The day of the northbound hegira of the cows had come. The immortal gods, trickling through their fingers grasses of grama, mesquite, redtop, buffalo, bluestem, watched a new land spring lustily into being. It was born of blood. But it was born of South and North, which never again were to know war one with the other. Both shared in sending old customs to a new land. A new language came to it. New industries grew in it. More rapidly than any tract of all our country or of any country ever was settled, the Great West of America became great and strong indeed. It wrote its story—whose beginnings almost have faded now—on the pages of the world’s history; or more splendidly still, on the lips of a country’s envying tradition of Homeric deeds.
CHAPTER XLVIII
THE GREAT LODESTONE
IT WAS morning of an autumn day on the old rancho of Laguna de Sol. Although flowers lacked, the leaves of the live oaks held their perennial course unchanged, the heavy pendants of the Spanish moss aiding them against the rays of a sun still ardent. The air was almost without movement, too richly languorous for any exercise—sweet, rich, mellow and golden as honey, breath of a world caring for neither past nor future.
The surface of the placid fields where grain had been now seemed as though covered by a moving carpet of gray and gold—countless field larks, come to this gentle region for their wintering. In the great lagoon beyond the live-oak groves countless wild fowl, also from north of thirty-six, had come below the edge of winter for their annual vacation. The cattle lay contented in the sun, horses stood dozing, free of care. Del Sol never had seemed more beautiful or shown more rapport with the mere facts of life.
Anastasie Lockhart, mistress of Del Sol, was in her dooryard, looking after morning-glory seed for the coming year. These and other climbing things had well-nigh taken possession of the big house during her absence north the past summer. There had been no hand to give the old place any ministrations, and in the fecund Southwest the fight of civilization against an eager Nature, claiming its own, is a continuous one. Years of poverty, which had meant also years of negligence, now obliged youth and inexperience to begin in a weak way the task of restoration. Del Sol had lacked the strong and resourceful hand of its founder.
Not that courage and resourcefulness lacked for the present owner of Del Sol—nor, indeed, that material means now lacked, after the astonishingly successful venture of the northern drive. And the steady ruin into which the place had advanced had been due more than anything else to an actual lack of material resources.
Anastasie Lockhart had been poor. But now she was not poor. The venture north had brought her in touch with the Aladdin lamp. Now she could hold up her head and look all the world in the face. Now she could pay her debts and be once more a Lockhart of the Lockharts, worthy when on her knees to look her departed father’s shade calmly in the face and to declare his faith kept with all the world.
This very morning Anastasie Lockhart had paid her men their wages for the month; indeed, but just now she had come from the cook-house door; where not so long before she had stood, haltingly confessing to them that she could not pay her laborers their hire. It was different to-day.
Not all the old Del Sol men now were at their table, for some had taken service north, perhaps never again to set foot on Texas soil, and others had not yet drifted home from seeing the world. Buck, the cook, still was there; and it appeared that both he and Milly had agreed to forget the past of Milly’s missing husband. Milly agreeing that she had “taken up with Buck,” believing him to be the moral superior of the missing Jim. The place of Del Williams was vacant, nor was Len Hersey’s light garrulity now audible. No heirs of Cal Dalhart had been found.