Books: The Long Chance

P >> Peter B. Kyne >> The Long Chance

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At the end of the second week the news that development work was
projected somewhere near the town, doubtless by some syndicate whose
operations were so extensive that the work would likely mean a
construction camp conveniently near, swept the Bob McGraw-Donna
Corblay episode completely aside. Rumor, fanned by the eager desires of
the business element of the hamlet, gained headway, despite the fact
that false rumor was all too frequent a visitor to San Pasqual, until
not more than half a dozen people in the town remembered that Donna
Corblay had had an adventure, the details of which they had failed to
unearth.

During those three weeks of convalescence, Bob McGraw's splendid
condition, due to his clean and hardy life on the range and desert,
caused him to rally with surprising rapidity from his dangerous wound.
At the end of ten days he was permitted to sit up in bed and talk
freely, and a few days later with the assistance of the nurse and Sam
Singer he was lifted into a chair and spent a glorious day sitting in
the sun in the wind-protected patio. The slight cough which had
troubled him at first commenced to disappear, proving that the wound
was healing from within, and the doctor announced that at the end of a
month Bob would be able to leave the house.

As the reader may have had cause to suspect earlier in this recital,
Bob McGraw was not the young man to permit the grass to sprout under
his feet in the matter of a courtship. The brief period each evening
which he and Donna spent together served to convince each that life
without the other would not be worth the living. Their wooing was
dignified and purposeful; their love was too pure and deep to be taken
lightly or tinged with the frivolity that too often accompanies an
ardent love affair between two young people who have not learned, as
had Bob and Donna, to view life seriously. Both were graduates of the
hard school of practicalities, and early in life each had learned the
value of self-reliance and the wisdom of thinking clearly and without
self-illusion.

The last week of Bob's stay at the Hat Ranch, under the chaperonage of
the nurse, was not spent in planning for the future, for the lovers did
not look beyond the reality of their new-found happiness. True, Bob had
tried it once or twice, during the long hot days in the patio while
waiting for Donna to return from her work, but the knowledge of his
inability to support a wife, the present desperate condition of his
finances and the unsettled state of his future plans, promptly
saturated his soul in a melancholy which only the arrival of Donna
could dissipate. As for Donna, like most women, she was content to
linger in that delightful state of bliss which precedes marriage. Never
having known real happiness before, she was, for the present at least,
incapable of imagining a more profound joy than walking arm in arm in
the moonlit patio with the man she loved. Without the adobe walls, the
zephyr lashed the sage and whirled the sand with fiendish disregard of
human happiness, but within the Hat Ranch enclosure Donna Corblay knew
that she had found a paradise, and she was content.

CHAPTER VIII

Donna's mail-order library proved a great source of comfort to Bob
during the lonely days at the Hat Ranch. At night she sang to him, or
sat contentedly at his side while he told her whimsical tales of his
wanderings. He was an easy, natural conversationalist, the kind of a
man who "listens" well--an optimist, a dreamer. He was, seemingly,
possessed of a fund of unfailing good-nature, and despite the fact that
the past seven years of his life had been spent far from that
civilization in which he had grown to manhood, in unconventional,
occasionally sordid surroundings, he had lost none of an innate
gentleness with women, that delicate attention to the little,
thoughtful, chivalrous things which, to discerning women, are the chief
charm in a man. And withal he was a droll rascal, a rollicking,
careless fellow who quickly discovered that, next to telling her that
he loved her and would continue to love her forever and ever, it
pleased Donna most to have him tell her about himself, to listen to his
Munchausenian tales of travel and adventure. Did he speak of cities
with their cafes, parks, theaters and museums, she was interested, but
when he told her of the country that lay just beyond the ranges, east
and west, or described the long valley to the north, rolling gradually
up to the high Sierra, with their castellated spires, sparkling and
snow-encrusted; of little mountain lakes, mirroring the firs of the
heights above them, of meadows and running water and birds and
blossoms, he could almost see the desert sadness die out in her eyes,
as she trailed him in spirit through this marvelous land of her heart's
desire.

"When we're married, Donna," he told her, when there came to him for
the first time a realization of the hunger in the girl's heart for a
change from the drab, lifeless, unchanging vistas of the open desert,
"we'll take horses and pack-animals and go up into that wonderful
country on our honeymoon."

She turned to him with glistening eyes, seized his hand and pressed it
to her cheek.

"How soon?" she murmured.

He was silent, wishing he had not spoken. He was a little subdued as he
answered.

"As soon as my ship comes in, Donna. Just at present it seems quite a
long way off, although if nothing happens to upset a little scheme of
mine, it will not be more than a year. Things are very uncertain right
now." He smiled sheepishly as he thought of his profitless wanderings.
"You know, Donna, I've been a rolling stone, and I haven't gathered
very much moss."

"We can wait. I haven't thought much about the future, either, Bob. I'm
just content to know I've got you, and the problem of keeping you
hasn't presented itself as yet."

They were silent, listening to the zephyr whistling around the Hat
Ranch.

"Do you know," she told him presently, "I haven't stopped to gather up
the hats since the night you came. Bob, dear, I'm afraid you're ruining
my business."

He stared at her amazed. "I don't understand" he said.

"I don't gather moss," she taunted him; "my specialty is hats," and
then she explained for the first time the peculiar side-line in which
she was engaged. It was their first discussion of any subject dealing
with the practical side of her life, and Bob was keenly interested. He
laughed as Donna related some homely little anecdote of the hat trade,
and later, after plying her with questions regarding her life, past and
present, the mood for a mutual exchange of confidences seized him and
he told her something of his own checkered career.

Bob McGraw's father had been a mining engineer who had never
accomplished anything more remarkable than proving himself a failure in
his profession. He was of a roving, adventurous disposition, the kind
of a man to whom the fields just ahead always look greenest, and as a
result his life had been a remarkable series of ups and downs--mostly
downs. Bob's mother had been an artist of more or less ability--
probably less--who, having met and fallen in love with McGraw senior in
New York during one of his prosperous periods, had continued to love
him when the fortune vanished. Bob had been born in a mining camp in
Tuolumne county. He had never seen his mother. She died bringing him
into the world. His father had drifted from camp to camp, each
successive camp being a little lonelier, less lively and less
profitable than its predecessor. He had managed to keep his son by him
until Bob was about ten years old, when he sent him to a military
academy in southern California. At eighteen, Bob had graduated from the
academy, and at his father's desire he entered the state university to
study law.

Long before he had waded half-way through the first book of Blackstone,
Bob had become fully convinced that he was his father's son, and that
mining engineering would be vastly more to his liking. It was a
profession, however, upon which his father frowned. Like most men who
have made a failure of their vocation, he dreaded to see his son follow
in his father's footsteps. He was insistent upon Bob following the law;
so to please him young Bob had managed to struggle through the course
and by dint of much groaning and burning of midnight oil, eventually he
was admitted to practice before the Superior Court. Unknown to his
father, however, he had been attending the courses in geology and
mining engineering, in which he had made really creditable progress. He
was unfortunate enough to pass his law examinations, however, whereupon
his father declared that he must make his own way in the world
thereafter. He secured for his son a position in the office of an old
friend, a corporation lawyer named Henry Dunstan, where Bob while not
actively engaged upon some minor detail of Dunstan's large practice had
the privilege of going down into the police courts for a little
practical experience in the gentle art of pleading.

A month later, McGraw, pere, while ascending the shaft of the mine
where he was employed as superintendent, was met by an ore bucket
coming down. Bob closed his office, went up country to the mine and saw
to it that his father was decently buried. Fortunately there was
sufficient money on hand to do this, Bob's parent having received his
pay check only the day before.

There had been no estate for Bob to probate, and his few briefless
weeks scouting around the police courts and acting as a messenger boy
for Henry Dunstan had given him a thorough disgust for the profession
of the law. He left his position with Dunstan and went to work on a
morning paper at fifteen dollars a week. At the end of two months he
was getting twenty--also he was very shabby and in debt. It was his
ambition to gather together sufficient money to enable him to complete
his mining course and secure his degree.

He hated the city; it was not in his nature to battle and grub with his
fellows for a few paltry dollars, and the call of his father's blood
was strong in his veins. Bob was the kind of fellow who likes to make a
heap of his winnings, when he has any, and stake it all on the turning
of a card; if this metaphor may be employed to designate Bob McGraw's
nature without creating the impression that he had, inherited a
penchant for the gaming table. It had been born in him to take a
chance. And the gold fever, inherited from his father, still burned in
his blood. He drifted to Nevada, where he did a number of things--
including the assault on Mr. Hennage's faro bank, which, as we have
already been informed, also resulted disastrously.

These adventures occupied the first two years of Bob McGraw's
wanderings. For the next eighteen months he worked in various mines in
various capacities, picking up, in actual experience, much of the
mining wisdom which circumstances had denied that he should acquire in
college. His Nevada experiences had given him a taste of the desert and
he liked it. There was a broad strain of poetry in his make-up,
inherited perhaps from his mother, and the desert appealed to that
mystical sixth sense in him, arousing his imagination, taunting him
with a desire that was almost pre-natal to investigate the formation on
the other side of the sky-line. It pandered to the spirit of adventure
in him, the purple distances lured him with promise of rich reward, and
the day he made the remarkable discovery that he had saved enough money
to purchase two burros, an automatic pistol, a box of dynamite and the
usual prospector's outfit, he took the trail through Windy Gap and
Hell's Bend into Death Valley.

Here Bob McGraw learned the true inwardness of a poem which he had once
recited as a boy at school. "Afar In the Desert I Love to Ride." Only
Bob walked. And after walking several hundred miles he found nothing.
But he had seen lots of country, and the silence pleased him. Also he
had met and talked with other desert wanderers, with whom he had shared
his water and his grub, and in return they had infected him still
further with the microbe of unrest. He heard tales of lost mines, of
marvelous strikes, of fortunes made in a day, and that imaginative
streak in him, inherited from his mother, fused with the wanderlust of
his father, combined to make of him a Desert Rat at twenty-three.

He came out of the desert, on that first trip, at Coso Springs, and
doubled north along the western edge of the White mountains up through
Inyo county picking, prospecting, starving, thirsting cheerfully as he
went. At the town of Bishop, his stomach warned him that it would be a
wise move to sell his outfit and seek a job; which he accordingly did.
He found employment with a cattle company and went up to Long valley in
Mono county. Here he was almost happy. Life on a cow range suited him
very well indeed, for it took him away from civilization and carried
him through a mineral country. He rode with a prospector's pick on his
saddle, and in addition the scenery just suited him. There was just
enough of desert and bare volcanic hills, valley and meadow and snow-
capped peaks to please the dreamer and lover of nature; there was
always the chance that a "cow," scrambling down a hillside, would
unearth for him a fortune.

Thus a few more years had slipped by. In the summer and fall Bob McGraw
rode range. In the winter he quit his job, invested his savings in two
burros and a prospector's outfit and roved until summer came again and
the heat drove him back to the range once more. He was very happy, for
the future was always rose-tinted and he had definitely located two
lost mines. That is to say, he could say almost for a certainty that
they lay within five miles of certain points. Somehow, his water had a
habit of always giving out just when he got to those certain points,
and when he had gone back after more water something had happened--a
new strike here, a reported rush elsewhere, to lure him on until he was
once more forced to abandon the trail and return to work for his
grubstake in the fall.

This was the man who had ridden into San Pasqual and got as far as the
Hat Ranch; when as usual, something had happened.

He told Donna his story simply, with boyish frankness, interlarding the
narrative with humorous little anecdotes that robbed the tale of the
stigma of failure and clothed it in the charm of achievement. She
laughed in perfect understanding when he described how some desert wag
had placed a sign beside the trail at Hell's Bend at the entrance to
Death Valley. "Who enters here leaves hope behind."

"I saw that sign when I came by, Donna," he told her, "and I didn't like
it. It sounded too blamed pessimistic for me, so when I broke camp next
morning I changed the sign to read 'Soap' instead of 'Hope.'"

Donna's laughter awoke the echoes in the silent patio, and Bob McGraw,
certain of his audience, rambled on. Ah, what a dreamer, what a
lovable, careless, lazy optimist he was! And how Donna's whole nature
went out in sympathy with his! She knew so well what drove him on; she
envied him the prerogative of sex which denied to her these joyous,
endless wanderings. "I love it" he told her presently. "I can't help
it. It appeals to something in me, just like drink appeals to a
drunkard. I'm never so happy as when gophering around in a barren
prospect hole or coyoting on some rocky hillside. But it's only another
form of the gambling fever, and I realize that whether my present plans
mature or not I've got to give it up. It was all right a few years ago,
but now the idea of wandering all my life over the mountains and
desert, and in the end dying under a bush, like a jack-rabbit--no,
I've got to give it up and follow something definite."

Again she patted his hand. She knew the resolution cost him a pang; it
pleased her to learn that he had made it because he realized that he
owed something to himself; not because of the fact of his love for her.

"It won't take you long, once you have made up your mind" she
encouraged him.

"I don't want to be rich," he explained. "When I started out, Donna, I
had that idea. I wanted money--in great big gobs, so I could throw it
around with both hands and enjoy myself. I used to think a good deal
about myself in those days, but five years in the desert and riding the
range changes one. It takes the little, selfish foolish notions out of
one's head and substitutes something bigger and nobler and--and--well,
I can't exactly explain, dear, but I know a little verse that covers
the subject very thoroughly:

The little cares that fretted me,
I lost them yesterday
Among the fields above the sea,
Among the winds at play,
Among the lowing of the herds,
The rustling of the trees,
Among the singing of the birds,
The humming of the bees;
The foolish fears of what might happen,
I cast them all away
Among the clover-scented grass,
Among the new-mown hay,
Among the hushing of the corn
Where drowsy poppies nod,
Where ill thoughts die and good are born,
Out in the fields with God."

The hint of the desert sadness died out in the girl's eyes as he
declaimed his gospel.

"Oh," she cried softly, "that's beautiful--beautiful."

"That's the Litany of a Pagan, Donna," he answered. "One has to believe
to understand when he goes to church in a city, but if you're a Pagan
like me, you only have to understand in order to believe."

"I am," she interrupted passionately, "I'm a Pagan and the daughter of
a Pagan. My father was a Sun Worshiper--like you."

"Tell me about yourself and your people," he said, and Donna told him
the story with which the reader is already familiar. He questioned her
carefully about Sam Singer and the man who had murdered her father and
despoiled him of his fortune.

"Who was this tenderfoot person?" he asked. "Didn't Sam Singer know his
name?"

"No. We never knew the man's name. When my father left for the desert
he merely told mother that he was going to meet an Eastern capitalist
at Salton. Sam says the only name my father called the man was Boston."

"Boston?"

Donna nodded.

"That means he hailed from Boston, and your father called him that in
sheer contempt. No wonder they fought."

He was silent, thinking over that strange tale of a lost mine which Sam
Singer had told Donna's mother.

"Well, I'm not going to keep on desert ratting until somebody cracks me
on the head and stows me on the shelf" he said presently.

He waved his arm toward the north. "Away up there, a hundred and fifty
miles, I've cast my fortune--in the desert of Owens river valley. I've
cut out for myself a job that will last me all my life, and win or
lose, I'll fight the fight to a finish. I'm going to make thirty-two
thousand acres of barren waste bloom and furnish clean, unsullied
wealth for a few thousand poor, crushed devils that have been
slaughtered and maimed under the Juggernaut of our Christian
civilization. I'm going to plant them on ten-acre farms up there under
the shadow of old Mt. Kearsarge, and convert them into Pagans. I'm
going to create an Eden out of an abandoned Hell. I'm going to lay out
a townsite and men will build me a town, so I can light it with my own
electricity. It's a big Utopian dream, Donna dear, but what a crowning
glory to the dreamer's life if it only comes true! Just think, Donna. A
few thousand of the poor and lowly and hopeless brought out of the
cities and given land and a chance for life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness; to know that their toil will bring them some return, that
they can have a home and a hope for the future. That's what I want to
do, and when that job is accomplished I will have lived my life and
enjoyed it; when I pass away, I want them to bury me in Donnaville--
that's to be the name of my colony--and for an epitaph I'd like Robert
Louis Stevenson's "Requiem":

Under the wide and starry sky
Dig the grave and let me lie,

Glad did I live and gladly die
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me;
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill."

He paused, a little flushed and exalted. Never before had Bob McGraw
unburdened his heart of its innermost secrets, its hopes, its fears,
its aspirations; for a moment now he almost quivered at the thought
that Donna would look upon him as a dreamer, an idealist--perhaps a
fool--he, a penniless desert wanderer assuming to hold in his sunburnt
palm the destinies of the under dogs of civilization--the cripples
too weak and hopeless to be anything more than wretched camp-followers
in the Army of Labor.

He glanced down at her now, half expecting, dreading to meet, the look
of gentle indulgence so common to the Unbeliever. But there was no
patronizing smile, no tolerant note in her voice as she asked simply:

"And this great, beautiful Utopia of yours, Bob--what did you call it?"

"It doesn't exist yet," he explained hastily, "but it--it may. And when
it does become a reality, I'm going to call it Donnaville."

"Why?"

"Because it sounds so much better than Bobville or Robertstown, and
because it will be beautiful. It will be the green fields of God after
centuries upon centuries of purgatory; because it will be the land I've
been telling you about, where you'll find all the things your soul is
hungry for; where we will own a big farm, you and I, with great fields
of alfalfa with purple blossoms; and there'll be long rows of apple and
pear trees and corn and--don't you understand, dear? It will be the
most beautiful thing in the desert. And yet," he added a little sadly,
"I may be beaten into the earth and all my life Donnaville will remain
nothing but a dream, a desire, and so I--I--"

"Nobody can despoil you of your dreams," she interrupted, "and hence
you'll never be beaten, Bob. The dreamers do the world's work. But tell
me. How do you propose to establish Donnaville? Tell me all about it,
dear. I want to--help."

He gave her a grateful glance. "I guess I must be wound up to-night,"
he began, "but it is good to talk it over after hugging it to myself so
many years, and suffering and striving as I have suffered and striven
since I came into this country.

"When I pulled out of Death Valley on my first trip I came into Inyo
from the south and worked up along the base of the White mountains as
far as Bishop. The Owens river valley runs north and south, with the
White mountains flanking it on the east and the high Sierra on the
west. It is from ten to fifteen miles wide, that valley, with the Owens
river running down the eastern side most of the way until it empties
into Owens lake just above Keeler. The lake is salty, bitter, filled
with alkali, boras and soda, and for nearly forty miles above its mouth
the river itself is pretty brackish and alkaline. Away up the valley
the river water is sweet but as it approaches the lake it gathers
alkali and borax from the formation through which it flows. This
renders it unfit for irrigating purposes and at first glance the lower
end of the valley seemed doomed to remain undeveloped unless somebody
led pure water from above down the valley in a big cement-lined canal
and the cost of such a canal would thus render the project prohibitive,
unless the water company which might tackle the job also owned the
land.

"The valley is pure desert, although there are a great many brilliant
green streaks in it, where streams of melted snow water flow down from
the mountains and either disappear in the sands or just manage to reach
the river or the lake. The valley looks harsh and desolate, but once
you climb the mountains and look down into it, it's beautiful. I know
it looked beautiful to me and I wished that I might have a farm there
and settle down. For the next few years, every time I drifted up or
down that valley I used to dream about my farm, and finally I picked
out a bully stretch of desert below Independence, and made up my mind
to file a desert claim of three hundred and twenty acres, provided I
could see my way clear to a water-right that would insure sufficient
water for irrigation.

"There wasn't any alkali in the land that I imagined would be my farm
some day--when I found the water. Of course I didn't want the river
water at this point, on account of the alkali in it, and from the
formation I judged that I wouldn't have much success putting in
artesian wells. Besides, I didn't care to be a lone rancher out in that
desert. I've always been a sociable chap, when I could meet the right
kind of people, and unless I could have neighbors on that desert I
didn't want any farm.

"I scouted for the water all one summer, but didn't find any. However,
just at a time when I was getting ready to come out of the mountains
and hustle for next year's grubstake, I found a 'freeze-out' in the
granite up on the slope of old Kearsarge, and it netted me nineteen
hundred dollars.

"That water question always bothered me. I knew the land was rich--a
pure marle, with lots of volcanic ash mixed with it, and that it would
grow anything--with water. You ought to see that land, Donna. Why, the
sage grows six feet tall in spots, and any desert land that will grow
big sage will produce more fortunes than most gold mines--if you can
only get the water. There the land lay, thousands of acres of it, but
good water wasn't available, so the land was worthless.

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