“There is no use talking, Bet,” her brother pursued in an argumentative way, thoughtfully staring at the letter again. “There is no use talking. Joe has it right. We are vegetating here. Most people in towns like this, here in the East, might honestly be classified among the flora rather than the fauna. We’re like rows of cabbages in a kitchen garden.”
“Why, Ford!”
He grinned up at her – a suddenly recalled grimace of his boyhood.
“There speaks the cabbage, Bet! We’re all alike – or most of us are. Here in the old Commonwealth I mean. We’re afraid to step aside from the rutted path, to accept a new idea; really afraid to be and live out each his own individuality.
“Ah! Out in this place Joe writes about – ”
He fingered the sheets of the letter again. She watched with the slow fading of all animation from her face – just as though a veil were drawn across it by invisible fingers. Her expression was not so much one of disapproval – her eyes held something entirely different in their depths. Was it fear?
“This Canyon Pass is a real field for a man’s efforts,” burst out Hunt with sudden exasperation. “I tell you, Bet, I feel as though my usefulness here had evaporated. I haven’t a thing in common with these people. Carping criticism and little else confronts me whichever way I turn.”
“You – you are nervous, Ford.”
“Nerves! What right has a man like me with nerves?” he demanded hotly.
“But, Ford – your work here?”
“Is a failure. Oh, yes. I can see better than you do, Bet – more clearly – that I have lost my grip on these people.”
“Surely there are other churches in the East that would welcome a man of your talents.”
“Aye! Another little hard-baked community in which I shall find exactly the elements that have made my pastorate here a failure.”
“You are not a failure!” she cried loyally.
“That’s nice of you, Bet. You are a mighty good sister. But I am letting you in for a share of the very difficulties that would soon put gray in my hair and a stone in my bosom instead of a heart.”
“Oh, Ford!”
“Out there – in some place like this Joe writes about – would be a new and unplowed field. A place where a man could develop – grow, not vegetate.”
“But – but must it necessarily be the West, Ford? I am not fond of the West.”
“You’ve never seen it.”
“I’m not fond of Western people.”
He looked at her with a dawning smile. “You’re afraid of them, Bet.”
“Yes. I am afraid of them,” whispered his sister, turning her face away from his gaze. “They are not our kind, Ford.”
“That’s exactly it,” he cried, smiting the desk with the flat of his palm. “We need to get out into the world, among people who are just as different from ‘our kind,’ as you term them, as possible. There we can expand. Out in Canyon Pass. I believe I could be a real help to that community. What is it Joe says?” He glanced again at the letter before him. “Yes! I might dig down to the very heart of Canyon Pass. Ditson Corners has merely a pumping station to circulate the blood of the community, patterned after the one at the reservoir on Knob Hill.”
She did not speak again. When Hunt looked around she had stolen from the room.
“Poor Bet!” he muttered. “The idea of change alarms her as it might have alarmed Aunt Prudence. Joe Hurley is right – he’s right beyond a doubt!”
CHAPTER III – A SHADOW THROWN BEFORE
A rider had his choice in journeying to Canyon Pass from a southerly direction – say from Lamberton, which lies between the railroad and the desert – of following the river trail to be deafened by the boisterous voice of the flood, or of climbing to the high lands and there jogging along the wagon track which finally dipped down the steeps to the ford of the West Fork and so into the mining town.
Spring was drifting into the background of the year. The cottonwood leaves were the size of squirrel ears. The new fronds of the piñon had expanded to full size and now their needles quivered in the heat of the almost summer-like day. Joe Hurley, sitting his heavy-haunched bay, giving as easily to the animal’s paces as a sack of meal, followed the wagon track rather than the river trail and so came to that fork where wheel-ruts from a westerly direction joined the road along the brink of the canyon wall.
A cream-colored pony came cantering along the trail from Hoskins, its rider as gaily dressed as a Mexican vaquero – a splotch of color against the background of the evergreens almost startling to his vision. But it was the identity of this rider that invigorated the tone of the mining man’s reflections.
“Nell Blossom! The only sure-enough cure for ophthalmia! Am I going to have the pleasure of being your escort back to Canyon Pass? It will sure do me proud. The Passonians are honing for you, Nell.”
“I’m going back to the Pass – yes, Mr. Hurley,” she said, pulling down her pony to the more sedate pace of his big bay.
“Where you been since you left us all in the lurch? There was almost a riot at the Grub Stake when Tolley found out you had gone.”
“Boss Tolley hasn’t got anything on me,” she said defensively. “I’d never sing there again, anyway.”
“Somebody said you’d lit out for the desert with Steve Siebert and Andy McCann,” and he chuckled. “They started the same day you vamoosed.”
“I might just as well have gone with those old desert rats. Pocket hunting couldn’t be much worse than Hoskins.”
“Great saltpeter! What took you to Hoskins?” exclaimed Hurley. “Where’s your local pride? If you weren’t born at Canyon Pass, you’ve lived there most of your life. You shouldn’t encourage a dump like Hoskins to believe for a moment that it has greater attractions than the Pass.”
“If I thought it might be more attractive, I learned better,” she said shortly.
“Mother Tubbs got a letter from you, but she wouldn’t tell us where you were.”
“No,” Nell said. “I didn’t want the boys riding over there and starting a roughhouse at the Tin Can Saloon.”
“Great saltpeter!” exclaimed Hurley again. “You don’t mean to say you been caroling your roundelays in that place?”
“A girl has to work somewhere, and I was sick to death of the Grub Stake.”
“Boss Tolley is no pleasant citizen and his joint is no sweet-scented garden spot, I admit,” Hurley agreed. “Personally I’d like to see Tolley run out of town and the Grub Stake eliminated. But Colorado Brown has opened a new place and is going to run it right – so he says.”
“That’s what is bringing me back,” Nell confessed. “He got word to me by Mother Tubbs, and he made me a better offer than Tolley ever would. But I expect one cabaret is about like another in these roughneck towns.”
“I don’t know about that,” the man said defensively. “We mean to try to clean up Canyon Pass. The boys have got to have amusement. Colorado Brown is a white man, and, if he gets the backing of the better element, he can give a good show and sell better hootch and better grub than ever Boss Tolley dared to.”
“Hootch is hootch,” Nell interrupted. “It’s all bad. There’s nothing good about a rotten egg, Mr. Hurley. And the men’s money is wasted in all those places – plumb wasted!”
He had been watching her closely as they talked. He had been watching Nell closely, off and on, for several years. Like many of the other young and unattached men of Canyon Pass, Joe Hurley had at one time attempted to