The Exile of The Lariat/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
MIRIAM
THE next morning, Hugh began an inventory of the stock of The Lariat. Fred Allward came in as he was listing a set of the Elsie books.
“What are you doing, Hughie?” he demanded.
“Who? Me? Why I’m out prospecting the Old Sioux Tract,” grunted Hugh, replacing Elsie's Holidays with a vicious shove of his long, muscular hand.
“So I see! Judge was telling me about your having to do assessment work for two years. Think the claims are worth it?”
He leaned against the counter, watching Hugh set down “1 Copy Elsie's Holidays,” in a small, copperplate hand. Fred never ceased to find delight in the meticulous accuracy and care which marked all that Hugh did.
Hugh looked up from the account book. “Do you think the claims are worth it, Fred?”
The older man pulled at the ubiquitous piece of plug. “Well,” he said, carefully, “I opine that the Old Sioux Tract is going to be rich prospecting in your line for a good many years. The dude ranch is one of the best in this section whether it’s worked for dudes or four-legged critters. But this here book store ain’t worth taxes. I can’t see just what you’d want with it.”
Hugh began to fill his pipe slowly. Fred watched him keenly.
After a time he sighed. “Well, Hughie, what do you expect me to do while you take two years’ rest? Read this what-do-you-call-it, Elsie's Holidays?”
Hugh smiled. “You go up and prospect the Old Sioux Tract. But don’t come in here with reports of your findings. It will just upset me. Keep a good record. Two years will pass eventually and I’ll make up for lost time then.”
“How about shipping out old Red Wolf’s Stone Devil?” asked Fred.
“Can’t be done, under the terms of the will, Judge Proctor says.”
“My God, Hughie, you are a fool!” exclaimed Fred.
Hugh shrugged his shoulders and there was another silence broken when Fred said, “Hughie, you won’t last a month at this,” peering over his employer’s shoulder as he set down concisely in the blankbook—
1 copy Science and Health—Eddy.
1 copy Darkest Africa—Stanley.
1 copy Wind in the Willows—Grahame.
Fred gave a violent snort and clanked out of the store.
Pink was the next visitor. He appeared an hour later when Hugh was varying the monotony of the book inventory by listing curios—
1 horsehair hackamore, black, very fine
1 Indian blanket, Chemhuivi
“I wonder how that Chemhuivi blanket got up here, Pink,” observed Hugh.
“Mark Olson hocked that with Bookie last summer.” Pink spat thoughtfully and accurately into the middle of the street. “You remember his wife was a half-breed Navajo. He hocked that for money to bury her with. It was when you was up in the Jackson Hole country.”
Hugh nodded and wrote on.
1 pair spurs, silver and turquoise. No leathers.
1 Hualapai water bottle, horsehair and pitch.
“Found that water bottle up in the same cave where you found the petrified turtle, didn’t you?” asked Pink.
“Yes. Not that one had anything to do with the other,” answered Hugh.
“I don’t see why not. There must of been a point somewhere in them old days when the humans and the critters began to overlap.” Pink’s voice was argumentative. He rose from the doorstep and came over to examine the dusty black water carrier.
“Well, I’ll tell you what I think.” Hugh lighted his pipe, the irked look leaving his eyes. The two men sank into chairs and put their feet on the top of the stove. “It was probably like this—” began Hugh.
“Wait a minute,” grunted Pink. “Hell’s a-popping again.”
Mrs. Morgan darted in at the door. “Pink, you promised me you’d be ready to drive me round town promptly at ten.”
“No, I didn’t. I told you I’d have the car ready at ten. You drive yourself.”
“Pink Morgan, you’ve got to drive me. I’m going to every house in this town and find out exactly what they’re doing with their garbage and their corrals. I tell you this fly nuisance is going to stop in Fort Sioux.”
“I’m not going. Anyhow, Hughie and I are having a business conference. And anyhow, why the car? You can hoof it to every house in Fort Sioux in an hour.”
“I want the car. I’m going with some dignity.”
Pink glared at his wife helplessly. She was so small, so persistent, so full of schemes and plans. It was the schemes and plans that always routed and finally dominated Pink. He was born to a planless scheme of life. He was a congenital herdsman; a rider of the plains, where time and urgency do not exist.
“I’m waiting, Pink,” said Mrs. Morgan.
Pink muttered something under his breath, rose slowly, and without looking at Hugh, followed his wife out of The Lariat. A moment later a brisk fusillade rattled the windows and Hugh chuckled as he watched the little car plow through the sand, Pink in shirt sleeves at the wheel, Mrs. Morgan, sitting in the middle of the rear seat, her small back as straight and rigid as her tightly compressed lips.
“But they can’t do it to me,” he said aloud, as he went back to his inventory. “Neither she nor Jessie can break me to the side saddle.”
It was several days before Hugh heard from Jessie, and then only through Johnny Parnell. That resplendent cowman, waiting for the Salt Lake train to arrive, lounged from the barber shop to the Indian Massacre and from the Indian Massacre to The Lariat.
“That there Miss Page,” he said, “wanted I should pick her up a pair of spurs. I guess she’s planning to beat Jess in an outfit.”
Hugh felt his pulses quicken, but he laid down a Smithsonian bulletin slowly. “How’s that?” he asked.
“Well, we supply all the dudes with spurs, if they want ’em. Miss Page had our usual brand, but when she saw Jessie gouging Magpie with those blue enamel Mexicans of hers, she got a altogether new ideal of horsemanship, I guess. Anyhow, she asked me to stop by here and negotiate a flossy pair from you.”
“That turquoise pair has no leathers,” said Hugh.
“O I can produce the leathers,” drawled Johnny. “How much? Four bits?”
Hugh laughed. “Take them to her with my compliments.”
“Don’t you do it! She’s rolling in money. She owns a bank or something back in Boston. Maybe it’s the dome of the State House. Jessie says she’s the self- and husband-supporting woman I’ve been looking for all these terrible years.”
Johnny pushed his sombrero to the back of his head and with a flash of his beautiful teeth offered Hugh a cigarette.
Hugh lighted the cigarette and proceeded awkwardly to wrap the spurs. “I suppose Jess is putting Magpie through her paces.”
“U-huh! She’s made more of a hit than all the he-guides put together. All the men want to take riding lessons, but so far she’s run this Miss Page as favorite. Women being queer.”
“Queer is the word,” agreed Hugh. “Here are the spurs. There is no charge. Tell Miss Page I’ll hope to see her wear them soon.”
“Thanks. She’s some woman. An old hand at handling men. Not a flirt, you understand. O no! Something finished about her method that I can’t sabe! Now, Jessie, bless her, you always know exactly what she’s doing to you, and that she’s too lazy to do very much. But not this other one! Me—I prefer Jessie. But not knocking Miss Page. It’s just that after being brought up to the Standard Breds, you wouldn’t know exactly how to go about gentling an Arabian. And that’s not knocking Jessie, either. You know how I stand about Jess. I’ve never made any bones of it.”
Hugh nodded and Johnny rambled on.
“Hughie, what do you suppose there is between Jessie and this here Miss Page?”
“What do you mean?” asked Hugh, eyeing his old friend keenly.
“It’s hard to say. The books would call it subtle! I think they are watching each other and, honest to God, Hughie, I think neither one would mind if the other fell down a canyon wall and was lost forever. If I thought Jessie cared enough about you, I’d say she was jealous. That is, if you’d known Miss Page long enough.”
“Women are queer,” repeated Hugh vacuously.
“They took a long trip the other day and Miss Page came in alone about sunset. Jessie, she didn’t get back till moon-up, two hours later. I jumped her and she said she and Miss Page had an argument. That the other one insisted on leaving her and coming home and Jess went on and finished the trip alone. Naturally, I was mad at Jessie and told her she’d lose her job of guide if such a thing ever happened again. She knows as well as I do that you’ve got to expect a dude to be crazy, and it’s always the guide’s job to stick with ’em.”
“What did Jessie say?” asked Hugh.
“She grunted.” Johnny suddenly laughed. “She also said a little later that I hadn’t complained when she’d let that fat school marm from Duluth come home alone the day before. Which was perfectly true. So there you are! Miss Page, as Jessie knows, is a peach, and Jessie, as Miss Page knows, is a pippin.”
Hugh smiled, and after Johnny had jingled out, he looked after him, recalling the mad days when he had believed life would not be worth living unless he bested young Johnny in the race to marry Jessie Morgan. Then he laughed aloud. Jessie! A first job as guide to Miriam Page. And after he had laughed aloud, he twisted his long brown hands together in a gesture that was expressive at once of pain and of consternation. Life, so brief and his control of its direction so uncertain! He did not return at once to his reading, but fell to pacing the floor.
The days were increasingly difficult. He had lived a life of great physical activity for which the pacing of the floor of The Lariat was a poor exchange. He had given up a star-hung sky for dingy cupids traced on a fly-specked ceiling. He had bartered the glory of the plains for books in tawdry bindings. Something, some one, must compensate for the loss or he could not endure it.
Billy Chamberlain, the barber, interrupted his half-savage meditation. Billy was smooth shaven and thin, with a fringe of sandy hair surrounding a shining bald spot His eyes were brown and slightly protuberant.
“Listen, Hughie,” he said, “I want to look up something in the dictionary. I’ll never get Pink Morgan out of the chair till I do.”
“What’s the trouble?” asked Hugh, nodding toward the shabby Webster beside the cash register.
“Pink says petrified wood ain’t wood. He sets up to know a lot because you're his son-in-law. He and Principal Jones has argued for an hour and I’m sick of it. A school teacher is always long-winded and Pink is as hard to run down as a coyote. And Pink says one of those damn birds you shipped out of here last summer wasn’t a bird, but a lizard. And I’ve been arguing with him about that. Would I find it under bird or lizard?”
“Under neither.” Hugh’s eyes were twinkling. “Here! I think I can find an exact statement in this.”
He opened a bulletin he had been reading just as Pink, one side of his face white with lather stamped in, followed by Principal Jones, a tall old man with a shock of white hair.
“Am I going to be shaved or ain’t I?” demanded Pink, furiously.
“Nobody could shave you with your jaw wagging like a dog’s tail,” retorted Chamberlain. “I’m over here trying to get some facts to stop it with.”
“Hughie,” demanded Pink, “wasn’t that last critter you brought in before Bookie died a lizard?”
“It was a prehistoric bird, you fool!” shouted Principal Jones in a voice of entire exasperation.
“Wait a moment, you fellows! Wait a moment!” exclaimed Hugh. “I’ll tell you the story of that little dinosaur and then you’ll understand what you’re arguing about.”
He leaned against the counter, half turned from the door to stare out the window at the air camp into which a white-winged plane was settling home. His voice was low and curiously persuasive. He was conscious of a keen desire to make these old friends of his see the picture as he saw it. So great was his concentration that he did not heed the glances of interest directed by his three hearers toward the door as Miriam Page entered, nor did he note their little grins of amusement as she motioned to them for silence.
“In the long ago, old timers,” said Hugh, “there was a lake stretching like a sea over these plains, from half-way up the Baldies to the peaks of the White Wolves. And the reason that we know this is so is because the story of it is written imperishably on the walls of the mountains. And the hieroglyphics in which the story is written are these.”
One after another he interpreted the familiar landmarks about them. Mountains became tropic islands Mesas became crescent sea beaches. The desert turned to uncanny jungles which thronged with the monsters of a long dead world.
Miriam leaned against the doorpost, her gaze intent on the back of Hugh’s head. Billy Chamberlain now and again swallowed with his jaws half opened. Principal Jones, with head craned forward, blinked and nodded as he did whenever a pupil acquitted himself shockingly well. Pink breathed heavily through his nose, forgetting to watch Miriam.
“—and that,” Hugh completed his tale, “is how the little dinosaur was saved from the ages for France.”
“Say, Hughie,” said Billy Chamberlain, “it’s a shame to waste good thunder like that on stones. Do you know you could persuade a hydrophobia skunk to think he was a canary bird. It ain’t that you’re such a good talker, either. It’s your way.”
Pink cleared his throat. “Are you ever going to shave me, Billy?”
“Come on! Come on! I hope you can keep your jaw quiet, now you’ve been showed up wrong!”
Hugh turned, smiling as the two belligerents strode toward the door, to discover Miriam, her eyes still intent upon him. She came slowly toward him.
“I came to buy,” she said, “and I stayed to—” she hesitated—“I stayed—to beg.”
Hugh took her outstretched hand, “To beg?” he repeated, a little awkwardly.
“Yes,” said Miriam, “that you would not waste your gift.”
“You mean my work!” exclaimed Hugh, with eager satisfaction. “I knew you’d understand.”
“Not your work. I don’t know much about that as yet. Your gift is the priceless gift of personality. Something vivid and fine that people get quite without your willing it to be so.”
Hugh was feeling more and more collapsed. He looked at Miriam with the old expression of baffled weariness. Principal Jones cleared his throat. Neither Miriam nor Hugh heard him. The old man looked from one to the other with keen scrutiny, waited a moment in the unembarrassed silence, then, quite unheeded, tip-toed out of the shop.
“Don’t look at me so!” exclaimed Miriam. “I do understand you—better than you realize.”
Hugh shook his head with a little smile. “There is so little to understand about me that you’re not complimenting yourself. You look tired. How did you come in?”
“On old Lemon Skin. My first long ride. Your wife says that a month from now I can ride what she calls a real horse.”
“Jessie is a good judge,” said Hugh, then added, “Did she come in with you?”
“No I just started off on my own early this morning and—decided to buy new spurs.”
“I sent my best pair to you this morning by Johnny Parnell. He must be over at the station. Have you had your dinner?”
It was not the sort of conversation he had planned with Miriam He looked at her appealingly. She seated herself casually in one of the chairs beside the stove.
“I’ll get some lunch when I’ve cooled down from the ride,” she said. “Perhaps you’ll let me rest here.”
“Perhaps I will,” agreed Hugh, with a smile.
“Has it been a long two weeks—I mean the weeks of shop-keeping?”
He was astounded to discover how glad he was to see her. “It’s been a week of Hades,” he replied, bluntly.
Miriam’s hazel eyes were very bright. “I wonder just why?” she murmured.
There was a silence, broken by the thudding of hoofs in sand as a herd of steers was rushed past the window by a shouting rider. Hugh moved restlessly.
“What sort of a time are you having up at the ranch?” he asked.
“Interesting. Mrs. Stewart is doing a good job, even if she doesn’t like me.”
“What makes you think she doesn’t like you?” demanded Hugh.
Miriam shrugged her shoulders and said with a whimsical smile, “I don’t mind that if you will like me just a little.”
Hugh’s eyes suddenly widened and contracted. “Me?” He drew a quick breath “Me? But I do like you. Very much. More than—” He hesitated, drawing a little closer to her.
“More than what?” she asked gently.
“More than I want to like a woman again,” he said, quietly.
“I can understand that.” Miriam nodded her head.
“Can you!” exclaimed Hugh, eagerly.
“Yes. Marriage had failed you, intellectually. You think that all marriage would be that way. So you are afraid.”
“No! Not afraid. I’ve lost my illusions. I’m not blaming any one any more than I blame myself. You’ve probably been in this neighborhood long enough to learn that I’m a failure at most things.”
“But I know that you’re not a failure. I know that you are a big man. And I like you I like you more than”—her eyes were very bright—“more than you perhaps will want me to like you!”
“That couldn’t be!” exclaimed Hugh. Then he paused, suddenly cognizant of his great loneliness, of his great hunger, of the direction in which he was drifting. He knew now that in his need he could turn to this woman as a thirsting traveler turns to a spring in the desert.
Miriam, a little flushed, very tender as to lip and eager as to eye, laid her hand gently on his.
“I wonder,” she said softly, “if you have any idea of what a dear you are.”
His warm palm closed on her fingers. “No!” he exclaimed. “If I seem to you to be anything but a cold and useless fossil digger, for God’s sake tell me so.”
“My dear, you seem to me, your work seems to me, to be too big for the average person to comprehend.”
“Not me. My work!” said Hugh.
“Have it your own way! Only let me share both in the short time I shall be in the west.”
“How can I share with you?” asked Hugh, eagerly.
“Will you let me ask you some questions, first?”
“Anything you wish!”
“Let’s begin with the will. Is it really your intention not to leave The Lariat except for meals and sleep?” She was smiling now.
Hugh returned the smile. “I don’t know whether I could trust myself as far as the barber shop or not! Why do you ask?”
“Because understanding about the will will help me to understand you! Incidentally, I’m curious! You realize, don’t you, that the most people talk of around here is the will and the Frontier Days Celebration?”
Hugh groaned and Miriam laughed. “Are you going to be able to stick it?” she asked. “It’s a wonderful property!”
A wonderful property! He then to her was enduring this barren exile that he might own the ranch and the Old Sioux Tract. And she had said that she understood him.
“Look!” he said suddenly, leaning toward her, his face flushed beneath its tan. “We can’t go on unless you feel as I do about it all.”
“Tell me how you feel about it,” the smile leaving her eyes.
Hugh rose to lean against the counter and slowly began to unpack his heart to her. He told her of his childhood, of Bookie, of the slow growth of his feeling toward his profession, of his marriage, of Jessie, of Mrs. Morgan. He told her of his toil to open up the buried manuscripts of unstoried time. And he told her of Bookie’s death. And last of all, he told her of his mental struggle over the will and what the sacrifice meant to him.
When he had finished Miriam’s eyes were tear-blinded.
“It is so difficult to be impartial in judging you,” she said, ruefully. “What you are dominates one so that one forgets what you ought to be. Why does your wife want you to go into politics?”
“In a frontier state, politics is the most obvious way out of primitive living and isolation, into positions of power and ease.”
Miriam nodded. Then she said slowly, “It’s very wonderful to love one’s work as you do. I’d almost say it was the greatest gift the gods can bestow. But such love should lead somewhere.”
“I don’t see why it should lead anywhere but to itself.” Hugh was watching Miriam with painful intensity.
“It ought to lead at least to the world’s sharing more in your work, particularly in your interpretation of it. I wish so much”
“What is it you wish?” asked Hugh, gently.
“I wish I could see you at work. Then I’d understand still better”
“And you want to understand?” Hugh leaned toward her.
Miriam looked up steadily into his eyes. “I must understand!”
Hugh drew a deep breath and paced the floor for a moment. Then he said, “I must and I will keep my word to Uncle Bookie. But I can show you where I have worked, if you have time and are fairly good at climbing. I know you are athletic, but do heights make you dizzy?”
“No. I’ve done a little climbing in the Alps. Enough to prove that.”
“Oh! Then this will be easy.” He looked at her attentively. How lovely, how very lovely she was! All the charm that was peculiarly Hugh’s was in his face as he took both Miriam’s hands in his.
“You know, Miriam! You know!” he whispered.
“Yes!” She looked up into his face and her lips quivered.
Hugh dropped her hands and started slowly toward the door, then turned back to say, “I’m going to arrange with Pink Morgan to stay in The Lariat till I come back. You and I are going to go in the launch up the river to a cave. I want you to see I can get you back by dark, but you’d better plan to stay at the Indian Massacre tonight.”
Miriam nodded and Hugh returned shortly with his father-in-law, who agreed most willingly to keep shop. Any engagement that relieved Pink of his wife and the hotel was entirely satisfactory. Miriam’s horse having been unsaddled and turned into the corral, the expedition started without delay.
The little launch in which Hugh had done so much river prospecting had been lying forlornly behind The Lariat since Bookie’s death. Miriam sat beside Hugh, intently following his vivid interpretation of the broad level floor of the canyon—the crimson, tortured walls of the canyon. They left the little town behind, passed the excavation which scarred the spot from which Hugh had unearthed a huge collection of fossilized bones, passed the crude camp of an oil prospector, passed a group of Sioux squaws, tramping southward with bundles of babies and bead work.
It was not until they had passed the last trace of humanity that Hugh ceased to speak of his work. But when the trudging squaws had disappeared, he laid his free hand on Miriam’s and said abruptly, “It’s been fearfully swift, hasn’t it! I would have laughed had any one told me, even two months ago, that it could have come to me so. Yet it is right that it should come to us swiftly. Life is so short. We have no time to waste.”
A slow flush showed through the delicate tan of Miriam’s cheeks. After a moment, during which her lower lip quivered, she answered, “Yes, we have no time to waste.”
“I am very happy,” Hugh said slowly. Then they sat in a silence that was unbroken until Hugh brought the launch into a pool that lay behind a giant butte. They did not disembark at once, but sat for a moment after Hugh had snubbed the boat to a convenient boulder, contemplating the beauty of the scene.
The rushing waters, blue as the sky, blue as deep sapphire, trembled and roared just beyond the quiet blue pool in which the little launch lay motionless. From a massive nest of sticks, far, far above, an eagle looked down on the quiet figures in the boat.
“There is Jessie to be considered,” said Miriam, suddenly.
“Yes,” returned Hugh, coolly, “I shall consider her. But not today, nor while you are in Wyoming. Jessie has had her chance with me for a good many years. She never could understand that my work is me. She didn’t want to understand. As a matter of fact, she doesn’t love me at all.”
“I believe that Johnny Parnell cares a great deal about Jessie, and it seems to me she could easily care about him,” suggested Miriam.
Hugh nodded absently. Jessie had long since ceased to trouble or interest any but the outer surface of his existence. He was gazing now at the new-made trail that etched the canyon wall beyond the butte. Miriam’s eyes followed his.
“We made that trail this spring,” said Hugh. “It’s very rough, but you can climb it. I’ll tell you about the cave to which it leads before we start.”
He told the story of the finding of the triceratops, failing, however, to speak of Jimmie Duncan or old Bookie’s connection with the cave. This finished, they began the slow ascent. Miriam was breathless when they reached the opening. Hugh unfastened the crude door with which he had sealed the entrance and seated Miriam on a packing case, while he lighted a number of candles and placed them at the rear of the cavern which the afternoon light failed to reach. When he came back to Miriam she was staring at the heap of skeletons with unmitigated horror. She clutched his arm as he sat down beside her.
“Hugh! Don’t stir an inch away from me!” she gasped.
He laughed and clasped her fingers firmly. “You little goose! Listen to me and I’ll make you feel differently about it. First, look at that excavation above the candles, while I tell you the story of Red Wolf’s stone devil beast.”
Slowly before Miriam’s fascinated gaze, there appeared at the rear of the cave a monster of forgotten time, a three-horned brute, with vast, wallowing body and a jointed tail that swept dragon-like behind the elephantine legs. And above the monster, crouched threateningly in mighty herbage, flew dragonflies, huge as the eagle in its nest in the butte side, and more horrible, more beautiful. Strange cries, strange scents, strange colors, and a loneliness more profound than savagery. Miriam suddenly glimpsed a vista of earth’s history that was mind shattering in its immensity. She knew now with appalling clarity what Hugh felt when he said that their little lives were too short! She knew now what it meant to this man to draw the curtain aside from this unending, unthinkable vista. She knew now how painfully, with what imperceptible slowness, that curtain must be drawn, what passion of interest and loyalty that drawing demanded from the men who gave their lives to it. And yet she could not endure the thought that such imagination, such loyalty, such vividness of perception should be given by Hugh to so remote a profession. And as she sat beside him, in the silence that followed his tale of the triceratops, Miriam’s resolve was taken. Neither paleontology nor Jessie were to claim him longer. He was to belong to her and to that larger place in the world to which his talents and his personality entitled him. But she was far too clever a woman to discuss this thought with Hugh.
She broke the silence with a little sigh. “I see it, Hugh, as I had not seen it before. What enormous labor, my dear, what patience, and what fascination! It is wonderful work.”
Hugh laughed delightedly. “I knew you’d get it! Forgot all about the piffling little Indian massacre at our feet, didn’t you?”
“It has no place in your huge canvas,” said Miriam.
“That’s it!” exclaimed Hugh, rising. “You are shivering, Miriam. We will get back to the launch. Some day”— He paused and, putting his hand beneath her chin, he turned her face toward his, “Some day, please God, we’ll see some of this work through together; shall we not, Miriam?”
She nodded slowly
Hugh drew a long breath. “You can’t imagine,” he exclaimed, “what your understanding means to me! It makes it possible for me to endure my exile in The Lariat.”
“I don’t believe you are going to find that exile half as stupid as you anticipate it will be,” said Miriam.
“Thanks to you, I won’t!” Hugh laughed and led her out to the trail.
They were in the launch and well out into the river when he said, with something of the old wistfulness in his eyes, “Well, we’ve snatched one perfect moment from eternity, anyhow The beauty of it ought to hallow that old cave long after you and I are forgotten dust.”
“I’ll be forgotten,” returned Miriam, “but you are never going to be if I can help it.”
“What are you going to do? Have my bones fossilized?” chuckled Hugh.
Miriam shook her head. It was after a long silence that she said, “Hugh, promise me that no matter what comes, nothing ever will shake your faith in me and in my caring for you. Remember, no matter what is said or done, my love for you is a perfect and a holy thing. You never must distrust it. Promise me, Hugh.”
“I promise you, Miriam,” said Hugh, his low voice hardly audible above the rushing river.
It was sunset when they tied to the bank of the river behind The Lariat, and Miriam went at once to the Indian Massacre. There was still an hour before supper, and Pink, relieved of duty in the book store, undertook to provide entertainment for this solitary guest.
“This is the most wonderful country in the world,” he said. “But you can’t get these folks in Fort Sioux to realize it. They don’t see nothing but mining and ranching.”
“What else could there be here?” asked Miriam, looking up from the ancient magazine she had found on the hotel counter.
“Lots of things. For example, there’s enough water power in that river to electrify half of Wyoming. I’ve talked it for ten years. Do you suppose I can get anybody with money to listen to me? No! All they can talk is cattle and oil.”
Pink chewed bitterly for a moment, then the big idea of his life flashed into his mind. He got up from his chair near the stove and crossed to Miriam, seated before the window.
“Say, I hear,” he began eagerly and confidentially, “that you are a banker. That means that you are next to big sums of money.”
“It might mean so,” agreed Miriam cautiously.
“Folks round here,” Pink went on, “look on me as a kind of a camp follower for my wife. She runs this town and she runs me. But she hasn’t robbed me of the power to think—not yet, I mean. And I’ve got one idea that if I can put it over will make me the biggest man in Wyoming. And if you’ll help me, we sure can put it over.”
“What’s the idea?” asked Miriam.
“Just what I’ve told you. Water power. Two or three different surveyors at different times have told me that a dam a few miles up the canyon from Fort Sioux would be a world wonder for the power it would produce. They’d put the dam at the butte where Hughie’s made the new trail.”
Miriam smiled. “Your ideas are rather expensive, aren’t they?”
“Expensive, yes! Gosh! Think of the bigness of it! Why, the waters would back up clean into Hughie’s cave and over a lot of the Old Sioux Tract. Turn it into a forty-mile lake.”
“What would Hugh say to that?” exclaimed Miriam.
Pink laughed. “He’d be as ugly as a wolverine and try to fight it. But what could he do? Progress can’t stop because the trail happens to cross a burying ground, can it?”
Miriam turned thoughtful eyes from Pink to the stove. Finally she said, “Can you tell me the name of some accredited engineer who may have gone over this ground?”
“Sure!” with eager astonishment. “George Haskins. He used to be in Cheyenne, but now he’s got some kind of a big job in Chicago. He went over this ground years ago with a pipe dream that didn’t pan out.”
“If I should attempt to swing such a deal, have I your word that you will not mention it to a living soul?”
“Absolutely!” roared Pink. “Do you actually mean that you’re going to consider it?”
“I might, if it is really feasible.”
“And where do I come in?” with sudden suspicion.
“I’d see that you were taken care of, of course.”
“Hah!” explosively, “looks like I’d have a chance to show the Missis I’m a man, after all! Here comes Hughie to supper. Poor old bone digger! I sure believe he’d go up and knife the Public Utilities Commission if he thought they’d give that charter.”
“If a big concern got back of the construction of that dam, I imagine Hugh would have to get into real politics before he could block it,” said Miriam carelessly.
“The only way he could stop it would be to make himself governor of the state!” chuckled Pink. “Hello, Hughie! Sold any books since I left?”
“No, but I’ve loaned the dictionary,” returned Hugh with a laughing glance at Miriam, as he followed her into the dining room.