The Heart of Canyon Pass

But Betty Hunt proved herself no kitten. She was usually a very self-contained and quite unexcited young woman. It was only for a minute that she allowed her anger to flame out.

“Now, that’s enough about that,” she pursued, still with a frown. “The thing is done. We are here. I do not believe that Ford will ever be happy in Canyon Pass; and I know I shall not.”

“Better not speak so positively, Bet,” said Hunt coolly. A brother seldom is much impressed by his sister’s little ruffles of temper. “You may have to change your opinion. My belief is that none of us can find happiness in a new environment. We must take the happiness with us to any new abode.”

Hurley was much subdued during their walk through the town. His knowledge of girls like Betty was very slight. He had never had a sister and he could not remember his mother.

Even girls like Nell Blossom had not been frequent events in the mining man’s life. His two years spent in the East had been almost as barren of feminine society as his years in the West.

Now, it must be confessed, Betty Hunt had “got him going,” to quote his own thought in the matter. Not that Hurley was of a fickle temperament. But he was not a man to eat his heart out in an utterly impossible cause.

Nell had shown him plainly that she had no use for him save as an acquaintance. He could not even count himself her friend now, for since her return from Hoskins she had seemed more remote from the men of Canyon Pass than ever before.

So, Joe Hurley had already put Nell out of his mind in that way before Betty Hunt had appeared on the scene. And, it seemed, he was fated to be attracted by a distant star. The minister’s sister was distinctly of another world – and a world far, far above that of Canyon Pass, Hurley told himself.

It was not Betty’s finnicky ways, as her brother bluntly called them, that held the girl from the East so dear in Joe’s eyes. It was in spite of her disapproval of Canyon Pass and all that lay therein. The mining man was deeply interested in the development of the camp. He had done much in a business way to improve conditions here. He hoped to do more.

He had quite realized that the place needed something besides modern business methods to raise it out of the slough in which it wallowed as a community. This realization, shared with such people as Bill Judson and old Mother Tubbs, had led Hurley to interest the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt in Canyon Pass. He foresaw the camp in time as well governed a place as Crescent City.

Betty’s scorn and vituperation regarding the shortcomings of the Pass actually pained Hurley. Was it so bad as she seemed to think it was? This girl from the East was very positive in her dislike for the place and its people.

Then he looked over her head at the quietly smiling face of Hunt. He did not seem to share his sister’s opinion that the Pass was beyond redemption. There was, after all, a quality of sanity and stability about Hunt that bolstered Hurley’s hope.

“That boy is all right,” thought Hurley finally. “He sees things with a clear eye. And our crudeness doesn’t scare him. His sister – Well! what could you expect of a pretty, fluffy little thing like her? This place is bound to look rotten to her at the first. But at that, she may change her opinion.”

In fact, Joe Hurley had determination enough to believe that he was just the chap who could change these opinions of Betty Hunt! His non-success with Nell Blossom had not convinced him that he would never be able to attract other girls.

Right at the start Joe had been enamored of the fragile beauty of the parson’s sister. Hers was not the robust, if petite, prettiness of Nell Blossom. It was a beauty of spirit and character that looked out of Betty’s gray eyes. Her very calmness and primness intrigued the mining man.

Opposite is attracted by opposite. Because he was so open and hearty himself, Hurley admired the daintiness and delicacy of Betty. Her primness, even her shrinking from the things to which he was so used in and about Canyon Pass, pleased the young man in a way.

Here was just the sort of girl he desired to establish in his home – a real home – when he got one. Joe Hurley did not propose to live in a bachelor shack in the purlieus of Canyon Pass all his life – by no means! He was getting on. The Great Hope was panning out well. It had every promise of being a big thing in time. He was going to be rich. Betty Hunt would grace the head of the table of a millionaire – wear the clothes a prince might buy for his wife – hold the respect and admiration that the highest lady in the land might claim.

“I’ve got to have that girl,” thought Hurley. “And I’m going after her!”

They climbed the steep road of rolled rock to the highland overlooking the town and giving them a view to the first turn of the canyon bed of Runaway River. When the squalid sight of Canyon Pass could be shut out of the mind, even Betty admitted that the dimming light in the canyon lent a fairylike charm to all its ruggedness. It was a slot made by giants in the hills without doubt. She expressed a desire to see more of it.

“I’ll get you a good cayuse,” said Hurley eagerly. “Got any riding duds with you?”

“I have my habit in one of my trunks.”

The Westerner looked at her doubtfully. “Don’t know about long skirts flapping around the legs of these Western critters – ”

“Habits are not made with skirts nowadays, Mr. Hurley,” Betty interrupted coldly. “Fashion – even in the Fenway – demands that the feminine riding suit shall be mannish.”

“Oh! If you ride astraddle,” replied Hurley, without realizing that his phrase shocked her, “we can find you a horse that will fill the bill. I’ve got one that I ride myself, and I can pick up one for Willie.”

“Most agreeable to me, I’m sure,” agreed the parson. “I can ride after a fashion. Bet got her training at boarding school. If Aunt Prudence knew all her niece got at that institution the dear old lady would have been shocked.”

Betty did not smile. There were things that had happened to her at boarding school that Ford knew nothing about. His words aroused in her mind the carking memory of the secret that had changed Betty Hunt’s life completely – the secret that had killed all the sparkle and winsome lightness in the girl’s nature. She became silent and after that only listened to the talk of the two young men.

Not that she was not interested as they went on and Hurley pointed out the several claims being worked with the most modern methods of the Oreode Company, and the Nufall Syndicate, and by himself and his associates at the Great Hope. This mining business was all new to the girl, and she had an inquiring mind. She did not shrink at all, when Hurley suggested a descent into the shaft and produced slickers and rubber boots and tarpaulins to put on over their clothes.

The man in charge let them down in the bucket, and a gasoline torch showed them all that there was to see under the surface. Hurley explained with pride how he had found and developed the first paying lead in the Great Hope, but that the name of the mine foreshadowed a much richer vein that he was confident was soon to be opened. Science and that “sixth sense” of the miner assured him that the big thing was coming.

“We’re always looking toward El Dorado, we miners,” he said with a laugh. “It’s hope that keeps us up.”

“‘El Dorado’ – the hoped-for land,” repeated Betty softly. And then, standing there in the flickering radiance of the torch, she repeated, while the men were silent, that concluding paragraph of Robert Louis Stevenson’s essay:

“‘O toiling hands of mortals! O unwearied feet, traveling ye know not whither! Soon, soon it seems to you, you must come forth on some conspicuous hilltop and, but a little way further, against the setting sun, descry the spires of El Dorado. Little do ye know your own blessedness, for to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labor.’”

“Amen,” Hunt commented seriously.

“You said it,” agreed the mining man with that bluff emphasis that did not shock Betty so much now as it might at the beginning. “That’s what keeps me going. Stevenson knew what he was writing about. But, we would have considered him a weakling out here, I am afraid. We are inclined to judge everything here in terms of muscle and brawn.”

“But it has been your brains, Joe, not your brawn, that has carried you so far in this work,” Hunt declared warmly.

Hurley sighed as they went back to the shaft. “Let me tell you I have had to use considerable brawn, Willie, in handling these roughnecks that work for me.”

He laughed again. Joe Hurley could not be sober for long. And his temper exploded when he had to shout at the top of his lungs to attract the attention of the watchmen when they wanted to get up to the surface.

“This feller isn’t worth the powder to blow him from here to Jericho,” grumbled Hurley. “I always miss old Steve Siebert when he slopes for the desert, as he’s bound to do every spring. That old desert rat is always here over Sunday to see that everything is all right, when he’s on the job. But he just has to go off prospecting once in so often.”

He told them more about Siebert and Andy McCann as they went away from the claim. Betty listened as before with quiet interest, but she made no comment. Hurley was not at all sure that she had enjoyed, or even approved of their visit to the mine when she and Hunt parted from him at his own shack, although she thanked him politely.

The walk did not end for Hunt and his sister without a more adventurous incident. The sun had disappeared and the dusk had begun to thicken in corners and by-streets as they approached the hotel. There, at the mouth of a narrow lane, two figures stood, a man and a girl, and their voices were sharp and angry.

“That’s what I’m telling you,” the man’s voice drawled, a note in it that at once raised in Hunt that feeling that any decent man experiences who hears one of his own sex so address a woman. “You got to come to it, and you might as well come now as later. I got you on the hip – that I have. Understand?”

“I understand nothing of the kind, Tolley. You’re a bluffer and a beast! And if you don’t let me alone – ”

“Don’t fool yourself,” interrupted the man. “I won’t let you alone till you come back to the Grub Stake. But I won’t talk to you about it again. I’ll talk to others.”

Then the girl told him angrily to do his worst. Betty attempted to pass on swiftly; but the young man hesitated.

“Do for goodness’ sake come along, Ford!” whispered his sister, looking back at him.

Back in Ditson Corners – or in almost any other Eastern town – the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt would scarcely have shown his interest in such a scene on the street, save perhaps to speak to a constable or policeman about it.

But there was something here he could not ignore. Nor was it entirely because he recognized the angry voice of the girl, although he had not as yet seen her face in the dusk.

“You’ll do what I tell you,” muttered the bully with an oath, as Hunt stepped nearer. “If you don’t come back to the Grub Stake to sing to-morrow night, I’ll let the whole o’ Canyon Pass know – ”

It was just then that Hunt’s hand dropped upon Boss Tolley’s shoulder. Nor did it drop lightly. The parson twisted the big man around by one muscular exertion and looked into his flushed face.

“Don’t you think you’ve said enough to the young lady?” Hunt asked quietly. “You have evidently forgotten yourself.”

“What – why, you fool tenderfoot!”

“Suppose you go, Miss Blossom,” suggested Hunt with unruffled voice. “Let me speak to this man.”

But the minister had quite mistaken Nell Blossom’s temper. She turned on him like a shot.

“What are you butting in for, I’d like to know? I can take care of myself – always have and always expect to.” Then she laughed harshly, turning to Tolley again. “Better beat it, Tolley, or the parson will do something to you besides grabbing your hat.”

The dance-hall keeper, swearing still, jerked away from Hunt’s grasp. He did not seek to continue the quarrel, however. He abruptly turned up the alley and disappeared.

“For goodness’ sake, Ford!” ejaculated Miss Betty.

Nell Blossom, thus attracted to the other girl, stepped nearer and stared at her. Her own face was unsmiling. If it had not been so really pretty one might have said it was a black look that she gave Betty. But it was an impish look, too.

“There are some things you’d better learn if you are going to stay in this camp, parson,” said the singer. “The principal thing is to mind your own business. If I ever need your help in any little thing, I’ll call on you.”

She passed them both, still staring – now with curiosity – at Betty and went on along the street. Betty seized her brother’s arm.

“What a horrid little creature!” she said.

CHAPTER XI – THE STORM ABOUT TO BURST

There was a strangely paradoxical feeling in the Reverend Willett Ford Hunt’s mind. Nell Blossom was a subject of thought he could not escape. He could not wholly overlook her manners and speech; yet he did not feel that she was blameworthy for either.

What chance had this wild blossom of a girl ever had, out in this wilderness, the daughter of a drunken ne’er-do-well, as he had been told, taught from her childhood to sing for her own living and for her father’s in the saloons of mining camps? Why, almost any other girl would have gone bad – as bad as could be. And he knew Nell Blossom was not bad.

He really wished he might make Joe Hurley his confidant about the girl, but, harking back to that letter of Joe’s in which the latter had spoken so enthusiastically of Nell, the parson felt that his friend was too strongly prejudiced in Nell’s favor to risk his criticizing her in any way.

One question recurred again and again to him: What did that man Tolley, who he knew was the proprietor of the Grub Stake saloon and dance hall, mean by commanding Nell to return to his employment?

Betty saw her brother’s more serious mien, and it must be confessed, wickedly hoped that the situation as it opened before him here at Canyon Pass was beginning to appall him. How could it do otherwise? Let alone the crudeness and lack of conveniences in their dwelling place, the nature of the people with whom they must associate, and the utter forlornness of life here in the mining town, that last incident as they walked back from the Great Hope Mine should impress Ford with the utter impracticability of his trying to begin a pastorate here.

The awful ruffian who had sworn at the girl – horrid as she seemed to be – shocked Betty beyond expression. And what a look that Nell Blossom, she had asked her brother the singer’s name, had given her, Betty Hunt! As unfriendly, as hateful, as though the Eastern girl had done the singer some grievous wrong.

The strange girl had insulted and flouted Ford, too. Betty’s loyalty to her brother was up in arms at that, if the truth were told. She could not but admire after all Ford’s cool assumption of authority with the ruffian and with the cabaret singer as well. Why, Ford did not seem to be afraid of these people at all. Even Joe Hurley could have been no more sure of himself in such a situation than her brother had proved to be.

For in spite of her disapproval of the mining man she realized that Joe was perfectly able to handle such situations and such rude people with equanimity. But then, he was of this soil. He was of the West. To tell the truth, Betty was inclined to think of Hurley as being quite as bad in manners, speech, and outlook on life as the other people of Canyon Pass.

She would say nothing about all this to her brother. Betty Hunt was quite capable of thinking things out for herself. Prejudiced she had been – and was – against the town and their visit to it; but she did not utterly lack logic. She went to bed that second night in the Wild Rose Hotel with somewhat different thoughts in her mind after all. At least, she did not drag the washstand in front of her locked door as a barrier.

In the morning the mining man appeared at the door of the hotel riding his big bay and leading two other saddled horses. The freight wagons had come in the evening before, and Betty had got her trunks. Out of one she had resurrected the riding habit which she had not worn of late, but which still fitted her perfectly and was chic.

But Betty was daunted by the look of the mount Hurley had selected for her.

“Mr. Hurley!” exclaimed Betty emphatically, “on your honor, is that horse safe?”

“As safe as a church. You hitch him on a railroad track, and he’d only step just far enough aside for the lightning express to go by without shaving him.”

She looked at him, both puzzled and disapproving. “I never know when you are serious,” she finally said.

“You can bet your last blue chip on the fact that I am taking no chances of a hoss throwing you or cutting up rusty while you’re on his back,” the man returned earnestly. “Hardscrabble is all right, Miss Betty.”

He offered his hand to Betty for her to step into with all the grace of a courtier. He looked up into her eyes, too, as she mounted past his shoulder into the saddle, and his smile was so friendly that she could not help smiling in return.

Hunt swung himself on to his own mount – a rather rangy cayuse that promised speed as well as endurance. Hurley bounded into his own saddle from the step without touching the stirrups until he was seated. Bouncer stood up on his hind legs, snorted, came down stiff-legged, and bucked once just to show that he was in fine fettle. The other horses cantered away from the hotel more sedately.

They spattered through the West Fork and went into the canyon along the river trail. There was not a soul in sight but themselves when they turned the first out-thrust of the cliff. Runaway River brawled in its bed. The huge, threatening cap of the Overhang cast its shadow almost to the opposite wall. The mighty rocks, the deep cracks in which the brush clung with tenuous roots, the wind-wrung, anguished, stunted trees, all held the visitors spellbound. Such a devil’s slot in the hills they could never have imagined without actually seeing it.

“Suppose that should fall?” Betty broke out pointing up at the frowning cap of the cliff.

“That’s what we are supposing all the time, Miss Betty,” replied Hurley quietly. “Part of it did fall about twenty years ago. That was long before my time, of course. But Bill Judson and some of the other old-timers can tell you about it. It came pretty near ringing the death-knell for Canyon Pass.”

“Backed up the river into the town, did it?” asked the logical Hunt.

“I’ll say it did! And over the town. Judson says it was so deep over his store that he went out from the headlands in a flatboat and grappled through the skylight of his joint for tobacco out of the showcase. Takes that old-timer to spread it on thick,” and he chuckled.

“But is it likely to happen again?” cried Betty.

“Any day – any hour – any minute,” repeated Hurley quietly. “There are thousands of tons of stuff up there that may fall. Choke the canyon half-wall high. If it does, there’ll be a lake here that’ll furnish water enough to irrigate blame near all of the Topaz Desert – believe me. Canyon Pass will have to go into raising frogs or such,” and he laughed.

“Oh! I felt that it was a dangerous place to live in,” murmured Betty.

“Great saltpeter!” exclaimed Hurley again. “No worse than folks who live on the sides of volcanoes in Italy, for instance. Or in the earthquake belt along the Pacific coast. Pshaw!”

“But – but there is so much room out here, Mr. Hurley,” cried Betty. “Why not choose a safer place in which to establish a town?”

“The mines and washings. Gold established Canyon Pass. It isn’t a beautiful spot, but it’s handy. We got to just keep on hoping that the Overhang doesn’t fall.”

“There is a place where some of it has fallen – and recently,” Hunt broke in, with some gravity.

Half blocking the trail, and bulking along the river’s edge for perhaps ten yards, was a heap of gravel and soil on which no grass or other verdure grew. Looking up the sloping canyon wall they could trace the downfall of this small slide for more than half the distance to the summit.

“What is that sticking out of it?” asked Betty. “A stick?”

Hurley sniffed like a bird-dog that has just raised a covey. He was to windward of the heap. Hunt had forced his mount nearer from the other side.

“That is not a stick,” he said quietly. “It looks to me like – ”

Hurley ejaculated something that was very near an oath. He flung himself out of his saddle and strode over the rubble. He stopped and examined the thing Betty had seen, even touching it with his gauntleted hand.

“Never heard of this,” he muttered. “Odd, I must say!”

“What is it?” asked Hunt.

“A horse’s leg. Been pecked clean by the vultures – not by coyotes, or the bones would be torn apart. Well!”

“Oh, there has been a dreadful accident here! Is somebody buried under that pile of gravel?” demanded Betty.

“Not likely. Just a cayuse. Maybe a wandering critter. Happened to be right here – taking a drink at the riverside, maybe – when the slide fell. Or it might have been the cause of the slip. Came down with it,” Hurley explained in jerky sentences. “The weight of the hoss might have broke off a piece of the Overhang and – here he is!”

This seemed to satisfy him. He went back to his own horse and mounted again.

They rode several miles farther, but Joe Hurley did not seem quite so volatile as usual. Was he “studying” on the buried horse by the riverside? At least, when they rode back toward noon, he fell behind at the point where the small landslip had landed, halting his horse beside it for a moment. He overtook his friends in a short time, however, but did not say anything.

As they sighted the ford again, down from the upland on this side came a dashing and brilliant-hued figure – a girl on a cream-colored pony. Hunt recognized Nell Blossom at first glance.

“Hi, Nell!” shouted Hurley, raising his hand and arm, palm out, in the Indian peace sign.

She scarcely nodded to him, but she grinned elfishly as she rode down into the shallows and her pony’s flying feet spattered them all at the river’s edge. She scarcely seemed to give Hunt and his sister a glance. She plied the quirt that hung from her wrist, and the cream-colored pony recklessly forded the stream and climbed the further bank.

“How impolite,” murmured the Eastern girl, brushing the drops from her sleeve.

“She’s a little devil,” agreed Hurley frankly. “That’s the lady I was telling you of, Willie. She’s as wild as a jack rabbit.”

Hunt nodded soberly. He made no other comment. As they rode up into Main Street they heard wild yells and hootings from the far end, then the pattering of a pony’s rapid hoofbeats. Back toward the ford tore the cream-colored pony bearing the bizarre figure of the cabaret singer.

Now Nell rode without touching the bridle reins. She swung the whip and cracked it sharply. In the other hand she gripped a six-shooter of practical size and weight.

“What is the matter with that crazy creature?” asked Betty.

Hurley merely laughed. Nell Blossom approached at a wild gallop. Men appeared at the doors of various stores and saloons along the street and yelled their delight.

“Ye-yip! Yip-py-yip!” shrieked the appreciative audience. “Oh, you Nell! Ye-yow! Git out o’ town!”

The girl, her face glowing, her hair flying from under her hat, her whole figure electric with life and abundance of spirit, rode faster and faster. As she approached the front of the Grub Stake she saw the slouching figure of its proprietor backed against the wall by the door, smoking. He grinned evilly at the rider.

Nell pressed the trigger. Five staccato shots whistled skyward. The sixth ruffled the lank hair on Boss Tolley’s head and splintered the door frame just above it!

The divekeeper dodged and crouched, as though expecting another bullet. He almost slunk into his barroom. Then he realized that the girl had made a show of him and was riding on, applauded by the laughter and shrieks of the onlookers.

He whirled, and, lifting both hands, shook the clenched fists after the flying Nell. He was almost apoplectic with rage. He burst forth:

“You crazy, derned hoptoad of a gal! Somebody ought to grab you off that animal. Shootin’ at folks thataway! Is that what you done when you drove poor Dick Beckworth over the edge of the Overhang?”