30,000 On the Hoof (35 page)

"That firm is not rated among Washington's reliable lawyers. And no suit has been registered under your name. You've been duped again."

"Ahuh... I'd begun to feel a hunch."

"Huett, this is a hell of a break. It'd kill most men. But you're a Westerner. One of Arizona's old hard pioneers! It won't kill you. It's just another knock--the toughest of your life, sure. But it involves only loss of cattle. That's nothing to an Arizona range man. Go back to your range and your cows. Cattle prices will climb sky-high. A few good seasons of rain and grass--and you're jake, old-timer!"

After the blow fell, Huett felt calm and strange. "Luce was right," he soliloquized, as he sat down on a park bench. "We're ruined."

"Boss, could you stake me to a nickel?" came in an oily voice from a man beside him. Logan turned to see a ragged tramp sitting there. His hard blue eyes expressed a humorous curiosity.

"Nickel? How much's that?" asked Huett, fingering in his vest pocket.

"Five cents. But if you don't happen to have it I'll take a dime."

"Two-bits. Smallest I've got, friend," replied Huett, handing the beggar a quarter.

"Thanks. Two-bits, eh?... Then you're from the West?" he returned, curiously.

"Arizona."

"You're kinder than you look, mister. Are you sick or in trouble?"

"Wal, so help me Gawd!" exclaimed Huett. "Somebody down here has seen that at last!... Here's a dollar, my friend. If you come to Arizona I'll give you a job."

"I'll bet you would at that... What's ailing you, Mister?"

But Logan had left.

He went back to his hotel, beginning a desperate fight against his stubborn bulldog desire to stay in Washington and never give up his demand for that money owed him. There was a telegram on the floor of his room just inside the door. He took it to the window, the better to see, and tore it open. The message was from Flagg and read:

"GEORGE AND GRANT KILLED IN ACTION ABE MISSING. LUCINDA."

Huett watched the dark hours pale and the dawn break with soft rosy greyness behind the grand spire of the Soldiers' Monument.

He hated the light of day. Beaten down, crushed by an unexpected blow that dwarfed the sum of all his life's calamities, he had paced the endless black hours away at last to sink on a park bench, realizing that as he had forsaken God in his wild youth, now God had forsaken him in his troubled age.

The flush of sunrise, clear and bright with spring radiance, grew like the illumination of his mind.

In the very beginning of that Western range career he had started with a driving passion, a single selfish purpose to which all else was subservient. He had sacrificed his wife, his sons, and Barbara. This tragedy, this devastation of his life in one crushing blow, must have been just punishment, just retribution. He confessed it with anguish, and an exceeding bitterness flooded his soul.

That noble spire of stone, sunrise-flushed, rising sheer against the rosy sky; an imperishable monument of honour to a nation's dead--how empty and futile its meaning to Logan Huett in that hour? It was a symbol of the great Government. Of the man of zealots, of patriots like himself, blinded by the leaders of powerful cliques and parties, who played politics as Westerners played poker, who fostered war because their war lords wanted war. Huett saw that the men who furnished the money to waste and the young men for gun-fodder were patriotic fools like himself.

These boys had flashed up like fire, virile, trenchant, wonderful, imbued with the glory of fighting for their country. They had been misled. War in modern times held no glory for the boys who faced the firing line.

All these weeks in Washington, watching, listening, reading, had been working imperceptibly on Huett's mind, summing up incredible and bewildering changes in his thoughts that did not clarify until this rending bolt of death.

His strong heart broke.

The scene before his eyes strangely altered. The lofty, shiny shaft, the faint tinge of foliage, the wide park and the gleam of water, the early cats and pedestrians that had begun to appear--these all faded. And in their place shone a stonewalled, pine-rimmed canyon, with winding ribbon of stream and herds of browsing cattle, and a grey, moss-roofed log cabin nestling on the wooded bench, all dim and unreal like the remembered scenes of a dream.

Nevertheless it was home. And his pang of agony was appalling. He should have lived for his family, and not for cattle. His great ambition had been a blunder. His greed had broken him. He had been clubbed down in the prime of his marvellous physical manhood. And as his vision sharpened he saw three dirty-faced, ragged little boys playing beside the brook. And he cried out in his soul: Oh, my sons, my sons! Would God I had died for you! Oh, my sons, my sons!

Huett had telegraphed his wife the day he would arrive in Flagg, which no doubt accounted for his being met at the train by Al Doyle, Holbert, Hardy, and other friends. But Lucinda did not come. No observer could have discerned from their greeting that they thought the world had come to an end for Logan Huett. Arizonians took hard knocks as incidents of range experience. They did not mention the loss of Huett's three sons.

"Old-timer, how'd you make out in Washington?" asked Al, hopefully.

"No good, Al," replied Huett, wearily. "Senator Spellman said my case against the Government was useless. When I signed that receipt and took that package I ruined myself... Some shyster lawyer down there said he could recover my money, and he fleeced me out of twenty-five hundred."

"By God, Logan, I was agin thet trip East," said Holbert glumly.

"It's over--and I'm done," said Logan, aware of their close scrutiny of his face.

"Wal, you reckon so now," returned Doyle, sagely wagging his grey head, "but a cowman who has bucked the Tonto for thirty years gets habits that can't be changed overnight."

"How are my women-folk?" asked Huett.

"Lucinda shows surprisin' strength. She must have known it was comin'.

But I heah Barbara took it bad."

"Aghh!" grunted Huett, clearing his throat, and moved to leave the platform. Doyle and Holbert walked up street with him.

"Logan, what you reckon about this?" queried Holbert. "None of us, an' shore not one of the cattle-buyers, had the prices of beef on the hoof figgered. Cattle are up to forty dollars a haid, an' goin' up."

"What did I say?" exclaimed Huett, stung out of his apathy. "I had it figured. I wanted to hold on for another year. My Gawd, if I only had!"

"Too late. But heh's somethin'. Cattle prices will not go down for years."

"Ha! Too late for me, in more ways than one."

"Aw no! Why, Logan, you're far younger'n me, an' I'm hangin' on," said Holbert, earnestly. "You know the cattle game. Twenty-five years ago I was rich. Then I was poor for twenty years. Now with these high prices an' a growin' herd I'm sittin' pretty."

"Quien sabe, Logan?" added Al. "You can never tell. But I reckon how cattle gossip makes you sick. So we'll cut it."

"Thanks, Al. There are some words I never want to hear again, so long as I live. They are cattle, money, Government, war."

"Wal, then, you'll have to get back into the woods again. For this burg is full of war news. It's been hard hit, Logan... Last Tonto cowboy to go was Jack Campbell. He crawled up on a nest-hole of machine-guns, an' threw a bomb in on the Boches, just as they riddled him. That was jack's finish. We're all forgettin' what once was his bad name."

"Well we may!" sighed Huett.

At the gate of Huett's yard Al and Holbert bade him good day and hurried away. Logan went in slowly, like a man walking a narrow log over a deep gulch, and who dreaded the opposite side. He mounted the porch, and as he hesitated, wiping his clammy face, the door opened to disclose Lucinda.

"Luce!" he cried, with tremendous relief and gladness that she did not look as he expected. And he staggered in, dropping his bag to reach for her. Lucinda closed the door and then took him in her arms.

"Poor old darling Logan!" she murmured, and held him close and kissed him and wept over him.

"Wife," he replied, huskily, as he held her away to gaze into her face.

It was like marble, thinner, showing traces of havoc, sad and marvellously strong. Huett found home, love, Understanding, mother, in her deep, dark eyes. "I--I don't know just how I expected to see you, but not like this."

"Logan dear, I always knew. It was a relief of torture when the news came... No other word about Abe. Missing. That was all."

"Missing! What does it mean?"

"Almost hopeless. They say it means a soldier might be blown to bits, or buried in a trench, or lost in a river."

"Ah!... No chance of having been made a prisoner?"

"In that case we'd have known long since."

"Where's Barbara?--Al said it went bad with her."

"Wait, dear, a little... It's hard to tell."

Logan sat down heavily and averted his eyes from Lucinda's intense and pitiful gaze. She came close and pressed his head against her. "I'm so glad you're back," she said. "There is something serious to talk over... Would you take us back to Sycamore?"

A keen blade could not have made Logan wince more violently. How terribly the question hurt! But Logan let it sink in before he asked her why.

"There are a number of reasons. We can earn our living there. We'll be away from this hot-pressed war news day and night... Back in our quiet canyon!... I can garden again. And you can farm. It's not so cold down there. We nearly froze here... I think Barbara might get better there. And the baby would thrive."

"Baby!"

"Yes. Barbara's baby. A lovely boy like Abe. But not so dark, and he has Barbara's eyes."

"Ah. I forgot about Bab. I forgot... Abe's boy! Well, now, isn't that just fine?... Luce, it makes me a grandfather."

"Logan, I'm afraid it was high time... Will you take us back?"

"Sure I will, Lucinda," returned Huett, his mind halting ponderingly at practical ideas. "It's a good idea. We got to stay somewhere... Mebbe it wouldn't hurt for long--going back to Sycamore... Let's see. Hardy has my wagon. My horses are running in Doyle's pasture. We can pack the stuff here that's ours. And buy what we need along with supplies... Supplies! My Gawd, what does that make you think of, Luce?... How about money?"

"I have over a thousand of what you left me."

Huett took out his cheque book and looked at his balance. "I've about the same. Ha! That's a fortune for us homesteaders. When shall we----"

A piercingly sweet, droning little song interrupted Huett. "Is that--the new baby?" he whispered, with a thrill.

"No, dear. That is Barbara. She sings a good deal of the time... You see--she has lost her mind!"

Chapter
SEVENTEEN
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Lucinda was no less shocked at Logan's aberration of mind than at his changed appearance. He appeared a ghost of his old stalwart, virile, giant self. And he forgot even the errands she sent him on. When he came home from down town she smelled liquor on his breath. She realized then, in deep alarm, that Logan had cracked. All his life he had leaned too far over on one side; now in this major catastrophe of his life he had toppled over the other way to collapse.

She had divined something of this upon his return, and had at once appealed to him to take her and Barbara back to Sycamore. If anything could save Logan it was action--something to do with his hands--some labours to draw his mind back to the old channels of habit. Before this blow, despite his sixty years, he had been at the peak of a magnificent physical life. If he stayed in Flagg, to idle away the hours in saloons and on corners, to sit blankly staring at nothing, he would not live out the year.

When the days had passed into weeks without his having done anything in regard to their return to Sycamore, she resolved to make the arrangements herself. She got Hardy to have a look at the big wagon, to grease the axles and repair the harness; and she hired a negro to drive in the team and put them on grain.

Then she set about the dubious task of supplies and utensils. Al Doyle, who was as keen as Lucinda to get Logan out in the open again, declared vehemently: "There won't be one single damn thing left on that ranch.

Logan forgot to leave a man on the place. All the tools, and furniture left in the cabin, will be gone. Stole!"

"Oh dear me! Al, it's beginning to pioneer all over again!"

"It shore is. But that's good, Lucinda, 'cause it'll raise Logan out of this bog he's in... I advise you to take two wagon-loads. I'll borrow one for you, and hire a driver, an' I'll buy all the necessary tools, an' have them packed. The grub supply is easy to figure out. We'll put our heads together on the cabin an' the needs of you women-folk... Don't worry, Lucinda. It'll all be jake. The thing to do is to be arustlin'."

Only once did Lucinda's heart faint within her, and that was when she came home to 'find Logan and Barbara in the sitting-room, with little Abe crawling half naked and dirty around the floor. Logan was trying again to get some coherent response from Barbara. And she sat hunched in a chair, her great dark eyes the windows of a clouded mind. They struck terribly at Lucinda's heart.