AN UNEARNED REWARD
It is the very last corner of the world in which you would expect to find a sermon. Overhead hang the Colorado skies, curtains of deepest, dullest cobalt, against which the unthreatening white clouds stand out with a certain solidity, a tangible look seen nowhere else save in that clear air. All around are the great upland swells of the mountains, rising endlessly, ridge beyond ridge, like the waves of the sea. In a hollow beside the glittering track is the one sign of human existence in sight—the sun-scorched, brown railway station. It is an insignificant structure planted on a high platform. There is a red tool-chest standing against the wall; a tin advertisement of somebody’s yeast-cakes is nailed to the clap-boards; three buffalo hides, with horns still on them, hang over a beam by the coal-shed, and across the side of the platform, visible only to those approaching from the west, is written, in great, black letters:
THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.
This legend had no place there on the September afternoon, some years ago, when Carroll Forbes stepped off the west-bound express as it halted a minute at the desolate spot. Because it looked to him like the loneliest place in all the world the notion seized him suddenly, as the train drew up beside the high platform, to catch up his valise and leave the car. He was looking for a lonely place, and looking helplessly. He snatched at the idea that here might be what he sought, as a drowning man at the proverbial straw.
When the train had gone on and left him there, already repenting tremulously of what might prove his disastrous folly, a man, who was possibly the station agent—if this were indeed a station—came limping toward him with an inquiring look.
Forbes was a handsome man himself, and thoroughly aware of the value of beauty as an endowment. He was conscious of a half-envious pang as he faced the blonde giant halting across the platform. This was, or had been, a singularly perfect specimen of the physical man. Over six feet in height, muscular, finely proportioned, fair-haired and fair-skinned, with a curling, blonde beard, and big, expressionless blue eyes, he looked as one might who had been made when the world was young, and there was more room for mighty men than now.
The slight, olive-skinned young man who faced him was conscious of the sudden feeling of physical disadvantage that comes upon one in the presence of imposing natural objects, for the man was as august in his way as the cliffs and canyons.
“I am a—an artist,” said Carroll Forbes. “Is there any place hereabouts where I can get my meals and sometimes a bed, while I am sketching in the mountains?”
The man stared at him.
“Would it have been better if I had said I was a surveyor?” asked Forbes of his confused inner consciousness.
“We feed folks here sometimes—that is, my wife does. Mebbe you could have a shake-down in the loft. Or there’s Connor’s ranch off north a ways. But they don’t care about taking in folks up there.”
“Then, if you would ask your wife?” ventured Forbes, politely. “I shall not trouble you long,” he added.
“Ellen!”
A woman appeared at the door, then moving slowly forward, stood at her husband’s side, and the admiration Forbes had felt at the sight of the man flamed into sudden enthusiasm as he watched the wife. She was tall, with heavy, black hair, great eyes like unpolished jet, one of the thick white, smooth, perfectly colorless skins, which neither the sun nor the wind affect, and clear-cut, perfect features. Standing so, side by side, the two were singularly well worth looking at.
“What a regal pair!” was Forbes’s internal comment; and while they conferred together he watched them idly, wondering what their history was, for of course they had one. It is safe to affirm that every human creature cast in the mould of the beautiful has, or is to have, one.
“She says you c’n stay,” announced the man. “Just put those traps of yours inside, will you?” and, turning, he limped off the length of the platform at a call from somebody who had ridden up with jingling spurs.
Forbes, left to his own devices, picked up his valise, then set it down again and looked around him helplessly, wondering if there was a night train by which he could get away from this heaven-forsaken spot.
“If you want to see where you can sleep,” said a voice at his side, “I will show you.” It was the woman. She bent as she spoke to pick up some of his impedimenta, but he hastily forestalled her with a murmur of deprecation.
She turned and looked at him, and as he met her eyes it occurred to him that the indifference of her face was the indifference of the desert—arid and hopeless. The look she gave him was searching and impersonal; he saw no reason for it, nor for the slow, dark color that spread over her face, and there was less than no excuse for the way she set her lips and stretched a peremptory hand, saying, “Give me those,” in tones that could not be disobeyed. To his own astonishment he surrendered them, and followed her meekly up a ladder-like flight of steps to the rough loft over the station. It was unfinished, but partitioned into two rooms. She opened the door of one of these apartments, silently set his luggage inside, and vanished down the stairs.
Forbes sat down on the edge of a broken chair and looked about him.
“Now, in heaven’s name,” he demanded of the barren walls, “what have I let myself in for, and why did I do it?”
To this question there seemed no sufficient answer, and for awhile he sat there fretting with the futile anxiety of a man who knows that his fate pursues him, who hopes that this turning or that may help him to evade it, yet always feels the benumbing certainty that the path he has taken is the shortest road to that he would avoid. When at last—recognizing that his meditations were unprofitable—he rose and went down the stairs, it was supper-time.
The woman was uncommunicative, but he could feel that her eyes were on him. The man—it occurred to Forbes that he had probably been drinking—was talkative. After the meal was over they went outside. Forbes, by way of supporting his pretence of being an artist, took out a pocket sketch-book and made notes of the values of the clouds and the outlines of the hills against the sky in a sort of artistic short-hand. The man Wilson sat down on a bench and began to talk. Between the exciting effects of the whiskey he had taken, the soothing influence of the cigar Forbes proffered him, and a natural talent for communicativeness, he presently went on to tell his own story. Forbes listened attentively. It seemed a part of the melodrama of the whole situation and was as unreal to him as the flaming miracle of the western skies or his own presence here.
“So the upshot of it all was that we just skipped out. She ran away with me.”
It was a curious story. As Forbes listened he became aware that it was one with which he had occasionally met in the newspapers, but never in real life before. It was, apparently, the story of a girl belonging to a family of wealth and possibly of high social traditions—naturally he did not know what importance to attach to Wilson’s boast that his wife belonged “to the top of the heap”—who had eloped with the man who drove her father’s carriage.
The reasons for this revolt against the natural order of her life was obscure; there was, perhaps, too high a temper on her side and too strict a restraint on the part of her guardians. There was necessarily a total absence of knowledge of life; there was also the fact that the coachman was undoubtedly a fine creature to look at; there might have been a momentary yielding on the part of a naturally dramatic temperament to the impulse for the spectacular in her life.
But whatever the reasons, the result was the same. She had married this man and gone away with him, and they had drifted westward. And when they had gone so far west that coachmen of his stamp were no longer in demand, he took to railroading, and from brakeman became engineer; and finally, being maimed in an accident in which he had stood by his engine while the fireman jumped—breaking his neck thereby—he had picked up enough knowledge of telegraphy to qualify him for this post among the mountains. He and his handsome wife lived here and shared the everlasting solitude of the spot together, and occasionally fed stray travellers like this one who had dropped down on them to-day.
“He drinks over-freely and he swears profusely,” mused Forbes, scrutinizing him, “but he is too big to be cruel, and he still worships her beauty as she, perhaps, once worshipped his; and he still feels an uncouth pride in all that she gave up for his sake.”
It had never occurred to him before to wonder what the after-life of a girl who eloped with her father’s servant might be like. He speculated upon it now. By just what process does a woman so utterly déclassée adjust herself to her altered position? Would she make it a point to forget, or would every reminder of lives, such as her own had been, be a turning of the knife in her wound? Would not a saving recollection of the little refinements of life cling longer to a weak nature than to a strong one under such circumstances?
This woman apparently gave tongue to no vain regrets, for her husband was exulting in the “grit” with which she had taken the fortunes of their life. “No whine about her,” was his way of expressing his conviction that the courage of the thoroughbred was in her.
“No, sir; there’s no whine about her. Un she’s never been sorry, un, s’help me, she sha’n’t never be,” concluded Wilson. There were maudlin tears in his eyes.
“Few men can say that of their wives,” said Forbes’s smooth, sympathetic voice. “You are indeed fortunate.”
While her husband was repeating the oft-told tale of their conjugal happiness, Ellen Wilson had done her after-supper work, and, slipping out of the door, climbed the short, rocky spur to the north of the station. Beyond the summit, completely out of sight and hearing, there was a little hollow that knew her well, but never had it seen her as it saw her now, when, throwing herself down, her face to the earth, she shed the most scalding tears of all her wretched years.
They were such little things this stranger had done—things so slight, so involuntary, so unconscious that they did not deserve the name of courtesies, but they were enough to open the flood-gates of an embittered heart. There was a world where all the men were deferential and all the women’s lives were wrapped about with the fine, small courtesies of life—formal, but not meaningless. It had been her world once and now was so no longer.
Good or bad, she knew little and cared less, this man had come from that lost world of hers, as she was made aware by a thousand small signs, whose very existence she had forgotten; and silently, fiercely she claimed him as an equal.
“I—I too was—” Slow tears drowned the rest.
She could have told him how a déclassée grows used to it. She knew how the mind can adjust itself to any phase of experience, and had learned that what woman has undergone, woman can undergo—yes, and be strong about it. She knew how, under the impulse of necessity, the once impossible grows to be the accepted life, and the food that could not be swallowed becomes the daily bread.
When the struggle for existence becomes a hand-to-hand fight, traditions of one’s ancestry do not matter, except, possibly, that some traditions bind you to strength and silence, while others leave you free to scream. She knew what it was to forget the past and ignore the future, and survey the present with the single-hearted purpose of securing three meals a day, if possible; two, if it were not.
She had forgotten with what facility she might the faces and scenes that once were dear to her. She had nothing to do with them any longer, as she knew. She might, perhaps, have heard their names without emotion. But, even in this day and generation and among this democratic people, in the soul of a woman bred as she had been the feeling for her caste is the last feeling that dies. And to her anguish she found that in her it was not yet dead.
The color died from the sky, and the stars came swiftly out.
She rose at last. It was time that she should be going. She stretched out the tired arms upon which she had been lying, looked at the patient hands which had long lost the beauty her face still kept, and lifted her eyes to the solemn sky.
“I shall die some day,” she said, passionately. “No one can take that away from me. Thank Heaven, it is not one of the privileges a woman forfeits by marrying out of her station.”
Forbes stayed three days longer; restless, wretched days whenever he thought of himself and his position; sunlit and serene whenever his facile temperament permitted him to forget them. He felt that he should be moving on, yet, having stopped, was at a loss how to proceed. Staying or going seemed equally difficult and dangerous. He had no precedents to guide his action. Nothing in his previous life and training had ever fitted him to be a fugitive. He was, as he often reminded himself, not a fugitive from justice, but from injustice; which is quite another matter, but after all hardly more comfortable. He began to suspect that he might have been a fool to come away, but was too dazed to decide intelligently whether he should go forward or back. He was still in this undecided frame of mind on the morning of the third day.
Wilson and his wife performed by turns the duties of telegraph operator, with the difference that whereas she received by sound, he took the messages on paper. On the evening of the second day of Forbes’s stay, Wilson, sitting alone in the office, received a message from Pueblo that startled him.
“Great Scott!” he said, and looked around to see if his wife was in sight. She was not, and on reflection he felt thankful. It would be better not to have her know. There were some things women, even plucky ones, made a fuss about. They were not fond of seeing criminals taken, for instance. So he answered the message, and having made the requisite copy locked that in the office safe. The long strip of paper, with its lines of dots and dashes, he crumpled carelessly and dropped into the waste-basket.
The next afternoon Mrs. Wilson, in the process of sweeping out the room, upset the waste-basket, and the crumpled piece of paper fell out and rolled appealingly to her feet. There were a dozen messages on the strip, but the last one riveted her eyes. She read it, then read it again; returned it to the waste-basket and sat down to think with folded hands in lap, her white face as inscrutable as the Sphinx. What should she do? Should she do anything?
The man might be a criminal or he might not. The fact that he was followed by detectives with papers for his arrest, who might be expected to arrive on the afternoon train, proved nothing to her mind. At the same time, criminal or none, if she interfered it might prove a dangerous experiment for her, and was sure to be a troublesome one. Why, then, should she interfere?
There was only one reason, but it was a reason rooted in the dumb depths of her being—the depths that this man’s bearing had so disturbed. He was of her people; on her side—though it was the side that had cast her off. The faint, sweet memories of her earliest years pleaded for him; the enduring bitterness of that later life which she had lived sometimes forgetfully, sometimes—but this was rare—prayerfully, sometimes with long-drawn sighs, seldom with tears, always in silence, fought for him; the inextinguishable class-spirit fought for him—and fought successfully.
She looked at the clock. It lacked an hour of train-time. What she did must be done quickly.
She went out to her husband, loafing on the platform.
“I’ve got to go to Connor’s, Jim. There’s no butter and no eggs.”
Wilson looked up carelessly. “All right,” he said.
She went into the back room which served as kitchen and store-room and provided herself with a basket, into which she put meat and bread. As she left the station, Wilson came around to the side and called to her:
“You’ll be back by supper-time, Ellen?”
The woman nodded, not looking back, and plunged on up the rocky spur.
When she found him, an hour later, Forbes was lying on a sunny slope indulging in the luxury of a day-dream. He was stretched out at full length, his arms under his head, the sketch-book that he had not used lying by his side unopened. For the life of him he could not feel that his position was serious, and the mountain-air and the sunshine intoxicated him.
“Once I get clear of this thing,” he was saying to himself, “I’ll come back here and buy me a ranch. Why should anybody who can live here want to live anywhere else?”
To him in this pastoral mood appeared the woman. There was that in her face which made him spring to his feet in vague alarm before she opened her lips.
“They’re after you,” she said. “You must be moving. Do you know what you want to do? What was your idea in stopping here? Have you any plans?”
He shook his head helplessly. “I thought perhaps—Mexico?”
“Mexico! But what you want just now is a place to hide in till they have given you up and gone along. After that you can think about Mexico. Come! I’ve heard the whistle. The train is in. You’re all right if they don’t start to look for you before supper-time, and I hardly think they will, for they’ll expect you to come in. But if anybody should stroll out to look over the country, this place is in sight from the knoll beside the station. Come!”
Stumbling, he ran along beside her.
“I swear to you,” he said between his labored breaths, “I did not do it. I am not unworthy of your help. But the evidence was damning and my friends told me to clear out. I may have been a fool to come—but it is done.”
Her calm face did not change.
“You must not waste your breath,” she warned. “We have two miles to go, and then I must walk to Connor’s and get back by six o’clock, or there’ll be trouble.”
They were working their way back toward the station, but going farther to the east. She explained briefly that their objective point was the nearest canyon. She knew a place there where any one would be invisible both from above and below. It was fairly accessible—“if you are sure-footed,” she warned. Here he might hide himself in safety for a day or two. She had brought him food. It would not be comfortable, but it was hardly a question of his comfort.
“You are very good,” said Forbes, simply. “I don’t want to give myself up now. You are very good,” he repeated, wondering a little why she should take the pains.
She made no answer, only hastened on.
To Forbes the way seemed long. His feet grew heavy and his head bewildered. Was this really he, this man who was in flight from justice and dependent on the chance kindness of a stranger for shelter from the clutches of the law?
They reached the canyon and began to make their way slowly down and along its side. The woman led fearlessly over the twistings of a trail imperceptible to him. He followed dizzily. Suddenly she turned.
“It is just around this rock that juts out in front. Is your head steady? It falls off sheer below and the path is narrow.”
“Go on,” he said, and set his teeth.
The path was steep as well as narrow, and the descent below was sheer and far. Mid-way around the rocks a mist came over his eyes. He put up his hand, stumbled, fell forward and out, was dimly aware that he had fallen against his guide.
A crash and cry awoke the echoes of the canyon. Then silence settled over it again—dead silence—and the night came down.
Their bodies were not found until three days later. When the Eastern detectives had identified their man they proposed his burial, but Wilson turned from the place with the muscles of his throat working with impotent emotion, and a grim look about his mouth that lifted his lips like those of a snarling beast.
“Carrion! Let it lie,” he said, with so dark a face that the men followed him silently, saying nothing more, and the two were left lying upon the ground which had drunk with impartial thirst the current that oozed from their jagged wounds.
The suspicions of primitive men are of a primitive nature. Those three days in which nothing had been seen or heard of his wife or Forbes had been a long agony to Wilson. And now that the end had come it seemed to him that his basest suspicions were confirmed. To his restricted apprehension there was but one passion in the world that could have sent his wife to this stranger’s side, to guard and save him at her cost. So thinking, it seemed to him that swift justice had been done.
And that he might not forget, nor let his fierce thoughts of her grow more tender, the next day when the train had gone eastward and he was left alone to his desolation he took his brush and laboriously wrote across the end of the high platform, in great letters for all men to see and wonder at, the phrase he thought her fitting epitaph:
THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.
And there it still stands, remaining in its stupid, brutal accusation the sole monument on earth of a woman’s ended life.