The Heart of Canyon Pass

Joe Hurley started back a step. If a kitten he had stooped to pet had suddenly turned and gouged him with its claws he could have been no more startled.

But Betty Hunt proved herself no kitten. She was usually a very self-contained and quite unexcited young woman. It was only for a minute that she allowed her anger to flame out.

“Now, that’s enough about that,” she pursued, still with a frown. “The thing is done. We are here. I do not believe that Ford will ever be happy in Canyon Pass; and I know I shall not.”

“Better not speak so positively, Bet,” said Hunt coolly. A brother seldom is much impressed by his sister’s little ruffles of temper. “You may have to change your opinion. My belief is that none of us can find happiness in a new environment. We must take the happiness with us to any new abode.”

Hurley was much subdued during their walk through the town. His knowledge of girls like Betty was very slight. He had never had a sister and he could not remember his mother.

Even girls like Nell Blossom had not been frequent events in the mining man’s life. His two years spent in the East had been almost as barren of feminine society as his years in the West.

Now, it must be confessed, Betty Hunt had “got him going,” to quote his own thought in the matter. Not that Hurley was of a fickle temperament. But he was not a man to eat his heart out in an utterly impossible cause.

Nell had shown him plainly that she had no use for him save as an acquaintance. He could not even count himself her friend now, for since her return from Hoskins she had seemed more remote from the men of Canyon Pass than ever before.

So, Joe Hurley had already put Nell out of his mind in that way before Betty Hunt had appeared on the scene. And, it seemed, he was fated to be attracted by a distant star. The minister’s sister was distinctly of another world – and a world far, far above that of Canyon Pass, Hurley told himself.

It was not Betty’s finnicky ways, as her brother bluntly called them, that held the girl from the East so dear in Joe’s eyes. It was in spite of her disapproval of Canyon Pass and all that lay therein. The mining man was deeply interested in the development of the camp. He had done much in a business way to improve conditions here. He hoped to do more.

He had quite realized that the place needed something besides modern business methods to raise it out of the slough in which it wallowed as a community. This realization, shared with such people as Bill Judson and old Mother Tubbs, had led Hurley to interest the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt in Canyon Pass. He foresaw the camp in time as well governed a place as Crescent City.

Betty’s scorn and vituperation regarding the shortcomings of the Pass actually pained Hurley. Was it so bad as she seemed to think it was? This girl from the East was very positive in her dislike for the place and its people.

Then he looked over her head at the quietly smiling face of Hunt. He did not seem to share his sister’s opinion that the Pass was beyond redemption. There was, after all, a quality of sanity and stability about Hunt that bolstered Hurley’s hope.

“That boy is all right,” thought Hurley finally. “He sees things with a clear eye. And our crudeness doesn’t scare him. His sister – Well! what could you expect of a pretty, fluffy little thing like her? This place is bound to look rotten to her at the first. But at that, she may change her opinion.”

In fact, Joe Hurley had determination enough to believe that he was just the chap who could change these opinions of Betty Hunt! His non-success with Nell Blossom had not convinced him that he would never be able to attract other girls.

Right at the start Joe had been enamored of the fragile beauty of the parson’s sister. Hers was not the robust, if petite, prettiness of Nell Blossom. It was a beauty of spirit and character that looked out of Betty’s gray eyes. Her very calmness and primness intrigued the mining man.

Opposite is attracted by opposite. Because he was so open and hearty himself, Hurley admired the daintiness and delicacy of Betty. Her primness, even her shrinking from the things to which he was so used in and about Canyon Pass, pleased the young man in a way.

Here was just the sort of girl he desired to establish in his home – a real home – when he got one. Joe Hurley did not propose to live in a bachelor shack in the purlieus of Canyon Pass all his life – by no means! He was getting on. The Great Hope was panning out well. It had every promise of being a big thing in time. He was going to be rich. Betty Hunt would grace the head of the table of a millionaire – wear the clothes a prince might buy for his wife – hold the respect and admiration that the highest lady in the land might claim.

“I’ve got to have that girl,” thought Hurley. “And I’m going after her!”

They climbed the steep road of rolled rock to the highland overlooking the town and giving them a view to the first turn of the canyon bed of Runaway River. When the squalid sight of Canyon Pass could be shut out of the mind, even Betty admitted that the dimming light in the canyon lent a fairylike charm to all its ruggedness. It was a slot made by giants in the hills without doubt. She expressed a desire to see more of it.

“I’ll get you a good cayuse,” said Hurley eagerly. “Got any riding duds with you?”

“I have my habit in one of my trunks.”

The Westerner looked at her doubtfully. “Don’t know about long skirts flapping around the legs of these Western critters – ”

“Habits are not made with skirts nowadays, Mr. Hurley,” Betty interrupted coldly. “Fashion – even in the Fenway – demands that the feminine riding suit shall be mannish.”

“Oh! If you ride astraddle,” replied Hurley, without realizing that his phrase shocked her, “we can find you a horse that will fill the bill. I’ve got one that I ride myself, and I can pick up one for Willie.”

“Most agreeable to me, I’m sure,” agreed the parson. “I can ride after a fashion. Bet got her training at boarding school. If Aunt Prudence knew all her niece got at that institution the dear old lady would have been shocked.”

Betty did not smile. There were things that had happened to her at boarding school that Ford knew nothing about. His words aroused in her mind the carking memory of the secret that had changed Betty Hunt’s life completely – the secret that had killed all the sparkle and winsome lightness in the girl’s nature. She became silent and after that only listened to the talk of the two young men.

Not that she was not interested as they went on and Hurley pointed out the several claims being worked with the most modern methods of the Oreode Company, and the Nufall Syndicate, and by himself and his associates at the Great Hope. This mining business was all new to the girl, and she had an inquiring mind. She did not shrink at all, when Hurley suggested a descent into the shaft and produced slickers and rubber boots and tarpaulins to put on over their clothes.

The man in charge let them down in the bucket, and a gasoline torch showed them all that there was to see under the surface. Hurley explained with pride how he had found and developed the first paying lead in the Great Hope, but that the name of the mine foreshadowed a much richer vein that he was confident was soon to be opened. Science and that “sixth sense” of the miner assured him that the big thing was coming.

“We’re always looking toward El Dorado, we miners,” he said with a laugh. “It’s hope that keeps us up.”

“‘El Dorado’ – the hoped-for land,” repeated Betty softly. And then, standing there in the flickering radiance of the torch, she repeated, while the men were silent, that concluding paragraph of Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay:

“‘O toiling hands of mortals! O unwearied feet, traveling ye know not whither! Soon, soon it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop and, but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness, for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.’”

“Amen,” Hunt commented seriously.

“You said it,” agreed the mining man with that bluff emphasis that did not shock Betty so much now as it might at the beginning. “That’s what keeps me going. Stevenson knew what he was writing about. But, we would have considered him a weakling out here, I am afraid. We are inclined to judge everything here in terms of muscle and brawn.”

“But it has been your brains, Joe, not your brawn, that has carried you so far in this work,” Hunt declared warmly.

Hurley sighed as they went back to the shaft. “Let me tell you I have had to use considerable brawn, Willie, in handling these roughnecks that work for me.”

He laughed again. Joe Hurley could not be sober for long. And his temper exploded when he had to shout at the top of his lungs to attract the attention of the watchmen when they wanted to get up to the surface.

“This feller isn’t worth the powder to blow him from here to Jericho,” grumbled Hurley. “I always miss old Steve Siebert when he slopes for the desert, as he’s bound to do every spring. That old desert rat is always here over Sunday to see that everything is all right, when he’s on the job. But he just has to go off prospecting once in so often.”

He told them more about Siebert and Andy McCann as they went away from the claim. Betty listened as before with quiet interest, but she made no comment. Hurley was not at all sure that she had enjoyed, or even approved of their visit to the mine when she and Hunt parted from him at his own shack, although she thanked him politely.

The walk did not end for Hunt and his sister without a more adventurous incident. The sun had disappeared and the dusk had begun to thicken in corners and by-streets as they approached the hotel. There, at the mouth of a narrow lane, two figures stood, a man and a girl, and their voices were sharp and angry.

“That’s what I’m telling you,” the man’s voice drawled, a note in it that at once raised in Hunt that feeling that any decent man experiences who hears one of his own sex so address a woman. “You got to come to it, and you might as well come now as later. I got you on the hip – that I have. Understand?”

“I understand nothing of the kind, Tolley. You’re a bluffer and a beast! And if you don’t let me alone – ”

“Don’t fool yourself,” interrupted the man. “I won’t let you alone till you come back to the Grub Stake. But I won’t talk to you about it again. I’ll talk to others.”

Then the girl told him angrily to do his worst. Betty attempted to pass on swiftly; but the young man hesitated.

“Do for goodness’ sake come along, Ford!” whispered his sister, looking back at him.

Back in Ditson Corners – or in almost any other Eastern town – the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt would scarcely have shown his interest in such a scene on the street, save perhaps to speak to a constable or policeman about it.

But there was something here he could not ignore. Nor was it entirely because he recognized the angry voice of the girl, although he had not as yet seen her face in the dusk.

“You’ll do what I tell you,” muttered the bully with an oath, as Hunt stepped nearer. “If you don’t come back to the Grub Stake to sing to-morrow night, I’ll let the whole o’ Canyon Pass know – ”

It was just then that Hunt’s hand dropped upon Boss Tolley’s shoulder. Nor did it drop lightly. The parson twisted the big man around by one muscular exertion and looked into his flushed face.

“Don’t you think you’ve said enough to the young lady?” Hunt asked quietly. “You have evidently forgotten yourself.”

“What – why, you fool tenderfoot!”

“Suppose you go, Miss Blossom,” suggested Hunt with unruffled voice. “Let me speak to this man.”

But the minister had quite mistaken Nell Blossom’s temper. She turned on him like a shot.

“What are you butting in for, I’d like to know? I can take care of myself – always have and always expect to.” Then she laughed harshly, turning to Tolley again. “Better beat it, Tolley, or the parson will do something to you besides grabbing your hat.”

The dance-hall keeper, swearing still, jerked away from Hunt’s grasp. He did not seek to continue the quarrel, however. He abruptly turned up the alley and disappeared.

“For goodness’ sake, Ford!” ejaculated Miss Betty.

Nell Blossom, thus attracted to the other girl, stepped nearer and stared at her. Her own face was unsmiling. If it had not been so really pretty one might have said it was a black look that she gave Betty. But it was an impish look, too.

“There are some things you’d better learn if you are going to stay in this camp, parson,” said the singer. “The principal thing is to mind your own business. If I ever need your help in any little thing, I’ll call on you.”

She passed them both, still staring – now with curiosity – at Betty and went on along the street. Betty seized her brother’s arm.

“What a horrid little creature!” she said.