CHAPTER VIII
THE THRALL OF THE PAST
Sibyl Dudley searched for both Curtis Clayton and William Sanders. When she could not find them, she reasoned that they had gone back to Paradise Valley, and sent them letters urging them to return to Denver. Ben had arrived, and after a talk with Sibyl, and another with Mary, he had induced Mary to send a pressing invitation to Lucy Davison to visit her for a few days.
Meanwhile, Justin was trying to find himself. The violence and virulence of party and factional feeling astonished him. He had not known that men could be so rabid and unreasonable. He was as bewildered by the discovery, and by the furious assaults made on him by men and newspapers, as he had been by the surprising fact of his election. He could not have been assailed more vindictively if he had been a criminal. To hold an honest opinion honestly seemed to be considered a crime by those whom it antagonized.
Candor had ever been impressed on him as a cardinal virtue. It brought a shock to discover that it was anything but a virtue in this political world to which he was so new. Concealment, duplicity, the accomplishment of a purpose by fair means or foul, these seemed to be the things that had value. It was true that a certain faction in Denver agreed with him, but the agreement was for pecuniary and material reasons. He could see that if their interests lay in the other direction they would oppose him as heartily. Even these men could not keep from pointing out to him how much he was to gain. They thought to stiffen his courage by assuring him that he was on the side that must win. As if that would move him now! No man seemed able to understand that the opinions he held and expressed had no root in a desire to advance himself or enrich himself.
With these discoveries came a temporary weakening of his faith. He was no Sir Oracle, and had never pretended to be, and he began to doubt himself and his conclusions. He wanted to do right, but what was right? Was it an abstraction, after all? He had never before questioned the certainty of those inner feelings on which he had always relied for guidance. Was conscience but a thing of education? A man had told him so but the day before.
As there was no help outwardly he had to burrow for it inwardly. The stimulating wine of memory lay inward, and he drew on it for strength, recalling those hours and even days of quiet thought and talk with Clayton which followed the election. Before him in all its pristine beauty rose that dream of Peter Wingate, that the desert, by which Wingate meant Paradise Valley, should blossom as the rose. Wingate’s hopeful and prophetic sermons had made a deep impression on the plastic mind of the boy who heard them. Though Justin scarcely knew it, that dream of a redeemed desert, working slowly through the years, had become his own. It had long been merely a vague desire, holding at first the form given to it by the minister, that settlers might come in and till the land. But Justin had long since seen that if settlers came in, they must go out again if water was not to be had, and that irrigation alone possessed the transforming power which could make the dream a reality.
The farmers now in Paradise Valley were irrigating as well as they could. They had little money and their devices were of a make-shift character. Yet wherever they could induce water to flow the desert bloomed. Justin had come to sympathize with them in their struggle against adverse conditions the more perhaps because he had so long held that guilty knowledge of the fact that Ben Davison had cut their dam.
In thus surveying the field before him and choosing between the cattlemen and the irrigationists, as they were represented in the valley of Paradise, which was the only world he knew well, Justin had a growing comprehension of that large truth, that if he who makes two blades of grass to grow where but one grew before is a benefactor, a still greater one is the man who changes a cattle range, where ten acres will hardly support a cow, to an irrigated land where five acres will sustain a home. This was the thing indefinitely and faultily foreshadowed in Peter Wingate’s dream.
The conditions in Paradise Valley were duplicated in many places throughout the state. Should the struggling farmers give way to the cattlemen, or should they be assisted? If the farmers held the irrigable lands there would be plenty of range left; for there were millions of acres which could never be touched by water, where cattle could graze undisturbing and undisturbed. But the cattlemen coveted the rich valleys where water could be secured without the expense of pumps and windmills, as well as the dry, bunch-grass uplands.
To hold the land they now occupied but did not own, they had allied themselves with the political party which promised a senator whose influence at Washington should favor them. If the agriculturalists won, the illegal fences stretched on every league of grazing land would have to come down, and that would be a serious if not fatal blow to the ranch industry as it was then conducted. Already there were threats and warnings from Washington.
All this Justin included in his wide survey of the conditions which confronted him. A poll of the votes to be cast had shown that he held in his hand the deciding ballot. If he says it to the cattlemen their candidate for United States senator would be elected, and would use his influence to keep the government from interfering with the illegal fences; the farmers would have to continue their unequal struggle, and perhaps would be forced ultimately out of the country; present ranch conditions would be maintained, and each winter would witness a recurrence, in a greater or less degree, of that terrible tragedy of the unsheltered range, where helpless animals perished by hundreds in the pitiless storms.
Influenced by Clayton and by the circumstances and incidents of his ranch life, Justin could not help feeling that the open range stood for barbarous cruelty, and agriculture for the reverse. He was the thrall of the past. As often as that memory of the unsheltered range came back to him, and out of the swirling snows starving and freezing cattle looked at him with hungry eyes, while his ears caught their low meanings mingled with the death song of the icy wind, he felt that his intuitions were right, and his doubts fled away.
Then would come the conviction that he had been led, until he stood where he was now. Was it not a strange thing, he reflected at such times, that he, who as a boy had sickened at the branding of a calf, who later had suffered heart-ache with Clayton over the tragedies of the range, who from the first had sympathized with the farmers even as Wingate had sympathized with them, should stand where he stood now? In his hand lay great issues. If he proved true, he would become, without design or volition on his part, the sword of the irrigationists. The question which he faced was whether or not he should be true to that dream of a blossoming desert and to the teachings of Clayton.
Harkness had assured him, with much vehemence, that there were “no strings on him;” the cowboys had given him their votes because they desired to testify thus to their admiration of his bravery and their detestation of the conduct of Ben Davison. Yet Justin knew there were “strings on him,”—influences, friendships, feelings, hopes and desires, which he could nether forget nor ignore. No longing for place or power could have moved him now that he had taken his stand, and anything approaching the nature of a bribe would have filled him with indignation. But these other things bade him pause and consider; they even forced him to doubt. And with Justin, doubt weakened the very foundations of the structure of belief which at first he had thought so stable.
CHAPTER IX
SANDERS TELLS HIS STORY
The evening before the day set for the election of United States senator Lemuel Fogg received this message from Sibyl Dudley:
“Remember our agreement. I am prepared to do what I promised. I shall not fail, and you must not.”
At a late hour that same evening a messenger handed Justin a note. It was from Sibyl. She was waiting for him in the lobby, and had a carriage in the street.
“I want to take you home with me,” she said, in her pleasantest manner.
“Is Lucy there?” was his eager question.
“What a mind reader you are!” She laughed playfully. “She is there, and if you are good I will permit you to have a look at her.”
She led the way to the carriage.
“You may see her, after you have seen some one else who is there,” she supplemented, as the carriage moved away from the hotel.
“Who may that be?”
Justin did not desire to see any one else.
“Wait!” she said, mysteriously.
Justin thought of Mary, of Ben, and even of Doctor Clayton. But he thought most of Lucy. But for his desire to see Lucy he would not have gone with Mrs. Dudley.
When he arrived and was shown into the parlor he beheld William Sanders. He could not believe that he had been summoned to meet Sanders, and glanced about the room to ascertain if it held any one else. Sanders was alone. Sibyl, following hard on Justin’s heels, came in while he was greeting Sanders. The latter, having risen to take Justin’s hand, moved his jaws nervously. At home he would have chewed a grass blade or a broom straw. His cunning little eyes glanced away from Justin’s, instead of meeting them squarely.
“I have come upon the strangest piece of information!” said Sibyl, speaking to Justin with simulated sympathy. “I could have brought you the news, or told you about it as we drove up, but I wanted you to hear it from Mr. Sanders himself. It is really the strangest and most romantic thing I ever listened to. I simply couldn’t believe it when Mr. Sanders told it to me first, but when he explained fully I saw that it must be true.”
“And it come about in a mighty curious way; that is, my bein’ hyer did. ’Twas through a fortune teller. I’ve gone to a good many of ’em in my time, but this was the best one I ever found.”
Sanders had dropped back into his chair, where he sat limply, his loose shabby garments contrasting strangely with the furnishings of the room. He clicked his teeth together, with a chewing motion, when he was not speaking, and looked at Justin with shifting gaze. He was not easy in his unfamiliar surroundings, and his manner showed it. Now and then he glanced at Sibyl, as if for help, as he proceeded with his narrative.
“I ain’t been feelin’ jist right toward Philip Davison, as you know, and you an’ me had some trouble one’t; but you know I voted fer ye, er I reckon you know it. Anyway, I did. Well, I come up to Denver not long ago, and this fortune teller I spoke of told me all about that trouble I had with Davison, and about how I was put out that time by you, and everything. She was a clairvoy’nt; went into a trance an’ seen the whole thing, and a lot more that I can’t tell you now, and when she come out of the trance we had a long talk and she give me some good advice. Charged me two dollars, but it was worth ten, and I’d 'a’ paid that ruther than missed it. And when Mrs. Dudley called on her–”
Sibyl affected a very clever confusion.
“I suppose you will think me very foolish, Mr. Wingate, and we women are foolish! I have always refused to believe in fortune tellers, but a friend of mine who had visited this one heard such strange things that–”
“That she went, too,” said Sanders, with an expression of gratification, “and I reckon she’ll be believin’ in fortune tellin’ from this on.”
“Well, it was very strange,” Sibyl admitted with apparent hesitation. “The things she told me caused me to write to Mr. Sanders, and now he is here to tell you what he knows.”
“And it’s a sing’lar story. And not so sing’lar either, when you look it up one side and down t’other. I’d 'a’ told you all about it long ago, but fer certain things that took place.”
Justin, thinking of Lucy and disappointed at not seeing her immediately, had not listened with much attention at first, but now he was becoming interested. It began to dawn on him that this story concerned him. So he looked at Sanders more attentively, with a glance now and then at Sibyl Dudley. He had never admired Mrs. Dudley and he did not admire her now; recalling the things he knew and the things he guessed about her and Clayton, he almost felt at times that he hated her. She was a handsome woman, but even his ignorance discounted the assumed value of rouge and fine raiment. He wondered some times that Clayton could ever have cared for her. He was sure he never could have done so; for, compared with Sibyl, Lucy Davison was as a modest violet to a flaunting tiger lily.
“I set out to ask Doc Clayton some questions about you, the first time I come to his house. You’ll remember that time, fer me and Fogg come together. But Clayton made me mad, when he told me that lie about his crooked arm; instid of answerin’ me, he made fun of me, and I went away without sayin’ anything.”
He chewed energetically on this old memory.
“I didn’t come back fer a good while after that, you’ll reck’lect; I got land at Sumner, an’ farmed there a spell. Finally I sold out, an’ thought I’d take another look at Paradise Valley. I’d been thinkin’ about it all that time, and allowin’ I’d go back when I got ready. I might have writ to you, but I wasn’t any hand to write in them days; and I hadn’t got over bein’ mad at Doc Clayton.”
Sibyl, turning her rings on her shapely fingers, was anxious that he should reach the real point, but she withheld any manifestation of impatience. In the school of experience she had learned to wait. Justin was also anxious, and he had not learned so well how to conceal it. But Sanders went on unheeding, stopping now and then to masticate a fact before proceeding further.
“When I come back, intendin’ to tell you all I knowed, which I’d begun to feel was due ye, I got into that quarrel with Davison about the fence before I could; and then you and me had that trouble. After that I wouldn’t tell; and I wouldn’t tell it now but fer certain things. But I reckon you’d ought to know. I dunno whether you’ll be pleased er not when you do know; but I’m calculatin’ that Davison won’t be pleased, and that suits me. I don’t make any bones of sayin’ that I don’t like Davison; but Davison is your paw!”
After all this slow preliminary, the revelation came like a shot from a rifle. Not realizing this, Sanders twisted round in his chair and began to draw from his hip pocket a grimy memorandum book of ancient appearance. Justin was too astonished to speak. He could hardly believe that he had heard aright, and he was prepared to dispute the assertion, for it seemed incredible.
“Do you mean that Mr. Davison is my father?” he cried.
“That’s jist what I mean!”
Sanders chewed again, and putting the memorandum book on his knee opened it carefully. Sibyl Dudley, though she had seen the book before, came forward softly from her chair to look. Her dark eyes had kindled. Justin stared at Sanders and the book. The shock of astonishment was still on him. He did not know what to think or say. Sanders appeared the least concerned of all.
“That’s jist what I mean, and hyer’s the little book in which your mother writ down the things I know about it; you can see it yerself, and you needn’t believe me. You was brought to that preacher, Mr. Wingate, by me, and left there. I took you and your mother into my wagon. She was too sick to walk even, and she died in it; and then, not knowin’ what to do with you, fer you was jist a baby, and I was only a kid myself, I took you to the preacher. I had left this mem’randum book behind, through a mistake; but I give him the Bible, and some other things, and calc’lated to bring this to him. But I didn’t right away, and then I lost track of him.”
Justin was trembling now. Though still unable to grasp the full meaning of this revelation, he saw that Sanders was recounting things he knew. There was no deception. He took the book in his shaking hands, when Sanders passed it to him. It was grimy and disreputable in appearance, but if Sander’s story were true it had been hallowed by his mother’s touch.
“When I heard the name of Wingate the first time that I come to the valley and stopped all night at Clayton’s I was goin’ to ask him all about you and tell him what I knowed; but he made me mad, when he cut me off that way, and I didn’t. 'Tain’t no good excuse fer not tellin’, I reckon, an’ you may think I hadn’t any better excuse later on, but that’s why I didn’t, anyway. Davison’s treatin’ me the way he did and that trouble I had with you made me keep my head shet till now. But that fortune teller, when I seen her the second time, said fer me to tell you the whole thing, and so I’m doin’ it, though mebbe it won’t please you.”
Sander’s tone was apologetic.
Justin heard in amazed bewilderment. Philip Davison his father! The thing was incredible, impossible. But he opened the memorandum book with reverent fingers, as Sanders wandered on with his explanations and excuses. This little diary at least was real. The first glance showed him the familiar handwriting which he knew to be his mother’s. He knew every curve and turn of the letters penned in the little Bible, which at that moment was in his trunk at the hotel. There she had written:
“Justin, my baby boy, is now six months old. May God bless and preserve him and may he become a good man.”
Here was the same handwriting, a portion of it in pencil so worn in places as to be almost illegible. Hardly hearing what Sanders was now saying Justin began to read. The dates were far apart. Some of the things set down had been written before Justin was born; others must have been penciled shortly before her death. Many were unrelated and told of trivial things. Others concerned her husband and her child. The details were more complete in the later pencilled notes, where she had sought to make a record for the benefit of her boy in the event of her death, which she seemed to foresee or fear. There was sadness here and tears and the story of a pitiful tragedy; and here also in full were the names of her husband and her son.
She was the wife of Philip Davison, and her son Justin was born a year after her marriage. Davison was then a small farmer, with a few cattle, living in a certain valley, which she named. Davison, as Justin knew, had come from that valley to the valley of Paradise. Davison’s habit of occasional intoxication was known to her before her marriage, as was also his violent outbursts of temper; but love had told her the old lie, that she could save him from himself. The result had been disaster. In a fit of drunken rage he had so abused her that she had fled from him in the night with her child. A terrible storm arose as she wandered through the foothills. But she had stumbled on, crazed by fear and more dead than alive. How she lived through the week that followed she declared in this yellowed writing that she did not know, but she had lived. She was journeying toward the distant railroad. Now and then some kind-hearted man gave her a seat in his wagon, and now and then she found shelter and food in the home of some lonely settler. She would not return to Davison, and she hoped he believed she had died in the storm.
The brief record ended in a blank, which had never been filled. Sanders—his name was not mentioned by her—had taken her into his prairie schooner—he was but a fatherless boy himself—and there she had died, worn out by suffering and exhaustion. But her baby had lived, and was now known as Justin Wingate.
A deep sense of indignation burned in Justin’s breast against Philip Davison, as he read the pathetic story. Against Sanders he could not be indignant, in spite of the wrong the man had done him by withholding this information through all the years; for Sanders had soothed the last moments of his mother, and Sanders’ wagon had given her the last shelter she had known. Justin’s fingers shook, and in his eyes there was a blinding dash of tears.
Sanders was still drawling on, stopping occasionally to chew at an unwilling sentence. It was an old story to him, and so had lost interest. Sibyl was standing expectantly by, watching Justin with solicitude for her plans. His feelings did not reach her.
“So I am Philip Davison’s son!”
Justin drew a long breath. His voice was choked and the words sounded hoarse and strange.
“I reckon I ought to 'a’ told you a good while ago,” Sanders apologized; “but I kinder felt that it would please Davison, and after that trouble you an’ me had I didn’t want to tell it; and, so, I didn’t.”
His cunning gray eyes shone vindictively.
“I don’t mind sayin’ to you that I wouldn’t turn my hand over to save Davison from the pit, if he is your father; he didn’t do right by me, an’ you didn’t do right by me. It won’t please him to know that you’re his son, fer you’re fightin’ him teeth an’ nail; and so I’m willin’ to tell it now.”
Sanders’ ulterior motive was exposed. First and last hatred of Philip Davison and of Justin had guided him.
“It must be a pleasure to you to know who your father really is,” said Sibyl, sweetly.
Justin regarded her steadily, without actually seeing her. His faculties were turned inward.
“Yes, that is true; I am glad to know who my father is. I have wondered about it many times. But I never dreamed it could be Mr. Davison. It doesn’t seem possible now.”
Yet in his hands he held the unimpeachable record.
Sanders rose, shuffling and awkward.
“I’ll turn the mem’randum over to you; I reckon it belongs by rights more to you than to Davison, and I don’t keer even to speak to him; he’s never done right by me.”
Justin aroused as Sanders moved toward the door.
“Sanders,” he said, “I’m obliged to you for this. I recognize this as my mother’s handwriting. You ought to have given it to me long ago, but I’m glad to get it now. And I thank you from the bottom of my heart for what you did for her. I shall never forget it.”
“Oh, ’twasn’t nothin’ at all,” Sanders declared, glad to escape the denunciation he had feared.
“And I want you to tell me more about my mother,” Justin urged; “what she said when she came to you, and how she looked, and everything.”
Sanders sat down again, chewing the quid of reflection, and gave the details Justin demanded, for they had held well in his tenacious memory. Justin, listening with breathless interest, asked many questions, while Sibyl sat by in silent attention and studied his strong beardless face. He thanked Sanders again, when the story was ended.
Sanders appeared anxious to depart, now that he had performed his mission, and Sibyl was glad to have him go. Justin remained in the room. He was thinking of Lucy and desired to see her.
“When I got on the track of that story and understood what it meant, I felt it to be my duty to bring you and Mr. Sanders together and let you hear it from his own lips,” said Sibyl, regarding Justin attentively. “And I told him to be sure to bring that diary, for I knew you would want to see it and would prize it highly.”
It was in Justin’s pocket, but he took it out again, still handling it reverently.
“I thank you for that, Mrs. Dudley,” he said with deep sincerity. “The whole thing is so new, so unexpected, that I am not yet able to adjust myself to it; but it was a kindness on your part, and this book I shall hold beyond price.”
He studied again the yellowed writing.
“It is beyond price, for my mother wrote it!”
He put the book away and looked at Sibyl.
“The way I chanced to hear of the story was very queer,” Sibyl explained. “And the way it has turned out justifies the superstitious spasm which took me to that fortune teller. Sanders was coming out of her room as I went in. I had seen him in Paradise Valley, and so recognized him, though he did not notice me. When I passed in I spoke to the woman about him, telling her that I knew him; and then she gave me the story she had drawn from him, or which in a confidential moment he had told her. I saw the value of it to you, if true. I had an interview with him for the purpose of verifying it; and then I arranged this meeting, for I thought you ought to receive it straight from him.”
Justin thanked her again.
“I think I should like to see Lucy now,” he said, “if you have no objection.”
Sibyl seemed embarrassed, as she answered:
“I’m sorry to have to say that the servants inform me that she has gone out with Mary to spend the night with a friend in another part of the city. I thought she would be here, and I was sure you would want to have a talk with her after that.”
Justin was disappointed.
“I might as well be going then. It is late; too late I suppose to call on her at the place where she is stopping. I will see her to-morrow evening.”
He got out of his chair unsteadily. His emotions had been touched so strongly that he felt exhausted, though he had not realized it until he arose. Then he took his hat and went out, after again thanking Sibyl for her kindness.