Cavanagh, Forest Ranger: A Romance of the Mountain West

With the strength of a bear the new assailant shook the bolted door. “Let me in!” he roared.

“Go to hell!” replied Lize, calmly.

“It’s dad!” called young Gregg. “Go away, you chump.”

“Let me in or I’ll smash this door!” retorted Gregg.

“You smash that door, old Bullfrog,” announced Lize, “and I’ll carry one of your lungs away. I know your howl – it don’t scare me. I’ve stood off one whole mob to-night, and I reckon I’m good for you. If you want to get in here you hunt up the judge of this town and the constable.”

After a pause Sam called, “Are you there, son?”

“You bet he is,” responded Lize, “and here he’ll stay.”

Joe added: “And you’d better take the lady’s advice, pop. She has the drop on you.”

The old rancher muttered a fierce curse while Ross explained the situation. “I’m as eager to get rid of these culprits as any one can be, but they must be taken by proper authority. Bring a writ from the magistrate and you may have them and welcome.”

Gregg went away without further word, and Lize said: “He’ll find Higley if he’s in town; and he is in town, for I saw him this afternoon. He’s hiding out to save himself trouble.”

Lee Virginia, with an understanding of what the ranger had endured, asked: “Can’t I get you something to eat? Would you like some coffee?”

“I would, indeed,” he answered, and his tone pleased her.

She hurried away to get it while Cavanagh disposed his prisoners behind a couple of tables in the corner. “I guess you’re in for a night of it,” he remarked, grimly. “So make yourselves as comfortable as you can. Perhaps your experience may be a discouragement to others of your kind.”

Lee returned soon with a pot of fresh coffee and some sandwiches, the sight of which roused young Gregg to impudent remark. “Well, notice that! And we’re left out!” But Edwards shrank into the shadow, as if the light hurt him.

Ross thanked Lee formally, but there was more than gratitude in his glance, and she turned away to hide her face from other eyes. Strange place it was for the blooming of love’s roses, but they were in her cheeks as she faced her mother; and Lize, with fresh acknowledgment of her beauty, broke out again: “Well, this settles it. I’m going to get out of this town, dearie. I’m done. This ends the cattle country for me. I don’t know how I’ve put up with these yapps all these years. I’ve been robbed and insulted and spit upon just long enough. I won’t have you dragged into this mess. I ought to have turned you back the day you landed here.”

The old man in the corner was listening, straining his attention in order to catch every word she uttered, and Ross again caught a gleam in his eyes which puzzled him. Before he had time to turn his wonder over in his mind they all caught the sound of feet along the walk, but this time the sound was sedate and regular, like the movement of police.

Both prisoners rose to their feet as Cavanagh again stood alert. The feet halted; a sharp rap sounded on the door.

“Who’s there?” demanded Lize.

“The law!” replied a wheezy voice. “Open in the name of the law!”

“It’s old Higley,” announced Lize. “Open the door, Ross.”

“Come in, Law,” she called, ironically, as the justice appeared. “You look kind of mice-eaten, but you’re all the law this blame town can sport. Come in and do your duty.”

Higley (a tall man, with a rusty brown beard, very much on his dignity) entered the room, followed by a short, bullet-headed citizen in a rumpled blue suit with a big star on his breast. Behind on the sidewalk Ballard and a dozen of his gang could be seen. Sam Gregg, the moving cause of this resurrection of law and order, followed the constable, bursting out big curses upon his son. “You fool,” he began, “I warned you not to monkey with them sheep. You – ”

Higley had the grace to stop that. “Let up on the cuss-words, Sam; there are ladies present,” said he, nodding toward Lee. Then he opened upon Cavanagh. “Well, sir, what’s all this row? What’s your charge against these men?”

“Killing mountain sheep. I caught them with the head of a big ram upon their pack.”

“Make him show his commission,” shouted Gregg. “He’s never been commissioned. He’s no game warden.”

Higley hemmed. “I – ah – Oh, his authority is all right, Sam; I’ve seen it. If he can prove that these men killed the sheep, we’ll have to act.”

Cavanagh briefly related how he had captured the men on the trail. “The head of the ram is at the livery barn with my horse.”

“How about that?” asked Higley, turning to Joe.

“I guess that’s right,” replied the insolent youth. “We killed the sheep all right.”

Higley was in a corner. He didn’t like to offend Gregg, and yet the case was plain. He met the issue blandly. “Marshal, take these men into custody!” Then to Ross: “We’ll relieve you of their care, Mr. Cavanagh. You may appear to-morrow at nine.”

It was a farcical ending to a very arduous thirty-six-hour campaign, and Ross, feeling like a man who, having rolled a huge stone to the top of a hill, has been ordered to drop it, said, “I insist on the maximum penalty of the law, Justice Higley, especially for this man!” He indicated Joe Gregg.

“No more sneaking, Higley,” added Lize, uttering her distrust in blunt phrase. “You put these men through or I’ll make you trouble.”

Higley turned, and with unsteady solemnity saluted. “Fear not my government, madam,” said he, and so made exit.

After the door had closed behind them, Cavanagh bitterly complained. “I’ve delivered my prisoners over into the hands of their friends. I feel like a fool. What assurance have I that they will ever be punished?”

“You have Higley’s word,” retorted Lize, with ironic inflection. “He’ll fine ’em as much as ten dollars apiece, and confiscate the head, which is worth fifty.”

“No matter what happens now, you’ve done your duty,” added Lee Virginia, with intent to comfort him.

Lize, now that the stress of the battle was over, fell a-tremble. “I reckon I’ll have to go to bed,” she admitted. “I’m all in. This night service is wearing.”

Ross was alarmed at the sudden droop of her head. “Lean on me,” he said, “it’s my turn to be useful.”

She apologized. “I can’t stand what I could once,” she confessed, as he aided her into the hotel part of the building. “It’s my nerve – seem’s like it’s all gone. I go to pieces like a sick girl.”

She did, indeed, resemble the wreck of a woman as she lay out upon her bed, her hands twitching, her eyes closed, and Ross was profoundly alarmed. “You need the doctor,” he urged. “Let me bring him.”

“No,” she said, huskily, but with decision, “I’m only tired – I’ll be all right soon. Send the people away; tell ’em to go to bed.”

For half an hour Cavanagh remained in the room waiting to see if the doctor’s services would be required, but at the end of that time, as she had apparently fallen asleep, he rose and tiptoed out into the hall.

Lee followed, and they faced each other in such intimacy as the shipwrecked feel after the rescue. The house was still astir with the feet of those to whom the noises of the night had been a terror or a lure, and their presence, so far from being a comfort, a protection, filled the girl’s heart with fear and disgust. The ranger explained the outcome of the turmoil, and sent the excited folk to their beds with the assurance that all was quiet and that their landlady was asleep.

When they were quite alone Lee said: “You must not go out into the streets to-night.”

“There’s no danger. These hoodlums would not dare to attack me.”

“Nevertheless, you shall not go!” she declared. “Wait a moment,” she commanded, and reentered her mother’s room.

As he stood there at Lize Wetherford’s door, and his mind went back over her brave deed, which had gone far to atone for her vulgarity, his respect for her deepened. Her resolute insistence upon law showed a complete change of front. “There is more good in her than I thought,” he admitted, and it gave him pleasure, for it made Lee Virginia’s character just that much more dependable. He thrilled with a new and wistful tenderness as the girl opened the door and stepped out, close beside him.

“Her breathing is quieter,” she whispered. “I think she’s going to sleep. It’s been a terrible night! You must be horribly tired. I will find you some place to sleep.”

“It has been a strenuous campaign,” he admitted. “I’ve been practically without sleep for three nights, but that’s all in my job. I won’t mind if Higley will ‘soak’ those fellows properly.”

She looked troubled. “I don’t know what to do about a bed for you; everything is taken – except the couch in the front room.”

“Don’t trouble, I beg of you. I can pitch down anywhere. I’m used to hard beds. I must be up early to-morrow, anyway.”

“Please don’t go till after breakfast,” she smiled, wanly, “I may need you.”

He understood. “What did the doctor say?”

“He said mother was in a very low state of vitality and that she must be very careful, which was easy enough to say. But how can I get her to rest and to diet? You have seen how little she cares for the doctor’s orders. He told her not to touch alcohol.”

“She is more like a man than a woman,” he answered.

She led the way into the small sitting-room which lay at the front of the house, and directly opposite the door of her own room. It was filled with shabby parlor furniture, and in one corner stood a worn couch. “I’m sorry, but I can offer nothing better,” she said. “Every bed is taken, but I have plenty of blankets.”

There was something delightfully suggestive in being thus waited upon by a young and handsome woman, and the ranger submitted to it with the awkward grace of one unaccustomed to feminine care. The knowledge that the girl was beneath him in birth, and that she was considered to be (in a sense) the lovely flower of a corrupt stock, made the manifest innocency of her voice and eyes the more appealing. He watched her moving about the room with eyes in which a furtive flame glowed.

“This seems a long way from that dinner at Redfield’s, doesn’t it?” he remarked, as she turned from spreading the blankets on the couch.

“It is another world,” she responded, and her face took on a musing gravity.

Then they faced each other in silence, each filled with the same delicious sense of weakness, of danger, reluctant to say good-night, longing for the closer touch which dawning love demanded, and yet – something in the girl defended her, defeated him.

“You must call me if I can be of any help,” he repeated, and his voice was tremulous with feeling.

“I will do so,” she answered.

Still they did not part. His voice was very tender as he said, “I don’t like to see you exposed to such experiences.”

“I was not afraid – only for you a little,” she answered.

“The Redfields like you. Eleanor told me she would gladly help you. Why do you stay here?”

“I cannot leave my mother.”

“I’m not so sure of your duty in that regard. She got on without you for ten years. You have a right to consider yourself. You don’t belong here.”

“Neither do you,” she retorted.

“Oh yes, I do – at least, the case is different with me; my work is here. It hurts me to think of going back to the hills, leaving you here in the midst of these wolves.”

He was talking now in the low, throbbing utterance of a man carried out of himself. “It angers me to think that the worst of these loafers, these drunken beasts, can glare at you – can speak to you. They have no right to breathe the same air with one like you.”

She did not smile at this; his voice, his eyes were filled with the gravity of the lover whose passion is not humorous. Against his training, his judgment, he was being drawn into closer and closer union with this daughter of violence, and he added: “You may not see me in the morning.”

“You must not go without seeing my mother. You must have your breakfast with us. It hurt us to think you didn’t come to us for supper.”

Her words meant little, but the look in her eyes, the music in her voice, made him shiver. He stammered: “I – I must return to my duties to-morrow. I should go back to-night.”

“You mustn’t do that. You can’t do that. You are to appear before the judge.”

He smiled. “That is true. I’d forgotten that.”

Radiant with relief, she extended her hand. “Good-night, then. You must sleep.”

He took her hand and drew her toward him, then perceiving both wonder and fear in her eyes, he conquered himself. “Good-night,” he repeated, dropping her hand, but his voice was husky with its passion.

Tired as he was, the ranger could not compose himself to sleep. The memory of the girl’s sweet face, the look of half-surrender in her eyes, the knowledge that she loved him, and that she was lying but a few yards from him, made slumber impossible. At the moment she seemed altogether admirable, entirely worthy to be won.

IX

THE OLD SHEEP-HERDER

The ranger was awakened in the first faint dawn by the passing of the girl’s light feet as she went across the hall to her mother’s room, and a moment later he heard the low murmur of her voice. Throwing off his blankets and making such scant toilet as he needed, he stepped into the hall and waited for her to return.

Soon she came toward him, a smile of confidence and pleasure on her lips.

“How is she?” he asked.

“Quite comfortable.”

“And you?” His voice was very tender.

“I am a little tired,” she acknowledged. “I didn’t sleep very well.”

“You didn’t sleep at all,” he declared, regretfully.

“Oh yes, I did,” she replied, brightly.

She appeared a little pale but by no means worn. Indeed, her face had taken on new charm with its confession of feminine weakness, its expression of trust in him.

These two ardent souls confronted each other in absorbed silence with keener perception, with new daring, with new intimacy, till he recalled himself with effort. “You must let me help you if there’s anything I can do. Remember, I’m your big brother.”

“I remember,” she answered, smilingly, “and I’m going out to see what my big brother is to have for breakfast.”

Cavanagh found the street empty, silent, and utterly commonplace. And as he walked past Halsey’s saloon the tumult of the night seemed born of a vision in disordered sleep – and yet it had happened! From these reeking little dens a score of foul tatterdemalions had issued, charged with malicious fury. Each of these shacks seemed the lurking-place of a species of malevolent insect whose sting was out for every comer.

The rotting sidewalks, the tiny shops, with their dusty fly-specked windows, the groggeries, from whose open doors a noisome vapor streamed, poisoning the morning air – all these typed the old-time West as Redfield and his farmstead typed the new.

“Once I would have laughed at this town,” he said; “but now it is disgusting – something to be wiped out as one expunges an obscene mark upon a public wall.”

As for the attack upon himself, terrifying as it had seemed to Lee Virginia, it was in reality only another lively episode in the history of the town, another disagreeable duty in the life of a ranger. It was all a part of his job.

He went forth to his duties with a deepened conviction of the essential lawlessness of the State and of America in general; for this spirit of mob law was to be found in some form throughout the land. He was disgusted, but not beaten. His resolution to carry out the terms of his contract with the Government remained unshaken.

He carried with him, also, a final disturbing glimpse of Eliza Wetherford’s girl that did indeed threaten his peace of mind. There was an involuntary appeal, a wistful depth, to her glance which awakened in him an indignant pity, and also blew into flame something not so creditable – something which smoldered beneath his conscious will. He perceived in her a spirit of yielding which was difficult to resist. He understood, much more clearly than at his first meeting with her, how impossible it was for her to remain in this country (where law was a joke and women a ribald jest) without being corrupted. She had not escaped her heritage of passion, and her glances, innocent as they were, roused, even in him, something lawless.

As he climbed the long hill he grappled deeply with this new and inexplicable weakness. He had always been a decent fellow as respects women, and had maintained the same regard for the moral code that he instinctively bore toward the laws of his adopted country. He could not, therefore, regard this girl (low as her parentage seemed) in the light of license; for (he thought) whatever of evil may have been planted deep in her nature by her ill-assorted father and mother, she is at the moment sweet and fine, and the man who would awaken her other self should be accursed.

In this mood, too, he acknowledged the loneliness of his life for the first time, and rode his silent way up the trail like one in a dream. He went over his life story in detail, wondering if he had not made a mistake in leaving England, in taking out his American citizenship. He considered again, very seriously, the question of going back to live on the estate of his mother, and once more decided that its revenue was too small. To return to it meant an acceptance of the restricted life of an English farmer, and, worst of all, an acquiescence in the social despotism which he had come to feel and to hate.

The English empire to him was falling apart. Its supremacy was already threatened by Germany, whereas the future of the States appealed to his imagination. Here the problems of popular government and of industry were to be worked out on the grandest scale. The West inspired him. “Some day each of these great ranges will be a national forest, and each of these canons will contain its lake, its reservoir.” There was something fine in this vision of man’s conquest of nature. “Surely in this development there is a place for me,” he said.

Start at any place he pleased, his mind circled and came back to Lee Virginia. He reproached himself for not having remained one more day to help her. She was in the midst of a most bleak and difficult pass, and whether she came through or not depended on something not derived from either her father or her mother. The test of her character was being made.

“Happily the father is dead, and his exploits fading to a dim legend; but the mother may live for years to dishearten and corrupt. It is foolish of the girl to stay, and yet to have her go would leave me and the whole valley poorer.”

He perceived in her a symbol. “She is the new West just as the mother represents the old, and the law of inheritance holds in her as it holds in the State. She is a mixture of good and evil, of liberty and license. She must still draw forward, for a time, the dead weight of her past, just as the West must bear with and gradually slough off its violent moods.”

His pony plodded slowly, and the afternoon was half-spent before he came in sight of the long, low log-cabin which was the only home he possessed in all America. For the first time since he built it, the station seemed lonely and disheartening. “Would any woman, for love of me, come to such a hearthstone?” he asked himself. “And if she consented to do so, could I be so selfish as to exact such sacrifice? No, the forest ranger in these attitudes must be young and heart-free; otherwise his life would be miserably solitary.”

He unsaddled his horse and went about his duties with a leaden pall over his spirit, a fierce turmoil in his brain. He was no longer single-hearted in his allegiance to the forest. He could not banish that appealing girlish face, that trusting gaze. Lee Virginia needed him as he needed her; and yet – and yet – the people’s lands demanded his care, his social prejudices forbade his marriage.

He was just dishing out his rude supper when the feet of a horse on the log bridge announced a visitor.

With a feeling of pleasure as well as relief, he rose to greet the stranger. “Any visitor is welcome this night,” he said.

The horseman proved to be his former prisoner, the old man Edwards, who slipped from his saddle with the never-failing grace of the cow-man, and came slowly toward the cabin. He smiled wearily as he said: “I’m on your trail, Mr. Ranger, but I bear no malice. You were doing your duty. Can you tell me how far it is to Ambro’s camp?”

There was something forlorn in the man’s attitude, and Cavanagh’s heart softened. “Turn your horse into the corral and come to supper,” he commanded, with Western bluntness; “we’ll talk about all that later.”

Edwards accepted his hospitality without hesitation, and when he had disposed of his mount and made himself ready for the meal, he came in and took a seat at the table in silence, while the ranger served him and waited for his explanation.

“I’m going up to take Ambro’s place,” he began, after a few minutes of silent eating. “Know where his camp is?”

“I do,” replied Ross, to whom the stranger now appeared in pathetic guise. “Any man of his age consenting to herd sheep is surely hard hit by the rough hand of the world,” he reasoned, and the closer he studied his visitor the plainlier he felt his ungoverned past. His chest was hollow, his eyes unnaturally large, and his hands thin, but he still displayed faint lines of the beauty and power he had once gloried in. His clothing was worn and poor, and Ross said: “You’ll need plenty of bedding up there.”

“Is it high?”

“About eleven thousand feet.”

“Jehosaphat! How will I stand that kind of air? Still, it may be it’s what I need. I’ve been living down in the low country for ten years, and I’m a little bit hide-bound.”

“Lung trouble?”

“Oh no; old age, I reckon.”

“You’re not old – not more than fifty-five.”

“I’m no colt,” he admitted; “and, besides, I’ve lived pretty swift.”

In this was the hint of a confession, but Cavanagh did not care to have him proceed further in that line. “I suppose Gregg paid your fine?”

“Yes.”

“In any other town in the State you’d have gone down the line.”

He roused himself. “See here, Mr. Ranger, you’ve no warrant to believe me, but I told you the God’s truth. Young Gregg got me to ride into the range and show him the trail. I didn’t intend to get mixed up with a game warden. I’ve had all the confinement I need.”

“Well, it’s a closed incident now,” interposed Ross; “we won’t reopen it. Make yourself at home.”

The stranger, hungry as he was, ate with unexpected gentility, and, as the hot coffee sent its cheerful glow through his body, he asked, with livening interest, a good many questions about the ranger and the Forest Service. “You fellers have to be all-round men. The cowboys think you have a snap, but I guess you earn your money.”

“A man that builds trail, lays bridges, burns brush, fights fire, rides the round-up, and covers seventy-five miles of trail every week on eighty dollars per month, and feeds himself and his horses, isn’t what I would call enjoying a soft snap.”

“What do you do it for?”

“God knows! I’ve been asking myself that question all day to-day.”

“This playin’ game warden has some outs, too. That was a wild crowd last night. The town is the same old hell-hole it was when I knew it years ago. Fine girl of Lize Wetherford’s. She blocked me all right.” He smiled wanly. “I certainly was on my way to the green timber when she put the bars up.”

Ross made no comment, and the other went on, in a tone of reminiscent sadness. “Lize has changed terribly. I used to know her when she was a girl. Judas Priest! but she could ride and shoot in those days!” His eyes kindled with the memory of her. “She could back a horse to beat any woman that ever crossed the range, but I didn’t expect to see her have such a skein of silk as that girl. She sure looks the queen to me.”

Cavanagh did not greatly relish this line of conversation, but the pause enabled him to say: “Miss Wetherford is not much Western; she got her training in the East. She’s been with an aunt ever since her father’s death.”

“He’s dead, is he?”

“So far as anybody knows, he is.”

“Well, he’s no loss. I knew him, too. He was all kinds of a fool; let a few slick ones seduce him with fizz-water and oysters on the half-shell – that’s the kind of a weak sister he was. He got on the wrong side of the rustler line-up – you know all about that, I reckon? Fierce old days, those. We didn’t know anything about forest rangers or game wardens in them days.”