wasted, – the cigar was out, – and such a thing had not happened in twenty years! To mark an unprecedented incident, he threw away an unconsumed half.
“He’s crazy ter have a last peep at Nancy,” he communed. “An’ they’d have made a bully fine pair, too, ef it hadn’t been fer that skunk Marten. Poor Derry! Mighty good job I stopped home, or he’d ha gone plumb to hell.”
Of course, the storekeeper was talking to himself; so he may not have said it, really. But he thought it, and, theologically, that is as bad. Moreover, he might have electrified Bison by his language that night were he gifted with second sight; for he had seen the last of the proud, self-contained yet light-hearted and generous-souled cavalier whom he had known and liked as “Derry” Power. They were fated to meet again many times, under conditions as varying as was ever recorded in a romance of real life; but MacGonigal had to find a place in his heart for a new man, because “Derry” Power was dead – had died there in the open doorway of the store – and a stranger named John Darien Power reigned in his stead.
CHAPTER II
THE TERMS
The Gulch was naked but unashamed, and lay in a drowsy stupor. An easterly breeze, bringing coolness elsewhere, here gathered radiated heat from gaunt walls on which the sun had poured all day, and desiccating gusts beat on Power’s face like superheated air gushing from a furnace. Not that the place was an inferno – far from it. On a June day just a year ago two young people had ridden up the rough trail on their way to the Dolores ranch, and the girl had called the man’s attention to the exquisite coloring of the rocks and the profusion of flowers which decked every niche and crevice. It may be that they looked then through eyes which would have tinted with rose the dreariest of scenes; but even today, in another couple of hours, when the sun was sinking over the mountain range to the west, the Gulch would assuredly don a marvelous livery of orange, and red, and violet. Each stray clump of stunted herbage which had survived the drought would make a brave show, and rock-mosses which should be moist and green would not spoil the picture because they were withered and brown or black.
But Power, despite a full share of the artist’s temperament, was blind to the fierce blending of color which the cliffs offered in the blaze of sunlight. His eyes were peering into his own soul, and he saw naught there but dun despair and icy self-condemnation. For he blamed himself for wrecking two lives. If Nancy Willard could possibly find happiness as Hugh Marten’s wife, he might indeed have cursed the folly of hesitation that lost her; but there would be the salving consciousness that she, at least, would drink of the nectar which wealth can buy in such Homeric drafts. But he was denied the bitter-sweet recompense of altruism. He knew Nancy, and he knew Marten, and he was sure that the fairest wild flower which the Dolores ranch had ever seen would wilt and pine in the exotic atmosphere into which her millionaire husband would plunge her.
Hugh Marten was a man of cold and crafty nature. Success, and a close study of its essentials, had taught him to be studiously polite, bland, even benignant, when lavish display of these qualities suited his purposes. But he could spring with the calculating ferocity of a panther if thereby the object in view might be attained more swiftly and with equal certainty. His upward progress among the mining communities of Colorado, New Mexico, and, more recently, California had been meteoric – once it began. None suspected the means until they saw the end; then angry and disappointed rivals would compare notes, recognizing too late how he had encouraged this group to fight that, only to gorge both when his financial digestion was ready for the meal. He had the faculty, common to most of his type, of surrounding himself with able lieutenants. Thus, John Darien Power came to him with no stronger backing than a college degree in metallurgy and a certificate of proficiency as a mining engineer, credentials which an army of young Americans can produce; but he discerned in this one young man the master sense of the miner’s craft, and promoted him rapidly.
He paid well, too, gave excellent bonuses over and above a high salary – was, in fact, a pioneer among those merchant princes who discovered that a helper is worth what he earns, not what he costs – and Power was actually entitled, through his handling of the Sacramento placer mine, to a sum large enough to warrant marriage with the woman he loved. Not for one instant had the assistant dreamed that his chief was casting a covetous eye on Nancy Willard. She was a girl of twenty, he a man looking ten years older than the thirty-eight years he claimed. Apparently, she was wholly unsuited to become the wife of a financial magnate. She knew nothing of the outer maze of society and politics; while it was whispered that Marten would soon run for state governor, to be followed by a senatorship, and, possibly, by an embassy. To help such ambitious emprise he needed a skilled partner, a woman of the world, a mate born and reared in the purple, and none imagined, Power least of any, that the vulture would swoop on the pretty little song-bird which had emerged from the broken-down cage of the Dolores ranch. For the place had been well named. Misfortune had dogged its owner’s footsteps ever since the death of his wife ten years earlier, and Francis Willard was buffeted by Fate with a kind of persistent malevolence. Neighboring farms had been rich in metals; his was bare. When other ranchers won wealth by raising stock, he hardly held his own against disease, dishonest agents, and unfortunate choice of markets. This present arid season had even taken from him three-fourths of his store cattle.
Power did not know yet how the marriage had been brought to an issue so speedily. In time, no doubt, he would fit together the pieces of the puzzle; but that day his wearied brain refused to act. He might hazard a vague guess that he had been misrepresented, that his absence in California was construed falsely, that the letters he wrote had never reached the girl’s hands; but he was conscious now only of a numb feeling of gratitude that he had been saved from killing his usurper, and of an overmastering desire to look once more on Nancy’s face before she passed out of his life forever.
He climbed the Gulch to the divide. From that point he could see the long, low buildings of the ranch, lying forlornly in the midst of empty stockyards and scorched grazing land; though the Dolores homestead itself looked neither forlorn nor grief-stricken. A hundred horses, or more, were tethered in the branding yard near the house. Two huge tents had been brought from Denver; the smoke of a field oven showed that some professional caterer was busy; and a great company of men, women, and children was gathered at that very moment near the porch, close to which a traveling carriage was drawn up. A spluttering feu de joie, sounding in the still air like the sharp cracking of a whip, announced that the departure of bride and bridegroom was imminent; but the pair of horses attached to the carriage reared and bucked owing to the shouting, and Power had a momentary glimpse of a trim, neat figure, attired in biscuit-colored cloth, and wearing a hat gay with red poppies, standing in the veranda. Close at hand was a tall man dressed in gray tweed.
Mr. and Mrs. Hugh Marten were about to start on their honeymoon trip to New York and Europe!
For an instant Power’s eyes were blinded with tears; but he brushed away the weakness with a savage gesture, and examined the stark rocks on each side in search of a nook whence he might see without being seen. It was the careless glance of a man maddened with well-nigh intolerable loss; yet, had he known how much depended on his choice of a refuge, even in the very crux of his grief and torment he would have given more heed to it. As it was, he retreated a few paces, until hidden from any chance eye which might rove that way from the ranch, chose a break in the cliff where an expert cragsman could mount forty feet without difficulty, and finally threw himself at full length on a ledge which sloped inward, and was overhung by a mass of red granite, all cracked and blistered by centuries of elemental war. Some stunted tufts of alfalfa grass were growing on the outer lip of the ledge. By taking off his sombrero, and peeping between the dried stems, he could overlook the cavalcade as it passed without anyone being the wiser.
The surface of the rock was so hot as to be almost unbearable; but he was completely oblivious of any sense of personal discomfort. That side of the Gulch was in shadow now, and concealment was all he cared for. He was sufficiently remote from the narrow track to which the horses would necessarily be confined that he ran no risk of yielding to some berserker
