, to run it right, as it does any other enterprise. He would have the votes behind him."
"Women's votes as well as the men's. It is growing dark. Shall we go back for some music before you leave? I like these talks," she went on as they walked towards the cabin where a light showed that Thora and Jackson were awaiting them. "It makes me feel as if I were a part of the big world of people, as if there were something I could do,
"I" said the sparrow,
"With my bow and arrow."
meaning suffrage and my vote. Not that I exactly want to be called a suffragist. I wish they had coined another title."
"I don't think they coined it themselves. It was wished on them. And I don't think you will become an extremist."
"No. Natural ways are best. The mills of the gods, grinding slowly but exceeding fine. How Dame Nature must laugh at us ants, trying to upset the world, scurrying to and fro, yet accomplishing something, after all. As you will accomplish. For you will find a way, I am sure of it."
"Why?"
She glanced at him in the dusk and her voice made him tingle.
"Because you are that kind of a man. And Fortune favors the brave."
"Then you ought to make a wonderful success of the Hidden Homestead," he replied.
The notes of Thora's violin greeted them and they went in to see her big but lissome figure swaying to her music, the fiddle tucked up under her strongly rounded chin, nestled on her capacious bosom, Jackson smoking a cigarette by permission, watching every move as a child might watch a magician.
"How are you getting along with Thora, Red?" Sheridan asked him on their way back.
"I ain't gittin'," said Jackson with a whimsical glumness. "She allows I've never yit growed up."
"She's never seen you in action, Red."
"No, that's a fact." His tone was more hopeful. "How you gittin' along, Pete Sheridan?"
There was no suggestion of impertinence in the query. It would have been a strange one, back East, between master and man, Sheridan reflected. Out here it was between man and man—and better so.
"We're getting to be pretty good chums. Red," he answered.
"That's fine. They're sure two fine wimmen."
"They are. And it seems up to you and me. Red, to look out for them, as much as they'll allow us to do so. Want to go into a partnership on that?"
"You needn't draw the papers," Jackson drawled. "I'm hired on that job already."
Another half mile and he flung away his cigarette and cleared his throat. Sheridan waited expectantly, riding easily to the mare's elastic gait. He had not been obliged to come West to become a horseman. And he wondered what the song would be. When Jackson sang, all was well with his world. But it would surely be a minor strain, in inverse ratio to Red's inner mood. So it came.
As I walked down the streets of Laredo,
As I walked out in Laredo one day,
I spied a poor cowboy wrapt up in white linen,
All wrapt up in linen as white as the day.
Oh, beat the drum slowly and play the fife lowly,
Play the Dead March as you bear me along;
Down to the green valley and lay the sod o'er me,
For I'm a young cowboy what knows he done wrong.