PERCH OF THE
DEVIL

BY
GERTRUDE ATHERTON

NEW YORK
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1914, by
Frederick A. Stokes Company
All rights reserved, including that of translation into
foreign languages
Fourth Printing

TO
MR. FRANK J. EDWARDS AND
MR. WILTON G. BROWN
OF HELENA, MONTANA

PART I

PERCH OF THE DEVIL

PART I

I

“THE shining mountains,” said Gregory Compton softly, throwing back his head, his eyes travelling along the hard bright outlines above the high valley in which his ranch lay. “The shining mountains. That is what the Indians called them before the white man came.”

His wife yawned frankly. “Pity they don’t shine inside as well as out—what we’ve got of ’em.”

“Who knows? Who knows?”

“We don’t. That’s the trouble.”

But although she spoke tartly, she nestled into his arm, for she was not unamiable, she had been married but sixteen months, and she was still fond of her husband “in a way”; moreover, although she cherished resentments open and secret, she never forgot that she had won a prize “as men go.” Many girls in Butte[A] had wanted to marry Gregory Compton, not only because he had inherited a ranch of eleven hundred and sixty acres, but because, comprehensively, he was superior to the other young men of his class. He had graduated from the High School before he was sixteen; then after three years’ work on the ranch under his unimaginative father, he had announced his intention of leaving the State unless permitted to attend the School of Mines in Butte. The old man, who by this time had taken note of the formation of his son’s jaw, gave his consent rather than lose the last of his children; and for two years and a semester Gregory had been the most brilliant figure in the School of Mines.

“Old Man Compton,” who had stampeded from his small farm in northern New York in the sixties to meet with little success in the mines, but more as a rancher, had been as typical a hayseed as ever punctuated politics with tobacco juice in front of a corner grocery-store, but had promised his wife on her death-bed that their son should have “schooling.” Mrs. Compton, who had arrived in Montana soon after the log house was built, was a large, dark, silent woman, whom none of her distant neighbours had ever claimed to know. It was currently believed in the New York village whence she came that in the early days of the eighteenth century the sturdy Verrooy stock had been abruptly crossed by the tribe of the Oneida. Ancient history in a new country is necessarily enveloped in mist, but although the children she had lost had been fair and nondescript like their father, her youngest, and her only son, possessed certain characteristics of the higher type of Indian. He was tall and lightly built, graceful, supple, swift of foot, with the soft tread of the panther; and although his skin was no darker than that of the average brunette, it acquired significance from the intense blackness of his hair, the thin aquiline nose, the long, narrow eyes, the severe and stolid dignity of expression even in his earlier years.

He had seemed to the girls of the only class he knew in Butte an even more romantic figure than the heroes of their magazine fiction, particularly as he took no notice of them until he met Ida Hook at a picnic and surrendered his heart.

Ida, forced by her thrifty mother to accept employment with a fashionable dressmaker, and consumed with envy of the “West Siders” whose measurements she took, did not hesitate longer than feminine prudence dictated. Before she gave her hair its nightly brushing her bold unpedantic hand had covered several sheets of pink note-paper with the legend, “Mrs. Gregory Compton,” the while she assured herself there was “no sweller name on West Broadway.” To do her justice, she also thrilled with young passion, for more than her vanity had responded to the sombre determined attentions of the man who had been the indifferent hero of so many maiden dreams. Although she longed to be a Copper Queen, she was too young to be altogether hard; and, now that her hour was come, every soft enchantment of her sex awoke to bind and blind her mate.

Gregory Compton’s indifference to women had been more pretended than real, although an occasional wild night on The Flat had interested him far more than picnics and dances where the girls used no better grammar than the “sporting women” and were far less amusing. He went to this picnic to please his old school friend, Mark Blake, and because Nine Mile Cañon had looked very green and alluring after the June rains when he had ridden through it alone the day before. The moment he stood before Ida Hook, staring into the baffling limpid eyes, about which heavy black lashes rose and fell and met and tangled and shot apart in a series of bedevilling manœuvres, he believed himself to be possessed by that intimate soul-seeking desire that nothing but marriage can satisfy. He kept persistently at her side, his man’s instinct prompting the little attentions women value less than they demand. He also took more trouble to interest her verbally than was normal in one whom nature had prompted to silence, and he never would learn the rudiments of small talk; but his brain was humming in time with his eager awakened pulses, and Ida was too excited and exultant to take note of his words. “It was probably about mines, anyway,” she confided to her friends, Ruby and Pearl Miller. “Nobody talks about anything else long in this old camp.”

Gregory’s infatuation was by no means reduced by the fact that no less than six young men contended for the favour of Miss Hook. She was the accredited beauty of Butte, for even the ladies of the West Side had noticed and discussed her and hoped that their husbands and brothers had not. It was true that her large oval blue-grey eyes, set like Calliope’s, were as shallow as her voice; but the lids were so broad and white, and the lashes so silky and oblique, that the critical faculty of man was drugged, if dimly prescient. Her cheeks were a trifle too full, her nose of a type unsung in marble; but what of that when her skin was as white as milk, the colour in cheek and lips of a clear transparent coral, that rarest and most seductive of nature’s reds, her little teeth enamelled like porcelain? And had she not every captivating trick, from active eyelash to the sudden toss of her small head on its long round throat, even to the dilating nostril which made her nose for the moment look patrician and thin! Her figure, too, with its boyish hips, thin flexible waist, and full low bust, which she carried with a fine upright swing, was made the most of in a collarless blouse, closely fitting skirt, and narrow dark belt.

Miss Hook, although her expression was often wide-eyed and innocent, was quite cynically aware of her power over the passions of men. More than one man of high salary or recent fortune had tried to “annex” her, as she airily put it; her self-satisfaction and the ever-present sophistications of a mining town saving her from anything so gratuitous as outraged maidenhood.

The predatory male and his promises had never tempted her, and it was her boast that she had never set foot in the road houses of The Flat. She had made up her mind long since to live on the West Side, the fashionable end of Butte, and was wise enough, to quote her own words, to know that the straight and narrow was the only direct route. Ambition, her sleepless desire to be a grand dame (which she pronounced without any superfluous accent), was stronger than vanity or her natural love of pleasure. By the ordinary romantic yearnings of her age and sex she was unhampered; but when she met Gregory Compton, she played the woman’s game so admirably the long day through that she brushed her heavy black hair at night quite satisfied he would propose when she gave him his chance. This she withheld for several days, it being both pleasant and prudent to torment him. He walked home with her every afternoon from the dressmaking establishment on North Main Street to her mother’s cottage in East Granite, to be dismissed at the gate coyly, reluctantly, indifferently, but always with a glance of startled wonder from the door.

In the course of the week she gave him to understand that she should attend the Friday Night dance at Columbia Gardens, and expected him to escort her. Gregory, who by this time was reduced to a mere prowling instinct projected with fatal instantaneity from its napping ego, was as helpless a victim as if born a fool. He thought himself the most fortunate of men to receive permission to sit beside her on the open car during the long ride to the Gardens, to pay for the greater number of her waltzes, to be, in short, her beau for the night.

The evening of Friday at Columbia Gardens is Society Night for all respectable Butte, irrespective of class; the best floor and the airiest hall in Silver Bow County proving an irresistible incentive to democracy. Moreover, Butte is a city of few resources, and the Gardens at night look like fairyland: the immense room is hung with Chinese lanterns depending from the rafters, the music is the best in Montana; and the richer the women, the plainer their frocks. A sort of informal propriety reigns, and millionaire or clerk pays ten cents for the privilege of dancing with his lady.

Ida, who had expended five of her hard-earned dollars on a bottle of imported perfume, wore a white serge suit cut as well as any in “the grand dame bunch.” After the sixth waltz she draped her head and shoulders with a coral-pink scarf and led Gregory, despite the chill of June, out to his willing fate. The park was infested by other couples, walking briskly to keep themselves warm, and so were the picnic grounds where the cottonwoods and Canadian poplars were being coaxed to grow, now that the smelters which had reduced the neighbourhood of Butte to its bones had been removed to Anaconda.

But farther up the cañon no one but themselves adventured, and here Gregory was permitted to ask this unique creature, provided with a new and maddening appeal to the senses, to renounce her kingdom and live on a ranch.

It was all very crude, even to the blatant moon, which in the thin brilliant atmosphere of that high altitude swings low with an almost impudent air of familiarity, and grins in the face of sentiment. But to Gregory, who was at heart passionate and romantic, it was a soul-quickening scene: the blazing golden disk poised on the very crest of the steep mountain before them, the murmur of water, the rustling young leaves, the deep-breasted orientally perfumed woman with the innocent wondering eyes. The moon chuckled and reminded his exacting mistress, Nature, that were he given permission to scatter some of his vast experience instead of the seductive beams that had accumulated it, this young man with his natural distinction of mind, and already educated beyond his class, would enjoy a sudden clarity of vision and perceive the defects of grammar and breeding in this elemental siren with nothing but Evian instincts to guide her.

But the dutiful old search-light merely whipped up the ancestral memories in Gregory’s subconscious brain; moreover, gave him courage. He made love with such passion and tenderness that Ida, for once elemental, clung to him so long and so ardently that the grinning moon whisked off his beam in disgust and retired behind a big black cloud—which burst shortly afterwards and washed out the car tracks.

They were married in July, and Mrs. Hook, who had worked for forty years at tub and ironing-board, moved over to the dusty cemetery in September, at rest in the belief not only that her too good-looking daughter was safely “planted,” but was a supremely happy woman.

Ida’s passion, however, had been merely a gust of youth, fed by curiosity and gratified ambition; it quickly passed in the many disappointments of her married life. Gregory had promised her a servant, but no “hired girl” could be induced to remain more than a week on the lonely De Smet Ranch; and Mrs. Compton’s temper finding its only relief in one-sided quarrels with her Chinese cooks, even the philosophical Oriental was prone to leave on a moment’s notice. There were three hired men and three in the family, after John Oakley came, to cook and “clean up” for, and there were weeks at a time when Ida was obliged to rise with the dawn and occupy her large and capable but daintily manicured hands during many hours of the day.

Gregory’s personality had kindled what little imagination she had into an exciting belief in his power over life and its corollary, the world’s riches. Also, having in mind the old Indian legend of the great chief who had turned into shining gold after death and been entombed in what was now known prosaically as the De Smet Ranch, she had expected Gregory to “strike it rich” at once.

But although there were several prospect holes on the ranch, dug by Gregory in past years, he had learned too much, particularly of geology, during his two years at the School of Mines to waste any more time digging holes in the valley or bare portions of the hills. If a ledge existed it was beneath some tangle of shrub or tree-roots, and he had no intention of denuding his pasture until he was prepared to sell his cattle.

He told her this so conclusively a month after they were married that she had begged him to raise sugar beets and build a factory in Butte (which he would be forced to superintend), reminding him that the only factory in the State was in the centre of another district and near the southern border, and that sugar ranged from six to seven dollars a hundredweight. He merely laughed at this suggestion, although he was surprised at her sagacity, for, barring a possible democratic victory, there was room for two beet-sugar factories in Montana. But he had other plans, although he gave her no hint of them, and had no intention of complicating his life with an uncongenial and exacting business.

By unceasing personal supervision he not only made the ranch profitable and paid a yearly dividend to his three aunts, according to the terms of his father’s will, but for the last two years, after replacing or adding to his stock, he had deposited a substantial sum in the bank, occasionally permitting his astute friend, Mark Blake, to turn over a few hundreds for him on the stock-market. This was the heyday of the American farmer, and the De Smet cattle brought the highest prices in the stock-yards for beef on the hoof. He also raised three crops of alfalfa a year to insure his live stock against the lean days of a Rocky Mountain winter. He admitted to Ida that he could afford to sink a shaft or drive a tunnel in one of his hills, but added that he should contemplate nothing of the sort until he had finished his long-delayed course in the School of Mines, and had thousands to throw away on development work, miners, and machinery. At this time he saw no immediate prospect of resuming the studies interrupted by the death of his father: until John Oakley came, eight months after his marriage, he knew of no foreman to trust but himself.

Ida desired the life of the city for other reasons than its luxuries and distractions. Her fallow brain was shrewd and observing, although often crude in its deductions. She soon realised that the longer she lived with her husband the less she understood him. Like all ignorant women of any class she cherished certain general estimates of men, and in her own class it was assumed that the retiring men were weak and craven, the bold ones necessarily lacking in that refinement upon which their young lady friends prided themselves. Ida had found that Gregory, bold as his wooing had been, and arrogantly masculine as he was in most things, not only had his shynesses but was far more refined and sensitive than herself. She was a woman who prided herself upon her theories, and disliked having them upset; still more not knowing where she was at, to use her own spirited vernacular. She began to be haunted by the fear of making some fatal mistake, living, as she did, in comparative isolation with him. Not only was her womanly pride involved, as well as a certain affection born of habit and possible even to the selfish, rooted as it is in the animal function of maternity, but she had supreme faith in his future success and was determined to share it.

She was tired, however, of attempting to fathom the intense reserves and peculiarities of that silent nature, of trying to live up to him. She was obliged to resort to “play-acting”; and, fully aware of her limitations, despite her keen self-appreciation, was in constant fear that she would “make a grand mess of it.” Gregory’s eyes could be very penetrating, and she had discovered that although he never told funny stories, nor appeared to be particularly amused at hers, he had his own sense of humour.

II

THE young couple stood together in the dawn, the blue dawn of Montana. The sky was as cold and bright as polished silver, but the low soft masses of cloud were blue, the glittering snow on the mountain peaks was blue, the smooth snow fields on the slopes and in the valley were blue. Nor was it the blue of azure or of sapphire, but a deep lovely cool polaric blue, born in the inverted depths of Montana, and forever dissociated from art.

It was an extramundane scene, and it had drawn Gregory from his bed since childhood, but to Ida, brought up in a town, and in one whose horizons until a short while ago had always been obscured by the poisonous haze of smelters, and ores roasted in the open, it was “weird.” Novels had informed her that sunrises were pink, or, at the worst, grey. There was something mysterious in this cold blue dawn up in the snow fields, and she hated mystery. But as it appeared to charm Gregory, she played up to him when he “dragged” her out to look at it; and she endeavoured to do so this morning although her own ego was rampant.

Gregory drew her closer, for she still had the power to enthrall him at times. He understood the resources within her shallows as little as she understood his depths, but although her defects in education and natural equipment had long since appalled him, he was generally too busy to think about her, and too masculine to detect that she was playing a part. This morning, although he automatically responded to her blandishments, he was merely sensible of her presence, and his eyes, the long watchful eyes of the Indian, were concentrated upon the blue light that poured from the clouds down upon the glistening peaks. Ida knew that this meant he was getting ready to make an announcement of some sort, and longed to shake it out of him. Not daring to outrage his dignity so far, she drew the fur robe that enveloped them closer and rubbed her soft hair against his chin. It was useless to ask him to deliver himself until he was “good and ready”, but the less direct method sometimes prevailed.

Suddenly he came out with it.

“I’ve made up my mind to go back to the School.”

“Back to school—are you loony?”

“The School of Mines, of course. I can enter the Junior Class where I left off; earlier in fact, as I had finished the first semester. Besides, I’ve been going over all the old ground since Oakley came.”

“Is that what’s in all them books.”

“Those, dear.”

“Those. Mining Engineer’s a lot sweller than rancher.”

“Please don’t use that word.”

“Lord, Greg, you’re as particular as if you’d been brought up in Frisco or Chicago, instead of on a ranch.”

He laughed outright and pinched her ear. “I use a good deal of slang myself—only, there are some words that irritate me—I can hardly explain. It doesn’t matter.”

“Greg,” she asked with sudden suspicion, “why are you goin’ in for a profession? Have you given up hopes of strikin’ it rich on this ranch?”

“Oh, I shall never relinquish that dream.” He spoke so lightly that even had she understood him better she could not have guessed that the words leapt from what he believed to be the deepest of his passions. “But what has that to do with it? If there is gold on the ranch I shall be more likely to discover it when I know a great deal more about geology than I do now, and better able to mine it cheaply after I have learned all I can of milling and metallurgy at the School. But that is not the point. There may be nothing here. I wish to graduate into a profession which not only attracts me more than any other, but in which the expert can always make a large income. Ranching doesn’t interest me, and with Oakley to——”

“What woke you up so sudden?”

“I have never been asleep.” But he turned away his head lest she see the light in his eyes. “Oakley gives me my chance to get out, that is all. And I am very glad for your sake——”

“Aw!” Her voice, ringing out with ecstasy, converted the native syllable into music. “It means we are goin’ to live in Butte!”

“Of course.”

“And I was so took—taken by surprise it never dawned on me till this minute. Now what do you know about that?”

“We shall have to be very quiet. I cannot get my degree until a year from June—a year and seven months from now. I shall study day and night, and work in the mines during the winter and summer vacations. I cannot take you anywhere.”

“Lord knows it can’t be worse’n this. I’ll have my friends to talk to and there’s always the movin’ picture shows. Lord, how I’d like to see one.”

“Well, you shall,” he said kindly. “I wrote to Mark some time ago and asked him to give the tenant of the cottage notice. As this is the third of the month it must be empty and ready for us.”

“My goodness gracious!” cried his wife with pardonable irritation, “but you are a grand one for handin’ out surprises! Most husbands tell their wives things as they go along, but you ruminate like a cow and hand over the cud when you’re good and ready. I’m sick of bein’ treated as if I was a child.”

“Please don’t look at it in that way. What is the use of talking about things until one is quite sure they can be accomplished?”

“That’s half the fun of bein’ married,” said Ida with one of her flashes of intuition.

“Is it?” Gregory turned this over in his mind, then, out of his own experience, rejected it as a truism. He could not think of any subject he would care to discuss with his wife; or any other woman. But he kissed her with an unusual sense of compunction. “Perhaps I liked the idea of surprising you,” he said untruthfully. “You will be glad to live in Butte once more?”

“You may bet your bottom dollar on that. When do we go?”

“Tomorrow.”

“Lands sakes! Well, I’m dumb. And breakfast has to be got if I have had a bomb exploded under me. That Chink was doin’ fine when I left, but the Lord knows——”

She walked toward the rear of the house, temper in the swing of her hips, her head tossed high. Although rejoicing at the prospect of living in town, she was both angry and vaguely alarmed, as she so often had been before, at the unimaginable reserves, the unsuspected mental activities, and the sudden strikings of this life-partner who should have done his thinking out loud.

“Lord knows,” thought Mrs. Compton, as she approached her kitchen, with secret intent to relieve her feelings by “lambasting” the Mongolian and leaving Oakley to shift for himself, “it’s like livin’ with that there Sphinx. I don’t s’pose I’ll ever get used to him, and maybe the time’ll come when I won’t want to.”

III

GREGORY stood for some time longer, leaning on the gate and waiting for the red fire to rise above the crystal mountains. He was eager for the morrow, not only because he longed to be at the foundation stones of his real life but because his mind craved the precise training, the logical development, the intoxicating sense of expansion which he had missed and craved incessantly during the six years that had elapsed since he had been torn from the School of Mines. Moreover, his heart was light; at last he was able to shift the great responsibilities of his ranch to other shoulders.

Some six months since, his friend, Mark Blake, had recommended to him a young man who not only had graduated at the head of his class in the State College of Agriculture, but had served for two years on one of the State Experimental Farms. “What he don’t know about scientific farming, dry, intensive, and all the rest, isn’t worth shucks, old man,” Blake had written. “He’s as honest as they come, and hasn’t a red to do the trick himself, but wants to go on a ranch as foreman, and farm wherever there’s soil of a reasonable depth. Of course he wants a share of the profits, but he’s worth it to you, for the Lord never cut you out for a rancher or farmer, well as you have done. What you want is to finish your course and take your degree. Try Oakley out for six months. There’ll be only one result. You’re a free man.”

The contract had been signed the day before. But Oakley had been a welcome guest in the small household for more than practical reasons. Until the night of his advent, when the two men sat talking until daylight, Gregory had not realised the mental isolation of his married life. Like all young men he had idealised the girl who made the first assault on his preferential passion; but his brain was too shrewd, keen, practical, in spite of its imaginative area, to harbor illusions beyond the brief period of novelty. It had taken him but a few weeks to discover that although his wife had every charm of youth and sex, and was by no means a fool, their minds moved on different planes, far apart. He had dreamed of the complete understanding, the instinctive response, the identity of tastes, in short of companionship, of the final routing of a sense of hopeless isolation he had never lost consciousness of save when immersed in study.

Ida subscribed for several of the “cheapest” of the cheap magazines, and, when her Mongolians were indulgent, rocked herself in the sitting-room, devouring the factory sweets and crude mental drugs with much the same spirit that revelled above bargain counters no matter what the wares. She “lived” for the serials, and attempted to discuss the “characters” with her husband and John Oakley. But the foreman was politely intolerant of cheap fiction, Gregory open in his disgust.

He admitted unequivocally that he had made a mistake, but assuming that most men did, philosophically concluded to make the best of it; women, after all, played but a small part in a man’s life. He purposed, however, that she should improve her mind, and would have been glad to move to Butte for no other reason. He had had a sudden vision one night, when his own mind, wearied with study, drifted on the verge of sleep, of a lifetime on a lonely ranch with a woman whose brain deteriorated from year to year, her face faded and vacuous, save when animated with temper. If the De Smet Ranch proved to be mineralised, Oakley, his deliverer, would not be forgotten.

He moved his head restlessly, his glance darting over as much of his fine estate as it could focus, wondering when it would give up its secrets, in other words, its gold. He had never doubted that it winked and gleamed, and waited for him below the baffling surfaces of his land. Not for millions down would he have sold his ranch, renounced the personal fulfilment of that old passionate romance.

Gregory Compton was a dreamer, not in the drifting and aimless fashion of the visionary, but as all men born with creative powers, practical or artistic, must be. Indeed, it is doubtful if the artistic brain—save possibly where the abnormal tracts are musical in the highest sense—ever need, much less develop, that leaping vision, that power of visualising abstract ideas, of the men whose gifts for bold and original enterprise enable them to drive the elusive wealth of the world first into a corner, then into their own pockets.

When one contemplates the small army of men of great wealth in the world today, and, just behind, that auxiliary regiment endowed with the talent, the imagination, and the grim assurance necessary to magnetise the circulating riches of our planet; contemptuous of those hostile millions, whose brains so often are of unleavened dough, always devoid of talent, envious, hating, but sustained by the conceit which nature stores in the largest of her reservoirs to pour into the vacancies of the minds of men; seldom hopeless, fooling themselves with dreams of a day when mere brute numbers shall prevail, and (human nature having been revolutionised by a miracle) all men shall be equal and content to remain equal;—when one stands off and contemplates these two camps, the numerically weak composed of the forces of mind, the other of the unelectrified yet formidable millions, it is impossible to deny not only the high courage and supernormal gifts of the little army of pirates, but that, barring the rapidly decreasing numbers of explorers in the waste places of the earth, in them alone is the last stronghold of the old adventurous spirit that has given the world its romance.

The discontented, the inefficient, the moderately successful, the failures, see only remorseless greed in the great money makers. Their temper is too personal to permit them to recognise that here are the legitimate inheritors of the dashing heroes they enjoy in history, the bold and ruthless egos that throughout the ages have transformed savagery into civilisation, torpor into progress, in their pursuit of gold. That these “doing” buccaneers of our time are the current heroes of the masses, envious or generous in tribute, the most welcome “copy” of the daily or monthly press, is proof enough that the spirit of adventure still flourishes in the universal heart, seldom as modern conditions permit its expansion. For aught we know it may be this old spirit of adventure that inspires the midnight burglar and the gentlemen of the road, not merely the desire for “easy money.” But these are the flotsam. The boldest imaginations and the most romantic hearts are sequestered in the American “big business” men of today.

Gregory Compton had grown to maturity in the most romantic subdivision of the United States since California retired to the position of a classic. Montana, her long winter surface a reflection of the beautiful dead face of the moon, bore within her arid body illimitable treasure, yielding it from time to time to the more ardent and adventurous of her lovers. Gold and silver, iron, copper, lead, tungsten, precious and semi-precious stones—she might have been some vast heathen idol buried aeons ago when Babylon was but a thought in the Creator’s brain, and the minor gods travelled the heaving spaces to immure their treasure, stolen from rival stars.

Gregory had always individualised as well as idealised his state, finding more companionship in her cold mysteries than in the unfruitful minds of his little world. His youthful dreams, when sawing wood or riding after cattle, had been alternately of desperate encounters with Indians and of descending abruptly into vast and glittering corridors. The creek on the ranch had given up small quantities of placer gold, enough to encourage “Old Compton,” least imaginative of men, to use his pick up the side of the gulch, and even to sink a shaft or two. But he had wasted his money, and he had little faith in the mineral value of the De Smet Ranch or in his own luck. He was a thrifty, pessimistic, hard-working, down-east Presbyterian, whose faith in predestination had killed such roots of belief in luck as he may have inherited with other attributes of man. He sternly discouraged his son’s hopes, which the silent intense boy expressed one day in a sudden mood of fervour and desire for sympathy, bidding him hang on to the live stock, which were a certain sure source of income, and go out and feed hogs when he felt onsettled like.

He died when Gregory was in the midst of his Junior year in the School of Mines, and the eager student was obliged to renounce his hope of a congenial career, for the present, and assume control of the ranch. It was heavily mortgaged; his father’s foreman, who had worked on the ranch since he was a lad, had taken advantage of the old man’s failing mind to raise the money, as well as to obtain his signature to the sale of more than half the cattle. He had disappeared with the concrete result a few days before Mr. Compton’s death.

It was in no serene spirit that Gregory entered upon the struggle for survival at the age of twenty-one. Bitterly resenting his abrupt divorce from the School of Mines, which he knew to be the gateway to his future, and his faith in mankind dislocated by the cruel defection of one whom he had liked and trusted from childhood, he seethed under his stolid exterior while working for sixteen hours a day to rid the ranch of its encumbrance and replace the precious cattle. But as the greater part of this time was spent out of doors he outgrew the delicacy of his youth and earlier manhood, and, with red blood and bounding pulses, his bitterness left him.

He began to visit Butte whenever he could spare a few days from the ranch, to “look up” as his one chum, Mark Blake, expressed it; so that by the time he married he knew the life of a Western mining town—an education in itself—almost as well as he knew the white and silent spaces of Montana. With the passing of brooding and revolt his old dreams revived, and he spent, until he married, many long days prospecting. He had found nothing until a few weeks ago, early in October, and then the discovery, such as it was, had been accidental.

There had been a terrific wind storm, beginning shortly after sundown, reaching at midnight a velocity of seventy-two miles an hour, and lasting until morning; it had been impossible to sleep or to go out of doors and see to the well-being of the cattle.

The wind was not the Chinook, although it came out of the west, for it was bitterly cold. Two of the house windows facing the storm were blown in and the roof of a recent addition went off. As such storms are uncommon in Montana, even Gregory was uneasy, fearing the house might go, although it had been his father’s boast that not even an earthquake could uproot it. After daybreak the steady fury of the storm ceased. There was much damage done to the outbuildings, but, leaving Oakley to superintend repairs, Gregory mounted his horse and rode over the ranch to examine the fences and brush sheds. The former were intact, and the cattle were huddled in their shelters, which were built against the side of a steep hill. A few, no doubt, had drifted before the storm, but would return in the course of the day. Here and there a pine tree had been blown over, but the winter wheat and alfalfa were too young to be injured.

He rode towards the hill where the wind had done its most conspicuous damage. It was a long steep hill of granite near the base and grey limestone above topped with red shales, and stood near the northeast corner of the ranch. Its rigid sides had been relieved by a small grove of pines; but although in spring it was gay with anemones and primrose moss, and green until late in July, there was nothing on its ugly flanks at this time of the year but sunburnt grass.

The old pines had clung tenaciously to the inhospitable soil for centuries, but some time during the night, still clutching a mass of earth and rock in their great roots, they had gone down before the storm.

Gregory felt a pang of distress; in his boyhood that grove of pines had been his retreat; there he had dreamed his dreams, visualised the ascending metals, forced upward from the earth’s magma by one of those old titanic convulsions that make a joke of the modern earthquake, to find a refuge in the long fissures of the cooler crust, or in the great shattered zones. He knew something of geology and chemistry when he was twelve, and he “saw” the great primary deposits change their character as they were forced closer to the surface, acted upon by the acids of air and water in the oxide zone.

There he had lived down his disappointments, taken his dumb trouble when his mother died; and he had found his way blindly to the dark little grove after his father’s funeral and he had learned the wrong that had been done him.

He had not gone there since. He had been busy always, and lost the habit. But now he remembered, and with some wonder, for it was the one ugly spot on the ranch, save in its brief springtime, that once it had drawn his feet like a magnet. Hardly conscious of the act, he rode to the foot of the hill, dismounted and climbed towards the grove which had stood about fifty feet from the crest.

The ruin was complete. The grove, which once may have witnessed ancient rites, was lying with its points in the brown grass. Its gaunt roots, packed close with red earth and pieces of rock, seemed to strain upward in agonised protest. Men deserted on the battlefield at night look hardly more stricken than a tree just fallen.

As Gregory approached his old friends his eyes grew narrower and narrower; his mind concentrated to a point as sharp and penetrating as a needle. If the storm, now fitful, had suddenly returned to its highest velocity he would not have known it. He walked rapidly behind the vanquished roots and picked out several bits of rock that were embedded in the earth. Then he knelt down and examined other pieces of rock in the excavation where the trees had stood. Some were of a brownish-yellow colour, others a shaded green of rich and mellow tints. There was no doubt whatever that they were float.

He sat down suddenly and leaned against the roots of the trees. Had he found his “mine”? Float indicates an ore body somewhere, and as these particles had been prevented from escaping by the roots of trees incalculably old, it was reasonable to assume that the ores were beneath his feet.

His brain resumed its normal processes, and he deliberately gave his imagination the liberty of its youth. The copper did not interest him, but he stared at the piece of quartz in his hand as if it had been a seer’s crystal. He saw great chambers of quartz flecked with free gold, connected by pipes or shoots equally rich. Once he frowned, the ruthlessly practical side of his intelligence reminding him that his labours and hopes might be rewarded by a shallow pocket. But he brushed the wagging finger aside. He could have sworn that he felt the pull of the metals within the hill.

He was tired and hungry, but his immediate impulse, as soon as he had concluded that he had dreamed long enough, was to go for his tools and run a cut. He sprang to his feet; but he had taken only a few steps when he turned and stared at the gashed earth, his head a little on one side in an attitude that always indicated he was thinking hard and with intense concentration. Then he set his lips grimly, walked down the steep hillside, mounted his horse, and rode home. In the course of the afternoon he returned to the hill, picked all the pieces of float from the soil between the tree-roots, and buried them, stamping down the earth. A few days later there was a light fall of snow. He returned once more to the hill, this time with two of his labourers, who cut up the trees and hauled them away. For the present his possible treasure vault was restored to the seclusion of its centuries.

He had made up his mind that the ores should stay where they were until he had finished his education in the School of Mines. He had planned to finish that course, and what he planned he was in the habit of executing. This was not the time for dreams, nor for prospecting, but to learn all that the School could teach him. Then, if there were valuable ore bodies in his hill he could be his own manager and engineer. He knew that he had something like genius for geology, also that many veins were lost through an imperfect knowledge (or sense) of that science in mining engineers; on the other hand, that the prospector, in spite of his much vaunted sixth sense, often failed, where the hidden ores were concerned, through lack of scientific training. He determined to train his own faculties as far as possible before beginning development work on his hill. Let the prospector’s fever get possession of him now and that would be the end of study. The hill would keep. It was his. The ranch was patented.

When he had finished the interment of the float he had taken a small notebook from his pocket and inscribed a date: June the third, eighteen months later. Not until that date would he even ride past his hill.

Born with a strong will and a character endowed with force, determination and a grimly passive endurance, it was his pleasure to test and develop both. The process was satisfactory to himself but sometimes trying to his friends.

Until this morning he had not permitted his mind to revert to the subject. But although the hill—Limestone Hill it was called in the commonplace nomenclature of the country—was far away and out of the range of his vision, he could conjure it up in its minutest external detail, and he permitted himself this luxury for a few moments after his wife had left him to a welcome solitude. On this hill were centred all his silent hopes.

If he had been greedy for riches alone he would have promoted a company at once, if a cut opened up a chamber that assayed well, and reaped the harvest with little or no trouble to himself. But nothing was farther from his mind. He wanted the supreme adventure. He wanted to find the ores with his own pick. After the adventure, then the practical use of wealth. There was much he could do for his state. He knew also that in one group of brain-cells, as yet unexplored, was the ambition to enter the lists of “doing” men, and pit his wits against the best of them. But he was young, he would have his adventure, live his dream first. Not yet, however.

The swift passing of his marital illusions had convinced him that the real passion of his life was for Montana and the golden blood in her veins. Placer mining never had interested him. He wanted to find his treasure deep in the jealous earth. He assured himself as he stood there in the blue dawn that it was well to be rid of love so early in the game, free to devote himself, with no let from wandering mind and mere human pulses, to preparation for the greatest of all romances, the romance of mining. That he might ever crave the companionship of one woman was as remote from his mind as the possibility of failure. To learn all that man and experience could teach him of the science that has been so great a factor in the world’s progress; to magnetise a vast share of Earth’s riches, first for the hot work of the battle, then for the power it would give him; to conquer life; these were a few of the flitting dreams that possessed him as he watched the red flame lick the white crests of the mountains, and the blue clouds turn to crimson; his long sensitive lips folded closely, his narrow eyes penetrating the mists of the future, neither seeing nor considering its obstacles, its barriers, its disenchantments. Thrice happy are the dreamers of the world, when their imaginations are creative, not a mere maggot wandering through the brain hatching formless eggs of desire and discontent. They are the true inheritors of the centuries, whether they succeed or fail in the eyes of men; for they live in vivid silent intense drama as even they have no power to live and enjoy in mortal conditions.

IV

THE Comptons were quickly settled in the little cottage in East Granite Street, for as Mrs. Hook’s furniture was solid Ida had not sold it. There was little to do, therefore, but repaper the walls, build a bathroom, furnish a dining-room, send the parlour furniture to the upholsterers—Ida had had enough of horsehair—and chattel the kitchen.

Ida had several virtues in which she took a vocal pride, and not the least of these was housekeeping in all its variety. The luxurious side of her nature might revel in front parlours, trashy magazines, rocking-chairs and chewing-gum, but she never indulged in these orgies unless her house were in order. After her arrival in Butte it was quite a month before she gave a thought to leisure. They spent most of this time at a hotel, but Ida was out before the stores opened, and divided her day between the workmen at the cottage, the upholsterer, and the bargain counter. She was “on the job” every minute until the cottage was “on wheels.” Her taste was neither original nor artistic, but she had a rude sense of effect, and a passion for what she called colour schemes. She boasted to Gregory at night, when she had him at her mercy at the hotel dinner-table, that although everything had to be cheap except the kitchen furnishings, colours did not cost any more than black or drab. When the cottage was in order, and they moved in, he saw its transfigured interior for the first time. The bedroom was done in a pink that set his teeth on edge, and the little parlour was papered, upholstered, carpeted, cushioned in every known shade of red.

“All you want is a chromo or two of Indian battlegrounds—just after,” he remarked.

Ida interrupted tartly:

“Well, I should think you’d be grateful for the contrast to them everlasting white or brown mountains. We don’t get away from them even in town, now the smoke’s gone.”

“One would think Montana had no springtime.”

“Precious little. That’s the reason I’ve got a green dining-room.”

Gregory, who had suffered himself to be pushed into an arm-chair, looked at his wife speculatively, as she rocked herself luxuriously, her eyes dwelling fondly on the magenta paper, the crimson curtains, the turkey red and crushed strawberry cushions of the divan, the blood-red carpet with its still more sanguinary pattern. What blind struggle was going on in that uninstructed brain against the commonplace, what seed of originality, perhaps, striving to shoot forth a green tip from the hard crust of ignorance and conceit?

He had made up his mind to suggest the tillage of that brain without delay, but, knowing her sensitive vanity, cast about for a tactful opening.

“Do you really intend to do your own work?” he asked. “I am more than willing to pay for a servant.”

“Not much. I’m goin’ to begin to save up for the future right now. I’ll put out the wash, but it’s a pity if a great husky girl like me can’t cook for two and keep this little shack clean. You ain’t never goin’ to be able to say I didn’t help you all I could.”

Gregory glowed with gratitude as he looked at the beautiful face of has wife, flushed with the ardour of the true mate.

“You are all right,” he murmured.

“The less we spend the quicker we’ll get rich,” pursued Mrs. Compton. “I don’t mind this triflin’ work, but it would have made me sick to stay much longer on that ranch workin’ away my youth and looks and nothin’ to show for it. Now that you’ve really begun on somethin’ high-toned and that’s bound to be a go, I just like the idea of havin’ a hand in the job.”

“Ah!— Well— If you have this faith in my power to make a fortune—if you are looking forward to being a rich man’s wife, to put it crudely—don’t you think you should begin to prepare yourself for the position——”

“Now what are you drivin’ at?” She sprang to her feet. Her eyes blazed. Her hands went to her hips. “D’you mean to say I ain’t good enough? I suppose you’d be throwin’ me over for a grand dame when you get up in the world like some other millionaires we know of, let alone politicians what get to thinkin’ themselves statesmen, and whose worn-out old wives ain’t good enough for ’em. Well, take this from me and take it straight—I don’t propose to wear out, and I don’t propose——”

“Sit down. I shall be a rich man long before you lose your beauty. Nor have I any social ambitions. The world of men is all that interests me. But with you it will be different——”

“You may betcherlife it’ll be different—some! When I have a cream-coloured pressed brick house with white trimmings over there in Millionaire Gulch nobody’ll be too good for me.”

“You shall live your life to suit yourself, in the biggest house in Butte, if that is what you want. But there is more in it than that.”

“Clothes, of course. Gowns! And jewels, and New York—Lord! wouldn’t I like to swell up and down Peacock Ally! And Southern California, and Europe, and givin’ balls, and bein’ a member of the Country Club.”

“All that, as a matter of course! But you would not be content with the mere externals. Whether you know it or not, Ida, you are an ambitious woman.” This was a mere gambler’s throw on Gregory’s part. He knew nothing of her ambitions, and would have called them by another name if he had.

“Not know it? Well, you may just betcherlife I know it!”

“But hardly where ambition leads. No sooner would you be settled in a fine house, accustomed to your new toys, than you would want society. I don’t mean that you would have any difficulty gaining admittance to Butte society, for it is said that none in the world is more hospitable and less particular. But whether you make friends of the best people here, much less become a leader, depends—well, upon several things——”

“Fire away,” said Ida sulkily. “You must be considerable in earnest to talk a blue streak!”

“Business may take me to New York from time to time, but my home shall remain here. I never intend to abandon my state and make a fool of myself on New York’s doorstep as so many Montanans have done. Nail up that fact and never forget it. Now, you would like to win an unassailable position in your community, would you not?”

“Yep.”

Gregory abandoned tact. “Then begin at once to prepare yourself. You must have a teacher and study—English, above all things.”

“My Goo-r-rd!” She flushed almost purple. For the moment she hated him. “I’ve always suspicioned you thought I wasn’t good enough for you, with your graduatin’ from the High School almost while you was in short pants, and them two years and over at that high-brow School of Mines; and now you’re tellin’ me you’ll be ashamed of me the minute you’re on top!”

Gregory made another attempt at diplomacy. What his wife achieved socially was a matter of profound indifference to him, but she must reform her speech if his home life was to be endurable.

“I am forcing my imagination to keep pace with your future triumphs,” he said with the charming smile that disarmed even Ida when irate. “If you are going to be a prominent figure in society——”

“My land, you oughter heard the grammar and slang of some of the newest West Siders when they were makin’ up their minds at Madame O’Reilley’s, or havin’ their measures took. They don’t frighten me one little bit.”

“There is a point. To lead them you must be their superior—and the equal of those that have made the most of their advantages.”

“That’s not such a bad idea.”

“Think it over.” He rose, for he was tired of the conversation. “These western civilisations are said to be crude, but I fancy they are the world in little. Subtlety, a brain developed beyond the common, should go far——”

“Greg, you are dead right!” She had suddenly remembered that she must play up to this man who held her ambitions in his hand, and she had the wit to acknowledge his prospicience, little as were the higher walks of learning to her taste. She sprang to her feet with a supple undulating movement and flung herself into his arms.

“I’ll begin the minute you find me a teacher,” she exclaimed. Then she kissed him. “I’m goin’ to keep right along with you and make you proud of me,” she murmured. “I’m crazy about you and always will be. Swear right here you’ll never throw me over, or run round with a P’rox.”

Gregory laughed, but held her off for a moment and stared into her eyes. After all, might not study and travel and experience give depth to those classic eyes which now seemed a mere joke of Nature? Was she merely the natural victim of her humble conditions? Her father had been a miner of a very superior sort, conservative and contemptuous of agitators, but a powerful voice in his union and respected alike by men and managers. Mrs. Hook had been a shrewd, hard-working, tight-fisted little woman from Concord, who had never owed a penny, nor turned out a careless piece of work. Both parents with education or better luck might have taken a high position in any western community. He knew also the preternatural quickness and adaptability of the American woman. But could a common mind achieve distinction?

Ida, wondering “what the devil he was thinking about,” nestled closer and gave him a long kiss, her woman’s wisdom, properly attributed to the serpent, keeping her otherwise mute. Gregory snatched her suddenly to him and returned her kiss. The new hope revived a passion by no means dead for this beautiful young creature, and for the hour he was as happy as during his rosy honeymoon.

V

WHEN the cottage was quite in order Mrs. Compton invited two of her old friends to lunch. As the School of Mines was at the opposite end of the city, Gregory took his midday meal with him.

Miss Ruby Miller and her twin-sister Pearl were fine examples of the self-supporting young womanhood of the West. Neither had struggled in the extreme economic sense, although when launched they had taken a man’s chances and asked no quarter. Born in a small town in Illinois, their father, a provident grocer, had permitted each of his daughters to attend school until her fifteenth year, then sent her to Chicago to learn a trade. Ruby had studied the mysteries of the hair, complexion, and hands; Pearl the science that must supplement the knack for trimming hats. Both worked faithfully as apprentice and clerk, saving the greater part of their earnings: they purposed to set up for themselves in some town of the Northwest where money was easier, opportunities abundant and expertness rare. What they heard of Montana appealed to their enterprising minds, and, beginning with cautious modesty, some four years before Ida’s marriage, Ruby was now the leading hair-dresser and manicure of Butte, her pleasant address and natural diplomacy assisting her competent hands to monopolise the West Side custom; Pearl, although less candid and engaging, more frank in reminding her customers of their natural deficiencies, was equally capable; if not the leading milliner in that town of many milliners, where even the miners’ wives bought three hats a season, she was rapidly making a reputation among the feathered tribe. She now ranked as one of the most successful of the young business women in a region where success is ever the prize of the efficient. Both she and her sister were as little concerned for their future as the metal hill of Butte itself.

“Well, what do you know about that?” they cried simultaneously, as Ida ushered them into the parlour. “Say, it’s grand!” continued Miss Ruby with fervour. “Downright artistic. Ide, you’re a wonder!”

Miss Pearl, attuned to a subtler manipulation of colour, felt too happy in this intimate reunion and the prospect of “home-cooking,” to permit even her spirit to grin. “Me for red, kiddo,” she said. “It’s the colour a hard workin’ man or woman wants at the end of the day—warm, and comfortin’, and sensuous-like, and contrastin’ fine with dirty streets and them hills. Glory be, but this chair’s comfortable! I suppose it’s Greg’s.”

“Of course. Luckily a woman don’t have the least trouble findin’ out a man’s weak points, and Greg has a few, thank the goodness godness. But come on to the dining-room. I’ve got fried chicken and creamed potatoes and raised biscuit.”

The guests shrieked with an abandon that proclaimed them the helpless victims of the Butte restaurant or the kitchenette. The fried chicken in its rich gravy, and the other delicacies, including fruit salad, disappeared so rapidly that there was little chance for the play of intellect until the two girls fled laughing to the parlour.

“It’s all very well for Pearl,” cried Miss Ruby, disposing her plump figure in Gregory’s arm-chair, and taking the pins from a mass of red hair that had brought her many a customer; “for she’s the kind that’ll never have to diet if she gets rich quick. I ought to be shassaying round with my hands on my hips right now, but I won’t.”

Miss Pearl extended herself on the divan, and Ida rocked herself with a complacent smile. One of her vanities was slaked, and she experienced a sense of immense relief in the society of these two old friends of her own sort.

“Say!” exclaimed Miss Miller, “if we was real swell, now, we’d be smokin’ cigarettes.”

“What!” cried Ida, scandalised. “No lady’d do such a thing. Say, I forgot the gum.”

She opened a drawer and flirted an oblong section of chewing-gum at each of her guests, voluptuously inserting a morsel in the back of her own mouth. “Where on earth have you seen ladies smokin’ cigarettes?”

“You forget I’m in and out of some of our best families. In other words them that’s too swell—or too lazy—to come to me, has me up to them. And they’re just as nice—most of ’em—as they can be; no more airs than their men, and often ask me to stay to lunch. I ain’t mentionin’ no names, as I was asked not to, for you know what an old-fashioned bunch there is in every Western town—well, they out with their gold tips after lunch, and maybe you think they don’t know how. I have my doubts as to their enjoyin’ it, for tobacco is nasty tastin’ stuff, and I notice they blow the smoke out quicker’n they take it in. No inhalin’ for them. But they like doin’ it; that’s the point. And I guess they do it a lot at the Country Club and at some of the dinners where the Old Guard ain’t asked. They smoke, and think it’s vulgar to chew gum! We know it’s the other way round.”

“Well, I guess!” exclaimed the young matron, who had listened to this chronicle of high life with her mouth open. “What their husbands thinkin’ about to permit such a thing! I can see Greg’s face if I lit up.”

“Oh, their husbands don’t care,” said Pearl, the cynic. “Not in that bunch. They’re trained, and they don’t care, anyhow. Make the most of Greg now, kiddo. When he strikes it rich, he’ll be just like the rest of ’em, annexin’ right and left. Matter of principle.”

“Principle nothing!” exclaimed Ruby, who, highly sophisticated as any young woman earning her living in a mining town must be, was always amiable in her cynicism. “It’s too much good food and champagne, to say nothin’ of cocktails and highballs and swell club life after the lean and hungry years. They’re just like kids turned loose in a candy store, helpin’ themselves right and left with both hands. Dear old boys, they’re so happy and so jolly you can’t help feelin’ real maternal over ’em, and spoilin’ ’em some more. I often feel like it, even when they lay for me—they look so innocent and hungry-like; but others I could crack over the ear, and I don’t say I haven’t. Lord, how a girl alone does get to know men! I wouldn’t marry one of them if he’d give me the next level of the Anaconda mine. Me for the lonesome!”

“Well, I’m glad I’m married,” said Ida complacently. “The kind of life I want you can only get through a husband. Greg’s goin’ to make money, all right.”

“Greg won’t be as bad as some,” said the wise Miss Ruby. “He’s got big ideas, and as he don’t say much about ’em, he’s likely thinkin’ about nothin’ else. At least that’s the way I figure him out. The Lord knows I’ve seen enough of men. But you watch out just the same. Them long thin ones that looks like they was all brains and jaw is often the worst. They’ve got more nerves. The minute the grind lets up they begin to look out for an adventure, wonderin’ what’s round the next corner. Wives ain’t much at supplyin’ adventure——”

“Well, let’s quit worryin’ about what ain’t happened,” said Miss Pearl abruptly. Men did not interest her. “Will he take you to any of the dances? That’s what I want to know. You’ve been put up and elected to our new and exclusive Club. No more Coliseum Saturday Nights for us—Race Track is a good name for it. We’ve taken a new little hall over Murphy’s store for Saturday nights till the Gardens open up, and we have real fun. No rowdyism. We leave that to the cut below. This Club is composed of real nice girls and young men of Butte who are workin’ hard at something high-toned and respectable, and frown hard on the fast lot.”

“Sounds fine. Perhaps Greg’ll go, though he studies half the night. Do you meet at any other time? Is it one of them mind improvers, too?”

“Nixie. We work all week and want fun when we get a few hours off. I improve my mind readin’ myself to sleep every night——”

“What do you read?” interrupted Ida, eagerly.

“Oh, the mags, of course, and a novel now and then. But you don’t need novels any more. The mags are wonders! They teach you all the life you don’t know—all the way from lords to burglars. Then there’s the movin’ pictures. Lord, but we have advantages our poor mothers never dreamed of!”

“Greg wants me to study with a teacher.” Ida frowned reminiscently and fatidically. “He seems to think I didn’t get nothin’ at school.”

“Well, what do you know about that?” gasped Miss Miller. Pearl removed her gum with a dry laugh.

“If a man insinuated I wasn’t good enough for him—” she began; Ruby, whose quick mind was weather-wise, interrupted her.

“Greg’s right. He’s got education himself and’s proved he don’t mean to be a rancher all his life. What’s more, I’ve heard men say that Gregory Compton is bound one way or another to be one of the big men of Montana. He’s got the brains, he’s got the jaw, and he can outwork any miner that ever struck, and no bad habits. Ide, you go ahead and polish up.”

“Why should I? I never could see that those bonanzerines were so much better’n us, barring clothes.”

“You don’t know the best of ’em, Ide. Madame O’Reilley was too gaudy to catch any but the newest bunch. The old pioneer guard is fine, and their girls have been educated all over this country and the next. Lord! Look at Ora Blake! Where’d you beat her? In these new Western towns it’s generally the sudden rich that move to New York to die of lonesomeness, and nowhere to show their clothes but Peacock Alley in the Waldorf-Astoria. The real people keep their homes here, if they are awful restless; and I guess the Society they make, with their imported gowns and all, ain’t so very different from top Society anywheres. Of course, human nature is human nature, and some of the younger married women are sporty and take too much when a bunch goes over to Boulder Springs for a lark, or get a crush on some other woman’s husband—for want mostly of something to do; but their grammar’s all right. I hope you’ll teach them a lesson when you’re on top, Ide. Good American morals for me, like good American stories. I always skip the Europe stories in the mags. Don’t seem modern and human, somehow, after Butte.”

“Now I like Europe stories,” said Ida, “just because they are so different. The people in ’em ain’t walkin’ round over gold and copper when they’re dishwashin’ or makin’ love, but their mines have been turned centuries ago into castles and pictures and grand old parks. There’s a kind of halo——”

“Halo nothin’!” exclaimed Miss Pearl, who was even more aggressively American than her sister. “It’s them ridiculous titles. And kings and queens and all that antique lot. I despise ’em, and I’m dead set against importin’ foreign notions into God’s own country. We’re dyed-in-the-wool Americans—out West here, anyhow—including every last one of them fools that’s buyin’ new notions with their new money. All their Paris clothes and hats, and smokin’ cigarettes, and loose talk can’t make ’em anything else. Apin’ Europe and its antiquated morals makes me sick to my stomach. Cut it out, kid, before you go any further. Stand by your own country and it’ll stand by you.”

“Well, I’ve got an answer to that. In the first place I’d like to know where you’ll find more girls on the loose than right here in Butte—and I don’t mean the sporting women, either. Why, I meet bunches of schoolgirls every day so painted up they look as if they was fixin’ right now to be bad; and as for these Eastern workin’ girls who come out here after jobs, pretendin’ it’s less pressure and bigger pay they’re after, when it’s really to turn loose and give human nature a chance with free spenders—well, the way they hold down their jobs and racket about all night beats me. None of them’s been to Europe, I notice, and I’d like to bet that the schoolgirls that don’t make monkeys of themselves is the daughters of them that has.”

“Oh, the schoolgirls is just plain little fools and no doubt has their faces held under the spout for ’em when they get home. But as for the Eastern girls, you hit it when you said they come out here to give human nature a chance. Some girls is born bad, thousands and thousands of them; and reformers might just as well try to grow strawberries in a copper smelter as to make a girl run straight when she is lyin’ awake nights thinkin’ up new ways of bein’ crooked. But the rotten girls in this town are not the whole show. And lots of women that would never think of goin’ wrong—don’t naturally care for that sort of thing a bit—just get their minds so mixed up by too much sudden money, and liberty, and too much high livin’ and too much Europe and too much nothin’ to do, that they just don’t know where they’re at; and it isn’t long either before they get to thinkin’ they’re not the dead swell thing unless they do what the nobility of Europe seems to be doin’ all the time——”

“Shucks!” interrupted Ruby, indignantly. “It’s just them stories in the shady mags, and the way our women talk for the sake of effect. There’s bad in America and good in poor old Europe. I’ll bet my new hat on it. Only, over there the good is out of sight under all that sportin’ high life everybody seems to write about. Over here we’ve got a layer of good on top as thick as cream, and every kind of germ swimmin’ round underneath. Lord knows there are plenty of just females in this town, of all towns, but the U. S. is all right because it has such high standards. All sorts of new-fangled notions come and go but them standards never budge. No other country has anything like ’em. Sooner or later we’ll catch up. I’m great on settin’ the right example and I’m dead set on uplift. That’s one reason we’re so strict about our Club membership. Not one of them girls can get in, no matter how good her job or how swell a dresser she is. And they feel it, too, you bet. The line’s drawn like a barbed-wire fence.”

“I guess you’re dead right,” admitted Ida. “And my morals ain’t in any danger, believe me. I’ve got other fish to fry. I’ve had love’s young dream and got over it. I’m just about dead sick of that side of life. I’d cut it out and put it down to profit and loss, but you’ve got to manage men every way nature’s kindly provided, and that’s all there is to it.”

“My land!” exclaimed Ruby. “If I felt that way about my husband I’d leave him too quick.”

“Oh, no, you wouldn’t. You can make up your mind to any old thing. That’s life. And I guess life never holds out both hands full at once. Either, one’s got a knife in it or it’s out of sight altogether.”

Ruby snorted with disgust. “Once more I vow I’ll marry none of them. Me for self-respect.”

“Now as to Europe,” pursued Ida. “You’re just nothin’ till you’ve been, both as to what you get, and sayin’ you’ve been there——”

“Ida,” said Ruby, shaking her wise red head, “don’t you go leaving your husband summers, like the rest. Men don’t get much chance to go to Europe. They prefer little old New York, anyhow—when they get on there alone. I wonder what ten thousand wives that go to Europe every summer think their husbands are doin’? I haven’t manicured men for nine years without knowin’ they need watchin’ every minute. Why, my lord! they’re so tickled to death when summer comes round they can hardly wait to kiss their wives good-bye and try to look lonesome on the platform. They’d like to be down and kick up their heels right there at the station. And I didn’t have to come to Butte to find that out.”

“Greg’ll never run with that fast lot.”

“No, but he might meet an affinity; and there’s one of them lyin’ in wait for every man.”

Ida’s brow darkened. “Well, just let her look out for herself, that’s all. I’ll hang on to Greg. But it ain’t time to worry yet. Let’s have a game of poker.”

VI

GREGORY, through the offices of his friend, Mark Blake, found a teacher for Ida before the end of the week, Mr. William Cullen Whalen, Professor of English in the Butte High School.

Mr. Whalen’s present status was what he was in the habit of designating as an ignominious anti-climax, considering his antecedents and attainments; but he always dismissed the subject with a vague, “Health—health—this altitude—this wonderful air—climate—not for me are the terrible extremes of our Atlantic seaboard. Here a man may be permitted to live, if not in the deeper sense—well, at least, there are always one’s thoughts—and books.”

He was a delicate little man as a matter of fact, but had East winds and summer humidities been negligible he would have jumped at the position found for him by a college friend who had gone West and prospered in Montana. This friend’s letter had much to say about the dry tonic air of winter, the cool light air of summer, the many hours he would be able to pass in the open, thus deepening the colour of his corpuscles, at present a depressing shade of pink; but even more about a salary far in excess of anything lying round loose in the East. Mr. Whalen, who, since his graduation from the college in his native town, had knocked upon several historic portals of learning in vain, finding himself invariably outclassed, had shuddered, but accepted his fate by the outgoing mail. Of course he despised the West; and the mere thought of a mining camp like Butte, which was probably in a drunken uproar all the time, almost nauseated him. However, in such an outpost the graduate of an Eastern college who knew how to wear his clothes must rank high above his colleagues. It might be years before he could play a similar rôle at home. So he packed his wardrobe, which included spats and a silk hat, and went.

Nature compensates even her comparative failures by endowing them with a deathless self-conceit. Whalen was a man of small abilities, itching ambition, all the education his brains could stand, and almost happy in being himself and a Whalen. It was true that Fortune had grafted him on a well-nigh sapless branch in a small provincial town, while the family trunk flourished, green, pruned, and portly, in Boston, but no such trifle could alter the fact that he was a Whalen, and destined by a discriminating heredity to add to the small but precious bulk of America’s literature. Although he found Butte a city of some sixty thousand inhabitants, and far better behaved than he had believed could be possible in a community employing some fifteen thousand miners, he was still able to reassure himself that she outraged every sensibility. He assured himself further that its lurid contrasts to the higher civilisation would play like a search-light upon the theme for a novel he long had had in mind: the subtle actions and reactions of the Boston temperament.

But that was three years ago, and meanwhile several things had happened to him. He had ceased to wear his spats and silk hat in public after their first appearance on Broadway; the newsboys, who were on strike, had seen to that. He wrote his novel, and the Atlantic Monthly, honored by the first place on his list, declined to give space to his innocent plagiarisms of certain anæmic if literary authors now passing into history. An agent sent the manuscript the rounds without avail, but one of the younger editors had suggested that he try his hand at Montana. He was more shocked and mortified at this proposition than at the failure of his novel. Time, however, as well as the high cost of living in Butte, lent him a grudging philosophy, and he digested the advice. But his were not the eyes that see. The printed page was his world, his immediate environment but a caricature of the subtle realities. Nevertheless, he had what so often appears in the most unlikely brains, the story-telling kink. Given an incident he could work it up with an abundance of detail and “psychology,” easily blue-pencilled, and a certain illusion. Condescend to translate his present surroundings into the sacred realm of American fiction he would not, but he picked the brains of old-timers for thrilling incidents of the days when gold was found at the roots of grass, and the pioneers either were terrorized by the lawless element or executed upon it a summary and awful justice. Some of his tales were so blood-curdling, so steeped in gore and horror, that he felt almost alive when writing them. It was true that their market was the Sunday Supplement and the more sensational magazines, whose paper and type made his soul turn green; but the pay was excellent, and they had begun to attract some attention, owing to the contrast between the fierceness of theme and the neat precise English in which it was served. Butte valued him as a counter-irritant to Mary McLane, and he became a professional diner-out.

“Do you think he’ll condescend to tutor?” Gregory had asked of Blake. Whalen was by no means unknown to him, but heretofore had been regarded as a mere worm.

“Sure thing. Nobody keener on the dollar than Whalen. He’ll stick you, but he knows his business. He’s got all the words there are, puts ’em in the right place, and tones ’em up so you’d hardly know them.”

VII

IDA was out when her prospective tutor called, and she was deeply impressed by the card she found under the door: “Mr. William Cullen Whalen,” it was inscribed.

It was the custom of the gentlemen of her acquaintance to express their sense of good fellowship even upon the formal pasteboard. “Mr. Matt Dance,” “Mr. Phil Mott,” “Mr. Bill Jarvis,” the legends read. Ida felt as if she were reciting a line from the Eastern creed as her lips formed again and again the suave and labial syllables on her visitor’s card. She promptly determined to order cards for her husband on the morrow—he was so remiss as to have none—and they should be engraved, in small Roman letters: “Mr. Gregory Verrooy Compton.”

“And believe me,” she announced to her green dining-room, as she sat down before her husband’s desk, “that is some name.”

Her note to Professor Whalen, asking him to call on the following afternoon at two o’clock, was commendably brief, so impatient was she to arrive at the signature, “Mrs. Gregory Verrooy Compton;” little conceiving the effect it would have upon Mr. Whalen’s fastidious spine.

He called at the hour named, and Ida invited him into the dining-room. It was here that Gregory read far into the night, and she vaguely associated a large table with much erudition. Moreover, she prided herself upon her economy in fuel.

Mr. Whalen sat in one of the hard, upright chairs, his stick across his knee, his gloves laid smartly in the rolling brim of his hat, studying this new specimen and wondering if she could be made to do him credit. He was surprised to find her so beautiful, and not unrefined in style—if only she possessed the acumen to keep her ripe mouth shut. In fact he found her quite the prettiest woman he had seen in Butte, famous for pretty women; and—and—he searched conscientiously for the right word, and blushed as he found it—the most seductive. Ida was vain of the fact that she wore no corset, and that not the least of her attractions was a waist as flexible as an acrobat’s. What flesh she had was very firm, her carriage was easy and graceful, the muscles of her back were strong, her lines long and flowing; she walked and moved at all times with an undulating movement usually associated with a warmer temperament. But nature often amuses herself bestowing the semblance and withholding the essence; Ida, calculating and contemptuous of the facile passions of men, amused herself with them, confident of her own immunity.

It was now some time since she had enjoyed the admiration of any man but her husband, and his grew more and more sporadic, was long since dry of novelty. Like most Western husbands, he would not have permitted her to make a friend of any other man, nor even to receive the casual admirer when he was not at home. Ida was full of vanity, although she would have expressed her sudden determination to captivate “little Whalen” merely as a desire to keep her hand in. He was the only man upon whom she was likely to practise at present (for Gregory would have none of the Club dances), and vanity can thirst like a galled palate. She had “sized him up” as a “squirt” (poor Ida! little she recked how soon she was to be stripped of her picturesque vocabulary), but he was “a long sight better than nothing.”

After they had exhausted the nipping weather, and the possibility of a Chinook arriving before night—there was a humming roar high overheard at the moment—she lowered her black eyelashes, lifted herself against the stiff back of her chair with the motion of a snake uncoiling, raised her thick white lids suddenly, and murmured:

“Well, so you’re goin’ to polish me off? Tell me all my faults! Fire away. I know you’ll make a grand success of it. Lord knows (her voice became as sweet as honey), you’re different enough from the other men in this jay town.”

Mr. Whalen felt as if he were being drenched with honey dew, for he was the type of man whom women take no trouble to educate. But as that sweet unmodulated voice stole about his ear porches he drew himself up stiffly, conscious of a thrill of fear. To become enamoured of the wife of one of these forthright Westerners, who took the law into their own hands, was no part of his gentle programme; but he stared at her fascinated, never having felt anything resembling a thrill before. Moreover, like all people of weak passions, more particularly that type of American that hasn’t any, he took pride in his powers of self-control. In a moment he threw off the baleful influence and replied drily.

“I think the lessons would better be oral for a time. Do—do I understand that I am to correct your individual method of expression?”

“That’s it, I guess.”

“And you won’t be offended?” Mr. Whalen’s upper teeth were hemispheric, but he had cultivated a paternal and not unpleasing smile. Even the pale blue orbs, fixed defiantly upon the siren, warmed a trifle.

“Well. I don’t s’pose I’ll like bein’ corrected better’n the next, but that’s what I’m payin’ for. Now that my husband’s studyin’ for a profession, I guess I’ll be in the top set before so very long. There’s Mrs. Blake, for instance—her husband told Mr. Compton she’d call this week. Is she all that she’s cracked up to be?”

“Mrs. Blake has had great advantages. She might almost be one of our own products, were it not for the fact that she—well—seems deliberately to wish to be Western.” He found himself growing more and more confused under the steady regard of those limpid shadowy eyes—set like the eyes of a goddess in marble, and so disconcertingly shallow. He pulled himself up sharply. “Now, if I may begin—you must not sign your notes, ‘Mrs. Gregory Verrooy Compton’——”

Ida’s eyes flashed wide open. “Why not, I’d like to know? Isn’t it as good a name as yours?”

“What has that to do with it? Ah—yes—you don’t quite understand. It is not the custom—in what we call society—to sign in that manner—it is a regrettable American provincialism. If you really wish to learn——”

“Fire away,” said Ida sullenly.

“Sign your own name—may I ask what it is?”

“My name was Ida Maria Hook before I married.”

“Ida is a beautiful and classic name. We will eliminate the rest. Sign yourself Ida Compton—or if you wish to be more swagger, Ida Verrooy Compton——”

“Land’s sake! We’d be laughed clean out of Montana.”

“Yes, there is a fine primitive simplicity about many things in this region,” replied Mr. Whalen, thinking of his spats and silk hat. “But you get my point?”

“I get you.”

“Oh!—We’ll have a little talk later about slang. And you mustn’t begin your letters, particularly to an acquaintance, ‘Dear friend.’ This is an idealistic and—ah—bucolic custom, but hardly good form.”

He was deeply annoyed at his lack of fluency, but Ida once more was deliberately “upsetting” him. She smiled indulgently.

“I guess I like your new-fangled notions. I’ll write all that down while you’re thinkin’ up what to say next.”

She leaned over the table and wrote slowly that he might have leisure to admire her figure in profile. But he gazed sternly out of the window until she swayed back to the perpendicular and demanded,

“What next? Do you want me to say băth and căn’t?”

“Oh, no, I really shouldn’t advise it, not in Butte. I don’t wish to teach you anything that will add to the discomforts of life—so long as your lines are cast here. Just modify the lamentably short American a a bit.” And he rehearsed her for a few moments.

“Fine. I’ll try it on Greg—Mr. Compton. If he laughs I’ll know I’m too good, but if he only puckers his eyebrows and looks as if somethin’ queer was floatin’ round just out of sight, then I’ll know I’ve struck the happy medium. I’ll be a real high-brow in less than no time.”

“You certainly are surprisingly quick,” said Professor Whalen handsomely. “In a year I could equip you for our centres of culture, but as I remarked just now it would not be kind to transform you into an exotic. Now, suppose we read a few pages of this grammar——”

“I studied grammar at school,” interrupted Ida haughtily. “What do you take Butte for, anyhow. It may be a mining camp, and jay enough compared with your old Boston, but I guess we learn something mor’n the alphabet at all these big red brick schoolhouses we’ve got—Montana’s famous for its grand schoolhouses——”

“Yes, yes, my dear Mrs. Compton. But, you know, one forgets so quickly. And then so many of you don’t stay in school long enough. How old were you when you left?”

“Fifteen. Ma wouldn’t let me go to the High.”

“Precisely. Well, I will adhere to my original purpose, and defer books until our next lesson. Perhaps you would like me to tell you something more of our Eastern methods of speech—not only words, but—er—syntax——”

“Oh, hang your old East! You make me feel downright patriotic.”

Professor Whalen was conscious that it was a distinct pleasure to make those fine eyes flash. “One would think we were not all Americans,” he said with a smile.

“Well, I guess you look upon America as East and West too. Loads of young surveyors and mining men come out here to make their pile, and at first Montana ain’t good enough to black their boots, but it soon takes the starch out of ’em. No use puttin’ on dog here. It don’t work.”

“Oh, I assure you it’s merely a difference of manner—of—er tradition. We—and I in particular—find your West most interesting—and significant. I—ah—regard it as the great furnace under our civilization.”

“And we are the stokers! I like your impudence!”

He had no desire to lose this remunerative pupil, whose crude mind worked more quickly than his own. She was now really angry and he made a mild dive in search of his admitted tact.

“My dear lady, you put words into my mouth that emanate from your own clever brain, not from my merely pedantic one. Not only have I the highest respect for the West, and for Montana in particular, but please remember that the contempt of the East for the West is merely passive, negative, when compared with the lurid scorn of the West for the East. ‘Effete’ is its mildest term of opprobrium. I doubt if your ‘virile’ Westerner believes us to be really alive, in a condition to inhabit aught but a museum. Your men when they ‘make their pile’, or take a vacation, never dream of going to Boston, seldom, indeed, to Europe. They take the fastest train for New York—and by no means with a view to exploring that wilderness for its oases of culture——”

“Well, I guess not!” cried Ida, her easy good nature restored. “All-night restaurants, something new in the way of girls—‘chickens’ and ‘squabs’—musical shows, watchin’ the sun rise—that’s their little old New York. They always come home shakin’ themselves like a Newfoundland puppy, or purrin’ like a cat full of cream, but talkin’ about the Great Free West, God’s Own Country, and the Big Western Heart. I’ve a friend who does manicurin’, and she knows ’em like old shoes.”

Whalen, who had a slight cultivated sense of humor, laughed. “You are indeed most apt and picturesque, dear Mrs. Compton. But—while I think of it—you mustn’t drop your final gs. That, I am told, is one of the fashionable divagations of the British aristocracy. But with us it is the hallmark of the uneducated. Now, I really have told you all you can remember for one day, and will take my leave. It is to be every other day, I understand. On Wednesday, then, at two?”

VIII

IDA walked to the gate with him. She was quite a head taller than he, but subtly made him feel that the advantage was his, as it enabled her to pour the light of her eyes downward. He picked his way up the uneven surface of East Granite Street, slippery with a recent fall of snow, not only disturbed, but filled with a new conceit; in other words thrilling with his first full sense of manhood.

Ida looked after him, smiling broadly. But the smile fled abruptly, her lips trembled, then contracted. Advancing down the street was Mrs. Mark Blake. Ida had known her enterprising young husband before he changed his name from Mike to Mark, but she knew his lady wife by sight only; Mrs. Blake had not patronized Madame O’Reilley. Ruby and Pearl pronounced her “all right”, although a trifle “proud to look at.” Ida assumed that she was to receive the promised call, and wished she could “get out of it.” Not only did she long for her rocker, gum and magazine, after the intellectual strain of the past hour, but she had no desire to meet Mrs. Blake or any of “that crowd” until she could take her place as their equal. She had her full share of what is known as class-consciousness, and its peculiar form of snobbery. To be patronized by “swells”, even to be asked to their parties, would give her none of that subtle joy peculiar to the climbing snob. When the inevitable moment came she would burst upon them, dazzle them, bulldoze and lead them, but she wanted none of their crumbs.

But she was “in for it.” She hastily felt the back of her shirtwaist to ascertain if it still were properly adjusted, and sauntered towards the cottage humming a tune, pretending not to have seen the lady who stopped to have a word with Professor Whalen. “Anyhow, she’s not a bonanzerine,” thought Ida. “I guess she did considerable scrapin’ at one time; and Mark, for all he could make shoe-blackin’ look like molasses, ain’t a millionaire yet.”

She might indeed, further reflected Ida, watching the smartly tailored figure out of the corner of her eye, be pitied, for she had been “brought up rich, expecting to marry a duke, and then come down kaplunk before she’d much more’n a chance to grow up.” Her father, Judge Stratton, a graduate of Columbia University, had been one of the most brilliant and unscrupulous lawyers of the Northwest. He had drawn enormous fees from railroads and corporations, and in the historic Clark-Daly duels for supremacy in the State of Montana, and in the more picturesque battle between F. Augustus Heinze and “Amalgamated” (that lusty offspring of the great Standard Oil Trust), when the number of estimable citizens bought and sold demonstrated the faint impress of time on original sin, his legal acumen and persuasive tongue, his vitriolic pen, ever had been at the disposal of the highest bidder.

He had been a distinguished resident of Butte but a few years when he built himself a spacious if hideous residence on the West Side. But this must have been out of pure loyalty to his adopted state, for it was seldom occupied, although furnished in the worst style of the late seventies and early eighties. Mrs. Stratton and her daughter spent the greater part of their time in Europe. As Judge Stratton disliked his wife, was intensely ambitious for his only child, and preferred the comforts of his smaller home on The Flat, he rarely recalled his legitimate family, and made them a lavish allowance. He died abruptly of apoplexy, and left nothing but a life insurance of five thousand dollars; he had neglected to take out any until his blood vessels were too brittle for a higher risk.

Mrs. Stratton promptly became an invalid, and Ora brought her home to Butte, hoping to save something from the wreck. There was nothing to save. As she had not known of the life insurance when they received the curt cablegram in Paris, she had sold all of her mother’s jewels save a string of pearls, and, when what was left of this irrelative sum after the luxurious journey over sea and land, was added to the policy, the capital of these two still bewildered women represented little more than they had been accustomed to spend in six months. When Mark Blake, who had studied law in Judge Stratton’s office after graduating from the High School, and now seemed to be in a fair way to inherit the business, besides being County Attorney at the moment, implored Ora to marry him, and manifested an almost equal devotion to her mother, whom he had ranked with the queens of history books since boyhood, she accepted him as the obvious solution of her problem.

She was lonely, disappointed, mortified, a bit frightened. She had lived the life of the average American princess, and although accomplished had specialised in nothing; nor given a thought to the future. As she had cared little for the society for which her mother lived, and much for books, music, and other arts, and had talked eagerly with the few highly specialised men she was fortunate enough to meet, she had assumed that she was clever. She also believed that when she had assuaged somewhat her appetite for the intellectual and artistic banquet the gifted of the ages had provided, she might develop a character and personality, possibly a gift of her own. But she was only twenty when her indulgent father died, and, still gorging herself, was barely interested in her capacities other than receptive, less still in the young men that sought her, unterrified by her reputation for brains. She fancied that she should marry when she was about twenty-eight, and have a salon somewhere; and the fact that love had played so little a part in her dreams made it easier to contemplate marriage with this old friend of her childhood. His mother had been Mrs. Stratton’s seamstress, to be sure, but as he was a good boy,—he called for the frail little woman every evening to protect her from roughs on her long walk east to the cottage her husband had built shortly before he was blown to pieces somewhere inside of Butte—he had been permitted to hold the dainty Ora on his knee, or toss her, gurgling with delight, into the air until he puffed.

Mark had been a fat boy, and was now a fat young man with a round rosy face and a rolling lazy gait. He possessed an eye of remarkable shrewdness, however, was making money rapidly, never lost sight of the main chance, and was not in the least surprised when his marriage lifted him to the pinnacle of Butte society. In spite of his amiable weaknesses, he was honest if sharp, an inalienable friend, and he made a good husband according to his lights. Being a man’s man, and naturally elated at his election to the exclusive Silver Bow Club soon after his marriage to the snow maiden of his youthful dreams, he formed the habit of dropping in for a game of billiards every afternoon on his way home, and returning for another after dinner. But within three years he was able to present the wife of whom he was inordinately proud with a comfortable home on the West Side, and he made her an allowance of ever increasing proportions.

Ora, who had her own idea of a bargain, had never complained of neglect nor intimated that she found anything in him that savoured of imperfection. She had accepted him as a provider, and as he filled this part of the contract brilliantly, she felt that to treat him to scenes whose only excuse was outraged love or jealousy, would be both unjust and absurd. Moreover, his growing passion for his club was an immense relief after his somewhat prolonged term of marital uxoriousness, and as her mother died almost coincidentally with the abridgment of Mr. Blake’s home life, Ora returned to her studies, rode or walked for hours, and, after her double period of mourning was over, danced two or three times a week in the season, or sat out dances when she met a man that had cultivated his intellect. For women she cared little.

It never occurred to Mark to be jealous of his passionless wife, although he would have asserted his authority if she had received men alone in the afternoon. But Ora paid a scrupulous deference to his wishes in all respects. She even taught herself to keep house, and her servants manners as well as the elements of edible cooking. This she regarded as her proudest feat, for she frankly hated the domestic details of life; although after three years in a “Block”,—a sublimated lodging house, peculiar to the Northwest—she enjoyed the space and privacy of her home. Mark told his friends that his wife was the most remarkable woman in Montana, rarely found fault, save in the purely mechanical fashion of the married male, and paid the bills without a murmur. Altogether it was a reasonably happy marriage.

Ora Blake’s attitude to life at this time was expressed in the buoyancy of her step, the haughty carriage of her head, the cool bright casual glance she bestowed upon the world in general. Her code of morals, ethics, manners, as well as her acceptance of the last set of conditions she would have picked from the hands of Fate, was summed up in two words: noblesse oblige. Of her depths she knew as little as Gregory Compton of his.

“This is Mrs. Compton, I am sure,” she said in her cool even voice, as she came up behind the elaborately unconscious and humming Ida. “I am Mrs. Blake.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Ida formally, extending a limp hand. “Come on inside.”

Mrs. Blake closed her eyes as she entered the parlour, but opened them before Ida had adjusted the blower to the grate, and exclaimed brightly:

“How clever of you to settle so quickly. I shouldn’t have dared to call for another fortnight, but Mr. Compton told my husband yesterday that you were quite in order. It was three months before I dared open my doors.”

“Well,” drawled Ida, rocking herself, “I guess your friends are more critical than mine. And I guess you didn’t rely wholly on Butte for your furniture. I had Ma’s old junk, and the rest cost me just two hundred dollars.”

“How very clever of you!” But although Mrs. Blake was doing her best to be spontaneous and impressed, Ida knew instantly that she had committed a solecism, and felt both angry and apprehensive. She was more afraid of this young woman than of her professor. Once more she wished that Mrs. Blake and the whole caboodle would leave her alone till she was good and ready.

Ora hastened on to a safer topic, local politics. Butte, tired of grafting politicians, was considering the experiment of permitting a Socialist of good standing to be elected mayor. Ida, like all women of the smaller Western towns, was interested in local politics, and, glad of the impersonal topic, gave her visitor intelligent encouragement, the while she examined her critically. She finally summed her up in the word “pasty”, and at that stage of Ora Blake’s development the description was not inapt. She took little or no interest in her looks, although she dressed well by instinct; and nature, supplemented by her mother, had given her style. But her hair was almost colourless and worn in a tight knot just above her neck, her complexion was weather-beaten, her lips rather pale, and her body very thin. But when men whose first glance had been casual turned suddenly, wondering at themselves, to examine that face so lacking in the potencies of colouring, they discovered that the eyes, deeply set and far apart, were of a deep dark blazing grey, that the nose was straight and fine, the ears small, the mouth mobile, with a slight downward droop at the corners; also that her hands and feet were very slender, with delicate wrists and ankles. Ida, too, noted these points, but wondered where her “charm” came from. She knew that Mrs. Blake possessed this vague but desirable quality, in spite of her dread reputation as a “high-brow”, and her impersonal attitude toward men.

Ruby had informed her that the men agreed she had charm if she would only condescend to exert it. “And I can feel it too,” she had added, “every time I do her nails—she never lets anyone do that hair of hers or give her a massage, which she needs, the Lord knows. But she’s got fascination, magnetism, whatever you like to call it, for all she’s so washed-out. Somehow, I always feel that if she’d wake up, get on to herself, she’d play the devil with men, maybe with herself.”

Ida recalled the comments of the wise Miss Miller and frowned. This important feminine equipment she knew to be her very own, and although she would have been proud to admit the rivalry of a beautiful woman, she felt a sense of mortification in sharing that most subtle and fateful of all gifts, sex-magnetism, with one so colourless and plain. That the gifts possessed by this woman talking with such well-bred indifference of local affairs must be far more subtle than her own irritated her still more. It also filled her with a vague sense of menace, almost of helplessness. Later, when her brain was more accustomed to analysis, she knew that she had divined—her consciousness at that time too thick to formulate the promptings of instinct—that when man is taken unawares he is held more firmly captive.

Ida, staring into those brilliant powerful eyes, felt a sudden desperate need to dive through their depths into this woman’s secret mind, to know her better at once, get rid of the sense of mystery that baffled and oppressed her. In short she must know where she was at and know it quick. It did not strike her until afterward as odd that she should have felt so intensely personal in regard to a woman whose sphere was not hers and whose orbit had but just crossed her own.

For a time she floundered, but feminine instinct prompted the intimate note.

“I saw you talkin’—talking to the professor,” she said casually. “I suppose you know your husband got him for me.”

“I arranged it myself—” began Mrs. Blake, smiling, but Ida interrupted her sharply:

“Greg—Mr. Compton didn’t tell me he had talked to you about it.”

“Nor did he. I have had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Compton but once—the day I married; he was my husband’s best man. Mark never can get him to come to the house, hardly to the club. But my husband naturally would turn over such a commission to me. I hope you found the little professor satisfactory.”

“He’ll do, I guess. He knows an awful lot, and I have a pretty good memory. But to get—and practice—it all—well, I guess that takes years.” She imbued her tones with a pathetic wistfulness, and gazed upon her visitor with ingenuous eyes, brimming with admiration. “It must be just grand to have got all that education, and to have lived in Europe while you were growing up. Nothing later on that you can get is the same, I guess. You look just about as polished off as I look raw.”

“Oh! No! No!” cried Ora deprecatingly, her cheeks flooding with a delicate pink that made her look very young and feminine. She had begun by disliking this dreadfully common person, but not only was she by no means as innocent of vanity as she had been trying for years to believe, but she was almost emotionally swift to respond to the genuine appeal. And, clever as she was, it was not difficult to delude her.

“Of course I had advantages that I am grateful for, but I have a theory that it is never too late to begin. And you are so young—a few months of our professor—are you really ambitious?”

“You bet.” Ida committed herself no further at the moment.

“Then you will enjoy study—expanding and furnishing your mind. It is a wonderful sensation!” Mrs. Blake’s eyes were flashing now, her mouth was soft, her strong little chin with that cleft which always suggests a whirlpool, was lifted as if she were drinking. “The moment you are conscious that you are using the magic keys to the great storehouses of the world, its arts, its sciences, its records of the past—when you begin to help yourself with both hands and pack it away in your memory—always something new—when you realise that the store is inexhaustible—that in study at least there is no ennui—Oh, I can give you no idea of what it all means—you will find it out for yourself!”

“Jimminy!” thought Ida. “I guess not! But that ain’t where her charm for men comes from, you bet!” Aloud she said, with awe in her voice:

“No wonder you know so much when you like it like that. But don’t it make you—well—kinder lonesome?”

“Sometimes—lately——” Mrs. Blake pulled herself up with a deep blush. “It has meant everything to me, that mental life, and it always shall!”

The astute Ida noted the defiant ring in her voice, and plunged in. “I wonder now? Say, you’re a pretty woman and a young one, and they say men would go head over ears about you if you’d give ’em a show. You’ve got a busy husband and so have I. Husbands don’t companion much and you can’t make me believe learning’s all. Don’t you wish these American Turks of husbands would let us have a man friend occasionally? They say that in high society in the East and in Europe, the women have all the men come to call on them afternoons they like, but the ordinary American husband, and particularly out West—Lord! When a woman has a man call on her, she’s about ready to split with her husband—belongs to the fast set—and he’s quail hunting somewheres else. Of course I’ve known Mark all my life—and you who was—were brought up in the real world—it must be awful hard on you. Wouldn’t you like to try your power once in a while, see how far you could go—just for fun? I guess you’re not shocked?”

“No, I’m not shocked,” said Ora, laughing. “But I don’t believe men interest me very much in that way—although, heaven knows, there are few more delightful sensations than talking to a man who makes you feel as if your brain were on fire. I don’t think I care to have American men, at least, become interested in me in any other way. In Europe——” She hesitated, and Ida leaned forward eagerly.

“Oh, do tell me, Mrs. Blake! I don’t know a blamed thing. I’ve never been outside of Montana.”

“Well—I mean—the American man takes love too seriously. I suppose it is because he is so busy—he has to take life so seriously. He specialises intensely. It is all or nothing with him. Of course I am talking about love. When they play about, it is generally with a class of women of which we have no personal knowledge. The European, with his larger leisure, and generations of leisure in his brain, his interest in everything, and knowledge of many things,—above all of the world,—has reduced gallantry to a fine art. He may give his fancy, his sentiment, his passion, even his leisure, to one woman at a time, but his heart—well, unless he is very young—that remains quite intact. Love is the game of his life with a change of partner at reasonable intervals. In other words he is far too accomplished and sophisticated to be romantic. Now, your American man, although he looks the reverse of romantic, and is always afraid of making a fool of himself, when he does fall in love with a woman—say, across a legal barrier—must annihilate the barrier at once; in other words, elope or rush to the divorce court. It isn’t that he is more averse from a liaison than the European, but more thorough. It is all or nothing. In many respects he is far finer than the European, but he makes for turmoil, and, less subtle, he fails to hold our interest.”

“You mean he don’t keep us guessing? Well, you’re right about most of them. I never saw a boy I couldn’t read like a page ad., until I met my husband. I thought I knew him, too, till I’d been married to him awhile. But, my land, he gets deeper every minute. I guess if I hadn’t married him he’d have kidnapped me, he was that gone, and forgetting anything else existed. Of course, I didn’t expect that to last, but I did think he’d go on being transparent. But, believe me, the Sphinx ain’t a patch on him. I sometimes think I don’t know him at all, and that keeps me interested.”

“I should think it might!” exclaimed Mrs. Blake, thinking of her own standard possession. “But then Mr. Compton is a hard student, and is said to have a voracious as well as a brilliant mind. No doubt that is the secret of what appears on the surface as complexity and secretiveness. I know the symptoms!”

“P’raps. But—well, I live with him, and I suspicion otherwise. I suspect him of having as many kind of leads, and cross-cuts, and ‘pockets’, and veins full of different kinds of ore in him as we’ve got right under our feet in Butte Hill. Do you think”—she spoke with a charming wistfulness—“that when I know more, have opened up and let out my top story, as it were, I shall understand him better?”

And again Ora responded warmly, “Indeed, yes, dear Mrs. Compton. It isn’t so much what you put into your mind—it’s more the reflex action of that personal collection in developing not only the mental faculties, but one’s intuitions, one’s power to understand others—even one whose interests are different, or whose knowledge is infinitely greater than our own.”

“I believe you could even understand Greg!” Ida spoke involuntarily and stared with real admiration at the quickened face with its pink cheeks and flashing eyes, its childish mobile mouth. Ora at the moment looked beautiful. Suddenly Ida felt as if half-drowned in a wave of ambiguous terror. She sat up very straight.

“I guess you’re right,” she said slowly. “You’ve made me see it as the others haven’t. I’ll work at all that measly little professor gives me, but—I don’t know—somehow, I can’t think he’ll do much more than make me talk decent. There’s nothing to him.”

Ora’s heart beat more quickly. Her indifference had vanished in this intimate hour, also her first subtle dislike of Ida, who’s commonness now seemed picturesque, and whose wistful almost complete ignorance had made a strong appeal to her sympathies. For the first time in her lonely life she felt that she had something to give. And here was raw and promising material ready and eager to be woven, if not into cloth of silver, at least into a quality of merchandise vastly superior to that which the rude loom of youth had so far produced. All she knew of Gregory Compton, moreover, made her believe in and admire him; the loneliness of his mental life with this woman appalled her. This was not the first time she had been forced to admit of late that under the cool bright surface of her nature were more womanly impulses than formerly, a spontaneous warmth that was almost like the quickening of a child; but she had turned from the consciousness with an impatient: “What nonsense! What on earth should I do with it?” The sense that she was of no vital use to anyone had discouraged her, dimmed her interest in her studies. Her husband could hire a better housekeeper, find a hundred girls who would companion him better. And what if she were instruite? So were thousands of women. Nothing was easier.

But this clever girl of the people, who might before many years had passed be one of the rich and conspicuous women of the United States, above all, the wife of one of the nation’s “big men,” working himself beyond human capacity, harassed, needing not only physical comfort at home, but counsel, companionship, perfect understanding,—might it not be her destiny to equip Ida Compton for her double part? Ora’s imagination, the most precious and the most dangerous of her gifts, was at white heat. To her everlasting credit would be the fashioning of a helpmate for one of her country’s great men. It would be enough to do as much for the state which her imperfect father had loved so passionately; but her imagination would not confine Gregory Compton within the limitations of a state. It was more than likely that his destiny would prove to be national; and she had seen the wives of certain men eminent in political Washington, but of obscure origin. They were Ida’s mannered, grooved, crystallised; women to flee from.

She leaned forward and took Ida’s hand in both of hers. “Dear Mrs. Compton!” she exclaimed. “Do let me teach you what little I know. I mean of art—history—the past—the present—I have portfolios of beautiful photographs of great pictures and scenes that I collected for years in Europe. It will do me so much good to go over them. I haven’t had the courage to look at them for years. And the significant movements, social, political, religious,—all this theft under so many different names,—Christian Science, the ‘Uplift’ Movement, Occultism—from the ancient Hindu philosophy—it would be delightful to go into it with someone. I am sure I could make it all most interesting to you.”

“My Gorrd!” thought Ida. “Two of ’em! What am I let in for?” But the undefined sharp sense of terror lingered, and she answered when she got her breath,

“I’d like it first rate. The work in this shack is nothing. Mr. Compton leaves first thing in the morning, and don’t show up till nearly six. The professor’s coming for an hour every other afternoon. But if I go to your house I want it understood that I don’t meet anyone else. I’ve got my reasons.”

“You shall not meet a soul. Can’t you imagine how sick I am of Butte? We’ll have heavenly times. I was wondering only the other day of what use was all this heterogeneous mass of stuff I’d put into my head. But,” she added gaily, “I know now it was for you to select from. I am so glad. And—and——” Her keen perceptions suggested a more purely feminine bait. “You were with Madame O’Reilley, were you not? I get my things from a very good dressmaker in New York. Perhaps you would like to copy some of them?”

“Aw! Would I?” Ida gasped and almost strangled. For the first time during this the most trying day of her life she felt wholly herself. “You may just bet your life I would. I need new duds the worst way, even if I’m not a West Sider. I’ve been on a ranch for nearly a year and a half, and although Mr. Compton won’t take me to any balls, there are the movin’ pictures and the mats—matinees; and the street, where I have to show up once in a while! I used to think an awful lot of my looks and style, and I guess it’s time to begin again. I can sew first rate, make any old thing. Do you mean it?”

“Indeed I do! I want to be of help to you in every way.” She rose and held Ida’s hand once more in hers, although she did not kiss her as another woman might have done. “Will you come tomorrow—about two?”

“You may bet your bottom dollar I’ll come. I haven’t thanked you, but maybe I’ll do that some other way.”

“Oh, I shouldn’t wonder,” said Mrs. Blake lightly.

IX

BUTTE, “the richest hill in the world” (known at a period when less famous for metals and morals as “Perch of the Devil”), is a long scraggy ridge of granite and red and grey dirt rising abruptly out of a stony uneven plain high in the Rocky Mountains. The city is scooped out of its south slope, and overflows upon The Flat. Big Butte, an equally abrupt protuberance, but higher, steeper, more symmetrical, stands close beside the treasure vault, but with the aloof and somewhat cynical air of even the apocryphal volcano. On all sides the sterile valley heaves away as if abruptly arrested in a throe of the monstrous convulsion that begat it; but pressing close, cutting the thin brilliant air with its icy peaks, is an irregular and nearly circular chain of mountains, unbroken white in winter, white on the blue enamelled slopes in summer.

For nearly half the year the whole scene is white, with not a tree, nor, beyond the straggling town itself, a house to break its frozen beauty. It is only when the warm Chinook wind roars in from the west and melts the snow much as lightning strikes, or when Summer herself has come, that you realize the appalling surface barrenness of this region devastated for many years by the sulphur and arsenic fumes of ore roasted in the open or belching from the smelters. They ate up the vegetation, and the melting snows and heavy June rains washed the weakened earth from the bones of valley and mountain, leaving both as stark as they must have been when the earth ceased to rock and began to cool. Since the smelters have gone to Anaconda, patches of green, of a sad and timid tenderness, like the smile of a child too long neglected, have appeared between the sickly grey boulders of the foothills, and, in Butte, lawns as large as a tablecloth have been cultivated. Anaconda Hill at the precipitous eastern end of the city, with its tangled mass of smokestacks, gallows-frames, shabby grey buildings, trestles, looks like a gigantic shipwreck, but is merely the portal to the precious ore bodies of the mines whose shafts, levels, and cross-cuts to the depth of three thousand feet and more, pierce and ramify under city and valley. These hideous buildings through which so many hundreds of millions have passed, irrupt into the very back yards of some of the homes, built too far east (and before mere gold and silver gave place to copper); but the town improves as it leaps westward. The big severe solid buildings to be found in every modern city sure of its stability crowd the tumble-down wood structures of a day when no man looked upon Butte as aught but a camp. And although the streets are vociferously cobbled, the pavements are civilised here and there.

Farther west the houses of the residence section grow more and more imposing, coinciding with the sense of Butte’s inevitableness. On the high western rim of the city (which exteriorly has as many ups and downs as the story of its vitals) stands the red School of Mines. It has a permanent expression of surprise, natural to a bit of Italian renaissance looking down upon Butte.

Some of the homes, particularly those of light pressed brick, and one that looks like the northeast corner of the upper story of a robber stronghold of the middle ages, are models of taste and not too modest symbols of wealth; but north and south and east and west are the snow wastes in winter and the red or grey untidy desert of sand and rock in summer.