The Virginian: A Horseman of the Plains
a while ago. I was to have ’em ready just as soon as ever yu’ asked for
’em yourself.” Lin had been made a happy man some twelve months previous
to this. And now, by way of an exchange of news, he added: “We’re
expectin’ a little McLean down on Box Elder. That’s what you’ll be
expectin’ some of these days, I hope.”
“Yes,” murmured the Virginian, “I hope so too.”
“And I don’t guess,” said Lin, “that you and I will do much shufflin’ of
other folks’ children any more.”
Whereupon he and the Virginian shook hands silently, and understood each
other very well.
On the day that the Virginian parted with Molly, beside the weight of
farewell which lay heavy on his heart, his thoughts were also grave with
news. The cattle thieves had grown more audacious. Horses and cattle
both were being missed, and each man began almost to doubt his neighbor.
“Steps will have to be taken soon by somebody, I reckon,” said the
lover.
“By you?” she asked quickly.
“Most likely I’ll get mixed up with it.”
“What will you have to do?”
“Can’t say. I’ll tell yu’ when I come back.”
So did he part from her, leaving her more kisses than words to remember.
And what was doing at Bennington, meanwhile, and at Dunbarton? Those
three letters which by their mere outside had so moved Mrs. Taylor,
produced by their contents much painful disturbance.
It will be remembered that Molly wrote to her mother, and to her
great-aunt. That announcement to her mother was undertaken first. Its
composition occupied three hours and a half, and it filled eleven pages,
not counting a postscript upon the twelfth. The letter to the great-aunt
took only ten minutes. I cannot pretend to explain why this one was
so greatly superior to the other; but such is the remarkable fact. Its
beginning, to be sure, did give the old lady a start; she had dismissed
the cow-boy from her probabilities.
“Tut, tut, tut!” she exclaimed out loud in her bedroom. “She has thrown
herself away on that fellow!”
But some sentences at the end made her pause and sit still for a long
while. The severity upon her face changed to tenderness, gradually. “Ah,
me,” she sighed. “If marriage were as simple as love!” Then she went
slowly downstairs, and out into her garden, where she walked long
between the box borders. “But if she has found a great love,” said the
old lady at length. And she returned to her bedroom, and opened an old
desk, and read some old letters.
There came to her the next morning a communication from Bennington. This
had been penned frantically by poor Mrs. Wood. As soon as she had been
able to gather her senses after the shock of her daughter’s eleven pages
and the postscript, the mother had poured out eight pages herself to the
eldest member of the family. There had been, indeed, much excuse for the
poor lady. To begin with, Molly had constructed her whole opening
page with the express and merciful intention of preparing her mother.
Consequently, it made no sense whatever. Its effect was the usual effect
of remarks designed to break a thing gently. It merely made Mrs. Wood’s
head swim, and filled her with a sickening dread. “Oh, mercy, Sarah,”
she had cried, “come here. What does this mean?” And then, fortified by
her elder daughter, she had turned over that first page and found what
it meant on the top of the second. “A savage with knives and pistols!”
she wailed.
“Well, mother, I always told you so,” said her daughter Sarah.
“What is a foreman?” exclaimed the mother. “And who is Judge Henry?”
“She has taken a sort of upper servant,” said Sarah. “If it is allowed
to go as far as a wedding, I doubt if I can bring myself to be present.”
(This threat she proceeded to make to Molly, with results that shall be
set forth in their proper place.)
“The man appears to have written to me himself,” said Mrs. Wood.
“He knows no better,” said Sarah.
“Bosh!” said Sarah’s husband later. “It was a very manly thing to do.”
Thus did consternation rage in the house at Bennington. Molly might
have spared herself the many assurances that she gave concerning
the universal esteem in which her cow-puncher was held, and the fair
prospects which were his. So, in the first throes of her despair, Mrs.
Wood wrote those eight not maturely considered pages to the great-aunt.
“Tut, tut, tut!” said the great-aunt as she read them. Her face was much
more severe to-day. “You’d suppose,” she said, “that the girl had been
kidnapped! Why, she has kept him waiting three years!” And then she
read more, but soon put the letter down with laughter. For Mrs. Wood
had repeated in writing that early outburst of hers about a savage with
knives and pistols. “Law!” said the great-aunt. “Law, what a fool Lizzie
is!”
So she sat down and wrote to Mrs. Wood a wholesome reply about putting
a little more trust in her own flesh and blood, and reminding her among
other things that General Stark had himself been wont to carry knives
and pistols owing to the necessities of his career, but that he had
occasionally taken them off, as did probably this young man in Wyoming.
“You had better send me the letter he has written you,” she concluded.
“I shall know much better what to think after I have seen that.”
It is not probable that Mrs. Wood got much comfort from this
communication; and her daughter Sarah was actually enraged by it.
“She grows more perverse as she nears her dotage,” said Sarah. But the
Virginian’s letter was sent to Dunbarton, where the old lady sat herself
down to read it with much attention.
Here is what the Virginian had said to the unknown mother of his
sweetheart.
MRS. JOHN STARK WOOD Bennington, Vermont.
Madam: If your daughter Miss Wood has ever told you about her saving
a man’s life here when some Indians had shot him that is the man who
writes to you now. I don’t think she can have told you right about
that affair for she is the only one in this country who thinks it was
a little thing. So I must tell you it, the main points. Such an action
would have been thought highly of in a Western girl, but with Miss
Wood’s raising nobody had a right to expect it.
“Indeed!” snorted the great-aunt. “Well, he would be right, if I had not
had a good deal more to do with her ‘raising’ than ever Lizzie had.” And
she went on with the letter.
I was starting in to die when she found me. I did not know anything
then, and she pulled me back from where I was half in the next world.
She did not know but what Indians would get her too but I could not make
her leave me. I am a heavy man one hundred and seventy-three stripped
when in full health. She lifted me herself from the ground me helping
scarce any for there was not much help in me that day. She washed my
wound and brought me to with her own whiskey. Before she could get me
home I was out of my head but she kept me on my horse somehow and talked
wisely to me so I minded her and did not go clean crazy till she had got
me safe to bed. The doctor says I would have died all the same if she
had not nursed me the way she did. It made me love her more which I did
not know I could. But there is no end, for this writing it down makes me
love her more as I write it.
And now Mrs. Wood I am sorry this will be bad news for you to hear. I
know you would never choose such a man as I am for her for I have got
no education and must write humble against my birth. I wish I could make
the news easier but truth is the best.
I am of old stock in Virginia. English and one Scotch Irish grandmother
my father’s father brought from Kentucky. We have always stayed at the
same place farmers and hunters not bettering our lot and very plain. We
have fought when we got the chance, under Old Hickory and in Mexico and
my father and two brothers were killed in the Valley sixty-four. Always
with us one son has been apt to run away and I was the one this time. I
had too much older brothering to suit me. But now I am doing well being
in full sight of prosperity and not too old and very strong my health
having stood the sundries it has been put through. She shall teach
school no more when she is mine. I wish I could make this news easier
for you Mrs. Wood. I do not like promises I have heard so many. I will
tell any man of your family anything he likes to ask one, and Judge
Henry would tell you about my reputation. I have seen plenty rough
things but can say I have never killed for pleasure or profit and am not
one of that kind, always preferring peace. I have had to live in places
where they had courts and lawyers so called but an honest man was all
the law you could find in five hundred miles. I have not told her about
those things not because I am ashamed of them but there are so many
things too dark for a girl like her to hear about.
I had better tell you the way I know I love Miss Wood. I am not a boy
now, and women are no new thing to me. A man like me who has travelled
meets many of them as he goes and passes on but I stopped when I came
to Miss Wood. That is three years but I have not gone on. What right has
such as he? you will say. So did I say it after she had saved my life.
It was hard to get to that point and keep there with her around me all
day. But I said to myself you have bothered her for three years with
your love and if you let your love bother her you don’t love her like
you should and you must quit for her sake who has saved your life. I did
not know what I was going to do with my life after that but I supposed
I could go somewhere and work hard and so Mrs. Wood I told her I would
give her up. But she said no. It is going to be hard for her to get used
to a man like me--
But at this point in the Virginian’s letter, the old great-aunt could
read no more. She rose, and went over to that desk where lay those faded
letters of her own. She laid her head down upon the package, and as her
tears flowed quietly upon it, “O dear,” she whispered, “O dear! And this
is what I lost!”
To her girl upon Bear Creek she wrote the next day. And this word from
Dunbarton was like balm among the harsh stings Molly was receiving. The
voices of the world reached her in gathering numbers, and not one of
them save that great-aunt’s was sweet. Her days were full of hurts; and
there was no one by to kiss the hurts away. Nor did she even hear from
her lover any more now. She only knew he had gone into lonely regions
upon his errand.
That errand took him far:-- Across the Basin, among the secret places
of Owl Creek, past the Washakie Needles, over the Divide to Gros Ventre,
and so through a final barrier of peaks into the borders of East Idaho.
There, by reason of his bidding me, I met him, and came to share in a
part of his errand.
It was with no guide that I travelled to him. He had named a little
station on the railroad, and from thence he had charted my route by
means of landmarks. Did I believe in omens, the black storm that I set
out in upon my horse would seem like one to-day. But I had been living
in cities and smoke; and Idaho, even with rain, was delightful to me.
XXX. A STABLE ON THE FLAT
When the first landmark, the lone clump of cottonwoods, came at length
in sight, dark and blurred in the gentle rain, standing out perhaps
a mile beyond the distant buildings, my whole weary body hailed the
approach of repose. Saving the noon hour, I had been in the saddle since
six, and now six was come round again. The ranch, my resting-place for
this night, was a ruin--cabin, stable, and corral. Yet after the twelve
hours of pushing on and on through silence, still to have silence, still
to eat and go to sleep in it, perfectly fitted the mood of both my flesh
and spirit. At noon, when for a while I had thrown off my long oilskin
coat, merely the sight of the newspaper half crowded into my pocket had