Perch of the Devil

by Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

The discontented, the inefficient, the moderately successful, the failures, see only remorseless greed in the great money makers. Their temper is too personal to permit them to recognise that here are the legitimate inheritors of the dashing heroes they enjoy in history, the bold and ruthless egos that throughout the ages have transformed savagery into civilisation, torpor into progress, in their pursuit of gold. That these “doing” buccaneers of our time are the current heroes of the masses, envious or generous in tribute, the most welcome “copy” of the daily or monthly press, is proof enough that the spirit of adventure still flourishes in the universal heart, seldom as modern conditions permit its expansion. For aught we know it may be this old spirit of adventure that inspires the midnight burglar and the gentlemen of the road, not merely the desire for “easy money.” But these are the flotsam. The boldest imaginations and the most romantic hearts are sequestered in the American “big business” men of today.

Gregory Compton had grown to maturity in the most romantic subdivision of the United States since California retired to the position of a classic. Montana, her long winter surface a reflection of the beautiful dead face of the moon, bore within her arid body illimitable treasure, yielding it from time to time to the more ardent and adventurous of her lovers. Gold and silver, iron, copper, lead, tungsten, precious and semi-precious stones—she might have been some vast heathen idol buried aeons ago when Babylon was but a thought in the Creator’s brain, and the minor gods travelled the heaving spaces to immure their treasure, stolen from rival stars.

Gregory had always individualised as well as idealised his state, finding more companionship in her cold mysteries than in the unfruitful minds of his little world. His youthful dreams, when sawing wood or riding after cattle, had been alternately of desperate encounters with Indians and of descending abruptly into vast and glittering corridors. The creek on the ranch had given up small quantities of placer gold, enough to encourage “Old Compton,” least imaginative of men, to use his pick up the side of the gulch, and even to sink a shaft or two. But he had wasted his money, and he had little faith in the mineral value of the De Smet Ranch or in his own luck. He was a thrifty, pessimistic, hard-working, down-east Presbyterian, whose faith in predestination had killed such roots of belief in luck as he may have inherited with other attributes of man. He sternly discouraged his son’s hopes, which the silent intense boy expressed one day in a sudden mood of fervour and desire for sympathy, bidding him hang on to the live stock, which were a certain sure source of income, and go out and feed hogs when he felt onsettled like.

He died when Gregory was in the midst of his Junior year in the School of Mines, and the eager student was obliged to renounce his hope of a congenial career, for the present, and assume control of the ranch. It was heavily mortgaged; his father’s foreman, who had worked on the ranch since he was a lad, had taken advantage of the old man’s failing mind to raise the money, as well as to obtain his signature to the sale of more than half the cattle. He had disappeared with the concrete result a few days before Mr. Compton’s death.

It was in no serene spirit that Gregory entered upon the struggle for survival at the age of twenty-one. Bitterly resenting his abrupt divorce from the School of Mines, which he knew to be the gateway to his future, and his faith in mankind dislocated by the cruel defection of one whom he had liked and trusted from childhood, he seethed under his stolid exterior while working for sixteen hours a day to rid the ranch of its encumbrance and replace the precious cattle. But as the greater part of this time was spent out of doors he outgrew the delicacy of his youth and earlier manhood, and, with red blood and bounding pulses, his bitterness left him.

He began to visit Butte whenever he could spare a few days from the ranch, to “look up” as his one chum, Mark Blake, expressed it; so that by the time he married he knew the life of a Western mining town—an education in itself—almost as well as he knew the white and silent spaces of Montana. With the passing of brooding and revolt his old dreams revived, and he spent, until he married, many long days prospecting. He had found nothing until a few weeks ago, early in October, and then the discovery, such as it was, had been accidental.

There had been a terrific wind storm, beginning shortly after sundown, reaching at midnight a velocity of seventy-two miles an hour, and lasting until morning; it had been impossible to sleep or to go out of doors and see to the well-being of the cattle.

The wind was not the Chinook, although it came out of the west, for it was bitterly cold. Two of the house windows facing the storm were blown in and the roof of a recent addition went off. As such storms are uncommon in Montana, even Gregory was uneasy, fearing the house might go, although it had been his father’s boast that not even an earthquake could uproot it. After daybreak the steady fury of the storm ceased. There was much damage done to the outbuildings, but, leaving Oakley to superintend repairs, Gregory mounted his horse and rode over the ranch to examine the fences and brush sheds. The former were intact, and the cattle were huddled in their shelters, which were built against the side of a steep hill. A few, no doubt, had drifted before the storm, but would return in the course of the day. Here and there a pine tree had been blown over, but the winter wheat and alfalfa were too young to be injured.

He rode towards the hill where the wind had done its most conspicuous damage. It was a long steep hill of granite near the base and grey limestone above topped with red shales, and stood near the northeast corner of the ranch. Its rigid sides had been relieved by a small grove of pines; but although in spring it was gay with anemones and primrose moss, and green until late in July, there was nothing on its ugly flanks at this time of the year but sunburnt grass.

The old pines had clung tenaciously to the inhospitable soil for centuries, but some time during the night, still clutching a mass of earth and rock in their great roots, they had gone down before the storm.