Rimrock Trail

by J. Allan Dunn

After which they all relapsed into silence, restrained from smoking for fear of a telltale spark or casual fragrance carried by the wind. It was a dark night, the hillsides stood blurry against a blue-black sky in which the stars glittered like metal points but failed to shed much light. Later, much later, toward morning, a moon would rise.

Here and there on the slopes bright spots or glows of fire marked the occupied claim-sites. From the camp itself there came a murmur that sometimes swelled louder under the dull flare that hung over the lower end of the valley; reflection and diffusion from the gasoline lights and acetylene flares used by the owners of the eating-houses, the bars and gambling shacks, all open for business during miners' hours, which meant two shifts, of night and day.

From the mouth of the tunnel the three watched the march of the stars, the wheel of the Big Dipper around its pivot, the North Star; marking time by the sidereal clock of the heavens, each with a variant emotion.

Mormon shifted his position more frequently than the others. None of them was especially comfortable, but Mormon wanted to keep as limber as possible, he was afraid of stiffening up, thinking always of his challenge to Roaring Russell. Slow to anger, Mormon, when his rage mounted was slow of statement. What he said he meant. The insult to Miranda Bailey while under his escort chafed him as a saddle chafes a galled horse. It had to be wiped out at the earliest moment and, singularly enough, the spinster was not particularly prominent in the matter. It was not a personal question; the insult had been offered to womanhood, and Mormon was ever its champion and its victim.

Sam, cut off from tobacco and melody, bunkered down with his back against a frame timber and looked at the tall lean figure of Sandy silhouetted against the stars, wondering why Sandy had stopped so abruptly when the names of Westlake and Molly Casey had been coupled. It wasn't like Sandy to move or halt without definite purpose, Sam reasoned. "I suppose he figgers Molly too much of a kid," he told himself. "If these claims pan out she'll be rich. Likewise, so will we." His thoughts shifted to dreams of what he would do when they were wealthy. Very far beyond the purchase of an elaborate saddle and outfit, a horse or two he coveted, the finest harmonica to be bought, he did not go. That Sandy might have felt a tinge of jealousy toward young Westlake was furthest from his conjectures.

As for Sandy, he had lost his mental orientation. Something had happened, something was happening within him and he could not tell the process nor name it. He was as a man who goes out into the darkness amid rooms and passages with which he considers himself familiar and suddenly—there comes a door where should be space, or space where there should be a window—and he is lost, his senses betray him, for the moment he is completely fogged, all bearings lost, possessed with the blankness that accompanies the flight of self-confidence.

He could see very plainly in mental vision the picture that Molly had sent to the Three Star, now framed and given the place of honor on the table of the ranch-house living-room. The picture of a girl in whose eyes the fleeting look of womanhood, that Sandy had now and then seen there and which had thrilled him so strangely, had become permanent. That she was something so vital she could not be dismissed from the life of the Three Star, from his own life, by sending her to school whence she would return almost a stranger, by making her an heiress, Sandy recognized. He had deliberately given her his hand to help her out of the rut in which he had found her and now, with the swift series of tableaux conjured up by Sam's suggestion of her and Westlake together, lovers, Sandy realized the gap that was widening between Molly and him. If she was out of the rut would she not now regard him as in another of his own from which there was no up-lifting?

To Sandy, Westlake seemed little more than a likable lad, placing him at about twenty-three or four. He felt immeasurably older, harder, though there were not more than six years between them—seven at the most. Even that made him almost twice the age of Molly. With this twist of his reverie he realized that Molly was no longer to be considered as a girl. Toward the little maid he had poured out protectiveness, affection and, while his vials were emptying, she had crossed the brook. Into what had his affection shifted with the changing of Molly to womanhood?

Sandy Bourke, knight of the roving heel, had never attempted to find solution for his attitude toward women. It was neither wariness nor antipathy. His life, drifting from rancho to rancho, sometimes consorting with the rougher side of men careless of conventions, had been, in the main, not unlike the life of a hermit, with long periods when he rode alone under sun and stars with only his horse for company.

There were months of this and then came swiftly moving periods of relaxation in a cattle town where men unleashed the repressions and let pent-up energies and appetites have full sway. Sandy loved card chances where his own skill might back what luck the pasteboards brought him in the deal. Drinking bouts, the company of the women with whom many of his fellows consorted, never appealed to him. His reservations found outlet in gambling or in the acceptance of some job where the danger risks ran high, where success and self-safety hung upon his coolness, his keen sense, his courage and his skill with horse and lariat and gun. A life as apart as a sailor's, more lonely, for he was often companionless for months.