He had felt no little anxiety when, with the usual spring exodus of the two old desert rats, Steve Siebert and Andy McCann, Nell and Dick Beckworth had likewise disappeared from the Grub Stake. Dick, of course, had settled with Boss Tolley; he intimated that he was starting north for the railroad at Crescent City. The hour had been so early that nobody else had chanced to see the gambler and the girl ride away. Nell was missed later, and all the right thinking men of the town, although they said little, feared the worst for Nell Blossom.
Nell had displayed at the last some little interest in Dick the Devil. The other girls at the Grub Stake gossiped about it.
Then came Mother Tubbs with a bona-fide letter from the girl to dam the flood of gossip. Nell was working as usual in a cabaret. She had left Boss Tolley because she could not stand him any longer. She was bitter about the Grub Stake and its proprietor. And not a word in the letter about Dick Beckworth. It was plain, even to the most suspicious, that Dick had not gone with her after all.
These few facts colored Joe Hurley’s thoughts as they rode along the track. What colored Nell’s?
When the sprightly talk lapsed between them, the girl’s face fell into unhappy lines. She who had been as blithe as a field lark all her life was showing to Joe Hurley for the first time a most unnatural soberness of spirit. Her eyes, their gaze fixed straight ahead, were filmed with remoteness that his friendly glance could not penetrate.
Something had changed Nell Blossom. She was no longer the happy-go-lucky girl she had been heretofore. He wondered if, after all, her affair with Dick Beckworth was serious.
They skirted the Overhang, their horses now at a canter. Nell suddenly pulled in her mount at a place where a patch along the brink of the treacherous cap had recently crumbled.
“Looks as if there might have been a small slide,” observed Hurley cheerfully.
“Was – was anybody hurt?”
“Reckon not. Just about where the big slide was years ago. There are always bits dropping down this cliff. I tell ’em there’s bound to be another landslip some time that will play hob with Runaway River and maybe flood out the town again. It’s like living over a volcano.”
Nell still looked back at the broken edge of the cliff. “Nobody missing, then? Nobody – er – left town?”
He laughed. “Nobody but you and old Steve and Andy McCann. Those old desert rats lit out the same morning you left town. Hold on! I don’t know as you know it; but Dick Beckworth went about that time. He’s gone to Denver, so Tolley says, to deal faro at a big place there.”
He could not see the girl’s face. As far as he knew the statement made no impression upon her. They jogged on practically in silence until they came to the point where the wagon-track plunged steeply to the ford of the West Fork, and from which spot the squalid town was first visible.
“Ugh!” Nell shuddered and glanced at Joe again. “It is such an ugly place.”
“Where’s your civic pride, Nell?” and the other chuckled.
“What is there to be proud of?” was her sharp demand.
“It’s a money-making town.”
“Money!”
“Quite a necessary evil, that same money,” he rejoined. “Gold is a good foundation to build a town upon. Canyon Pass has ‘got a future in front of it,’ as the feller said. Business is booming. Bank deposits are increasing. Three families have bought piano-players, and there are at least a dozen talking machines in town – besides the female citizens,” and he laughed again.
“All that?” in a sneering tone. “Still, the bulk of the wages from the mines and washings are spent for drink and in gambling. The increase in bank deposits I bet are made by the merchants and honkytonk keepers, Mr. Hurley. Canyon Pass is prosperous – yes. But at the expense of everything decent and everybody’s decency. Mother Tubbs has got it right. Canyon Pass hasn’t got a heart.”
“Oh – heart!”
“Yes, heart. There’s neither law nor gospel, she says. Only such law as is enforced at the muzzle of the sheriff’s gun. And as far as religion goes – when was there ever a parson in Canyon Pass?”
“They’re rare birds, I admit. But you needn’t blame me, Nell.”
“I do blame you!” she exclaimed fiercely. “You’re at fault – you, and Slickpenny Norris who runs the bank, and Bill Judson of the Three Star, and the manager of the Oreode Company, and the other more influential men. It is your fault that there isn’t a church and other civilized things in Canyon Pass.”
“Great saltpeter, Nell! You’re not wailing for a Sunday School and a sky pilot?”
“Me? I reckon not!” She almost spat out the scornful denial. “I’m just telling you what your old Canyon Pass is. It’s a back number. But I’m free to confess if a parson and a crew of psalm-singing tenderfoots came here, I’d like enough pull my freight again – and that time for keeps! Even Hoskins would be more endurable.”
At this outburst Joe Hurley broke into laughter. Nell Blossom was paradoxical – had always been.
And yet, what Nell had said about the shortcomings of Canyon Pass stuck in Joe Hurley’s mind. Within a few days the thought, fermenting within him, resulted in that letter which had so interested – not to say excited – the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt in far-away Ditson Corners.
CHAPTER IV – PHILOSOPHY BOUND IN HOMESPUN
“No, there ain’t no news – no news a-tall,” declared Mrs. Sam Tubbs, comfortably rocking. “Nothing ever happens in Canyon Pass. For a right busy town on its main street, there’s less happens in the back alleys than in any camp I ever seen – and I seen a-plenty.
“It’s in the back alleys o’ life, Nell, that the interesting things happen. Folks buy and sell, and argue and scheme, and otherwise play the fool out on the main streets. But in the alleys babies is born, and people die, and boys and gals make love and marry. Them’s the re’lly interesting things in life.”
“Ugh! Love and marriage! They are the biggest fool things the world knows anything about.”
Mother Tubbs chuckled. It was an unctuous chuckle. It shook her great body like a violent explosion in a jelly-bag and made the wide-armed rocking-chair she sat in creak.
“Sho!” she said. “I’ve heard seventeen-year-old gals say as much ’fore now, who dandled their second young-un on their knee ’fore they was twenty. The things we’re least sure of in this world is love and marriage. Lightning ain’t nothin’ to ’em – nothin’!
“Now, there’s Mr. Joe Hurley – ”
Nell started, turned on the top step of the Tubbs’ back porch, and looked searchingly at the old woman with a frown on her brow.
“Now, there’s Mr. Joe Hurley,” pursued Mother Tubbs placidly. “There ain’t a thing the matter with that man but that he needs a wife.”
“Why doesn’t he take one, then?” demanded Nell wickedly. “There are plenty of them around here whose husbands don’t seem to care anything about them.”
“Like me and my Sam, heh?” put forth Mother Tubbs, still amused. “But I reckon if Mr. Joe Hurley, or any other man, should attempt to run away with me, Sam would go gunning for him. What they call the ‘first law of Nater’ – which is the sense of possession, not self-preservation – would probably get to working in Sam’s mind.
“He’d get to thinking of my flapjacks and chicken-with-fixin’s and his bile would rise ’gainst the man – no matter who – who was enjoying them victuals.
“Oh, yes. Not only is the way to a man’s heart through his stomach; but believe me, Nell, most men are like those people the Bible speaks of ‘whose god is their