The Freebooters of the Wilderness

by Agnes C. Laut

She had promised. Then, she had spent a most miserable morning. Why was it to be the last ride? She had not cared to go out. Though the papers had suppressed all details of the cowardly assassination, the glare of publicity had been focussed too keenly on her for comfort by that explosion of the old frontiersman in the court room. She had remained in all morning watching the motley crowds of a frontier town surge past the hotel windows down the dusty hot main street, with its medley of fine brick blocks, and poor shacks, and saloons, and false fronts—little unpainted restaurants and cigar stands and gambling places of one-story, with a false timber wall running up a couple of stories.

"United States of the World," the old frontiersman had called this country. Surely that was the true name of the wonderful new country that had defied all traditions and mingled in her making the races from every corner of the world! An immigrant train had come in. Eleanor lifted the parlor window, and looked, and listened. Jap and Chinese and Hindoo—strikingly tall fellows with turbaned head gear; negro and West Indians and Malay; German and Russian and Poles and Assyrians. In half an hour, she did not hear one word of pure English, or what could be called American. Oh, it was good to be alive in this wonderful new world under these wonderful new conditions working out the age-old problem of right and wrong that had defied solution since time began! She did not mind the crudity. And if I am to be frank, she did not mind the rudity. It was not a boiled shirt-front, kid-glove world. In fact, at that moment she saw her hero stage driver shooting out tobacco squids at the innocent granolithic, which showed no target because so many other contributors had preceded the stage driver. In fact, it was not a world for a lady with a train, though Eleanor saw some trollopy immigrant "ladies" emerging from a big tent on a back lot decked with tawdry lace and sporting trains in inverse proportions to the sufficiency of their "h's." Nor was it a perfumed world. She could smell the reek of the whiskey saloons all down the street—eleven of them, there were in a succession of twelve buildings; and the twelfth building, if Eleanor had known it, was a gambling joint of the Chinese variety that had iron shutters and iron doors and signs up for "Gentlemen Only." Let us hope, dear reader, that "gentlemen only" entered behind the dark of those iron doors! She could not help wondering had the old day passed forever in the West. Was a new day not dawning? What was to become of all these incoming people? Could the cattle barons and the sheep kings and the land rings fence them off the vast, broad, idle acres forever?

Yet this was the world where her father had come penniless, a refugee from miscarried justice, and had won out. It was the world where he had been shot down by some miserable, criminal assassin, who, it was more than likely, had mistaken him for Wayland. It was Wayland's world, a world in the making. Well had Matthews designated it—The United States of the World! More Jews than in Palestine; more Germans than in Berlin; more Italians than in Rome; more Russians than in St. Petersburg; more Canadians than in any four Canadian cities combined; more descendants of the British than in the British Isles—the United States of the World in the Making! Was it any wonder crime was rampant; and Democracy rocked to the shock of collision and miscalculation and inexperience; and Righteousness became a tacking to progress, not a straight line, like the zig-zag of the ship making headway all the time, but tacking back and forward to wind and current? It was good to be alive and take part in the making of the United States of the World!

She had had breakfast and luncheon in her apartments. At mid-day, she saw Wayland coming along the thronged main street. At every step, some man stopped him to shake hands; and groups turned and gazed after him as he passed, and spat their approval or disapproval with great emphasis at the mottled pavement. Below the window, a big Swede grabbed his two shoulders with the grip of a steam crane.

"Say, you Vaylan', huh?" he asked. "Say, you a' right! You ever need yob, Vaylan', you 'ply our union! Huh?" and he laughed, and went on; and the tears welled to Eleanor's eyes.

Then came the lawyer to read the will; and after the lawyer's departure, Matthews had told her how she concerned his errand down from the North; and when the door closed on Matthews, she burst into tears.

She saw the street lights come twinkling out, and she did not turn on the light of the sitting room chandelier. Did he love her at all; or if he did, did he know what this waiting all day meant to a woman? Then, it came to her in a flash, his wistful look in the morning behind the forced gayety, his reference to the last ride, to keeping resolutions. Was that resolution for the sake of his work at all; or for her? Of course, Matthews had told him in the Desert; and with the thought, the weight that had oppressed her rolled from her heart. She jumped from her chair and uttered a low cry of happy laughter.

"Oh, I'll soon make short work of that resolution," she vowed.

Alas and alas! Samson straining his manhood for strength to shore up a resolution, and here was a sharpening of scissors to shear him well!

There was a knock on the door. She thought it the waiter coming up with a late dinner and had called "come in," when the door opened, and in the glare of light from the hall way stood the news editor, embarrassed and hesitating.