ALLUREMENTS OF GLENDORA
In a bend of the Little Missouri,
where it broadened out and took on the appearance
of a consequential stream, Glendora lay, a lonely little
village with a gray hill behind it.
There was but half a street in Glendora,
like a setting for a stage, the railroad in the foreground,
the little sun-baked station crouching by it, lonely
as the winds which sung by night in the telegraph wires
crossing its roof. Here the trains went by with
a roar, leaving behind them a cloud of gray dust like
a curtain to hide from the eyes of those who strained
from their windows to see the little that remained
of Glendora, once a place of more consequence than
today.
Only enough remained of the town to
live by its trade. There was enough flour in
the store, enough whisky in the saloon; enough stamps
in the post office, enough beds in the hotel, to satisfy
with comfort the demands of the far-stretching population
of the country contiguous thereto. But if there
had risen an extraordinary occasion bringing a demand
without notice for a thousand pounds more of flour,
a barrel more of whisky, a hundred more stamps or
five extra beds, Glendora would have fallen under
the burden and collapsed in disgrace.
Close by the station there were cattle
pens for loading stock, with two long tracks for holding
the cars. In autumn fat cattle were driven down
out of the hidden valleys to entrain there for market.
In those days there was merriment after nightfall
in Glendora. At other times it was mainly a quiet
place, the shooting that was done on its one-sided
street being of a peaceful nature in the way of expressing
a feeling for which some plain-witted, drunken cowherder
had no words.
A good many years before the day that
the Duke and Taterleg came riding into Glendora, the
town had supported more than one store and saloon.
The shells of these dead enterprises stood there still,
windows and doors boarded up, as if their owners had
stopped their mouths when they went away to prevent
a whisper of the secrets they might tell of the old
riotous nights, or of fallen hopes, or dishonest transactions.
So they stood now in their melancholy, backs against
the gray hill, giving to Glendora the appearance of
a town that was more than half dead, and soon must
fail and pass utterly away in the gray-blowing clouds
of dust.
The hotel seemed the brightest and
soundest living spot in the place, for it was painted
in green, like a watermelon, with a cottonwood tree
growing beside the pump at the porch corner. In
yellow letters upon the windowpane of the office there
appeared the proprietor’s name, doubtless the
work of some wandering artist who had paid the price
of his lodging or his dinner so.
ORSON WOOD, PROP.
said the sign, bedded in curlicues
and twisted ornaments, as if a carpenter had planed
the letters out of a board, leaving the shavings where
they fell. A green rustic bench stood across one
end of the long porch, such as is seen in boarding-houses
frequented by railroad men, and chairs with whittled
and notched arms before the office door, near the
pump.
Into this atmosphere there had come,
many years before, one of those innocents among men
whose misfortune it is to fall before the beguilements
of the dishonest; that sort of man whom the promoters
of schemes go out to catch in the manner of an old
maid trapping flies in a cup of suds. Milton
Philbrook was this man. Somebody had sold him
forty thousand acres of land in a body for three dollars
an acre. It began at the river and ran back to
the hills for a matter of twenty miles.
Philbrook bought the land on the showing
that it was rich in coal deposits. Which was
true enough. But he was not geologist enough to
know that it was only lignite, and not a coal of commercial
value in those times. This truth he came to later,
together with the knowledge that his land was worth,
at the most extravagant valuation, not more than fifty
cents an acre.
Finding no market for his brown coal,
Philbrook decided to adopt the customs of the country
and turn cattleman. A little inquiry into that
business convinced him that the expenses of growing
the cattle and the long distance from market absorbed
a great bulk of the profits needlessly. He set
about with the original plan, therefore, of fencing
his forty thousand acres with wire, thus erasing at
one bold stroke the cost of hiring men to guard his
herds.
A fence in the Bad Lands was unknown
outside a corral in those days. When carloads
of barbed wire and posts began to arrive at Glendora
men came riding in for miles to satisfy themselves
that the rumors were founded; when Philbrook hired
men to build the fence, and operations were begun,
murmurs and threats against the unwelcome innovation
were heard. Philbrook pushed the work to conclusion,
unmindful of the threats, moved now by the intention
of founding a great, baronial estate in that bleak
land. His further plan of profit and consequence
was to establish a packing-house at Glendora, where
his herds could be slaughtered and dressed and shipped
neat to market, at once assuring him a double profit
and reduced expense. But that was one phase of
his dream that never hardened into the reality of
machinery and bricks.
While the long lines of fence were
going up, carpenters were at work building a fit seat
for Philbrook’s baronial aims. The point
he chose for his home site was the top of a bare plateau
overlooking the river, the face of it gray, crumbling
shale, rising three hundred feet in abrupt slope from
the water’s edge. At great labor and expense
Philbrook built a road between Glendora and this place,
and carried water in pipes from the river to irrigate
the grass, trees, shrubs and blooming plants alien
to that country which he planted to break the bleakness
of it and make a setting for his costly home.
Here on this jutting shoulder of the
cold, unfriendly upland, a house rose which was the
wonder of all who beheld it as they rode the wild
distances and viewed it from afar. It seemed a
mansion to them, its walls gleaming white, its roof
green as the hope in its builder’s breast.
It was a large house, and seemed larger for its prominence
against the sky, built in the shape of a T, with wide
porches in the angles. And to this place, upon
which he had lavished what remained of his fortune,
Philbrook brought his wife and little daughter, as
strange to their surroundings as the delicate flowers
which pined and drooped in that unfriendly soil.
Immediately upon completion of his
fences he had imported well-bred cattle and set them
grazing within his confines. He set men to riding
by night and day a patrol of his long lines of wire,
rifles under their thighs, with orders to shoot anybody
found cutting the fences in accordance with the many
threats to serve them so. Contentions and feuds
began, and battles and bloody encounters, which did
not cease through many a turbulent year. Philbrook
lived in the saddle, for he was a man of high courage
and unbending determination, leaving his wife and child
in the suspense and solitude of their grand home in
which they found no pleasure.
The trees and shrubs which Philbrook
had planted with such care and attended with such
hope, withered on the bleak plateau and died, in spite
of the water from the river; the delicate grass with
which he sought to beautify and clothe the harsh gray
soil sickened and pined away; the shrubs made a short
battle against the bleakness of winter, putting out
pale, strange flowers like the wan smile of a woman
who stands on the threshold of death, then failed
away, and died. Mrs. Philbrook broke under the
long strain of never-ending battles, and died the
spring that her daughter came eighteen years of age.
This girl had grown up in the saddle,
a true daughter of her fighting sire. Time and
again she had led a patrol of two fence-riders along
one side of that sixty square miles of ranch while
her father guarded the other. She could handle
firearms with speed and accuracy equal to any man
on the range, where she had been bearing a man’s
burden since her early girlhood.
All this information pertaining to
the history of Milton Philbrook and his adventures
in the Bad Lands, Orson Wood, the one-armed landlord
at the hotel in Glendora told Lambert on the evening
of the travelers’ arrival there. The story
had come as the result of questions concerning the
great white house on the mesa, the two men sitting
on the porch in plain view of it, Taterleg entertaining
the daughter of the hotel across the show case in
the office.
Lambert found the story more interesting
than anything he ever had imagined of the Bad Lands.
Here was romance looking down on him from the lonely
walls of that white house, and heroism of a finer kind
than these people appreciated, he was sure.
“Is the girl still here?” he inquired.
“Yes, she’s back now.
She’s been away to school in Boston for three
or four years, comin’ back in summer for a little
while.”
“When did she come back?”
Lambert felt that his voice was thick
as he inquired, disturbed by the eager beating of
his heart. Who knows? and perhaps, and all the
rest of it came galloping to him with a roar of blood
in his ears like the sound of a thousand hoofs.
The landlord called over his shoulder to his daughter:
“Alta, when did Vesta Philbrook come back?”
“Four or five weeks ago,” said Alta, with
the sound of chewing gum.
“Four or five weeks ago,”
the landlord repeated, as though Alta spoke a foreign
tongue and must be translated.
“I see,” said Lambert,
vaguely, shaking to the tips of his fingers with a
kind of buck ague that he never had suffered from before.
He was afraid the landlord would notice it, and slewed
his chair, getting out his tobacco to cover the fool
spell.
For that was she, Vesta Philbrook
was she, and she was Vesta Philbrook. He knew
it as well as he knew that he could count ten.
Something had led him there that day; the force that
was shaping the course of their two lives to cross
again had held him back when he had considered selling
his horse and going West a long distance on the train.
He grew calmer when he had his cigarette alight.
The landlord was talking again.
“Funny thing about Vesta comin’
home, too,” he said, and stopped a little, as
if to consider the humor of it. Lambert looked
at him with a sudden wrench of the neck.
“Which?”
“Philbrook’s luck held
out, it looked like, till she got through her education.
All through the fights he had and the scrapes he run
into the last ten years he never got a scratch.
Bullets used to hum around that man like bees, and
he’d ride through ’em like they was
bees, but none of ’em ever notched him.
Curious, wasn’t it?”
“Did somebody get him at last?”
“No, he took typhoid fever.
He took down about a week or ten days after Vesta
got home. He died about a couple of week ago.
Vesta had him laid beside her mother up there on the
hill. He said they’d never run him out
of this country, livin’ or dead.”
Lambert swallowed a dry lump.
“Is she running the ranch?”
“Like an old soldier, sir.
I tell you, I’ve got a whole lot of admiration
for that girl.”
“She must have her hands full.”
“Night and day. She’s
short on fence-riders, and I guess if you boys are
lookin’ for a job you can land up there with
Vesta, all right.”
Taterleg and the girl came out and
sat on the green rustic bench at the farther end of
the porch. It complained under them; there was
talk and low giggling.
“We didn’t expect to strike
anything this soon,” Lambert said, his active
mind leaping ahead to shape new romance like a magician.
“You don’t look like the
kind of boys that’d shy from a job if it jumped
out in the road ahead of you.”
“I’d hate for folks to think we would.”
“Ain’t you the feller they call; the Duke
of Chimney Butte?”
“They call me that in this country.”
“Yes; I knew that horse the
minute you rode up, though he’s changed for
the better wonderful since I saw him last, and I knew
you from the descriptions I’ve heard of you.
Vesta’d give you a job in a minute, and she’d
pay you good money, too. I wouldn’t wonder
if she didn’t put you in as foreman right on
the jump, account of the name you’ve got up here
in the Bad Lands.”
“Not much to my credit in the
name, I’m afraid,” said Lambert, almost
sadly. “Do they still cut her fences and
run off her stock?”
“Yes; rustlin’s got to
be stylish around here ag’in, after we thought
we had all them gangs rounded up and sent to the pen.
I guess some of their time must be up and they’re
comin’ home.”
“It’s pretty tough for a single-handed
girl.”
“Yes, it is tough. Them
fellers are more than likely some of the old crowd
Philbrook used to fight and round up and send over
the road. He killed off four or five of them,
and the rest of them swore they’d salt him when
they’d done their time. Well, he’s
gone. But they’re not above fightin’
a girl.”
“It’s a tough job for
a woman,” said Lambert, looking thoughtfully
toward the white house on the mesa.
“Ain’t it, though?”
Lambert thought about it a while,
or appeared to be thinking about it, sitting with
bent head, smoking silently, looking now and then toward
the ranchhouse, the lights of which could be seen.
Alta came across the porch presently, Taterleg attending
her like a courtier. She dismissed him at the
door with an excuse of deferred duties within.
He joined his thoughtful partner.
“Better go up and see her in
the morning,” suggested Wood, the landlord.
“I think I will, thank you.”
Wood went in to sell a cowboy a cigar;
the partners started out to have a look at Glendora
by moonlight. A little way they walked in silence,
the light of the barber-shop falling across the road
ahead of them.
“See who in the morning, Duke?” Taterleg
inquired.
“Lady in the white house on
the mesa. Her father died a few weeks ago, and
left her alone with a big ranch on her hands.
Rustlers are runnin’ her cattle off, cuttin’
her fences ”
“Fences?”
“Yes, forty thousand acres all fenced in, like
Texas.”
“You don’t tell me?”
“Needs men, Wood says. I thought maybe ”
The Duke didn’t finish it; just
left it swinging that way, expecting Taterleg to read
the rest.
“Sure,” said Taterleg,
taking it right along. “I wouldn’t
mind stayin’ around here a while. Glendora’s
a nice little place; nicer place than I thought it
was.”
The Duke said nothing. But as
they went on toward the barber-shop he grinned.