CHAPTER XXXVI
VAN RUNS AMUCK
Instead of turning northward in the mountain range and riding on to the "Laughing Water" claim, Van continued straight ahead to Goldite. The letter to Beth was heavy in his pocket. Until he should rid himself of its burden he knew he should have no peace—no freedom to act for himself.
He had been delayed. The sun was setting when at last he rode his broncho to the hay-yard in the camp, and saw that he was fed with proper care. Then he got some boots and walked to Mrs. Dick's.
Beth, from her window, looking towards the sun, discovered him coming to the place. She had never in her life felt so wildly joyous at beholding any being of the earth. She had watched for hours, counting his steps across the desert's desolation one by one, tracing his course from Starlight "home" by all the signs along the trail which she and he had traveled together.
She ran downstairs like a child. She had momentarily forgotten even Glen. Nothing counted but this sight of Van—his presence here with herself. When she suddenly burst from the door into all the golden glory of the sunset, herself as glorious with color, warmth, and youth as the great day-orb in the west, Van felt his heart give one tumultuous heave in his breast, despite the resentment he harbored.
There had never been a moment when her smile had been so radiant, when the brown of her eyes had been so softly lighted and glowing, when her cheeks had so mirrored her beauty.
How superb she was, he said to himself—how splendid was her acting! He could almost forgive himself for having played the fool. His helplessness, his defenselessness had been warranted. But—her smile could befuddle him no more. He took off his hat, with a certain cold elegance of grace. His face still wore that chiseled appearance of stone-like hardness.
"Oh!" she cried, in her irrepressible happiness of heart. "You're home! You're safe! I'm glad!"
It was nothing, her cry that he was safe. She had worried only for the desert's customary perils, but this he could not know. He thought she referred to a possible meeting with Barger. He was almost swept from his balance by her look, for a bright bit of moisture had sprung in her eyes and her smile took on a tenderness that all but conquered him anew.
"I delivered your letter in Starlight," he said. "I return your brother's reply."
He had taken the letter from his pocket. He held it forth.
She took it. If memories of Glen started rushingly upon her, they were halted by something she felt in the air, something in the cold, set speech of the man she loved as never she had thought to love a creature of the earth. She made no reply, but stood looking peculiarly upon him, a question written plainly in her glance.
"If there is nothing more," he added, "permit me to wish you good-day." He swept off his hat as he had before, turned promptly on his heel, and departed the scene forthwith.
She tried to cry out, to ask him what it meant, but the thing had come like a blow. It had not been what he had said, so much as the manner of its saying—not so much what she had heard as what her heart had felt. A deluge of ice water, suddenly thrown upon her, could scarcely have chilled or shocked her more than the coldness that had bristled from his being.
Wholly at a loss to understand, she leaned in sudden weakness against the frame of the door, and watched him disappearing. Her smile was gone. In its place a dumb, white look of pain and bewilderment had frozen on her face. Had not that something, akin to anger, which her nature had felt to be emanating from him remained so potently to oppress her, she could almost have thought the thing a joke—some freakish mood of playfulness after all the other moods he had shown. But no such thought was possible. The glitter in his eyes had been unmistakable. Then, what could it mean?
She almost cried, as she stood there and saw him vanish. She had counted so much upon this moment. She had prayed for his coming safely back from the desert. She had so utterly unbound the fetters from her love. Confession of it all had been ready in her heart, her eyes, and on her lips. Reaction smote her a dulling blow. Her whole impulsive nature crept back upon itself, abashed—like something discarded, flung at her feet ingloriously.
"Oh—Van!" she finally cried, in a weak, hurt utterance, and back along the darkening hall she went, her hand with Glen's crushed letter pressed hard upon her breast.
Van, for his part, far more torn than he could have believed possible, proceeded down the street in such a daze as a drunken man might experience, emerging from liquor's false delights to life's cold, merciless facts. The camp was more emptied than he had ever known it since first it was discovered. Only a handful of the reservation stragglers had returned. The darkness would pour them in by hundreds.
Half way down the thoroughfare Van paused to remember what it was his body wanted. It was food. He started again, and was passing the bank when someone called from within.
"Hello, there—Van!" came the cry. "Hello! Come in!"
Van obeyed mechanically. The cashier, Rickart, it was who had shouted the summons—a little, gray-eyed, thin-faced man, with a very long moustache.
"How are you, Rick?" said the horseman familiarly. "What's going on?"
"Haven't you heard?—you?" interrogated Rickart. "I thought it was funny you were loafing along so leisurely. Didn't you know to-day was the day for the rush?"
"I did," said Van. "What about it?"
"Not much," his friend replied, "except your claim has been jumped by McCoppet and one J. Searle Bostwick, who got on to the fact that the reservation line included all your ground."
Van looked his incredulity.
"What's the joke?" he said. "I bite. What's the answer?"
"Joke?" the cashier echoed. "Joke? They had the line surveyed through, yesterday, and Lawrence confirmed their tip. Your claim, I tell you, was on reservation ground, and McCoppet had his crowd on deck at six o'clock this morning. They staked it out, according to law, as the first men on the job after the Government threw it open—and there they are."
Van leaned against the counter carelessly, and looked at his friend unmoved.
"Who told you the story?" he inquired. "Who brought it into camp?"
"Why a dozen men—all mad to think they never got on," said Rickart, not without heat. "It's an outrage, Van! You might have fought them off if you'd been on deck, and made the location yourself! Where have you been?"
Van smiled. The neatness of the whole arrangement began to be presented to his mind.
"Oh, I was out of the way all right," he said. "My friends took care of that."
"I thought there was something in the wind, all along," imparted the little cashier. "Bostwick and McCoppet have been thicker than thieves for a week. But the money they needed wasn't Bostwick's. I wired to New York to get his standing—and he's got about as much as a pin. But the girl stood in, you bet! She's got enough—and dug up thirty thousand bucks to handle the crowd's expenses."
Van straightened up slowly.
"The girl?"
"Miss Kent—engaged to Bostwick—you ought to know," replied the man behind the counter. "She's put up the dough and I guess she's in the game, for she turned it all over like a man."
Van laughed, suddenly, almost terribly.
"Oh, hell, Rick, come out and git a drink!" he said. "Here," as he noted a bottle in the desk, "give me some of that!"
Rickart gave him the bottle and a glass. He poured a stiff amber draught and raised it on high, a wild, fevered look in his eyes.
"Here's to the gods of law and order!" he said. "Here's to faith, hope, and charity. Here's to friendship, honor, and loyalty. Here's to the gallant little minority that love their neighbors as themselves. Give me perfidy or give me death! Hurray for treason, strategy, and spoils!"
He drank the liquid fire at one reckless gulp, and laughing again, in ghastly humor, lurched suddenly out at the open door and across to the nearest saloon.
Rickart, in sudden apprehension for the "boy" he genuinely loved, called out to him shrilly, but in vain. Then he scurried to the telephone, rang up the office of the sheriff, and presently had a deputy on the wire.
"Say, friend," he called, "if Bostwick or McCoppet should return to camp to-night, warn them to keep off the street. Van Buren's in, and I don't want the boy to mix himself in trouble."
"All right," came the answer, "I'm on."
In less than an hour the town was "on." Men returning by the scores and dozens, nineteen out of every twenty exhausted, angered with disappointment, and clamorous for refreshments, filled the streets, saloons, and eating houses, all of them talking of the "Laughing Water" claim, and all of them ready to sympathize with Van—especially at his expense.
His night was a mixture of wildness, outflamings of satire on the virtues, witty defiance of the fates, and recklessness of everything save reference to women. Not a word escaped his lips whereby his keenest, most delighted listener could have probed to the heart of his mood. To the loss of his claim was attributed all his pyrotechnics, and no one, unless it was Rickart, was aware of the old proverbial "woman in the case," who had planted the sting that stung.
Rickart, like a worried animal, following the footsteps of his master, sought vainly all night to head Van off and quiet him down in bed. At two in the morning, at McCoppet's gambling hall, where Van perhaps expected to encounter the jumpers of his claim, the little cashier succeeded at last in commanding Van's attention. Van had a glass of stuff in his hand—stuff too strong to be scathed by all the pure food enactments in the world.
"Look here, boy," said Rickart, clutching the horseman's wrist in his hand, "do you know that Gettysburg, and Nap, and Dave are camping on the desert, waiting for you to come home?"
Van looked at him steadily. He was far from being dizzied in his brain. Since the blow received at the hands of Beth had not sufficed to make him utterly witless, then nothing drinkable could overcome his reason.
"Home?" he said. "Waiting for me to come home."
Suddenly wrenching his hand from Rickart's grip he hurled the glass of liquor with all his might against the mirror of the bar. The crash rose high above the din of human voices. A radiating star was abruptly created in the firmament of glass, and Van was starting for the door.
The barkeeper scarcely turned his head. He was serving half a dozen men, and he said: "Gents, what's your poison?"
A crowd of half-intoxicated revelers started for Van and attempted to haul him back. He flung them off like a lot of pestiferous puppies, and cleared the door.
He went straight to the hay-yard, saddled his horse, and headed up over the mountains. He had eaten no dinner; he wanted none. The fresh, clean air began its work of restoration.
It was daylight when he reached the camp his partners had made on the desert. Napoleon and Gettysburg were drunk. Discouraged by his long delay, homeless, and utterly disheartened, they had readily succumbed to the conveniently bottled sympathy of friends.
No sooner had the horseman alighted at the camp than Napoleon flung himself upon him. He was weeping.
"What did I sh-sh-sh-sh-(whistle) shay?" he interrogated brokenly, "home from a foreign—quoth the r-r-r-r-r-(whistle) raven—NEVER MORE!"
Gettysburg waxed apologetic, as he held his glass eye in his hand.
"Didn't mean to git in thish condition, Van—didn't go to do it," he imparted confidentially. "Serpent that lurks in the glash."
Van resumed his paternal rôle with a meed of ready forgiveness.
"Let him who hath an untainted breath cast the first bottle," he said. Even old Dave, thought sober, was disqualified, and Algy was asleep.