Out of the Depths: A Romance of Reclamation

“How do you do, Lafayette?” Mrs. Blake greeted him with quiet cordiality. “This is a pleasant surprise.”

“Yes–yes, indeed! I–yes, very!” he stammered, so embarrassed that he would have stuck at the foot of the steps had not Blake started him up with a vigorous boost.

Mrs. Blake gave him her hand. “You look so strong and hearty!” she remarked. “It speaks well for the fare Miss Knowles provides.”

“Oh, that credit is due our Jap chef,” laughed the girl. “I can cut out a cow from the herd better than I can bone a chop. But the butter and eggs and cream that are awaiting you–Which reminds me that we’ve yet to see It.”

“It?” asked Blake.

“Yes, him–the baby!”

“Oh, you dear girl!” cooed Mrs. Blake. “Come in and see him.”

Isobel followed her into the car. Blake nodded to Ashton. But the younger man shrank away from the door.

“If you’ll kindly excuse me,” he muttered. “It would remind me too much of–the time when–No, I’d rather not.”

“Of course,” assented Blake with ready understanding. “How do you like this country? I went through here once on a railway survey. It’s rare good luck–this chance to visit Miss Knowles. Jenny is a little run down, as you see.”

“I shall trust that her visit to this locality will soon quite restore her,” remarked Ashton.

“It will. The doctors said Maine; I said Colorado. It has done you no end of good. You are looking particularly fine and fit.”

“It has helped me–in more ways than one,” murmured Ashton.

“Glad to hear you say it!” responded Blake in hearty approval.

Ashton turned from him as Isobel appeared in the doorway, cuddling a lusty, rosy-cheeked baby. The mother hovered close behind her.

“Look at him!” jeered Blake with heavily feigned derision. “Did you ever see such a big, fat, lubberly–”

“Yes, look at him, Lafe,” said the girl, stepping out into the vestibule. “He is only a yearling, but isn’t he just the perfect image of his father?”

Ashton burst into a ringing laugh, but abruptly checked himself at sight of the sober face of the young mother. “I–I beg pardon!” he stammered. “I–she–Miss Knowles–that is what she told me to tell you about him.”

“And you didn’t play up worth a little bit, Lafe!” complained the girl.

It was Blake’s turn to laugh. “You–!” he accused. “Schemed to frame up a case on us did you!”

His wife smiled faintly, not altogether certain that an aspersion had not been cast upon her chuckling son.

“But it’s partly true, really,” remarked Ashton, peering at the baby’s big pale-blue eyes.

Blake burst into a hilarious roar. But Mrs. Blake now beamed upon Ashton. “Then you, too, see the resemblance, Lafayette! Isn’t it wonderful, and he so young? His name is Thomas Herbert Vincent Leslie Blake.–Now, my dear, if you please, I shall take him in. We must be preparing to start, if it is so long a drive.”

“Do let me hold him until you and Mr. Blake are ready,” begged the girl.

“I am not quite sure that–You will be careful not to drop him? He is tremendously strong, and he squirms,” dubiously assented the fond mother. “Come, Tom. We must not keep Miss Knowles waiting.”

Blake disappeared with her into the luxuriously furnished car.

“Isn’t he a dear?” cooed the girl, clasping the baby to her bosom and kissing his chubby clenched hands. He stared up into her glowing face with his round light-blue eyes. “Thomas Blake!–Tom Blake!” she whispered.

Ashton did not heed the words. He was gazing too intently at the girl and the child. His eyes glistened with a wonderment and longing so exquisitely intense that it was like a pain. The girl sank down in one of the cane chairs and laid the baby on his back. He kicked and gurgled, seized one of his upraised feet and thrust a pink big toe in between his white milk teeth.

“That’s more than you can do, Lafe!” challenged the girl.

She glanced up, dimpling with merriment,–met the adoration in his eyes, and looked down, blushing. He attempted to speak, but the words choked into an incoherent sound like a sob. He jumped from the car and hurried to take the lines from the porter.

CHAPTER XIII

THE OTHER LADY’S HUSBAND

Miss Knowles did not seem to observe Ashton’s deflection. She remained worshipfully downbent over the wriggling, chuckling baby until its parents reappeared.

Mrs. Blake had changed to an easy and serviceable dress of plain, strong material. The skirt, cut to walking length, showed that her feet and ankles were protected by a pair of absurdly small laced boots. Her husband had shifted to an equally serviceable costume–flannel shirt, broad-brimmed felt hat, and surveyor’s boots.

“Crossing the plains we packed a trunk with what we considered most necessary,” said Mrs. Blake, as she took the baby. “It is not a large one, and in addition there is only my satchel and the level and the lunch my maid is putting up for us.”

“There is room for more, if you wish,” replied Isobel. “But we can send over here for anything you need, any time.”

“You’re not going to let us really rough-it!” complained Mrs. Blake, as her husband swung her to the ground. “Were it not for Thomas Herbert–”

“–We’d go to Africa again and eat lions,” Blake completed the sentence. “Wait, though–we may have a chance at mountain lions.”

The porter had gone to help a manservant fetch the trunk from the other end of the car. Isobel untied the saddle horses from the rear of the buckboard. The trunk was lifted in, and Blake lashed it on, together with his level rod and tripod, using Ashton’s lariat.

“Level is in the trunk,” he explained, in response to Ashton’s look of inquiry. “I suppose we ride.”

“I think it will be better if Lafe drives,” objected Isobel. “I am so reckless, and you don’t know the road, as he does. The only thing is Rocket–Lafe has about trained him out of his tricks. But I should warn you that the hawss has been rather vicious.”

“Tom will ride him,” confidently stated Mrs. Blake.

Her husband took the bridle reins of the big horse and mounted him with the agility of a cowboy. For a moment Rocket stood motionless. Then, whether because of Blake’s weight or the fact that he was a stranger, all the beast’s newly acquired docility vanished. He began to plunge and buck even more violently than when first mounted by Ashton.

Half a hundred Stockchuteites–all the residents of the town and several floaters–had come down to inspect the palatial private car and its passengers. At Rocket’s first leap these highly interested spectators broke into a murmur of joyful anticipation. They were about to see the millionaire tenderfoot pull leather.

Yet somehow the event failed to transpire. Blake sat the flat saddle as if glued fast to it. His knees and legs were crushing against the sides of the leaping, whirling beast with the firmness of an iron vise. He held both hands upraised, away from the “leather.”

Presently Rocket’s efforts began to flag. Instead of seeking to quiet the frantic beast, Blake began to whoop and to strike him with his hat. Thus taunted, Rocket resorted to his second trick. He took the bit in his teeth and started to bolt. The crowd scattered before the rush of the runaway. But they need not have moved. Blake reached down on each side of the beast’s outstretched neck and pulled. Tough-mouthed as he was, Rocket could not resist that powerful grip. His head was drawn down and backwards until his trumpet nostrils blew against his deep chest. After half a dozen wild plunges, he was forced to a stand, snorting but subdued.

“That’s some riding, Miss Chuckie!” called the burly sheriff of the county. “Your guest forks a hawss like a buster.”

The girl rode forward beside Blake, her face radiant. She paid him the highest of compliments by taking his riding as a matter of course; but in her eyes was a look strangely like that of his wife’s fond gaze,–a look of pride at his achievement, rather than admiration.

“We’ll ride ahead of the team to keep clear of the dust,” she remarked.

He twisted about and saw that Ashton was starting to drive after them. His wife’s elderly maid was waving her handkerchief from one of the car windows. The porter and the manservant stood at attention. He exchanged a nod and smile with his wife, patted Rocket’s arched neck and clicked to him to start.

“This is great, Miss Knowles!” he said. “I did not look for such fun, first crack out of the box. And–if you don’t mind my saying it–it’s such a jolly surprise your being what you are.”

The girl blushed with pleasure. “I–we have been so eager to meet you,” she murmured. She added hurriedly, “On account of your wonderful work as an engineer, you know.”

“I wouldn’t have suspected Ashton of bragging for me,” he replied.

“Oh, he–he says you have a remarkable knack of hitting on the solution of problems. But it’s in the engineering journals and reports that we’ve read about your work. Perhaps that is why you thought we had met before. After reading about you so much, I felt that I already knew you, and so my manner, you know–”

He shook his head at this seemingly ingenuous explanation. “No, there is something about your voice and face–” His eyes clouded with the grief of a painful memory; his head sank forward until his square chin touched his broad chest. He muttered brokenly: “But that’s impossible… Anyway–better for them they died–better than to live after…”

Behind her veil the girl’s face became deathly white. He raised his head and looked at her with a wistful gleam of hope. She had averted her face from him and was gazing off at the hills with dim unseeing eyes.

“Pardon me, Miss Knowles,” he said, “but do you mind if I ask what is your first name?”

She hesitated almost imperceptibly before replying: “I am called Chuckie–Chuckie Knowles. Doesn’t that sound cowgirlish? We always have a chuck-wagon on the round-ups, you know. But it’s a name that used to be quite common in the West.”

“Yes, it comes from the Spanish Chiquita,” he said. He repeated the word with the soft caressing Spanish accent, “Che-keé-tah!”

A flood of scarlet swept up into the girl’s pallid face, and slowly subsided to her normal rich coloring. After a short silence she asked in a conventional tone: “I suppose you are glad to get away from Chicago. The last papers we received say that the East is sweltering in one of those smothery heat waves.”

“It’s the humidity and close air that kills,” said Blake. “I ought to know. I lived for years in the slums.”

“Oh, you–you really speak of it–openly!” the girl exclaimed.

“What of it?” he asked, astonished in turn at her lack of tact.

“Nothing–nothing,” she hastened to disclaim. “Only I know–have read about the dreadful conditions in the Chicago slums. It is–it must be so painful to recall them–That was so rude of me to–”

“Not at all,” he interrupted. To cover her evident confusion he held up his white hand in the scorching sunrays and commented jovially: “Talk about Eastern heat–this is a hundred and five Fahrenheit at the very least! A-a-ah!” He drew in a deep breath of the dry pure air. “This is something like! When you get your land under ditch, you’ll have a paradise.”

“Oh, but you do not understand,” she replied. “We want you to find out and tell us that Dry Mesa cannot be watered. Irrigation would break up Daddy’s range and put him out of business. It is just what we do not want.”

“I see,” said Blake, with instant comprehension of the situation.

“I know it cannot be done. But there are so many reclamation projects, and Daddy has read and read about them until he almost has a bee in his bonnet.”

“Yet you sent for me–an engineer.”

“Because I knew that when you told him our mesa couldn’t be watered, he would stop worrying. You know, you are quite a hero with us. We have read all about your wonderful work.”

Blake’s pale eyes twinkled. “So I’m a hero. Will you dynamite my pedestal if I figure out a way to water your range?”

She flashed him a troubled glance, but rallied for a quick rejoinder: “Even you can’t pump the water out of Deep Cañon, and Plum Creek is only a trickle most of the year.”

“I see you want me to make my report as dry as I can write it,” he bantered.

“No,” she replied, suddenly serious. “We wish the exact truth, though we hope you’ll find it dry.”

“Then you are to blame if the matter does not figure out your way,” he warned her. “You’ve given me a problem. If there is any possible way for me to irrigate your mesa, I am bound to try my best to work it out. Hadn’t you better head me off before I start in? At present I haven’t the remotest desire to do this except to comply with your wishes.”

“It’s as I told Daddy,” she said. “If there really is a way, the sooner we know it the better. It is the uncertainty that is bothering Daddy. If your report is for us, all well and good; if against us, he will stand up and fight and forget about worrying.”

“Fight?” asked Blake.

“Fight the project, fight against the formation of any irrigation district. He owns five sections. The reservoir might have to be on his patented land. He’d fight fair and square and hard–to the last ditch!”

“Isn’t that a Dutchman’s saying?” asked Blake humorously.

The girl’s tense face relaxed, and she burst out in a ringing laugh. She shifted the conversation to less serious subjects, and they cantered along together, laughing and chatting like old friends.

By this time Ashton and Mrs. Blake had gradually come to the same stage of pleasant comradeship. Ashton had started the drive in a sullen mood, his manner half resentful and wholly embarrassed. Of this the lady was tactfully oblivious. Avoiding all allusion to the catastrophe that had befallen him, she told him the latest news of the mutual friends and acquaintances in whom ordinarily he would have been expected to be interested.

She even spoke casually of his father. His face contracted with pain, but he showed no bitterness against the parent who had disowned him. After that her graciousness towards him redoubled. With Isobel for excuse, she gradually shifted the conversation to ranch life and his employment as cowboy. In many subtle ways she conveyed to him her admiration of the manner in which he had turned over a new leaf and was making a clean fresh start in life.

After delicately intimating her feelings, she at once turned to less personal topics. The last traces of his embarrassment and moodiness left him, and he began to talk quite at his ease, though with a certain reserve that she attributed to the vast change in his fortunes. In return for her kindness, he repaid her by showing a real interest in Thomas Herbert Vincent Leslie Blake.

That young man spent his time chuckling and crowing and kicking, until overcome with sleep. Two hours out from Stockchute he awoke and vociferously demanded nourishment. Promptly the party was brought to a halt. They were among the piñons on one of the hillsides. While the baby took his dinner, Isobel laid out the lunch and the men burned incense in the guise of a pair of Havana cigars produced by Blake.

The lunch might have been put up in the kitchen of a first-class metropolitan hotel. The fruit was the most luscious that money could buy; the sandwiches and cake would have tempted a sated epicure; the mineral water had come out of an ice chest so nearly frozen that it was still refreshingly cool. But–what was rather odd for a lunch packed in a private car–it included no wine or whiskey or liqueur. Blake caught Ashton’s glance, and smiled.

“You see I’m still on the waterwagon,” he remarked. “I’ve got a permanent seat. There have been times when it looked as if I might be jolted off, but–”

“But there’s never been the slightest chance of that!” put in his wife. She looked at Isobel, her soft eyes shining with love and pride. “Once he gets a grip on anything, he never lets go.”

“Oh, I can believe that!” exclaimed the girl with an enthusiasm that brought a shadow into the mobile face of Ashton.

“A man can’t help holding on when he has something to hold on for,” said Blake, gazing at his wife and baby.

“That’s true!” agreed Ashton, his eyes on the dimpled face of Isobel.

Refreshed by the delicious meal, the party prepared to start on. But they did not travel as before. While Ashton was considerately washing out the dusty nostrils of the horses with water from his canteen, Isobel decided to drive with Mrs. Blake. Declaring that it would be like old times to sit a cowboy saddle, the big engineer lengthened the girl’s stirrup leathers and swung on to the pony. This left Rocket to his owner.

At first Ashton seemed inclined to be stiff with his new road-mate. But as they jogged along, side by side, over the hills and across the sagebrush flats, Blake restricted his talk to impersonal topics and spared his companion from any allusion to their past difficulties. Throughout the ride, however, the two men maintained a certain reserve towards each other, and at no time approached the cordial intimacy that developed between the girl and Mrs. Blake before the end of their first mile together.

After telling merrily about her dual life as summer cowgirl and winter society maiden, Isobel drifted around, by seemingly casual association of ideas, to the troublesome question of irrigation on Dry Mesa, and from that to Blake and his work as an engineer.

“I do so hope Mr. Blake finds that there is no project practicable,” she went on. “He has warned me that if there seems to be any chance to work out an irrigation scheme on our mesa he is bound to try to do it.”

“And he would do it,” added Mrs. Blake with quiet confidence.

“Then I hope and pray he will find there is no chance, because Daddy would have to oppose him. That would be such a pity! He and I have read so much about Mr. Blake’s work that we have come to regard him as our–as one of our heroes.”

Mrs. Blake smiled. It was very apparent, despite the quietness and repression of her high-bred manner, that she was very much in love with her husband.

The girl continued in a meekly deferential tone: “So you will not mind my worshiping him. He is a hero, a real hero! Isn’t he?”

The words were spoken with an earnestness and sincerity that won Mrs. Blake to a like candor. “You are quite right,” she said. “Lafayette may have told you how Mr. Blake and I were wrecked on the most savage coast of Africa. He saved me from wild beasts and tropical storms, from fever and snakes,–from death in a dozen horrible forms. Then, when he had saved me–and won me, he gave me up until he could prove to himself that he was worthy of me.”

“He did?” cried the girl. “But of course!–of course!”

“Yet that was nothing to the next proof of his strength and manhood,” went on the proud wife. “He destroyed a monster more frightful than any lion or tropical snake–he overcame the curse of drink that had come down to him from–one of his parents.”

“From–from his–” whispered the girl, her averted face white and drawn with pain.

Mrs. Blake had bent over to kiss the forehead of her sleeping baby and did not see. “If only all parents knew what terrible misfortunes, what tortures, their transgressions are apt to bring upon their innocent children!” she murmured.

“He told me that he won his way up out of the–the slums,” said Isobel. “It must be some men fail to do that because they have relatives to drag them down–their families.”

“It seems hard to say it, yet I do not know but that you are right, my dear,” agreed Mrs. Blake. “Strong men, if unhampered, have a chance to fight their way up out of the social pit. But women and girls, even when they escape the–the worst down there, can hardly hope ever to attain–And of course those that fall!–Our dual code of morality is hideously unjust to our sex, yet it still is the code under which we live.”

The girl drew in a deep, sighing breath. Her eyes were dark with anguish. Yet she forced a gay little laugh. “Aren’t we solemn sociologists! All we are concerned with is that he has won his way up, and there’s no one ever to drag him down or disgrace him; and–and you won’t be jealous if I set him up on a pedestal and bring incense to him on my bended knees.”

“Only you must give Thomas Herbert his share at the same time,” stipulated the mother.

The girl burst into prolonged and rather shrill laughter that passed the bounds of good breeding. Her emotion was so unrestrained that when she looked about at her surprised companion her face was flushed and her eyes were swimming with tears.

“Please, oh, do please forgive me!” she begged with a humility as immoderate as had been her laughter. “I–I can’t tell you why, but–”

“Say no more, my dear,” soothed Mrs. Blake. “You are merely a bit hysterical. Perhaps the excitement of our coming, after your months of lonely ranch life–”

“You’re so good!” sighed the girl. “Yes, it was due to–your coming. But now the worst is over. I’ll not shock you again with any more such outbursts.”

She smiled, and began to talk of other things, with somewhat unsteady but persistent gayety.

CHAPTER XIV

A DESCENT

When the party arrived at the ranch, the girl hostess took Mrs. Blake to rest in the clean, simply furnished room provided for the visitors. Blake, after carrying in their trunk single-handed, went to look around at the ranch buildings in company with Ashton.

On returning to the house, the two found Knowles and Gowan in the parlor with the ladies. Isobel had already introduced them to Mrs. Blake and also to her son. That young man was sprawled, face up, in the cowman’s big hands, crowing and valiantly clutching at his bristly mustache.

Gowan sat across from him, perfectly at ease in the presence of the city lady. But, with his characteristic lack of humor, he was unmoved by the laughable spectacle presented by his employer and the baby, and his manner was both reserved and watchful.

At sight of Blake, Isobel called to her father in feigned alarm: “Look out, Daddy! Better stop hazing that yearling. Here comes his sire.”

Knowles gave the baby back to its half-fearful mother, and rose to greet his guest with hospitable warmth: “Howdy, Mr. Blake! I’m downright glad to meet you. Hope you’ve found things comfortable and homelike.”

“Too much so,” asserted Blake, his eyes twinkling. “We came out expecting to rough-it.”

“Well, your lady won’t know the difference,” remarked Knowles.

“You’re quite mistaken, Daddy, really,” interposed his daughter. “She and Mr. Blake were wrecked in Africa and lived on roast leopards. We’ll have to feed them on mountain lions and bobcats.”

“If you mean that, Miss Chuckie,” put in Gowan, “I can get a bobcat in time for dinner tomorrow.”

The girl led the general outburst of laughter over this serious proposal. “Oh! oh! Kid! You’ll be the death of me!–Yet I sent you a joke-book last Christmas!”

“Couldn’t see anything funny in it,” replied the puncher. “I haven’t lost it, though. It came from you.”

To cover the girl’s blush at this blunt disclosure of sentiment, Mrs. Blake somewhat formally introduced her husband to the puncher. He shook Blake’s hand with like formality and politeness. But as their glances met, his gray eyes shone with the same cold suspicion with which he had regarded Ashton at their first meeting. Before that look the engineer’s friendly eyes hardened to disks of burnished steel, and his big fist released its cordial grip of the other’s small, bony hand. He gave back hostility for hostility with the readiness of a born fighter. Gowan was the first to look away.

The incident passed so swiftly that only Knowles observed the outflash of enmity. His words indicated that he had anticipated the puncher’s attitude. He addressed Blake seriously: “Kid has been with us ever since he was a youngster and has always made my interests his own. Chuckie has been telling us what you said about putting through any project you once started.”

Blake nodded. “Yes. That is why I suggested to Miss Knowles that she call off the agreement under which I came on this visit. We shall gladly pay board, and I’ll merely knock around; or, if you prefer, we’ll leave you and go back tomorrow morning.”

“No, Daddy, no! we can’t allow our guests to leave, when they’ve only just come!” protested Isobel.

“As for any talk about board,” added her father, “you ought to know better, Mr. Blake.”

“My apology!” admitted Blake. “I’ve been living in the East.”