The Heart of Canyon Pass

“Just what do you mean?” Hunt asked.

“Why, we seen him – me and that old rat sittin’ there with his gun, makin’ goo-goo eyes. Sure! And me and him pulled Dick out of the river. He went clean over his horse’s head and landed in the river – same’s a bird. He might have been drowned if me and that ground owl there hadn’t got him out. But he never said one word about Nell Blossom bein’ with him or havin’ anything to do with his comin’ down that cliff. No, sir!”

“Nary a word,” agreed the surprised Siebert. “Nary a word.”

“What – what became of him?” stammered Hunt, a great weight lifted from his heart.

“He went along with me to the edge of the desert,” said Siebert slowly. “He dried out at my fire that night. Next morning he lit out to hit the Lamberton trail. That’s all I know about Dick.”

“And it’s more than I knowed,” grunted Andy McCann. “That old rat there might have garroted Dick for his money. But it sure wasn’t Nell Blossom that croaked Dick the Devil – if he’s dead at all.”

Here Hunt stepped between the two old prospectors. It looked as though somebody had to separate them or there might have been a shooting, after all!

But it was Joe Hurley who had the last word. He set up the overturned table and walked over to the bar.

“To show that there’s no hard feelings,” he drawled, “this’ll be on me. Get busy, Tolley, on the right side of this bar. And hereafter, you think twice before you say anything you’re not dead sure of about Nell Blossom. Somebody’d better drag Sam Tubbs out from under that table. He don’t want to miss this.”

There sounded a sudden rush of heavily shod feet outside the barroom door. As Hunt had expected, an angry crowd from Colorado Brown’s burst in.

“Just in season, boys,” Hurley continued. “All a mistake about our Nell. Tolley just proved himself to be as careless with the truth as he always is. Isn’t that so, Tolley?”

Tolley grunted.

The winter weather forecast by the return of Steve Siebert and Andy McCann from the desert held off the next morning when Betty Hunt and Nell started on their usual ride into the hills.

Nell had heard a garbled report but few of the particulars of the incident which the night before had threatened bloodshed at the Grub Stake. She knew that the parson had again done something that was sure to endear him to the Passonians in general. And his courageous act had been in her cause. But she had failed to learn of the disproval of Dick Beckworth’s reported death.

She said nothing to Betty about the incident. She had begun to shrink from discussing the rougher side of the life of Canyon Pass with the parson’s sister. As Joe Hurley would have expressed it, Nell Blossom was becoming “right gentled” through her association with Betty Hunt.

Betty herself, in Nell’s company, managed to put aside those more serious thoughts and anxieties of mind that ruffled her natural composure at other times. Since the day, weeks before, when she had been forced to wreck Joe Hurley’s hope of happiness, the cloud of despondency that overshadowed her life seemed at times greater than she could live under.

Nor could the Eastern girl put aside such thoughts of the Westerner as at first amazed and startled, then revealed to the honest soul of Betty Hunt that the unfortunate circumstance in her past life that made it impossible for her to make Joe happy, likewise barred her own heart from happiness.

Wicked as her strict upbringing made the fact seem, she had to admit that she had fallen under the spell of Joe Hurley’s generous character, that she loved him. She could not deny this discovery, although it filled her mind with confusion. Wedded to a man she hated and in love with a man she could not wed!

In any event, this was a secret – like the other that so disturbed her – which under no circumstances could she confide to either her brother or any friend. At first she felt the discovery a degrading one. Brought up as she had been under the grim puritanism of her Aunt Prudence Mason, the idea of a married woman admitting that she loved a man other than the one she was married to was a sin. The idea of divorce was as foreign to her religious training as was the thought of fratricide.

She was cheerful on the surface at least when she and Nell rode out of Canyon Pass and through the East Fork. They climbed the canyon wall on that side by a tortuous path on which only a burro or a very sure-footed pony was safe. It was Nell, when they were once on the summit, who discovered the threat of a weather change.

The air was very keen. Many of the bushes by the way had shriveled during the night as though before a furnace blast.

“Black frost,” said the younger girl. “Old Steve and Andy know their little book. Sam says Steve told him there was a blizzard coming. We won’t ride far to-day, Betty.”

“A blizzard? Only fancy,” murmured the Eastern girl.

She was not much impressed. She had no experience – even of New England winter storms – to enable her to judge the nature of a storm in these Western mountains.

But Nell should have known better than to lead the way into a gulch which quite shut them in from sight of the surrounding country. A blizzard is a chancy thing; and often the first storm of a Western winter is the worst of all.

They rode to a spring at which deer drank; they saw many tracks, but there were none of the pretty creatures in sight. Birds fluttered through the chaparral with strange cries, and the rabbits ran back and forth as though much disturbed by domestic happenings.

“I never saw them jacks so queer acting,” said Nell thoughtfully. “We’d better ride home, Betty.”

“Why?” asked the other girl gayly. “You are not afraid they will attack us, are you?”

“Not that,” and the Western-born young woman smiled. “But there’s something comin’, I reckon – just as Steve and Andy say.”

Before they rode up out of the gulch they heard something slashing like a multitude of knives through the dead leaves overhead. When they rode out into the open they beheld the thick cloud that had almost reached the zenith, and out of that cloud came not snow, but ice!

Fine particles of the sharpest crystal were driven in a thick haze through the singing air. Nell instantly whipped off her neckcloth and tied it across her nose and mouth, warning Betty to follow her example.

“Get this in your lungs, Betty, and you’ll have pneumonia as sure as sure!” she shouted.

Frightened, they urged their ponies on to the beginning of the rough path down the canyon wall. Although they were soon somewhat sheltered from the driving ice-storm there were bare places where the two girls suffered the full force of the gale.

“I know a place!” cried Nell in a muffled voice. “We got to hole up till this stops. Come on!”

It had grown dark of a sudden. Nell pulled her pony off the path, and he picked his way daintily to a cavity in the wall. Here an overhanging rock offered some shelter. At least, the girls were out of the steady beat of the storm.

They dismounted and got behind the ponies, between their warm bodies and the rock itself. If Betty was the more frightened of the two, she showed it no more than did Nell Blossom.

The air became thicker and the whine of the wind rose to a shriek which all but drowned their voices when they tried to communicate with each other. It was such a manifestation of the storm king as Betty Hunt had never seen before.

They were but a little way off the path. Suddenly both girls, in spite of the wind, heard the clatter of shod hoofs. Another horse was coming down the path. In a moment they dimly saw the looming figure of a man leading the animal.

“Who is it?” gasped Betty, but if Nell heard the question she did not answer.

Nell clutched Betty’s wrist for silence. The girls stared at the man beating his way downward. He wore a broad-brimmed hat, but they could see the long, black, curling hair flowing from beneath it. He turned his face toward them, and Betty beheld the keen face and heavy mustache of the stranger she had seen hiding from the sheriff and his posse weeks before near the trail to Hoskins!

The man progressed so slowly, and he was so near, that the Eastern girl could study his features now with more certainty. There was something in the contour of his face that reminded her of Andy Wilkenson!

Could it be he? Was it possible that this fugitive – the man the officers had accused of a crime – was the debonair Andy who had so enthralled her girlish mind and heart back there at Grandhampton Hall?

She had not forgotten Wilkenson’s observations about Crescent City. Betty had never ceased to fear that he might appear to her in this part of the great West. But here – now – and in this dramatic manner?

Much shaken, she turned to look at Nell Blossom. She suddenly realized that the other girl was sagging against her shoulder very strangely. She glanced down into Nell’s muffled face.

The younger girl’s eyes were closed. She was as pallid as death itself. Nell Blossom had fainted!

CHAPTER XXIII – A GREAT LIGHT DAWNS

Some men can escape their duty if they choose to – can ignore it, flout it, even deny its very existence – but not one who is called to be a leader of men toward a higher plane of daily existence. The greatest sophism with which the race has ever been cursed is that hoary one of the lazy preacher: “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Religious precept is utterly worthless if the preceptor does not follow his own expounded faith with a living example. The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt had come to that pass where he could no longer ignore the fact that his friend, Joe Hurley, was on the down grade. When the parson cooled down after the exciting events of that evening, both in Colorado Brown’s place and at the Grub Stake, he saw more clearly that he had fallen into error.

If he was to be the spiritual guide and mentor of his congregation at Canyon Pass, he must be the same to one member of it as he was to another. He had not been slow to admonish others of his parishioners; but the man who had brought him here – the one whom he really looked upon as being his chief supporter in the work he was striving to do – was slipping away from him and into flagrantly evil ways.

If Hunt’s character has been revealed at all in this narrative, moral and physical courage have not seemed to be its lack. Then why had the young parson failed to go after Joe Hurley as he did after Judson, the storekeeper, Sam Tubbs, Hi Brownell, Smithy, and other men who were wont to “kick over the traces”?

There was just one clear and cogent reason why Hunt had not taken Joe to task for his failings, as he already had many another man in Canyon Pass. His old friendship for Joe had nothing to do with this neglect. And certainly he did not fear making the good cause in which he was so interested a powerful enemy. There was nothing in Joe Hurley’s generous character that would suggest that for a moment.

It was, in short, the fact that Hunt believed that he and Joe were in love with the same girl.

Although, as far as Hunt had observed, Nell Blossom displayed no particular fondness for Joe Hurley, the latter believed the mining man “understood” the cabaret singer. At least, Nell revealed no such disdain for Joe Hurley as she had publicly for Hunt.

When the latter reviewed the late incidents as they related to Joe, while he tossed on his mattress that night, he admitted he was taking the wrong course with his friend. He had seemed tacitly to overlook sins of commission on Joe’s part that he would have pilloried in another.

Had Hurley not been heated by drink and his passion for gambling, he would not have pursued that unwise course in going to the Grub Stake in a mood which had all but precipitated tragedy. Joe’s recklessness had been unleashed, and Hunt had been obliged to stand by after the unexpected conclusion of the scene and see his friend drink with the very men who, a few minutes before, had been ready to take Joe’s life.

He arose with a new determination. He saw his sister and Nell Blossom ride away from the Wild Rose Hotel. Then he made his way directly to the Great Hope Mine.

Hurley had an office – a small shack – off at one side. The parson found him alone in it, his boots cocked on his battered desk, his pipe drawing well. His grin was as infectious as ever.

“Well, Willie! some time that last night, eh?” was Joe’s greeting. “When I get in a tight corner again, I’ll never wish for a better side-partner than you, old sobersides!”

“Joe,” returned Hunt with a directness that seemed brutal, “if you had been your sober self last night – quite the same man you are wont to be – there would have been no tight corner.”

“Huh?” The other’s boots came to the floor with emphasis. His brown eyes sparked. The muscles of his jaws set grimly. “You’ve got a crust, Willie, to talk to me like that.”

“You need talking to, Joe; and I’m going to do the talking. No! Sit right where you are and listen. You’ve got it coming to you; and, if you are the man I have always thought you, you’ll stand the gaff.”

“Aw, shucks! A drink or two isn’t going to kill Joe Hurley.”

“A drink or two kills his moral sense, and kills his usefulness as a good citizen,” returned Hunt. “Then, you have been gambling steadily.”

“Great saltpeter! isn’t a feller to have any fun at all? I haven’t lost much to Miguel.”

“It is your example to the rest. And what you have lost would help the fund for our church building. And we must have a church, Joe.”

Joe uttered something under his breath.

“What makes you so reckless, Joe?”

“Shucks, Willie! Maybe I have slipped a few cogs. A lone bachelor like me can’t help it sometimes, can he?” asked Hurley, with a smile that tried to be whimsical rather than bitter. “Remember, Willie, I haven’t got a sister to keep me well balanced. It’s womenfolks and – and an interest in one that makes a man a sobersides.”

“Is it!” returned Hunt, with scorn. “If a man hasn’t the stamina to stay straight, no girl will ever keep him in the narrow path – believe me!”

“You belittle Miss Betty’s powers of persuasion,” returned Joe, with a sly glance.

“If that is your belief,” Hunt said, with sharpness and a rising color, “I should think you would keep straight for Nell’s sake.”

“Nell Blossom?”

“Yes. You are interested in her, aren’t you?”

“Surest thing you know, Willie.”

“Then, for her sake – ”

“Hold on!” ejaculated Hurley, sudden suspicion in his gaze. “Do you think I’m soft on Nell?”

“Well – er – aren’t you?” demanded his friend rather faintly.

“I’m free to confess I was,” said Joe slowly, watching Hunt now with growing understanding in his eyes. “But that little skeesicks showed me where I got off long ago. And I tell you fair, Willie, she is not the girl who is bothering me.”

“Then, there is a girl? Joe! You and Betty – ”

Hurley put up his hand, turning his face away. “No use, Willie. Betty’s given me my congé, too. I reckon I am an ‘also-ran’ with the ladies.”

“My dear Joe!” Hunt grabbed his hand. “I’m sorry. I don’t understand Betty.”

Hurley went to the door suddenly, opened it, and looked out. A cold blast from the hills ruffled the papers on the desk. The sun was suddenly dimmed. In the distance the coming wind whined like a sick dog.

“Say! we’re going to get it,” he muttered.

“A storm coming?” asked Hunt absently. His own heart sang. A foolish happiness swept over him. He went to look out over Hurley’s shoulder. “Does it look bad to you?”

“Youbetcha! It’s coming faster than you ever saw a storm move, I reckon, Willie. Those old has-beens, Steve and Andy, can’t be fooled. They got in from the desert just ahead of it.”

“A blizzard, Joe?” cried the parson with sudden anxiety. “The girls!”

“What about them? What girls?”

“Betty and Nell. They’ve gone out on horseback.”

“You don’t mean it? Er – Well, Nell must have seen it coming and turned back. She knows this country as well as a man. But, come on! Let’s go down to Tim’s corral and see if the ponies are in again. It wouldn’t do – ”

He slammed the office door, shouted to his manager, and strode away. Hunt had to put his best foot forward to keep up with him. Women and children were already scuttling to shelter when they went down through the town. Bill Judson waved a hand at them from his door, shouting:

“Them old desert rats knowed their biz, didn’t they? I’d set my clock by them, I would.”

At the corral the two young men saw at a glance that the girls’ ponies had not been returned by Cholo Sam. They went on toward the hotel in silence. Now the first needles of the ice-storm cut their faces. It was nothing like any storm Hunt had ever seen. And how fast it grew in volume and strength!

Cholo Sam and Maria were at the door of the hotel, looking down the street eagerly and anxiously.

“Which way did they go?” shouted Hurley, without any preamble.

“Oh, Señor Hurley!” cried Sam. “To the East. T’roo the East Fork.”

Already sight of the rugged path up the heights on that side of the canyon was blotted out by the driving ice particles.

“Shall we get horses and go after them?” panted Hunt.

“Horses won’t live in this. Maybe we can stir up some of the boys to go with us. Wish I had my roughnecks here.”

But there was not time to go back to the mine. The storm had come on so suddenly that the workers above the town might hole in until the first force of the blizzard was over.

Hunt ran up to his room to get his heavier coat and a couple of blankets. As he descended the stairs, Cholo Sam came from the barroom with a filled flask in his hand.

“Some of the best brandy, Señor Hunt,” he said. “It is for the seekness only that comes with the cold. Ah thees ice in the lungs is death, señor – death!”

The parson took it without hesitation and slipped it into his pocket. He ran out to see Joe Hurley coming out of Colorado Brown’s place with Jib Collins and Cale Mack behind him. In another few seconds, so rapidly did the driving ice thicken the air, Hunt lost sight of the trio and they fairly bumped into him when they reached the spot where he stood.

“That you, Willie?” shouted Hurley. “We’ll get a rope and tie ourselves together. Tie mufflers over our faces. Say, there may be some more fellers in the Grub Stake who will help.”

He turned that way, finding his direction more by sense than by sight. They stumbled up the steps and in at the door of the Grub Stake.

At that very moment a half-frozen man, leading a storm-battered horse, had fallen at Tolley’s rear door. The dive keeper was dragging him into the place like a log as Hurley, Hunt, and their companions strode into the barroom.

CHAPTER XXIV – THE BARRIER DOWN – FOR A MOMENT

“Hey, you fellers!” shouted Tolley to the several men in the barroom of the Grub Stake. “Come give me a hand. Here’s a feller that’s taken pretty near his last pill, I reckon.”

The parson, as well as Hurley and the others, responded to the dive keeper’s call. Tolley kicked shut the back door with savage insistence against the driving wind.

“I reckon his hoss is done for,” he panted. “But the feller himself – Hi, Nobbs! get him a jolt of something hot.”

Hunt and Joe Hurley helped raise the senseless man, and, with Tolley carrying the feet, they moved him close to one of the glowing stoves. His hat fell off. It was Joe who voiced a surprise that was not his alone.

“Why, Tolley! here’s your dead man now. As I’m a sinner – and the parson assures me that I am – this is Dick Beckworth.”

“Dick the Devil!” ejaculated two or three in chorus.

“This is a nice sort of a day for him to come back,” muttered Tolley, evidently quite as much amazed as the others.

Hunt peered into the face of the senseless man. There was a certain regularity of feature, in spite of the sharpness and blueness caused by the extreme cold he had suffered, which the parson saw might lead the casual observer to consider Dick Beckworth handsome. His complexion was as spotless as a girl’s; the skin scarcely tanned; ears and nose small and perfectly formed; the closed eyes, long-lashed; and the brows as delicately marked as though done with a stencil.

He was shaved, although he had come out of the wilderness, and his jet-black mustache was as silky as his long hair. Dick Beckworth, gambler and lady’s man, without doubt made a striking appearance wherever he went. Even lying there on the bench, colorless, and with his eyes closed, the parson realized that the man would be indeed a “heart-breaker” – among young and inexperienced women at least.

It could not be doubted that he had made a strong impression upon the almost childish mind and heart of Nell Blossom. She must have been attracted by this man just as she would have been by a gaudy flower or a bird of brilliant plumage.

Hunt felt a strange loathing for the gambler, much as his present state should excite pity. This was the man, he believed, who had brought about the change that Joe Hurley said had suddenly come over Nell Blossom’s character.

Beckworth had hidden the fact that he had escaped death through his fall into the canyon and so had laid a burden of terror and anguish upon Nell’s heart, which was reason enough for her apparent hatred of all mankind.

Nobbs, the barkeeper, brought the drink at Tolley’s command. They forced open Dick’s jaws and poured the potent stuff into him. The color almost instantly stained his cheeks. His eyelids fluttered. He choked.

“What was it Andy McCann said about him?” Hurley said thoughtfully. “He’s got the luck of a hanged man. He’s coming around all right. But there are others out in the storm that need help more than this fellow.”

“Who’s that?” asked one of the men who had been loitering at the Grub Stake bar.

Hurley explained briefly about the absent girls. Two men besides those already of their party volunteered to join Hurley and the parson. A rope – a hair lariat – was likewise found with which the searchers could bind themselves together. It would be the simplest thing imaginable to drift away from each other in such a blinding storm.

Dick Beckworth gave unmistakable signs of returning consciousness. He groaned, struggled, raised up on an elbow to stare about.

“Hold on!” the parson said to Joe. “See if the man can speak. He may know something.”

“Right you are, Willie,” Hurley agreed. He leaned over the dazed gambler. “Hi, Dick! Do you know me? Joe Hurley! See?”

“Where – where am I?” whispered Dick.

“You’re in the Grub Stake, all right, Dick,” broke in Tolley eagerly. “The old Grub Stake, I tell ye – that you never ought t’ve left.”

“Grub Stake? Tolley?” questioned Dick. Then he opened his eyes wide and recognized Hurley’s face so close to his own. “That you, Joe? I – ”

“Which way did you come into town, Dick?” broke in the mining man.

“Eh? What?”

“Did you come through the East Fork or the West Fork?”

“Why – why, the East Fork.”

“You did! Did you see anybody on the way down? You came down the cliff, didn’t you? Anybody up on the plain?” were Hurley’s excited questions.

“Why – I – I – ”

“Two women are out in the storm,” went on Hurley. “Did you see them anywhere up yonder?”

“Two women? I – I thought they were men. They rode down ahead of me. Then it grew so – so thick I couldn’t see ’em again.”

“Great saltpeter!” exclaimed Hurley. “You must have passed ’em. They are up there somewhere among the rocks.”

“Or they’ve gone over the rocks – hosses and all!” groaned Collins.

“Shut up!” muttered his chum, Cale Mack. “Ain’t you got no sense? Look at the parson!”

“This is Parson Hunt,” explained Hurley to the staring Dick. “His sister Betty is one of the missing girls you saw.”

“Who?” gasped Dick. “Betty Hunt? Here? Here? At Canyon Pass?”

“My sister,” Hunt said hoarsely. “Didn’t you see her and Nell Blossom again as you rode down?”

“Your sister?” repeated the startled gambler. “Betty Hunt – your sister?”

He fell back and closed his eyes. Hurley started for the front door.

“No time to lose, boys,” he cried. “Come on! Betty and Nell are somewhere up there along that path. No more delay.”

He had already knotted one end of the rope around his waist. Hunt followed his example, leaving six feet or more of slack between them. The other men who were going with them quickly fastened themselves in rotation. They knotted neckerchiefs or mufflers across their faces. Nobbs opened the door for them, and the file went out into the storm.