The Exile of The Lariat/Chapter 15
CHAPTER XV
CHRISTMAS AGAIN
THERE was something extraordinarily baffling about the reported sale of Hugh’s property. Principal Jones undertook to run down the facts. But Judge Proctor was gone on a vague trip east. Charles Grafton insisted that he knew nothing of the sale. No deeds had been recorded. There was no move on the part of the Eastern Electric Corporation to begin any sort of building operations. Yet the rumor of the sale persisted. Finally a mysterious note reached Hugh from the Judge in Boston, saying that he had been obliged to take action on the property under the terms of Bookie’s will, and that when the negotiations with the Boston Public Library were completed, he could confer with Hugh personally. It was maddening, but Hugh was obliged to be content with this meager information.
He had more than half expected and much dreaded to receive a letter from Miriam, but no letter arrived. Johnny told Hugh that he had heard that Miriam was to be in the west for some time on business, and Hugh, whenever a slender woman’s figure flashed unexpectedly across his vision, would catch his breath, wondering if there was now to be a renewal of the battle which Miriam had irrevocably lost.
The days rushed madly on, Hugh becoming more and more involved in the details of party program. He was deep in conference with Mrs. Ellis in The Lariat when the first word he had received about Miriam arrived. It was in the shape of a telegram from a hospital in Salt Lake City.
“Miss Miriam Page ill at this address. Pneumonia. She cannot live through another day. Come at once”
Hugh read the message through twice, then laid it on the counter and stared at Mrs. Ellis. A sense of irreparable loss shook him. It was only now, long after the week spent over his fossils in severing his life from Miriam’s, that the actual realization of what that loss meant came to him.
“I must go to Salt Lake City,” he said abruptly “I must start now.”
“What is the trouble?” exclaimed Mrs. Ellis.
“A personal matter,” replied Hugh. “I’ve missed the Limited. Marten must take me in the Dinosaur.”
“But, Hughie!” protested his manager. “If it’s as important as that, you ought to tell me what it is.”
“I can’t tell you! You must make my excuses. I’ll be back as soon as possible.”
“A very risky trip to take in the airplane in such weather as this. I know it’s clear, but too frightfully cold, and if you have to come down for any reason!”
“None the less,” insisted Hugh, pale-lipped, “I must go.” He started to his feet.
Johnny Parnell, striding in, put his hand on Hugh’s shoulder. “Hold on, Governor!” he said “I want to tell you something. Did you get a telegram just now from Salt Lake?”
“Yes,” replied Hugh. “I’ve got to leave for there at once. By the Dinosaur”
“Governor,” said Johnny, with the note of deference he now always gave his old friend, “I heard that you’d got that telegram. I heard from Billy Chamberlain, who knows Morse and was in the ticket office when the message came.”
Hugh drew himself up. “Because I have no privacy,” he exclaimed, “my friends should not feel warranted in intruding on me.”
“The point is, Governor,” Johnny was red with earnestness, “that you haven’t any personal affairs any more. And I’ve got to intrude because it ain’t intruding. Hughie, you mustn’t go to her”
“I am leaving for Salt Lake as soon as Marten can get the plane tuned up. Don’t interfere with me, Parnell,” said Hugh.
“I’ve got to,” insisted Johnny miserably. “Even if she’s dying, you must not go. Lord, I wonder what she was doing in Salt Lake anyhow!”
“Coming up here to make mischief, of course!” exclaimed Mrs. Ellis, suddenly putting two and two together. “The Christmas Eve celebration tonight, too! Hugh Stewart, you cannot go. You cannot enter office with this last episode attached to your name.”
Hugh turned to the coat hooks on the wall and pulled himself rapidly into his heavy airman’s outfit, his two friends staring impotently. When he was dressed he looked at them with a splendid sort of defiance.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and went out.
He helped Marten groom the Dinosaur for the trip. Marten, knowing of the telegram, asked no questions, but worked with disapproval in every line of his face. Before the usual crowd that dogged Hugh and the airplane could gather, they were off.
Brilliant blue of sky. Iridescent white of plains. Bitter cold of air. Hours of ear-shattering throbbing of the engine. Hugh made no attempt at consecutive thought. He was weary of that. He gave himself over to grief. Not the grief that bowed him at his Uncle Bookie’s death. Not the grief that, commingled with anger and chagrin, had made his week with Jimmie’s dinosaur a week of torment. It was the pain of a man over the death of a woman whose beauty of mind and body he has loved. Eyes dry and bright, teeth set hard, fists clenched within his fur mittens, he sat silent until sunset they sighted the fuel station which marked the end of the first third of their journey. It was a lonely spot, set deep in sheep country, supplied by an oil tank that worked its way up on the rough trails used by the sheep herders.
The Dinosaur descended to reload with gasoline. They were in a wide valley, surrounded by snow-covered peaks. But there was no snow in the valley. There were great reaches of orange sand, thick set with gray green sage brush, reaches that were cut by draws and little hills, little rounded hills, studded with the tiny log fuel station, a sheep wagon crowned the highest hillock, black against the sinking sun. Black, too, against the evening glory was a gently moving, faintly tinkling ocean of sheep; thousands upon thousands of them, following their shepherd, an equestrian in bronze.
When Marten had stopped his engine before the oil tank he said to Hugh in a tone that was as nearly surly as he ever had used to the Gray Stallion:
“You have to give me half an hour to get after that cylinder that’s been missing the last few miles.”
Hugh nodded, removed his goggles and stood staring up the valley at the slow-moving flocks. Christmas Eve! How like a Tissot the sheep, the little hills, the twisted cedars. Hugh’s mind deserted Miriam’s death agony for a moment and went back to his mother, his tall, gray-eyed mother and the Christmas star. The star of Bethlehem, under which she always told him the matchless tale of the Babe in the Manger. The door of memory moved wide. The unspeakable fragrance of these nights with his mother touched his tortured mind. Again he felt the nearness to a great glory and that great world tragedy—felt his mother’s passionate love for him and his for her—how different, how very different, from this later love—felt again his mother’s overwhelming desire for him to achieve something as stupendous as that other mother had desired for that other and deeply tragic child. Suddenly Hugh bowed his head and groaned aloud. How he had wasted himself—Jessie—Miriam And why? What was the keystone to his failure?
Hugh did not know.
The valley was in purple dusk. The west sky above the snowy peaks showed only in faintest orange, but the east was glorious in reflected crimson that shot in fiery spokes to the very zenith. A light like a huge silver Chinese lantern glowed from the highest hillock. It must be supper time within the canvas-covered sheep wagon.
Marten tinkered steadily at the recalcitrant cylinder. Hugh tramped impatiently back and forth.
The glow in the east faded into purple. A star pricked forth, huge, lambent. There was the sudden sound of a galloping horse and the shepherd appeared within the glow of Marten’s lantern. He was a young fellow in blue overalls. His tanned face in the flickering light was stark with fear.
“Say, strangers!” he panted. “When I went home to supper just now, I found my wife sick. Looks like the baby was going to be here a month ahead of time. It’s awful! She’s going through hell up there. She’ll die if we don’t get a doctor. Does—does either of you folks know anything about birthing a baby?”
“No!” replied Hugh and Marten together.
“God!” cried the sheep herder. “How long would it take you to go up to Fort Sioux for the doctor in that thing?”
“Six hours for the round trip,” replied Marten.
The sheep herder clutched his hair. “She’ll be dead by then.”
Marten said suddenly, “This here is Hon. Hugh Stewart, the new governor of Wyoming. He’s on his way to the bedside of a—a friend that’s dying.”
The man’s jaw dropped. He stared at Hugh, pulled off his cap and replaced it, then gasped, “How should I know! But I can’t help it, if it was the king of England”—with a quick sob, “it’s my wife and she’s in labor. I’ve got to have help!”
It was only a moment that Hugh stood silent. But in that moment his whole lifetime of habit in thought fought with the new Hugh agonizing in fate’s crucible.
Miriam dying, leaving behind her nothing but Hugh’s aching heart. The sheep herder’s wife, ignorant and coarse in all probability, but fighting to perform the woman’s racial task.
“Is your engine in shape, Marten?” asked Hugh finally.
“Good enough!”
“I’ll go back for Doc Olson,” said Hugh, buttoning his tunic.
Marten moistened his lips and his voice was husky as he said, “No you won’t, old timer! Excuse me, I mean Governor. That engine is on the bum and you can’t handle it. I’ll go.”
Hugh nodded. “Get going, then, Marten.”
“You mean,” gasped the sheep herder, “that you—you are going to put off your trip for my wife?”
“You’d better get back to her,” said Hugh. “I’ll follow you as fast as I can.”
He helped Marten to refill the tank, stood for a moment watching the Dinosaur’s great wings dwindle into the gleaming Christmas heavens, then he started rapidly toward the silver light of the sheep wagon.
Hugh opened the door of the sheep wagon. The sheep herder was bending over the bench at the opposite end.
“Georgie! Georgie! Help me!” his wife sobbed.
“What shall I do, Dora? What can I do!”
There was only a scream of agony from Dora. Hugh, trembling, lips set, stuffed some wood into the stove, saw that the supply was low and would have gone out to forage for more had not George turned his head and said to him, hoarsely:
“Wring another hot towel out of that water. She won’t let go my hands.”
There was a dish-pan simmering on the stove. Hugh seized a steaming towel and wrung it, then crossed with it to the bed.
“Now bring in an armload of wood from under the wagon before she needs another,” said George.
Hugh leaped to the task, then twisted out another scalding cloth. Dora writhed and groaned George, holding her hands, soothed her steadily. Far out a coyote pack howled and the shepherd dog replied from near the wagon. The little stove glowed red. Hugh moved steadily between the simmering dish-pan and the bed.
It was a losing fight. If Dora knew, as she probably did not, what might have been done to help her, she was in an agony that precluded giving coherent directions. And, anyhow, it is not a part of our extraordinary system of education that women shall know what to do in the great and inevitable emergency. George, in his life spent among herds, might have helped had he not been rendered useless by love and terror. The two men, sweating in sympathy and fear, struggled impotently, however, to relieve her pain. About two hours after the Dinosaur had left, the baby was born. They rolled it in a blanket, laid it at the foot of the bed, and gave all their attention to Dora. But she was beyond their help.
She seemed, now that her face was not distorted, very young to Hugh. Her eyes were very blue. She looked up at George with a smile unutterably sweet, then her lids fluttered down. She never lifted them again. George, his face buried in the pillow, his cheek against Dora’s, did not stir. Hugh stood rigid beside the stove until a sudden sense of chill bade him start the fire again. Then he looked hesitatingly from the little bundle at the silent mother’s feet to George’s motionless form. He could not bear to disturb the man. He lifted the baby, bent his head over the tiny lips, felt a flutter of breath against his cheek, and with a thrill such as he never before had experienced, he sat down by the fire and held the child in its warmth.
For a little time there was utter silence within. Without, the nameless sounds of the great flocks and the menacing call of the coyotes. The baby was very still. But some stirring instinct told Hugh that if he could keep it warm it would live until the doctor arrived. There must be more wood chopped. He looked toward the bed.
“George!” he said, softly. “George, old man!”
The sheep herder raised his haggard face.
“George, come over here and keep the baby warm while I chop more wood.”
“Put it down on the bench,” said George, dully, turning back to Dora.
“No, George! It needs to be held close to the heat. Come, old timer! We’ll put it through, won’t we? It’s her own flesh and blood we’ve got to save.”
George rose stiffly and held out his arms for the child. Hugh pulled the blanket gently over Dora’s face, then slipped out to the cedar logs behind the wagon. He stood for a moment looking up at the Christmas star. His mother. Miriam. Jessie. God! What was life? Why was it? Whither did it tend? What was the reason for that pitiful and unnecessary sacrifice within the sheep wagon? Suddenly he saw a dimpled child of twelve fighting for her mother’s life, as he and George had fought for Dora’s. A child of twelve witnessing in her mother the agony that had shaken him to the depths of his being. He slowly ground his teeth in the starlight and turned to the homely task at hand.
When he re-entered the wagon, George was again beside the bunk, the baby lying on the bench. Hugh replenished the fire and lifted the bundle tenderly to his breast. Mrs. Ellis had lost, poor little girl. He, by the eternal, would save this baby, if his unskilled hands could do it.
It was midnight when the first faint sound of the Dinosaur’s engine cut through the night. It seemed to Hugh a long, long time after that, that the door of the sheep wagon was jerked open and the familiar face of Doc Olson appeared against the night. A glance at the bed sufficed and the doctor turned his attention to the baby, Hugh watched him anxiously. The doctor’s ruddy face was very tender as he made his examination.
“Poor little girl!” he murmured. “Poor little girl! Hold the light steady, Governor. You kept her warm. That was right. Poor little girl. What’s the young chap’s name? George?” He turned to the sheep herder, still engrossed in his grief. “George, where is the baby’s clothing?”
George pulled a basket from under the bunk and gave it to Hugh. With what seemed to Hugh marvelous dexterity, the doctor annointed the baby and wrapped it in roll after roll of little knit blankets which he ordered Hugh to extract from the basket.
“Now, George,” he said, placing the baby in Hugh’s arms while he repacked his case, “have you a sheepskin or two, tanned down good and soft? That’s right. Here you are, Hughie, roll the baby in there. I think she’ll make the trip.”
“What are you going to do?” asked George, suddenly.
“Take the baby up to Fort Sioux, where she can be cared for,” replied the doctor. “She hasn’t even a fighting chance here. I think I can save her, up there.”
George looked at him, his face working. “I’ve gotta stay here, with Dora—and the sheep. I can’t seem to start thanking you folks. ’Specially the Governor, I”
“It’s all right, old timer!” interrupted Hugh. “My one regret is that I was of no use.”
Marten at this moment put his head cautiously in at the door. “Come in, Marten,” said the doctor. “Here’s a little Christmas baby for us to take back up to Fort Sioux.”
Marten looked at the bench and removed his helmet. Hugh cleared his throat. “Marten,” he said, “did you get that cylinder fixed?”
“Yes, Governor.”
“Then I guess I’ll drive the plane back to Fort Sioux and leave you here with George for a couple of days. I can send back for you by Carl Brown. I’ll wire up to Cheyenne for him.”
“You don’t need to do that,” said George. “If Marten will stick by a day or so, Big Elijah was coming through here to take—her—up to Fort Sioux.”
“Fine! That’s all right, Governor,” said Marten. “Here, I’ll feed the crowd, before you make the start.”
“Make it quick,” ordered the doctor. “Minutes count with this little bundle.”
He turned to take the baby from Hugh. But Hugh shook his head. “Hands off, Doctor! This is my charge,” and he settled himself on the bench, his face bent thoughtfully above the quiet little burden in his arms.
It was barely breakfast time when the Dinosaur rolled quietly across the field to the hangar below Fort Sioux. Hugh and the doctor alighted and tramped wearily up the trail toward the hotel. But Hugh was not to make his return thus quietly. Marten, on his hasty errand the night before, had found time to tell Mrs. Morgan of Hugh’s whereabouts. Scarcely had the Gray Stallion, still with the baby held jealously in his tired arms, put foot on the lowest step of the Massacre’s snow-banked porch, when a crowd burst from the hotel, from the barber shop, from anywhere and nowhere. There was the bare beginning of a cheer, quickly broken as the portent of the lonely little sheepskin bundle in Hugh’s arm broke upon the crowd.
Then somebody said in a hushed voice, “Did the mother die, Governor?”
“Yes,” replied Hugh simply, “but Doc Olson thinks we can pull the baby through. It’s a little girl.”
A quick murmur rose Hugh shook his head. “Wait a moment, friends. Let’s not make capital of this.” He hesitated, looking for a long moment from one familiar, understanding face to another. “We can’t make capital of it,” he repeated, brokenly. “The cost was too great.” He went on mounting the steps in a silence that was poignantly sympathetic.
He slept until midafternoon. It was Johnny Parnell who wakened him.
“This telegram just came for you, Governor. I thought you’d better have it as quick as you could.”
Hugh sat up in bed, staring from the unopened telegram to Johnny’s troubled eyes.
“It’s that then, is it, Johnny?” Hugh looked appealingly at his old friend.
“Yes, Hughie. Miriam Page died this morning.”
Hugh twisted his brown hands together and there was a long silence. Hugh gazed at the unopened message as though he would imprint forever on his mind its shape and color. Johnny did not stir. At last Hugh looked up at him.
“The inscrutability of it, Johnny. The wastage.”
“It isn’t wastage,” said Johnny, sturdily. “That baby ain’t waste, and, by Jupiter, the place last night’s work gave you in folks’ hearts ain’t waste.”
Hugh moved impatiently. Then he forgot Johnny as Miriam’s loveliness flashed before his inward vision. But even as the vision came, it was replaced by the look of unutterable sweetness with which Dora had finished her task. He spoke with sudden determination:
“I must get up, Johnny. Do you suppose you could rustle a tray of breakfast over here for me, while I shave?”
“I’d get you the earth on a tray if you wanted it!” exclaimed Johnny, striding out of The Lariat.
It was Jessie who brought the breakfast in. She was quite casual about it, nodding at Hugh as she placed the tray on his desk near the stove. Hugh knotted his tie and sat down in silence. Not until he had finished did Jessie attempt to speak. Then she said, still casually:
“Hughie, when did you plan to go after Judge Proctor?”
“I’ve been trying right along to get an interview with him,” replied Hugh. “There is something strange about the whole thing. I can get no details from any one. I wouldn’t have believed it possible that any of that crowd could have reached the Judge. Why, he was one of Uncle Bookie’s best friends! He knew how Uncle Bookie felt about the Old Sioux Tract. It was a sacred place to him.”
Jessie was suddenly very white and uneasy. Her deep eyes glowed with anxiety as she rose and, standing before Hugh, said, “Hughie, that other crowd didn’t reach the Judge. I did.”
“You!” exclaimed Hugh.
Jessie nodded. “We all knew that they were trying to force the sale on the plea of your week spent working on Jimmie’s dinosaur. I thought two could work that game, so I went to him and we hatched a scheme based on the fact that you’d broken the literal terms of the will when you started to give all your time to politics. I don’t know how the old Judge worked up the legal end of it. But anyhow, a group of the cattlemen bid in the Dude Ranch. And you remember that legacy of mine? I bid in the Old Sioux Tract. You can have ’em both any way or time you want to arrange for them.”
Hugh stood staring at Jessie in utter amazement. “Jessie! Jessie! I can’t! I don’t deserve it!”
Jessie walked slowly to the rear window. Straight and strong and very fine was her silhouette against the winter sky. Slowly she walked back again to Hugh.
“Hughie, I never have known what you really think about things. Before Bookie’s death I couldn’t even guess. But now, somehow, I understand without being told. And I believe that you do deserve it.”
“I don’t, Jessie! I don’t!” cried Hugh. “You must not! Jessie, you break me with your generosity.”
Jessie smiled at him wistfully, lifted the tray and walked slowly to the door. There she paused, to say slowly, “Hugh, I don’t think it’s generosity. It’s just—it’s just my—it’s just that I am, as I warned you, a great lover.” Then she went out.
Her exit was the signal for half a dozen impatient politicians to enter, and for the rest of the day Hugh was swamped with work.
Jessie had not found the swap suggested by Johnny Parnell, cows for sheep, an easy matter to arrange. In spite of their frank recognition of the debt the party owed to Mrs. Ellis, it was perhaps almost too much to ask of a cowman that he consider a ten-mile shift of the sheep dead-line as paid for by the preservation of the maternity center section of the Children’s Code. At least, no one but Jessie Morgan would have had even a gambling chance to swing the deal. But Jessie should have had six months instead of six weeks to handle the matter. And the last week of December found the legislature working feverishly to pass the Hospital Bill under cover of an unshakable filibuster. Mrs. Ellis, fighting desperately and gamely, had begun to break a little under the strain. And Hugh had resolutely thrust thought of the Sioux Tract from his mind in a final endeavor to help this woman who was so rare a friend not only to himself but, he had grown to realize, to Wyoming.
But though he spent the remainder of Christmas day in strenuous conference with one group after another, no feasible plan was brought forward that might save this most vital clause of the Code.
Hugh spent a restless night and woke in the morning with a sense of confusion and anxiety. It seemed to him that somehow he must have a few hours to himself. That if he could be alone on the plains for even a short time, he would be able to come to a decision which he felt dimly and uneasily was forming within him. He was conscious that somehow, out of the chaos and pain of the past two years, a trail was beginning to emerge which he might have the strength to follow. And he was despairingly eager to be on his way.
Mrs. Ellis came in while he was finishing his breakfast and he tried haltingly to explain something of this to her. She leaned back in her chair wearily.
“You mean that you have a plan you think will work?” she asked.
Hugh shook his head. “No, I haven’t, Mrs. Ellis. But I have an insane desire to mount Fossil and go up to the Dinosaur Cave or to some other spot where I have worked. I feel as if, there, this disorder in my brain might fall into the old order I used to be—I—to tell the truth, I’m all broken up!”
Mrs. Ellis nodded: “I know. She was extraordinarily lovely to look at!”
Hugh stirred restlessly.
“I suppose,” Mrs. Ellis went on, a little wistfully, “that you think I’ve been very hard about Miriam Page?”
“Yes, Mrs. Ellis, I do,” replied Hugh, frankly.
“Do you mind talking about it a little?” asked Mrs. Ellis.
“I’m aching to talk with some one who won’t sit in judgment,” Hugh sighed as he spoke.
“My dear, you sat in judgment, didn’t you, when you found out what Miriam had done?”
“What I did was with regard to her personal deception of me. You condemned her love for me. I think love, such as I thought hers was for me, is its own justification.”
“Hughie,” said the mother of the Code, “when you are as white-headed as I am, you’ll find that love based on selfishness always comes a cropper. Jessie’s did. Yours did. Miriam’s did. Mine did.”
“Yours?” asked Hugh.
“Yes, mine. Me. But never mind that. I learned my lesson. As I fear you have not learned yours.”
“Mrs. Ellis, I think I’ve learned it.”
The white-haired woman looked at him thoughtfully. Hugh’s face indeed had changed. Subtly, yet none the less the change was there. His mouth was kinder. The lines about his eyes and lips were softer.
“I’ve learned it,” repeated Hugh. “I’ve learned that truly as Miriam and I believed we had found the great passion, we had not. Neither of us was willing to sacrifice our real desires and ambitions to the other. But that is not saying that I did not love her, Mrs. Ellis. Perhaps I’m not capable of the greater thing. I can’t bear the thought of her death. I see her in her beauty everywhere, no matter what I am doing.” His voice died away huskily.
“I know, Hughie, I know.” Mrs. Ellis nodded and they were silent until she said:
“Hugh, some day when you and Jessie have been sufficiently purged, you are going to return to each other. Out of all this agony you two are going to rear on the coals of that flaming physical passion you had for each other in your youth a very great and wonderful love. I’m not doubting the sincerity of your feeling for Miriam Page when I say this, either.”
Hugh looked out the window for a long moment before he said, “I wonder if all men fail their friends as I seem to have failed mine.”
“You’ve not failed anybody, Hughie. The people of greater promise have greater demands made on them, that’s all. I think we’ve all been selfish in what we’ve expected of you. But we shall all keep right on expecting! That’s life.”
"There’s something worse than not coming up to the expectations of your friends,” said Hugh. “A recognition of your own inner failure.”
Mrs. Ellis rose and slowly crossed to Hugh’s side. She looked down into his tired eyes, then smoothed the hair back from his forehead and kissed him.
“If your mother were living,” she said, "she’d gather you to her heart and comfort you as no other woman can. My dear, go mount Fossil, sweat your way up to the cave and then come back and tell me what you find there.”
Hugh lifted her plump hand to his cheek, rested against it for a moment, then went to prepare for the ride.
It was, of course, as he knew it would be, an exceedingly heavy trip up to the cave. And he was glad that this was so. Fossil broke trail willingly enough along the river edge as long as they were on the flats. But when the canyon walls began to hem them in, gradually crowding them closer and closer to the raging, ice-caked current, he began to struggle to turn homeward. But Hugh forced him on to within a mile of the cave, where the trail began to lift. Here, under the shelter of a wide ledge, he left the horse and went on afoot.
To the right rose the scarred yellow canyon wall, picked out in clean-cut black and white by drift of snow. Below and to the left, first the river, dull greenish black, with churning ice-cakes flashing multi-colored like mighty opals. Beyond the river, the canyon wall again, purple, orange, ivory. Just before he reached the cave, Hugh paused to gaze at a green promontory that pushed abruptly into the river opposite. Even in winter there was below and a little behind it a quiet pool, in which a boat might rest.
Arms folded, Hugh gazed at the pool, seeing it not in a winter setting but as it had been on that summer’s day when he and Miriam had rested for a perfect hour on its placid bosom.
After a time he clambered on, heavily, and jerking open the door, entered the cave.
He built a fire, ate his lunch; it was long past noon; and then, seated on a box close to the flames, he began his vigil. Hugh was not indulging in a tragic moment. He was not burying his dead. He was deliberately seeking to swing into the rhythm which he had lost, which, he told himself bitterly, he probably never had had. He was beginning with Bookie and his mother and working deliberately down through his life, examining himself for the first time with a merciless eye.
It was a long process. But his thought in coming to this spot where he had worked had been sound. His mind did begin to function in the old, calm, orderly manner. And when his panorama had been set in sequence and began to move cleanly and clearly across his vision, he was able to gaze upon it as the man from Mars. He saw the little boy Hugh, lugging broken bits of fossil turtle shell home to his mother. He saw the adolescent Hugh, riding herd for Bookie, with a little bag of fossil fragments hanging from the pommel of the saddle. He saw Hugh at college, concentrating on geology to the exclusion of sports and friendships. He saw Hugh mad with first love; love of Jessie. And he saw Hugh turn from love and from Jessie when she scorned his fossils. He saw Bookie endeavoring by every tactful method he could evolve, to force Hugh to see himself and his capacities in other lights than that of paleontology. He checked over his attitude toward Pink, Mrs. Morgan, Jessie, Miriam, Mrs. Ellis, and he saw that he never had judged of them save as they interfered or did not interfere with his chosen work.
Again and again he ran the panorama through, pausing over certain sections to analyze motives, until he had satisfied himself that once and for all he understood the man Hugh. And it was with a sudden and overwhelmingly thrilling sense of shame and of gladness that he realized that at last he had envisaged the truth about himself. Life holds no more final satisfaction than this for any man.
His had been the selfishness of the unsocial nature. Selfishness. Unsociality. Lack of herd instinct—that had wiped out the mighty creatures whose fossil remains he had worshiped. Fang against fang, claw against claw, the Creator had permitted the experiment to go on to its own extermination. Fang against fang, claw against claw, the human experiment too was speeding on its way. Nor would the Creator raise a finger to alter its course. For with the fang and the claw, He had given to humanity the capacity for thought. It was within man’s own power to work toward extermination or toward a perfection that dazzled Hugh’s fine imagination to contemplate.
The fire had burned out Hugh rose and went slowly from the cave, pausing without the opening to gaze on the unspeakable beauty of the moonlit night. Thumb Butte, thrusting its straight, fine height toward the heavens, glowed pale green against the black wall of the canyon.
Hugh drew a great breath.Not of sadness. It was a breath of exultation. At last he had caught the rhythm! He made his way back to Fossil like a man wakened from a long nightmare.