Chapter 20

THE QUEST SUPREME

It was twilight again, and such a twilight as only the Blue Mountains of that far divide may know. It barred the west with golden bands, painted lavish purples and mauves in the hollows, and reddened the everlasting snows on the summits. It deepened the greens of the tamaracks, and made iridescent the foams of the streams tearing downward joyously to the wide rivers below. It painted the reddish-yellow bars of the cross on the peak above the Croix d'Or, and rendered its outlines a glorified symbol. It lent stateliness to the finger of granite beneath the base that told those who paused that beneath the shaft rested one who had a loyal heart. It swooped down and lingered caressingly on the strong, tender face of the girl who sat on the wall surrounding the graves of Bells Park and "the best woman that ever lived."

"For some reason," Joan said, speaking to the two men beside her, "the ugliness of some of it has gone. There is nothing left but the good and the beautiful. Ah, how I love it--all! All!"

Dick's arm slipped round her, and drew her close, and unresisting, to his side.

"And but for you and Bill," he said softly, "it might never have ended this way."

"Humph!" drawled the deep voice of the grizzled old miner. "Things is just the way they have to be. Nobody can change 'em. The Lord Almighty fixes 'em, and I expect they have to work out about as He wants 'em to. Somehow, up here in the tops of the hills, where it's close to the sky, He seems a heap friendlier and nearer than He does down on the plains. 'Most always I feel sorry for them poor fellers that live down there. They seem like such lonesome, forgotten cusses."

The youthful couple by him did not answer. Their happiness was too new, too sacred, to admit of speech.

"Now," Bill went on argumentatively, "me and Bully Presby are friends. He likes me for standin' up for my own, and told me so to-day. He ain't got over that feller Wolff yet. Says he could have killed him when he found out Wolff had poisoned the water and rolled the bowlder into the shaft to pen us in. I reckon Wolff tried to blackmail him about what he knew, but the Bully didn't approve none of the other things. That ain't his way of fightin'. You can bet on that! He drifted over and got the green lead in the Cross, when others had given it up and squandered money. That shows he was a real miner. We come along, and--well--all he's done is just to help us find it, and then hand over the proceeds, all in the family, as I take it. Nobody's loser. The families gets tangled up, and instead of there bein' two there's just one. The Rattler and the Croix d'Or threatens to be made into one mine, and the two plants consolidated to make it more economical. The green lead's the best ledge in the Blue's, and 'most everybody seems to be gettin' along pretty well. That ain't luck. It's God Almighty arrangin' things for the best."

He sat for a moment, and gave a long sigh, as if there were something else in his mind that had not been uttered. Dick lifted his eyes, and looked at him affectionately, and then whispered into the ear close by his shoulder: "Shall I tell him now?"

"Do!" Joan said, drawing away from him, and looking expectantly at the giant.

Dick fumbled in his pocket with a look of sober enjoyment.

"Oh, by the way, Bill," he said, "I got a letter from Sloan a few days ago. Here it is. Read it."

The latter took it, and frowning as he opened it, held it up to catch the light.

"Great Scott!" he exclaimed. "Gives the Croix d'Or to you. Says he wants you to have it, because you're the one that made good on it, and he don't need the money! That the deeds are on the way by registered mail, and all he asks is a small bar from the first clean-up!"

He folded the letter, and held it in his hands, looking thoughtfully off into the distance for a time while he absorbed the news.

"Why, Dick," he said, "you're a rich man! Richer'n I ever expected you'd be; but I'm a selfish old feller, after all! It seems to me as if we ain't never goin' to be the same again, as we uster be when all we had was a sack of flour and a side of bacon, and the whole North-west to prospect. It seems as if somethin' mighty dear has gone."

Dick got up and stood before him, with his hands in his pockets, and smiling downward into his eyes.

"I've thought of that, too, Bill," he said, "and I can't afford to lose you. I'd rather lose the Cross. So I'll tell you something that I told Joan, long ago--that if ever the mine made good, and I could give you something beside a debt, you were to have half of what I made. A few days ago it would have been a quarter interest you owned. Now it is a half. We're partners still, Bill, just as we were when there was nothing but a sack of flour and a side of bacon to divide."

They looked at him, expecting him to show some sign of excitement, but he did not. Instead, he reached over, and painstakingly pulled a weed from the foot of the wall, and threw it away. He cleared his throat once or twice, but did not look at them, and then got to his feet and started as if to go down to the camp. Then, as if his feelings were under control again, came back, and took one of Joan's and one of Dick's hands into his own toil-worn palms, and said:

"Thanks, Dick! It's more'n I deserve, this knowin' both of you, and havin' you give me a share in the Cross! And I accept it; but conditionally."

He dropped their hands, and turned to look around, as if seeing a very broad world.

"What is the condition?" Joan asked, laying her hand on his arm, and looking up at him. "Can we change it?"

"No," he said; "you can't. I've had a hard hit of my own for a long time now. I'm a-goin' to try to heal it. I'm goin' away on what may be a short, or a long, long trail." His voice dropped until it was scarcely audible. "I'm goin' away to keep goin' till I find The Lily. And when I find her, I'll come back, and bring her with me, if she'll come."

He turned his back toward them, unbuttoned the flap of his flannel shirt, and reached inside. He drew out a sheet of paper wrapped in an old silk handkerchief, as if it were a priceless possession to be carefully preserved, and held it toward them. He did not look at either of them as he spoke.

"I got that a long time ago," he said; "but somehow I could never say anything about it to any one. And I reckon you're the only two in the world that'll ever see it. Read it and give it back to me when--when you come down the mountain."

He turned and stalked away over the trail, his feet planting themselves firmly, as he had walked through life with firmness.

They watched him go, and opened the letter, and read, in a high, strong handwriting:

DEAR MR. MATHEWS: I am writing you of business, for one thing, and because I feel that I must, for another. I have paid for a tombstone suitable for Bells Park, whom I esteemed more than I have most men. And I have paid for its delivery to you, knowing that you will have it mounted in place. So you must pay nothing for it in any form, as I wish to stand all the expense in memory of an old and tried friend. I have left Goldpan for good and all, and all those old associations of my life. I am starting over again, to make a good and clean fight, in clean surroundings. I am sick to death of all that has made up my life. I am bitter, knowing that I was handicapped from the start. My father educated me because it was easier to have me in a boarding school in all my girlhood than to have me with him. I never knew my mother. I had no love bestowed upon me in my girlhood. When I came of age my father, who was an adventurer of the discredited gentleman type, gave me to a friend of his. I learned a year after I had been married that I had been sold to my husband--God save the mark! I tried to be patient when he dragged me from camp to camp, and I want to say that whatever else I have been, I have been good. You understand me, I hope, because I am defending myself to you, the only living being for whose esteem I care. I have had two happy moments in my life--one when the news was brought me that my husband had shot himself across a gambling table, and the second when you faced me that night after Bells Park was killed, alone there in the street after your partner had gone on, and said: "Lily, it hurts you as it does me. You're on the level, little pal. I want to stop long enough to tell you I believe in you." Then you went on, and I shall not see you again.

I am writing this from a place I shall leave before it starts to you. You could not find me if you had the desire, and so I say to you that which perhaps I never should have said, if we had remained in sight of each other in the Blue Mountains. You are the only man I have ever met who made me heartsick because I was not worthy of him, and could not aspire to his level. You are the only man I have ever loved so much that it was an ache. You are the only man who told me by the look in his eyes, that he thought my life unworthy, and accused me without words every time we met. I am through with it, and if it will do you any good to know that your reproaches have done more than anything else to cause me to begin all over again, and live a different life, I want you to have that satisfaction. And this shall be my only good-by.

LILY MEREDITH.

For a long time Joan stood holding the letter in her hands, and then, as if fathoming its cry of loneliness, clutched it tightly to her breast.

"He will find her!" she said. "I know it! He must! It wouldn't be kind of heaven to keep her from him. And he loved her all the time!"

Far across the peaks of the Blue Mountains the last rays of the sunset went out, as an extinguished torch. A bird near by cheeped sleepily, and the new night was coming to its own. Throbbing, rumbling, and grinding in a melody softened by distance, the roar of the Rattler's mills became audible, as it brought the yellow gold, glistening and beautiful, from its sordid setting of earth. In the camp of the Croix d'Or a chorus was wafted faintly up as men sitting in the dusk sang: "Hearts that are brave and true, my lads, hearts that are brave and true!"

Silently, arm in arm, they gave a last lingering look at the shaft, the peak above, and turned down the trail to the camp which seemed all aglow with rosy light.

THE END

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