FATE, THE SATIRIST
Four months drifted by. The will
of Colonel William Landor had been read and executed.
According to its provisions the home ranch with one-tenth
of the herd, divided impartially as they filed past
the executor, were left to Mary Landor; in event of
her death to descend to “an only nephew, Clayton
Craig by name.” A second fraction of the
great herd, a tenth of the remainder, selected in
the same manner, reverted at once “unqualifiedly
and with full title to hold or to sell to the aforementioned
sole blood relative, Clayton Craig.” All
of the estate not previously mentioned, the second
ranch whereon How Landor had builded, various chattels
enumerated, a small sum of money in a city bank, and
the balance of the herd, whose number the testator
himself could not give with certainty, were willed
likewise unqualifiedly to “my adopted daughter,
Elizabeth Landor.” That was all. A
single sheet of greasy note paper, a collection of
pedantic antiquated phrases, penned laboriously with
the scrawling hand of one unused to writing; but incontrovertible
in its laconic directness. Save these three no
other names were mentioned. So far as the Indian
Ma-wa-cha-sa, commonly called How Landor, was
concerned he might never have existed. In a hundred
words the labour was complete; and at its end, before
the single sheet was covered, sprawling, characteristic,
was the last signature of him who at the time was
the biggest cattleman west of the river: William
Landor of the Buffalo Butte.
Craig himself did not appear, either
at the reading or the execution. Instead a dapper
city attorney with a sarcastic tongue and an isolated
manner was present to conserve his interests; and,
satisfied on that score, and ere the supply of Havanas
in a beautifully embossed leather case was exhausted,
in fact, to quote his own words, “as quickly
as a kind Providence would permit,” he vanished
into the unknown from whence he came. Following,
on the next train, came a big-voiced, red-bearded
Irishman who proclaimed himself the new foreman and
immediately took possession. Simultaneously there
disappeared from the scene the Buffalo Butte ranch
and the brand by which it had been known; and in its
place upon the flank of every live thing controlled,
stared forth a C locked to a C (C-C): the heraldry
of the new master, Clayton Craig.
Likewise the long-planned wedding
journey had taken place and become a memory.
Into the silent places they went, this new-made man
and wife and no one was present at the
departure to bid them adieu. Back from the land
of nothingness they came and again no one
was at hand to welcome their return. In but one
respect did the accomplishment of that plan alter
from the prearranged; and that one item was the consideration
of time. They did not stay away until winter,
as the girl had announced. Starting in November,
they did not complete the month. Nor did they
stay for more than a day in any one spot. Like
the curse of the Wandering Jew, a newborn restlessness
in the girl kept calling “On, on.”
Battle against it as she might, she was powerless
under its dominance. She knew not from whence
had come the change, nor why; but that in the last
weeks she had altered fundamentally, unbelievably,
she could not question. The very first night
out, ere they had slept, she had begun to talk of
change on the morrow. The next day it was the
same and the next. When they were
moving the morbid restlessness gradually wore away;
for the time being she became her old careless-happy
self; and in sympathy her companion opened as a flower
to the sun. Then would come a pause; and the
morbid, dogging spirit of unrest would close upon her
anew. Thus day by day passed until a week had
gone by. Then one morning when camp was struck,
instead of advancing farther, the man had faced back
the way they had come. He made no comment, nor
did she. Neither then nor in days that followed
did he once allude to the reason that had caused the
change of plan. When the girl was gay, he was
gay likewise. When she lapsed listlessly into
the slough of silence and despond, he went on precisely
as though unconscious of a change. His acting,
for acting it was, even the girl could not but realise
at that time, was masterly. What he was thinking
no human being ever knew, no human being could ever
know; for he never gave the semblance of a hint.
Probably not since man and woman began under the sanction
of law and of clergy to mate, had there been such
a honeymoon. Probably never will there be such
another. That the whole expedition was a piteous,
dreary failure neither could have doubted ere the
first week dragged by. That the marriage journey
which it ushered in was to be a failure likewise, neither
could have questioned, ere the second week, which
brought them home, had passed. The Garden of
Eden was there, there as certainly in its frost-brown
sun-blessed perfection as though spread luxuriously
within the tropics. Adam was there, Adam prepared
to accept it as normally content as the first man;
but Eve was not satisfied. Within the garden the
serpent had shown his face and tempted her. For
very, very long she would not admit the fact even
to herself, deluded herself by the belief that this
newborn discontent was but temporary; yet bald, unaltering
as the prairie itself, the truth stood forth.
Thus they went, and thus they returned. Thus
again thereafter the days went monotonously by.
One bright spot, and one alone, appeared
on their firmament; and that was the opening of the
new house. This was to be a surprise, a climax
boyishly reserved by its builder for their return.
The man had intentionally so arranged that the start
should be from the old ranch, and in consequence the
girl had never seen either the new or its furnishings,
until the November day when the overloaded surrey drew
up in the dooryard, and the journey was complete.
Pathetic, indescribable, in the light of the past,
in the memory of the solitary hours that frontier
nest represented, the moment must have been to the
man when he led the way to the entrance and turned
the key. Yet he smiled as he threw open the door;
and, standing there, ere she entered, he kissed her.
“It isn’t much, but it
was mine, Bess, and now it’s yours,” he
said, and, her hand in his, he crossed the threshold.
A moment the girl stood staring around
her. Crude as everything was, and cheap in aggregate,
it spoke a testimony that was overwhelming. Never
before, not even that first night they had been alone,
had the girl realised as at this moment what she meant
to this solitary, impassive human. Never before
until these mute things he had fashioned with his
own hands stood before her eyes did she realise fully
his love. With the knowledge now came a flood
of repentance and of appreciation. Her arms flew
about his neck. Her wet face was hid.
“How you love me, man,” she voiced.
“How you love me!”
“Yes, Bess,” said the other simply; and
that was all.
For that day, and the next, and the
next, the mood lasted, an awakening the girl began
to fancy permanent; then inevitably came the reaction.
The man took up his duties where he had laid them down:
the supervision of a herd scattered of necessity to
the winds, the personal inspection of a range that
stretched away for miles. Soon after daylight,
his lunch for the day packed in the pouch he slung
over his shoulder, he left astride the mouse-coloured,
saddleless broncho; not to return until dark
or later, tired and hungry, but ever smiling at the
home-coming, ever considerate. Thus the third
night he returned to find the house dark and the fire
in the soft coal stove dead; to find this and the girl
stretched listless on the bed against the wall, staring
wide-eyed into the darkness.
“I was tired and resting, How,”
she had explained penitently, and gone about the task
of preparing supper; but the man was not deceived,
and that moment, if not before, he recognised the
inevitable.
Yet even then he made no comment,
nor altered in the minutest detail his manner.
If ever a human being played the game, it was How Landor.
With a blindness that was masterly, that was all but
fatuous, he ignored the obvious. His equanimity
and patience were invulnerable. Silent by nature,
he grew fairly loquacious in an effort to be companionable.
Probably no white man alive would have done as he did,
would have borne what he did; perhaps it would have
been better had he done differently; but he was as
he was. Day after day he endured the galling starched
linen and unaccustomed clothing, making long journeys
to the distant town to keep his wardrobe clean and
replenished. Day after day he polished his boots
and struggled with his cravat. Puerile unqualifiedly
an observer would have characterised this repeated
farce; but to one who knew the tale in its entirety,
it would have seemed very far from humorous.
All but sacrilege, it is to tell of this starved human’s
doing at this time. The sublime and the ridiculous
ever elbow so closely in this life and jostled so
continuously in those stormy hours of How Landor’s
chastening. Suffice it to repeat that every second
through it all he played the game; played it with
a smiling face, and the ghost of a jest ever trembling
on his lips. Played it from the moment he entered
his house until the moment he daily disappeared, astride
the vixenish undersized cayuse. Then when he
was alone, when there were no human eyes to observe,
to pity perchance, then But let it pass
what he did then. It is another tale and extraneous.
Thus drifted by the late fall and
early winter. Bit by bit the days grew shorter;
and then as a pendulum vibrates, lengthened shade by
shade. No human being came their way, nor wild
thing, save roving murderers on pillage bent.
Even the cowmen he employed, the old hands he and Bess
had both known for years, avoided him obviously, stubbornly.
After the execution of the will he had built them
another ranch house at a distance on the range, and
there they congregated and clung. They accepted
his money and obeyed his orders unquestioningly; but
further than that they were white and he
was red. Howard, the one man with whom he had
been friendly, had grown restless and drifted on whither
no one knew. Save for the Irish overseer and
one other cowboy, the old Buffalo Butte ranch was
deserted. Locally, there neither was nor had
been any outward manifestation of hostility, nor even
gossip. But the olden times when the hospitable
ranch house of Colonel William Landor was the meeting
point of ranchers within a radius of fifty miles were
gone. They did not persecute the new master or
his white wife; they did a subtler, crueller thing:
they ignored them. To the Indian’s face,
when by infrequent chance they met, they were affable,
obliging. His reputation had spread too far for
them to appear otherwise; but, again, they were white
and he was red and between them the chasm
yawned.
Thus passed the months. Winter,
dead and relentless, held its sway. It was a
normal winter; but ever in this unprotected land the
period was one of inevitable decimation, of a weeding
out of the unfit. Here and there upon the range,
dark against the now background of universal white,
stared forth the carcass of a weakling. Over it
for a few nights the coyotes and grey wolves howled
and fought; then would come a fresh layer of white,
and the spot where it had been would merge once more
into the universal colour scheme. Even the prairie
chickens vanished, migrated to southern lands where
corn was king. No more at daylight or at dusk
could one hear the whistle of their passing wings,
or the booming of their rallying call. Magnificent
in any season, this impression of the wild was even
more pronounced now. The thought of God is synonymous
with immensity; and so being, Deity was here eternally
manifest, ubiquitous. The human mind could not
conceive a more infinite bigness than this gleaming
frost-bound waste stretched to the horizon beneath
the blazing winter sun. Magnificent it was beyond
the power of words to describe; but lonely, lonely.
Within the tiny cottage, the girl, Bess, drew the
curtains tight over the single window and for days
at a time did not glance without.
Then at last, for to all things there
is an end, came spring. Long before it arrived
the Indian knew it was coming, read incontestably its
advance signs. No longer, as the mouse-coloured
cayuse bore him over the range, was there the mellow
crunch of snow underfoot. Instead the sound was
crisp and sharp: the crackling of ice where the
snow had melted and frozen again. Distinct upon
the record of the bleak prairie page appeared another
sign infallible. Here and there, singly and en
masse, wherever the herds had grazed, appeared
oblong brown blots the size of an animal’s body.
The cattle were becoming weak under the influence of
prolonged winter, and lay down frequently to rest,
their warm bodies branding the evidence with melted
snow. The jack rabbits, ubiquitous on the ranges,
that sprang daily almost from beneath the pony’s
feet, were changing their winter’s dress, were
becoming darker; almost as though soiled by a muddy
hand. Here and there on the high places the sparkling
white was giving way to a dull, lustreless brown.
Gradually, day by day, as though they were a pestilence,
they expanded, augmented until they, and not the white,
became the dominant tone. The sun was high in
the sky now. At noontime the man’s shadow
was short, scarcely extended back of his pony’s
feet. Mid-afternoons, in the low places when he
passed through, there was a spattering of snow water
collected in tiny puddles. After that there was
no need of signs. Realities were everywhere.
Dips in the rolling land, mere dry runs save at this
season, became creeks; flushed to their capacity and
beyond, sang softly all the day long. Not only
the high spots, but even the north slopes lost their
white blankets, surrendered to the conquering brown.
Migratory life, long absent, returned to its own.
Prairie kites soared far overhead on motionless wings.
Meadow larks, cheeriest of heralds, practised their
five-toned lay. Here and there, to the north of
prairie boulders, appeared tufts of green; tufts that,
like the preceding brown, grew and grew and grew until
they dominated the whole landscape. Then at last,
the climax, the finale of the play, came life,
animal and vegetable, with a rush. Again at daylight
and at dusk swarms of black dots on whistling wings
floated here and there, descended to earth; and, following,
indefinite as to location, weird, lonely, boomed forth
in their mating songs. Transient, shallow, miniature
lakes swarmed with their new-come denizens. Last
of all, final assurance of a new season’s advent,
by day and by night, swelling, diminishing, unfailingly
musical as distant chiming bells, came the sound of
all most typical of prairie and of spring. From
high overhead in the blue it came, often so high that
the eye could not distinguish its makers; yet alway
distinctive, alway hauntingly mysterious. “Honk!
honk! honk!” sounded and echoed and re-echoed
that heraldry over the awakened land. “Honk!
honk! honk!” it repeated; and listening humans
smiled and commented unnecessarily each to the other:
“Spring is not coming. It is here.”