Hidden Creek - Katharine Newlin Burt
HIDDEN CREEK
BY KATHARINE NEWLIN BURT
AUTHOR OF "THE BRANDING IRON" AND "THE RED LADY"
1920
TO MAXWELL STRUTHERS BURT WHO BLAZED THE TRAIL
CONTENTS
PART ONE: THE GOOD OLD WORLD
I. SHEILA'S LEGACY
II. SYLVESTER HUDSON COMES FOR HIS PICTURE
III. THE FINEST CITY IN THE WORLD
IV. MOONSHINE
V. INTERCESSION
VI. THE BAWLING-OUT
VII. DISH-WASHING
VIII. ARTISTS
IX. A SINGEING OF WINGS
X. THE BEACON LIGHT
XI. IN THE PUBLIC EYE
XII. HUDSON'S QUEEN
XIII. SYLVESTER CELEBRATES
XIV. THE LIGHT OF DAWN
XV. FLAMES
PART TWO: THE STARS
I. THE HILL
II. ADVENTURE
III. JOURNEY'S END
IV. BEASTS
V. NEIGHBOR NEIGHBOR
VI. A HISTORY AND A LETTER
VII. SANCTUARY
VIII. DESERTION
IX. WORK AND A SONG
X. WINTER
XI. THE PACK
XII. THE GOOD OLD WORLD AGAIN
XIII. LONELINESS
XIV. SHEILA AND THE STARS
HIDDEN CREEK
PART ONE
THE GOOD OLD WORLD
CHAPTER I
SHEILA'S LEGACY
Just before his death, Marcus Arundel, artist and father of Sheila,
bore witness to his faith in God and man. He had been lying apparently
unconscious, his slow, difficult breath drawn at longer and longer
intervals. Sheila was huddled on the floor beside his bed, her hand
pressing his urgently in the pitiful attempt, common to human love, to
hold back the resolute soul from the next step in its adventure. The
nurse, who came in by the day, had left a paper of instructions on the
table. Here a candle burned under a yellow shade, throwing a circle of
warm, unsteady light on the head of the girl, on the two hands, on the
rumpled coverlet, on the dying face. This circle of light seemed to
collect these things, to choose them, as though for the expression of
some meaning. It felt for them as an artist feels for his composition
and gave to them a symbolic value. The two hands were in the center of
the glow--the long, pale, slack one, the small, desperate, clinging
one. The conscious and the unconscious, life and death, humanity and
God--all that is mysterious and tragic seemed to find expression there
in the two hands.
So they had been for six hours, and it would soon be morning. The large,
bare room, however, was still possessed by night, and the city outside
was at its lowest ebb of life, almost soundless. Against the skylight the
winter stars seemed to be pressing; the sky was laid across the panes of
glass like a purple cloth in which sparks burned.
Suddenly and with strength Arundel sat up. Sheila rose with him, drawing
up his hand in hers to her heart.
"Keep looking at the stars, Sheila," he said with thrilling emphasis, and
widened his eyes at the visible host of them. Then he looked down at her;
his eyes shone as though they had caught a reflection from the myriad
lights. "It is a good old world," he said heartily in a warm and human
voice, and he smiled his smile of everyday good-fellowship.
Sheila thanked God for his return, and on the very instant he was gone.
He dropped back, and there were no more difficult breaths.
Sheila, alone there in the garret studio above the city, cried to her
father and shook him, till, in very terror of her own frenzy in the face
of his stillness, she grew calm and laid herself down beside him, put his
dead arm around her, nestled her head against his shoulder. She was
seventeen years old, left alone and penniless in the old world that he
had just pronounced so good. She lay there staring at the stars till they
faded, and the cold, clear eye of day looked down into the room.
CHAPTER II
SYLVESTER HUDSON COMES FOR HIS PICTURE
Back of his sallow, lantern-jawed face, Sylvester Hudson hid
successfully, though without intention, all that was in him whether of
good or ill. Certainly he did not look his history. He was
stoop-shouldered, pensive-eyed, with long hands on which he was always
turning and twisting a big emerald. He dressed quietly, almost correctly,
but there was always something a little wrong in the color or pattern of
his tie, and he was too fond of brown and green mixtures which did not
become his sallowness. He smiled very rarely, and when he did smile, his
long upper lip unfastened itself with an effort and showed a horizontal
wrinkle halfway between the pointed end of his nose and the irregular,
nicked row of his teeth.
Altogether, he was a gentle, bilious-looking sort of man, who might have
been anything from a country gentleman to a moderately prosperous clerk.
As a matter of fact, he was the owner of a dozen small, not too
respectable, hotels through the West, and had an income of nearly half a
million dollars. He lived in Millings, a town in a certain Far-Western
State, where flourished the most pretentious and respectable of his
hotels. It had a famous bar, to which rode the sheep-herders, the
cowboys, the ranchers, the dry-farmers of the surrounding country--yes,
and sometimes, thirstiest of all, the workmen from more distant
oil-fields, a dangerous crew. Millings at that time had not yielded to
the generally increasing "dryness" of the West. It was "wet,"
notwithstanding its choking alkali dust; and the deep pool of its
wetness lay in Hudson's bar, The Aura. It was named for a woman who had
become his wife.
When Hudson came to New York he looked up his Eastern patrons, and it was
one of these who, knowing Arundel's need, encouraged the hotel-keeper in
his desire to secure a "jim-dandy picture" for the lobby of The Aura and
took him for the purpose to Marcus's studio. On that morning, hardly a
fortnight before the artist's death, Sheila was not at home.
Marcus, in spite of himself, was managed into a sale. It was of an
enormous canvas, covered weakly enough by a thin reproduction of a range
of the Rockies and a sagebrush flat. Mr. Hudson in his hollow voice
pronounced it "classy." "Say," he said, "put a little life into the
foreground and that would please _me_. It's what I'm seekin'. Put in an
automobile meetin' one of these old-time prairie schooners--the old West
sayin' howdy to the noo. That will tickle the trade." Mark, who was
feeling weak and ill, consented wearily. He sketched in the proposed
amendment and Hudson approved with one of his wrinkled smiles. He offered
a small price, at which Arundel leapt like a famished hound.
When his visitors had gone, the painter went feverishly to work. The day
before his death, Sheila, under his whispered directions, put the last
touches to the body of the "auto_m_obile."
"It's ghastly," sighed the sick man, "but it will do--for Millings." He
turned his back sadly enough to the canvas, which stood for him like a
monument to fallen hope. Sheila praised it with a faltering voice, but he
did not turn nor speak. So she carried the huge picture out of his sight.
The next day, at about eleven o'clock in the morning, Hudson called. He
came with stiff, angular motions of his long, thin legs, up the four
steep, shabby flights and stopped at the top to get his breath.
"The picture ain't worth the climb," he thought; and then, struck by the
peculiar stillness of the garret floor, he frowned. "Damned if the feller
ain't out!" He took a stride forward and knocked at Arundel's door. There
was no answer. He turned the knob and stepped into the studio.
A screen stood between him and one half of the room. The other half was
empty. The place was very cold and still. It was deplorably bare and
shabby in the wintry morning light. Some one had eaten a meager breakfast
from a tray on the little table near the stove. Hudson's canvas stood
against the wall facing him, and its presence gave him a feeling of
ownership, of a right to be there. He put his long, stiff hands into his
pockets and strolled forward. He came round the corner of the screen and
found himself looking at the dead body of his host.
The nurse, that morning, had come and gone. With Sheila's help she had
prepared Arundel for his burial. He lay in all the formal detachment of
death, his eyelids drawn decently down over his eyes, his lips put
carefully together, his hands, below their white cuffs and black sleeves,
laid carefully upon the clean smooth sheet.
Hudson drew in a hissing breath, and at the sound Sheila, crumpled up in
exhausted slumber on the floor beside the bed, awoke and lifted her face.
It was a heart-shaped face, a thin, white heart, the peak of her hair
cutting into the center of her forehead. The mouth struck a note of life
with its dull, soft red. There was not lacking in this young face the
slight exaggerations necessary to romantic beauty. Sheila had a strange,
arresting sort of jaw, a trifle over-accentuated and out of drawing. Her
eyes were long, flattened, narrow, the color of bubbles filled with
smoke, of a surface brilliance and an inner mistiness--indescribable
eyes, clear, very melting, wistful and beautiful under sooty lashes and
slender, arched black brows.
Sheila lifted this strange, romantic face on its long, romantic throat
and looked at Hudson. Then she got to her feet. She was soft and silken,
smooth and tender, gleaming white of skin. She had put on an old black
dress, just a scrap of a flimsy, little worn-out gown. A certain slim,
crushable quality of her body was accentuated by this flimsiness of
covering. She looked as though she could be drawn through a ring--as
though, between your hands, you could fold her to nothing. A thin little
kitten of silky fur and small bones might have the same feel as Sheila.
She stood up now and looked tragically and helplessly at Hudson and
tried to speak.
He backed away from the bed, beckoned to her, and met her in the other
half of the room so that the leather screen stood between them and the
dead man. They spoke in hushed voices.
"I had no notion, Miss Arundel, that--that--of--this," Hudson began in a
dry, jerky whisper. "Believe _me_, I wouldn't 'a' thought of intrudin'. I
ordered the picture there from your father a fortnight ago, and this was
the day I was to come and give it a last looking-over before I came
through with the cash, see? I hadn't heard he was sick even, much
less"--he cleared his throat--"gone beyond," he ended, quoting from the
"Millings Gazette" obituary column. "You get me?"
"Yes," said Sheila, in her voice that in some mysterious way was another
expression of the clear mistiness of her eyes and the suppleness of her
body. "You are Mr. Hudson." She twisted her hands together behind her
back. She was shivering with cold and nervousness. "It's done, you see.
Father finished it."
Hudson gave the canvas an absent glance and motioned Sheila to a chair
with a stiff gesture of his arm.
"You set down," he said.
She obeyed, and he walked to and fro before her.
"Say, now," he said, "I'll take the picture all right. But I'd like to
know, Miss Arundel, if you'll excuse me, how you're fixed?"
"Fixed?" Sheila faltered.
"Why, yes, ma'am--as to finances, I mean. You've got some funds, or some
relations or some friends to call upon--?"
Sheila drew up her head a trifle, lowered her eyes, and began to plait
her thin skirt across her knee with small, delicate fingers. Hudson
stopped in his walk to watch this mechanical occupation. She struggled
dumbly with her emotion and managed to answer him at last.
"No, Mr. Hudson. Father is very poor. I haven't any relations. We have no
friends here nor anywhere near. We lived in Europe till quite lately--a
fishing village in Normandy. I--I shall have to get some work."
"Say!" It was an ejaculation of pity, but there was a note of triumph in
it, too; perhaps the joy of the gratified philanthropist.
"Now, look-a-here, little girl, the price of that picture will just about
cover your expenses, eh?--board and--er--funeral?"
Sheila nodded, her throat working, her lids pressing down tears.
"Well, now, look-a-here. I've got a missus at home."
Sheila looked up and the tears fell. She brushed them from her cheeks.
"A missus?"
"Yes'm--my wife. And a couple of gels about your age. Well, say, we've
got a job for you."
Sheila put her hand to her head as though she would stop a whirling
sensation there.
"You mean you have some work for me in your home?"
"You've got it first time. Yes, _ma'am_. Sure thing. At Millings, finest
city in the world. After you're through here, you pack up your duds and
you come West with me. Make a fresh start, eh? Why, it'll make me plumb
cheerful to have a gel with me on that journey ... seem like I'd Girlie
or Babe along. They just cried to come, but, say, Noo York's no place for
the young."
"But, Mr. Hudson, my ticket? I'm sure I won't have the money--?"
"Advance it to you on your pay, Miss Arundel."
"But what is the work?" Sheila still held her hand against her forehead.
Hudson laughed his short, cracked cackle. "Jest old-fashioned house-work,
dish-washing and such. 'Help' can't be had in Millings, and Girlie and
Babe kick like steers when Momma leads 'em to the dish-pan. Not that
you'd have to do it all, you know, just lend a hand to Momma. Maybe
you're too fine for that?"
"Oh, no. I have done all the work here. I'd be glad. Only--"
He came closer to her and held up a long, threatening forefinger. It was
a playful gesture, but Sheila had a distinct little tremor of fear. She
looked up into his small, brown, pensive eyes, and her own were held as
though their look had been fastened to his with rivets.
"Now, look-a-here, Miss Arundel, don't you say 'only' to me. Nor 'but.'
Nor 'if.' Nary one of those words, if you please. Say, I've got daughters
of my own and I can manage gels. I know _how_. Do you know my nickname?
Well--say--it's 'Pap.' Pap Hudson. I'm the adopting kind. Sort of
paternal, I guess. Kids and dogs follow me in the streets. You want a
recommend? Just call up Mr. Hazeldean on the telephone. He's the man that
fetched me here to buy that picture off Poppa."
"Oh," said Sheila, daughter of Mark who looked at stars, "of course
I shouldn't think of asking for a recommendation. You've been only
too kind--"
He put his hand on her shoulder in its thin covering and patted it,
wondering at the silken, cool feeling against his palm.
"Kind, Miss Arundel? Pshaw! My middle name's 'Kind' and that's the truth.
Why, how does the song go--''T is love, 't is love that makes the world
go round'--love's just another word for kindness, ain't it? And it's not
such a bad old world either, eh?"
Without knowing it, with the sort of good luck that often attends the
enterprises of such men, Hudson had used a spell. He had quoted, almost
literally, her father's last words and she felt that it was a message
from the other side of death.
She twisted about in her chair, took his hand from her shoulder, and drew
it, stiff and sallow, to her young lips.
"Oh," she sobbed, "you're kind! It _is_ a good world if there are such
men as you!"
When Sylvester Hudson went down the stairs a minute or two after Sheila's
impetuous outbreak, his sallow face was deeply flushed. He stopped to
tell the Irishwoman who rented the garret floor to the Arundels, that
Sheila's future was in his care. During this colloquy, pure business on
his side and mixed business and sentiment on Mrs. Halligan's, Sylvester
did not once look the landlady in the eye. His own eyes skipped hers, now
across, now under, now over. There are some philanthropists who are
overcome with such bashfulness in the face of their own good deeds. But,
sitting back alone in his taxicab on his way to the station to buy
Sheila's ticket to Millings, Sylvester turned his emerald rapidly about
on his finger and whistled to himself. And cryptically he expressed his
glow of gratified fatherliness.
"As smooth as silk," said Sylvester aloud.
CHAPTER III
THE FINEST CITY IN THE WORLD
So Sheila Arundel left the garret where the stars pressed close, and
went with Sylvester Hudson out into the world. It was, that morning, a
world of sawing wind, of flying papers and dust-dervishes, a world, to
meet which people bent their shrinking faces and drew their bodies
together as against the lashing of a whip. Sheila thought she had never
seen New York so drab and soulless; it hurt her to leave it under so
desolate an aspect.
"Cheery little old town, isn't it?" said Sylvester. "Gee! Millings is
God's country all right."
On the journey he put Sheila into a compartment, supplied her with
magazines and left her for the most part to herself--for which isolation
she was grateful. With her compartment door ajar, she could see him in
his section, when he was not in the smoking-car, or rather she could see
his lean legs, his long, dark hands, and the top of his sleek head. The
rest was an outspread newspaper. Occasionally he would come into the
compartment to read aloud some bit of information which he thought might
interest her. Once it was the prowess of a record-breaking hen; again it
was a joke about a mother-in-law; another time it was the Hilliard murder
case, a scandal of New York high-life, the psychology of which intrigued
Sylvester.
"Isn't it queer, though, Miss Arundel, that such things happen in the
slums and they happen in the smart set, but they don't happen near so
often with just plain folks like you and me! Isn't this, now, a real
Tenderloin Tale--South American wife and American husband and all their
love affairs, and then one day her up and shooting him! Money," quoth
Sylvester, "sure makes love popular. Now for that little ro-mance, poor
folks would hardly stop a day's work, but just because the Hilliards here
have po-sition and spon-dulix, why, they'll run a couple of columns about
'em for a week. What's your opinion on the subject, Miss Arundel?"
He was continually asking this, and poor Sheila, strange, bewildered,
oppressed by his intrusion into her uprooted life, would grope wildly
through her odds and ends of thought and find that on most of the
subjects that interested him, she had no opinions at all.
"You must think I'm dreadfully stupid, Mr. Hudson," she faltered once
after a particularly deplorable failure.
"Oh, you're a kid, Miss Sheila, that's all your trouble. And I reckon
you're half asleep, eh? Kind of brought up on pictures and country walks,
in--what's the name of the foreign part?--Normandy? No friends of your
own age? No beaux?"
Sheila shook her head, smiling. Her flexible smile was as charming as a
child's. It dawned on the gravity of her face with an effect of spring
moonlight. In it there was some of the mischief of fairyland.
"What _you_ need is--Millings," prescribed Sylvester. "Girlie and Babe
will wake you up. Yes, and the boys. You'll make a hit in Millings." He
contemplated her for an instant with his head on one side. "We ain't got
anything like you in Millings."
Sheila, looking out at the wide Nebraskan prairies that slipped
endlessly past her window hour by hour that day, felt that she would not
make a hit at Millings. She was afraid of Millings. Her terror of Babe
and Girlie was profound. She had lived and grown up, as it were, under
her father's elbow. Her adoration of him had stood between her and
experience. She knew nothing of humanity except Marcus Arundel. And he
was hardly typical--a shy, proud, head-in-the-air sort of man, who would
have been greatly loved if he had not shrunk morbidly from human
contacts. Sheila's Irish mother had wooed and won him and had made a
merry midsummer madness in his life, as brief as a dream. Sheila was all
that remained of it. But, for all her quietness, the shadow of his
broken heart upon her spirit, she was a Puck. She could make laughter
and mischief for him and for herself--not for any one else yet; she was
too shy. But that might come. Only, Puck laughter is a little unearthly,
a little delicate. The ear of Millings might not be attuned.... Just
now, Sheila felt that she would never laugh again. Sylvester's humor
certainly did not move her. She almost choked trying to swallow
becomingly the mother-in-law anecdote.
But Sylvester's talk, his questions, even his jokes, were not what most
oppressed her. Sometimes, looking up, she would find him staring at her
over the top of his newspaper as though he were speculating about
something, weighing her, judging her by some inner measurement. It was
rather like the way her father had looked a model over to see if she
would fit his dream.
At such moments Sylvester's small brown eyes were the eyes of an
artist, of a visionary. They embarrassed her painfully. What was it,
after all, that he expected of her? For an expectation of some kind he
most certainly had, and it could hardly have to do with her skill in
washing dishes.
She asked him a few small questions as they drew near to Millings. The
strangeness of the country they were now running through excited her and
fired her courage--these orange-colored cliffs, these purple buttes,
these strange twisting canons with their fierce green streams.
"Please tell me about Mrs. Hudson and your daughters?" she asked.
This was a few hours before they were to come to Millings. They had
changed trains at a big, bare, glaring city several hours before and
were now in a small, gritty car with imitation-leather seats. They were
running through a gorge, and below and ahead Sheila could see the brown
plain with its patches of snow and, like a large group of red toy
houses, the town of Millings, far away but astonishingly distinct in the
clear air.
Sylvester, considering her question, turned his emerald slowly.
"The girls are all _right_, Miss Sheila. They're lookers. I guess I've
spoiled 'em some. They'll be crazy over you--sort of a noo pet in the
house, eh? I've wired to 'em. They must be hoppin' up and down like a
popper full of corn."
"And Mrs. Hudson?"
Sylvester grinned--the wrinkle cutting long and deep across his lip.
"Well, ma'am, she ain't the hoppin' kind."
A few minutes later Sheila discovered that emphatically she was not the
hopping kind. A great, bony woman with a wide, flat, handsome face, she
came along the station platform, kissed Sylvester with hard lips and
stared at Sheila ... the stony stare of her kind.
"Babe ran the Ford down, Sylly," she said in the harshest voice Sheila
had ever heard. "Where's the girl's trunk?"
Sylvester's sallow face reddened. He turned quickly to Sheila.
"Run over to the car yonder, Miss Sheila, and get used to Babe, while I
kind of take the edge off Momma."
Sheila did not run. She walked in a peculiar light-footed manner which
gave her the look of a proud deer.
"Momma" was taken firmly to the baggage-room, where, it would seem, the
edge was removed with difficulty, for Sheila waited in the motor with
Babe for half an hour.
Babe hopped. She hopped out of her seat at the wheel and shook Sheila's
hand and told her to "jump right in."
"Sit by me on the way home, Sheila." Babe had a tremendous voice. "And
leave the old folks to gossip on the back seat. Gee! you're different
from what I thought you'd be. Ain't you small, though? You've got no
form. Say, Millings will do lots for you. Isn't Pap a character, though?
Weren't you tickled the way he took you up? Your Poppa was a painter,
wasn't he? Can you make a picture of me? I've got a steady that would be
just wild if you could."
Sheila sat with hands clenched in her shabby muff and smiled her
moonlight smile. She was giddy with the intoxicating, heady air, with the
brilliant sunset light, with Babe's loud cordiality. She wanted
desperately to like Babe; she wanted even more desperately to be liked.
She was in an unimaginable panic, now.
Babe was a splendid young animal, handsome and round and rosy, her body
crowded into a bright-blue braided, fur-trimmed coat, her face crowded
into a tight, much-ornamented veil, her head with heavy chestnut hair,
crowded into a cherry-colored, velvet turban round which seemed to be
wrapped the tail of some large wild beast. Her hands were ready to burst
from yellow buckskin gloves; her feet, with high, thick insteps, from
their tight, thin, buttoned boots, even her legs shone pink and plump
below her short skirt, through silk stockings that were threatened at the
seams. And the blue of her eyes, the red of her cheeks, the white of her
teeth, had the look of being uncontainable, too brilliant and full to
stay where they belonged. The whole creature flashed and glowed and
distended herself. Her voice was a riot of uncontrolled vitality, and, as
though to use up a little of all this superfluous energy, she was
violently chewing gum. Except for an occasional slight smacking sound, it
did not materially interfere with speech.
"There's Poppa now," she said at last. "Say, Poppa, you two sit in the
back, will you? Sheila and I are having a fine time. But, Poppa, you old
tin-horn, what did you mean by saying in your wire that she was a husky
girl? Why, she's got the build of a sagebrush mosquito! Look-a-here,
Sheila." Babe by a miracle got her plump hand in and out of a pocket and
handed a telegram to her new friend. "Read that and learn to know Poppa!"
Sylvester laughed rather sheepishly as Sheila read:
Am bringing home artist's A1 picture for The Aura and artist's A1
daughter. Husky girl. Will help Momma.