Beatrice went to the door beside Hester and, for what seemed a very long time, stood waiting without a word spoken by any one of them, so intently were they all listening. Much as Beatrice desired that John Herrick should explain the presence of that money upon the table, she dreaded5 his speaking, for she wished to lose no sound of the tumult6 that was coming ever nearer up the hill.
The crowd of men was in sight now, climbing the last rise of the trail. They were singing some wild foreign song: it might have been Russian, Polish, Hungarian; she knew not which. The words conveyed no meaning to her, but the loud harsh cadences7 seemed to cry out a message of their own: a song of blind tyrannies and passionate8 rebellion, of cracking whips and pistol-shots, of villages burning amid curses and weeping and the cries of children. She shivered with terror as the shouting voices came close.
“If only they were Americans,” she whispered to Hester. How could any one control such a mob which scarcely understood a common tongue?
“There is no knowing what they may do,” Hester whispered in answer, “but if any one is able to quiet them, Roddy can.”
The men came tramping up to the foot of the veranda9 steps and stopped—a dense10, huddled11 throng12 with a tossing lantern carried here and there that showed the dark faces and the shining, excited eyes. A few figures stood out against the foreign backgrounds: a handful of American and Irish laborers13, Dan O’Leary, head and shoulders taller than the others, Dabney Mills hovering14 on the outskirts15 of the group, talking incessantly16 and entirely17 unheeded.
Thorvik stood on the lowest step, his back to them, bareheaded and pouring out a stream of eloquence18. Two or three men stepped up to him and began an earnest discussion, which waxed hotter and hotter as the minutes passed, as the crowd quieted, and as all stood waiting. Dabney Mills joined them, shaking his head and protesting vehemently19. Beatrice, leaning forward, caught enough of the broken English to understand the meaning of their hesitation20. They were arguing as to which should go in first. Inside a great sum of money was spread out upon the table, with no one to guard it but an injured man and two girls, yet these disturbers of the night’s peace were quarreling as to who should enter first.
It was Dan O’Leary who pushed through the crowd finally and strode up the steps. The girls turned to watch him cross the hall and stop before the table where John Herrick sat unmoving.
“Well, boss,” the Irishman said simply, “how about it?”
John Herrick’s thin face relaxed into a smile.
“Why don’t your friends come in?” he asked.
“They’re a bit shy,” Dan admitted. “I hear them talking it over how you can shoot straighter than any other man in Broken Bow County.”
John Herrick’s smile grew broader and he got to his feet.
“Then I suppose I must go out to them,” he said, “if they won’t come in.”
He limped slowly across the hall and out upon the steps, while a great roar went up from the men as he appeared.
“The money of which there has been so much talk is in there on my table. Is there any man who cares to come in to count it?”
There was no answer, nor did any one come forward. Thorvik, hurrying from one to another, whispering, pointing, urging, seemed to have no influence at all. Dabney Mills, shrill21 and abusive, shouted something from the back of the crowd, but no one moved. Dan O’Leary burst into a great roar of laughter and slapped his knee.
“You should have heard them tell, on the way up the mountain, what they were going to do,” he declared to Beatrice at whose side he was standing22. “Thorvik and Mills, why, they were breathing fire, and now look at them.” He stepped forward and stood by John Herrick. “Boys,” he said, “I’m through. I came up here with you to ask the boss a question, to find out if he had got away with any of the Irrigation Company’s funds. Well, I don’t care any more to ask it. I know he’s all right.”
Beatrice turned at a sound behind her and saw Olaf, followed by old Julia and Tim, come pushing through the door in the hall within. The man and the woman were both deaf and the boy slept in one of the outbuildings, so that they had only just now been awakened23 by the noise. Olaf’s eye was fixed24 unwaveringly upon Thorvik, and that worthy25, suddenly becoming aware of the fact began to sidle away into the background and disappeared behind the bulk of a gigantic Slovak. Beatrice laid a restraining hand on Olaf’s arm, for John Herrick was speaking again.
“You shall have an explanation,” he began, “though I have been waiting for you to understand of yourselves. While you were talking up your strike, or rather while your leader was talking and you were listening, the Irrigation Company was coming to the end of its funds. Why? Because, after your valuable Thorvik came to this camp, construction dragged, no man did a full day’s work any more, time and material and money were being wasted until the whole enterprise was at the edge of disaster. Was it easy to raise more capital, do you think, when the whole place was seething26 with discontent and everybody knew that a strike was coming? No, the men who had put money into the project, far from being willing to subscribe27 more, were wishing they could withdraw. It came about that we moved first, and shut down the work the very night that you were ready to declare a strike. It was a good thing for both sides. We all needed a little time to think things over.”
He paused, as though for comment from his audience, but no one spoke4 and he went on again.
“While you have been—resting, I have been working, and I have managed to arrange for enough capital to carry on the work to the end, on one condition. When things are not to your liking28, you are to use the good American way of talking things over and settling them peaceably, not the method you brought with you from over the sea, of rioting and burning and stirring up hatred29 between one man and another. On that basis we can go on. In a crisis like this it is always easiest to blame one man, and you have chosen to blame me. What you have been saying about me I neither know nor care, but if you had used your own wits instead of Thorvik’s, you would have seen how things really stood. And I will tell you this. Through all this time of waiting, I have kept in my safe a sufficient sum in cash for immediate30 use, so that when the time came to begin again, we could go forward without a day’s, without an hour’s delay. It is there, as I said, ready for you to earn it. And now have you had enough of Thorvik and his talk of revolutions? Do you want to go back to work?”
“We want to go back,” shouted a voice from the crowd.
It was an American voice, but its refrain was taken up in a dozen foreign tongues. Yes, it was plain that they were weary of their leader and that they wished to work again.
“Then go home and get some sleep and we will start work in the morning,” John Herrick said. “The money will be there to pay your next week’s wages and there will be enough for one thing besides. It will buy your precious Thorvik a ticket back to his own country and we will all see that he makes use of it.”
“But—see here,” Dabney Mills’ querulous voice rose above the murmur31 of approval, “I’ve be telling them——”
Then it was that Beatrice had the greatest surprise of all her life. She suddenly found herself standing on the step beside John Herrick, telling what had happened, making plain to that strange, listening group, what was the source of Dabney’s story. With her hand holding to her uncle’s, she spoke out bravely and told the whole truth—just what had really occurred and just how the reporter had spied and listened and questioned and put together his so-called facts. She even found herself at the end, telling of Dabney’s inglorious encounter with the bear.
Beatrice found herself telling what had happened
Although the men did not understand much English, her speech was so direct that they could easily comprehend the greater part of it. When she came to the story of the bear, such a shout of laughter went up that it drowned what little more she might have wished to say. The men slapped each other on the shoulder, told the story all over again to one another in their own tongues, rocked and chuckled32 and burst forth33 again and again in uproarious mirth. It seemed to touch the sense of humor of every one of them that the strutting34, vainglorious35 young reporter should have been the hero of such an ignominious36 adventure. When the gale37 of merriment had somewhat laughed itself out, Dan O’Leary’s voice could be heard above the others.
“We don’t need any more proof that they belong to each other,” he said. “The pluck of the little one and the pluck of the big one, they sure come from the same stock. And now let’s be getting back and be ready for work in the morning. We needn’t spend our time waiting for Sherlock Holmes. He has gone on ahead, and another of our friends with him.”
Under cover of the noisy laughter, two people had quietly slipped away. A pair of shadows flitting down the trail, a slim one and a sturdy one, were the last that Beatrice ever saw of Dabney Mills and of Thorvik.
The crowd dispersed38, and went trudging39 down the mountainside, as John Herrick had advised, to sleep in preparation for the work next day. Their voices and laughter could be heard from afar as they wound down the path—a cheery, comforting sound after the angry shouts and that wild, terrible song that had heralded40 their coming. Beatrice, standing to look after them, felt a sudden wave of friendliness41 and good-will for the whole company, which, a short time before, she had regarded with such terror and repulsion.
She went in at last to talk the whole matter over with John Herrick and Hester and Olaf and Dan O’Leary, who had stayed behind. They heard the whole tale, not only of the irrigation project, but of all that had led up to it. The story was of a man beginning with nothing and in ten years gathering42 the fortune that he was now putting into the watering of the valley. It was wealth reaped from the fertile, untried resources and the open-handed opportunities of a new country. The valley was in the hands of prospectors43 and homesteaders when he came. He had seen the mines opened, the farms plowed44 from virgin45 soil, the wilderness46 changed to a settled country. After the pioneers and the farmers, had come the crowd of foreign laborers, to build the railroads, to pick the fruit, to rear the houses and dig the irrigation ditches.
“They are a blight47 on the country,” said Olaf, but John Herrick shook his head.
“We need them,” he insisted. “We have to help them and teach them; and their children will be good Americans. There are a few like Thorvik who will cause trouble to the end of the chapter, but we can make something of the rest of them.”
It was the mountain above them that alone had not changed, he went on to tell them, although it was the mountain that had made the valley what it was. It had given its treasures of gold and silver, the timber and pasturage of its lower slopes; its roaring streams watered the fields and the valley was fertile with soil washed from its rocky shoulders.
“A good part of the mountain belongs to me,” John Herrick said, “and a bit of it to Beatrice, too. I can go higher and higher, blasting its rocks, cutting its trees, but at a certain point I have to stop. There is no man yet who has conquered the wind and clouds and cold of the summit, and Gray Cloud Mountain is still master of us all.”
When at last he ceased talking, it was only because Hester had dropped asleep in her chair and the gray dawn was showing behind the windows. Beatrice was still listening eagerly, and so was Olaf, who heaved a long sigh as the story came to an end.
“I wish I were going to do things like that,” he said wistfully.
“You are,” returned John Herrick, “and so is Beatrice, and Hester, too. There are just such adventures ahead of all of you, in times like these: every person who is growing up now will find his share of strange, new things to do. Now you must take Beatrice home, Olaf. You children should not have let me talk the whole night away.”
Dan O’Leary, who had said very little, got up and held out his hand to Olaf as he said good-by.
“We’ll be glad to see you down in the town,” he declared. “We’ve got over some things we used to think about you, and we’ve learned a great deal this night.”
They rode slowly down the hill, and Beatrice and Olaf turned in at her gate, still discussing the night’s adventure.
“He is a real man, John Herrick is,” was Olaf’s final verdict as they reached the steps of the cabin. “You can’t beat him for fairness or for pluck. And you know, the first time I saw you, I thought you were like him. I believe I had begun to understand that you belonged to each other long before any one told me so.”
She lingered on the steps, watching him lead Buck48 away to his stable and then mount his own horse.
“I ride like a sailor,” he admitted as he climbed into the saddle, “and—I didn’t tell you—I am going to sea again next week. My mother doesn’t like my going but I can’t stop ashore49 more than this long. Now that all this trouble is cleared up, I will go down to stay with her until I leave. And you will go to see her sometimes, won’t you, after I am gone?”
“Yes,” promised Beatrice, “but we are going ourselves before very long. I can’t believe the summer has really passed. Hester is coming with us to go to the school where Nancy and I go, and John Herrick—can I ever call him anything else, I wonder—is coming too. But in a year we will all be back again.”
He rode away, leaving her sitting on the steps, still wide awake and reluctant to go in. The cabin was very still, since evidently no one had awakened to miss her in the hours that she had been gone. She sat very quietly, watching the sky grow red between the black columns of the pine-trees, listening to the soft thunder of the waterfall and the growing chorus of the birds as they awoke with the awakening50 dawn.
An approaching footstep surprised her. Some one had come very softly up the needle-strewn pathway while she sat there dreaming. It was a figure that she did not recognize at once—a person with outlandish clothes, and a yellow face, and with two bundles done up in blue cotton handkerchiefs hung on the pole upon his shoulder. After a moment of inspection51 she exclaimed:
“Joe Ling!”
The Chinaman nodded.
“I leave your house because trouble was coming,” he explained. “Trouble over now,” he waved his hand toward the village; “I come back again.”
By some secret sense through which Chinamen seem to know everything, he had got news of the outbreak in the town almost before it had occurred and had departed; but now, divining just as quickly that the difficulty was over, he had returned. There could be no more convincing proof that peace and quiet were really restored in Ely.
Beatrice thought for a moment, inclined at first to send him away. She was beginning to be more used to the strange ways of Chinamen, however. “And besides,” she reflected, “it will not do Nancy and me any harm to have a vacation from our work for these last days that we are here.”
She nodded to Joe Ling and he made his way around the corner of the house, to be heard presently in the kitchen making preparations for breakfast as easily as though he had been in residence a twelvemonth.
She would soon be going back to all the old interests, she thought, still without moving—back to lessons, dances, club meetings. How far away that had all seemed to be! Everything would look different to her now. She would never be discontented again nor wonder if the future was going to be dull, since she had once realized how much life can hold.
Leaning back against the door-post, she sat contentedly52 staring out across the hill. In the room upstairs Nancy was stirring, for Beatrice heard the window close. Soon she would have to go in to relate all that had happened in the night, but just for a minute more she would watch the glowing sky, the moving tree-tops and the peak of Gray Cloud Mountain showing clear and sharp in the first light of dawn.
The End
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1
astonishment
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| n.惊奇，惊异 | |
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2
squeaking
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| v.短促地尖叫( squeak的现在分词 )；吱吱叫；告密；充当告密者 | |
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yelp
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| vi.狗吠 | |
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spoke
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| n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说 | |
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5
dreaded
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| adj.令人畏惧的；害怕的v.害怕，恐惧，担心( dread的过去式和过去分词) | |
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tumult
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| n.喧哗；激动，混乱；吵闹 | |
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7
cadences
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| n.（声音的）抑扬顿挫( cadence的名词复数 )；节奏；韵律；调子 | |
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8
passionate
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| adj.热情的，热烈的，激昂的，易动情的，易怒的，性情暴躁的 | |
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9
veranda
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| n.走廊；阳台 | |
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dense
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| a.密集的，稠密的，浓密的；密度大的 | |
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11
huddled
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| 挤在一起（huddle的过去式与过去分词形式） | |
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throng
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| n.人群，群众；v.拥挤，群集 | |
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13
laborers
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| n.体力劳动者，工人( laborer的名词复数 )；（熟练工人的）辅助工 | |
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14
hovering
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| 鸟( hover的现在分词 )； 靠近（某事物）； （人）徘徊； 犹豫 | |
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outskirts
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| n.郊外，郊区 | |
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incessantly
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| ad.不停地 | |
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entirely
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| ad.全部地，完整地；完全地，彻底地 | |
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eloquence
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| n.雄辩；口才，修辞 | |
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vehemently
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| adv. 热烈地 | |
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hesitation
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| n.犹豫，踌躇 | |
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shrill
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| adj.尖声的；刺耳的；v尖叫 | |
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standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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23
awakened
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| v.（使）醒( awaken的过去式和过去分词 )；（使）觉醒；弄醒；（使）意识到 | |
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fixed
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| adj.固定的，不变的，准备好的；(计算机)固定的 | |
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worthy
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| adj.(of)值得的，配得上的；有价值的 | |
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seething
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| 沸腾的，火热的 | |
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27
subscribe
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| vi.(to)订阅，订购；同意；vt.捐助，赞助 | |
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28
liking
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| n.爱好；嗜好；喜欢 | |
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hatred
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| n.憎恶，憎恨，仇恨 | |
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30
immediate
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| adj.立即的；直接的，最接近的；紧靠的 | |
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murmur
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| n.低语，低声的怨言；v.低语，低声而言 | |
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32
chuckled
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| 轻声地笑( chuckle的过去式和过去分词 ) | |
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forth
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| adv.向前；向外，往外 | |
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34
strutting
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| 加固，支撑物 | |
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vainglorious
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| adj.自负的；夸大的 | |
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ignominious
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| adj.可鄙的，不光彩的，耻辱的 | |
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37
gale
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| n.大风，强风，一阵闹声（尤指笑声等） | |
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38
dispersed
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| adj. 被驱散的, 被分散的, 散布的 | |
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39
trudging
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| vt.& vi.跋涉，吃力地走（trudge的现在分词形式） | |
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40
heralded
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| v.预示( herald的过去式和过去分词 )；宣布（好或重要） | |
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41
friendliness
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| n.友谊，亲切，亲密 | |
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42
gathering
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| n.集会，聚会，聚集 | |
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43
prospectors
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| n.勘探者，探矿者( prospector的名词复数 ) | |
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44
plowed
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| v.耕( plow的过去式和过去分词 )；犁耕；费力穿过 | |
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45
virgin
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| n.处女，未婚女子；adj.未经使用的；未经开发的 | |
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46
wilderness
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| n.杳无人烟的一片陆地、水等，荒漠 | |
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47
blight
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| n.枯萎病；造成破坏的因素；vt.破坏，摧残 | |
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48
buck
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| n.雄鹿，雄兔；v.马离地跳跃 | |
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49
ashore
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| adv.在(向)岸上，上岸 | |
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50
awakening
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| n.觉醒，醒悟 adj.觉醒中的；唤醒的 | |
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51
inspection
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| n.检查，审查，检阅 | |
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52
contentedly
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| adv.心满意足地 | |
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