War Comes to the Big Bend Page 6

  The sounds he heard were a welcome home—the rush of swift water not twenty yards from where he stopped the car in the big courtyard—the pound of hoofs on the barn floor—the shrill whistle of a stallion that saw and recognized him—the drawling laugh of his cowboys and the clink of their spurs, as they became aware of his return.

  Nash, the suspected driver, was among those who hurried to meet the car.

  Anderson’s keen, covert glance made note of the driver’s worried and anxious face. “Nash, she’ll need a lookin’ over,” he said as he uncovered bundles in the back seat and lifted them out.

  “All right, sir,” replied Nash eagerly. A note of relieved strain was significant in his voice.

  “Here, you Jake!” cheerily called Anderson to a raw-boned, gaunt-faced fellow who wore the garb of a cowboy.

  “Boss, I’m powerful glad to see you here,” replied Jake as he received bundle after bundle until he was loaded down. Then he grinned. “Mebbe you want a pack hoss.”

  “You’re horse enough for me. Come on,” Anderson said, and, waving the other men aside, he turned toward the green, shady hill above which the red and white of the house just showed.

  A bridge crossed the rushing stream. Here Jake dropped some of the bundles and Anderson recovered them. As he straightened up, he looked searchingly at the cowboy. Jake’s yellow-gray eyes returned the gaze. And that exchange showed these two of the same breed, and sure of each other.

  “Nawthin’ come off, boss,” he drawled, “but I’m glad you’re home.”

  “Did Nash leave the place?” queried Anderson.

  “Twice . . . at night . . . an’ he was gone long. I didn’t foller him because I seen he didn’t take no luggage, an’ that boy has some sporty clothes. He was sure comin’ back.”

  “Any sign of his pard . . . that Glidden?”

  “Nope. But there’s been more than one new feller snookin’ ’round.”

  “Have you heard from any of the boys with the cattle?”

  “Yep. Bill Weeks rode down. He said a bunch of IWWs were campin’ above Blue Spring. That means they’ve moved on down to the edge of the timber an’ uncomfortable near our wheat. Bill says they’re killin’ our stock fer meat.”

  “M-m-m. How many in the gang?” inquired Anderson darkly. His early dealings with outlaw rustlers had not left him favorably inclined toward losing a single steer.

  “Wal, I reckon we can’t say. Mebbe five hundred, countin’ all along the valley on this side. Then we hear there’s more on the other . . . Boss, if they git ugly, we’re goin’ to lose stock, wheat, an’ mebbe some blood.”

  “So many as that!” ejaculated the rancher in amaze.

  “They come an’ go, an’ lately they’re most comin’,” replied Jake.

  “When do we begin cuttin’ grain?”

  “I reckon tomorrow. Adams didn’t want to start till you got back. It’ll be barley an’ oats for a few days, an’ then the wheat . . . if we can get the men.”

  “An’ has Adams hired any?”

  “Yes, a matter of twenty or so. They swore they wasn’t IWWs, but Adams said, an’ so do I, that some of them are men who first claimed to our old hands that they did belong to the IWW.”

  “An’ so we’ve got to take a chance if we’re goin’ to harvest two thousand acres of wheat?”

  “I reckon, boss.”

  “Any reports from Walla Walla way?”

  “Wal, yes. But I reckon you’d better git your supper ’fore I tell you, boss.”

  “Jake, you said nothin’ bad come off.”

  “Wal, nawthin’ has around here. Come on now, boss. Miss Lenore says I was to keep my mouth shut.”

  “Jake, who’s your boss? Me or Lenore?”

  “Wal, you are. But I ain’t disobeyin’ Miss Lenore.”

  Anderson walked the rest of way up the shady path to the house without saying any more to Jake. The beautiful white house stood clear of the grove, bright in the rays of the setting sun. A barking of dogs greeted Anderson, and then the pattering of feet. His daughters appeared on the porch. Kathleen, who was ten, made a dive for him and Rose, who was fourteen, came flying after her. Both girls were screaming joyously. Their sunny hair danced. Lenore waited for him at the step, and as he mounted the porch, burdened by the three girls, his anxious, sadly smiling wife came out to make perfect the welcome home. No—not perfect, for Anderson’s joy held a bitter drop, the absence of his only son.

  “Oh, Dad . . . what-all did you fetch me?” cried Kathleen, and she deserted her father for the bundle-laden Jake.

  “And me!” echoed Rose.

  Even Lenore, in the happiness of her father’s return, was not proof against the wonder and promise of these many bundles.

  They all went within, through a hall to a great cozy living room. Mrs. Anderson’s very first words, after her welcoming smile, were a half faltered: “Any . . . news of . . . Jim?”

  “Why . . . yes,” replied Anderson hesitatingly.

  Suddenly the three sisters were silent. How closely they resembled one another then—Lenore, a budding woman, Rose a budding girl, and Kathleen, a rosy, radiant child.

  Lenore lost a little of her bloom. “What news . . . Father?” she asked.

  “Haven’t you heard from him?” returned Anderson.

  “Not for a whole week. He wrote the day he reached Spokane. But then he hardly knew anything except that he’d enlisted.”

  “I’m sure glad Jim didn’t wait for the draft,” replied the father. “Well, Mother an’ girls, Jim was gone when I got to Spokane. All I heard was that he was well when he left for Frisco an’ strong for the aviation corps.”

  “Then he means to . . . to be an aviator?” said Lenore with quivering lips.

  “Sure, an’ he’s wise. Jim knows engines. He has a knack for machinery. An’ nerve! No boy ever had more. He’ll make a crack flier.”

  “But the danger,” whispered the boy’s mother with a shudder.

  “I reckon there’ll be a little danger, Mother,” replied Anderson cheerfully. “We’ve got to take our chance on Jim. There’s one sure bet. If he had stayed home, he’d be fightin’ IWWs.”

  That trying moment passed. Mrs. Anderson said that she would see to supper being put on the table at once. The younger girls began untying the bundles. Lenore studied her father’s face a moment.

  “Jake, you run along,” she said to the waiting cowboy. “Wait till after supper before you worry Father.”

  “I’ll do that, Miss Lenore,” drawled Jake, “an’ if he wants worryin, he’ll hev to look me up.”

  “Lass, I’m only tired, not worried,” replied Anderson as Jake shuffled out with jingling spurs.

  “Did anything serious happen in Spokane?” she asked anxiously.

  “No. But Spokane men are alive to serious trouble ahead,” replied her father. “I spoke to the Chamber of Commerce . . . and exploded a bomb in that camp. Then I had conferences with a good many different men. Fact is, they ran me pretty hard. Couldn’t have slept much, anyhow, in that heat. Lass, this is the place to live. I’d rather die here than live in Spokane, in summer.”

  “Did you see the governor?”

  “Yes, an’ he wasn’t as anxious about the Walla Walla Valley as the Big Bend country. He’s right, too. We’re old Westerners here. We can handle trouble. But they’re not Americans up there in the Big Bend.”

  “Father, we met one American,” said Lenore dreamily.

  “By George, we did! An’ that reminds me. There was a government official from Washington . . . came out to Spokane to investigate conditions. I forget his name. He asked to meet me an’ he was curious about the Big Bend . . . its loyalty to the U.S. I told him all I knew, an’ what I thought. An’ then he said he was goin’ to motor through that wheat belt an’ talk to what Americans he could find, an’ impress upon them that they could do as much as soldiers to win the war. Wheat . . . bread . . . that’s our great gun in this war, Lenore . . . I knew this, but I was made p
retty blamed sober by that government man. I told him by all means to go to Wheeler, an’ to have a talk with young Dorn. I sure gave that boy a good word. Poor lad. He’s true blue. An’ to think of him bein’ with that old German devil. Old Dorn has always had a hard name. An’ this war has brought out the German cussedness.”

  “Father, I’m glad you spoke well of the young man,” said Lenore still dreamily.

  “Hum. You never told me what you thought,” replied her father, with a quick glance of inquiry at her. Lenore was gazing out of the window, away across the wheat field and the range. Anderson watched her a moment, and then resumed. “If I can get away, I’m goin’ to drive up to see Dorn again pretty soon. Do you want to go?”

  Lenore gave a little start, as if the question had surprised her. “I . . . I hardly think so,” she slowly replied.

  “It’s just as well,” he said. “That’ll be a hard ride . . . Guess I’ll clean up a little for supper.”

  Anderson left the room. And while Kathleen and Rose gleefully squabbled over the bundles, Lenore continued to gaze dreamily out of the window.

  * * * * *

  That night Lenore went early to her room, despite the presence of some young people from a neighboring village. She locked the door and sat in the dark beside her open window.

  An early moon silvered the long slopes of wheat, and made the alfalfa squares seem black. A cool sweet breeze fanned her cheek. She could smell the fragrance of apples, of new-mown hay, and she could hear the low murmur of running water. A hound bayed off somewhere in the fields. There was no other sound. It was a quiet, beautiful, pastoral scene. But somehow it did not comfort Lenore.

  She seemed to doubt the sincerity of what she saw there and loved so well. Moon-blanched and serene, lonely and silent, beautiful and promising, the wide acres of Many Waters, and the silver slopes and dark mountains beyond did not tell the truth. Away over the dark ranges a hideous war had stretched out a red hand to her country. Her only brother had left his home to fight, and there was no telling if he would ever come back. Evil forces were at work out there in the moonlight. There had come a time for her to be thoughtful.

  Her father’s asking her to ride to the Big Bend country had caused some strange little shock of surprise. Lenore had dreamed without thinking. Here in the darkness and silence, watching the crescent moon slowly sink, she did not. And it was to learn that she remembered singularly well the first time she had seen young Dorn, and still more vividly the second time, but the third time seemed both clear and vague. Enough young men had been smitten with Lenore to enable her to gauge the symptoms of the easy-come, easy-go attractions. In fact they rather repelled her. But she had found Dorn’s manner striking, confusing, and unforgettable. And why that should be so interested her intelligence.

  It was confusing to discover that she could not lay it to the sympathy she had felt for an American boy in a difficult position, because she had often thought of him long before she had any idea who he was or where he lived.

  In the very first place he had been unforgettable for two reasons—because he had been so struck at sight of her, so that he had gazed unconsciously, with a glow on his face, a radiance in his eye, as of a young poet spellbound at an inspiration—and because he had seemed to be a physical type of young man she had idealized, a strong, lithe-limbed giant, with a handsome, frank face, clean-cut and smooth, ruddy-cheeked and blue-eyed.

  Only after meeting him out there in the desert of wheat had she felt sympathy for him. And now with intelligence and a woman’s intuition, barring the old insidious dreamy word, Lenore went over in memory all she could remember of that meeting. And the truth made her sharply catch her breath. Dorn had fallen in love with her. Her intuition declared that, while her intelligence repudiated it. Stranger than that was the thrill that began somewhere in the unknown depths of her and mounted, to leave her tingling all over. She had told her father that she did not want to ride to the Big Bend country. But she did want to go. And that thought, flashing up, would not be denied. To want to meet a strange, young man again was absolutely a new and irritating discovery for Lenore. It mystified her, because she had not had time to like Dorn. Liking an acquaintance had nothing to do with the fact. And that stunned her.

  “Could it be . . . love at first sight?” she whispered incredulously as she stared out over the shadowing fields. “For me? Why, how almost . . . impossible. I . . . I only remembered him . . . a big handsome boy . . . with blazing eyes . . . And now I’m sorry for him.”

  To whisper her amaze and doubt and consternation only augmented the instinctive recurring emotion. She felt something she could not explain. And that something was nearly scarcely owing to this young man’s pitiful position between duty to his father and love for his country. It had to do with his blazing eyes and intangible dream-like perceptions of him as not real, of vague sweet fancies that retreated before her introspective questioning. What alarmed Lenore was a tendency of her mind to shirk this revealing analysis. Never before had she been afraid to look into herself. But now she was finding unplumbed wells of feeling, secret chambers of dreams into which she had never let the light, strange instinctive activities, more physical than mental. When in her life before had she experienced a nameless palpitation of her heart?

  Long she sat there staring out into the night. And the change in the aspect of the broad spaces, now dark and impenetrable and mysterious, seemed like the change in her knowledge of herself. Once she had flattered herself that she was an inch of crystal water; now she seemed a complex, aloof, and contrary creature, almost on the verge of tumultuous emotions.

  She said her prayers that night, a girlish habit resumed since her brother had declared his intention of enlisting in the Army. And to that old prayer, which her mother had prayed before her, she added an appeal of her own. Strange that young Dorn’s face should flash out of gloom. It was there, and her brother’s was fading.

  “I wonder . . . will he and Jim . . . meet over there . . . on the battlefields?” she whispered. She hoped they would. Like tigers these boys would fight the Germans. Her heart beat high. Then a cold wind seemed to blow over her. It had a sickening weight. If that icy and somber wind could have been traced to its source, then the mystery of life would have been clear. But that source was the cause of war, as its effect was the horror of women. A hideous and monstrous thing existed out there in the darkness. Lenore passionately loved her brother, and this black thing had taken him away. Why could not women, who suffered most, have some word in the regulation of events? If women could help govern the world, there would be no wars.

  At last encroaching drowsiness dulled the poignancy of her feelings and she sank to sleep.

  Chapter Six

  Singing of birds at her window awakened Lenore. The dawn streamed in brightly and sweetly fragrant. The wheat fields seemed a rosy gold, and all that open slope called to her thrillingly of the beauty of the world and the happiness of youth. It was not possible to be morbid at dawn. “I hear. I hear,” she whispered. “From a thousand slopes far and wide.”

  At the breakfast table when there came opportunity, she looked up serenely, and said: “Father, on second thought I will go to the Big Bend, thank you.”

  Anderson laid down his knife and fork and his eyes opened wide in surprise.

  “Changed your mind!” he exclaimed.

  “Yes. That’s a privilege I have, you know,” she replied calmly.

  Mrs. Anderson appeared more anxious than surprised. “Daughter, don’t go. That will be a fearful ride.”

  “M-m-m. Sure glad to have you, lass,” added Anderson with his keen eyes on her.

  “Let me go, too,” begged Rose.

  Kathleen was solemnly gazing at Lenore with the wise, penetrating eyes of extreme youth.

  “Lenore, I’ll bet you’ve got a new beau up there,” she declared.

  Lenore blushed scarlet. She was less angry with her little sister than with the incomprehensible fact of a playful word bringing t
he blood stingingly to her neck and face. “Kitty, you forget your manners,” she said sharply.

  “Kitty is fresh. She’s an awful child,” added Rose with a superior air.

  “I didn’t say a thing!” cried Kathleen hotly. “Lenore, if it ain’t true, why’d you blush so red?”

  “Hush, you silly children,” ordered the mother reprovingly.

  Lenore was glad to finish that meal and to get outdoors. She could smile now at that shrewd and terrible Kitty, but recollection of her father’s keen eyes was confusing. Lenore felt there was really nothing to blush for; still she could scarcely tell her father that upon awakening this morning she had found her mind made up—that only by going to the Big Bend country could she determine the true state of her feelings. She simply dared not accuse herself of being in unusually radiant spirits because she was going to undertake a long hard ride into a barren, desert country.

  The grave and thoughtful mood of last night had gone with her slumbers. Often Lenore had found problems decided for her while she slept. On this fresh, sweet, summer morning, with the sun bright and warm, presaging a hot and glorious day, Lenore wanted to run with the winds, to wade through the alfalfa, to watch with strange and renewed pleasure the waves of shadow as they went over the wheat. All her life she had known and loved the fields of waving gold. But they had never been to her what they had become overnight. Perhaps this was because it had been said that the issues of the Great War, the salvation of the world, and its happiness, its hope, depended upon the millions of broad acres of golden grain. Bread was the staff of life. Lenore felt that she was changing and growing. If anything should happen to her brother Jim, she would be heiress to thousands of acres of wheat. A pang shot through her heart. She had to drive the cold thought away. And she must learn—must know the bigness of this question. The women of the country would be called upon to help, to do their share.

  She ran down through the grove and across the bridge, coming abruptly upon Nash, her father’s driver. He had the car out.

  “Good morning,” he said with a smile, doffing his cap.