CHAPTER XXXIX
FROM THE ASHES
The nine days’ wonder had come and passed. Never again could the valley of Leaping Creek return to the conditions which had for so long prevailed there. And strangely enough the victory won was far more a moral than a physical one. True, one or two lives had paid for the victory, but this was less than nothing compared with the effect achieved.
Within three weeks a process of emigration had set in which left the police with scarcely an excuse for their presence in the valley at all. All those who, for long years, had sought sanctuary within the shelter of the vast, forest-clad slopes of the valley, began to realize that the immunity which they had enjoyed for so long was rapidly becoming doubtful. The forces of the police suddenly seemed to have become possessed of a too-intimate knowledge of the shortcomings which had driven them to shelter. In fact, the limelight of government authority was shining altogether too brightly, searching out the shadowed corners in the lives of the citizens, and yielding up secrets so long and so carefully hidden.
The first definite result of the police raid apparent was the “moving on” of Dirty O’Brien. It came quite suddenly, and unexpectedly. Rocky Springs one morning awoke to find that the old saloon was closed. Inquiry soon elicited the true facts. O’Brien had vanished. The barn was empty. His team and spring wagon had gone, and the house, and bar, had been stripped of everything worth taking. The night before O’Brien had served his customers up to the usual hour, and there was nothing unusual to be observed. Therefore, the removal must have been effected swiftly and silently in the dead of night, performed as the result of careful, well-laid plans.
This was the first result of the definite establishment of police authority. Evidently the future of Rocky Springs no longer appealed to the shrewd saloonkeeper, and so he “moved on.”
This was the cue for further goings. With the saloon closed, and the police authority established, Rocky Springs was Rocky Springs no longer. So, one by one, silently, without the least ostentation, men began to yield up their claims as citizens, and, vanishing over the distant horizon, were heard of no more.
The sledgehammer of police methods had penetrated through the case-hardening of the village, and the place became hopelessly impossible for its population of undesirables.
For Helen Seton those first three weeks left her with a dull, apathetic feeling that quite suddenly her whole world had been turned upside down. That somehow a complete wreckage of all the life about her, her new life, had been consummated. Nor did she understand why, or how. It seemed to her she was living in a new world where all was misery and depression. Her usually bubbling spirit was weighted down as with an avalanche of responsibility and unhappiness.
For her the change had begun with almost the very moment of the felling of the old pine, and, somehow, it seemed to her as if that wicked, mischievous monument of bygone crimes were responsible.