The Exile of The Lariat/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI
BIG FANG
HE had reason to add to this respect when a little later the Utilities Commission postponed decision on the Thumb Butte charter until fall.
From Easter on to the fall elections Hugh gave all his time to the fight. He turned The Lariat over to Principal Jones’s care. Afraid of Fred Allward’s capacity for getting into trouble, he sent the old miner out on a long prospecting trip that should cover the northern extreme of that section of the Old Sioux Tract which the building of the dam would cause the river to inundate. Fred departed under strict orders to confine himself only to prospecting and to curb his ambition to exhume the fossils himself. Jessie went back to the ranch, in what capacity Hugh neither knew nor asked.
It was early summer when Miriam appeared in Fort Sioux. She had not written Hugh of her proposed visit, and she chose a dramatic moment for her arrival.
There was no telephone in The Lariat. Mrs. Ellis and Mrs. Morgan, with half a dozen of the faithful, had been sitting for hours at the telephone in the Indian Massacre. Now, radiant with the bigness of their news, they were moving in a solid phalanx on Hugh in The Lariat. It was not yet dusk though the sun had set. Hugh, standing at the rear window, his back to the river, saw the group of women’s faces as in a glory, flushed and uplifted by the tender warmth of the afterglow. He stepped forward to meet them.
Mrs. Ellis left the group and holding out her hand said, “You are the Fusion nominee for governor, Hughie.”
It was at this moment that Miriam came in at the open door. At first no one saw her. Hugh, in laughing reply to the women’s congratulations, saw Mrs. Morgan’s sudden scowl and looked up to behold the woman he loved standing at the edge of the group. He turned very white.
“Ah! Miriam!” he said in a voice that no woman there was to forget, and clasped the slender gloved hand held out to him. “Mrs. Ellis,” he said, “this is Miss Page, of Boston.”
Mrs. Ellis bowed and stood in silence while Hugh made the other introductions. No one offered to shake hands with Miriam. No one spoke when introduced. It was Mrs. Morgan who made the first attack.
“You are here for the summer, Miss Page?”
“No, Mrs. Morgan I am on a business trip to Seattle, and I’ve stopped over for a few days to congratulate Hugh on his success as a politician.”
“I'm no politician!” exclaimed Hugh. “Here are the politicians!” He included the group in a gesture.
“Are there no men?” asked Miriam.
As if in answer to her query, Principal Jones strolled in. He shook hands with Hugh, then with Miriam.
“Come out to help, Miss Page?” he asked.
“If I can, in the few days of my stay,” answered Miriam.
Principal Jones nodded and turned to Hugh. “The men over at the barber shop are about torn in two. They hate you for your attitude on Thumb Butte. But they’d like to have it appear as if they had some influence in getting a Fort Sioux man nominated for governor of the state. So far, hate has won.”
“Has it really gone that far, Hughie?” asked Miriam. “You wrote me that the town had deserted you, but I didn’t realize all that that meant.”
“Oh, I’m reconciled to being deserted by the men,” replied Hug. “The best citizens of the town have stuck by me,” nodding at the group of women.
“I can see that!” agreed Miriam readily. “But the men ought to back you, too.”
“The finest men in Wyoming—the ranchers—are backing him,” said Mrs. Ellis, suddenly. “Fort Sioux doesn’t happen to be a ranchers’ town.”
“I see!” Miriam’s tone carried relief.
“No, you don’t see!” exclaimed Mrs. Morgan, speaking with an exasperation she found impossible to control. “You don’t see that your presence in Wyoming at this particular time is enough to lose Hughie the election.”
Hugh flushed and lifted his head angrily, but before he could speak there was a sudden blare of horns without and Johnny Parnell burst into the room.
“Hail, Governor! Come out and meet the cattlemen. Been gathering all day. Come out, old Gray Stallion!”
He threw his arm excitedly around Hugh’s shoulders and rushed him out to the door-step. Flames were rising from a bonfire in the street. By its light, Hugh beheld men’s faces turned up to his; many, many faces. They filled the street. For a moment the blare of horns was all. Then a voice shouted:
“Three cheers for the Gray Stallion! Hip! Hip! Hooray!”
The uproar reverberated from the canyon wall in an echo of ear-splitting intensity.
“Hey, governor, tell us the truth!” cried some one when the echo had subsided. “Who gets the gray stallion when the fight is over?”
“We’ll turn him into a fossil and stand him in Pink Morgan’s corral as a consolation prize!” shouted a voice.
There was huge laughter and more cheers. A prolonged singing of “Hail! Hail! the gang’s all here!” Then the demand for a speech.
Hugh standing erect in the doorway, his face a little thinner, a little more weary than ever, features blocked out in heavy shadow and crimson light, hesitated in the silence that followed the demand. He was more deeply moved by this ovation than any he had received during the months of speechmaking. On the outskirts of the crowd of men who wore proudly on the lapels of their coats a little button bearing a gray horse head, he distinguished the faces of his fellow townsmen, disapproving faces, it seemed to Hugh, even in the warming glow of the fire. And a pang of regret darkened the happiness of the moment. Then he gathered himself together.
“I can’t talk about anything but fossils, you know!” he said, clearly. “I’m nothing but what our political enemies call me, a bone digger—I—” a man’s voice interrupted:
“Gosh! And I been backing you for a stallion!—a thoroughbred gray at that!”
“Three cheers for the thoroughbred!” roared another voice.
The cheers were given. Hugh raised his hand for silence and went on, “It doesn’t matter what I am. What does matter is what I can see and get you to see. All that I want to do is to make you view Wyoming as my Uncle Bookie did, here from this door-step. He saw Wyoming men and women as a breed different from other states because our plains and mountains make them so. He knew that folks born of such country as this had a chance to be bigger in mind and body than folks of lesser states. He knew that they had not only the chance but the obligation to be bigger. And he saw them failing to be so. It hurt the old man.” He paused, then went on slowly:
“I wish you all could have seen Wyoming as I have been seeing it these many months, from beneath the wings of the Dinosaur. The plains spread out in purple glory, infinite in extent, yet melting always into mountain ranges that the Dinosaur must wing to the very stars to crest, mountain range after range, white topped, gold and green flanked, endless, boundless, yet bounded always by purple plains Wyoming! It belongs to the eagles, and we have been seeking to give it to the coyote pack.”
Hugh bowed, then went down into the moved and applauding crowd.
It was nearly ten o’clock when he returned to The Lariat. Miriam was sitting alone, her chin in her palm. She rose and came rapidly to Hugh’s side.
“Hughie! I never thought what my coming might do to you. You’ve told me nothing. Has there been scandal and talk, and has it hurt your cause?”
Hugh hesitated. Miriam did not wait for him to reply but went on a little breathlessly:
“Don’t try to answer. Of course, it’s been awful for you! Hughie, is that why you look so terribly worn?”
“I don’t think so, Miriam. You see, politics is hard on those who like it. And I don’t like it. I’ve been sweating blood to make myself carry on. So it’s doubly hard on me. But it’s worth it.”
Tears welled to her eyes. “I don’t care what it does to other people. But not to you. Your dear face! O Hughie! Hughie! What have I done to you!”
Women’s voices sounded without the open door, and Mrs. Ellis came in, followed by Jessie.
“Hughie,” said Mrs. Ellis, “I’ve persuaded Jessie to come in—to save the situation in the eyes of the public.”
Crimson-faced, Miriam turned to the gray-haired veteran of politics. “Mrs. Ellis, I shall go at”
“I don’t care to talk to you,” then turning to Jessie, “Do you want me to stay, Jessie?”
Jessie, tall, calm, strong and tanned, smiled slightly. “We shall do very well without you, Mrs. Ellis. You’d better go to bed. Telephone to the ranch, will you, as to my whereabouts?”
Mrs. Ellis nodded and went out. Jessie turned to Miriam. “I’m sorry to intrude, Miss Page. But I guess this is best—that is, if you and Hughie sincerely want the Gray Stallion to win.”
Hugh looked from one woman to another, uneasy and bewildered. For once in her life, Miriam’s finesse failed her. She spoke abruptly. “What is the first train I can get, west?”
“There is nothing out of here tonight. The Limited goes through the junction at two in the morning, but that won’t help you any. The junction is a hundred miles west of here,” replied Jessie.
“How about the airplane?” asked Miriam.
“Marten has gone up to Cheyenne,” replied Hugh. “Don’t be in too much of a hurry, Miriam.”
“There’s every reason in the world to hurry,” returned Miriam, looking at Jessie, who nodded.
“I have a suggestion to make; Hughie, you’re a fairly good airman now, they say. Let’s make a spectacle. You drive Miss Page and me to the junction. Nobody has gone to bed in Fort Sioux except perhaps Mrs. Ellis. It ought to shut people’s mouths for this once.”
Without a word, Hugh jerked on his leather coat and cap. “I’ll be ready in half an hour,” he said, and strode out.
“You’ve let him in for a sweet situation,” Jessie’s voice was contemptuous.
“Well, and I’m suffering for it, am I not?” asked Miriam sharply.
“Not enough or as much as he will later,” replied Jessie. “Come over to the hotel and I’ll give you some warm clothes.”
“Thank you,” said Miriam stiffly. “I have extra things. In my suitcase here.”
There was, as Jessie had surmised there would be, a large and interested audience on the great open space by the bridge where Hugh now parked the Dinosaur.
“What, you too, Jessie?” called Billy Chamberlain.
“Me? Didn’t you know Hughie was going to teach me to drive this pet stone bird of his, Billy? We’re going to take Miss Page to make the Limited at the junction, and then I’m to have my first lesson.”
Jessie’s lazy voice was lost in the sudden whirr of the propeller.
There was no moon, but the stars were brilliant. Hugh, teeth set over the seething caldron within him, lifted the Dinosaur in the familiar proud spiral until the river and the black canyon rim were only vague traceries below; then he turned westward.
This, above all, he had not wanted, that Miriam should in any way be made to feel humiliated. She was of such fine stuff, so straight, so eager, so proud! He could not bear to feel that any sense of shame had touched her. Yet how utterly stupid, how entirely helpless he had been! The thing had been done, and Jessie in saving the situation had added the very peak of pain to Miriam’s humiliation. He recognized Jessie’s generosity fully and was only the angrier for its ease and fineness.
He lifted the Dinosaur above the mesas, above the fast flying ramparts of the White Wolves, among whose peaks as always clouds were drifting. The clouds were thick and high tonight. Hugh and Marten had not made many night trips; never across the White Wolves except in the brilliant light of day. He sent the Dinosaur up and up until the cold was piercing, and he dared expose the two women no further. Still the clouds persisted. He drove with a vague sense of bewilderment now. No stars above. No earth below. Only the thick white vapor, stultifying, saturating.
Jessie touched his arm and shouted in his ear. “Miriam is fainting with the cold and elevation.”
Elevation! Cold did not matter so much, but the elevation was getting her. He began as cautiously as might be to nose downward. He believed that he must by now be well past the crest of the Wolves and that it was safe to venture beneath the vast continent of clouds. The Dinosaur dropped out of the clouds as suddenly as it had entered them. It was very dark. Suddenly something huge, blacker than the night itself, loomed before them Hugh reversed his engine. The plane crashed into the upward slope of the peak, ran with decreasing speed up and up, crashed into a wall and half turning slid downward. The engine stopped.
They brought up in utter blackness. The accident had come with unbelievable swiftness. At one moment they had been thundering through white space. The next, they had dropped into black silence. Hugh had been thrown violently against the side of the cockpit at the moment of the crash into the wall, but except for this the descent and stop had been gentle enough.
“Either of you hurt?” cried Hugh.
“I guess not,” replied Jessie dubiously.
“I’m all right,” said Miriam; “at least I can breathe here.”
“Neither of you stir while I look about,” Hugh prepared with infinite caution to investigate their whereabouts.
His right arm was useless, but he managed his pocket flash with his left hand. The machine was caught on a ledge above a canyon on whose depths the flashlight made no impression; and for all its charmed nine lives the Dinosaur was lying so precariously balanced that Hugh shuddered with fear for the two women. He dared not keep them in ignorance of their danger, and implored them to crawl out with breathless care. It seemed a thousand years to him before they were panting on the ledge beside him.
For a few moments no one spoke; then Hugh said, “The clouds seem to be breaking and we’ll have a chance to locate ourselves. This ledge is very narrow. Don’t move about without using the flash.”
“What is holding the Dinosaur up?” asked Jessie.
“Some freak of balance and the devilish luck that pursues her,” replied Hugh. “I could write a book on what she’s done to Marten’s and my nerves this summer.”
“What shall we do?” queried Miriam.
“As soon as there is more light, I’ll try to get away for help,” answered Hugh.
“Can’t we relaunch the Dinosaur?” asked Jessie.
“There’s no take-off here,” Hugh winced with pain as he spoke. He thought his arm must be broken. “I don’t want to smash the old bird up. She’s trump card for the Gray Stallion—and I’m fond of her for herself, hang her.”
“Have you any idea of where we are, Hughie?” Miriam’s voice sounded forlorn, and he reached out to touch her knee comfortingly.
“I have an idea we’re sitting on the shoulder of Big Fang, the highest peak of the White Wolves. If that’s true we’re twenty bad miles from help at Heckle’s ranch. But there’s no danger at all. There’s a couple of days’ grub in the Dinosaur. I’ll leave you girls here and make Heckle’s in a few hours.”
“We’d better all go together,” said Jessie.
“Don’t be foolish,” exclaimed Hugh. “Miriam couldn’t make that trip.”
“If you think I’ll stay on this ledge alone for two days with Miriam Page, you—well, you misjudge how I feel about things. I’d rather go on myself and leave you two here, only that would undo what I’ve tried to accomplish.” Jessie’s voice, disembodied in the darkness, sounded curiously bitter. Her hearers knew that she was not smiling and at ease now.
“It’s an impossible situation!” ejaculated Miriam.
“Exactly!” replied Jessie.
Hugh rose His arm was hurting him intolerably.
“Where are you going, Hughie?” demanded Jessie.
“I’m going to start!”
“Don’t be a fool. That’s suicide in this darkness. If you go, I go,” Jessie rose.
“I think that’s the answer,” said Miriam quietly. “Both of you go, leaving me here. No harm can come to me.”
“I’d not think of it!” Hugh sat down abruptly. “There is no immediate hurry. We’ll wait until daylight.”
In the darkness, he could vaguely discern that Jessie had seated herself at the edge of the ledge, close to the Dinosaur. Miriam was leaning against the wall of the mountain, some distance from either of them. Silence fell. Hugh managed to get his pipe going, and clasping the elbow of his injured arm firmly in his left hand, he gave himself over to contemplation that was scarcely less painful than his injury.
He would not permit himself to feel that he had done wrong to any one in allowing his love for Miriam to be frankly expressed. But he was coming to a full realization of the truth of Mrs. Ellis’ statement that a man in public life in America must live his private life conventionally or else be willing to face situations such as he had faced this evening in The Lariat. For himself he did not care. He sincerely believed that the bigness of the love he and Miriam felt for each other was full justification for itself. But he had discovered this evening that what hurt Miriam, hurt him; that what hurt Mrs. Ellis hurt him, and most of all, whatever threatened the success of the Gray Stallion’s mission was almost intolerable to him. And yet, he could not consider giving up Miriam without envisaging a mental and spiritual anguish which he believed he could not endure.
For a long time Hugh contemplated the situation. Not the accident that had dropped them on the ledge, but the circumstances which had led to it His pipe went cold. He forgot the pain in his arm. But he could not for a moment forget that his old sense of the rightness of his own decisions was gone. He felt as though in a nightmare with his house of life collapsing about his head.
The wind was rising by degrees. Dawn must be coming. Hugh thought that Miriam and Jessie must be asleep, they sat so silent upon the ledge.
A bluebird piped from below the ledge. After a long time another bluebird answered, feebly and remotely. The damp coldness of the night had been odorless. Now the wind brought the indescribable, pungent odor of the dawn. Faintly opposite, lifted a vague black outline as of an opposing mountain or canyon wall. Pale stars glimmered above the outline, and the stars scarcely had appeared when they were effaced by an increased translucency of the sky, that merged into the translucency of the stars and so absorbed them.
Gradually now Hugh was able to discern the huddled form of Miriam. His eye followed along the growing edge of the shelf on which their lives were so precariously perched. The wings of the Dinosaur. Something huddled beneath Jessie? No. A boulder against which the Dinosaur braced herself from the chasm below. Hugh turned on his flashlight and threw a finger of light the length of the ledge.
Jessie was not there.
He started to his feet with an exclamation. Miriam wakened with a groan.
“Hughie! What is it?”
“Jess has gone. She can’t have fallen or I’d have heard her. She’s done what she threatened.”
The two stared at each other while dawn in full panoply marched over the shoulder of Big Fang.
Hugh stood in helpless exasperation for a moment. Miriam, very lovely in the growing light, in spite of her obvious weariness, smiled a little.
“You see why she did it, don’t you, Hughie?”
“No, I don’t. Even with her strength and experience she’s running a horrible risk.”
“Of course, she knows that. But she preferred the risk to having to stay alone with me. She could go as far as chaperoning us on this trip. She could go no farther. Jessie is a tremendous hater. After all, she has a right to hate me even more than I hate her.”
“I don’t see why you should hate Jessie,” said Hugh, for the first time speaking a little shortly to Miriam.
“I hate her because she’s had your youth, because she still has some of your thoughts. I want to blot her out of your very memory.”
Hugh, who had been scanning the growing depths of the canyon below, holding his injured arm, his mind torn by a thousand difficulties, turned now, with his whole attention given to the pain in Miriam’s face and voice. He strode over to her and looked down into her eyes.
“Miriam! Miriam! What have I done to you, my dearest?”
“You’ve given me some perfect hours and some exquisite dreams,” she said. “But O Hugh, that is not enough for me! I want every corner of your mind.”
“I have tried to give it all to you, Miriam. I thought I’d convinced you of that.”
A sudden spoke of orange light shot along the eastern sky. It lighted the two tense faces gazing at each other across that impassable chasm of personality which separates all human beings. “You are sure that you love me, Hugh?”
“Very, very sure, Miriam.”
“And that no matter what happens you will believe in the bigness and fineness of my love for you?”
“Yes, Miriam.”
She turned to stare at the canyon which lay exposed now at their feet. After a moment she asked, “Where are we, Hugh?”
“We’re in the Forest Reserve and perched well above the tree line. I’ll not tell you how high we are.”
“I think you are wise!” Miriam shuddered. “Hugh, it would be better for you to leave me here and go on after Jessie. I’ll be quite safe, if I don’t go to gazing over the edge.”
“Jess is without food or water,” said Hugh slowly “I don’t see how she could be such a fool.”
“She’s not a fool. She’s much cleverer than I thought she was— I’m not thinking so much about her sufferings as I am about stopping the gossips that will gloat over your being alone here with me.”
Hugh stood for a moment in thought. “I don’t like it. Not any of it,” he said finally. “My whole life now is made up of inhibiting every desire that is normal to me. If only I could be alone with you and my work—” He paused, clasping his right elbow and biting his lips with pain.
“Hugh, have you hurt your arm?”
“A little. Perhaps you’d loan me your scarf and help me to bind my arm across my chest.”
Miriam snatched the knit scarf from her shoulders. “Do you think it’s broken, Hughie? O my dear, your hand is terribly swollen! You mustn’t think of starting out.”
“Nonsense, Miriam! Tie me up, then I’ll get the grub out of the plane and be off.”
She bandaged him skillfully. He would not allow her to go near the plane, but after a long effort he managed to hoist out the wicker hamper of food that always accompanied the Dinosaur on its flights. Under his direction, Miriam filled his pockets with a two days’ meager supply of chocolate, meat cubes and wafers. They filled a small canteen with tepid water from the tank in the plane, and Hugh was ready for the journey.
Had he not been handicapped by the broken arm, he believed that he could with Miriam’s help have lowered himself from the ledge to the slanting wall below and thus have reached the floor of the canyon. But this was not to be considered, nor did he believe Jessie for all her fine strength and agility had been able to accomplish this alone. She must have found it possible to scramble up the mountain wall above the ledge, and this was the way Hugh proposed to follow.
Miriam watched him anxiously. His path decided upon, he turned to her with sudden tenderness.
“Miriam, you believe that I ought to go?”
“Yes, Hughie. Don’t bother about me. I shall be perfectly safe.”
“I know. Nevertheless, I can’t bear to leave you. It would be wonderful to be alone here with you—for as long as they would leave us alone!”
Miriam clung to him helplessly for a moment, hiding her face against his shoulder.
“We’re on the lap of the gods,” she whispered, finally. “Kiss me, Hugh, and go, while I still have strength to send you.”
He kissed her lingeringly, then turned toward the wall. Miriam gave a little sob.
“Hugh! Hugh! I shall be alone with my thoughts so long! Tell me that it’s not altogether the strain of politics that gives your eyes the look they wear. Yet the look wasn’t there before.”
Hugh smiled. “Why not let it be the result of politics? You wouldn’t want it to be something mysterious, would you? You are the only person in the world who knows how I feel about my work and what giving it up costs me. But what does that matter? Some day—I don’t know how—but some day, you and I will be alone, lifting the curtain of the past. That’s the glorious thought that’s pulling me through.”
“You’d give up politics quite happily?” asked Miriam. “Even though you have discovered your power to make people see things as you see them?”
“I can make them see only the Old Sioux Tract as I see it,” replied Hugh soberly.
He began carefully to work his way inch by inch up the yellow face of the mountain. Miriam stood watching him, her eyes tragic, her delicately cut lips twitching as though she found it difficult to maintain the poise habitual to her.
Hugh progressed upward slowly, very slowly. Now he found foothold in a crevice, handhold on a sage-brush root, and lifted himself to a projecting rock. Now he crawled gingerly along an upward slanting crack—no handhold—his body pressed hard against the scaling wall, one foot carefully following the other, every muscle cramping until he was grateful that the hospitable crack abruptly ended and he must take to the even more perilous way of tugging himself upward by sheer lift from root to root. His injured arm was agony. He was accustomed to thus perilously scrambling over the face of the mountains in his prospecting work, but not thus hampered. The pain made him giddy. Again and again he clung to a frail root, face pressed hard against the rock, eyes closed, wondering with an outward sense whether or not his hold must slip and he be dashed to pieces in the depths below.
Again and again he slid back, a foot, two feet, shale scraping his cheek and chin, only to bring up on some fragile promontory, and from there after balancing for a ghastly moment to go on with the ascent once more.
But he was inured to this sort of death play, and his mind dealt mechanically with the difficulties of the climb while it gave its real attention to the fact that something far more hazardous, far more tremendous in its significance than this tense scaling of the mountainside was threatening him. He would not permit himself to acknowledge what it was that imperiled his peace of mind. He only allowed himself to face once more that sense of cosmic loneliness which always visited him when he felt himself out of step with the awful march of the ages which it was the fate of his mind always to envisage. Miriam, Jessie, the Old Sioux Tract, Johnny, Pink, were suddenly of no importance. He was utterly alone. He and his tiny span of life. So stupendously important to himself; of such trivial necessity to the ages. Yet of necessity so real, however small, that he must resume his step or know no peace. It was agony.
Above him, the deep blue of the sky was cut clearly across by the yellow edge of the mountain wall. He did not look down but kept his gaze fixed on the difficult horizon line. Painfully but surely it drew nearer. At noon he lifted a weary knee to the final edge and rolled slowly onto the fair slope of the peak.
He rested for a little while, then got to his feet. He was on the summit of the highest peak of the range. To the east lay a chaos of orange crests and gold and purple mesas, with far slopes clothed in the dull green splendor of the Forest Reserve. On either hand lay the long ridge that culminated in the mighty yellow mountain head on which he stood. His station surely was suited to his mood; solitary, wind swept, intimate to the infinite reaches of the sky. His slender, khaki-clad figure, his tanned and thought-worn face were singularly in harmony with the aspect of the mountain peak and with the temper of his mind.
Hugh had no doubts as to the geography of the locality. He knew that this was the wild-horse country in which Red Wolf had found the gray stallion. He knew that due east, beyond and beneath the rolling sea of purple clouds that now concealed, now revealed the distant valleys lay the horse ranch whither he was sure Jessie was making her way. He believed he could make it himself by midnight, if he did not before that time meet a rescue party sent back by Jessie.
He ate sparingly, then started down the mountain slope.
It was not yet sunset when he reached the bed of the creek at the foot of the peak. The creek itself was at this season only a narrow brook. That at other times it was a rushing torrent was attested by the driftwood lying high up on the mountainside. The whole section was profoundly eroded. Grotesque pillars of sandstone rose abruptly on every hand. The steep banks of the creek were cut into a thousand fantastic shapes.
Hugh stared about him with a quick concentration of interest. The tilt of strata in this section of Wyoming was to the north. He had supposed the strata that lay so near the surface of the Old Sioux Tract would here, so much farther south, be too deep buried for visual prospecting. And yet on the pillar in the shade of which he had paused was the impress of a palm leaf and of horse-tail rushes; fossil vegetation of the strata that bore the dinosaurs. He glanced at the sun, thought of Miriam alone on the ledge, and Jessie, struggling on toward the horse ranch, then set his teeth and held his course to the east.
And virtue had its immediate reward, for, almost at once, in the sandstone bank which he began to climb, he came upon a deep brown out-cropping which brought him to his knees for closer observation. The brown mass was a fossil vertebra of huge proportions. Hugh studied it closely, his cheeks flushing with excitement. A rare and important find lay in this forsaken bank, he was very sure. He gazed at the out-cropping lovingly, then rose, marked the locality well, and made his way on eastward, over the burning dancing sands of the bad lands. And he was shaken by temptation as a drunkard is shaken by the smell of alcohol. But he plodded on.
The sun had slipped behind the great head of Big Fang and all the strange distorted out-croppings and erosions of the bad lands danced in fantastic mockery in front of Hugh’s pain-blurred vision before he came upon Jessie with the rescue party. For a moment, he thought them only a part of the crimson, dancing landscape. Then he heard Jessie’s voice, “Hughie! O Hughie!” He leaned against a pillar and waited. Jessie and Heckle, the rancher, with a couple of cowboys, leading extra horses, rode up to him.
“Hello!” said Hugh. “That was quick work, Jess.”
“Sorry about the accident,” said Heckle, a brawny man in his late forties. “What’s happened to your arm, Mr. Stewart?”
“Guess I broke it, last night, when the old bird skidded down the mountainside. Got a horse for me? I think the best move will be from the mountain top. I can show you the exact spot.”
“You go back to the ranch, Hughie, and let them take you in the car to Fort Sioux,” said Jessie. “You must get to the doctor as soon as you can You must be in misery.”
“I am going on up with you all,” insisted Hugh. “You’ll need all the help you can get.”
“You’ll be no help in the shape you’re in!” exclaimed Heckle. “The young lady up there ain’t hurt and is fairly husky, as I understand it. ’T won’t take any time at all to work her up off that ledge.”
“Two of you must go down and come up with her,” insisted Hugh. “And the plane must be roped to the rocks or the wind will dislodge it. Don’t frighten her any more than you can help. She hasn’t a Wyoming girl’s nerves. Maybe I’d better get on to a doctor. Don’t do anything but secure the plane to the ledge I’ll send Marten back to superintend lowering it off the ledge. It can be handled best that way I’d have come by that route myself if it hadn’t been for this arm.”
Hugh’s voice died away in a mumble of pain.
“Can you get back to the ranch alone, Hughie?” asked Jessie, anxiously. “I think you need me more than Miriam does.”
“Pshaw! Heckle might wander over Big Fang for two days without locating Miriam’s ledge. You’ve got to guide him, Jessie. Give me a horse, Heckle, old man, and I won’t hold you longer.”
One of the cowboys helped him to mount a horse which gratefully and immediately picked up the home trail. Jessie watched him disappear into the dusk, then led the way on toward the peak.