The Settler

After that one lull the tumult increased in loudness and volume, and for a long half-hour Helen listened as some soft maid of Rome may have hearkened to the din of Goth or ravaging Hun in the sacred streets of the imperial city. To her, brought up under the shadow of law, with its material manifestation – a policeman – always within call, the brutal elemental passion behind that huge, amorphous voice was very terrible. Almost equally fearful was the sudden cessation that set the silence singing in her ears, the voiceless darkness, thick night of that black room.

Touching the trustee, more for the comfort of his presence than to draw his attention, she whispered, "What now?"

Just then the door rattled under a heavy kick; a strident voice answered her question: "Open, Glaves, an' send out that – baggage" (it was a viler word) "or we'll burn the house over your ears!"

"You will – " the trustee began, but was interrupted by a wail from his wife in the bedroom.

"Jimmy! Oh, Jimmy, don't let 'em have her. They'll duck her in the slough – mebbe drown her like they did Jenny Ross back in Huron."

"Will you shet up!" he roared, but the man outside had heard.

"You bet we will. She needs a little cooling."

"That's surely Mr. Shinn that's talking so fierce!" the trustee taunted. "Man, but you're gaining a heap wolfish, though it did take you some time to work up to the p'int of speech. Why didn't you take the shortcut through Bill's bottle?" His tone suddenly altered from banter to such stern command that they distinctly heard Shinn shuffle back a step from the door. "Burn this house? Get, or I'll blow the black heart out of you!"

A derisive yell rose outside, then silence fell again, a hush so complete that Helen distinctly heard the tick of the clock, her own breathing, the chirrup of a hearth cricket. Pulling the trustee's sleeve, she whispered, "I've brought such trouble upon you!"

"Rubbish!" he snapped. "Say that ag'in an' I'll spank you!" But he gently patted her hand.

A minute slid by without further speech; a second, third, fourth, then she whispered, "Surely they must have gone."

Before he could reply came a rapid beat of running feet, a splintering crash, an oblong of moonlight flashed out of the darkness at the end of the room, and quiet reigned again. Only the battering ram, a long log, poked its blunt nose over the doorsill.

"Stand clear there!" the trustee sharply warned. Then, as a dim, crouched figure appeared between the jambs, he shouted, "Fair warning!" and fired; but as the figure fell back and out, a chuckling laugh drifted through the smoke, Shinn's coarse voice yelled: "His gun's single barrel! In, afore he kin reload!" and a black, surging mass trampled over the dummy and filled the doorway. As aforeseen, the conclusion was justified – the trustee's long gun was familiar as his face in the settlement – and the click of Danvers' left trigger was drowned by a second harsh command – "Fair warning!"

The report, thunderous, ear-splitting in the confined space, certified to Shinn's mistake. His writhing mouth, Hines's wintry visage, the press of men in the door showed redly under the flash, then sulphurous darkness wiped out all. To Helen, its smothering pall seemed to pulse with thick life, to extend clutching fingers, horrors that were intensified by Mrs. Glaves's sudden burst of hysterical screaming. Crouched behind Glaves, she listened in agony to the swearing, sharp oaths, as men tripped and stumbled over the furniture and one another. There was no escape. They were feeling for her all over the room, and through a sick horror she heard Shinn's triumphant yell —

"I've got her!"

A choked gurgle, snarl of rage, as Glaves fastened onto his throat, explained his mistake. "Hell! has no one a match?" His strangled voice issued from a dark whorl, crash of splintering furniture, as they swung and staggered in that pit of gloom. The struggle could have but one ending. Healthy, Glaves would have been no match for Shinn, and, as a match scratched, came the soft thud of his body as he was thrown with brutal force against the wall.

Flaring up, the flame revealed Helen, white, trembling, sick with that paralysis of fear that a mouse must feel in the claws of a cat. From the bedroom came the hysterical whooping, terrible in its sameness. Wide-eyed, she stared, fascinated, at Shinn, but he also was staring at a body spread-eagled before the door, its face turned down in a black, viscid, spreading pool. The match went out.

"My God!" a man cried. "It's Hines!"

But Helen did not hear that or a cry from outside warning of approaching hoofs. Throughout the frenzy of noise, horror of darkness, suspense, the attack, she had carried herself bravely; but this swift death, following on all, broke her shaken nerves, deprived her of consciousness.

The trustee, however, heard and saw the house vomit its black life, the dark figures streaming under the moonlight out to the bluff where the horses were tied, panic-stricken by sudden death and uneasy memories of outraged law. Leaning in his doorway, bent and bruised, he saw also Flynn and Danvers thunder by with a score of remittance-men, a wild cavalcade hard on their heels. In the Irishman's hand a neck-yoke swung with ominous rattle of iron rings; Danvers carried a cavalry sabre he had snatched from his wall; the others brandished clubs. Looming an instant in the steam of their sweating beasts, they shot on with a glad hurrah.

"Yoicks! Tally-ho!" young Poole shrilled as he passed. "Sic 'em, Flynn!"

"A Flynn! A Flynn!" Danvers squeaked as Shinn crumpled under the neck-yoke.

Wild lads, under wilder leadership, they fought – as Mrs. Flynn had predicted – none the worse for a smell at the whiskey. Those of the enemy who made a slow mounting were ridden down, fell under the clubs, or achieved uncomfortable leaps into briers and scrub, to be afterwards caught and drubbed, while such as escaped were run down and brought to bay by twos and threes. In a running fight over miles of moonlit prairie the grudges of years were settled; jeers, gibes, many a cheating received payment in full, with arrears of interest. Thus Cummings received from Danvers the "boot" due on the mare that Carter once described as being "blind, spavined, sweenied, an' old enough to homestead," payment being slapped down upon the spot where most pain may be inflicted with least structural damage. In like manner Poole settled with Peter Rodd for a cannibalistic sow; Perceval with MacCloud, arrears not due on a quarter-section of scrub; Gray with Seebach for forty bushels of heated seed wheat. Leaving them to their rough auditing, the story returns with Flynn to the cabin after the dropping of Shinn.

After relighting the lamp, Glaves had carried his sore bones back to the lounge, and when Flynn entered he found the terrible old fellow glowering upon the dead. His wife's hysteria had slackened to a strained sobbing, and, answering Flynn's question, he tartly replied: "No, 'tain't Mrs. Carter. Had her fainting-spell an' kem to without any fuss, like a sensible girl. She's in there tending to that old fool." Then, beetling again on the dead, he forecast the verdict of the sheriff's jury. "Ye'll bear witness, Flynn, that this man kem to his death through running into a charge of buckshot after my winder 'd been shot in an' door battered down."

XXIV
WITHOUT THE PALE

"I really believe that I ought to resign!"

When, one morning a week later, Helen delivered herself of certain secret misgivings at breakfast, the trustee looked up, startled, from his eggs and mush, then proceeded to fish for motives.

"Scairt? You needn't to be. We've got this settlement by the short hairs at last."

His rude metaphor roughly set forth the truth. Without ties, the bachelors of the charivari party had scattered west through the territories, while Shinn, MacCloud, and other married men had gone into such close hiding that the sheriff had been unable to subpoena one for the inquest. But though she neither feared nor anticipated further violence, Helen now knew that she never would be able to live down the settlers' prejudice; and without the children's love, parents' confidence, her day of usefulness was past.

Glaves snorted at this altruistic reason. "Love? Confidence? What's their market value? You kedn't hope to compete with a dollar note for the first; as for the second – Danvers hit it off exactly when he stuck that sign on his stable door – 'No more trading here!' Now, from my p'int of view, it isn't a question of love or confidence, but one of faith."

"Faith?" she echoed.

Nodding, he went on. "Me and Flynn backed you up – stood by you through all, didn't we?"

"Indeed you did!" She grew rosily red under warmth of feeling. "I shall never – "

"An' now you allow to throw us down? For Shinn and MacCloud will shorely tell how that they scared you an' beat us out."

It was bad argument, poor ethics – a bald statement of his grim intention of bending the stubborn settlers to his inflexible purpose. She felt, however, that it would be still poorer ethics for her to desert and disappoint these, her champions, defenders. It was one of these peculiar situations where any course seems wrong, and if she chose that which seemed most human, she did it with a mental reservation. She would resign just as soon as she could persuade him to look at things her way.

"Of course I'll stay – to please you. But – "

"No 'buts,'" he interrupted. "Haying begins Monday, an' by fall it'll all be ol' hist'ry."

But Monday brought justification of her doubt, proving that, if cowed, the settlers were by no means conquered. Only the young Flynns attended school, and the array of empty benches loomed in her troubled vision like a huge face, vacant, mulishly obstinate as a blank wall, vividly eloquent of the invincible determination that would have none of her. Her heart sank, and when the week passed without further attendance she gave up, handed her resignation to Flynn and Glaves in council at the latter's cabin.

Both, as might be expected, registered strenuous objections. "'Tain't your fault if they cut off their nose to spite their face," Glaves argued. And when she replied that the children would suffer, he rasped: "What of it? 'The sins of the fathers shall be visited on the children to the fourth generation.' Ye have Scripter for that."

"But not the sin of the stranger," she gently objected. "I have myself to blame for the prejudice."

Now, though neither trustee would admit her confession, both were afflicted with a sneaking consciousness of its truth. For not only had she offended by consorting with that public enemy, the remittance-man, but the cause of Carter's desertion had escaped from Elinor Leslie's indiscreet tongue. Every man, woman, and child in the country-side was informed as to the events which led up to and followed the Ravells' visit. Their denials, therefore, were negated by that profuseness of expression which accentuates the truth it seeks to conceal.

"You know it," she answered them, and opposed further argument with that soft feminine obstinacy which wears out masculine strength.

"But what else kin you do?" Glaves cried at last, in despair.

"Go to Winnipeg and take a place in an office or store."

Though she affected brightness, she could not altogether hide the dejection, homesickness that inhered in the thought. Now that she was to leave it, that rude cabin, with its log walls, legal patchwork, home-made furniture, glowed with the glamours of home. Even Mrs. Glaves's gaunt ugliness became suddenly dear in the light of an indefinite future among strangers.

Detecting her underlying sadness, Flynn exclaimed: "Phwat? Wurrk in a sthore? Sell pins, naydles, an' such truck while I've a roof over me head? Ye'd die in thim lonesome hotels. Ye 'll just come right home wid me."

"Likely, ain't it?" Glaves broke in, jealous for his prerogative. "In the first place, if she goes, she ain't agoing to stop at no hotel, but with my own sister that keeps a boarding-house on Main Street. An' if she stays, it'll be right here, with me – eh, old woman?"

His wife's warm assent brought Helen to tears without, however, affecting her resolution. For the settlement would be by the ears, she said, just as long as she stayed in it.

"Humph!" Glaves growled. "It'll have itself be the throat afore long. Yesterday Poole an' Danvers ran their mowers into Shinn's five-acre swamp, an' if that don't bring that big Injin a-kiting from the tall timber, I'm Dutch."

She was not, however, to be moved, and after an embarrassed pause Flynn said, hesitatingly: "Thim cities, now, is mighty ixpinsive. A lone girl without money – ye'll let me – "

Digging a shabby bill-book from the bottom depths of his overalls, he precipitated a second kindly quarrel. Glaring at it, Glaves snorted, "When she knows she kin draw on me for the vally of my last head of stock down to the dog!"

Having means for some months, this storm was more easily laid than that which burst when Flynn offered to drive her in to Lone Tree.

"An' her living with me?" Glaves stormed.

"'Tis meself that knowed her longest," Flynn argued.

"Humph!" Glaves sneered – "three days. Thursday she stopped at your house coming out from Lone Tree. Sunday I saw her at meeting – went a-purpose an' never tended sence. No, she goes with me."

"Anyway, I knowed her longest," Flynn persisted. "But 'tis herself shall say. Which shall it be, ma'am?"

"Both," she laughed; and so, with a grizzled champion on either hand, she rattled southward the following day.

By one of those strange coincidences of ironical fate, this, the day of her departure, occurred on the third anniversary of her first drive out with Carter, and all things, season, sight, sound, conspired to vividly recall that memorable occasion. Rank growths in uncut sloughs bowed under warm winds that freighted a distant metallic rattle of many mowers; beyond the settlements the Park Lands stretched to the Assiniboin with only the chimneys of the burned Cree village to break their spangled undulations. As before, they came suddenly upon the valley, rugged, riven, with its bald, buttressing headlands, timbered ravines; the river, writhing in giant convolutions along the level bottoms. As before, they dropped with jolts, jerks, skidding of wheels to the ford that now tuned its hoarse voice to a melancholy dirge in harmony with her mood; and from the door of the log mission Father Francis bowed his silver head in courtly farewell.

After the valley came the "Dry Lands," the tawny plains, barren of trees, cabin, or farmstead; finally Lone Tree impinged in that huge monochrome, its grain-sheds reminding her, as before, of red Noah's arks on a yellow carpet. To her the hour of departure restored the fresh, clear vision of the stranger. The town appeared as on that first occasion – its one scanty street of clapboard hotels and stores with false fronts fencing the railway tracks that came spinning out of the western horizon to flash on over the east; the wise ox-teams rolling along the street; the squaws with ragged ponies hitched in big-wheeled Red River carts; the cows pasturing amid tomato-cans that strewed vacant lots; the loafers, omni-present riffraff of the small frontier, holding down nail-kegs and cracker-boxes under store verandas.

It was a trying drive. Every turn of the trail brought its reminiscences; mud chimneys, the Indian graveyard, a lone coyote, recalled the beginnings of her love, and now that she was leaving she vividly realized how she had grown to this land of white silences, grave winds, vast, sunwashed spaces. But if she had need of the heavy veil that she pinned on that morning, that marvellous feminine restraint enabled her to turn a composed face to the doctor and Jenny, who came to the station to see her off.

As she passed up street, the riffraff exchanged nods and winks, but Lone Tree furnished still other champions. The store-keeper, he who had loaded Carter's buck-board with jams and jellies, came hurrying across the tracks with good wishes and protestations.

"Shinn, MacCloud, Cummings – the hull gang – go off my books," he swore to Glaves. "Not another cent's credit to keep 'em from starving."

"They can rot in their beds for me," the doctor added. "I strike Silver Creek from my practice." And though the train was even then whistling for the station, Hooper, the agent, stole time for friendly greetings.

If roughly expressed, their sympathy was at least genuine; it eased the parting so that she was able to lean out and give them a last smile as the train rolled by the water-tank with long, easy clickings, carrying her away beyond their tough pale. Good enough as a farewell, it was not, however, a success as a smile, and the woe behind its wanness formed the subject of an indignant caucus that convened as soon as Jenny left the platform.

"I can't figure out jes' what Carter means," the storekeeper fretfully exclaimed. "Granted that she throwed him that onct – the charivari? – that business at the revival? If it had been my wife, I'd been smelling round for – "

"Blood!" the agent interjected; and though he had intended "trouble," the store-keeper accepted the amendment.

"What's the man looking for?" the doctor roared. "She has beauty, amiability, intelligence, almost every quality that a man can desire in a wife, yet he goes off in a pout because she falls short of the angels. He's a damned fool. He ought to be – "

"Aisy, aisy wid ye." Flynn stemmed the tide of wrath. "'Tis no throuble at all to condimn whin a purty girl's at t'other ind of the argymint. She's sweet, an' I'll break the face av the man as says she isn't good. But – give the man toime. Let be till we know that he's heard av the rhuctions. Thin, if he does nothing – "

"Well," the doctor interrupted, "he'll hear, all right – from me, this very night."

"Me, too," the store-keeper added.

"An' don't forget to give him partickler h – l!" the agent called after as they strolled away.

Nor did they. Dipping his pen in scorn, the doctor opened his epistle with a timely question as to the exact number and kinds of fool that Carter considered himself, and finished with a spirit that transcended even Glaves's difficult requirements. Equally thorough in his beginnings, a rush of business prevented the store-keeper from making an end that evening; but his default had its advantages in that he was thus enabled to deliver the remainder, viva voce, to Carter himself, when he stepped off the train next morning. Served hot, with good frontier adjectives sizzling among the nouns and articles, his opinion gained the admiring attention of Hooper, the agent, who stood ready to offer advice and assistance.

For his part, Carter listened quietly until the storekeeper paused for breath. Then he turned to the agent. "If you'd like five minutes with my character and attainments, don't be bashful! I've got it coming. After that please oblige with a little information on this charivari? I only heard yesterday morning of that revival through Bender's coming into camp."

As he listened, his natural sternness deepened to dark austerity, then fluxed in sad pity as the store-keeper told of Helen's departure. Murmuring "Poor thing! – poor little thing!" he asked for her address.

His face fell when the store-keeper answered: "You'll have to go to Glaves for that. The doc' might have it, but him an' Miss Jenny went north this morning to settle up her father's affairs." Noting Carter's disappointment, he kindly added: "You kin drive my sorrels. They're a third faster than the livery teams. On'y, remember they're fresh off the grass."

"I'll try not to misuse them," Carter answered, brightening, a remark that plentifully illustrates his impatient feeling.

Agent and store-keeper helped him hitch; and as he headed the sorrels out on the Silver Creek trail – the trail that for him, as for Helen, was one long heartache – the agent drew a deduction from his sombre sternness.

"I heard that MacCloud an' Cummings were back. Je-hosh-a-phat! There'll be something doing if they cross his track."

Stepping out of his stable, after feeding the noon oats next day, Glaves "lifted up his eyes," in biblical phrase, and saw Carter "a long way off." A hot morning at the hay, and the loss of two sections of his mower-sickle by impact with a willow snag, did not tend to alleviate his natural crustiness. As he recognized the tall figure behind the sorrels, the hoar of his fifty winters seemed to settle in the lines of his weathered visage; his eye took the steely sparkle of river ice; his nod, when Carter reined in opposite, was curt as his answer.

"Your wife's address? Yes, I know it."

Forewarned by the store-keeper of the old man's bitterness, Carter was not surprised. "Meaning that you won't give it to me?"

"Not till I know as she wants you to have it."

Tone and manner were superlatively irritating, but the man had taken blood on his soul in Helen's defence, and Carter spoke quietly. "Don't you allow that she's a right to decide for herself?"

"Now, ain't that exac'ly what I said?"

It was not, but contradiction would merely inflame his obstinacy. At a loss how to proceed, Carter switched the heads, one by one, from a patch of tall brown pig-weeds, using his left hand, for the right was roughly tied up in his handkerchief. On his part Glaves looked steadily past him.

It was a beautiful day – sensuous, soft, one of the golden days when warm winds flirt among rustling grasses breathing the incense of smiling flowers. Heat hung in quivering waves along the horizon like an emanation from the hot, prolific earth over whose bosom birds, bumblebees, the little beasts of the prairies, came and went on errands of love and business with songs and twitterings. And there, in the midst of this joy of life, the grim old man bent frowning brows on Carter, who was lost in bitter meditation.

He was laboring under an unhappy sense of error, for his contumacy, determined absence, was not altogether a product of hurt pride. As he himself had dissolved their relations, it was Helen's privilege to renew them, and he had waited, yearning for her word. But now that he was dragged under the harrows of remorse, in an agony of pity for her, he stood before Glaves as in the presence of Nemesis, convicted of a huge mistake.

The initiative, after all, had lain with him. If he had owned to his fault, had apologized for his summary desertion, she could have been trusted to do the rest. Now he doubted that he was too late, for it was but reasonable to suppose that the trustee's determined opposition had origin with her. He squared his big shoulders to this burden of his own packing.

"Will you forward a letter?"

Frowning, Glaves answered without looking at him, "You kin leave your address."'

"But you will forward it?"

"If she wants it."

Carter flushed, but checked a sharp answer. "You ain't extending too much grace to a sinner."

"Any less than you extended her? What d' you expect of me that saw her name dragged in the mud, herself insulted – that took a life to save her body from violence? G – d d – you!" His pent-up feelings exploded, and for three minutes thereafter hot speech bubbled like vitriol through his clinched teeth in scathing denunciation of Carter's remissness.

"Part of what you say being true, we'll pass the rest," the latter said, when the trustee had drained his phials of wrath. "Now – without conceding your right to withhold her address – will you forward some money?"

Glaves stared. He had expected a blow, a violent quarrel, at least; nay, had lusted for it. But he was too much of a man himself to mistake a just imperturbability for fear, while the mention of money checked his anger by switching his ideas. Jealous for her honor, he looked his suspicion. "Whose money?" But if accent and tone declared against the acceptance of favors, he took the proffered greenbacks after Carter explained that they covered her share of the cattle he and Morrill had owned in common – took them, that is, with a proviso.

"Let me see," he mused, counting five of ten bills of one-hundred-dollar denomination. "You'd forty head of stock when Morrill died. Five hundred covers her share. Take these back." And to further argument he sternly answered, "I don't allow that she's looking for any presents from you."

"No, I don't allow that she is."

Sadness of look and tone caused Glaves to glance up quickly, but he did not relax in his grimness up to the moment that, having left his address, Carter drove away. Then a shade of doubt crept into his steel eyes. "If it had been myself – " he muttered; then as Helen's parting smile recurred in memory, he added: "No, damn him! Let him suffer!" But this was not the end. Pausing in his doorway as he went in to dinner, he saw the buckboard, small as a fly, crawl over a distant knoll, and by some association of ideas remembered Carter's hand and wondered why it was bandaged. And when he learned from Poole and Danvers, who called round for their mail that evening, his first small doubt was raised almost to the dimension of regret.

Since the charivari, Glaves's opinion of the remittance-man – as a fighting animal, at least – had risen above zero, and he lent first an indulgent, then a rapt ear to the boys' story. As he himself had prophesied, the piracy of the five-acre swamp brought Shinn out from his hiding, but the latter's evil fate arranged matters so that as he descended upon the remittance buccaneers from one end of the swamp, Carter appeared on the Lone Tree trail which cat-a-cornered the other. The result bubbled forth from the mouth of first one boy, then the other, in eager interruptions.

"Shade of my granny!" Danvers swore. "You never saw such a fight!"

"No preliminaries," Poole declared. "Carter just leaped from his buggy and went for him like a cat after a mouse."

"And little good it did him. He might have been a gopher in the paws of a grizzly."

"Lay like a dead man for a long half-hour – "

"And looked like a snake that had mixed with a streak of lightning."

"Blind, battered, bruised, we carried him home on his shield – that is, on our hay-rake – "

"And that poor squalid wife of his looked rather disgusted when she found that he wasn't dead."

While they thus poured the tale of Shinn's discomfiture into Glaves's thirsty ears, Carter rattled steadily on towards Lone Tree. Passing Flynn's, he had been tempted to put in, but remembered that the Irishman would be out at the hay, and so ran on and by the one person who could have furnished an approximation of Helen's address. For she had merely promised to write Jenny as soon as she was settled, as he had learned when he met the doctor, back-trailing alone, early that morning.

"But you'll surely find her at one of the hotels!" the agent called to him, on the platform of the freight-train that carried him away at midnight.

But Helen had gone straight to the trustee's sister. And having wasted two days scanning hotel registers, wandering the streets, he concluded that perhaps she had changed her mind and gone straight through to her friends back East. Charging his friends and financial backers to keep on with the search, however, he returned to his labors in that unenviable condition of mind which romanticist writers describe as "broken-hearted."

In a city of twenty thousand it ought not to be so very difficult to locate a young lady whose style and beauty drew the eyes of the street. But if the search failed, the cause inhered in other reasons than lack of diligence – in a reason that largely accounted for Glaves's reluctance to give her address. Sick at heart, hopeless for the future, she had sunk her surname with the bitter past; resumed her maiden name while keeping the married title. Even with Glaves's sister, a big, good-natured woman, she passed as a widow.