Command me in any way. Have you received urgent summons to Bison?

Your mother is ill."

Then, and not until then, did some Heaven-sent clarity of vision reveal to Power that Nancy had not been acting a part when she wrote the letter he found in the hut. It was only too true that, as he told Peter Granite in the first mad words which burst from his lips, she had left him forever. He did not pretend to understand her motives--he was sure he never would understand them--but her action, at least, was finite. He knew now she was gone beyond recall. By some malign trick of fate she was probably stating her unalterable resolve over the telephone to his friend at the very moment he was reeling under the shock of MacGonigal's frantic messages with reference to his mother.

Well, be it so! His dream of a life's happiness had been shattered by a thunderbolt from a summer sky, and, crowning misery, here was his mother at death's door, in a state of mind surely aggravated by distress because of uncertainty as to his whereabouts! Sheer despair was again calming if benumbing him when, by ill-chance, his haggard eyes dwelt on Nancy's letter. The concluding words seemed to grip him by the throat:

"I can write no more. My poor heart is breaking."

G.o.d of mercy, what did it all mean? He gave way utterly. A strong man weeping is a pitiable sight, and Nancy's high resolve might have weakened had she seen him in that bitter hour.

Perhaps she knew. She must have known. Her forlorn soul must have gaged his distress by the measure of her own sorrowful longing. But she had deceived Power so thoroughly that not for many a year did he even guess that her flight was undertaken solely on his account. And it was better so; for the story of their love might have been stained by a sordid tragedy, and Power, instead of going West that night, would have taken a special train to Newport with fixed intent to choke Willard's wretched life out of him. As it was, he crossed two-thirds of the great land which had given him vast wealth, and much tribulation, and little joy.

At New York, and elsewhere en route, he received telegrams from his trusty friend at Bison. They were not rea.s.suring; but they did, at least, contain one grain of comfort in the tidings that his mother still lived.

But therein MacGonigal allowed his heart to control his pen; for Mrs.

Power breathed her last before her son had quitted New York, and it was to a town in mourning that Power returned. His mother had endeared herself to every soul in the place. The people looked on her as their guardian angel. They almost scowled on John Darien Power when the flying feet of his horse clattered along the main street in his haste to soothe the fretfulness of a woman who was already three days dead. Why did he leave her? they asked. Where had he hidden that the country should be scoured for him during the last week, and none could find him? He used to be a decent, outspoken sort of fellow, Derry Power; but wealth had spoiled him, as it seemed to spoil every man who secured it. Queer thing! Deponent thought that he, or she, would risk the experiment at the price.

Thus, light-hearted gossip, which talks in headlines, and recks little of the subtler issues of life.

CHAPTER XII

AFTER DARKNESS, LIGHT

Death brings peace. Having accomplished its dread mission, it atones to the body from which the soul is s.n.a.t.c.hed by smoothing away the lines of agony from the face; it seems even to relent for awhile, and restore to worn and aged features the semblance of long-vanished youth.

When Power looked at his dead mother, he saw her as she might have looked in placid sleep when he was a boy in San Francisco. But a discovery that is often soothing to those who are bereft of their nearest and dearest brought him no consolation. His stupor of grief and misery was denied the relief of tears. Rather did his brooding thought run to the other extreme. The mother he loved was at rest--why should he not join her? He believed, like many another man who has pa.s.sed through the furnace of a soul-destroying pa.s.sion, that he had drunk the flame-wreathed cup of life to the dregs. The fiery potion had swept through his veins and reduced him to ashes. He was no longer even the recluse of the Dolores Ranch, finding in books solace for a lost love, but the burnt-out husk of his former self. What was there left, that he should wish to live? Why should he not end it all, and seek the kindly oblivion of the grave?

Ever stronger and more insistently did this idea take root in his mind, and some evil monitor seemed to bellow it at him when he stood next day in the cemetery, and saw the coffin lowered into the earth. The beautiful words of the burial service give sorely needed help to stricken hearts; but this man's ears were closed to their solemn promise.

"I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live."

The minister's voice, hitherto broken and tremulous, for he held the dead woman in much esteem, and her loss was grievous to him, rang out with a new confidence when it declaimed that splendid pa.s.sage; yet Power was conscious only of a desire to cry aloud in frenzied protest. Then that phase pa.s.sed; the tumult died down; he shrank into a lethargy which was infinitely more dangerous than a state of wild revolt.

In that black mood he was watched unceasingly by faithful friends.

MacGonigal and Jake were never far from his side. Though he did not know of, and would have angrily resented, their quiet guardianship, he could not have taken his own life just then, and the time was yet far distant when he would ask himself in wonder and thankfulness how he had escaped death by his own hand during the first dreary hours following his return to Bison.

But there were other influences at work, and one of these made its presence felt speedily. After the funeral he was sitting alone in the room which he had converted into a library. His unseeing eyes were fixed on the smiling landscape into which irrigation had converted the once arid ranch. A troop of brood mares, with foals at heel, were emulating mankind by neglecting the lush pastures at their feet and craning their graceful necks over a palisade to nibble the thorn hedge it protected.

This double barrier shut off the lawn and garden from the meadow lands.

Here and there the green of apple orchards, planted with artistic regard to open vistas, was already flecked with golden fruit. Soon the reapers would be busy on the sections where maize and oats and wheat were ripening. The lowing of cattle announced that milking-time was near; for, among her other activities, Mrs. Power had established a model dairy, and it was her gentle boast that she had made it pay; thus bringing out in the mother the money-coining instincts which the son had developed so unexpectedly.

Such a scene might well lull the beholder to rest; but Power was blind to its charms. He was reviewing, in an aimless way, the a.s.sociations which that very apartment held for him. Changed though it was out of all semblance to the poverty-stricken living-room of the ranch, Nancy's spirit had never been wholly exorcised. He pictured her slim and lissome figure as she had stood with him at the window many an evening, and watched the purple shadows stealing over the hills. In that room she had married Marten. From a bamboo stand near one of the windows she had taken the spray of white heather which formed her wedding bouquet. Why had she never mentioned it to him? Or were the last five weeks nothing but some disordered vision of the imagination, a delusion akin to those glimpses of palm-laden oases and flashing waters which come to thirst-maddened wanderers in deserts?

But another shadow intervened. His mother, in turn, had loved the gorgeous sunsets of Colorado; she, too, was wont to gaze at the far-flung panorama which once delighted Nancy's eyes. And she, alas! had become a dream which would never again wake into reality. At that moment the relief of tears was imminent--and tears are intolerable to a strong man. He sprang upright in a spasm of pain, and bitter words escaped him brokenly.

The movement, no less than the few disconnected sentences, seemed to arouse Jake, who happened to be lounging against one of the pillars of the veranda--out of sight, perhaps, but certainly not out of hearing.

"Would yer keer ter hev an easy stroll around, Mistah Power?" he said instantly.

"No, thanks--why are you waiting there? Do you want to speak to me?"

This questioning might bear interpretation as the outburst of one who resented the overseer's presence; but Jake was ready with the soft answer which turneth away wrath:

"No, sir. Not exactly, that is. I was jest waitin' fur Mac. He allowed he'd be back about this time. Gosh! Here he is, crossin' the divide, an'

totin' along some tony galoot I hain't seen afore."

"Tell MacGonigal, and every other person in the place, that I am not to be disturbed."

Power withdrew from the French window, and Jake nodded to the group of horses.

"You're feelin' pretty bad, I guess," he said to himself. "But thar ain't a gun in the outfit outside my locked grip, an' you cahn't find enough rope ter hang a cat, an' the only pisen in the ranch is on a sideboard, an' a skinful of that would do you good, an' this yer son of a gun can stand a lot o' black looks from you, Derry."

He heard Power sink into a chair on the inner side of the room, and sheer curiosity led him to steal along the veranda to the porch, where MacGonigal and a stranger were alighting from a two-wheeled buggy.

"Derry's jest tole me ter quit," he said in a stage whisper, jerking his left hand, as though it still possessed a thumb, in the direction of the library.

The newcomer, a tall, well-built man of middle age, smiled involuntarily at the queer gesture. As it happened, he had never before seen a veritable cowboy outside the bounds of one or other of the American circus shows which visit Europe occasionally, and Jake had donned his costliest rig for the funeral.

"Shall I find Mr. Power in that room with the open window?" he inquired.

"Yes, sir," said Jake.

"I think he will be glad to see me," said the unknown, and, without further comment, he ran up the steps and entered the veranda. The two men watched him in silence. They saw him halt in front of the window, and heard him say, "Power, may I come in?" They heard the sc.r.a.ping of a chair on the parquet floor as it was thrust aside; then the stranger vanished.

"Who's the dook?" demanded Jake, vastly surprised by the turn of events.

"Friend o' Derry's," said MacGonigal, _sotto voce_. "He wired me from Newport, an' his messages struck me as comin' from a white man; so I gev' him the fax, an' the nex' thing I hear is that he's on the rail, but I'm to keep mum, as he thought it 'ud help Derry some if he kem on him suddint. An' here he is."

During a full minute neither man spoke. At last, Jake, who appeared to have something on his mind, brought it out.

"Thar was a piece 'bout Derry and Mrs. Marten in the _Rocky Mountain News_ a week sence," he began.

"Thar was," agreed MacGonigal, who looked vastly uncomfortable in a suit of heavy black cloth.

"Not anything ter make a song of," went on Jake. "An or'nary kind o'

yarn, 'bout a point-ter-point steeplechase, whatever that sort o' flam may be, an' Bison won, in course."

"Jest so," said the other.

"Guess you spotted it, too?"

"Guess I did."

"Marten's in Baku. Whar's Baku?"

"I don't know, but it's a d.a.m.n long way from Newport, anyhow, or Derry an' Nancy wouldn't be cavortin' round together on plugs from one p'int to any other p'int."