II.
The first dry moon was just past the full. At nine o'clock the sky began to whiten above the long, bare ridge of the side-hill cut. At half past, the edge of the moon's disk clove the sky-line, and the shadow of the ridge crept down among the willows and tule-beds of the bottom. At ten the shadow had shrunk; it lay black on the ditch-bank, but the whispering treetops below were turning in silver light that flickered along the cow-path and caught the still eye of a dark, shallow pool among the tules.
Nancy had chosen this night for a stroll to the bridge, where Travis might be expected to pass, any time between eight o'clock and moonrise. Instead of Travis came a man whom she recognized as one of the watchmen from a lower division. He saluted her, after the custom of the country, claiming nothing on personal grounds but the privilege to look rather hard at the girlish figure silhouetted against the water. It was yet early enough for sky-gleams to linger on still pools, or to color the wimpling reaches of the ditch.
Nancy was disappointed; she had not come out to see a strange rider passing on Travis's gray horse. Her little plans were disconcerted. She had waited for what she considered a dignified interval, before seeming to take cognizance of her watchman's hours; now it appeared that the part of dignity might be overdone. Had Travis been superseded on his beat? She was conscious of missing him already. Her walk home, through the confidential willows, struck a chill of loneliness which the aspect of the house did not dispel. All was as dark and empty as she had left it. Was her father still at work at those tedious dams? This had been his given reason for frequent absences of late, after his usual working hours; though why he should choose the dark nights for mending his dams Nancy had not asked herself. To-night she wanted him, or somebody, to drive away this queer new ache that made the moonlight too large and still for one little girl to wander in alone.
She searched for him. He was in none of the expected places; the dank fields were as empty as the house. She turned back to the ditch; from its high bank she could see farther into the shadowy places of the bottom.
Travis, meanwhile, had been leisurely pursuing his evening beat. He had overtaken one of his fellow-watchmen, on foot, walking to town, had lent him his horse for the last two miles to camp, and invited him to help himself to what he could find for supper, without waiting for his host.
“It is a still night,” said Travis; “I'll mog along slowly up the ditch, and put in a little extra listening: it's at night the water talks.”
Long after the rider had passed on, the tread of his horse's hoofs was heard, diminishing on the hard-tramped bank; a loosened stone rattled down and splashed into the water; the wind rustled in the tule-beds; then all surface sounds ceased, and the only talker was the ditch, chuckling and dawdling like an idle child on its errand, which it could not be persuaded to take seriously, to the desert lands.
Travis came to the ticklish spot near the bridge, and stopped to listen. Here the ditch cut through beds of clean sand, where the water might sink and work back into the old ground, the sand holding it like a sponge, till all the bottom became a bog, and the banks sank in one wide-spread, general wash-out. The first symptom of such deep-seated trouble would be the water's motion in the ditch,—whirling round and round as if boring a hole in the bottom.
Travis laid his ear to the current, for he could judge of the water's movement by the sound. All seemed right at the bridge, but far up the ditch he was aware of a new demonstration. He listened awhile, and then walked on with long, light steps and gained upon the sound, which persisted, defining itself as a muffled churning at marked intervals, with now and then a wait between. The prodding was of some tool at work under water, at the ditch-bank.
He crossed to the upper side, and moved forward cautiously along the ridge, crouching that his figure might not be seen against the sky.
Nancy had gone up the cow-trail, past the low grounds, and was just climbing the bank when a dark shape, of man or beast, crashed down the opposite slope and shot like a slide of rock into the water.
A half-choked cry followed the plunge, then ugly sounds of a scuffle under the ditch-bank—men breathing hard, sighing and snorting; and somebody gasped as if he were being held down till his breath was gone.
“Get in there, you old muskrat! You shall stop your own breaks if it takes your cursed carcass to do it! Now then, have you got your breath?”
Nancy stayed only to hear a voice that was her father's, convulsed with terror and the chill of his repeated duckings, begging to be spared the anguish of drowning by night in three feet of ditch-water.
“Mr. Travis,” she screamed, “you let my father be, whatever you are doing to him! Father, you come right home and get on dry clothes!”
Travis was as much amazed as if Diana with the moon on her forehead had appeared on the ditch-bank to take old Solomon Lark under her maiden protection; but no less he stuck to his prize of war.
“Your father hasn't time to change his clothes just yet, Miss Nancy; he's got some work to do first.”
“Who are you, to be setting my father to work? Let go of him this minute! You are drowning him; you are choking him to death!” sobbed the frantic girl. The shadow fortunately withheld the details of her father's condition, but she had seen enough. Had Travis been drinking? Was the man bereft of his senses?
He was quite himself apparently,—hideously cool, yet roused, and his voice cut like steel.
“You had better go home, Miss Nancy, and light a fire and warm a blanket for your father's bed. He'll be pretty cold before he gets through with this night's work.”
After this cruel speech he took no more notice of Nancy, but leaped upon the ditch-bank and began hurling earth in great shovelfuls, patting the old man on the head with his cold tool whenever he tried to clamber up after him.
“You'd better not try that,” he roared in a terrible voice that wounded Nancy like a blow. “Get in there, now! Puddle, puddle, or I'll have you buried to the ears in five minutes!”
It was shocking, hideous, like a horrible dream. The earth rattled down all about Solomon, and frequently upon him; the water was thick with mud, and the wretched old man tramped and puddled for dear life, helping to mend the hole which he had secretly dug where no eye could discover, till the water had fingered it and enlarged the mischief to a break.
It was the work of vermin, and as such Travis had treated his prisoner. Nancy felt the insult as keenly as she abhorred the cruelty. She fled, hysterical with wrath and despair at her own helplessness. But while she made ready the means of consolation at home, her thinking powers came back, and, between what she suspected and what she remembered, she was not wholly in the dark as to the truth between her father and Travis.
There was no one to warm Travis's blankets, when he fell back upon camp about daybreak, reeking with cold perspiration, soaked with ditch-water and sore in every muscle from his frenzy of shoveling. He had had no supper the night before; his guest had eaten all the cooked food, burned all his light-wood kindlings, and forgotten to cover the bread-pail, and his bread was full of sand. He didn't think much of those tenderfeet, who called themselves ditch-men, on that lower division where there was no work at all to speak of.
He began—worse comfort—to consider his police work from a daughter's point of view. Alas for himself and Nancy! His idyl of the ditch was shattered like the tender sky-reflections that bloomed on its still waters, and vanished when the waters were troubled. His own thoughts were as that roily pool where he had ducked the old man in the darkness. He overslept himself, after thinking he should not sleep at all, and started down his beat not until noon of the next day. Halfway to the bridge on the ditch-bank he met Nancy Lark. She gave him a note, which he dismounted to take, she vouchsafing no greeting, not even a look, and standing apart while he read it, with the air of a martyr to duty.
Mr. Travis [the letter ran],—I am a death-struck man in consequence of your outrageous treatment of me last evening. I've took a dum chill, and it has hit me in the vitals through standing in water up to my armpits. If you think your fool ditch is worth more than a Human's life, though your company's enemy, that's for you to settle as you can when the time comes you'll have to. I don't ask any favors. But if you got anny desency left in you through working for that fish-livered company of bondholders coming out here to stomp us farmers into the dirt, you will call this bizness quits. I aint in no shape to fight ditches no more. You have put me where I be, and the less said on both sides the better, it looks to me. If that's so you can say so by word or writing. I should prefer writing as I aint got that confidence I might have. Yours truly,