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.”
“I don’t care for stories,” said the girl crossly. “And I don’t know that I believe there is a heaven,” she went on quickly. “Once you are dead I reckon that’s all there is to it. I won’t learn any more songs about heaven. I used to cry over them – and about folks dying. I remember the first song Dad taught me to sing in the saloons. It used to make me cry when I came to the verse:
Last night as I lay on my pillow —
Last night as I lay on my bed —
Last night as I lay on my pillow,
I dreamt that my Bonnie was dead.
Bring back! Oh, bring back!
Bring back my Bonnie to me, to me —
It’s all stuff and nonsense!” she broke off with confidence.
“That ain’t a hymn,” said Mother Tubbs placidly. “Hymns is different, Nell. A good, uplifting hymn like ‘Am I a Soldier of the Cross,’ or ‘Beulah Land,’ takes you right out of yourself – bears your heart up on wings o’ hope and helps you forget you’re only a poor, miserable worm – ”
“I’m not a worm!” interrupted Nell with vigor. “I’m as good as anybody – as good as anybody in Canyon Pass, anyway, even if some of these women do look down on me.”
“Of course you are, Nell. ‘Worm’ is just a manner o’ speaking.”
“Dad trained me to sing in these saloons, I know,” went on the girl quickly, angrily, “because he was too weakly to use a pick and shovel. We had to eat, and he thought he had to have drink. So I had to earn it. But I’ve been a good girl.”
“I never doubted it, Nell,” Mother Tubbs hastened to say. “Nobody could doubt it that knowed you as well as I do.” She let her gaze wander over the squalid back yards of the row of shacks of which the Tubbs’ domicile was no better than its neighbors. “They don’t know you like I do, Nell. You’ve lived with me for three years – all the time you was growing into a woman, as ye might say. You hafter do what you do, and I don’t ’low when we are forced into a job, no matter what it is, that it’s counted against us as a sin.”
Nell flashed the placid old woman another glance. There was something hidden behind that look – of late there was something secretive in all Nell Blossom said or did. Did Mother Tubbs understand that this was so? Was she, in her rude but kindly way, offering a sympathy that she feared to put into audible speech for fear of offending the proud girl?
The latter suddenly laughed, but it was not the songbird’s note her voice expressed. There was something harsh – something scornful – in it.
“I reckon I could get away with murder, and you’d say I was all right, Mother Tubbs,” she declared.
“Well, mebbe,” the old woman admitted, her eyes twinkling.
“Suppose – ” said Nell slowly, her face turned away again, “suppose a party was the cause of another’s death – even if he deserved it – but didn’t mean just that – suppose, anyway, what you did caused a man’s death, for whatever reason, although unintended? Would it be a sin, Mother Tubbs?”
She might have been reflecting upon a quite casual supposition for all her tone and manner betrayed. Just how wise Mother Tubbs was – just how far-seeing – no human soul could know. The old woman had seen much and learned much during her long journey through a very rough and wicked world.
“I tell you, Nell,” Mother Tubbs observed, “it’s all according to what’s in our hearts, I reckon. If what we done caused a party to die, and we had death in our heart when we done the thing that killed him, I reckon it would be a sin. No getting around that. For we can’t take God’s duties into our hands and punish even the wickedest man with death – like we’d crunch a black beetle under our bootsole. ‘Vengeance is Mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.’” She repeated the phrase with reverence. “No, sin is sin. And because a party deserves to be killed, in our opinion, don’t excuse our killing him.”
Nell was quite still for a minute. Then she shrugged her shoulders.
“Humph!” she said briskly. “I don’t think much of your religion, Mother Tubbs. No, I don’t.”
Mother Tubbs began to croon:
It’s the old-style religion,
The old-style religion,
The old-style religion,
That gets you on your way.
’Twas good enough for Moses,
Good enough for Moses —
The old-style religion,
That gets you on your way.
“It ain’t no new-fangled religion, Nell. But it’s comforting – ”
“It wouldn’t comfort me none,” answered the girl. “I reckon it ain’t religion – and a sky pilot – that Canyon Pass needs after all. If we’d just run about fifty of these tramps out of town – and Boss Tolley and his gang – we could get along without psalm-singing and such flubdubbery.”
“You ain’t talking like you used to, Nell,” said the old woman, observing her curiously.
“I hadn’t thought so much about it. Religion is too soft. These roughnecks would ride right over a parson and – and that kind. Now, wouldn’t they?”
“Not altogether. I expect they’d try – at first. But if a man had enough grace in him, he’d stand up against ’em.”
“He’d better have backbone.”
“Same thing,” chuckled Mother Tubbs. “Same thing. It takes the grace of God to stiffen a man’s backbone – I tell you true. I hope this parson Mr. Joe Hurley talks about has got plenty of grace.”
“Who – what?” gasped the girl. “What parson?”
“Well, now! That is a gob o’ news. But I thought you must o’ heard it – over to Colorado Brown’s, or somewhere – the way you was talkin’. This parson is a friend of Mr. Joe Hurley, and he wants to get him out yere.”
“From the East?”
“Yeppy. Mr. Joe says he went to school with him. And he’s some preacher.”
“What do you think o’ that!” ejaculated Nell. “Mr. Hurley didn’t say anything to me about it the day we rode into the Pass together.”
“I reckon not. This has all been hatched up since then.”
“But, Mother Tubbs!” cried the girl. “You don’t expect any tenderfoot parson can come in here and make over Canyon Pass?”
“I reckon not. We folks have got to make ourselves over. But we need a leader – we need a Shower of the Way. We’ve lost our eyesight – the best of us – when it comes to seeing God’s ways. My soul! I couldn’t even raise a prayer in conference meeting no more. But I used to go reg’lar when I was a gal – played the melodeon – led the singin’ – and often got down on my knees in public and raised a prayer.”
“Humph!” scoffed the girl. “If God answered prayer, I bet you prayed over Sam enough to have cured him of getting drunk forty times over!”
“I don’t know – I don’t know,” returned Mother Tubbs thoughtfully. “I been thinking lately that, mebbe when I was praying to God to save Sam from his sins, I was cursing Sam for his meanness! I ain’t got as sweet a disposition as I might have, Nell.”
“Oh, yes you have, Mother Tubbs!” exclaimed Nell, and suddenly jumped up to kiss the old woman warmly. “You’re a dear, sweet old thing!”
“Well, now,” rejoined Mother Tubbs complacently, “I ought to purr like any old tabby-cat for that.”
CHAPTER V – HOW THE PASSONIANS TOOK IT
“Well,” observed Bill Judson oracularly, “it’s about time for something new to break in Canyon Pass. About once in so often even a dead-an’-alive camp like this yere has got to feel the bump of progress from the train behind. Otherwise we’d stay stalled till Gabriel’s trump.”
He spoke to Smithy, his single clerk at the Three Star Grocery. He had to speak to Smithy, or to the circumambient air, for nobody but the gangling clerk was within hearing. They lounged on the store porch in the middle of the afternoon, and the only other thing alive on the main street of Canyon Pass was a wandering burro browsing on the tufts of grass edging the shallow gutters.
“I don’t see as Canyon Pass has got to be bumped by a gospel sharp to wake it up,” complained Smithy, stretching his arms as though they were elastic. “Yahhoo! Well, he’ll have a sweet time here, Mr. Judson.”
“I dunno,” said the storekeeper reflectively. “For my part I feel like I favored it.”
“’Cause it’s something new?”
“’Cause it’s something needed. I ain’t one of those fellers that run after every new thing just because it is new. But I’m for progress. I want to see the Pass get ahead. Crescent City and Lamberton have both got churches and parsons.”
“And they’ve got railroads,” put in Smithy, making a good point. “Canyon Pass needs the railroad more’n it does a parson.”
“Son,” proclaimed Judson, “before Canyon Pass can get a railroad connection, mountains have got to be moved and the meanest stretch of desert that ever spawned lizards, sidewinders and cacti, and produce in their places about five hundred square mile of irrigated farmland to pay for spiking the rails to the sleepers. See?”
“Well, the farms might come,” declared Smithy defensively.
“Sure. So might Christmas come at Fourth o’ July. But we ain’t never celebrated the two holidays together yet. No, sir. To irrigate the edge of that desert even, a dam would have to be built across the southern outlet of the canyon, and that would back the water up yere in freshet season till the roof of my shack would be so deep under the surface that about all I could properly keep in stock would be perch and rainbow trout.
“They ain’t building branch railroads no more to mining camps like Canyon Pass. That’s why we all chipped in for the stamp mill and the cyanide plant. Nope. We’ll freight in our supplies with mules and communicate with the more effete centers of civilization by stagecoach for some time to come I reckon.
“That being the case we got to uplift ourselves without the help of the iron horse, as the feller said. And having a church and a parson is uplifting.”
“Nobody ain’t talked very brash about a church.”
“Parson comes first. Naturally. Of course this friend of Joe Hurley is only coming on a visit at first.”
“He’ll have a sweet visit here,” repeated Smithy.
“That’s according,” said Judson. “We got to be hospitable. If a judge, or a senator, or a school teacher, or even a drummer sellin’ fishin’ tackle, came yere we’d feel like we wanted to show him the town’s best side. Why not this parson?”
“Huh! A drummer don’t try to convert us and innovate psalm-singing and such,” grumbled Smithy.
“Son,” drawled Judson, his eyes twinkling under his bushy brows, “you’re convicted of sin right now. You’re scare’t of this parson – and that’s the trouble with most of you fellers who are raising a yawp against progress as represented by this Reverend Hunt.”
“’Taint only us fellers,” grumbled Smithy. “Some of the womenfolk ain’t pleased. Say! Nell says she don’t want no black-coated parson in this camp. Says it would give her the willies, so she couldn’t sing.”
It was an indisputable fact – Joe Hurley himself had discovered it – that the Passonians were divided upon the matter of the expected coming of the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt. The sheep and the goats that had heretofore milled together in a general herd, were dividing upon strictly religious lines. Joe was somewhat surprised. Some of the very people he had presumed would welcome the innovation, were suspicious of it.
Mr. Robertson Norris, “Slickpenny” Norris was his undignified appellation, became quite red of face and beat rather a futile fist upon the banking counter as he gave his opinion to Joe Hurley. Norris was a puny-looking, string-bean sort of man. The height of rage could not have made his appearance impressive.
“Joe Hurley, you are a director of this bank, and your last statement of the Great Hope shows that you are a good mining man. I find on most subjects you display good sense. But on this question you’re all wrong – all wrong!”
“I don’t get you – I don’t get you at all,” drawled Hurley. “A moral man like you, Norris, I reckoned would welcome the idea of having a parson in the town.”
“I have no quarrel with parsons – none at all, Joe,” declared the banker. “But Canyon Pass is in no present shape – financially, I mean – to contemplate the building of a church edifice. A church is something you can’t tax, and it brings in absolutely no revenue to the town. It’s not an asset, but a liability, and the Pass can’t afford any such luxuries at this time.”
“Great saltpeter!”
“Listen to me, Joe Hurley! I’ve advocated proper town improvements, even when they take the skin off my own nose, and always will. I am strong for Main Street being paved and sidewalks laid, though ’twould cost me a pretty penny. We ought to set out trees. Them oil lamps on wooden posts are a disgrace. I’d make every merchant paint the front of his buildings on Main Street once a year, by law.”
“Well! What’s the matter with a church?” demanded Hurley. “That is, if we get that far.”
“It’s absolutely no use. If one is built it won’t be nothing but a shack. It won’t add anything to the importance of the town. No, I don’t approve. I’m disappointed in you, Joe.”
“All right – all right!” cried Joe in some heat. “But I’m not disappointed in you, old-timer. Great saltpeter! I wonder what you did before you drifted into Canyon Pass that a parson and religion are likely to bring fresh into your memory.”
With this backhand slap at the banker, the young man went out. It was rather odd that Joe Hurley, like Bill Judson, should suspect the Passonians of the same secret reason for not desiring a spiritual refreshment of the town. But then, both the storekeeper and the owner of the Great Hope were observant of human nature and knew Canyon Pass and its inhabitants very well.
Joe Hurley’s proposal was rattling the dry bones. If he saw two men conversing on the street, with both their arms and whiskers waving in the breeze, he might be sure the topic under discussion was the coming of “that gospel-sharp Joe Hurley’s sicked on to us.”
If two housewives met in midflight between store and store in the course of a forenoon’s shopping, the principal subject of gossip was bound to be the possibility of a parson settling in Canyon Pass. Nor did the feminine opinion always march with that of Mother Tubbs.
In spite of the emancipation of the sex and its introduction to the high office of the ballot, the women of the mining town were – like women everywhere – considerably influenced by the expressed opinions of their husbands, brothers, and sons. If Charlie Raidlaw, who dealt faro for Boss Tolley, or Phin Shattuck, one of Colorado Brown’s “gentlemanly mixers,” gave it as his opinion that a white-liveried, lily-handed parson was going to be a pest in the town and sure to hurt business, Mrs. Charlie and Sue Shattuck, Phin’s sister, were pretty sure to scout the idea that a parson in the Pass would be any improvement.
“It’s needed,” Rosabell Pickett announced with conviction. Rosabell played the piano in the Grub Stake, painted her face like a Piute Indian, dressed as gaudily as a circus poster, and was the only employee Boss Tolley had who really was not afraid of him. In fact, Rosabell was not afraid of any man and had small respect for most; she was frank in saying so. A girl can be a piano player in a honkytonk and be long on self-respect. Rosabell approved of herself – quite.
“It’s needed,” repeated Rosabell. “I wish he’d preach in the street out there, just stir up the people till they was with him, every one, and then march in here with an ax and smash every hootch bottle behind your bar, Tolley – that’s what I wish.”
“You’re crazy, Rosie!” cried the proprietor of the Grub Stake. “I’d hafter go a-gunnin’ for any man that tried to smash up my business thataway, and that wouldn’t make the Grub Stake friends. You oughtn’t to bite the hand that feeds you, Rosie. If it wasn’t for the Grub Stake – and me – you wouldn’t be wearin’ rhinestone shoebuckles.”
“Is that so?” countered the young woman. “You needn’t worry none about my biting your hand ’nless you keep it washed oftener than is your present habit. And I want you to know that I don’t sell my opinions when I take the Grub Stake’s pay-envelope – not much!”
“Well, I wanter see that dratted parson come in yere!” said Tolley blusteringly.
“He won’t come alone,” put in Hurley, who had been listening at the bar to the argument.
“Huh?”
“I say he won’t come in here alone. I might as well serve notice here and now that this Parson Hunt is a friend of mine. I don’t never aim to throw a friend down or fail him when he gets into a jam. If he comes in here – for any purpose, Tolley – I’ll likely be with him.”
“You keep him out o’ yere! You keep him out!” blustered the other. “We don’t want no sky pilots here in the Pass. Anyway, I won’t have ’em in the Grub Stake.”
A burly fellow in overalls and riding boots broke in. He had already sampled Tolley’s red-eye more deeply than was wise.
“You say the word, boss,” he growled, “and we’ll run the preacher out o’ town.”
Joe Hurley looked at the ruffian coldly. “You won’t run anybody out of town, Hicks – not any,” the mine owner said. “But I’ll tell you something that may be worth your attention. If Canyon Pass ever gets up on its hind legs and reares and starts to run certain tramps and ne’er-do-wells out of town, I’m ready to lay a bet with any man that you’ll be right up in the forefront of them that are chased out. Get me?”
Hicks, scowling, dropped his hand to the gunbutt peeping above the waistband of his overalls. Joe Hurley did not flicker an eyelash nor move a finger. Finally Hicks lurched away with an oath and went out through the swinging doors.
“And that’s that,” said Rosabell briskly, cutting the tense chord of silence. “I always did say the more of a boozer a man is, the quicker he’ll take water. I hope your friend Mr. Hunt, Joe, has got backbone same as you have. Is he an old gentleman?”
“Not so you’d notice it,” replied Hurley with a sudden grin.
He remained awhile to bandy repartee with Rosabell and some of the other idlers. But Boss Tolley slipped out of the honkytonk, although he did not follow Hicks.
Mulligan Lane ran at the rear of the stores, saloons, and other amusement places facing this side of Main Street. Colorado Brown’s cabaret was not far from Tolley’s rear door. It was dusk of rather a sultry day – a day that had forecast the heat of the approaching summer.
Tolley lounged under the withered cottonwood behind Brown’s dance-pavilion. The sign of the flood’s highwater mark – that flood of twenty years before – had been cut by some idle knifeblade deep into the bole of the tree high over Tolley’s head, and he was a tall man. A sallow-faced, bony giant of a man was Tolley, hairy and brawny, without a redeeming feature in his cruel countenance. Had he not possessed, in the memorable words of Bill Judson, “a wishbone where his backbone should have been,” Boss Tolley would have been a very dangerous man. Lacking personal courage he depended upon the backing of men like Hicks and his bouncer, Macpherson.
He slouched now under the tree and waited – a sullen lump of a figure whose dark garments blended with the shadowy trunk as the night fell. The small figure coming up the slope of the lane approached the back door of Colorado Brown’s place without seeing the man until almost within arm’s length.
“Hey, Nell!” She started, looked up, stepped back a pace. “Don’t be scare’t of me.”
“Don’t flatter yourself, Tolley,” replied the girl curtly.
“I want to speak with you.”
“I don’t want to speak to you.”
“Say – listen! You ain’t treating me right. You walked out and left me flat. You didn’t even ask me for a raise. How’d you know I wouldn’t give you as much as Brown does?”
“I didn’t want to know. I got through. You didn’t have any hold on me, Tolley.”
“Mebbe not. Mebbe I have. You better listen,” for the girl was turning scornfully away. “You and Dick played it low down on me.”
Now she gave him her full attention. It was so dark under the tree that he could not see her face clearly, but he knew some sudden emotion shook her. To himself he grinned.
“I got to admit my losing you and Dick has put a crimp in the Grub Stake’s business. You was my best performer, and Dick Beckworth was the best card-sharp I had. Looker here! You come back to the Grub Stake and – and I won’t say nothing more.”
“What do you mean?” She had almost instantly gained control of herself. “You can say all you like. I am never going to sing in your joint again.”
“You ain’t?”
“No.”
“You better think again.” His voice was grim, menacing. “I can say something you won’t like to hear.”
“Say it.” She spat the command out as boldly as was her usual speech; but in her heart sudden fear fluttered like a netted bird.
“I been tellin’ them Dick Beckworth lit out for Crescent City, and that I heard later he was dealing ’em in Denver.”
“Dick Beckworth?” gasped the girl.
“Yeppy. I told ’em that. But I know derned well he didn’t ride north that day – ”
“Why do you speak to me of Dick Beckworth?”
She tried to say it boldly, calmly. She stared at him in the dusk, her figure tense. He could see her blue eyes gleam like twin sapphires.
“I’m telling you. Listen,” whispered Tolley hoarsely. “I could show ’em the bones of Dick’s hoss in the gravel below the Overhang – right at the edge of Runaway River. I got his saddle right now in my big safe. What do you say to that?”
“Dick – ”
“I reckon you know how the hoss and the saddle went over the cliff. And Dick was with ’em. He wasn’t with ’em when I raked out the saddle. Dick had gone to some place a dern sight more distant than Crescent City – nor yet Denver.”
She was silent. He could hear her quick, labored breathing. Satisfaction fired all the mean soul of the man.
“You think it over, Nell.”
He turned and lurched heavily away. The girl stood rooted to the place, more shaken, more terrified, than even Boss Tolley suspected. He was out of sight before she gained strength to move.