I
THE DESERT CHARIOT

Lee Virginia Wetherford began her return journey into the mountain West with exultation. From the moment she opened her car-window that August morning in Nebraska the plain called to her, sustained her illusions. It was all quite as big, as tawny, as she remembered it – fit arena for the epic deeds in which her father had been a leader bold and free.

Her memories of Roaring Fork and its people were childish and romantic. She recalled, vividly, the stagecoach which used to amble sedately, not to say wheezily, from the railway to the Fork and from the Fork back to the railway, in the days when she had ridden away in it a tearful, despairing, long-limbed girl, and fully expected to find it waiting for her at Sulphur City, with old Tom Quentan still as its driver.

The years of absence had been years of growth, and though she had changed from child to woman in these suns and moons, she could not think of the Fork as anything other than the romantic town she had left – a list wherein spurred and steel-girt cow-men strode lamely over uneven sidewalks, or swooped, like the red nomads of the desert, in mad troops through the starlit night.

The first hint of “the new West” came to her by way of the pretentious Hotel Alma, which stood opposite the station at Sulphur, and to which she was led by a colored porter of most elaborate and kindly manners.

This house, which furnished an excellent dinner and an absorbing mixture of types both American and European, was vaguely disturbing to her. It was plainly not of the old-time West – the West her father had dominated in the days “before the invasion.” It was, indeed, distinctly built for the tourist trade, and was filled with all that might indicate the comfortable nearness of big game and good fishing.

Upon inquiry as to the stage, she was amazed to hear that an automobile now made the journey to the Fork in five hours, and that it left immediately after the midday meal.

This was still more disconcerting than the hotel, but the closer she came to the ride, the more resigned she became, for she began to relive the long hours of torture on the trip outward, during which she had endured clouds of dust and blazing heat. There were some disadvantages in the old stage, romantic as her conception of it had been. Furthermore, the coach had gone; so she made application for her seat at once.

At two o’clock, as the car came to the door, she entered it with a sense of having stepped from one invading chariot of progress to another, so big and shining and up to date was its glittering body, shining with brass and glowing with brave red paint. It was driven, also, by a small, lean young fellow, whom the cowboys on her father’s ranch would have called a “lunger,” so thin and small were his hands and arms. He was quite as far from old Tom Quentan as the car was from the coach on which he used to perch.

The owner of the machine, perceiving under Virginia’s veil a girl’s pretty face, motioned her to the seat with the driver, and rode beside her for a few minutes (standing on the foot-board), to inquire if she were visiting friends in the Fork.

“Yes,” she replied, curtly, “I am.”

Something in her tone discouraged him from further inquiry, and he soon dropped away.

The seats were apparently quite filled with men, when at the last moment a middle-aged woman, with a penetrating, nasal, drawling utterance, inquired if she were expected to be “squoze in betwixt them two strange men on that there back seat.”

Lee Virginia turned, and was about to greet the woman as an old acquaintance when something bold and vulgar in the complaining vixen’s face checked the impulse.

The stage-agent called her “Miss McBride,” and with exaggerated courtesy explained that travel was heavy, and that he had not known that she was intending to go.

One of the men, a slender young fellow, moved to the middle of the seat, and politely said, “You can sit on the outside, madam.”

She clambered in with doleful clamor. “Well, I never rode in one of these pesky things before, and if you git me safe down to the Fork I’ll promise never to jump the brute another time.”

A chuckle went ’round the car; but it soon died out, for the new-comer scarcely left off talking for the next three hours, and Virginia was very glad she had not claimed acquaintanceship.

As they whirled madly down the valley the girl was astonished at the transformation in the hot, dry land. Wire fences ran here and there, enclosing fields of alfalfa and wheat where once only the sage-brush and the grease-wood grew. Painted farm-houses shone on the banks of the creeks, and irrigating ditches flashed across the road with an air of business and decision.

For the first half-hour it seemed as if the dominion of the cattle-man had ended, but as the swift car drew away from the valley of the Bear and climbed the divide toward the north, the free range was disclosed, with few changes, save in the cattle, which were all of the harmless or hornless variety, appearing tame and spiritless in comparison with the old-time half-wild broad-horn breeds.

No horsemen were abroad, and nothing was heard but the whirr of the motor and the steady flow of the garrulous woman behind. Not till the machine was descending the long divide to the west did a single cowboy come into view to remind the girl of the heroic past, and this one but a symbol – a figure of speech. Leaning forward upon his reeling, foaming steed, he spurred along the road as if pursued, casting backward apprehensive glances, as if in the brassy eyes of the car he read his doom – the doom of all his kind.

Some vague perception of this symbolism came into Virginia’s thought as she watched the swift and tireless wheels swallow the shortening distance between the heels of the flying pony and the gilded seat in which she sat. Vain was the attempt to outride progress. The rider pulled out, and as they passed him the girl found still greater significance in the fact that he was one of her father’s old-time cowboys – a grizzled, middle-aged, light-weight centaur whom she would not have recognized had not the driver called him by his quaint well-known nickname.

Soon afterward the motor overhauled and passed the battered stage lumbering along, bereft of its passengers, sunk to the level of carrying the baggage for its contemptuous aristocratic supplanter; and as Lee Virginia looked up at the driver, she caught the glance of a simple-minded farm-boy looking down at her. Tom Quentan no longer guided the plunging, reeling broncos on their swift and perilous way – he had sturdily declined to “play second fiddle to a kerosene tank.”

Lee began to wonder if she should find the Fork much changed – her mother was a bad correspondent.

Her unspoken question, opportunely asked by another, was answered by Mrs. McBride. “Oh, Lord, yes! Summer tourists are crawlin’ all over us sence this otto line began. ’Pears like all the bare-armed boobies and cross-legged little rips in Omaha and Denver has jest got to ride in and look us over. Two of them new hotels in Sulphur don’t do a thing but feed these tenderfeet. I s’pose pro-hi-bition will be the next grandstand-play on the part of our town-lot boomers. We old cow-punchers don’t care whether the town grows or not, but these hyer bankers and truck-farmers are all for raisin’ the price o’ land and taxin’ us quiet fellers out of our boots.”

Virginia winced a little at this, for it flashed over her that all the women with whom she had grown up spoke very much in this fashion – using breeding terms almost as freely as the ranchers themselves. It was natural enough. What else could they do in talking to men who knew nothing but cows? And yet it was no longer wholly excusable even to the men, who laughed openly in reply.

The mountains, too, yielded their disappointment. For the first hour or two they seemed lower and less mysterious than of old. They neither wooed nor threatened – only the plain remained as vast and as majestic as ever. The fences, the occasional farms in the valleys could not subdue its outspread, serene majesty to prettiness. It was still of desert sternness and breadth.

From all these impersonal considerations the girl was brought back to the vital phases of her life by the harsh voice of one of the men. “Lize Wetherford is goin’ to get jumped one o’ these days for sellin’ whiskey without a license. I’ve told her so, too. Everybody knows she’s a-doin’ it, and what beats me is her goin’ along in that way when a little time and money would set her straight with the law.”

The shock of all this lay in the fact that Eliza Wetherford was the mother to whom Lee Virginia was returning after ten years of life in the East, and the significance of the man’s words froze her blood for an instant. There was an accent of blunt truth in his voice, and the mere fact that a charge of such weight could be openly made appalled the girl, although her recollections of her mother were not entirely pleasant.

The young fellow on the back seat slowly said: “I don’t complain of Lize sellin’ bad whiskey, but the grub she sets up is fierce.”

“The grub ain’t so bad; it’s the way she stacks it up,” remarked another. “But, then, these little fly-bit cow-towns are all alike and all bad, so far as hotels are concerned.”

Lee Virginia, crimson and burning hot, was in agony lest they should go further in their criticism.

She knew that her mother kept a boarding-house; and while she was not proud of it, there was nothing precisely disgraceful in it – many widowed women found it the last resort; but this brutal comment on the way in which her business was carried on was like a slash of mud in the face. Her joy in the ride, her impersonal exultant admiration of the mountains was gone, and with flaming cheeks and beating heart she sat, tense and bent, dreading some new and keener thrust.

Happily the conversation turned aside and fell upon the Government’s forest policy, and Sam Gregg, a squat, wide-mouthed, harsh-voiced individual, cursed the action of Ross Cavanagh the ranger in the district above the Fork. “He thinks he’s Secretary of War, but I reckon he won’t after I interview him. He can’t shuffle my sheep around over the hills at his own sweet will.”

The young fellow on the back seat quietly interposed. “You want to be sure you’ve got the cinch on Cavanagh good and square, Sam, or he’ll be a-ridin’ you.”

“He certainly is an arbitrary cuss,” said the old woman. “They say he was one of Teddy’s Rough-riders in the war. He sure can ride and handle a gun. ’Pears like he thinks he’s runnin’ the whole range,” she continued, after a pause. “Cain’t nobody so much as shoot a grouse since he came on, and the Supervisor upholds him in it.”

Lee Virginia wondered about all this supervision, for it was new to her.

Gregg, the sheepman, went on: “As I tell Redfield, I don’t object to the forest policy – it’s a good thing for me; I get my sheep pastured cheaper than I could do any other way, but it makes me hot to have grazing lines run on me and my herders jacked up every time they get over the line. Ross run one bunch off the reservation last Friday. I’m going to find out about that. He’ll learn he can’t get ‘arbitrary’ with me.”

Lee Virginia, glancing back at this man, felt sorry for any one who opposed him, for she recalled him as one of the fiercest of the cattle-men – one ever ready to cut a farmer’s fence or burn a sheep-herder’s wagon.

The old woman chuckled: “’Pears like you’ve changed your tune since ’98, Sam.”

He admitted his conversion shamelessly. “I’m for whatever will pay best. Just now, with a high tariff, sheep are the boys. So long as I can get on the reserve at seven cents a head – lambs free – I’m going to put every dollar I’ve got into sheep.”

“You’re going to get thrown off altogether one of these days,” said the young man on the back seat.

Thereupon a violent discussion arose over the question of the right of a sheepman to claim first grass for his flocks, and Gregg boasted that he cared nothing for “the dead-line.” “I’ll throw my sheep where I please,” he declared. “They’ve tried to run me out of Deer Creek, but I’m there to stay. I have ten thousand more on the way, and the man that tries to stop me will find trouble.”

The car was descending into the valley of the Roaring Fork now, and wire fences and alfalfa fields on either side gave further evidence of the change in the land’s dominion. New houses of frame and old houses in fresh paint shone vividly from the green of the willows and cottonwoods. A ball-ground on the outskirts of the village was another guarantee of progress. The cowboy was no longer the undisputed prince of the country fair.

Down past the court-house, refurbished and deeper sunk in trees, Lee Virginia rode, recalling the wild night when three hundred armed and vengeful cowboys surrounded it, holding three cattle-barons and their hired invaders against all comers, resolute to be their own judge, jury, and hangman. It was all as peaceful as a Sunday afternoon at this moment, with no sign of the fierce passions of the past.

There were new store-buildings and cement walks along the main street of the town, and here and there a real lawn, cut by a lawn-mower; but as the machine buzzed on toward the river the familiar little old battlemented buildings came to view. The Palace Hotel, half log, half battlement, remained on its perilous site beside the river. The triangle where the trails met still held Halsey’s Three Forks Saloon, and next to it stood Markheit’s general store, from which the cowboys and citizens had armed themselves during the ten days’ war of cattle-men and rustlers.