The Claim Jumpers - Stewart Edward White
"That's to show you where I am," came the clear voice. "You ought to
feel honoured. I've only three cones left."
The dike before which Bennington had paused was one of the round
variety. It rose perhaps twenty feet above the _debris_ at its base,
sheer, gray, its surface almost intact except for an insignificant
number of frost fissures. From its base the hill fell rapidly, so that,
even from his own inferior elevation, he was enabled to look over the
tops of trees standing but a few rods away from him. He could see that
the summit of this dike was probably nearly flat, and he surmised that,
once up there, one would become master of a pretty enough little
plateau on which to sit; but his careful circumvallation could discover
no possible method of ascent. The walls afforded no chance for a
squirrel's foothold even. He began to doubt whether he had guessed
aright as to the girl's whereabouts, and began carefully to examine the
tops of the trees. Discovering nothing in them, he cast another puzzled
glance at the top of the dike. A pair of violet eyes was scrutinizing
him gravely over the edge of it.
"How in the world did you get up there?" he cried.
"Flew," she explained, with great succinctness.
"Look out you don't fall," he warned hastily; her attitude was
alarming.
"I am lying flat," said she, "and I can't fall."
"You haven't told me how you got up. I want to come up, too."
"How do you know I want you?"
"I have such a lot of things to say!" cried Bennington, rather at a
loss for a valid reason, but feeling the necessity keenly.
"Well, sit down and say them. There's a big flat rock just behind you."
This did not suit him in the least. "I wish you'd let me up," he begged
petulantly. "I can't say what I want from here."
"I can hear you quite well. You'll have to talk from there, or else
keep still."
"That isn't fair!" persisted the young man, adopting a tone of
argument. "You're a girl----"
"Stop there! You are wrong to start with. Did you think that a creature
who could fly to the tops of the rocks was a mere girl? Not at all."
"What do you mean?" asked the easily bewildered Bennington.
"What I say. I'm not a girl."
"What are you then?"
"A sun fairy."
"A sun fairy?"
"Yes; a real live one. See that cloud over toward the sun? The nice
downy one, I mean. That's my couch. I sleep on it all night. I've got
it near the sun so that it will warm up, you see."
"I see," cried Bennington. He could recognise foolery--provided it were
ticketed plainly enough. He sat down on the flat rock before indicated,
and clasped his knee with his hands, prepared to enjoy more. "Is that
your throne up there, Sun Fairy?" he asked. She had withdrawn her head
from sight.
"It is," her voice came down to him in grave tones.
"It must be a very nice one."
"The nicest throne you ever saw."
"I never saw one, but I've often heard that thrones were unpleasant
things."
"I am sitting, foolish mortal," said she, in tones of deep
commiseration, "on a soft, thick cushion of moss--much more
comfortable, I imagine, than hard, flat rocks. And the nice warm sun
is shining on me--it must be rather chilly in the woods to-day. And
there is a breeze blowing from the Big Horn--old rocks are always damp
and stuffy in the shade. And I am looking away out over the Hills--I
hope some people enjoy the sight of piles of quartzite."
"Cruel sun fairy!" cried Bennington. "Why do you tantalize me so with
the delights from which you debar me? What have I done?"
There was a short silence.
"Can't you think of anything you've done?" asked the voice,
insinuatingly.
Bennington's conscience-stricken memory stirred. It did not seem so
ridiculous, under the direct charm of the fresh young voice that came
down through the summer air from above, like a dove's note from a
treetop, to apologize to Lawton's girl. The incongruity now was in
forcing into this Arcadian incident anything savouring of
conventionality at all. It had been so idyllic, this talk of the sun
fairy and the cloud; so like a passage from an old book of legends,
this dainty episode in the great, strong, Western breezes, under the
great, strong, Western sky. Everything should be perfect, not to be
blamed.
"Do sun fairies accept apologies?" he asked presently, in a subdued
voice.
"They might."
"This particular sun fairy is offered one by a man who is sorry."
"Is it a good big one?"
"Indeed, yes."
The head appeared over the edge of the rock, inspected him gravely for
a moment, and was withdrawn.
"Then it is accepted," said the voice.
"Thank you!" he replied sincerely. "And now are you going to let down
your rope ladder, or whatever it is? I really want to talk to you."
"You are so persistent!" cried the petulant voice, "and so foolish! It
is like a man to spoil things by questionings!"
He suddenly felt the truth of this. One can not talk every day to a sun
fairy, and the experience can never be repeated. He settled back on the
rock.
"Pardon me, Sun Fairy!" he cried again. "Rope ladders, indeed, to one
who has but to close her eyes and she finds herself on a downy cloud
near the sun. My mortality blinded me!"
"Now you are a nice boy," she approved more contentedly, "and as a
reward you may ask me one question."
"All right," he agreed; and then, with instinctive tact, "What do you
see up there?"
He could hear her clap her hands with delight, and he felt glad that he
had followed his impulse to ask just this question instead of one more
personal and more in line with his curiosity.
"Listen!" she began. "I see pines, many pines, just the tops of them,
and they are all waving in the breeze. Did you ever see trees from on
top? They are quite different. And out from the pines come great round
hills made all of stone. I think they look like skulls. Then there are
breathless descents where the pines fall away. Once in a while a little
white road flashes out."
"Yes," urged Bennington, as the voice paused. "And what else do you
see?"
"I see the prairie, too," she went on half dreamily. "It is brown now,
but the green is beginning to shine through it just a very little. And
out beyond there is a sparkle. That is the Cheyenne. And beyond that
there is something white, and that is the Bad Lands."
The voice broke off with a happy little laugh.
Bennington saw the scene as though it lay actually spread out before
him. There was something in the choice of the words, clearcut,
decisive, and descriptive; but more in the exquisite modulations of the
voice, adding here a tint, there a shade to the picture, and casting
over the whole that poetic glamour which, rarely, is imitated in
grosser materials by Nature herself, when, just following sunset, she
suffuses the landscape with a mellow afterglow.
The head, sunbonneted, reappeared perked inquiringly sideways.
"Hello, stranger!" it called with a nasal inflection, "how air ye? Do
y' think minin' is goin' t' pan out well this yar spring?" Then she
caught sight of his weapon. "What are you going to shoot?" she asked
with sudden interest.
"I thought I might see a deer."
"Deer! hoh!" she cried in lofty scorn, reassuming her nasal tone. "You
is shore a tenderfoot! Don' you-all know that blastin' scares all th'
deer away from a minin' camp?"
Bennington looked confused. "No, I hadn't thought of that," he
confessed stoutly enough.
"I kind of like to shoot!" said she, a little wistfully. "What sort of
a gun is it?"
"A Savage smokeless," answered Bennington perfunctorily.
"One of the thirty-calibres?" inquired the sunbonnet with new interest.
"Yes," gasped Bennington, astonished at so much feminine knowledge of
firearms.
"Oh! I'd like to see it. I never saw any of those. May I shoot it, just
once?"
"Of course you may. More than once. Shall I come up?"
"No. I'll come down. You sit right still on that rock."
The sunbonnet disappeared, and there ensued a momentary commotion on
the other side of the dike. In an instant the girl came around the
corner, picking her way over the loose blocks of stone. With the
finger-tips of either hand she held the pink starched skirt up,
displaying a neat little foot in a heavy little shoe. Diagonally across
the skirt ran two irregular brown stains. She caught him looking at
them.
"Naughty, naughty!" said she, glancing down at them with a grimace.
She dropped her skirt, and stood up beside him with a pretty shake of
the shoulders.
"Now let's see it," she begged.
She examined the weapon with much interest, throwing down and back the
lever in a manner that showed she was accustomed at least to the
old-style arm.
"How light it is!" she commented, squinting through the sights.
"Doesn't it kick awfully?"
"Not a bit. Smokeless powder, you know."
"Of course. What'll we shoot at?"
Bennington fumbled in his pockets and produced an envelope.
"How's this?" he asked.
She seized it and ran like an antelope--with the same _gliding_
motion--to a tree about thirty paces distant, on which she pinned the
bit of paper. They shot. Bennington hit the paper every time. The girl
missed it once. At this she looked a little vexed.
"You are either very rude or very sincere," was her comment.
"You're the best shot I ever saw----"
"Now don't dare say 'for a girl!'" she interrupted quickly. "What's the
prize?"
"Was this a match?"
"Of course it was, and I insist on paying up."
Bennington considered.
"I think I would like to go to the top of the rock there, and see the
pines, and the skull-stones, and the prairies."
She glanced toward him, knitting her brows. "It is my very own," she
said doubtfully. "I've never let anybody go up there before."
One of the diminutive chipmunks of the hills scampered out from a cleft
in the rocks and perched on a moss-covered log, chattering eagerly and
jerking his tail in the well-known manner of chipmunks.
"Oh, see! see!" she cried, all excitement in a moment. She seized the
rifle, and taking careful aim, fired. The chattering ceased; the
chipmunk disappeared.
Bennington ran to the log. Behind it lay the little animal. The long
steel-jacketed bullet had just grazed the base of its brain. He picked
it up gently in the palm of his hand and contemplated it.
It was such a diminutive beast, not as large as a good-sized rat, quite
smaller than our own fence-corner chipmunks of the East. It's little
sides were daintily striped, its little whiskers were as perfect as
those of the great squirrels in the timber bottom. In its pouches were
the roots of pine cones. Bennington was not a sentimentalist, but the
incident, against the background of the light-hearted day, seemed to
him just a little pathetic. Something of the feeling showed in his
eyes.
The girl, who had drawn near, looked from him to the dead chipmunk, and
back again. Then she burst suddenly into tears.
"Oh, cruel, cruel!" she sobbed. "What did I do it for? What did you
_let_ me do it for?"
Her distress was so keen that the young man hastened to relieve it.
"There," he reassured her lightly, "don't do that! Why, you are a great
hunter. You got your game. And it was a splendid shot. We'll have him
skinned when we get back home, and we'll cure the skin, and you can
make something out of it--a spectacle case," he suggested at random. "I
know how you feel," he went on, to give her time to recover, "but all
hunters feel that way occasionally. See, I'll put him just here until
we get ready to go home, where nothing can get him."
He deposited the squirrel in the cleft of a rock, quite out of sight,
and stood back as though pleased. "There, that's fine!" he concluded.
With one of those instantaneous transitions, which seemed so natural to
her, and yet which appeared to reach not at all to her real nature, she
had changed from an aspect of passionate grief to one of solemn
inquiry. Bennington found her looking at him with the soul brimming to
the very surface of her great eyes.
"I think you may come up on my rock," she said simply after a moment.
They skirted the base of the dike together until they had reached the
westernmost side. There Bennington was shown the means of ascent, which
he had overlooked before because of his too close examination of the
cliff itself. At a distance of about twenty feet from the dike grew a
large pine tree, the lowest branch of which extended directly over the
little plateau and about a foot above it. Next to the large pine stood
two smaller saplings side by side and a few inches apart. These had
been converted into a ladder by the nailing across of rustic rounds.
"That's how I get up," explained the girl. "Now you go back around the
corner again, and when I'm ready I'll call."
Bennington obeyed. In a few moments he heard again the voice in the air
summoning him to approach and climb.
He ascended the natural ladder easily, but when within six or eight
feet of the large branch that reached across to the dike, the smaller
of the two saplings ceased, and so, naturally, the ladder terminated.
"Hi!" he called, "how did you get up this?"
He looked across the intervening space expectantly, and then, to his
surprise, he observed that the girl was blushing furiously.
"I--I," stammered a small voice after a moment's hesitation, "I guess
I--_shinned_!"
A light broke across Bennington's mind as to the origin of the two dark
streaks on the gown, and he laughed. The girl eyed him reproachfully
for a moment or so; then she too began to laugh in an embarrassed
manner. Whereupon Bennington laughed the harder. He shinned up the
tree, to find that an ingenious hand rope had been fitted above the
bridge limb, so that the crossing of the short interval to the rock was
a matter of no great difficulty. In another instant he stood upon the
top of the dike.
It was, as he had anticipated, nearly flat. Under the pine branch,
which might make a very good chair back, grew a thick cushion of moss.
The one tree broke the freedom of the eye's sweep toward the west, but
in all other directions it was uninterrupted. As the girl had said, the
tops of pines alone met the view, miles on miles of them, undulating,
rising, swelling, breaking against the barrier of a dike, or lapping
the foot of a great round boulder-mountain. Here and there a darker
spot suggested a break for a mountain peak; rarely a fleck of white
marked a mountain road. Back of them all--ridge, mountain, cavernous
valley--towered old Harney, sun-browned, rock-diademed, a few wisps of
cloud streaming down the wind from his brow, locks heavy with the age
of the great Manitou whom he was supposed to represent. Eastward, the
prairie like a peaceful sea. Above, the alert sky of the west. And
through all the air a humming--vast, murmurous, swelling--as the
mountain breeze touched simultaneously with strong hand the chords, not
of one, but a thousand pine harps.
Bennington drew in a deep breath, and looked about in all directions.
The girl watched him.
"Ah! it is beautiful!" he murmured at last with a half sigh, and looked
again.
She seized his hand eagerly.
"Oh, I'm so glad you said that--and no more than that!" she cried. "I
feel the sun fairy can make you welcome now."
CHAPTER V
THE SPIRIT MOUNTAIN
"From now on," said the girl, shaking out her skirts before sitting
down, "I am going to be a mystery."
"You are already," replied Bennington, for the first time aware that
such was the fact.
"No fencing. I have a plain business proposition to make. You and I are
going to be great friends. I can see that now."
"I hope so."
"And you, being a--well, an open-minded young man" (Now what does she
mean by that? thought Bennington), "will be asking all about myself. I
am going to tell you nothing. I am going to be a mystery."
"I'm sure----"
"No, you're not sure of anything, young man. Now I'll tell you this:
that I am living down the gulch with my people."
"I know--Mr. Lawton's."
She looked at him a moment. "Exactly. If you were to walk straight
ahead--not out in the air, of course--you could see the roof of the
house. Now, after we know each other better, the natural thing for you
to do will be to come and see me at my house, won't it?"
Bennington agreed that it would.
"Well, you mustn't."
Bennington expressed his astonishment.
"I will explain a very little. In a month occurs the Pioneer's Picnic
at Rapid. You don't know what the Pioneer's Picnic is? Ignorant boy!
It's our most important event of the year. Well, until that time I am
going to try an experiment. I am going to see if--well, I'll tell you;
I am going to try an experiment on a man, and the man is you, and I'll
explain the whole thing to you after the Pioneer's Picnic, and not a
moment before. Aren't you curious?"
"I am indeed," Bennington assured her sincerely.
She took on a small air of tyranny. "Now understand me. I mean what I
say. If you want to see me again, you must do as I tell you. You must
take me as I am, and you must mind me."
Bennington cast a fleeting wonder over the sublime self-confidence
which made this girl so certain he would care to see her again. Then,
with a grip at the heart, he owned that the self-confidence was well
founded.
"All right," he assented meekly.
"Good!" she cried, with a gleam of mischief. "Behold me! Old Bill
Lawton's gal! If you want to be pards, put her thar!"
"And so you are a girl after all, and no sun fairy," smiled Bennington
as he "put her thar."
"My cloud has melted," she replied quietly, pointing toward the brow of
Harney.
They chatted of small things for a time. Bennington felt intuitively
that there was something a little strange about this girl, something a
little out of the ordinary, something he had never been conscious of in
any other girl. Yet he could never seize the impression and examine it.
It was always just escaping; just taking shape to the point of
visibility, and then melting away again; just rising in the
modulations of her voice to a murmur that the ear thought to seize as
a definite chord, and then dying into a hundred other cadences. He
tried to catch it in her eyes, where so much else was to be seen.
Sometimes he perceived its influence, but never itself. It passed as a
shadow in the lower deeps, as though the feather mass of a great sea
growth had lifted slowly on an undercurrent, and then as slowly had
sunk back to its bed, leaving but the haunting impression of something
shapeless that had darkened the hue of the waters. It was most like a
sadness that had passed. Perhaps it was merely an unconscious trick of
thought or manner.
After a time she asked him his first name, and he told her.
"I'd like to know your's too, Miss Lawton," he suggested.
"I wish you wouldn't call me Miss Lawton," she cried with sudden
petulance.
"Why, certainly not, if you don't want me to, but what am I to call
you?"
"Do you know," she confided with a pretty little gesture, "I have
always disliked my real name. It's ugly and horrid. I've often wished
I were a heroine in a book, and then I could have a name I really
liked. Now here's a chance. I'm going to let you get up one for me, but
it must be pretty, and we'll have it all for our very own."
"I don't quite see----" objected the still conventional de Laney.
"Your wits, your wits, haven't you any wits at _all_?" she cried with
impatience over his unresponsiveness.
"Well, let me see. It isn't easy to do a thing like that on the spur of
the moment, Sun Fairy. A fairy's a fay, isn't it? I might call you
Fay."
"Fay," she repeated in a startled tone.
Bennington remembered that this was the name of the curly-haired young
man who had lent him the bucking horse, and frowned.
"No, I don't believe I like that," he recanted hastily.
"Take time and think about it," she suggested.
"I think of one that would be appropriate," he said after some little
time. "It is suggested by that little bird there. It is Phoebe."
"Do you think it is appropriate," she objected. "A Phoebe bird or a
Phoebe girl always seemed to me to be demure and quiet and thoughtful
and sweet-voiced and fond of dim forests, while I am a frivolous,
laughing, sunny individual who likes the open air and doesn't care for
shadows at all."
"Yet I feel it is appropriate," he insisted. He paused and went on a
little timidly in the face of his new experience in giving expression
to the more subtle feelings. "I don't know whether I can express it or
not. You are laughing and sunny, as you say, but there is something in
you like the Phoebe bird just the same. It is like those cloud
shadows." He pointed out over the mountains. Overhead a number of
summer clouds were winging their way from the west, casting on the
earth those huge irregular shadows which sweep across it so swiftly,
yet with such dignity; so rushingly, and yet so harmlessly. "The hills
are sunny and bright enough, and all at once one of the shadows crosses
them, and it is dark. Then in another moment it is bright again."
"And do you really see that in me?" she asked curiously. "You are a
dear boy," she continued, looking at him for some moments with
reflective eyes. "It won't do though," she said, rising at last. "It's
too 'fancy.'"
"I don't know then," he confessed with some helplessness.
"I'll tell you what I've always _wanted_ to be called," said she, "ever
since I was a little girl. It is 'Mary.'"
"Mary!" he cried, astonished. "Why, it is such a common name."
"It is a beautiful name," she asserted. "Say it over. Aren't the
syllables soft and musical and caressing? It is a lovely name. Why I
remember," she went on vivaciously, "a girl who was named Mary, and who
didn't like it. When she came to our school she changed it, but she
didn't dare to break it to the family all at once. The first letter
home she signed herself 'Mae.' Her father wrote back, 'My dear
daughter, if the name of the mother of Jesus isn't good enough for you,
come home.'" She laughed at the recollection.
"Then you have been away to school?" asked the young man.
"Yes," she replied shortly.
She adroitly led him to talk of himself. He told her naively of New
York and tennis, of brake parties and clubs, and even afternoon teas
and balls, all of which, of course, interested a Western girl
exceedingly. In this it so happened that his immaturity showed more
plainly than before. He did not boast openly, but he introduced
extraneous details important in themselves. He mentioned knowing
Pennington the painter, and Brookes the writer, merely in a casual
fashion, but with just the faintest flourish. It somehow became known
that his family had a crest, that his position was high; in short, that
he was a de Laney on both sides. He liked to tell it to this girl,
because it was evidently fresh and new to her, and because in the
presence of her inexperience in these matters he gained a confidence in
himself which he had never dared assume before.
She looked straight in front of her and listened, throwing in a
comment now and then to assist the stream of his talk. At last, when he
fell silent, she reached swiftly out and patted his cheek with her
hand.
"You are a dear big _boy_," she said quietly. "But I like it--oh, so
much!"
From the tree tops below the clear warble of the purple finch
proclaimed that under the fronds twilight had fallen. The vast green
surface of the hills was streaked here and there with irregular peaks
of darkness dwindling eastward. The sun was nearly down.
A sudden gloom blotted out the fretwork of the pine shadows that had,
during the latter part of the afternoon, lain athwart the rock. They
looked up startled.
The shadow of Harney had crept out to them, and, even as they looked,
it stole on, cat-like, across the lower ridges toward the East. One
after another the rounded hills changed hue as it crossed them. For a
moment it lingered in the tangle of woods at the outermost edge, and
then without further pause glided out over the prairie. They watched it
fascinated. The sparkle was quenched in the Cheyenne; the white gleam
of the Bad Lands became a dull gray, scarce distinguishable from the
gray of the twilight. Though a single mysterious cleft a long yellow
bar pointed down across the plains, paused at the horizon, and slowly
lifted into the air. The mountain shadow followed it steadily up into
the sky, growing and growing against the dullness of the east, until at
last over against them in the heavens was the huge phantom of a
mountain, infinitely greater, infinitely grander than any mountain ever
seen by mortal eyes, and lifting higher and higher, commanded upward by
that single wand of golden light. Then suddenly the wand was withdrawn
and the ghost mountain merged into the yellow afterglow of evening.
The girl had watched it breathless. At its dissolution she seized the
young man excitedly by the arm.
"The Spirit Mountain!" she cried. "I have never seen it before; and now
I see it--with you."
She looked at him with startled eyes.
"With you," she repeated.
"What is it? I don't understand."
She did not seem to hear his question.
"What is it?" he asked again.
"Why--nothing." She caught her breath and recovered command of herself
somewhat. "That is, it is just an old legend that I have often heard,
and it startled me for a minute."