truth! Oh, I’ve deceived you all your life!”
“Deceived me! Oh, mother! Then tell me—now.”
“Child—you’ll forgive me—and never—hate me?” cried the mother, brokenly.
“Mother, how can you talk so! I love you.” And Allie clasped the shaking form closer. Then followed a silence during which Mrs. Durade recovered her composure.
“Allie, I ran off with Durade before you were born,” began the mother, swiftly, as if she must hurry out her secret. “Durade is not your father. … Your name is Lee. Your father is Allison Lee. I’ve heard he’s a rich man now. … Oh, I want to get back—to give you to him—to beg his forgiveness. … We were married in New Orleans in 1847. My father made me marry him. I never loved Allison Lee. He was not a kind man—not the sort I admired. … I met Durade. He was a Spaniard—a blue-blooded adventurer. I ran off with him. We joined the gold-seekers traveling to California. You were born out there in 1850. … It has been a hard life. But I taught you—I did all I could for you. I kept my secret from you—and his! … Lately I could endure it no longer. I’ve run off from Durade.”
“Oh, mother, I knew we were running off from him!” cried Allie, breathlessly. “And I know he will follow us.”
“Indeed, I fear he will,” replied the mother. “But Lord spare me his revenge!”
“Mother! Oh, it is terrible! … He is not my father. I never loved him. I couldn’t. … But, mother, you must have loved him!”
“Child, I was Durade’s slave,” she replied, sadly.
“Then why did you run away? He was kind—good to us.”
“Allie, listen. Durade was a gambler—a man crazy to stake all on the fall of a card. He did not love gold. But he loved games of chance. It was a terrible passion with him. Once he meant to gamble my honor away. But that other gambler was too much of a man. There are gamblers who are men! … I think I began to hate Durade from that time. … He was a dishonest gambler. He made me share in his guilt. My face lured miners to his dens. … My face—for I was beautiful once! … Oh, I sunk so low! But he forced me. … Thank God I left him—before it was too late—too late for you.”
“Mother, he will follow us!” cried Allie.
“But he shall never have you. I’ll kill him before I let him get you,” replied the mother.
“He’d never harm me, mother, whatever he is,” murmured Allie.
“Child, he would use you exactly as he used me. He wanted me to let him have you—already. He wanted to train you—he said you’d be beautiful some day.”
“Mother!” gasped Allie, “is THAT what he meant?”
“Forget him, child. And forget your mother’s guilt! … I’ve suffered. I’ve repented. … All I ask of God is to take you safely home to Allison Lee—the father whom you have never known.”
The night hour before dawn grew colder and blacker. A great silence seemed wedged down between the ebony hills. The stars were wan. No cry of wolf or moan of wind disturbed the stillness. And the stars grew warmer. The black east changed and paled. Dawn was at hand. An opaque and obscure grayness filled the world; all had changed, except that strange, oppressive, and vast silence of the wild.
That silence was broken by the screeching, blood-curdling yell of the Sioux.
At times these bloody savages attacked without warning and in the silence of the grave; again they sent out their war-cries, chilling the hearts of the bravest. Perhaps that warning yell was given only when doom was certain.
Horn realized the dread omen and accepted it. He called the fugitives to him and, choosing the best-protected spot among the rocks and wagons, put the women in the center.
“Now, men—if it’s the last for us—let it be fight! Mebbe we can hold out till the troops come.”
Then in the gray gloom of dawn he took a shovel; prying up a piece of sod, he laid it aside and began to dig. And while he dug he listened for another war-screech and gazed often and intently into the gloom. But there was no sound and nothing to see. When he had dug a hole several feet deep he carried an armful of heavy leather bags and deposited them in it. Then he went back to the wagon for another armful. The men, gray-faced as the gloom, watched him fill up the hole, carefully replace the sod, and stamp it down.
He stood for an instant gazing down, as if he had buried the best of his life. Then he laughed grim and hard.
“There’s my gold! If any man wins through this he can have it!”
Bill Horn divined that he would never live to touch his treasure again. He who had slaved for gold and had risked all for it cared no more what might become of it. Gripping his rifle, he turned to await the inevitable.
Moments of awful suspense passed. Nothing but the fitful beating of hearts came to the ears of the fugitives—ears that strained to the stealthy approach of the red foe—ears that throbbed prayerfully for the tramp of the troopers’ horses. But only silence ensued, a horrible silence, more nerve-racking than the clash of swift, sure death.
Then out of the gray gloom burst jets of red flame; rifles cracked, and the air suddenly filled with hideous clamor. The men began to shoot at gliding shadows, grayer than the gloom. And every shot brought a volley in return. Smoke mingled with the gloom. In the slight intervals between rifleshots there were swift, rustling sounds and sharp thuds from arrows. Then the shrill strife of sound became continuous; it came from all around and closed in upon the doomed caravan. It swelled and rolled away and again there was silence.
4
In 1865, just after the war, a party of engineers was at work in the Wyoming hills on a survey as hazardous as it was problematical. They had charge of the laying out of the Union Pacific Railroad.
This party, escorted by a company of United States troops under Colonel Dillon, had encountered difficulties almost insurmountable. And now, having penetrated the wild hills to the eastern slope of the Rockies they were halted by a seemingly impassable barrier—a gorge too deep to fill, too wide to bridge.
General Lodge, chief engineer of the corps, gave an order to one of his assistants. “Put young Neale on the job. If we ever survey a line through this awful place we’ll owe it to him.”
The assistant, Baxter, told an Irishman standing by and smoking a short, black pipe to find Neale and give him the chief’s orders. The Irishman, Casey by name, was raw-boned, red-faced, and hard-featured, a man inured to exposure and rough life. His expression was one of extreme and fixed good humor, as if his face had been set, mask-like, during a grin. He removed the pipe from his lips.
“Gineral, the flag I’ve been holdin’ fer thot dom’ young surveyor is the wrong color. I want a green flag.”
Baxter waved the Irishman to his errand, but General Lodge looked up from the maps and plans before him with a faint smile. He had a dark, stern face and the bearing of a soldier.
“Casey, you can have any color you like,” he said. “Maybe green would change our luck.”
“Gineral, we’ll niver git no railroad built, an’ if we do it’ll be the Irish thot builds it,” responded Casey, and went his way.
Truly only one hope remained—that the agile and daring Neale, with his eye of a mountaineer and his genius for estimating distance and grade, might run a line around the gorge.
While waiting for Neale the engineers went over the maps and drawings again and again, with the earnestness of men who could not be beaten.
Lodge