Then it was that Beatrice had the greatest surprise of all her life. She suddenly found herself standing on the step beside John Herrick, telling what had happened, making plain to that strange, listening group, what was the source of Dabney’s story. With her hand holding to her uncle’s, she spoke out bravely and told the whole truth—just what had really occurred and just how the reporter had spied and listened and questioned and put together his so-called facts. She even found herself at the end, telling of Dabney’s inglorious encounter with the bear.
Beatrice found herself telling what had happened
Although the men did not understand much English, her speech was so direct that they could easily comprehend the greater part of it. When she came to the story of the bear, such a shout of laughter went up that it drowned what little more she might have wished to say. The men slapped each other on the shoulder, told the story all over again to one another in their own tongues, rocked and chuckled and burst forth again and again in uproarious mirth. It seemed to touch the sense of humor of every one of them that the strutting, vainglorious young reporter should have been the hero of such an ignominious adventure. When the gale of merriment had somewhat laughed itself out, Dan O’Leary’s voice could be heard above the others.
“We don’t need any more proof that they belong to each other,” he said. “The pluck of the little one and the pluck of the big one, they sure come from the same stock. And now let’s be getting back and be ready for work in the morning. We needn’t spend our time waiting for Sherlock Holmes. He has gone on ahead, and another of our friends with him.”
Under cover of the noisy laughter, two people had quietly slipped away. A pair of shadows flitting down the trail, a slim one and a sturdy one, were the last that Beatrice ever saw of Dabney Mills and of Thorvik.
The crowd dispersed, and went trudging down the mountainside, as John Herrick had advised, to sleep in preparation for the work next day. Their voices and laughter could be heard from afar as they wound down the path—a cheery, comforting sound after the angry shouts and that wild, terrible song that had heralded their coming. Beatrice, standing to look after them, felt a sudden wave of friendliness and good-will for the whole company, which, a short time before, she had regarded with such terror and repulsion.
She went in at last to talk the whole matter over with John Herrick and Hester and Olaf and Dan O’Leary, who had stayed behind. They heard the whole tale, not only of the irrigation project, but of all that had led up to it. The story was of a man beginning with nothing and in ten years gathering the fortune that he was now putting into the watering of the valley. It was wealth reaped from the fertile, untried resources and the open-handed opportunities of a new country. The valley was in the hands of prospectors and homesteaders when he came. He had seen the mines opened, the farms plowed from virgin soil, the wilderness changed to a settled country. After the pioneers and the farmers, had come the crowd of foreign laborers, to build the railroads, to pick the fruit, to rear the houses and dig the irrigation ditches.
“They are a blight on the country,” said Olaf, but John Herrick shook his head.
“We need them,” he insisted. “We have to help them and teach them; and their children will be good Americans. There are a few like Thorvik who will cause trouble to the end of the chapter, but we can make something of the rest of them.”