Part 37

The meeting took place on a remote, barren hillside, on the edge of a dead forest whose gaunt stems stood upright, or leaned against each other, a weird, unearthly company. As Dirke arrived with his second,--a saturnine Kentuckian, with a duelling record of his own,--he glanced about the desolate spot thinking it well chosen. Only one feature of the scene struck him as incongruous. It was a prickly poppy standing there, erect and stiff, its coarse, harsh stem and leaves repellent enough, yet bearing on its crest a single flower, a wide white silken wonder, curiously at variance with the spirit of the scene. Dirke impatiently turned away from the contemplation of it, which had for an instant fascinated him, and faced, instead, the count, who was approaching from below, accompanied by his friend and countryman.

Shots were to be exchanged but once, and though the principals were both good shots, the seconds anticipated nothing serious. The count, for his part, was not desirous of killing his adversary, and he had no reason to suppose that the latter thirsted for his blood. He considered the incident which had led to this unpleasant situation as a mere freak on the part of this morose individual whom he had unfortunately run afoul of. He had, indeed, moments of wondering whether the man were quite in his right mind.

Dirke wore the ring, and he gloried in wearing it, as he took his place, elate, exultant, yet perfectly self-contained.

"Are you ready?" the Kentuckian asked, and the sense of being "ready" thrilled him through every nerve.

At the given signal, Dirke raised his pistol in deliberate, deadly aim. De Lys saw it, and a subtle change swept his face, while he instantly readjusted his own aim. In Dirke's countenance there was no change, no slightest trace of any emotion whatever. Yet both seconds perceived, in the flash of time allowed, that the combat was to be a mortal one, and that it was Dirke who had thus decreed it.

And then it was, in that crucial moment, that Dirke's groping soul came out into the light,--even as the wide white flower over yonder had come out into the light, springing from its grim, unsightly stem. In that flashing instant of time his true nature, which he had so long sought to belie, took final command. All that was false, fantastic, artificial, loosed its hold and fell away. For the first time in two years Dabney Dirke was perfectly sane.

At the word to fire, he did the one thing possible to the man he was; his pistol flashed straight upwards.

The two shots rang out simultaneously, setting the echoes roaring among the hills. Dirke staggered, but recovered his foothold again and stood an instant, swaying slightly, while he slowly, with an absent look in his face and in his eyes, drew the ring from his finger. As de Lys came up, he dropped the trinket at his feet. Then, slowly, heavily, he sank back, and the men gently lowered him to the ground.

De Lys knelt beside him, white with consternation.

"Monsieur!" he cried; "Monsieur! It was a misunderstanding! I mistook you wholly! And you, you were magnanimous! Ah, mon Dieu!"

And then a wonder came to pass, for Dabney Dirke's lips parted in a smile. The smile was faint, yet indescribably sweet, and the voice was faint, and far-away, in which he murmured brokenly; "It was--a message--to--the stars."

The horror in the faces bending over him was lost in a look of awe. There was an influence mystically soothing in the dying man's words. The dry, soft air played about the group, rustling the short, sparse grass. It seemed the only motion left in a hushed and reverent world.

Then, as the smile deepened upon his face, fixed there by the hand of death, the lips parted for the last time, and Dirke whispered; "I am going--in--for astronomy!"

VIII.

MR. FETHERBEE'S ADVENTURE.

Mr. Fetherbee was in his element,--a fact which the casual observer would have found it hard to believe; for he was a dapper little gentleman, dainty in his attire and presumably fastidious as to his surroundings, and these last were, in the present instance, hardly calculated to suit a fastidious taste. In a word, Mr. Fetherbee was "doing" Lame Gulch, doing it from the tourist's standpoint, delighting in every distinctive feature of the rough-and-ready, sordid, picturesque, "rustling" young mining-camp.

He was a popular little man, and he had been received with open arms, so to speak, by the Springtown contingent, when he had put in an appearance the day before at the Mountain Lion. He had arrived in a state of high good humor, induced by the stage ride from the railroad terminus, which he had accomplished, perched upon the topmost seat of the big "Concord," scraping acquaintance with a miscellaneous lot of pilgrims, all bound to the same conglomerate Mecca. Indeed, so charmed had he been with the manners and language of his fellow-passengers, that it is to be feared that he did but scant justice to the superb scenery spread out for the delectation of the traveller. There were moments, to be sure, when a line of gleaming snow-caps visible through the interstices of a tract of starveling trees would arrest his attention; yet the more moving and dramatic interest of some chance utterance in his immediate vicinity, was sure to recall him to a delighted contemplation of a rakish sombrero or of a doubtfully "diamond" scarf-pin. When, at last, the stage reached the edge of the sort of basin in which the camp lies, and began the descent of the last declivity, he could scarcely contain himself for sheer joy. What, to him, were the glories of the encircling peaks, the unfolding wonders of this heart of the Rockies, compared with the actual sight of the mushroom growth of pine huts and canvas tents, straggling sparsely up the hill, centring closely in the valley? Children and dogs tumbled over each other on the barren slope which looked like one vast back yard; donkeys grazed there, apparently fattening upon a rich diet of tin cans and shavings. Over yonder was a charred heap which had once been a building of some pretension, as was evident from the rude stone foundation which the blackened timbers leaned against. So Lame Gulch had its history, its traditions, its ruin. The charred timbers already looked older than the everlasting hills that towered on every hand, wrapped in the garment of eternal youth.

"What a lot of houses there are here," Mr. Fetherbee remarked to his next neighbor, a seamy old reprobate with an evil eye.

"Hm!" was the reply, the articulate profanity of which was lost in a cloud of the thickest, vilest tobacco smoke. "Ever seen a mining-camp when the stuff's given out?"

"No; what does it look like?"

"Like a heap of bloomin' peanut-shells chucked in a corner."

At the Mountain Lion were Allery Jones, Harry de Luce, Dick Dayton "the mascot," and half a dozen other Springtown men, and they pounced upon the new-comer with every flattering indication of delight.

Mr. Fetherbee had been but six months a resident of Springtown, but it had hardly taken as many days for Springtown to make the discovery that he was the king of story-tellers. He and his wife had taken up their residence in that most delightful of health resorts, and, having definitively closed up his affairs in the East, he had entered upon the Western life with keen zest. In one particular only he was apparently destined here as elsewhere to the disappointment which had dogged his footsteps from childhood up. Fortune had treated him kindly in many respects; she had given him health and prosperity, she had bestowed upon him a host of friends, and the wife of his choice,--a choice which fifteen years of rather exceptional happiness had amply justified,--best of all, he was endowed with an unfailing relish for these blessings: yet in the one burning desire of his heart he had been persistently frustrated. He had never had an adventure.

Men he knew had found this crowning bliss ready to their hand. There was his old chum, Jack Somers, who had been actually shipwrecked among the Azores; there was Caleb Fitz who had once stopped a runaway horse and saved the lives of two beauteous ladies, getting a corresponding number of his own ribs broken into the bargain; lucky dog! There was that miserable little cad, Sandy Seakum, who had been in Boston at the big fire of '72, and had done something he was forever bragging about in the way of saving a lot of bonds and other securities belonging to his father-in-law. But for Mr. Fetherbee there had been no such honors. He had never met so much as a savage dog; the very burglars had declined to concern themselves with his house; and once when the top story of a hotel he was sleeping in had caught fire, and prodigies of valor were performed in the rescue of the inmates under the roof, he had disgraced himself irretrievably in his own eyes by sleeping through the night unconscious of any disturbance. It was perhaps this unsatisfied craving for adventures of his own which gave such a vivid coloring to his anecdotes of other men's exploits; possibly too, his sense of humor, which had an entirely individual flavor, had been quickened by a sly appreciation of his own oddities.

On the evening of his arrival at Lame Gulch, Mr. Fetherbee had outdone himself. He had sat, the centre of an appreciative group, in the corner of the big office, well away from the roaring wood fire, his chair tilted back against the wall, his hat on the back of his head, spouting entertainment in an uninterrupted stream. Not that Mr. Fetherbee was in the habit of tilting his chair back, or, for the matter of that, of wearing his hat on the back of his head. But here, at Lame Gulch, he felt it incumbent upon him to enter as far as was practicable into the spirit of the piece. As he sat, enveloped in smoke and surrounded by the familiar forms of his Springtown cronies, he was obliged to admit that the "piece" in question had not yet developed much action. Yet the atmosphere was electric with possibilities, and the stage was well peopled with "characters," not one of which escaped the watchful eye of Mr. Fetherbee. A "character" he would have defined as a picturesque and lawless being, given to claim-jumping, murder, and all ungodliness; these qualities finding expression in a countenance at once fascinating and forbidding, a bearing at once stealthy and imperious. If no single one of the slouching, dark-browed apparitions that crossed his vision could be said to fulfil all these requirements, the indications scattered among them were sufficiently suggestive to have an exhilarating effect upon the genial little story-teller.

And now it was morning and the serious business of the day had begun. He was off for "the mines" with Dick Dayton, Allery Jones, and Frank Discombe,--a young mining engineer who was far more proud of his attainments as "Jehu," than of his really brilliant professional reputation. They rattled noisily along the main street of the camp in a loose-jointed vehicle drawn by two ambitious steeds which Allery Jones characterized as "fiery skeletons." It was a glorious September morning, and though there had been a heavy frost in the night, the sensitive mountain air was already, two or three hours after sunrise, warmed and mellowed through and through. The road soon began to rise, taking a fine sweep about the shoulder of Bear Mountain, and then making its way over obstacles of a pronounced nature, through a very poor and peaked "virgin forest." The wood-cutter had hacked his way right and left, combining a quest for firewood with his efforts in the service of the road-builder, scorning to remove stumps and roots, delighting in sharp corners and meaningless digressions. The horses struggled gallantly on, sometimes marching like a sculptor's creation, elevated on a huge pedestal of rock above the wagon which grovelled behind, its wheels sunk to their hubs in the ruts on either side;--sometimes plunging into unexpected depressions, which brought their backs below the level of the dasher. The wheels made their individual way as best they could, without the slightest reference to one another. At one moment Mr. Fetherbee perched with Dayton on the larboard end of the rear axle-tree; a moment later he found himself obliterated beneath the burly form of the latter, whom the exigencies of mountain travel had flung to the starboard side. Released from Dayton's crushing weight, his small person jounced freely about, or came butting against Discombe's back in the most spontaneous manner possible. The threatened dislocation of his joints, the imminent cracking of all his bones, the squeezing of his small person between the upper and the nether millstones of Dayton's portly form and the adamantine seat-cushions; each and every incident of the transit Mr. Fetherbee took in perfectly good part. Yet it may be questioned whether he would have arrived at the goal intact, had it not been for the timely splitting of an under-pinning of the wagon, which caused a sudden collapse in the bows of the storm-tossed bark, and obliged the travellers to descend while yet half a mile distant from their journey's end.

The drive had been a silent function, each man having been preoccupied with the effort to preserve the integrity of his physical structure. Once on their feet, a splashed and battered company, they observed one another critically, bursting into shouts of unrestrained mirth over the astonishing hieroglyphics of mud which had inscribed themselves upon their respective countenances. Mr. Fetherbee himself looked like an Indian brave in full war-paint.

The day thus pleasantly begun was one of divers experiences, any one of which seemed to contain within itself all the essential elements of an adventure. More than once Mr. Fetherbee felt, as he jocosely expressed it, as if every minute would be the next! Thanks to Discombe's commanding position as superintendent of several of the mines, they were able to investigate the situation pretty thoroughly. They climbed up and down ladders, regardless of the wear and tear upon their breathing apparatus, they hailed the discovery of "free gold" in a bit of ore with as much enthusiasm as if they had been able to distinguish the microscopic speck which was agitating the minds of foreman and superintendent. Into one mine they descended, two passengers at a time, standing on the edge of a huge ore-bucket, which was gently lowered down the shaft. It was a treat to see the gnomelike figure of Mr. Fetherbee poking about among the rocky ribs of Mother Earth, closely attended by the flickering lights and weird shadows cast by the tallow-dip with which he had prudently provided himself early in the day. Emerging into the light of heaven they all rested for a while, sprawling there upon the sun-baked hillside, looking down into a quiet wooded valley full of brooding sunshine and heavenly shadows, while their ears were filled with the din of the ore-bucket, restored to its legitimate function, rattling up the shaft and sending its contents crashing down into the dump.