Chapter 6

"It wuz wonderful how The new life appeared to come back to my boy; (Fer that's what I called him--'my boy') an' the joy O' perviden fer suthin' besides my lone self Made me happy. Y' see, th' experunce wuz new; Fer I'd lived all alone ever since forty-two, When, back in Ohio, I'd buried my wife An' baby. Since then I'd looked on my life As a weary, onfriendly, detestable load. So that's why I lived all alone, don't you see? I didn't love nothin' and nothin' loved me.

"But now of young Josh--his name wuz Josh Clark-- He'd come frum ol' York State--could sing like a lark-- Wuz finely brung up, an' that mother o' his, A sister he tol' me, an' a girl he called Liz. 'D a give the hull earth if they only could know If he wuz alive; but so hard-hearted, he Would never be grateful to them nur to me. Though I had no claim on him, yet it would seem After all I hed done fer him, shorely some gleam O' thankfulness somewhere might some time be seen. 'Sides spendin' my all I hed broken down too, Wuz a shattered ol' man, though but then fifty-two; Fer I'd give up my health an' my strength to pull through My boy--fer I loved him, if ever men do. But, no; it appeared that he hedn't no heart. Not once did he thank me, and never asked why I nussed him to life, 'stid o' lettin' him die.

"His wants wuz demands, his wishes commands, An' once in the dusk, as we set on the sands Of a stream that run by, he reached with his hands So quick an' so blamed unexpected, you see, Grabbed me by the hair an' out with a knife, An' demanded my gold. I thought fer my life He wuz jokin'; but no, when I seed that fierce look Of murder an' pillage, I knowed what I'd done; I'd thawed out a viper upon my hearth-stun An' now wuz becomin' its prey.

"But, I'd none: I'd spent all the surplus I hed to save him. I'd missed all the summer an' fall to nuss him Who now like a tiger wuz takin' my life. 'Hol' on, my dear Josh! Hol' on, my dear boy!' No further I got, fer his hands clutched my throat-- I squirmed myself loose, but grapplin' my coat He throwed me ag'in, now a madman, indeed. His dirk-knife wuz raised. I said, 'Do yer best. I've give you now all that I ever possessed But life. Take it now if you like!' An' he struck.

"How long I laid there in the dark, I don't know; But when I kem to I wuz layin' in bed, An' the people wuz talkin' so easy an' low, An' I knowed by the bandages too on my head That I hed been nigh to the gates o' the dead.

"An' 'Where wuz Josh Clark?' did you say? I don't know. He never wuz seen in the diggins below, Ner heerd of in them parts ag'in, fer I know He'd a-swung to the limb that come fust in the way; Fer the boys in them days hed little to say, But wuz mighty in doin'. So he got away.

"So it seems that some people is jist so depraved There ain't a thing in 'em that ort to be saved. 'Twuz jist so with Josh, who I loved as a son; He lived fer hisself an' fer hisself alone. 'N' 'at's why I remarked at the fust of this yarn, The thing 'at it's cost me so dearly to larn--'I panned him out over an' over ag'in, But found nary sign of a color.'"

THE WRAITH OF THE BLIZZARD

The night it was gloomy, the wind it was high; And hollowly howling it swept through the sky. --_Southey_.

What matter how the night behaved? What matter how the north wind raved? --_Whittier_.

THE WRAITH OF THE BLIZZARD

We dread the unseen. Fear is always enervating; sometimes even deadly. Who has not fearsomely anticipated that which never came and wasted valuable energy and time in building bridges none are ever to cross? The surgical patient actually suffers more at sight of somber white-clad nurses, and the thought of the operation, than he does from the ordeal itself. It may be that we subconsciously dread the helpless state of unconsciousness into which the anæsthetic plunges us, and hesitate at a trip, no matter how short, into death's borderland, preferring to keep our own hands as long as possible on the helm of the ship of life.

I wonder why we become terror-stricken at the thought of ghosts. The untutored child needs only a hint to make him shy at the dark; and a lad has to be pretty large before he can walk far at night without once in a while looking behind him, just to be certain there is nothing following.

Thus spirits, spooks, bogies, wraiths, and other uncanny apparitions are unintentional inheritances of the race; a race that knows little more about the impending and impinging unseen than did the Saxon fathers who gave us our spooky speech.

I once had an experience which grows in interest as the years pass by. I had no fear or thought of fear that night, and the scenes of the evening were absolutely unannounced; they entered upon the sleety stage for whose violent acts I held no program.

One afternoon I was to go to one of my appointments, a mining town in Utah. In order to relieve home cares I took with me my four-year-old son, who thus would get some novel entertainment as well. To the buggy I hitched Jenny, the strawberry-roan cayuse, and started for the distant point. It was a little stormy all the way, and by the time we had well begun the service it had thickened so that a hard snow was setting in. It was dead in the north and continued with such strength that soon there appeared no slant to the falling columns. By the time church was dismissed the blizzard was on in full force, and the roads were already so filled with the new drifts that to return with the buggy was hardly thinkable. I borrowed a saddle, and leaving the little lad with friends, started for home, where I was under appointment to preach that evening. My way lay in the north, in the very teeth of the raging storm. With head tucked down, I trusted the reins to Jenny, who had never disappointed me in many a mountain trip, but I had not gone far until I found the storm was at my back. Peering sharply through the fast falling darkness, I discovered that the mountains were on my left instead of on my right, as they should have been. Jenny had turned tail to the storm. Feeling herself unwilling to face the arctic onset, she was retreating.

Only the dire necessity of the occasion made me compel her to face the torturing attack of the icy shafts that were hurling themselves on us like steel points.

We were forced, Jenny and I, to abandon the only road, now drift-filled, and take an unbroken way through the sagebrush, junipers, buckbrush, and other tangled chaparral, where there was no trail at all, and farther to the right, that I might keep an eye on the mountains and not get turned around again. I felt the force of Cardinal Newman's immortal hymn,

... amid the encircling gloom, Lead thou me on! The night is dark and I am far from home; Lead thou me on!

We had not gone far until I began to hear the sweetest music. I could not imagine from whence it fell, as I knew there was not a human home in all that plain between the two settlements. Then I heard personal conversation; in fact, the night was full of pleasant travelers. The awful storm seemed not to affect them in the least. They seemed to have an open road too, while we were plunging through deep snowdrifts, my feet already dragging along their tops.

When the first carriage load came up I saw it was only a desert juniper. The boreal gale sweeping through its shivering branches made converse in the music of the wild, Jenny and I being the only seat-holders in that grand opera. Soon another caravan of belated folks drove up; but it was only a load of hay that had been over-tipped. Others came, but they were only bushes or some inanimate object. There was little life out on that perishing night.

After hours of fearsome and benumbing travel, Jenny stumbled with me into the little home town. A good feed of oats and a warm shelter doubtless ended the story happily for her. But for me--the ghost of the desert and the wraith of the blizzard had become real. They spoke to me that night and I understood.

THE GREAT NORTHWEST

God had sifted three kingdoms to find the wheat for this planting.--_Longfellow_.

Westward the course of empire takes its way.--_Berkeley_.

In the wilderness shall waters break out, and streams in the desert. And the parched ground shall become a pool, and the thirsty land springs of water.--_Isaiah_.

THE GREAT NORTHWEST

Possibly there are those who find themselves thinking that Western tales are travelers' tales and must be taken with "a grain of salt." Some also say that the man who crosses the Missouri never is able to tell the truth again; this is crude, I know, and in some cases true, but they who are so afflicted were just the same before they ever saw the Missouri.

Our waterless areas were considered by Captain Bonneville (as told by Washington Irving) utterly barren and forever hopeless wastes. In Astoria--chapter thirty-four--these words are used:

"In this dreary desert of sand and gravel of the Snake here and there is a thin and scanty herbage, insufficient for the horse or the buffalo. Indeed, these treeless wastes between the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific are even more desolate and barren than the naked, upper prairies on the Atlantic side; they present vast desert tracts that must ever defy cultivation, and interpose dreary and thirsty wilds between the habitations of man, in traversing which the wanderer will often be in danger of perishing."

So thought Captain Bonneville; so wrote the matchless American _littérateur_, Washington Irving, of "Sunnyside," author and authority, creator of The Life of George Washington, and the Broken Heart, which made Lord Byron weep. The doughty Captain Benjamin L. E. Bonneville, who died as late as 1878, obtaining leave of absence and a furlough, endured the pleasure of hardships common to the explorer, and through his happy biographer added the Trail to literature; but his eye of vision did not see these great stones of the commonwealth, Utah, Wyoming, Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. The very region so carefully pictured above as the dreariest of deserts, a veritable Western Sahara, is the exact location of Idaho and a large portion of Oregon; a region perfectly adapted to the sustenance of immense population and intense development.

Moses understood all the wisdom of the Egyptians. We do not, but we do know that the biggest thing in an arid country is the ditch. America's triumph to date in the twentieth century is the completion of the Panama Ditch. The ditch is in Idaho more valuable by far than the land, for without it the parched soil is practically worthless, being an area of shimmering sand, where the ash-colored and dust-covered sagebrush breeds the loathsome horned toad, the rough-and-ready rattlesnake, and the slinking, night-hunting coyote, which preys on the lithe-limbed, loping jack rabbit.

The modern Western American is rapidly learning a modified wisdom of the ancient irrigators of Egypt, and already knows how to drain the irrigated acres and leech these old alluvial plains. From the days when the frosty glacial plowman ran his deep basaltic furrows for the majestic Snake and other streams, these gorges of nature had been only mossy beds over which lazily slid the unmeasured volumes down to the western and "bitter moon-mad sea." Now man, the mightiest of all magicians, has lured the liquid serpents from their age-long couches, cut them into thousands of smaller streams, and sent them bravely abroad on the face of the protesting desert, drowning its death and making it to bloom and blossom.

As a concrete instance of the artificial possibilities of Idaho and contiguous regions, I will here instance a statement made for me by the Rev. H. W. Parker, superintendent of Pocatello District, and resident of Twin Falls, under date of October, 1914: "Where ten years ago this very minute there was not a fence nor a furrow (only the conditions above described by Washington Irving) there are now such municipalities as Twin Falls, Filer, Rupert, Burley, and others soon to be as fine. As pastor in 1904, my first official trip to Twin Falls was made on July 14. I found one or two frame buildings and some tents stuck around in the sagebrush; some streets had been marked out, but no grading had been done. Dust, heat, and sagebrush were the main features of the place. In October I preached the first sermon ever delivered by any minister in the new village. The congregation numbered forty-one. On February 5, 1905, I organized the first church with seventeen members; on May 23, 1909, we dedicated the present edifice at a cost of $18,000, exclusive of the lots.

"To-day this church has a membership of more than five hundred. This youngster has turned back into the treasuries of the denomination in regular collections more than $3,000. The city has to-day seven thousand people. There are between four and five miles of asphalt-paved streets, a perfect sewer system, and cement sidewalks throughout the whole municipality. An investment of $120,000 has been made in two splendidly equipped grade school buildings, besides a high school costing a quarter of a million dollars. These combined schools have an enrollment of over two thousand pupils with a teaching force of above sixty; the high school graduated forty-eight last commencement. There is not a saloon in the entire county."

Surely "progress" is here spelled in large letters.

Years ago, with the narrow strip along the Atlantic in mind, Longfellow wrote, "God had sifted three kingdoms to find the wheat for this planting." And as the mighty empire took its course toward the West of limitless opportunity the good God kept the sieve running full time, so that to-day

The best of the best Are in the Northwest.