The Heart of Canyon Pass

Hunt’s abundant cheerfulness – even over the coarse supper-fare and the absence of napkins – closed his sister’s lips even more firmly. The two had come to Canyon Pass with diametrically opposed mental attitudes. Hunt was prepared to accept things as they should find them, but nothing in Canyon Pass, or about it or its inhabitants, could please Betty.

As darkness fell the town grew noisier, for it was a Saturday night. Betty, looking from her window, saw only flaring oil lamps and gasoline torches illuminating the street. The men who passed up and down were much rougher in appearance and of tongue than those she had watched under similar circumstances in Crescent City. There were almost no women in sight.

Men spoke harshly, or shouted ribaldries to one another. Indeed, the girl from the East scarcely understood the language they used. Miserably she crept to bed. She had locked her door after her brother left her, and she even dragged the pine washstand against it as a barricade.

The Wild Rose Hotel itself was no quiet abode on this night. There was a bar, and although it was at the other end of the house, the noise of the shouting, the rude songs, the stamping and quarreling therein made Betty shake in her bed until long after midnight. She had no idea that her brother went to bed, fell asleep in a minute, and slept as peacefully as a baby until almost sunrise.

A Sabbath dawn could be as calm at Canyon Pass as at Ditson Corners. The pearl-gray light of the new day washed the sleep from the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt’s eyes. He arose to lean on his elbow and gaze through a window that, curtainless, looked out on Mulligan Lane. There were some frowsy buildings within sight – evidently dwellings of a kind – but the parson lifted his eyes to the hills feeling with the psalmist that “whence cometh my strength.”

They stood – those hills – in serrated ranks from the far east to the point where the sudden uplift of the canyon wall on that side of the river closed the outlook. Even Old Graylock of his familiar Berkshires had not the magnificence of these peaks. He was impressed again as he already had been with the difference merely in size between these western hills and the Berkshires, let alone the vast dissimilarity in their contour.

The eminences of western Massachusetts for the most part slope away into wooded and pastured ridges, which themselves melt into the lush lowlands. Their crowns do not seem so imposing as these western peaks because of their configuration.

His window was open. Suddenly he became aware of voices below it at the back of the hotel.

Something was going on there – something that revealed the dregs of life to be as mean and offensive here in Canyon Pass as they could be in any place in the whole world. He heard the maundering tones of an intoxicated man and – sharply contrasted – the voice of a woman.

“Get up, Sam, and come home.”

“Hic! Won’t go home till mawnin’ – till mawnin’ – hic – doth ’pear.”

“Well, morning’s appearing all right, and it’ll catch you here, wallerin’ like a hog in the lane. Come home with me.”

“No. I’m a man. I’m – hic! – independent, I am. I’ll go hu-hu-home jest whenever I please.”

“Now’s the time to please me, Sam. Get up and come along.”

“Couldn’t do it, gal. Couldn’t think – hic! – of it. ’Twould be givin’ up my indepen – dic! – dence. I’m – I’m my own master. Leastways, I am on Sunday when the mine’s shut down. Here I stand – ”

“But you don’t stand!” ejaculated the woman’s voice sharply. “And I don’t believe you can.”

The inebriated man gave no heed to this challenge. “Here I stand,” he repeated. “‘On Jordan’s bank I take my stand, and cast a – hic! – cast a wishtful eye’ – ”

“More’n likely you’ll cast a shoe and won’t get home at all, if I can’t start you,” complained the woman’s voice.

Hunt had risen and was scrambling into the more necessary articles of his apparel. He went to the window and looked down into the lane.

There was an overturned box just below the window and slouched down upon it was a withered, baldheaded man whose frayed whiskers and untrimmed hair made him look a deal like an inebriated monkey. There was nothing humorous looking in this specimen of fallen humanity to the mind of the parson. He could only pity his case.

But it must be confessed the other person engaged in the colloquy gained Hunt’s interest and held it at once.

She was small, lissome, of a vigorous figure and vastly more attractive to his eye than any girl he had ever looked at. Indeed, he was amazed to see such a really beautiful creature in such squalid surroundings.

“Get up and come home with me,” said the girl again. “What will Mother Tubbs say when she sees you?”

“Heh? I reckon I better stay yere,” was the reply. “Man can’t keep his – hic! – dignity when a great walrus of a woman throws him ’round like he was a sack of spuds. I tell you, gal, I made a great mistake in marryin’ that woman.”

“It was a great mistake for her – that’s a fact,” was the sharp rejoinder. “You got so many failings I don’t see how Mother Tubbs remembers ’em all when she prays for you. Ugh! You men! There ain’t a one of you I’d give a hoot in a rain-water barrel for. Get up!”

The girl again tried to drag him to his feet. Sam Tubbs merely fell over sideways and sprawled helpless upon the ground.

Hunt, without his coat or vest, but grabbing up the flap-brimmed hat he had secured from the gunman the evening before, opened his door, ran down the back stairway of the hotel, and made his way quickly into the lane. As he appeared before Nell Blossom, standing over the now slumbering drunkard, he looked anything but the cleric.

“Can I be of help?” he asked.

“You can’t help me none, mister,” replied Nell brusquely.

“I scarcely think you need help,” said Hunt, smiling. “But this unfortunate – ”

“‘Unfortunate’ is right!” repeated the girl. “Sam Tubbs is so unfortunate that it would be money right now in his pocket if he’d never been born. If I leave him here some of those cheap hangers-on of the Grub Stake or Colorado’s place will roll him for all he has in his jeans. And Mother Tubbs needs what he’s got left of his pay – believe me!”

“Where does he live?”

“Where I do. Down the lane a ways.”

“I think we can get him there,” said Hunt, and without further ado he stooped, got a grip on Sam Tubbs, and proceeded to throw him over his shoulder like a sack of meal.

The girl’s eyes grew round. For the first time she expressed some appreciation – perhaps a little admiration – for his friendliness.

“You wasn’t behind the door when they were passing out muscle,” she remarked. “Well, come on. I’ll show you the way.”

The now slumbering Sam Tubbs was scarcely a heavy burden, and to Hunt the task of carrying him was slight. He was considerably amused as well as interested in the girl. It was quite apparent that she did not know he was the new parson. Evidently she had not been in the crowd the day before that had welcomed the coming of the tenderfoot preacher and his sister to Canyon Pass.

Hunt was studying her face now with more than amusement, although her bluff manner of speech and utterly independent air made Nell Blossom a revelation of a new phase of femininity to him. Her speech, in the first place, did not accord with her beauty, nor, indeed, with the natural refinement expressed in her countenance.

She certainly was a lovely girl! In the early morning light her light brown hair seemed threaded all through the mass of it with strands of gold. Her eyes were the blue of a mountain lake – but with ice in their depths. Their gaze, as it was turned on Hunt, was utterly impersonal.

Her peachy complexion as well, offset by dark brows and red lips, aroused Hunt’s admiration for its sheer beauty. Brown-gold hair, blue eyes, petite and lissome figure – when had such description of a girl caught in the cogs of his memory? Somewhere lately he had seen, or heard described, such a sprite of a girl as this.

She was dressed plainly enough in serviceable corduroy – short skirt, blouse, broad-brimmed hat, high laced boots. A crimson scarf was knotted under the collar of her blouse. She wore no ornament.

Nell did not say much during that brief walk. Not that she was at all timid or bashful; but she seemed to feel no particular interest in this young man who had put himself out to help Sam Tubbs.

For her own part she considered Sam a nuisance. She had no use for the old reprobate. It was solely for Mother Tubbs’ sake that she had bothered herself with regard to Sam. Finding him drunk – as usual – on her way home from Colorado Brown’s place early on this Sunday morning, she had tried to get him home without realizing at first that Sam was quite so far gone in liquor as he was.

As for this man who walked by her side, carrying so easily the insensible Sam, Nell did not question who he was. That he was a stranger – possibly a traveling salesman, or “drummer” – perhaps a mining man, she believed, if she thought of him at all. As Hunt suspected, she did not for a moment identify him as the parson Joe Hurley had brought to Canyon Pass. In any event she could not have imagined the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt as this sort of person.

They turned abruptly into another narrow alley and came to the front of the Tubbs’ shack. The yard, fenced by pickets of barrel-staves, was neatly kept and there was an attempt at a flower bed on either side of the walk. Mother Tubbs usually punished Sam for his sin of drunkenness, after he had slept off his potations, by making him weed the tiny gardens and rake the path. These penitential activities kept the Tubbs premises spick and span.

Nell led the way imperturbably around to the back door of the shack. This door was open and a thin blue haze – odorous and appetizing – floated out of the kitchen.

“Just getting a nice breakfast for you, honey,” said Mother Tubbs, filling the doorway and seeing Nell first of all. “Now, if only Sam would come along – Is that Sam? He ain’t dead, is he?”

“Only dead drunk,” said Nell in scorn.

“Where shall I put him?” asked Hunt quietly.

“Well, I reckon it don’t much matter. You can drop him down anywhere, mister. I’ll fetch a dish-pan o’ water and sluice him down when I get a chance. But I can’t let them cakes sp’ile.” Then she saw and recognized the parson’s face, for Mother Tubbs had been at the Wild Rose Hotel the day before when the stagecoach had arrived. “Goodness me! I declared, Mister – er – Brother Hunt, this is good of ye.”

Nell stared. The note of respect in Mother Tubbs’ voice revealed in a flash Hunt’s identity to the cabaret singer.

“I am sartain sure obliged to you,” went on the old woman. “Nell Blossom never could have got him home alone.” Hunt had lowered her husband to a seat on the porch floor and propped his back against a post. “Sleeping like a baby, ain’t he? Well, he can stay thataway till after Nell has her breakfast.”

Hunt was not giving her his attention. The name “Nell Blossom” had revealed to him instantly the familiarity of the girl’s description. This was the golden-haired, blue-eyed, high-spirited beauty Joe Hurley had written about – the girl who could really sing.

They stared at each other while the old woman went back to her cakes. Nell was obviously shifting the gears of her opinion about this stranger. He, a parson? No lunger, this husky six-footer!

“Mebbe you ain’t acquainted,” Mother Tubbs said, bustling back from the stove. “Nell Blossom is a-living with me and has been doing so – off and on – for more than three years. Ever since her pa, old Henry Blossom, up and died. She’s a singer, Nell is – the sweetest you ever heard, Brother Hunt. I’m hoping, when you get to holding meetings, that we can get her to sing in the choir.”

Hunt bowed, smiling, to the girl. Her expression of countenance was no less forbidding than before. She offered him no encouragement.

“Won’t you stop for breakfast with me and Nell, Brother Hunt?” went on the hospitable old woman. “I always try to have something hot and tasty for Nell when she comes home after her night’s work.”

Nell started – was it angrily? She opened her lips to speak, then shut them in a straight, red line. In any case, Hunt caught the significance of her attitude of objection, had he been tempted to accept the old woman’s hearty invitation.

“Not this morning, Mrs. – er – Tubbs, is it? Sister Tubbs? I am glad to have met you.” He met her huge hand with a warm clasp of his own. “When we get started here, I am sure I can depend on your aid and good wishes?”

“Youbetcha!” exclaimed the old woman. “And you’ll see me in one of the front seats – mebbe in two of ’em if they ain’t bigger than usual,” she added with twinkling eyes.

He laughed boyishly, lifting the dilapidated old hat to both Mother Tubbs and the girl as he turned the corner of the shack. The old woman looked down admonishingly at Nell Blossom.

“You weren’t a mite perlite to the minister, Nell,” she complained.

CHAPTER IX – A BEGINNING

That eastern mountain range was all etched with rose color now as Hunt went back to the hotel. But the town had scarcely quieted after its night’s revelry. Inebriates were still dribbling along the streets from the all-night places.

He thought of Nell Blossom. She certainly was a flower in the mire of Canyon Pass. Joe Hurley had written none too enthusiastically about the girl, as far as concerned her beauty. And although Hunt was by no means given to impulsive judgments, he knew there was a refined atmosphere about the girl despite her gruff independence of manner and speech.

His return to the hotel was unheralded save by the cheerful grin of Cholo Sam, the Mexican proprietor of the hostelry, who was sluicing out the barroom.

“Some morning, thees, Señor Hunt.” He flashed a tentative, toothful smile toward the array of bottles behind his bar. “Weel you have one leetle drink, Señor? A ‘pick-my-up,’ you call eet, eh?”

“Coffee, Sam,” replied Hunt briskly, acknowledging the offer in the spirit it was meant. “Coffee only – and perhaps a bit of bread with it. Service for two, please. My sister will want some. Will you bring it up?”

“But surely, señor.” He hesitated. “Ees eet the truth that the señor ees a meenister – the padre? Si?”

“Quite true, Sam. That is my business – my trade. And I have come here to Canyon Pass hoping to exercise it.”

Hunt mounted to his room to find that Betty was already astir. She had been into his room during his absence. One of the bags he had brought upon the stagecoach had been opened and across the foot of the bed was carefully laid his ordinary Sunday garments – frock-coat, high-cut waistcoat, and narrow trousers of dead black sheen.

With the outer garments was the stiff-bosomed white shirt – “boiled” Joe Hurley would have designated its variety – the silk socks, with a pair of low, gun-metal kid shoes set primly on the floor under the edge of the bed.

Ford Hunt looked at all these once – then again. He thought of what he had been doing already on this Sunday morning. Then he burst into loud laughter.

Sunday afternoon when the weather was propitious was the time for social intercourse in Canyon Pass. Those who had worked or played or had been intoxicated the night before had slept off the effects of their super-exertions for the most part. They came forth now shaved and in clean garments and strolled to Main Street.

It was still too early for the cabarets and gambling places to be open, and even the saloon bars were somnolent save for the flies buzzing about them or drunkenly crawling in the spilled beer. The pivotal point of the town’s rendezvous and gossip on Sunday afternoon was the Three Star Grocery. In front of that old Bill Judson held forth between his exertions of waiting on such customers as might claim his attention.

“Dad burn it!” ejaculated Judson. “I bet Tom Hicks has crawled into his hole and pulled the hole in after him. I should want to if I was him. And you take it from me, boys, a parson that can do that to a bad actor like Tom Hicks will make Canyon Pass sit up and take notice before he’s through.”

“It showed sand, I allow,” agreed one of his hearers judiciously. “But it’s r’iled Boss Tolley all up and he swears the parson sha’n’t stay.”

“You don’t say!” drawled Judson sarcastically. “And who ever elected Tolley to be boss of the Pass? If for no other reason, I’m strong for this yere Reverend Hunt.”

“As a man – a reg’lar he-man – I’m for him, too,” agreed another. “But I’m thinkin’ we can get along yere at Canyon Pass without much psalm-singing and preaching.”

“Yeppy. You’re right,” declared a third of Judson’s hearers.

“Let alone that you’re all wrong,” put in Judson again with energy, “let’s look at the thing in a practical way, as the feller said. If a man come in yere and opened a shoe shop or a candy pop or wanted to sell shoestrings, we’d give him the glad hand, wouldn’t we? ‘Live and let live,’ has always been the motto of Canyon Pass, ain’t it?”

“What’s that got to do with it, Bill?”

“Why, you big gump! Ain’t this parson got something to peddle? His stock in trade is religion, and he’s got just as much right to show goods and try to drum up trade as the next one, ain’t he? He’s entitled to a fair deal. And Boss Tolley, Tom Hicks, and them other highbinders can sulk in their dens and suck their paws. I ain’t never gone ironed since I opened this shack, nigh thirty years ago. But I’ll sling a gun on my hip and act as bodyguard if it’s necessary for any feller that ain’t getting a fair deal in this town. That’s gospel!”

“I never knowed ye was so all-fired religious, Bill,” complained one of his surprised hearers.

“Religious!” retorted the storekeeper. “It ain’t that I’m religious – not so’s you’d notice it. But I got a sense of fair play, – dad burn it! Here comes the parson now, boys.”

Hunt and Joe Hurley came out of the Wild Rose Hotel. The minister had not donned his clerical garments. He was dressed as he had been the day before when he arrived on the stagecoach, except for the hat he wore. That flopping-brimmed headgear which he had taken from Tom Hicks crowned the parson’s brush of crisp, dark hair.

“Boys,” said Hurley, when they came near, “meet Willie Hunt. He’s one of the best old scouts I met when I was East, that time I stood that college on its head, like I told you. I reckon you know Willie is a real man, if he is a parson. Mr. Hunt, meet Jib Collins, Cale Mack, Jim Tierney, and – last but not least – Bill Judson, who is the honored mentor of this camp.”

“Whatever that is,” and the storekeeper grinned, shaking hands in turn with Hunt. “This yere Joe Hurley slings language at times that sartainly stops traffic. He can’t seem to get over it. It was wished on him when he lived East that time he is always telling us about.”

Hunt knew how to meet these men – he was by nature a “good mixer.” There is much in the grasp of a hand, a steady look, an unafraid smile, that recommends the stranger to such bold spirits. The timid, even the hesitant, make no progress with them.

“Parson,” pursued Judson, “we was just discussin’ your business as you and Joe come along. In my opinion we need you yere at Canyon Pass. I’m speakin’ for myself alone,” and he glared at the other men in the group accusingly; “but I can’t put it too strong. We need ye. To my mind religion is a mighty good thing. We’re loose livin’, we’re loose talkin’, and we need to be jacked up right smart.

“You can count on me, parson, to back any play you make, clean across the board. I’m for you, strong. We need meetin’s started. We ought to have a Sunday school for the young ’uns. We need to be preached at and prayed with. I come of right strict Presbyterian stock, and when I was a lad I was used to all the means of grace, I was.”

“You are interested, then, Mr. Judson, in any attempt we may make to inaugurate services here on Sunday?” Hunt asked cheerfully.

“Youbetcha!” was the hearty rejoinder.

“Of course, Mr. Judson,” Hunt pursued, “you understand that, to have successful and helpful services, some of us at least must have the spirit of service?”

“Sure. That’s what I tell ’em.”

“I take it from brief observation that this day – the Sabbath – is observed very little at present in Canyon Pass?”

“True as true,” said the storekeeper.

“To get people really interested in divine services on this day, don’t you think we should begin by making some difference – a real difference – between the First Day and the other six?” Hunt continued, eyeing Judson reflectively. “If we who are interested in the betterment of the community are not willing to lead in this matter, those we wish to help can scarcely follow.

“Sunday should not be like the other six days of the week. Your mines and gold washings shut down on this day. How about other secular activities ceasing – as far as it may be possible?”

“I – I reckon you’re right, parson,” Judson said, though with some hesitation. “Of course, the boys have been used to having their freedom on Sundays, and their fun. I don’t believe you could go far in shutting down the saloons and gambling tables – not right at first.”

“But would you go as far as you could personally to establish a better standard of Sunday observance?” pursued Hunt.

“Heh?” ejaculated the puzzled Judson.

Hunt, still smiling, mounted the steps of the store, closed the door, and turned the great key which had been left in the outside of the lock. He removed the key and handed it to Bill Judson as he came down the steps again.

“Mr. Judson,” he said in a perfectly unmoved voice, “if you will begin by keeping that door locked on Sundays you will be leading the way in this community toward a proper observance of the Lord’s Day.”

Joe Hurley was on the point of bursting out laughing. But he thought better of joining Collins, Mack, and Tierney in wild expressions of joy at the old man’s discomfiture.

Judson’s face turned from its usual weather-beaten tan to a purple-red. His rheumy eyes sparked. Then slowly, reflectively, a grin wreathed his tobacco-stained lips and crinkled the outer corners of his eyelids.

“Parson,” he said, thrusting out his hand again, “you’re on! I’ll show these fellers I’m a good sport. Nobody was ever able to say honestly that Bill Judson took water; and I won’t give ’em the chance’t to say it now.”

CHAPTER X – MUTTERINGS OF A STORM

It was Joe Hurley who saw Betty appear on the porch of the hotel. Perhaps his gaze had been fixed in that direction for that very purpose. It was a vision to draw the eyes of any man hungry for a picture of a well-dressed and modest young woman. Betty Hunt was like nothing that had ever before stepped out upon the Main Street of Canyon Pass.

“Come on, Willie,” urged Hurley, seizing the minister’s sleeve. “You’ve jarred Judson clean to bedrock. Spare him any more for now. Come on. Your sister is waiting for us to take her to the Great Hope.”

Betty was not gaily appareled. Her frock was black and white, and so was her hat. She still remembered Aunt Prudence’s death – and that she was a parson’s sister! But it was the way the frock was made, and how it and the hat became her that marked Betty as an object of approval, to the male Passonians at least.

“Such a beautiful day, Mr. Hurley,” Betty ventured. “One might think it a respectable country town if only one could forget last night.”

She stared at Hurley with accusation. He dropped his head sheepishly. Somehow Betty Hunt put the matter as though it were his fault!

“We’re going to change all that in time,” said Hunt cheerfully. “These people are not so bad, Betty – ”

“That they couldn’t be worse? Yes, I know,” retorted his sister.

“Why, Betty!” murmured Hunt, “isn’t that a bit uncharitable?”

“I have no thought for charity in a place like this,” declared the girl. “Such dirt, vileness and disorder I never dreamed of! These people are not even human! I cannot excuse them. No branch of the human family could possibly be ignorant enough for us to excuse what I have already seen about me in Canyon Pass.”

“Great saltpeter!” murmured Hurley.

“You did not tell my brother the half of it!” she cried, flaring at the mining man. “You hid the worst. You only said things in your letters that you knew would attract him here.”

Joe Hurley started back a step. If a kitten he had stooped to pet had suddenly turned and gouged him with its claws he could have been no more startled.