“Now come! Have I been a snob about my father's profession?”
“No; but you love it, naturally. You have grown up with its pomp and circumstance around you. You are the history makers when history is most exciting.”
“Go on with your story, you proud little Dutchman! When I despise you for your farming relatives, you can taunt me with my history making.”
Paul was about two years old when his parents broke up in the Wood River country and came south by wagon on the old stage-road to Felton. Whenever he saw a “string-bean freighter's” outfit moving into Bisuka, if there was a woman on the driver's seat, he wanted to take off his hat to her. For so his mother sat beside his father and held him in her arms two hundred miles across the Snake River desert. The stages have been laid off since the Oregon Short Line went through, but there were stations then all along the road.
One night they made camp at a lonely place between Soul's Rest and Mountain Home. Oneman Station it was called; afterwards Deadman Station, when the keeper's body was found one morning stiff and cold in his bunk. He died in the night alone. Emily Bogardus had cause to hate the man when he was living, and his dreary end was long a shuddering remembrance to her, like the answer to an unforgiving prayer.
The station was in a hollow with bare hills around, rising to the highest point of that rolling plain country. The mountains sink below the plain, only their white tops showing. It was October. All the wild grass had been eaten close for miles on both sides of the road, but over a gap in the Western divide was the Bruneau Valley, where the bell-mare of the team had been raised. In the night she broke her hopples and struck out across the summit with the four mules at her heels. Towards morning a light snow fell and covered their tracks. Adam was compelled to hunt his stock on foot; the keeper refusing him a horse, saying he had got himself into trouble before through being friendly with the company's horses. He started out across the hills, expecting that the same night would see him back, and his wife was left in the wagon camp alone.
“I know this story very well,” said Paul, “and yet I never heard it but once, when mother decided I was old enough to know all. But every word was bitten into me—especially this ugly part I am coming to. I wish it need not be told, yet all the rest depends on it; and that such an experience could come to a woman like my mother shows what exposure and humiliation lie in the straightest path if there is no money to smooth the way. You hear it said that in the West the toughest men will be chivalrous to a woman if she is the right sort of a woman. I'm afraid that is a romantic theory of the Western man.
“That night, before his team stampeded, as he sat by the keeper's fire, father had made up his mind that the less they had to do with that man the better. He may have warned mother; and she, left alone with the brute, did not know the wisdom of hiding her fear and loathing of him. He may have meant no more than a low kind of teasing, but her suffering was the same.
“Father did not come. She dared not leave the camp. She knew no place to go to, and in his haste, believing he would soon be with her again, he had taken all their little stock of funds. But he had left her his gun, and with this within reach of her hand in the shelter of the wagon hood, without fire and without cooked food, she kept a sleepless watch.