The Heart of Canyon Pass

And on this day all had been rubbed raw again by Joe Hurley’s outbreak. If he had only not spoken as he had! If things had only gone on between Betty and him as they had been going – calmly, quietly; yes, she confessed it now, really pleasantly.

She had come to think of the mining man’s attention as an undoubted aid to her placid life. Her rides with him, and their association in other ways, their conversations on various subjects had been of greater moment in establishing her peace of mind than Betty had realized.

She faced that fact – alone in her own room now – with fuller appreciation of what Joe Hurley had come to mean to her.

She was an utterly honest girl. She had faced a terrible and soul-racking situation before and come to a decision which she had held to through all the months since she had left school.

Just what did Joe Hurley mean to Betty Hunt?

Her first half-fear of Joe, a real dislike of his presumed character, had melted before a broader understanding of the man and his aims. Joe was her brother’s friend and the chief supporter of Hunt’s earnest work among these people. First of all Betty had begun to like Joe because he so generously aided the parson.

Her appreciation of the underlying strata of Joe’s character had grown from day to day of personal association with him. He was a man who would ultimately achieve big things. She felt this to be his dominant trait. Yet he had tenderness, generosity, wit, and a measure of “book learning” of which last she eagerly approved.

Under ordinary conditions – Betty Hunt admitted this frankly now – she would have been as strongly attracted by Joe Hurley, once she had got over her first doubt of his surface qualities, as by any young man she had ever associated with.

She did not question her own judgment in Joe’s case, no matter how far wrong the unsophisticated school girl had been to give her heart into the keeping of another who had seemed a much more charming man!

Andy Wilkenson – sophisticated, smiling, tender, with all the graces of person and intellect that any young girl could wish – had set himself to win Betty Hunt. His intentions had been perfectly honorable, in the sense thus used.

Andy had urged marriage – an immediate, if secret, marriage – from the very first. And there was reason for secrecy. Betty wished to finish her course at Grandhampton Hall. Aunt Prudence must not know of this great, new thing that had come into Betty’s life. Even Ford must not be told.

For, after all, the girl realized that she was very young – much younger, even, it seemed, than Andy Wilkenson. Andy was so much more sensible than she!

Betty feared she could not keep her mind sufficiently on her studies to stand well at the end of the semester if she was not utterly sure of Andy. Once married to him, of course, Andy would be hers entirely! No other woman could ever mean anything to him if the unsuspicious, broken-down old minister in a neighboring town joined them in holy bonds.

Aunt Prudence would forgive her when it was all over and she went home with her diploma and her marriage certificate in her trunk. It would be absolutely wicked to disturb poor Aunt Prudence by a letter either announcing the engagement, which was for a very brief term, or her marriage. For Betty’s elderly relative was ill – worse than either Betty or her brother dreamed of at the time.

The opportunities Betty had to be with Andy were not many. The rules of the Hall were very strict. Even her introduction to the young man from the West had been clandestine. Unknown to Betty, Wilkenson, learning all he could about certain girls in her set at the school, had selected Betty Hunt deliberately as his mark.

Betty’s school fees were paid by an old aunt who was reputed very rich. The aunt was known to be devoted to her. All that she had was sure to be Betty’s when Aunt Prudence died. Wilkenson had even gone so far as to learn much more particularly about the state of Aunt Prudence Mason’s health than Betty herself knew.

One item only escaped Andy Wilkenson’s cunning mind. It was not until they had been married and Wilkenson was driving Betty back to the Hall by unfrequented roads late in the afternoon that the small but appalling oversight on his part broke upon his understanding.

“You know, girlie, I haven’t got much money. I came East yere” – how Betty had loved that drawl then – “to get me a stake. I did a fool thing and threw away – just threw away – my bank roll out in Crescent City.”

“Oh, money!” replied Betty with fine scorn. “You can go to work at something, Andy, and earn more.”

“Ye-as,” he agreed in a tone that might have revealed a good deal to a more sophisticated person than the girl who had so recently been Betty Hunt, “so I can. But I may not make any good connection before you get out of that school. And then I’d like us to go back West. I’m known out there. A man can always do better in his own stamping-grounds.”

“Oh, the West must be wonderful,” murmured Betty, with clasped hands.

“Yep. But no place is wonderful unless you’ve got a good stake. Now, how about it, Betty? This old aunt of yours is pretty well fixed, eh?”

The girl was startled. “Wealthy? I think so. Aunt Prudence has been very kind to me.”

“She’ll keep on being kind to you, I reckon?”

“Of course! The dear soul. You’ll just love her, Andy.”

“Maybe. But I don’t think I’ll risk trying her out. Not just yet. She’s pretty sick, anyway, isn’t she?”

Betty told him that Aunt Prudence was feeble. The girl did not know at that time how serious the woman’s malady was. Only on the day following did the telegram come recalling her to Amberly!

“Anyway,” Wilkenson observed, after some thought, “you’re her heir, Betty.” For a second time the girl was startled by his speech. She began to peer at him now in the dusk in a puzzled fashion.

“What I’m aimin’ at,” said Wilkenson quite calmly, “is that we’d better keep all this quiet until Auntie goes over the divide. No use stirring up possible objections. She’ll leave you her money, you say. We’ll take that money and go back West. I know a place I can buy in Crescent City that will pay big returns. I will let the pasteboards alone, myself. I always get foolish if I deal ’em wild instead of for the house. We’ll cut a swath out there, Betty, that’ll make ’em sit up and take notice. Sure thing!”

“Andy! What are you talking about?” asked the incredulous girl. “Auntie’s money – It’s all invested. I know it is. It’s tied up.”

“Shucks! we can untie it,” and Wilkenson laughed. “No banker’s knots mean much to me. And four or five per cent. interest ain’t a patch on what I’ll make for you when we get to going.”

“But, Andy,” she said weakly, “I know all about Auntie’s will. I have even read it. She made it years ago when Ford and I were little. And she is a woman who never changes her mind. Ford has papa’s little fortune. Aunt Prudence gives me her property; but I can spend only the income from it until I am thirty.”

“What’s that?” His tone made her jump. “Thirty?” Then he thought. “Well, shucks, honey,” he drawled, “you’re a married woman now. That makes you practically of age in this State, and the courts – ”

“It makes no difference, Andy. The will is made that way for that very purpose,” the girl said frankly.

“For what purpose?”

“So that – that my husband cannot touch the principal. Until I am thirty I cannot touch it myself.”

An oath – a foul, blistering expression – parted the man’s lips. In the deepening gloom of the evening she could see his face change to a mask of indignant disappointment. She did not shrink from him. She did not plead with him. In that dragging minute, Andy had stopped the car with a jerk, Betty understood everything about this Westerner. And from that instant had germinated and grown all the hatred and fear of the West and its people that Betty Hunt had betrayed when first her brother had suggested the journey to Canyon Pass.

She had stepped out of the car. She had torn in small pieces the paper the old minister had given her. She had drawn from her finger the plain band Wilkenson had placed upon it, which she must have hidden in any case, and thrown it from her into the bushes beside the way.

Then Betty Hunt had commanded Andrew Wilkenson never to speak to her again – never to try to see, write, or otherwise communicate with her. She walked away from him. She heard the roar of the engine after a moment and knew he turned the car and drove away.

And that had been the end of Betty’s romance. She had not seen the Westerner again.

CHAPTER XIX – A GOOD DEAL OF A MAN

During the ensuing weeks the cabaret singer went often to see Betty at the hotel. They even rode together, for Joe Hurley suddenly became so busy at the Great Hope Mine that he was forced to excuse himself, so he said, from accompanying the Eastern girl on those pleasant jaunts which both had so enjoyed.

The two girls actually enjoyed each other’s society and found more than a riding habit in which to feel a mutual interest. The friendship grew out of a hunger in the hearts of both Nell and Betty.

The parson did not make a third in their rambles, nor was he often in sight when Nell called on Betty. The latter would not have encouraged any intimacy between the mining-camp girl and Hunt under any circumstances. She did not dream that her brother felt more than passing interest in the half-wild Nell.

The latter never attended the services held in Tolley’s old dance hall. But the Passonians in general came to accept the religious exercises as an institution and supported them fairly in point of contributions and attendance. There was yet, however, strong opposition to the parson and his work. Nor did it all center around Boss Tolley.

Nell, soon after the beginning of her acquaintance with Betty, stopped singing “This Is No Place for a Minister’s Son” and took up no other ditty aimed in any particular at the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt and his work.

As for Hunt himself, he went forward, accepting both praise and blame with equal equanimity. But he began to be worried secretly about Joe Hurley.

Hunt supplemented the morning preaching with a Sunday school in the afternoon and a general service in the evening, at which he usually gave a helpful talk on more secular lines than his morning sermon.

Hunt would have been glad to have had more and better singing; but although Rosabell Pickett did her best, the song service was far from satisfactory. The parson never passed Colorado Brown’s place in the evening and heard Nell’s sweet voice that he was not covetous. He would never be satisfied – but he whispered this not even to Betty – until he heard that voice leading his congregation in the meeting room.

The rougher element that had at first attended the meetings mainly out of curiosity soon drifted away.

Hunt was not, however, above carrying his work out into the highways and byways of the town. If the men would not come to his services, he carried a measure of his helpful efforts to them. He did more than visit the homes of Canyon Pass. He went, especially at the noon hour, to where the men were at work.

Hunt never made himself offensive. He did not join the workmen at the mines or washings as a parson, but as another man, interested in their labor and in themselves.

Once a mule-drawn ore wagon broke down on the road to the ore-crushers. It blocked the way of other teams. The parson took off his coat, helped raise the wagon-body so the axle could be blocked, and aided in getting on another wheel in place of the broken one.

A man working alone in a ditch some distance from the Oreode was so unfortunate as to bring a rock down and get caught by the leg. His shouts for help were first heard by Hunt, who was striding along the wagon track. Without other aid the parson pried up the rock and drew the man out from under it. Then he carried the fellow, with his lacerated leg, to his shack, where he lived with his partner; and between the partner and Hunt the injured man was nursed as long as he needed attention at all.

This incident was the spark that started the idea of the hospital for Canyon Pass in Hunt’s mind. He began to talk hospital to everybody, even to Slickpenny Norris. The banker threw up his hands and began to squeal at last.

“That’s just it! That’s just it!” he cried. “I knew one thing would lead to another if a parson come into this town. I told that crazy Joe Hurley so. He had no business ever to have brought you here.”

“What has my coming to Canyon Pass got to do with it?” Hunt asked mildly. “The need of a hospital – there are always accidents happening at the mines – was here long before I came. If a man is hurt badly he dies before help can get here. Doctor Peterby is no surgeon – and you know, Mr. Norris, he is not always to be trusted. This towns needs a place where an injured man can get surgical treatment and proper nursing.”

“I don’t see why,” muttered Norris. “We were getting along quite well enough before you butted in.”

Hurley, however, agreed with his friend. In spite of the fact that he seemed to have “fallen from grace” a good bit, the owner of the Great Hope was strong for all secular improvement of the town, whatever may have been his private emotions regarding the religion that Hunt represented. The movement for a hospital took form and grew.

It was not these things, however, that endeared Hunt to the hearts of the rougher element of Canyon Pass. And in time – and that before fall – some of the toughest hard-rock men and muckers working in the mines and at the Eureka Washings openly praised the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt.

Hunt one noon had given the men who gathered in a quiet place to eat their lunches a little talk on first aid to the injured. He had sent to Denver for several first-aid kits and was now going about from mine to mine explaining the more important uses of the articles in the box.

The men understood the helpfulness of this. Neglected wounds meant blood-poisoning, one of the most painful scourges a prospector or miner working far beyond the reach of surgeon and hospital, can have. It was well to know, too, how to make a proper tourniquet, and how to lay a bandage so that it would hold well.

The whistle blew and the great engine was started. The men drifted away to their several jobs. There were three pipes at work tearing down the bank on the upper bench at the Eureka Washings, and others below. The force of the water thrown from the nozzles of these pipes rocked the mighty hydraulic “guns” and caused the men astride of them to hold on with both hands. It took a husky fellow to guide that stream spouting from between his knees.

Hunt had returned the kit to the superintendent’s office and climbed to the upper bench, intending to go over the highland to the Great Hope Mine, which was nearer the West Fork River. Hi Brownell, who straddled the middle gun up here, risked waving a cordial hand at the parson when he saw the latter departing. The noise of the hurtling streams drowned Hi’s voice, of course.

Just as Hunt returned a smiling salute to the young fellow – one in whom the parson was deeply interested, for Hi was really a worth-while boy – the accident happened that was fated to mark this day as one long to be remembered at Canyon Pass. Incidentally the occasion, more than any other one thing, brought about the establishment of the new hospital.

The whine and splash of the streams of water drowned most other sounds. But of a sudden, as Hunt was turning his back on the scene, he heard a sharp crack – a sound that would have penetrated the thunderous rumble of a railroad train.

Hunt wheeled. He saw Hi Brownell thrown high into the air as though from a viciously bucking broncho, come down sprawling, and the savage stream from his pipe strike the man and carry him, as though he were a leaf on a torrent, into the cavity in the bank, against which the nozzle of the pipe was aimed.

The flapping limbs and struggling torso of Brownell were visible for a moment only; then down upon the spot roared soil, gravel, and larger stones, of which the bank’s strata were built.

Unguided, the shooting stream from the gun swept first one way along the bench, then the other. It corrugated the face of the bank deeply for yards in either direction. For a moment Hunt saw again the struggling body of the injured man at the edge of the fallen rubble. Then came another slide to cover it completely!

The broken hydraulic gun fell over on its side. The parting of some section of it was what had thrown Brownell into the air and into the path of its stream.

But before the other gunners on the bench who saw Brownell’s accident could shut off their streams, Hunt had acted. Some muckers tried to run in to seize Brownell or dig him out from under the gravel that had fallen, but the stream from the writhing pipe swept them aside like chips. Half a dozen were rolling in the mud of the bench.

Hunt sprang directly for the seat of the trouble. That hose-pipe had to be controlled before a thing could be done to help the buried Brownell. Precious moments were lost signaling to the engineer below to shut off power.

Hunt had not played football on his college team for nothing. He made an extremely low “tackle,” for he went down on his knees and then slid along through the mud to grapple with the writhing pipe that had broken away from its fastenings. He got hold of it and wrestled with it for a few seconds as two men might wrestle on the mat. When the other men came running from below Hunt had conquered the formidable thing, and the stream was shooting into the air, where all the harm it did was to shower some of the men as it fell back to earth.

For thirty seconds or more he held it so, until the stream was shut off below. The others ran for the pile that had overwhelmed Brownell. They dug into it with their bare hands, got hold of one leg, and dragged him forth like a wet rag out of a pan of dishwater!

He was alive; nor were there many bones broken. But he was a terrible sight, and they had to work over him for some minutes before he breathed again. Hunt went at this task, too, as coolly as did the superintendent. That first-aid kit came in very handily at this juncture.

The men stood around for a little while and watched and talked. The accident had come near being a tragedy.

“Believe me,” said one rough fellow, “that parson is a good deal of a man. I’m for him, strong!”

“You’d even go to church for him, would you, Jack?” chuckled his mate.

“Church? I’d go to a hotter place than that for him!” was the prompt and emphatic reply.

CHAPTER XX – MURDER WILL OUT

Joe Hurley had lost none of his admiration for his college friend whom he had encouraged to come West. He still believed the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt was the very man to find the heart of Canyon Pass. Nor did events as they developed disprove his pre-judgment of the result of Hunt’s coming.

But it must be confessed a sour note had come into the life of the owner of the Great Hope. He was a worker; he was energetic; he never under any circumstances neglected business – not even when he had been most attentive to Betty Hunt. But he now had little joy in his work and looked for recreation to a means he had eschewed for the most part since the Easterners had arrived.

Like most men of his class and upbringing, the ex-cow-puncher found satisfaction for a certain daring trait in his character at the gambling table. The coarser forms of pleasure in the honkytonks did not attract Joe Hurley. He danced occasionally with the better class of girls; he never drank more than he thought was good for him – and he carried his drink well; but when he “sat in” at a game of stud poker or went up against the wheel – roulette was popular with the Passonians – he admitted in his saner moments that he “didn’t know when he had enough.” The wild streak in the fellow showed through the veneer of repression as it had when he was in college.

Hunt could not feel as lenient now toward these escapades as he once had. Not alone had the Easterner’s outlook on life become more serious; but after five years Joe Hurley, he thought, should have “grown up.” He was, however, too wise to utter a single word in opposition to Joe’s renewed course in moral retrogression. He took Sam Tubbs to task when he met that old reprobate staggering home from the saloons and gave him a tongue-lashing that Sam admitted afterward made his wife’s nagging seem like a cradle lullaby. Hunt faced down Slickpenny Norris on the open street, to the delight of the bystanders, over the banker’s niggardliness in opposing the building and equipment of the hospital. The parson had been known to seize upon two well-grown young fellows fighting in a vacant lot to the delight of their fellows, knock their heads together resoundingly and send each home “with a flea in his ear.” But he had not a word of admonition it seemed for Joe Hurley.

Yet Hunt was troubled about his friend. He feared Betty knew something about the reason for the change in the mine owner. But here again he was silent. He knew his sister well – too well to try to gain her confidence on any matter which she would not give gratuitously.

Hunt had been much too busy at the time when Hurley began to withdraw from Betty’s companionship to notice the gradual drifting apart of the two. When the brother awoke to the fact that his friend and his sister seemed to be mere acquaintances again, Betty had found a close companion in Nell Blossom.

Under certain circumstances this latter fact might have encouraged Hunt to consider his own influence with Nell as increasing; but by this time he had gained more than a casual acquaintance with the cabaret singer’s character. Joe Hurley had not written too strongly about Nell’s stubbornness. Hunt had undertaken in several ways to break down the wall the girl had raised between them. She fought him off with all the vigor of a wildcat and without much more politeness than one of those felines would have shown.

He met her at Mother Tubbs’ – not by intention; but he was rather frequently there to confer with the uncultured but very sensible old woman. Nell snubbed him, or scorned him, or was downright impudent to him, just as her mood chanced to be. He had to warn the old woman to pay no attention to the girl’s attitude or there would have been a flare-up between the two. And Hunt very well knew that while Nell lived with Mother Tubbs she was pretty safe.

He heartily approved, too, of her intimacy with Betty. He could not gauge the influence Betty was having on the self-willed girl; but he had confidence in his sister, and he knew Nell would only be helped by the association and that Betty would not be injured.

The opposition of Boss Tolley and his gang was the last thing to trouble the placidity of Parson Hunt’s soul. They snapped and barked, but had as yet come to no close-quarters since Tolley’s adventure with the pepper-besprinkled Bible. That tale had convulsed the Passonians with mirth, and even when weeks later it was retold, it brought ready laughs from the citizens.

It was now fall, a golden-and-red autumn that enthralled the visitors from the East when they looked abroad to the hills of a morning. Even Betty confessed that the glories of the Berkshires at the same season were surpassed by this sight. She had come now to appreciate the rude and bold lines of the mountains and the gaudy color schemes of frost-bitten shrubbery intermixed with the emerald of the Coniferæ.

The early brightening of the face of nature by these autumnal tints foretold for the natives of Canyon Pass an early winter. To make this assurance doubly sure, old Steve Siebert and Andy McCann came wandering back to the Pass weeks ahead of their scheduled time.

It was a fair enough day when the two old prospectors came in – McCann in the morning and Siebert along toward night. In all the time they had been absent, after getting out of the canyon itself, they had not been in sight of each other. One had prospected east of the Runaway, and the other west. Their activities in fact had been at least a hundred miles apart. But both had seen signs – unmistakable signs – of approaching winter.

They met as usual the amused inquiries of the Passonians regarding the “ten-strike” they had been expected to make. Was there due to be a stampede for the scene of the claims they had staked out? Had they brought in samples of the “real stuff” that would start a regular Cripple Creek boom somewhere out in the Topaz?