The Heart of Canyon Pass
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But no man, Willie, has seemed yet to put the come hither on Nell Blossom. She just won’t be led, coaxed, or driven. She’s as hard as molded glass. A man-hater, if ever you heard of one. With all your famed powers of persuasion, reverend, I’d like to make a wager that you couldn’t mold our Nell into a pattern of the New England virtues, such as your own prim little sister has become by this time, I’ve no doubt. No insult to Miss Betty intended, Willie. But our Nell – well, you’d have your hands full in trying to make her do a thing that she did not want to do.
The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt was stung here, not by the good-natured raillery aimed at his own traits of character by his old college mate. But why had Joe gone out of his way to drag Betty’s name into it? It seemed to be a mild slur upon his sister’s character, and Hunt had an uneasy feeling that he ought to resent it.
Betty had met Joe Hurley but once – to Hunt’s knowledge. It was an occasion when she had stopped at the college town on her way home from boarding school. Hunt had met her at the station, and Joe had shown up, too. The three of them had sought a restaurant where they ate, and Betty had chattered like – well, just as a girl of her age and fresh from the excitement of boarding school would chatter. When her first fear of the big Westerner had worn off she had usurped the conversation almost completely. Hunt had often thought since that Joe Hurley was quite attracted by his lively sister.
But how did Joe know that Betty had changed so?
That his sister was not the same cheerful, brisk, chatterbox of a girl she had been when Joe met her, Hunt quite well knew. And the change puzzled him.
He visualized their Aunt Prudence Mason, who had lived all her long life in the rut of New England spinsterhood, molding more or less the characters of the orphaned brother and sister left at an early age to her sole care. Was Betty, here in the straitened environment of Ditson Corners, doomed to jog along the well-beaten track Aunt Prudence had followed? The brother shuddered as he thought of it.
He glanced at Joe’s letter once more. A golden-haired, blue-eyed girl who really sang – not shrieked as did Miss Pelter whose top notes in the church choir rasped Hunt’s nerves like a cross-cut saw dragged through a pine knot.
There was always a quarrel of some kind in that choir – the bickerings and heart-burnings of his volunteer church choir were perennial.
Then, there was the feud over the Ditson pew – which branch of the influential Ditson family should hold the chief seats in the church. Hunt could not satisfy everybody. There was still a clique, even after his two years’ pastorate, who let it be frankly known that they had desired to call Bardell, instead of him, to the pulpit of the First Church.
These continued faultfindings and disputes were getting on Hunt’s nerves. And they must be affecting Betty – influencing her more than he had heretofore considered.
This letter from Joe Hurley had come at a moment when Hunt was desperately and completely out of tune with his environment. He had brought to his first pastorate a modicum of enthusiasm which, during the first year, had expanded into an earnest and purposeful determination to do his duty as he saw it and to carry his congregation in spirit to the heights he would achieve.
He – and they – had risen to a certain apex of spiritual experience through the first months of his earnest endeavor, and then the cogs had begun to slip. Suddenly Willett Ford Hunt’s castles toppled and collapsed about him. He found himself, half stunned, wholly mazed, wallowing in the débris of his first church row, the renewed war over the Ditson pew.
Hunt had extricated himself from this cataclysm with difficulty, almost like a man lifting himself off the earth by his bootstraps. The Ditson feud was by no means at an end even now, and it never would be ended as long as two Ditsons of different branches of the family remained alive. Hunt had sought to renew his own and his congregation’s spiritual life. It was then and not until then that he discovered the fire was out.
Oh, for a church where one might preach as one pleased, so long as one followed the spiritual instincts aroused by right living and a true desire to help one’s fellow men! That is what Hunt said he longed for.
But actually what he longed for is what perhaps we all long for whether we know it or not – appreciation. Not fulsome praise, not a mawkishly sentimental fawning flattery. He desired to feel that the understanding heart of the community apprehended what he wished to do and respected his effort though he might fall short of the goal.
There seemed to be no heart – understanding or otherwise – in Ditson Corners. Why! A wild Western mining camp, such as Joe said Canyon Pass was, could be no more ungrateful a soil to cultivate than this case-hardened, hide-bound, self-centered and utterly uncharitable Berkshire community.
The thought – not even audibly expressed – nevertheless shocked Hunt.
Hunt reached for the letter again. What had Joe said about there being a field for religious endeavor in Canyon Pass? It was along in the first part of the screed, and when he had found it he read:
Joshing aside, Willie, I believe you might dig down to the very heart of Canyon Pass – and I believe it has a heart. You were such a devil of a fellow for getting at the tap-root of a subject. If anybody can electrify the moral fiber of Canyon Pass – as some of them say I have the business part – it will be a man like you. You could do the “Lazarus, arise!” stunt if anybody could – make the composite moral man of Canyon Pass get up, put on a boiled shirt, and go forth a decent citizen. And believe me, the composite figure of the moral man here sadly needs such an awakening.
There was something that gripped Hunt in the rough and ready diction of this letter – something that aroused his imagination. It brought to his mind, too, a picture of Joe himself – a picture of both his physical and his mental proportions.
The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt was no pigmy himself, nor did he lack courage and vigor. He was good to look upon, dark without being sallow, crowned with a thick brush of dull black hair – there were some brown lights in it – possessing good features, keen gray eyes, broad shoulders, a hundred and eighty pounds of gristle and flesh on a perfect bony structure, and could look over a six-barred gate before he vaulted it. He had not allowed his spiritual experiences, neither rising nor falling, to interfere with his gymnastics or his daily walk.
But Joe Hurley topped Hunt by two inches, was broader, hardier, a wholly out-of-door man. Joe was typically of the West and the wilderness. He knew the open places and the tall timber, the mountains and the canyons, the boisterous waters of cascade and rock-hemmed river. He was such an entirely different being from Hunt that the latter had often wondered why the Westerner had made such a chum and confidant of him during those two years at college.
And now the pastor of Ditson Corners’ First Church realized that Joe Hurley had something that he wanted. He wished he was with Joe, out there in that raw country. He felt that he could get nearer to mankind out there and perhaps – he said it reverently – nearer to the God he humbly desired to serve. He thought of Betty.
“She needs a change as much as I do. How does Joe guess that she is becoming exactly a prim, repressed, narrow-thinking woman, and a Martha cumbered by many cares? She needs her chance as much as I need mine.”
He heard Betty’s step on the porch, and in a moment she entered the study, her hands full of those grateful mid-spring flowers, the lily of the valley.
Betty Hunt was not a fragile girl, but she did not possess much of that embonpoint the Greeks considered so necessary to beauty of figure. Nor was she angular. At least, her grace of carriage and credibly tailored frock masked any lack of flesh.
Slim hands she had, too, – beautiful hands, very white and with only a faint tracery of blue veins upon them. Really, they were a musician’s hands – pliable, light of touch, but strong. The deftness with which they arranged the flowers suggested that she did not need vision to aid in the task.
Therefore she kept her gaze on Hunt. He felt it, turned, and smiled up at her. He shook the leaves of the letter in his hand.
“Bet,” he said, “I’ve got another letter from Joe Hurley.”
Betty’s countenance changed in a flash.
“Oh! That Westerner?”
There was more than disapproval in her tone. She looked away from him quickly. Her own gray eyes filmed. A shocked, almost terrified expression seemed to stiffen all her face. But Hunt did not see this.
“There is no use talking, Bet,” her brother pursued in an argumentative way, thoughtfully staring at the letter again. “There is no use talking. Joe has it right. We are vegetating here. Most people in towns like this, here in the East, might honestly be classified among the flora rather than the fauna. We’re like rows of cabbages in a kitchen garden.”
“Why, Ford!”
He grinned up at her – a suddenly recalled grimace of his boyhood.
“There speaks the cabbage, Bet! We’re all alike – or most of us are. Here in the old Commonwealth I mean. We’re afraid to step aside from the rutted path, to accept a new idea; really afraid to be and live out each his own individuality.
“Ah! Out in this place Joe writes about – ”
He fingered the sheets of the letter again. She watched with the slow fading of all animation from her face – just as though a veil were drawn across it by invisible fingers. Her expression was not so much one of disapproval – her eyes held something entirely different in their depths. Was it fear?
“This Canyon Pass is a real field for a man’s efforts,” burst out Hunt with sudden exasperation. “I tell you, Bet, I feel as though my usefulness here had evaporated. I haven’t a thing in common with these people. Carping criticism and little else confronts me whichever way I turn.”
“You – you are nervous, Ford.”
“Nerves! What right has a man like me with nerves?” he demanded hotly.
“But, Ford – your work here?”
“Is a failure. Oh, yes. I can see better than you do, Bet – more clearly – that I have lost my grip on these people.”
“Surely there are other churches in the East that would welcome a man of your talents.”
“Aye! Another little hard-baked community in which I shall find exactly the elements that have made my pastorate here a failure.”
“You are not a failure!” she cried loyally.
“That’s nice of you, Bet. You are a mighty good sister. But I am letting you in for a share of the very difficulties that would soon put gray in my hair and a stone in my bosom instead of a heart.”
“Oh, Ford!”
“Out there – in some place like this Joe writes about – would be a new and unplowed field. A place where a man could develop – grow, not vegetate.”
“But – but must it necessarily be the West, Ford? I am not fond of the West.”
“You’ve never seen it.”
“I’m not fond of Western people.”
He looked at her with a dawning smile. “You’re afraid of them, Bet.”
“Yes. I am afraid of them,” whispered his sister, turning her face away from his gaze. “They are not our kind, Ford.”
“That’s exactly it,” he cried, smiting the desk with the flat of his palm. “We need to get out into the world, among people who are just as different from ‘our kind,’ as you term them, as possible. There we can expand. Out in Canyon Pass. I believe I could be a real help to that community. What is it Joe says?” He glanced again at the letter before him. “Yes! I might dig down to the very heart of Canyon Pass. Ditson Corners has merely a pumping station to circulate the blood of the community, patterned after the one at the reservoir on Knob Hill.”
She did not speak again. When Hunt looked around she had stolen from the room.
“Poor Bet!” he muttered. “The idea of change alarms her as it might have alarmed Aunt Prudence. Joe Hurley is right – he’s right beyond a doubt!”
CHAPTER III – A SHADOW THROWN BEFORE
A rider had his choice in journeying to Canyon Pass from a southerly direction – say from Lamberton, which lies between the railroad and the desert – of following the river trail to be deafened by the boisterous voice of the flood, or of climbing to the high lands and there jogging along the wagon track which finally dipped down the steeps to the ford of the West Fork and so into the mining town.
Spring was drifting into the background of the year. The cottonwood leaves were the size of squirrel ears. The new fronds of the piñon had expanded to full size and now their needles quivered in the heat of the almost summer-like day. Joe Hurley, sitting his heavy-haunched bay, giving as easily to the animal’s paces as a sack of meal, followed the wagon track rather than the river trail and so came to that fork where wheel-ruts from a westerly direction joined the road along the brink of the canyon wall.
A cream-colored pony came cantering along the trail from Hoskins, its rider as gaily dressed as a Mexican vaquero – a splotch of color against the background of the evergreens almost startling to his vision. But it was the identity of this rider that invigorated the tone of the mining man’s reflections.
“Nell Blossom! The only sure-enough cure for ophthalmia! Am I going to have the pleasure of being your escort back to Canyon Pass? It will sure do me proud. The Passonians are honing for you, Nell.”
“I’m going back to the Pass – yes, Mr. Hurley,” she said, pulling down her pony to the more sedate pace of his big bay.
“Where you been since you left us all in the lurch? There was almost a riot at the Grub Stake when Tolley found out you had gone.”
“Boss Tolley hasn’t got anything on me,” she said defensively. “I’d never sing there again, anyway.”
“Somebody said you’d lit out for the desert with Steve Siebert and Andy McCann,” and he chuckled. “They started the same day you vamoosed.”
“I might just as well have gone with those old desert rats. Pocket hunting couldn’t be much worse than Hoskins.”
“Great saltpeter! What took you to Hoskins?” exclaimed Hurley. “Where’s your local pride? If you weren’t born at Canyon Pass, you’ve lived there most of your life. You shouldn’t encourage a dump like Hoskins to believe for a moment that it has greater attractions than the Pass.”
“If I thought it might be more attractive, I learned better,” she said shortly.
“Mother Tubbs got a letter from you, but she wouldn’t tell us where you were.”
“No,” Nell said. “I didn’t want the boys riding over there and starting a roughhouse at the Tin Can Saloon.”
“Great saltpeter!” exclaimed Hurley again. “You don’t mean to say you been caroling your roundelays in that place?”
“A girl has to work somewhere, and I was sick to death of the Grub Stake.”
“Boss Tolley is no pleasant citizen and his joint is no sweet-scented garden spot, I admit,” Hurley agreed. “Personally I’d like to see Tolley run out of town and the Grub Stake eliminated. But Colorado Brown has opened a new place and is going to run it right – so he says.”
“That’s what is bringing me back,” Nell confessed. “He got word to me by Mother Tubbs, and he made me a better offer than Tolley ever would. But I expect one cabaret is about like another in these roughneck towns.”
“I don’t know about that,” the man said defensively. “We mean to try to clean up Canyon Pass. The boys have got to have amusement. Colorado Brown is a white man, and, if he gets the backing of the better element, he can give a good show and sell better hootch and better grub than ever Boss Tolley dared to.”
“Hootch is hootch,” Nell interrupted. “It’s all bad. There’s nothing good about a rotten egg, Mr. Hurley. And the men’s money is wasted in all those places – plumb wasted!”
He had been watching her closely as they talked. He had been watching Nell closely, off and on, for several years. Like many of the other young and unattached men of Canyon Pass, Joe Hurley had at one time attempted to storm the fortress of Nell Blossom’s heart. Finally he had become convinced that the girl was not for him.
Joe Hurley neither wore his heart on his sleeve nor was he unwise enough to anger Nell by forcing his attentions beyond that barrier she had raised between them. His were merely the objections of any clean-minded man when he had seen her yielding to the machinations of Dick the Devil. Joe knew the gambler’s kind.
He had felt no little anxiety when, with the usual spring exodus of the two old desert rats, Steve Siebert and Andy McCann, Nell and Dick Beckworth had likewise disappeared from the Grub Stake. Dick, of course, had settled with Boss Tolley; he intimated that he was starting north for the railroad at Crescent City. The hour had been so early that nobody else had chanced to see the gambler and the girl ride away. Nell was missed later, and all the right thinking men of the town, although they said little, feared the worst for Nell Blossom.
Nell had displayed at the last some little interest in Dick the Devil. The other girls at the Grub Stake gossiped about it.
Then came Mother Tubbs with a bona-fide letter from the girl to dam the flood of gossip. Nell was working as usual in a cabaret. She had left Boss Tolley because she could not stand him any longer. She was bitter about the Grub Stake and its proprietor. And not a word in the letter about Dick Beckworth. It was plain, even to the most suspicious, that Dick had not gone with her after all.
These few facts colored Joe Hurley’s thoughts as they rode along the track. What colored Nell’s?
When the sprightly talk lapsed between them, the girl’s face fell into unhappy lines. She who had been as blithe as a field lark all her life was showing to Joe Hurley for the first time a most unnatural soberness of spirit. Her eyes, their gaze fixed straight ahead, were filmed with remoteness that his friendly glance could not penetrate.
Something had changed Nell Blossom. She was no longer the happy-go-lucky girl she had been heretofore. He wondered if, after all, her affair with Dick Beckworth was serious.
They skirted the Overhang, their horses now at a canter. Nell suddenly pulled in her mount at a place where a patch along the brink of the treacherous cap had recently crumbled.
“Looks as if there might have been a small slide,” observed Hurley cheerfully.
“Was – was anybody hurt?”
“Reckon not. Just about where the big slide was years ago. There are always bits dropping down this cliff. I tell ’em there’s bound to be another landslip some time that will play hob with Runaway River and maybe flood out the town again. It’s like living over a volcano.”
Nell still looked back at the broken edge of the cliff. “Nobody missing, then? Nobody – er – left town?”
He laughed. “Nobody but you and old Steve and Andy McCann. Those old desert rats lit out the same morning you left town. Hold on! I don’t know as you know it; but Dick Beckworth went about that time. He’s gone to Denver, so Tolley says, to deal faro at a big place there.”
He could not see the girl’s face. As far as he knew the statement made no impression upon her. They jogged on practically in silence until they came to the point where the wagon-track plunged steeply to the ford of the West Fork, and from which spot the squalid town was first visible.
“Ugh!” Nell shuddered and glanced at Joe again. “It is such an ugly place.”
“Where’s your civic pride, Nell?” and the other chuckled.
“What is there to be proud of?” was her sharp demand.
“It’s a money-making town.”
“Money!”
“Quite a necessary evil, that same money,” he rejoined. “Gold is a good foundation to build a town upon. Canyon Pass has ‘got a future in front of it,’ as the feller said. Business is booming. Bank deposits are increasing. Three families have bought piano-players, and there are at least a dozen talking machines in town – besides the female citizens,” and he laughed again.
“All that?” in a sneering tone. “Still, the bulk of the wages from the mines and washings are spent for drink and in gambling. The increase in bank deposits I bet are made by the merchants and honkytonk keepers, Mr. Hurley. Canyon Pass is prosperous – yes. But at the expense of everything decent and everybody’s decency. Mother Tubbs has got it right. Canyon Pass hasn’t got a heart.”
“Oh – heart!”
“Yes, heart. There’s neither law nor gospel, she says. Only such law as is enforced at the muzzle of the sheriff’s gun. And as far as religion goes – when was there ever a parson in Canyon Pass?”
“They’re rare birds, I admit. But you needn’t blame me, Nell.”
“I do blame you!” she exclaimed fiercely. “You’re at fault – you, and Slickpenny Norris who runs the bank, and Bill Judson of the Three Star, and the manager of the Oreode Company, and the other more influential men. It is your fault that there isn’t a church and other civilized things in Canyon Pass.”
“Great saltpeter, Nell! You’re not wailing for a Sunday School and a sky pilot?”
“Me? I reckon not!” She almost spat out the scornful denial. “I’m just telling you what your old Canyon Pass is. It’s a back number. But I’m free to confess if a parson and a crew of psalm-singing tenderfoots came here, I’d like enough pull my freight again – and that time for keeps! Even Hoskins would be more endurable.”
At this outburst Joe Hurley broke into laughter. Nell Blossom was paradoxical – had always been.
And yet, what Nell had said about the shortcomings of Canyon Pass stuck in Joe Hurley’s mind. Within a few days the thought, fermenting within him, resulted in that letter which had so interested – not to say excited – the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt in far-away Ditson Corners.
CHAPTER IV – PHILOSOPHY BOUND IN HOMESPUN
“No, there ain’t no news – no news a-tall,” declared Mrs. Sam Tubbs, comfortably rocking. “Nothing ever happens in Canyon Pass. For a right busy town on its main street, there’s less happens in the back alleys than in any camp I ever seen – and I seen a-plenty.
“It’s in the back alleys o’ life, Nell, that the interesting things happen. Folks buy and sell, and argue and scheme, and otherwise play the fool out on the main streets. But in the alleys babies is born, and people die, and boys and gals make love and marry. Them’s the re’lly interesting things in life.”
“Ugh! Love and marriage! They are the biggest fool things the world knows anything about.”
Mother Tubbs chuckled. It was an unctuous chuckle. It shook her great body like a violent explosion in a jelly-bag and made the wide-armed rocking-chair she sat in creak.
“Sho!” she said. “I’ve heard seventeen-year-old gals say as much ’fore now, who dandled their second young-un on their knee ’fore they was twenty. The things we’re least sure of in this world is love and marriage. Lightning ain’t nothin’ to ’em – nothin’!
“Now, there’s Mr. Joe Hurley – ”
Nell started, turned on the top step of the Tubbs’ back porch, and looked searchingly at the old woman with a frown on her brow.
“Now, there’s Mr. Joe Hurley,” pursued Mother Tubbs placidly. “There ain’t a thing the matter with that man but that he needs a wife.”
“Why doesn’t he take one, then?” demanded Nell wickedly. “There are plenty of them around here whose husbands don’t seem to care anything about them.”
“Like me and my Sam, heh?” put forth Mother Tubbs, still amused. “But I reckon if Mr. Joe Hurley, or any other man, should attempt to run away with me, Sam would go gunning for him. What they call the ‘first law of Nater’ – which is the sense of possession, not self-preservation – would probably get to working in Sam’s mind.
“He’d get to thinking of my flapjacks and chicken-with-fixin’s and his bile would rise ’gainst the man – no matter who – who was enjoying them victuals.
“Oh, yes. Not only is the way to a man’s heart through his stomach; but believe me, Nell, most men are like those people the Bible speaks of ‘whose god is their stomach.’”
“Does the Bible say that, Mother Tubbs?” broke in the girl.
“Somethin’ near to it.”
“Then there is some sense in the Bible, isn’t there?”
“Hush-er-you, Nell Blossom!” ejaculated the old woman sternly. “Does seem awful that you’re such a heathen. The Bible’s plumb full of good advice, and lovely stories, and sweet truths. I used to read it a lot before I broke my specs. But I remember lots that I read, thanks be.”