Chapter 15

A yell of delight went up from the crowd, and a shower of tiny bits of white papers showed the fate of the instrument. Kitsap pointed his finger at the enraged Lamson, and as the shower of paper fell about him fairly shouted his denunciation:

"I, Kitsap, the clerk, am a representative of the Elliott Bay National Bank. I come here by the orders of the _tyee_--the president. Your hop receipts are in the bank's treasure-chest, and here is your letter received at the bank last Monday." Kitsap opened the letter that had come to him by express and read:

Picking is progressing well, and the valley will yield a big crop. A few hungry ranchers are selling at fourteen cents cash at the warehouse, but I look for better prices later. I hope you will be willing to carry my receipts _till November, when I look for a price close to twenty cents_.

As Kitsap read, his voice rose, and, as he ended, there was absolute silence for an instant. Then the ranchers took their spellbound eyes from the quivering Indian and looked at the pale face of the speechless Lamson. The store-keeper looked with the others, and it was his groan that broke the spell:

"Thunder! I stood to make a thousand on the deal."

Then the overjoyed ranchers found their voices in a wild laugh, and laid enthusiastic hands on Kitsap. Lamson and the buyers slipped away, beaten and humiliated, to lament the failure of the fourteen-cent raid, and to spend a few bitter hours in planning a new offer next morning at a better price, for there was need to cover promises made to Eastern houses.

The ranchers quickly formed themselves into a meeting and sent couriers out to notify all signers of the contract that the deal was off. Then they appointed a committee to go to the bank next day with Kitsap and be witnesses to his report to his superiors.

Before another day passed, the spirit of the valley had changed from a desire to sell quickly for cash into a determination to hold the crop for a twenty-cent market. The Elliott Bay National secured daily bulletins from inside sources and kept the world's markets before the entire valley. Picking progressed to an end, and the Indians held their last feast and departed. Then buyers came from other markets, inspected the crop, and made offers. Gradually the valley ranchers joined the lead of the reservation Indians and placed their receipts with the Elliott Bay National, to be held for a rise and sold as near twenty cents as possible. The cashier sent East for a prominent broker, who replied that he would arrive by the Sound in mid-October. Then the other buyers began bulling the market, hoping to induce a rancher here and there to sell and, by thus breaking the ranks, run prices down. But Kitsap, on the ground, and the cashier, in the bank, were able to hold them together till the new broker arrived.

The new man was business from the ground up. He knew where he could sell hops, and for what price. He inspected the valley crop of hops and frankly announced his intention to pay twenty-one cents. Then the other buyers rushed in to get a share, and the result was an agreement by which the new broker got half the crop at twenty-one cents and the late lamented fourteen-cent raiders divided the other half among themselves at twenty-three cents, the money to be distributed through the Elliott Bay National to all ranchers at the average of twenty-two cents.

Kitsap telephoned the news to the reservation, and the priest sent the son of Peter Coultee on his spotted cayuse to ride into the village with the news. DeQuincey's Royal Mail with the news of Waterloo did not create more enthusiasm than the Indian's triumphant shout. As he dashed along he yelled to the white men:

"Hops sold at twenty-two cents!"

To the Indian ranchers he called out the same news in the jargon:

"_Hops marsh mox-taltum-tee-mox._"

Down the street he rode, yelling and winning yells in return. The news spread from street to street, men carried it into the valley, and that night many a heart among the ranches beat quicker and many a voice at the firesides murmured the name of "Kitsap."

The town marshal made the trip to Seattle and delivered the six-hundred-dollar wager to Kitsap. The Indian told the cashier the terms of the wager and asked to be excused on the following Saturday, that he might assemble the reservation children and scatter the Lamson money.

"It will be a great event to them," said Kitsap. "I shall take all of Lamson's five hundred dollars in dimes, and the whole reservation will come out to see the fun."

The cashier granted the leave of absence gladly.

"If you will hold the event in the afternoon, I think the president would be pleased to go out and see it," said he.

Kitsap needed no other hint, but went boldly to the president and invited him to witness the scattering of the coins.

"With pleasure," replied the president.

"Come on the three o'clock train, and I will have a carriage for you," said Kitsap.

The reservation had been waiting for twenty-cent hops as a band of children wait for the circus. Five thousand dimes to be thrown to less than three hundred children! It would be a rare scramble. Indian children raided their mothers' button-baskets that they might throw the buttons in the sand and practise scrambling for them. Then came the news of twenty-two cent hops, and every Indian, young or old, jumped up and down and shouted that Kitsap had won that Lamson money.

"Saturday afternoon at four o'clock," was Kitsap's message to the reservation priest, and the priest assembled ten young men for a conference. It was decided to mark off ten squares on the lawn in front of the schoolhouse. On each square a squad of thirty children should stand, the children of each squad graded so as to be nearly of a size, girls and boys in alternate squares. Before each square one of the ten young men should stand with five hundred silver coins in a dish. At a signal from Kitsap, who should stand on the school steps, the ten young men should throw the dimes in the air and the scramble would begin.

When the train stopped at the reservation station that October afternoon, the president of the Elliott Bay National found Kitsap the elder there to meet him, with a clean spring wagon. During the short drive to the reservation school, he noted that the road was deserted, but when the school was reached a scene of color and animation met his eye. The tribe was out in full regalia, even the clients of the bank, who came gravely to the president's wagon to greet him. Kitsap the elder drove to a spot reserved for the head men of the tribe, and the chief of the money-house was welcomed to a place among them. Then a hush fell upon the assembly.

A procession of young men, headed by Kitsap, decked in tribal finery, came out of the schoolhouse. Kitsap remained on the stairs, as the ten young men, bearing dishes of dimes, took their places before the squares. Every child stood waiting--every grown person held his breath. The voice of Kitsap, speaking each sentence first in the jargon and then in English, made a short harangue. The president smiled as he caught this glimpse of Kitsap's own interpretation of a bank.

"Lamson, the white man, told a lie about the money-house. The great _tyee_ of the treasure-chest sent Kitsap, who is a brave of the white _tyee's_ house, to tell the Puyallups the truth. The Great Spirit made Lamson angry and caused him to lose this money to Kitsap, who serves the great white _tyee_. But the great white _tyee_ said: 'Behold, the Great Spirit has punished Lamson. Forever will he be called Two Lies. The money shall be for the children, as Kitsap said. I will go myself to see Kitsap throw the silver coins to the children, for it is a lesson. Let them always speak true words, or the Great Spirit will punish them, and they will have an evil name like Lamson!' And look, children, Kitsap's _tyee_ sits with the _tyee_ of the Puyallups to see you scramble. Remember, keep on your own square and do not strike. Push and pull, but do not strike. Show the white _tyee_ who lives in the magic treasure-house that you can play your games fairly. Then he will be pleased and tell his own people of the silver coins that Kitsap throws to the children."

There was silence a moment, and then Kitsap raised a feathered wand. In the native tongue he shouted:

"All ready? Throw!"

Ten lithe Indians threw their silver treasure into the air. Five thousand silver coins flashed in the sun and fell in a sparkling shower on the heads of the tribal children. With one voice the children screamed and sprang to the scramble; with one voice the Puyallup tribe roared in glee; with one motion the tribal hats went into the air, and the president of the Elliott Bay National yelled in his enthusiasm, pounded a red man on the back, waved a silk hat on high, and became as one of these child-hearted aborigines.

Late that night, while the president sat at his club, hoarse but happy, and told what he had seen, a band of Indians out on the reservation held a ceremony in a big tent. The rite was as old as the tribal memory--the rite of formally adopting a chief--and a young man was declared to have won a great fight, and to be worthy of a high place in the councils of the tribe. They wanted to name him Chief Who-Made-The-Silver-Rain, but the young man replied that Chief Kitsap, being his father's name, was good enough for him.

THE WAYFARERS

BY

MARY STEWART CUTTING

AUTHOR OF "LITTLE STORIES OF COURTSHIP," "LITTLE STORIES OF MARRIED LIFE," ETC.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY ALICE BARBER STEPHENS

XXIII

Justin was in Chicago--the fact was verified--and he would start for home on the morrow. There seemed to be no details, save the comforting one that Billy Snow was with him. After that first sharp immediate relief from suspense, Lois again felt its filminess settling down upon her.

Girard had gone back very early to the Snows' to breakfast. He talked to Lois by telephone, but he did not come to the house; while Dosia, wrapped in an outward abstraction that concealed a whirl within, went about her daily tasks, living over and over the scene of the night before. The shattering of the pitcher seemed to have shattered something else. Once he had felt, then, as she had done; once--so far away that night of disaster had gone, so long was it since she had held that protecting hand in her dreams, that the touch brought a strange resurrection of the spirit. She had an upwelling new sense of gratitude to him for something unexpressed, some quality which she passionately revered, and which other men had not always used toward her.

"Oh, he's good, he's _good_!" she whispered to herself, with the tears blinding her, as she picked up Redge's blocks from the floor. She felt Lawson's kisses on her lips, her throat--that cross of shame that she held always close to her; George Sutton's fat face thrust itself leeringly before her. How many girls have passages in their lives to which they look back with the shame that only purity and innocence can feel! Yet the sense of Girard's presence before was as nothing to her sense of it now--it blotted out the world. She saw him sitting alone in the dining-room, with his head resting on his hand, the attitude informed with life. The turn of his head, the shape of his hand, were insistent things. She saw him standing in front of her, long-limbed, erect of mien. She saw--If she looked pale and inert, it was because that inner thought of her lived so hard that the body was worn out with it.

Neither telegram nor any other message came from Justin, except the bare word that he had started home. On the second morning, just as Lois had finished dressing, she heard the hall door open and shut. She called, but cautiously, for fear of disturbing her baby, who had dropped off to sleep again.

Justin was standing by the table, looking at the newspaper, as she entered the dining-room. With a cry, she ran toward him. "Justin!"

He turned, and she put her arms around him passionately. He held her for a moment, and then said, "You'd better sit down."

"But, Justin--oh, my dearest, how ill you look!" She clung to him. "Where have you been? Why didn't you send me any word?"

"I've been to Chicago."

"Yes, yes, I know. Why did you go?"

"I don't know."

"You don't _know_?"

"Lois, will you give me some coffee?"

She poured out the cup with trembling hands, and sat while he took a swallow of the hot fluid, still scanning the newspaper. At last she said:

"Aren't you going to tell me any more?"

"There isn't any more to tell. There's no use talking about it. I believe I had some idea of selling the island when I went to Chicago, but I don't know how I got there. I didn't know I was there until I woke up two nights ago at a little hotel away out on the West Side. Billy pounded on the door, and said they told him I had been asleep for twenty-eight hours. I suppose I was dead tired out. I don't want to speak of it again, Lois; it wasn't a particularly pleasant thing to happen. Will you tell Mary to bring in the rest of the breakfast? I must catch the eight-thirty train back into town. I thought you might be bothered, so I came out first. Where are the children?"

"They are coming down now with Dosia," said his wife, helping Mary with the dishes. Redge ran up to his father, hitting him jubilantly with a small stick which he held in his chubby hand, and bringing irritated reproof down upon him at once; but Zaidee, her blue eyes open, her lips parted over her little white teeth, slid into the arm outstretched for her, and stood there leaning against "Daddy's" side, while he ate and drank hurriedly, with only one hand at his disposal. Poor Lois could not help one pang of jealousy at being shut out, but she heroically smothered it.

"Mr. Harker was here the evening before last; he brought me some money," she ventured at last.

"That was all right."

"And Mr. Girard was very kind; he stayed here all that night--until your message came."

"I hope you haven't been talking about this all over the place."

"No--oh, no," said Lois, driving back the tears at this causeless injury. "Mr. Leverich said it was best not to. Nobody knows about your being away at all. You're not going _now_, Justin--without even seeing baby?"

"I'll see him to-night when I come home," said Justin, rising. He kissed the children and his wife hastily, but she followed him into the hall, standing there, dumbly beseeching, while he brushed his hat with the hat-brush on the table, and then rummaged hastily as if for something else.

"Here are your gloves, if that is what you are looking for," she said.

"Yes, thank you." He bent over and kissed her again, as if really seeing her for the first time, with a whispered "Poor girl!" That momentary close embrace brought her a needed--oh, so needed!--crumb of comfort. She who had hungered so insatiably for recognition could be humbly thankful now for the two words that spoke of an inner bond.

But all day she could not get rid of that feeling of suspense that had been hers for five days past; the strain was to end, of course, with Justin's return, but it had not ended--in some sad, weighting fashion it seemed just to have begun. What was he so worried about? Was she never to hear any more?

That night Girard came over, but with him was another visitor--William Snow. No sun could brown that baby-fair skin of William's, but he had an indefinably large and Western air; the very way in which he wore his clothes showed his independence. Dosia did not notice his swift, covert, shamefaced glance at her when she came into the room where he was talking to Lois--his avoidance of her the year before had dropped clear out of her mind; but his expression changed to one of complacent delight as she ran to him instantly and clasped his arm with both hands to cry, "Oh, Billy, Billy, I'm so glad to see you! I am so glad--I can't tell you how glad I am!"

"All right, Sweetness, you're not going to lose me again," said William encouragingly. "My, but you do knock the spots out of those Western girls. Can't we go in the dining-room by ourselves? I want to ask you to marry me before we talk any more."

"Yes, do," said Dosia, dimpling.

It was sweet to be chaffed, to be heedlessly young once more, to take refuge from all disconcerting thoughts--from a new embarrassment--with Billy, in the corner of the other room, where she sat in a low chair, and he dragged up an ottoman close in front of her. Through the open window the scent of honeysuckle came in with the gloom.

"Oh, but you've grown pretty!" he said, his hands clasped over his knees, gazing at her. "That's right, get pink--it makes you prettier. I like this slimpsy sort of dress you've got on; I like that black velvet around your throat; I--have you missed me much?"

"No," said Dosia, with the old-time sparkle. "I've hardly thought of you at all. But I feel now as if I had."

Billy nodded. "All right, I'll pay you up for that some day. Oh, Dosia, you may think I'm joking, but I'm not! There have been days and nights when I've done nothing but plan the things I was going to do and say to make you care for me--but they're all gone the moment I lay eyes on you. I'll talk of whatever you like afterward, but I've got to say first"--Billy's voice, deep and manly and confident, had yet a little shake in it--"that nobody is going to marry you but me, and don't you forget it. I'm no kid any more." Something in his tone gave his words emphasis. "I know how to look out for you better than any one else does."

"Dear Billy," said Dosia, touched, and resting her cheek momentarily against the rough sleeve of his coat, "it's so good to have you back again."

Lois, who had been longing intolerably all day for evening to come, so that she could be alone with her husband, sat in the drawing-room, trying to sew with nervous, trembling fingers, while her husband, looking frightfully tired, and Bailey Girard smoked and talked--of all things in the world!--of the relative merits of live or "spoon" bait in trolling, and afterward went minutely into details of the manufacture of artificial lures for catching trout.

Those wasted "social" hours of non-interest, non-satisfaction, how long, how unbearably long, they can seem! Lois' face twitched, as well as her fingers; she did not realize, as women often do not, that to Justin this conversation, banal and irrelevant to any action of his present life or his present anxiety, was like coming up from under-depths to breathe at a necessary air-hole.

After five days of torturing, unexplained absence, to talk of nothing but fishing, as if his life depended on it! Girard himself had wondered, but he accepted the position allotted to him as a matter of course. He had thought, from Justin's manner to-day, that he was to know something of his affairs; but if Justin did not choose to confide in him--that was all right. Possibly the affairs were all right, too; they were none of his business, anyway.

Suddenly a word caught the ears of the two who were sitting in the dining-room.

"That was the kind Lawson Barr used when he went down on the Susquehanna. By the way, I hear that he's dead."

Lawson! Dosia's face changed as if a whip had flicked across it, and then trembled back into its normal quiet. William leaned a little nearer, his eyes curiously scanning her.

"Hadn't you heard before?"

"No; what?"

"He's dead."

"Lawson _dead_! Not Lawson?" Her dry lips illy formed the words.

"Yes, Dosia. Don't look like that--don't let them see in there, Girard is looking at you; turn your face toward me. Leverich told us, coming up to-night. Lawson died a week ago."

"How?"

"Fell from his horse somewhere up in a canyon--he was drunk, I reckon. They found him twenty-four hours afterward. The superintendent of the mines wrote to Leverich. He'd tried to keep pretty straight out there, all but the drinking, I guess that was too much for him. It was the best thing he could do--to die--as Girard says. Girard hates the very sound of his name."

"Oh," breathed Dosia painfully.

"The superintendent said that some of the miners chipped in to bury him, and the woman he boarded with sent a pencil scrawl along with the superintendent's letter to say that she'd 'miss Mr. Barr dreadful,'--that he'd get up and get the breakfast when she was sick, and 'the kids, they thought the world of him.' She signed herself, 'A true mourner, Mrs. Wilson.'"

Lawson was dead!

Dosia sat there, her hand clasping Billy's sleeve as at first--something tangible to hold on to. Her gaze had gone far beyond the room; even that haunting consciousness that Bailey Girard was near her was but a far, hidden subconsciousness. She was out on a rocky slope beside a dead body--Lawson, his head thrown back, those mocking, caressing eyes, those curving, passionate lips, closed forever, the blood oozing from between his dark locks. As ever with poor Dosia, there was that sharp, unbearable pang of self-reproach, of self-condemnation. Of what avail her prayers, her belief in him, when he had died thus? Oh, she had not prayed enough. She had not been good enough to be allowed to help; she had not believed hard enough. Perhaps it had helped just a little--he had "tried to keep pretty straight, all but the drinking; that was too much for him."

That covered some resistance in an underworld of which she knew nothing. Poor Lawson, who had never had the right chance, whose youth had been poisoned at the start! In that grave where he lay, drunkard and reveler, part of the youth of her, Dosia Linden,--once his promised wife, to whom she had given herself in her soul,--must always lie too, buried with him; nothing could undo that. To die so causelessly! But the miners had cared a little; he had been kind to a woman and her little children--"the kids had thought the world of him"; she was "a true mourner, Mrs. Wilson." Dosia imagined him cheeringly cooking for this poor, worn-out mother, carrying the children from place to place as she had once seen him carry that little boy home from the ball, long, long ago.

A strain from that unforgotten music came to her now, carrying her to the stars! Oh, not for Lawson the splendid rehabilitation of the strong, except in that one moment of denial when he had risen by the might of his manhood in renunciation for her sake; only the humble virtues of his weakness could be his--yet perhaps, in the sight of the God who pities, no such small offering, after all!

"Dosia, you didn't really _care_ for him!"

She smiled with pale lips and brimming eyes--an enigmatic answer which Billy could not read. He sat beside her, smoothing her dress furtively, until she got up, and, whispering, "I must go," left the room, unconscious of Girard's following gaze.

"I think we'd better be getting back," said the latter, in an odd voice, rising in the middle of one of Justin's sentences, as Billy came straying in to join the group.

Lois' heart leaped. She had felt that another moment of live bait and reminiscences would be more than she could stand.

"You need some rest," she said gratefully. "You have been tired out in our service."

"Oh, I'm not tired at all," he returned, shortly. Her work seemed to catch his eye for the first time and, in a desire to change the subject, "What are you making?" he asked.

"A ball for Redge. I made one for Zaidee, and he felt left out--he's of a very jealous disposition," she went on abstractedly. "Are you of a jealous disposition, Mr. Girard?"