CHAPTER XV—PEP AND A LITTLE PEPPER
All Sabbaths were not fine at Canyon Pass, as Hunt realized on opening his eyes on that important morning. From the same open window through which he had viewed the chaste glories of the Topaz Range a week before, he now saw heavy, thunderous-looking clouds wrapping the peaks and surging down into the lower reaches of the landscape, blotting out, as they moved on, each monument that he had learned in this brief time of his sojourn to know. It promised no fair day for the parson’s first service.
This, however, was not the basis of the heaviness that oppressed him. Hunt admitted the cause of his heart-sick feeling without dodging the issue. It was Nell Blossom and her attitude toward him personally that so troubled the parson of Canyon Pass. That she opposed the good work he was trying to inaugurate was only a side issue in Hunt’s mind. Opposition in general merely spurred a spirit like his to greater effort. That is, a frank opposition.
But the minister’s personal interest in Nell Blossom had become something that controlled him. He could not control it.
It was not right, he told himself, to do any poaching on what he considered Joe’s preserves. Whether or not Nell cared for the mine owner, Hunt believed he would be disloyal to his friend if he showed anything but the interest of a minister and religious adviser in the young woman.
Hunt was honest enough to admit that such feeling was not what inspired him in the matter. Nell Blossom was not at all the kind of girl he would have deliberately chosen as the object of a serious affection. But who of us may choose when love enters the lists?
The winsomeness of Nell shone through the rough and prickly husk of her. He realized that no man could see in all its clarity the girl’s soul. He believed that the untaught mining-camp child, used as she was to the rude life about her and only that life, was really out of her natural element. Whatever Henry Blossom, Nell’s dissolute father, may have been, the girl’s mother had perhaps given her child as a legacy a natural refinement scarcely to be looked for in any person brought up in so unpolished a community.
In short, Nell Blossom’s intrinsic worth was no more hidden from the parson than her physical beauty. Her hatred of and disdain for all men had its root in no fault she had committed. Some man, had it been that gambler Hunt had heard called “Dick the Devil?” had disillusioned the child-heart of Nell Blossom and, perhaps, the sweets of love had turned to ashes in her mouth.
What had become of that gambler? What was the truth about that tragedy at the brink of the canyon wall? Did Tolley know the facts and misstate them? Or was Dick Beckworth really dead and his body swept away by the torrent of Runaway River?
It was plain, Hunt decided, that Dick’s disappearance weighed heavily for some cause on Nell Blossom’s mind. Something had happened on that spring morning weeks before which had changed Nell from the happy-go-lucky girl the parson knew she must have been to this bitter, disdainful, and apparently wicked woman who scoffed at religion in any form, and especially had “no use for a pulpit-pounder.”