The Winning of Barbara Worth

by Harold Bell Wright

Again Texas halted his team, and Barbara, leaving her companion in the buckboard, climbed to the top of the hill that held buried deep in its heart—what? Was the body of her true father buried there? Were there brothers, sisters, lying under that huge mound? Could the sands, if they could speak, tell her who she was, her name and people? Could they, if they would, make known to her relatives and friends of her own blood?

Coming slowly down the shoulder of the drift she went around to the foot of the steep eastern side and there, in the lee of the billow that curled high above her, she tried to dig with her hands a tiny hole. At every movement that displaced a handful of sand, a dry golden flood poured down from above, covering instantly the mark she had made. With sudden, energy the young woman exerted all her strength, digging faster and faster. But still, from above her head, down the steep side of the drift the sand slid without effort, making a faint whispering sound as if to mock her labors. Then Texas called and she went back to him, her brown eyes hard and dry.

The old plainsman, quick to feel her mood, would have driven swiftly on past the remaining scenes of the tragedy and tried to talk of other things. But she would not have it so. She must know all. So he showed her where he had first found the tracks in the sand and then where the baby feet had left their marks when the tired mother had set her down to rest.

Thus they came at last, when the day was almost gone, to the grave beside the trail—the trail that had beside its many miles so many graves. And Barbara stood before the simple headstone that bore only the date and one word "Mother." And the silent man, who had in his wild adventurous life witnessed so many scenes of death, turned away his face that he might not see the girl kneeling beside the mound of earth.

When Barbara, coming back to the buckboard, saw him so, she understood; and when Texas, hearing her light steps, turned quickly toward her he saw the brown eyes filled now with softening tears while her face expressed the gratitude she could not put into words.

Behind them the upper rim of the sun shone blood-red above the top of the purple mountain wall; over their heads in the soft still depths of the velvet sky an early star appeared. Around them on every side the great desert lay under its seas of soft color, its veils of misty light and streaming scarfs of lilac and rose. Even as they looked the dusk of twilight fell upon the great plain. The ground-owl's weird call came from a hummock near the trail, the ghostly form of a coyote slipped stealthily past like a shadow moving from shadow to shadow until he was lost in the deeper shade, out of which, as if in mocking challenge of a spirit band to any mortal who would follow, came the wild, snarling, unearthly cries of his invisible mates. And still to the eastward the higher levels of the Mesa above the rim of the dark Basin, the slow drifting clouds of dust that lifted from the tired feet of the grading teams coming into the camp from the day's work on the canals, or from freighters drawing near their journey's end, caught the last of the light and showed long level bands and bars and threads of gold against the deep purple of the hills beyond, whose peaks and domes and ridges were flaming crimson, burnished copper and gleaming silver on the deep background of the sky. Before them on the other side of the deep Dry River channel, through which now a generous stream of water flowed, they could see the tents of the camp—some glowing brightly from lights within, others showing mere spots of dull white in the gloom, while here and there lanterns, like great fireflies, flitted aimlessly to and fro.

Before two tent houses, some distance apart from the main camp and built under a wide ramada made of willow poles and arrow weed brought from the distant river, Texas stopped his team. From the open door of one of the tents Jefferson Worth came quickly, at the sound of their arrival, to receive his daughter, and from her father's arms Barbara turned to greet Abe Lee who, following his chief from the canvas house, had paused a little back from the group in the shadow of the ramada. Later in the evening, when Barbara had had her supper with her father and Abe in the big camp dining tent and the three were sitting in the dark under the wide brush porch, Pat came with Texas, as the big Irishman said, "to see how the new boss liked her quarters." And then Pablo came softly out of the darkness with his guitar to bid La Senorita welcome and to ask if she would care that night to listen a little to the music that he knew she loved.

So Barbara held her little court before the rude tent house under the arrow weed ramada, in the heart of her Desert, within a stone's throw of the spot where they had gathered once before around a baby girl whose mother lay dead beside a dry water hole. And not one of them thought of the significance of the group or how each, representing a distinct type, stood for a vital element in the combination of human forces that was working out for the race the reclamation of the land. The tall, lean, desert-born surveyor, trained in no school but the school of his work itself, with the dreams of the Seer ruling him in his every professional service; the heavy-fisted, quick-witted, aggressive Irishman, born and trained to handle that class of men that will recognize in their labor no governing force higher than the physical; the dark-faced frontiersman, whom the forces of nature, through the hard years, had fashioned for his peculiar place in this movement of the race as truly as wave and river and wind and sun had made The King's Basin Desert itself; the self-hidden financier who, behind his gray mask, wrought with the mighty force of his age—Capital; and a little to one side, sitting on the ground, reclining against one of the willow posts that upheld the arrow weed shelter, dark Pablo, softly touching his guitar, representing a people still far down on the ladder of the world's upward climb, but still sharing, as all peoples would share, the work of all; and, in the midst of the group, the center of her court—Barbara, true representative of a true womanhood that holds in itself the future of the race, even as the desert held in its earth womb life for the strong ones whom the slow years had fitted to realize it.

"Faith," said Pat, when Pablo's guitar was silent for a little, "av only the Seer was here the family wud be altogether complete."

"Dear old Seer," said Barbara softly. "How he would love to be here; and how we would love to have him!"