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CHAPTER XXI
MADONNA DOLOROSA
Blake was cooking supper when, shortly before sunset, Gowan drove up to the waterhole, with a pony in lead behind the heavy wagon. Leaving the wagon with the rope and other articles of his load on the far side of the creek bed, he watered and picketed the horses, and came across to the tent with his rifle and a roll of blankets.
“Howdy, Mr. Blake. Got here in time for supper, I see,” he remarked as he unburdened himself. “Met Mr. Knowles and the ladies down near the ranch. They told me about the shooting.” He faced about to stare at Ashton’s bandaged head. “They told me you came mighty near getting yours. You shore are a lucky tenderfoot.”
Ashton shrugged superciliously. “The worst of it is the additional hole in my hat. I see you have a new one. Is that the latest style on the range?”
“Stetson, brand A-1.,” replied the puncher. “How does it strike you, Mr. Blake?–and my new shirt? Having a dude puncher on our range kind of stirred up my emulosity. They don’t have real cowboy attire like his at an ordinary shorthorn cow town like Stockchute–but I did the best I could.”
Blake made no response to this heavy badinage. He set the supper on the chuck-box, and laconically said: “Come and get it.”
“Might have known you’ve been on round-up,” remarked Gowan, with an insistent sociability oddly at variance with his usual taciturn reserve. “According to Miss Chuckie, you’re some rider, and according to Mr. Knowles, you can shoot. I wouldn’t mind hearing from you direct about that shooting this morning.”
Blake recounted the affair still more briefly than he had told it to Knowles.
“That shore was a mighty close shave,” commented the puncher. “But you haven’t said what the fellow looked like.”
“He wore ordinary range clothes,” replied Blake. “I couldn’t see him behind the rocks, and caught only a glimpse of him as he went around the ridge. His horse was much the same build and color as Rocket.”
The puncher stared at Ashton with his cold unblinking eyes. “You shore picked out a Jim Dandy guide, Mr. Tenderfoot. According to this, it looks mighty like he’s gone and turned hawss thief. Mr. Knowles says your Rocket hawss has vamoosed. If he’s moving to Utah under your ex-guide, it’ll take some lively posse to head him. What d’you say, Mr. Blake?”
“I think the man is apt soon to come to the end of his rope–after dropping through a trap door,” said the engineer.
Gowan looked at him between narrowed eyelids, and paused with upraised coffee cup to reply: “A man that has shown the nerve this one has won’t let anyone get close enough to rope him.”
“It will be either that or a bullet, before long,” predicted Blake. “The badman is getting to be rather out of date.”
“Maybe a bullet,” admitted Gowan. “Never any rope, though, for his kind.–Guess I’ll turn in. It’s something of a drive over to Stockchute and back with the wagon, and I got up early. You and Ashton might go on watch until midnight, and turn me out for the rest of the night.”
“Very well,” agreed Blake.
The puncher stretched out on his blankets under a tree, a few yards from the tent. Ashton took the dishes down to sand-scour them at the pool, while Blake saw that everything damageable was disposed safe from the knife-like fangs of the coyotes.
“How about keeping watch?” asked Ashton, when he returned with the cleansed dishes. “Shall I take first or second?”
“Neither,” answered Blake. “You will need all the sleep and rest you can get. Tomorrow may be a hard day. Turn in at once.”
“If you insist,” acquiesced Ashton. “I still am rather weak and dizzy.” He went to the tent and disappeared.
Blake took the lantern and strolled across to the wagon, to look at the numerous articles brought by Gowan. He set the lantern over in the wagon bed on top of what seemed to be a heap of empty oat sacks, while he overhauled the load. It included three coils of rope of a hundred feet each, a keg of railroad spikes, two dozen picket-pins, two heavy hammers, a pick and shovel, and a crowbar.
The last three articles had not been ordered by Blake. The puncher had brought them along, apparently with a hazy idea that the descent of the cañon would be something on the order of mining. There were also in the wagon two five-gallon kerosene cans to use in carrying water up the mountain, a sack of oats, Gowan’s saddle, and two packsaddles.
In shifting one of the packsaddles to get at the hammers, Blake knocked it against the sack on which the lantern had been set. The lantern suddenly fell over on its side. Blake reached in to pick it up, and perceived that the sack was rising in a mound. He caught up one of the hammers, and held it poised for a stroke. From the sack came a muffled rattle. The hammer descended in a smashing blow.
The sack rose and fell as if something under it was squirming about convulsively. But to Blake’s surprise it did not fall aside and disclose that which was making the violent movement. The squirming lessened. He grasped an outer corner of the sack and jerked it upward. It failed to flip into the air. The lower part sagged heavily. The squirmer was inside and–the mouth of the sack was tied fast.
Blake looked at it thoughtfully. After some moments, he placed the sack where it had lain at first, and upset the keg of spikes on top of it. He then carefully examined Gowan’s saddle; but it told him nothing. He shook his head doubtfully, and returned to camp.
Going quietly around to Gowan, he set down the lantern close before the puncher’s face and stopped to light a cigar. Gowan stirred restlessly and rolled half over, but did not open his eyes. Blake smoked his cigar, extinguished the lantern, and quietly stretched out on the edge of the sleeper’s blankets. In a few moments he, too, was asleep.
About two o’clock Gowan stirred and rolled over, pulling at his blankets. Instantly Blake was wide awake. The puncher mumbled, drew the blankets closer about him, and lay quiet. Blake went into the tent and dozed on his own blankets until roused by the chill of dawn. He went down for a plunge in the pool, and was dressed and back at the fireplace, cooking breakfast, when Gowan started up out of his heavy slumber.
“Yes, it’s getting along about that time,” Blake called to him cheerfully. “You might turn out Ashton. He has made as good a night of it as you have.”
Gowan had been staring at the dawn, his lean jaw slack. As Blake spoke, he snapped his mouth shut and came over to confront the engineer. “You agreed to call me at midnight,” he said.
“My apology!” politely replied Blake. “I know how you must feel about it. But I hope you will excuse me. I saw that you, like Ashton, needed a full night’s sleep, and so did not disturb you.”
The puncher looked away and muttered: “I’m responsible for you to Mr. Knowles. He sent me here to guard you.”
“That is true. Of course you will say it’s owing to no fault of mine that we have come through the night safely. Well, we have a big day’s work before us. May I ask you to call Ashton? Breakfast is ready.”
At this the puncher sullenly went to rouse the sleeper. Ashton came out rubbing his eyes; but after a dip in the pool, he declared himself restored by his long sleep and ready for a day’s work. During the night his bandage had come loose. He would have tossed it away, but Blake insisted upon re-dressing the wound. He did so with as much skill and almost as much gentleness as had his wife.
When Blake and Ashton left the camp, the puncher was leading the horses across to load their first packs. The two levelmen walked briskly up the valley, carrying only enough food and water to last themselves until evening, when Gowan was to have the camp moved to the top of High Mesa.
Beginning from his bench-mark at the foot of the mountain, Blake carried the level line slantingly up the ridge side. The work was slow and tedious, since the telescope of the level could never be on a horizontal line either higher or lower respectively than the top and bottom of the thirteen-foot rod. This necessitated setting-up the instrument every few feet during the steepest part of the ascent.
They saw nothing of Gowan, who had chosen a more roundabout but easier trail. At midmorning, however, they were overtaken by Genevieve and Isobel and Thomas Herbert Vincent Leslie Blake. Knowles had started for Stockchute to seek the aid of the sheriff and his Indian prisoners. The ladies divided the ascent into several stages, riding ahead of the surveyors and resting in the shade of a rock or pine until the men had passed them.
Near noon, when the levels had been carried up close to the top of High Mesa, Gowan rode down to the party to inquire where the new camp was to be pitched.
“I’ve brought up a lot this trip,” he stated. “I can fetch the rest by sundown, if I don’t have to meander all over the mesa with these first packs.”
“Where did you leave the packhorses?” asked Blake.
“Up along the cañon where Ashton shot his yearling deer,” answered the puncher. “It’s about half way between that gulch where you say you’re going down and the bend across from the head of Dry Fork Gulch.”
“We’ll camp there,” decided Blake. “It is on the shortest trail to that gulch, and you’ll not have time to get your second load farther before dark.”
The puncher started back. But Isobel, who had come riding up with Genevieve, called out to stop him: “Wait, Kid. It is almost noon. You must take lunch with us.”
“Can’t leave those hawsses standing with the packs, Miss Chuckie, if they’re to make another trip today,” he replied.
“Suppose you unload them and come back along the edge of the cañon?” suggested Blake. “We shall knock off soon and all go over to give my wife her first look at the cañon. We can eat lunch there together.”
To this Gowan nodded a willing assent, and he jogged away, with a half smile on his thin lips. But that which pleased him had precisely the opposite effect on Ashton. He did not fancy sharing the companionship and attention of Miss Knowles with the puncher. As this interference with his happiness was due to Blake, he showed a petulant resentment towards the engineer that won him the girl’s sympathetic concern. She attributed his fretfulness to his wound. Blake made the same mistake.
“You’ve done quite enough for the morning, Ashton, with that head of yours,” he said. “We’re over the worst now, and can easily run on up to the camp this afternoon. We shall knock off for a siesta.”
“Needn’t try to make out I’m a baby!” snapped Ashton.
“Leave your rod here,” went on Blake, disregarding the other’s irascibility. “I’ll take the level. It may enable us to see the bottom of the cañon.”
He started on up the slope beside his wife’s pony. Ashton was somewhat mollified when he saw Isobel linger for him to walk beside her horse. She was carrying the baby, who, regardless of scenic attractions, had fallen asleep during the long climb from the lower mesa. The sight of the child clasped to her bosom awakened all that was highest in his nature. Concern over his wound had sobered her usual gay vivacity to a look of motherly tenderness.
“Do you know,” he murmured during a pause in their conversation, “you make me think of pictures of the Madonna!”
“Lafe!” she protested, blushing and as quickly paling. “You should not say such a thing. It is lovely–a beautiful thing to tell me; but–but I do not deserve it!”
“Madonna!–my Madonna!” he murmured in ardent adoration.
“Oh, please! when I’ve asked you not to!” she implored. “It is not right! I–I am not!–” Tears glistened in her soft eyes. She bent over to suppress a sob that might have awakened the sleeping infant.
Ashton gazed up at her, wonder and contrition mingling with his deepening adoration. “Forgive me, Miss Chuckie! But I meant it–I feel it! I never before felt this way towards any girl!.. I know I have no right to say anything now. I am a pennyless adventurer, a disgraced, disinherited son, a mere cowpuncher apprentice; but if, by next spring, I shall have–”
“Oh, see. They’re getting such a long way ahead of us!” exclaimed the girl, urging her pony to a faster gait.
The animal started forward with a suddenness that left Ashton behind. He made no effort to regain his position beside the girl’s stirrup. Instead, he lagged farther and farther in the rear, his face crimson with mortification and anger. As his chagrin deepened, his flush became almost feverish and there was a suggestion of wildness in his flashing eyes. It was as though his passion was intensifying some injury to his brain caused by the concussion of the bullet on his skull.
CHAPTER XXII
A REAL WOLF
When the loiterer came over the second ridge into view of the booming chasm in the top of the plateau, he saw the others down near the brink. The baby had been laid on a soft bed of pine needles, and Blake was leading the ladies down to look over into the abyss, one on each arm.
Ashton’s chagrin flared into jealous hate. He felt certain that the girl was quite capable of strolling along the extreme edge of the precipice without a trace of giddiness. Yet now she was clinging to Blake even more closely than was Genevieve. There was more than apprehension in the clasp of her little brown hand on the engineer’s shoulder. Her cheek brushed his sleeve.
The anger of the onlooker was so intense that he did not see Gowan riding towards him from the left. The puncher dismounted and came forward, his cold gaze fixed on Ashton’s face.
“So you’re beginning to savvy it, too,” he remarked.
Ashton confronted him, vainly attempting to mask his telltale look and color with a show of hauteur. “I never discuss personal matters with acquaintances of your stamp,” he said.
“That’s too bad,” coolly deplored Gowan. “Maybe you’ve heard the saying about cutting off your nose to spite your face.”
“What do you mean?”
“If you want to go it alone, I can’t stop you,” replied the puncher. “Needn’t think I’m sucking around you for any favors or friendship. If this was my range, I would run you off it so fast you’d reach Stockchute with your tongue hanging out like a dog’s. That’s how much I like you.”
“The feeling is fully reciprocated, I assure you,” rejoined Ashton.
“All right. Now what’re we going to do about him?–each play a lone hand, or make it pardners for this deal?”
“I–fail to understand,” hesitated Ashton.
“No, you don’t,” jeeringly contradicted the puncher. “It’s a three-cornered fight. You see it now, even if you have been too big a fool to see it before. We can settle ours after. But I’m free to own up to it that you’re a striped skunk if you won’t work with me first to get rid of him. Look at him now–and him married!”
Ashton’s flush deepened to purple. “Married!–yes, married!” he choked out.
“Right alongside his wife, too!” Gowan thrust the goad deeper. “You’d think even that brand of skunk would have more decency. Not that his wife is any friend of mine, like she is yours. But for a man with such a wife and baby … with Miss Chuckie! The–”
Gowan ended with a string of oaths so virulent that even Ashton’s half-mad anger was checked.
“You may be–er–I fear that we–Perhaps it’s not so bad as it appears!” he stammered.
“Bah!” disgustedly sneered the puncher, and he strode on ahead, leaving Ashton torn between rage and doubt and terror of his own furious jealousy.
The others continued to stand on a flat ledge that here formed the lip of the cañon. Genevieve was trembling with awed delight. Her husband and the girl appeared more calm, but they were drinking in the grandeur of the tremendous gorge below them with no less intense appreciation of its gloomy vastness.
Upstream, to their left, the precipices jutted so far out from each wall of the cañon that they overlapped, a thousand or fifteen hundred feet from the top. But downstream the upper part of the chasm flared to a width that permitted the noonday sun to penetrate part way down through the blue-black shadows.
“O-o-o-oh!” sighed Genevieve, for the tenth time, and she clung tighter than ever to the strong arm of her husband. “Isn’t it fearfully, fearfully delightful? It makes the soles of my feet tingle to look at it!”
“That tickly feeling!” exclaimed Isobel. “I often ride up here to the cañon, I do so love to feel that way! Only with me it’s like ants crawling up and down my back.”
“O-o-o-oh!” again sighed Genevieve. “It–it so overpowers one!”
“It’s sure some cañon,” admitted her husband. “That French artist Doré ought to have seen it.”
“If only we had a copy of Dante’s Inferno to read here on the brink!” she whispered.
“It always reminds me of Coleridge’s poem,” murmured Isobel, and she quoted in an awed whisper:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man,
Down to the sunless sea.
“Fortunately for us, this is a cañon, not a string of measureless caverns,” said Blake. “It can be measured, one way or another. If I had a transit, I could calculate the depth at any point where the water shows–triangulate with a vertical angle. But it would cause a long delay to send on for a transit. We shall first try to chain down at that gulch break.”
Genevieve shrank back from the verge of the precipice and drew the others after her.
“Dear!” she exclaimed, “I did not dream it was so fearful. One has to see to realize! You will not go down–promise me you will not go down!”
“Now, now, little woman,” reproached Blake. “What’s become of my partner?”
“But baby–? If you should leave him fatherless!”
“Better that than for him to have a father who is a quitter! Just wait, Sweetheart. That break looks much less overwhelming than these sheer cliffs. You know I shall not attempt anything foolhardy. If it is not possible to get down without too great risk, I shall give it up and send for a transit.”
“Oh, will you?” exclaimed Isobel, hardly less apprehensive than his wife. “Why not wait anyway until you can send for your transit?”
“Because I cannot triangulate the bottom within half a mile upstream from where the tunnel would have to be located. That roar and the wildness of the water wherever we can see it is proof that it is flowing down a heavy grade. At the point where I triangulated it might be above the level of Dry Mesa, and way below the mesa here at the tunnel site.”
“You could triangulate at the first place where the bottom can be seen, beyond here,” suggested Genevieve.
“Suppose it proved to be lower than Dry Mesa, wouldn’t that still leave us up in the air?” he asked. “Like this–”
He pulled out his notebook and drew a rough sketch.
“I see, Dear,” said his wife. “When do you plan to go down?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“Can you wait until we come up from the ranch?”
“Yes. Mr. Knowles will no doubt be back by then. He can bring you out early.”
“We shall come early, anyway,” said Isobel.
“Of course!” added Genevieve. She drew a deep breath. “I shall see the place before you attempt to descend.”
Her husband nodded reassuringly and looked around to where Gowan and Ashton stood waiting, several yards from one another.
“About lunch time, isn’t it?” he remarked. “Mr. Gowan will wish to be starting soon to bring up his second load.”
At the suggestion, the ladies hastened to spread out their own lunch and the one brought by Blake. When called by Isobel, Gowan came forward to join the party, with rather less than his usual reserve in his speech and manner.
Ashton was the last to seat himself on the springy cushion of brown pine needles, and he sat throughout the meal in moody silence. Blake and the ladies attributed this to the fatigue of working through the long hot morning while suffering from his unhealed wound. He repulsed the sympathetic attentions of the Blakes. But he could not long continue to resist the kindly concern of the girl. After lunch she made him lie down in the shade while she bathed his wound with a good part of the small supply of water remaining in the canteens.
Gowan had been asking questions about the work. Blake explained at some length why he considered it necessary not only to descend into the cañon but to carry the line of levels down along the bed of the subterranean stream to this point opposite Dry Fork Gulch. When Isobel drew apart with Ashton the puncher did not look at them, though his eyes narrowed to slits and his mouth straightened.
“You shore have nerve to tackle it, Mr. Blake,” he commented. “Everything alive that I know of that’s ever gone down into Deep Cañon hasn’t ever come up again, except it had wings.”
“We’ll prove that the rule has an exception,” replied Blake, smiling away the reawakened apprehension of his wife.
Gowan shook his head doubtfully, and strolled down the slope to peer into the cañon. The level was directly in his path, set up firmly on its tripod, about six feet from the brink. The puncher stopped beside it to squint through the telescope.
“You’ll have one–peach of a time seeing anything through this contraption down there,” he remarked. “I can’t see even right here in the sun.”
“The telescope is out of focus,” explained Blake. “Turn that screw on the side.” Gowan twisted a protruding thumbscrew. “Not that–the one above it,” directed Blake.
“Can’t stop to fool now,” replied the puncher. “I’ve got to hustle along.”
He started hastily around between the level and the precipice. The toe of his boot struck hard against the iron toe of the outer tripod-leg. He stumbled and sprawled forward on his hands and knees. Behind him the instrument toppled over towards the brink.
Genevieve cried out in alarm at Gowan’s fall. Her husband sprang to the rescue–not of the puncher, but of the level. It had crashed down with its head to the chasm, and was sliding out over the brink. Blake barely caught it by the tip of one of the legs as it swung up for the plunge. He drew it back and set it up to see what damage had been done to the head. Gowan watched him, tight-lipped.
“This is luck!” exclaimed the engineer, after a swift examination. “Nothing broken–only knocked out of adjustment. I can fix that in half an hour. She struck with the telescope turned sideways. You must have set the clamp screw.”
The puncher’s face darkened. “Wish the–infernal machine had gone plumb down to hell!” he growled. “It came near tripping me over the edge.”
“My apology,” said Blake. “I spraddled the tripod purposely to keep it from being upset.”
“Oh, Kid, you’ve hurt yourself,” called Isobel, as the puncher began to wrap a kerchief about his hand. “Come here and let me bandage it.”
“No,” he replied. “Two babies are enough for you to coddle at one time. I’ve got to hit out.”
He turned his back on Blake and hurried up to his horse. The engineer followed as far as the nearest tree, where he set up the instrument in the shade and began to adjust it.
“Good thing she has platinum crosshairs,” he said to Ashton. “A fall like that would have been certain to break the old-style spiderweb hairs.”
Ashton did not reply. He was absorbed in a murmured conversation with Isobel. Blake completed the adjustments of the level and stretched out beside his wife to play with his gurgling son. A half hour of this completed the two hours that he had set apart for the noon rest. He placed the baby back in his wife’s lap and stood up to stretch his powerful frame.
“How about it, Ashton?” he inquired. “Think you feel fit to rod this afternoon? Don’t hesitate to say no, if that’s the right answer. I expect my wife and Miss Chuckie, between them, can help me carry the line as far as the camp.”
“I can do it alone,” interposed the girl. “Let them both stay here and rest all afternoon.”
“No, Miss Chuckie. I can and shall do my work,” insisted Ashton, springing up with unexpected briskness for one who had appeared so fatigued. “It is you and Mrs. Blake who must stay here to rest–unless you wish to keep us company.”
“Might we not go to the new camp and put it in order?” suggested Genevieve.
“What if that outlaw should come sneaking back?” objected Ashton. “It seems to me you should keep with us.”
“He would not trouble us,” replied Isobel.
“Yet if he should? Anyway, Blake and I saw a wolf up here the other day.”
“A real wolf! Where?”
“Yes,” answered Blake. “Over in the ravine the other side of the head of Dry Fork Gulch.”
“He may attack you,” argued Ashton.
The girl laughed. “You’re still a tenderfoot to think a wolf wouldn’t know better than that. Wish he didn’t! It would mean the saving of a half dozen calves this winter.” She flashed out her long-barreled automatic pistol and knocked a cone from the tree above Blake’s head with a swiftly aimed shot.
Blake caught the cone as it fell and looked at the bullet hole through its center. “Unless that was an accident, I should call it some shooting,” he remarked.
“Accident!” she called back. “Stand sideways and see what happens to your cigar.”
“No, thanks. I’ll take your word for it. Just lit this one, and I’ve only a few left. By by, Tommy! Don’t let the wolves eat mamma and the poor little cowlady!”
He picked up the level and started off at a swinging stride. Ashton followed several paces behind. His face was sullen and heavy, but in their merriment over Blake’s banter, the ladies failed to observe his expression.
They rested for a while longer. Then, after venturing down for another awed look into the abyss, they rode along, parallel with the stupendous rift, to the place selected for the new camp. As Gowan had brought up the tent in one of the first packs, the ladies pitched it on the level top of the ridge.
“This is real camping!” delightedly exclaimed Genevieve, as they set to gathering leafy twigs for bedding and dry branches for fuel. “How I wish we could stay all night!”
“We can, if you wish,” replied Isobel.
“Can we, really?”
“Our men often sleep out in the open, this time of year. We shall take the tent for ourselves. Won’t it be fun! But will Thomas be all right?”
“I can manage with what I have until tomorrow afternoon.”
“How long do you think they will be down in the cañon?” the girl inquired.
Genevieve shuddered. “I wish I could tell! If only Tom finds that he cannot get down at all, how thankful I shall be!”
“And–Lafe!” murmured the girl.
“It is possible that they may be unable to do it in one day,” went on Genevieve apprehensively–“Down, down into those dreadful depths, and then along the river, all the way to where the tunnel is to be, and back again, and then up the awful cliffs! Surely they cannot finish in one day! Of course they will succeed–Tom can do anything, anything! Yet how I dread the very thought–!”
“We must prepare to stay right here on High Mesa until they do finish!” declared Isobel. “It will be impossible to go back to the ranch tomorrow if they are still in that frightful place! Kid will have to take the hawsses down to the waterhole. He shall go on home, and tomorrow morning fetch us cream and eggs and everything you need. They will have to be told at the ranch; and if Daddy has returned, he will come up to help and be with us.”
“You dear girl! The more I think of this terrible descent, the more I dread it. I feel a presentiment that–But I must try to be brave and not interfere with Tom’s work! It will be a great comfort to have your father with us.”
“Daddy will surely come if he has returned. Isn’t he kind and good? He couldn’t have done more to make me happy if he had been my own real father!”
Genevieve smiled into the girl’s glowing face. “Yes, dear. Yet I am far from surprised, since you are the daughter he wished to make happy. I was more surprised to have him tell me you were adopted. You have never said a word about it.”
“I–you see, I did not happen to,” confusedly murmured the girl.
“Chuckie Knowles is not your real name,” Genevieve gently reproached her.
“No, it is the pet name Daddy gave me. My real one is–Isobel.”
“Isobel–?”
“Yes. Daddy’s sister, in Denver, always calls me that. But here on the ranch–”
“Isobel–?” repeated Genevieve, with a rising inflection.
The color ebbed from the girl’s face, but she answered steadily: “Chuckie–Isobel–Knowles. I am Daddy’s daughter. I have no other father.”
“Is-o-bel–Is-o-bel,” Genevieve intoned the name musically. “It has a beautiful sound. I had a friend at school–Isabella–but we always called her Belle.”
The girl suddenly faced away from her companion, and darted to meet Blake and Ashton, who were bringing the line of levels up over the ridge.
