The curtain of years had fallen and risen again on the same scene, the valley which stretched off toward the setting sun and the guardian mountain which stood unchanged at its head. But this was October, the royal season of purple and gold and red, when the asters and sunflowers were blooming their lives away in one lavish outpouring of beauty and the rose bushes were crimson under the kiss of the frost. A shimmering mass of gold clothed the great cotton-woods along the winding course of the creek and hills of russet brown replaced those of vivid green I had first seen sixteen years before.
Where the young bride had stood on that July day, amid the strange surroundings, looking with inexperienced eyes upon a new world, she stood again, seeing it from the angle of a participant, from the viewpoint of a woman, fused by the furnace of experience into a part of that life.
It was the same scene, but the setting had changed and as a flood of memories swept over me I felt as though I were a reincarnated spirit, walking the earth in a third phase of existence, having passed through the first, a light-hearted girl among family and friends in urban surroundings, having lived through the second, an atom in the midst of those vast wind-swept plains amongst elemental conditions, a part in the great primitive struggle for existence and coming back again to find the prairies transformed by cultivation into farms, with the crops covering the hills and bottom lands like a huge patch-work quilt of green, brown and brilliant yellow, fastened together with black threads of barbed wire.
Above on the hill stood a church and a school-house, those certain indications of community life. Across the meadows great red barns and towering wind mills overshadowed the less pretentious houses. Bridges spanned the creek with its shifting, treacherous sand and in place of the dim winding trails across the prairie, neatly fenced county roads decorously followed the section lines.
It was the same—yet everything was changed. This well-ordered farming community seemed prosaic, it lacked the romance and charm of the old ranch life and the glorious sense of unlimited freedom.
The bunkhouse was occupied by the family of a hard-working farmer who had married the daughter of our caretaker, Parker; tractors, ploughs and harrows filled the space about the blacksmith shop. I resented those unfamiliar implements and the prosperous farms. On all sides there was heard a strange language of silos, separators and “crop rotation”. I had become a part of the old life, but here I felt restricted and out of place—an alien.
Inside the house all, too, was changed. The books which Joe had scorned, the crystal clock and our Lares and Penates were in our Denver home, but on the ranch I missed them and most of all the old familiar faces. All had gone. Several of the boys had stayed in the country, married and taken up farming, raising bounteous crops and numerous children. Some, individual and picturesque to the end, had crossed the Great Divide, others had sought new positions in Wyoming, the last of the frontier states. Bill was there cooking in an oil camp. We received characteristic, though infrequent, letters from him, usually in the early summer, labored epistles over which he had “sworn and sweat,” as he expressed it, which began by assuring us that he was well and hoped that we were the same and ended by an earnest request to go with us as cook “in case you was thinkin’ of goin’ campin’.” He went with us when we did go, the same old Bill, unchanged in heart or humor.
Old Bohm was dead. The final act of that great tragedy took place in an isolated mine where he had sunk all his fortune in a golden prospect. Hoping to regain it, the fortune he held in trust for a friend had followed, but the game he had played so successfully before failed when Nemesis took a hand. His friend went to the mine to demand an accounting and several hours later Bohm’s body, broken and bleeding, was taken from the depths of the mine. According to the story of his companion, the only witness, he had slipped and fallen to the bottom of the shaft—and his death, as his life, remained an enigma.
But down through the long years the echoes of the past reverberated. Again and again we heard them, sometimes very faintly, then with perfect distinctness and on that day of our return after a long absence we felt again that mysterious suggestion of tragedy and the echoes were startlingly clear.
As I came in from my walk just before supper, a strange man rode up and Mr. Parker asked him to stop.