The Baron of Diamond Tail/Chapter 26
"HE WAS a vindictive and unprincipled man." said Barrett. "Nobody will ever know what was true and what was false in the charges he laid at Senator Nearing's door."
"But what do you suppose it was, Ed, that he tricd twice to tell—that night, that first terrible night, and here again when Uncle Hal was dying? What was it he knew that was so terrifying it could turn Uncle Hal's blood to water, and drive him to such a desperate and cowardly length that he would have sacrificed me to Findlay to protect himself?"
Alma's eyes were clouded again with the shadow of old troubles, which Barrett had hoped were gone forever from her skies. She looked at him appealingly, as if the thought that he could tell what Findlay knew dwelt with her and would not let her rest.
"The only man that might have answered that question is dead," Barrett returned.
"Dale Findlay? Yes, I know. But surely"
"Old Charley Thomson. They found him yesterday up in the canyon, shot through the heart."
"Findlay must have done it, he left here with Findlay that night. But I thought they were friends."
"I believe Thomson was holding something over Findlay, Alma, just as Findlay held his secret over your Uncle Hal. I think the old rascal rode Findlay a little too hard in his extremity, and Findlay cut the rope."
"Money. Thomson must have pushed him for a share of what he had hidden up there. He was afraid Dale would skip, leaving him holding the sack."
"That's a reasonable conclusion, considering both of them. The world's a better place for the vacancy that old scoundrel left in it. He was a worse man, any day, than Findlay."
They had buried Hal Nearing in the spot he had dedicated to that purpose, a grassy hill near the ranch-house, and heaped stones above his grave according to his wish. The two young people now sat in the sunny patio, where the little golden argosies of the air came sailing down from gaunt-growing trees. Soon this nook that gladdened in green refreshment around the fountain all the summer days would be bare, and stripped of its dignity as that stricken house was stripped.
Barrett had been so engrossed with the matters attendant upon the tragedies at the ranch that he had not had an hour to himself before this afternoon. Mrs. Nearing, fatigued by her vigil beside her dying husband, broken by the sorrow that came as the culmination of her long fear, was resting in her room. She was gentler under this burden of grief than she had been when haunted by the fear that it might come. Barrett found her again her gracious self, for peace had descended upon her, in spite of the turmoil through which it had come.
Only a few hours ago they had laid Nearing in his grave. Alma had stopped Barrett as he was saddling to ride away to Eagle Rock camp. Hospitality had a greater claim than duty, she said; he must stop at the ranch one night to refresh himself before riding to the range. Besides, she had matters of importance to disclose.
But it seemed difficult for her to bring herself to tell what she had held him there to communicate. She was serene after the storm that had shaken her like a young pine on the mountain-side, refined and sweet, Barrett thought, as a violet after rain. Now that the great understanding had come between them, in the greatest matter of business that ever arises in the lives of maids and men, all other affairs could wait her pleasure while she drank deeply in the blissful peace of this.
At last she came to it, like a truant to her tasks. She turned a little on the bench where she sat at Barrett's side, so that she faced him, and regarded him in such a long silence that he began to fear some new trouble had shown itself in her course.
"I've been slow to speak of it, Ed, because I'm afraid it doesn't reflect much credit on Uncle Hal," she said. "Of course I don't hold the mad tyranny of that night against him now, for I know he had been driven out of his mind. He was insane."
Barrett took her hand and held it tenderly between his, as if he warmed a nestling picked up from the sodden, storm-beaten ground.
"I'm afraid that is a defense too common to be accepted at the bar where Hal Nearing stands to plead this day," he said. "You can forgive him, for it is a woman's office to forgive. But he was a poor, weak, cowardly human vessel, full of the vile frailties that curse our kind."
"He is dead," she said softly. "It is easier to forgive when the transgressor is dead."
"Much easier," he granted, thinking of his own compassion for Dale Findlay, creeping in the gathering blindness of death toward his horse.
Alma was silent again. Tears suffused the brightness of her eyes when she lifted her head and looked into his face, and smiled. He knew that Hal Nearing's sin against her had been washed away, and that no pang of it remained to trouble the serenity of her heart.
"This happened while you and Fred were taking Findlay's body to Bonita," she explained, prefacing what she had to disclose. "Uncle Hal called for me just a little while before he died and turned over my shares in the Elk Mountain Cattle Company, or rather my father's shares which came to me from him. Ed, I never dreamed that I owned a little more than a third of the company's stock."
"I don't believe you're even listed as a stockholder," he said.
"No; Uncle Hal used my stock as his own. He was my guardian until I came of age."
"And never made any settlement afterwards," said Barrett conclusively.
"No. He continued to vote my stock as his own. Together with what he and Aunt Hope held, he could do everything he wanted to do. That's how he always kept himself elected president, and Aunt Hope secretary and treasurer. She is still, you know."
"I know," said Barrett, thinking a good deal faster than he spoke.
"It isn't really a company at all," she explained, "only a loose sort of copartnership. Few of the stockholders except you and me have more than five or six thousand dollars invested. The Englishman, the poor boy who was killed up in Eagle Rock Canyon, you remember—had twenty thousand dollars in it. It must have been a whole lot of money to him; I hope we can make it good to his family, Ed."
"We're going to make a good, strong try, palomita mia."
She smiled in his eyes at the sound of this endearing term, which had quite a different meaning on his lips than simple Teresa's.
"We held a sort of stockholders' meeting there at Uncle Hal's bedside," she said. "He resigned the presidency, formally, and Aunt Hope put it in the records. We voted together on a new president, three hundred shares of the outstanding five hundred being represented. You are the president, Ed."
"No!" said he, genuinely amazed by the swift revelation of his new consequence.
"It was all regular and legal, nobody can question it. For the good of the company Aunt Hope and I have agreed to stand together and keep you in office. It never would do to have a stranger in here mussing things up."
"Mussing things up!" said he, hearing her words like an echo of his own in the frequent charges he had lodged in bitterness and contempt against himself. "That's all I've done since I came here."
"If you'll look back from the top, Ed, you'll see a pretty direct line that you cut to your objective," she said, in gentle correction. "You came into the tangle like a blindfolded and shackled man, but you struck to the knot of it with a penetration that was admirable, I think."
"I happened on to a few things," he admitted, "but I didn't push ahead, I didn't force anybody's hand."
"I know Uncle Hal was afraid of you from the first hour. He begged you to keep hands off, hoping to free himself in his own desperate way. He never could have done it; all the time he was sinking deeper in the mire."
"It was a degrading situation for a man of Senator Nearing's mettle, the man I always thought him to be when I was a boy."
"It was a degrading situation for all of us, that black monster master over this house. It is to you we owe our redemption, for there's no telling what the end would have been if you hadn't come here to the range and forced Findlay's hand—for you did force his hand, no matter what you say."
"Maybe for the last trick or two," Barrett admitted, mightily comforted and exalted in his own opinion of himself by her praise.
"What would have happened if you hadn't come the other night?" she asked, censuring him with her eyes for his disparagement of his own fitness and valor.
"We'd better not think of that," said he, drawing her away from it by the almost sharp, commanding sternness of his voice, as one covers from a child the sight of some fearful thing.
"You came, you saved me when my hand was not quick and strong enough to meet my resolution to save myself. We must think of it; the thought of it will bind us closer in the bitter trials and dark days we must meet along the way, querido mio."
"Yes, we must think of it," he granted, his head bent, his voice low.
In the silence that fell they seemed to be thinking of it, of what a few moments' mischance along the way, a minute's delay in starting at the summons of old Manuel, would have brought in sorrow to them both. When Alma looked into his face at last, tears trembled in her eyes. She put out her hand to seek his, blindly through the veiling shower, as a child seeks to touch and clasp, and express in its fondling a greater trust and confidence than its tongue has mastered words to speak.
"You came," she said, simply and sufficiently.
There was still such an unsettled air of turmoil about the place that neither of them could turn from the past troubles and put them behind at once, no matter for the apparent security and peace of the present hour. Barrett was first to break upon their musing.
"I'm puzzled over what Findlay did with his money," he said. "I hoped to recover some of it and turn it into the treasury. He had only a few hundred dollars, enough to pay his and Cattle Kate's funeral expenses, when he—died."
"Teresa told me," Alma said. "Some way, I don't believe he had much, Ed. Manuel says he'd been buying the sheriff of this county off a long time, and I expect that came high. Then he had so many hangers-on that he had to split with."
"Even at that, he ought to have had a pretty good pile, considering the number of cattle he stole from this ranch alone."
"He had the name of being a wild gambler. Manuel says he always tried to break the bank when he went to Cheyenne. It's a surprise, the number of things that quiet old Mexican knows."
"I think Thomson could have told something, As it is, there are a good many things that will never be answered in this mystery. Let's put The End to the last page of it, and close the book."
"I wish we could," said she, wistfully.
She sat gazing toward the far hills, where the sun was going down, something again in her eyes of deep-reading romance that Barrett had seen there when they stood that first morning at the gate. And still gazing away as if pursuing a dream that fled always before her, she sought his hand again.
"cc Ed?"
"Yes, palomita mia."
"Did Findlay say anything before he died?"
"He muttered something just as I got to him. His voice was indistinct."
She nestled a little closer to his side, to warm and coax the secret from him, with the beguiling softness that is world-old in a woman's way.
"Ed, Fred Grubb said he lifted his head up and spoke clearly, but he was too far away to make out the words. What did he say, Edgar? Won't you tell me, querido mio?"
She leaned her soft cheek upon his shoulder, caressing his forehead with her hand. Barrett caught the fluttering tempter, and held it imprisoned against his breast, as if to put in it the key to all his heart's secrets and treasured hopes. But he remained silent. And she:
"What did he say, Edgar? Won't you tell me, dear?"
Barrett drew a long breath, as a man breathes before he dashes into a fire, or when he poises himself to dive from a great and dangerous height.
"He tried to speak; he muttered something," he said.
"I know, I know"—eagerly—"but what did he say?"
Barrett raised her head, his hand on the rich treasure of her dark red hair. A moment he gazed gravely into her eyes, putting back the hair from her forehead and holding it so, hard under his hand, as if not willing that one tiny strand or blowing stress should intervene.
"No man will ever know," he said, with a gravity and depth of earnestness that shook her to the soul.
She bowed her head as if under a rebuke, and remained so, silent and humbled from her warm beguilement, at his side.
There was the whisper of falling leaves around them, and the sun was red through the blue curtain that softened the crags and riven pines of the far hills into romance, and made them holy as an altar clouded in incense where men bow down to pray.
Out of the bunkhouse there came a sound as of a bee imprisoned in a flower, and the beat of a foot that measured the time of a melody. Fred Grubb was playing upon his jewsharp his evening song. The sound of it soothed away their melancholy; they looked toward the place of the poet's concealment, and smiled.
"And so the book of our tragedies is finished," said Alma.
And stooping, she wrote with her finger in the dust, The End.