The mountains, too, yielded their disappointment. For the first hour or two they seemed lower and less mysterious than of old. They neither wooed nor threatened—only the plain remained as vast and as majestic as ever. The fences, the occasional farms in the valleys could not subdue its outspread, serene majesty to prettiness. It was still of desert sternness and breadth.
From all these impersonal considerations the girl was brought back to the vital phases of her life by the harsh voice of one of the men. “Lize Wetherford is goin’ to get jumped one o’ these days for sellin’ whiskey without a license. I’ve told her so, too. Everybody knows she’s a-doin’ it, and what beats me is her goin’ along in that way when a little time and money would set her straight with the law.”
The shock of all this lay in the fact that Eliza Wetherford was the mother to whom Lee Virginia was returning after ten years of life in the East, and the significance of the man’s words froze her blood for an instant. There was an accent of blunt truth in his voice, and the mere fact that a charge of such weight could be openly made appalled the girl, although her recollections of her mother were not entirely pleasant.
The young fellow on the back seat slowly said: “I don’t complain of Lize sellin’ bad whiskey, but the grub she sets up is fierce.”
“The grub ain’t so bad; it’s the way she stacks it up,” remarked another. “But, then, these little fly-bit cow-towns are all alike and all bad, so far as hotels are concerned.”
Lee Virginia, crimson and burning hot, was in agony lest they should go further in their criticism.
She knew that her mother kept a boarding-house; and while she was not proud of it, there was nothing precisely disgraceful in it—many widowed women found it the last resort; but this brutal comment on the way in which her business was carried on was like a slash of mud in the face. Her joy in the ride, her impersonal exultant admiration of the mountains was gone, and with flaming cheeks and beating heart she sat, tense and bent, dreading some new and keener thrust.
Happily the conversation turned aside and fell upon the Government’s forest policy, and Sam Gregg, a squat, wide-mouthed, harsh-voiced individual, cursed the action of Ross Cavanagh the ranger in the district above the Fork. “He thinks he’s Secretary of War, but I reckon he won’t after I interview him. He can’t shuffle my sheep around over the hills at his own sweet will.”
The young fellow on the back seat quietly interposed. “You want to be sure you’ve got the cinch on Cavanagh good and square, Sam, or he’ll be a-ridin’ you.”
“He certainly is an arbitrary cuss,” said the old woman. “They say he was one of Teddy’s Rough-riders in the war. He sure can ride and handle a gun. ’Pears like he thinks he’s runnin’ the whole range,” she continued, after a pause. “Cain’t nobody so much as shoot a grouse since he came on, and the Supervisor upholds him in it.”