The Heart of Canyon Pass

“Anyway,” said Nell, her eyes sparkling, “the old-timers are going to be rich at last? How fine!”

“It may only be a pocket – or a broken lead. But I wish ’em both millionaires. Me, I’ll stick to the Great Hope a while longer.” He looked at Betty. “I am a great feller for sticking to a thing.”

Betty blushed and looked away. Hunt said thoughtfully:

“If the slide has only caused Siebert and McCann to be friends again, it has brought about something good – something very good indeed.”

“Well, you talk to Judson about that. His stock is pretty near ruined. And see Tolley. He’s almost weeping. And Colorado Brown. To say nothing of Cholo Sam, who has lost his hotel.”

The girls again looked at each other. There was the same thought in their minds. What had become of Dick Beckworth if the hotel had collapsed? Of course there had been plenty of time for him to have escaped from the building before it went down. None of the structures had fallen much before daybreak. Yet thought of him continued to trouble the girls.

Joe Hurley got Betty off to one side. There was no work being done at any of the mines, so the owner of the Great Hope had nothing to do at this hour. Having been at work all night it might be supposed that he would need sleep; but when he looked on Betty Hunt his gaze was anything but somnolent.

“There’s a whole lot been happening in a few short hours, Betty,” he said to the parson’s sister. “It come on us so quick and it happened so fast that it put out of my head for the time being something I had to say to you.”

“Something – Nothing you shouldn’t say, Joe?” she stammered, looking at him with pleading eyes.

“I get you, Betty,” said the mining man. “I get you – sure. You are warning me off the grass. I don’t blame you. You think I am kind of dense, I expect – ”

“Oh, never that, Joe,” she murmured. “You are kind and thoughtful only.”

“I hope you will believe so,” said Joe bluntly, “when I tell you I know what your trouble is – and I know there ain’t no chance for me now. But I am going to be your friend just as you said I could.”

“Oh! Joe, do you know?”

“I got wind of a story Dick Beckworth’s been telling – about your being already married. It’s so, isn’t it?”

Betty, her face working pitifully, nodded.

“All right. We won’t say no more about it. He’s a low dog for telling about it. I don’t want to know no more – not even who the feller is who married you. But you can bank on me, Betty, every time! I’m your friend.”

“I know you are, Joe,” she whispered, and the look she gave him paid Joe Hurley for a good deal.

But he was by no means satisfied to consider that Betty Hunt’s marriage closed the door of paradise in his face. He was just as determined to get her as ever he had been. He had learned the great thing that he had desired to know. Betty loved him. He had seen it in her look! He could wait, and be patient, and let things take their course. She could be wedded to another man as hard and fast as all the laws could make it. But Joe Hurley felt a glory in his soul that expanded from the heaven-born belief that time would change all that!

They started down into the town, the girls shod with rubber boots that Joe supplied. The people of Canyon Pass were running about like muddy ants seeking their flooded hills. Mother Tubbs and Sam were high and dry in the loft of the stamp mill. The old woman had made Sam lug up there her one good feather-bed – and it was dry. But as she said, she expected to find all her other possessions “as wet as a frog’s hind leg.”

Bill Judson lounged in the doorway of the Three Star and hailed them with some cheerfulness.

“There’s one sure thing, Parson Hunt,” he said. “What I got in cans ain’t water-soaked – much. And the cat and six kittens ain’t drowned. I expect I can keep shop with what I got left for a while. But Smithy’s lost all his clo’es that’s fit to wear, dad burn it! I can’t have him waitin’ on lady customers in a gunny-sack and a pair of ridin’ boots.”

A little group surrounded Sheriff Blaney on the street as the quartette strolled along. Joe was interested.

“Find him, Blaney?” he asked the officer.

“Not any. And it beats my time. I don’t see where that Dick Beckworth could have holed up. He sure didn’t get out of town, for the Forks are both plumb impassable for man or beast.”

The two girls exchanged glances again. What had happened to Dick Beckworth? Surely he must have got out of the closet – out of the hotel —

Suddenly Betty seized Nell’s arm with an hysterical grip.

“Nell! Nell!” she whispered.

“Don’t give way. Of course he’s all right – though he ought not to be!”

“That closet door! It shut with a spring lock. It could not be opened from inside!”

“Oh, he could smash down the door.”

The two young men did not notice the girls’ perturbation. They were striding ahead. A crowd was running toward the fallen hotel. Something of moment was happening there. But before they reached the place Cholo Sam saw them, and started toward the parson and Joe.

“Señor Hunt! Señor Joe! Keep the señoritas back. It is not for them to see.”

“What’s the matter, Sam?” asked Hurley.

“That Dick the Deevil! He ees found – my goodness, yes! They haf just pulled him out of the ruins of my Wild Rose – drowned like one rat!”

Fortunately for Canyon Pass and its flood-harassed inhabitants, frost and snow held off that winter until remarkably late. The mild season gave ample opportunity for new homes to be built and for the necessary repairs to be made upon the structures that had withstood the rising waters.

The supply wagons brought in quantities of necessary goods from Crescent City and the railroads. The mines and washings shut down while all turned to the work of rebuilding. Tolley’s Grub Stake and Colorado Brown’s place, both swept by the water, were the last buildings to be remodeled. The gamblers and dance-hall girls and other employees of those places left town, for it promised to be a lean winter for their ilk at Canyon Pass.

In fact, Boss Tolley sold out and got out himself among the very first to desert the town. His departure and the sale of all his property opened the way for Parson Hunt’s supporters to buy from the purchaser of Tolley’s property the building which had been used for church services and the lot on which it stood.

They could not begin the building of a proper church until spring, of course; but the money was pledged for an edifice that would cost all Joe Hurley had planned.

Hurley himself was able to subscribe a much larger sum than at first, for the Great Hope had proved to be as valuable a mine as he had told Betty and the parson he believed it would. But it was from another source that the church building fund gained its largest contribution.

Old Steve Siebert and Andy McCann had “struck it rich.” The romance of the uncovering of a rich vein of gold in the west wall of the canyon is told to-day to every tourist who comes to Canyon Pass.

How, at a time in the camp’s early history, two partners who had prospected the Topaz Range and the desert adjoining fruitlessly for years had found traces of gold high up on the canyon wall behind a sheltering ledge and had “locked horns” in their first quarrel over how the lode was to be got at.

At the height of their argument a landslip had buried the hollow where the rich find was located and, rather than that either should profit by the joint find, the two old fellows had never tried to open the claim until nature, by another freak, uncovered it for them.

“I says to Andy, and Andy says to me,” Steve Siebert was wont to recall, “when we seen how rich that lode was, a part of our profits oughter go to the parson and his church.”

“You’re mighty right we did,” agreed Andy. Agreeing was now Andy’s strongest trait. “We-all got to pull together in this world. And if we-all pull together yere in Canyon Pass we can have as good a church as any camp needs. We sure got the best parson.”

“You’re right, Andy,” Steve said. “I certainly do despise folks that are always fighting each other and pullin’ contrary. No sense in it – no sense a-tall.”

In fact the two old fellows became joint treasurers of the church building fund. They took it upon themselves, too, to pass the contribution plates at service. The only friction Andy McCann and Steve Siebert were ever known to display thereafter was a mild rivalry as to the amount of money collected from the congregation seated on their particular sides of the house. It was suspected that each swelled his collection considerably on Sunday mornings so that his half of the house would make the best showing when the offering was counted!

“Dad burn it!” muttered Bill Judson, “let ’em alone. That’s a mild matter for disagreement. They ain’t likely to pull no guns on each other over that.”

Indeed Canyon Pass was on its good behavior that winter. The exigencies of the flood which had driven out a good deal of the worst element of the town gave the better people a chance to take hold of its government with a firmer hand – and a hand that Hunt and his associates were determined should not again lose its grip. Even Slickpenny Norris in time came to see that religious progress was not actually synonymous with bankruptcy.

To the parson’s standard flocked many of those who had before been but lukewarm. Not least of his new helpers was the erstwhile cabaret singer. Nell Blossom proved her value in the work to be quite all that Hunt had hoped.

This busy time, when Joe Hurley and Betty really were so wrapped up in each other that they could scarcely be expected to be of value to anybody but themselves, the parson found in Nell Blossom a willing and efficient aid. They were both earnest in the cause, and so earnest that it seemed they had little thought for extraneous matters. Yet on one occasion when they were looking over the blueprints of the proposed church edifice, Nell slipped an extra sheet of plans into sight from beneath those of the church.

“Why, what is this, Ford?” she asked.

“Oh, yes! I wanted to show you that, Nell. And get your approval.”

“My approval?”

“Er – yes. You see, I’ve bought the lot right next to the church site. Now, this cottage – er – Here! Let me show you. We can have the mill work for it shipped in with the church stuff. The same gang that builds the church can run the house up. There’s the front elevation. Say, Nell, how do you like it?”

“Why, it’s lovely!” she cried.

“Do you think it’s nice enough for a parson’s wife to live in?”

“Ford! Mr. Hunt! I – ”

“Better let the ‘Mr. Hunt’ stuff slide, Nell Blossom,” he said, getting hold of her hand. “Even a minister’s wife is supposed to call her husband by his first name – at least, in private.”

“Oh, Ford!”

“That’s better.”

“But – but I am not fit to be a parson’s wife, Ford,” she cried, trembling.

“Do you know, sometimes I’ve half believed I wasn’t fit to be a parson? But it’s my job and I’m going to do the best I can with it. And – I need your help, Nell Blossom.”

“I came out here to try to win the heart of Canyon Pass. I found it – almost as soon as I arrived. But I thought for a long time that it never would be mine. I am bold enough now, Nell, to believe that I may win it.”

He smiled at her with such affection in his gaze, such a warmth of comprehension as well as desire, that Nell Blossom, tearful, trembling, half fearful, swayed toward him and felt again his strong arms about her.

“If – if I can only be worthy of you, Ford. If I don’t disgrace you,” she sobbed. “Just think! A singer all my life in those ugly cabarets – ”

“Ah, yes,” said the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt quietly. “And only for a difference in environment I might have been a part of the most reckless audience you ever had to sing to. We will let the past bury the past, Nell. We have only to deal with the future.”

And he held her to him close.

THE END