too, a picture of Joe himself – a picture of both his physical and his mental proportions.
The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt was no pigmy himself, nor did he lack courage and vigor. He was good to look upon, dark without being sallow, crowned with a thick brush of dull black hair – there were some brown lights in it – possessing good features, keen gray eyes, broad shoulders, a hundred and eighty pounds of gristle and flesh on a perfect bony structure, and could look over a six-barred gate before he vaulted it. He had not allowed his spiritual experiences, neither rising nor falling, to interfere with his gymnastics or his daily walk.
But Joe Hurley topped Hunt by two inches, was broader, hardier, a wholly out-of-door man. Joe was typically of the West and the wilderness. He knew the open places and the tall timber, the mountains and the canyons, the boisterous waters of cascade and rock-hemmed river. He was such an entirely different being from Hunt that the latter had often wondered why the Westerner had made such a chum and confidant of him during those two years at college.
And now the pastor of Ditson Corners’ First Church realized that Joe Hurley had something that he wanted. He wished he was with Joe, out there in that raw country. He felt that he could get nearer to mankind out there and perhaps – he said it reverently – nearer to the God he humbly desired to serve. He thought of Betty.
“She needs a change as much as I do. How does Joe guess that she is becoming exactly a prim, repressed, narrow-thinking woman, and a Martha cumbered by many cares? She needs her chance as much as I need mine.”
He heard Betty’s step on the porch, and in a moment she entered the study, her hands full of those grateful mid-spring flowers, the lily of the valley.
Betty Hunt was not a fragile girl, but she did not possess much of that embonpoint the Greeks considered so necessary to beauty of figure. Nor was she angular. At least, her grace of carriage and credibly tailored frock masked any lack of flesh.
Slim hands she had, too, – beautiful hands, very white and with only a faint tracery of blue veins upon them. Really, they were a musician’s hands – pliable, light of touch, but strong. The deftness with which they arranged the flowers suggested that she did not need vision to aid in the task.
Therefore she kept her gaze on Hunt. He felt it, turned, and smiled up at her. He shook the leaves of the letter in his hand.
“Bet,” he said, “I’ve got another letter from Joe Hurley.”
Betty’s countenance changed in a flash.
“Oh! That Westerner?”
There was more than disapproval in her tone. She looked away from him quickly. Her own gray eyes filmed. A shocked, almost terrified expression seemed to stiffen all her face. But Hunt did not see this.
“There is no use talking, Bet,” her brother pursued in an argumentative way, thoughtfully staring at the letter again. “There is no use talking. Joe has it right. We are vegetating here. Most people in towns like this, here in the East, might honestly be classified among the flora rather than the fauna. We’re like rows of cabbages in a kitchen garden.”
“Why, Ford!”
He grinned up at her – a suddenly recalled grimace of his boyhood.
“There speaks the cabbage, Bet! We’re all alike – or most of us are. Here in the old Commonwealth I mean. We’re afraid to step aside from the rutted path, to accept a new idea; really afraid to be and live out each his own individuality.
“Ah! Out in this place Joe writes about – ”
He fingered the sheets of the letter again. She watched with the slow fading of all animation from her face – just as though a veil were drawn across it by invisible fingers. Her expression was not so much one of disapproval – her eyes held something entirely different in their depths. Was it fear?
“This Canyon Pass is a real field for a man’s efforts,” burst out Hunt with sudden exasperation. “I tell you, Bet, I feel as though my usefulness here had evaporated. I haven’t a thing in common with these people. Carping criticism and little else confronts me whichever way I turn.”
“You – you are nervous, Ford.”
“Nerves! What right has a man like me with nerves?” he demanded hotly.
“But, Ford – your work here?”
“Is a failure. Oh, yes. I can see better than you do, Bet – more clearly – that I have lost my grip on these people.”
“Surely there are other churches in the East that would welcome a man of your talents.”
“Aye! Another little hard-baked community in which I shall find exactly the elements that have made my pastorate here a failure.”
“You are not a failure!” she cried loyally.
“That’s nice of you, Bet. You are a mighty good sister. But I am letting you in for a share of the very difficulties that would soon put gray in my hair and a stone in my bosom instead of a heart.”
“Oh, Ford!”
“Out there – in some place like this Joe writes about – would be a new and unplowed field. A place where a man could develop – grow, not vegetate.”
“But – but must it necessarily be the West, Ford? I am not fond of the West.”
“You’ve never seen it.”
“I’m not fond of Western people.”
He looked at her with a dawning smile. “You’re afraid of them, Bet.”
“Yes. I am afraid of them,” whispered his sister, turning her face away from his gaze. “They are not our kind, Ford.”
“That’s exactly it,” he cried, smiting the desk with the flat of his palm. “We need to get out into the world, among people who are just as different from ‘our kind,’ as you term them, as possible. There we can expand. Out in Canyon Pass. I believe I could be a real help to that community. What is it Joe says?” He glanced again at the letter before him. “Yes! I might dig down to the very heart of Canyon Pass. Ditson Corners has merely a pumping station to circulate the blood of the community, patterned after the one at the reservoir on Knob Hill.”
She did not speak again. When Hunt looked around she had stolen from the room.
“Poor Bet!” he muttered. “The idea of change alarms her as it might have alarmed Aunt Prudence. Joe Hurley is right – he’s right beyond a doubt!”
CHAPTER III – A SHADOW THROWN BEFORE
A rider had his choice in journeying to Canyon Pass from a southerly direction – say from Lamberton, which lies between the railroad and the desert – of following the river trail to be deafened by the boisterous voice of the flood, or of climbing to the high lands and there jogging along the wagon track which finally dipped down the steeps to the ford of the West Fork and so into the mining town.
Spring was drifting into the background of the year. The cottonwood leaves were the size of squirrel ears. The new fronds of the piñon had expanded to full size and now their needles quivered in the heat of the almost summer-like day. Joe Hurley, sitting his heavy-haunched bay, giving as easily to the animal’s paces as a sack of meal, followed the wagon track rather than
