CHAPTER XIX
THE CRAWLING STONE RISE
SO sudden was the onset of the river that the trained riders of the big ranch were taken completely aback, and hundreds of head of Dunning cattle were swept away before they could be removed to points of safety. Fresh alarms came with every hour of the day and night, and the telephones up and down the valley rang incessantly with appeals from neighbor to neighbor. Lance Dunning, calling out the reserves of his vocabulary, swore tremendously and directed the operations against the river. These seemed, indeed, to consist mainly of hard riding and hard language on the part of everybody. Murray Sinclair, although he had sold his ranch on the Crawling Stone and was concentrating his holdings on the Frenchman, was everywhere in evidence. He was the first at a point of danger and the last to ride away from the slipping acres where the muddy flood undercut; but no defiance seemed to disturb the Crawling Stone, which kept alarmingly at work.
Above the alfalfa lands on the long bench north of the house the river, in changing its course many years earlier, had left a depression known as Mud Lake. It had become separated from the main channel of the Crawling Stone by a high, narrow barrier in the form of a bench deposited by the receding waters of some earlier flood, and added to by sand-storms sweeping among the willows that overspread it. Without an effective head or definite system of work the efforts of the men at the Stone Ranch were of no more consequence than if they had spent their time in waving blankets at the river. Twenty men riding in together to tell Lance Dunning that the river was washing out the tree claims above Mud Lake made no perceptible difference in the event. Dicksie, though an inexperienced girl, saw with helpless clearness the futility of it all. The alarms and the continual failures of the army of able-bodied men directed by Sinclair and her cousin wore on her spirit. The river rose until each succeeding inch became a menace to the life and property of the ranch, and in the midst of it came the word that the river was cutting into the willows and heading for Mud Lake. All knew what that meant. If the Crawling Stone should take its old channel, not alone were the two square miles of alfalfa doomed: it would sweep away every vestige of the long stacks below the corrals, take the barns, and lap the slope in front of the ranch-house itself.
Terror seized Dicksie. She telephoned in her distress for Marion, begging her to come up before they should all be swept away; and Marion, turning the shop over to Katie Dancing, got into the ranch-wagon that Dicksie had sent and started for the Crawling Stone. The confusion along the river road as the wagon approached the ranch showed Marion the seriousness of the situation. Settlers driven from their homes in the upper valley formed almost a procession of misery-stricken people, making their way on horseback, on foot, and in wagons toward Medicine Bend. With them they were bringing all they had saved from the flood—the little bunch of cows, the wagonload of hogs, the household effects, the ponies—as if war or pestilence had struck the valley.
At noon Marion arrived. The ranch-house was deserted, and the men were all at the river. Puss stuck her head out of the kitchen window, and Dicksie ran out and threw herself into Marion’s arms. Late news from the front had been the worst: the cutting above Mud Lake had weakened the last barrier that held off the river, and every available man was fighting the current at that point.
Marion heard it all while eating a luncheon. Dicksie, beset with anxiety, could not stay in the house. The man that had driven Marion over, saddled horses in the afternoon and the two women rode up above Mud Lake, now become through rainfall and seepage from the river a long, shallow lagoon. For an hour they watched the shovelling and carrying of sandbags, and rode toward the river to the very edge of the disappearing willows, where the bank was melting away before the undercut of the resistless current. They rode away with a common feeling—a conviction that the fight was a losing one, and that another day would see the ruin complete.
“Dicksie,” exclaimed Marion—they were riding to the house as she spoke—“I’ll tell you what we can do!” She hesitated a moment. “I will tell you what we can do! Are you plucky?”
Dicksie looked at Marion pathetically.
“If you are plucky enough to do it, we can keep the river off yet. I have an idea. I will go, but you must come along.”
“Marion, what do you mean? Don’t you think I would go anywhere to save the ranch? I should like to know where you dare go in this country that I dare not!”
“Then ride with me over to the railroad camp by the new bridge. We will ask Mr. McCloud to bring some of his men over. He can stop the river; he knows how.”
Dicksie caught her breath. “Oh, Marion! that would do no good, even if I could do it. Why, the railroad has been all swept away in the lower valley.”
“How do you know?”
“So every one says.”
“Who is every one?”
“Cousin Lance, Mr. Sinclair—all the men. I heard that a week ago.”
“Dicksie, don’t believe it. You don’t know these railroad men. They understand this kind of thing; cattlemen, you know, don’t. If you will go with me we can get help. I feel just as sure that those men can control the river as I do that I am looking at you—that is, if anybody can. The question is, do you want to make the effort?”
They talked until they left the horses and entered the house. When they sat down, Dicksie put her hands to her face. “Oh, I wish you had said nothing about it! How can I go to him and ask for help now—after Cousin Lance has gone into court about the line and everything? And of course my name is in it all.”
“Dicksie, don’t raise spectres that have nothing to do with the case. If we go to him and ask him for help he will give it to us if he can; if he can’t, what harm is done? He has been up and down the river for three weeks, and he has an army of men camped over by the bridge. I know that, because Mr. Smith rode in from there a few days ago.”
“What, Whispering Smith? Oh, if he is there I would not go for worlds!”
“Pray, why not?”
“Why, he is such an awful man!”
“That is absurd, Dicksie.”
Dicksie looked grave. “Marion, no man in this part of the country has a good word to say for Whispering Smith.”
“Perhaps you have forgotten, Dicksie, that you live in a very rough part of the country,” returned Marion coolly. “No man that he has ever hunted down would have anything pleasant to say about him; nor would the friends of such a man be likely to say a good word of him. There are many on the range, Dicksie, that have no respect for life or law or anything else, and they naturally hate a man like Whispering Smith”
“But, Marion, he killed”
“I know. He killed a man named Williams a few years ago, while you were at school—one of the worst men that ever infested this country. Williams Cache is named after that man; he made the most beautiful spot in all these mountains a nest of thieves and murderers. But did you know that Williams shot down Gordon Smith’s only brother, a trainmaster, in cold blood in front of the Wickiup at Medicine Bend? No, you never heard that in this part of the country, did you? They had a cow-thief for sheriff then, and no officer in Medicine Bend would go after the murderer. He rode in and out of town as if he owned it, and no one dared say a word, and, mind you, Gordon Smith’s brother had never seen the man in his life until he walked up and shot him dead. Oh, this was a peaceful country a few years ago! Gordon Smith was right-of-way man in the mountains then. He buried his brother, and asked the officers what they were going to do about getting the murderer. They laughed at him. He made no protest, except to ask for a deputy United States marshal’s commission. When he got it he started for Williams Cache after Williams in a buckboard—think of it, Dicksie—and didn’t they laugh at him! He did not even know the trails, and imagine riding two hundred miles in a buckboard to arrest a man in the mountains! He was gone six weeks, and came back with Williams’s body strapped to the buckboard behind him. He never told the story; all he said when he handed in his commission and went back to his work was that the man was killed in a fair fight. Hate him! No wonder they hate him—the Williams Cache gang and all their friends on the range! Your cousin thinks it policy to placate that element, hoping that they won’t steal your cattle if you are friendly with them. I know nothing about that, but I do know something about Whispering Smith. It will be a bad day for Williams Cache when they start him up again. But what has that to do with your trouble? He will not eat you up if you go to the camp, Dicksie. You are just raising bogies.”
They had moved to the front porch and Marion was sitting in the rocking-chair. Dicksie stood with her back against one of the pillars and looked at her. As Marion finished Dicksie turned and, with her hand on her forehead, looked in wretchedness of mind out on the valley. As far, in many directions, as the eye could reach the waters spread yellow in the flood of sunshine across the lowlands. There was a moment of silence. Dicksie turned her back on the alarming sight. “Marion, I can’t do it!”
“Oh, yes, you can if you want to, Dicksie!” Dicksie looked at her with tearless eyes. “It is only a question of being plucky enough,” insisted Marion.
“Pluck has nothing to do with it!” exclaimed Dicksie in fiery tones. “I should like to know why you are always talking about my not having courage! This isn’t a question of courage. How can I go to a man that I talked to as I talked to him in your house and ask for help? How can I go to him after my cousin has threatened to kill him, and gone into court to prevent his coming on our land? Shouldn’t I look beautiful asking help from him?”
Marion rocked with perfect composure. “No, dear, you would not look beautiful asking help, but you would look sensible. It is so easy to be beautiful and so hard to be sensible.”
“You are just as horrid as you can be, Marion Sinclair!”
“I know that, too, dear. All I wanted to say is that you would look very sensible just now in asking help from Mr. McCloud.”
“I don’t care—I won’t do it. I will never do it, not if every foot of the ranch tumbles into the river. I hope it will! Nobody cares anything about me. I have no friends but thieves and outlaws.”
“Dicksie!” Marion rose.
“That is what you said.”
“I did not. I am your friend. How dare you call me names?” demanded Marion, taking the petulant girl in her arms. “Don’t you think I care anything about you? There are people in this country that you have never seen who know you 178 and love you almost as much as I do. Don’t let any silly pride prevent your being sensible, dear.” Dicksie burst into tears. Marion drew her over to the settee, and she had her cry out. When it was over they changed the subject. Dicksie went to her room. It was a long time before she came down again, but Marion rocked in patience: she was resolved to let Dicksie fight it out herself.
When Dicksie came down, Marion stood at the foot of the stairs. The young mistress of Crawling Stone Ranch descended step by step very slowly. “Marion,” she said simply, “I will go with you.”