The Chalice Of Courage: A Romance of Colorado

by Cyrus Townsend Brady

Once a man who loved the strife, noble or ignoble, of the madding crowd, he had grown accustomed to silence, habituated to solitude. Winter and summer alike he roamed the mountains, delving into every forest, exploring every hidden cañon, surmounting every inaccessible peak; no storm, no snow, no condition of wind or weather daunted him or stopped him. He had no human companionship by which to try his mettle, but nevertheless over the world of the material which lay about him he was a master as he was a man.

He found some occupation, too, in the following of old Adam's inheritance, during the pleasant months of summer he made such garden as he could. His profession of mining engineer gave him other employment. Round about him lay treasures inestimable, precious metals abounded in the hills. He had located them, tested, analyzed, estimated the wealth that was his for the taking—it was as valueless to him as the doubloons and golden guineas were to Selkirk on his island. Yet the knowledge that it was there gave him an energizing sense of potential power, unconsciously enormously flattering to his self esteem.

Sometimes he wandered to the extreme verge of the range and on clear days saw far beneath him the smoke of great cities of the plains. He could be a master among men as he was a master among mountains, if he chose. On such occasions he laughed cynically, scornfully, yet rarely did he ever give way to such emotion.

A great and terrible sorrow was upon him; cherishing a great passion he had withdrawn himself from the common lot to dwell upon it. From a perverted sense of expiation, in a madness of grief, horror and despair, he had made himself a prisoner to his ideas in the desert of the mountains. Back to his cabin he would hasten, and there surrounded by his living memories—deathless yet of the dead!—he would recreate the past until dejection drove him abroad on the hills to meet God if not man—or woman. Night-day, sunshine-shadow, heat-cold, storm-calm; these were his life.

Having disburdened his faithful animals of their packs and having seen them safely bestowed for the winter in the corral he had built near the base of the cliff upon which his rude home was situated, he took his rifle one morning for one of those lonely walks across the mountains from which he drew such comfort because he fancied the absence of man conduced to the nearness of God. It was a delusion as old nearly as the Christian religion. Many had made themselves hermits in the past in remorse for sin and for love toward God; this man had buried himself in the wilderness in part for the first of these causes, in other part for the love of woman. In these days of swift and sudden change he had been constant to a remembrance and abiding in his determination for five swift moving years. The world for him had stopped its progress in one brief moment five years back—the rest was silence. What had happened since then out yonder where people were mated he did not know and he did not greatly care.

In his visits to the settlements he asked no questions, he bought no papers, he manifested no interest in the world; something in him had died in one fell moment, and there had been, as yet, no resurrection. Yet life, and hope, and ambition do not die, they are indeed eternal. Resurgam!

Life with its tremendous activities, its awful anxieties, its wearing strains, its rare triumphs, its opportunities for achievement, for service; hope with its illuminations, its encouragements, its expectations; ambition with its stimulus, its force, its power; and greatest of all love, itself alone—all three were latent in him. In touch with a woman these had gone. Something as powerful and as human must bring them back.

It was against nature that a man dowered as he should so live to himself alone. Some voice should cry to his soul in its cerements of futile remorse, vain expiations and benumbing recollection; some day he should burst these grave clothes self-wound about him and be once more a man and a master among men, rather than the hermit and the recluse of the solitudes.

He did not allow these thoughts to come into his life, indeed it is quite likely that he scarcely realized them at all yet; such possibilities did not present themselves to him; perhaps the man was a little mad that morning, maybe he trembled on the verge of a break—upward, downward I know not so it be away—unconsciously as he strode along the range.

He had been walking for some hours, and as he grew thirsty it occurred to him to descend to the level of the brook which he heard below him and of which he sometimes caught a flashing glimpse through the trees. He scrambled down the rocks and found himself in a thick grove of pine. Making his way slowly and with great difficulty through the tangle of fallen timber which lay in every direction, the sound of a human voice, the last thing on earth to be expected in that wilderness, smote upon the fearful hollow of his ear.