Thomas Holmes - The Heart of Canyon Pass

“What do you mean?” She had almost instantly gained control of herself. “You can say all you like. I am never going to sing in your joint again.”

“You ain’t?”

“No.”

“You better think again.” His voice was grim, menacing. “I can say something you won’t like to hear.”

“Say it.” She spat the command out as boldly as was her usual speech; but in her heart sudden fear fluttered like a netted bird.

“I been tellin’ them Dick Beckworth lit out for Crescent City, and that I heard later he was dealing ’em in Denver.”

“Dick Beckworth?” gasped the girl.

“Yeppy. I told ’em that. But I know derned well he didn’t ride north that day – ”

“Why do you speak to me of Dick Beckworth?”

She tried to say it boldly, calmly. She stared at him in the dusk, her figure tense. He could see her blue eyes gleam like twin sapphires.

“I’m telling you. Listen,” whispered Tolley hoarsely. “I could show ’em the bones of Dick’s hoss in the gravel below the Overhang – right at the edge of Runaway River. I got his saddle right now in my big safe. What do you say to that?”

“Dick – ”

“I reckon you know how the hoss and the saddle went over the cliff. And Dick was with ’em. He wasn’t with ’em when I raked out the saddle. Dick had gone to some place a dern sight more distant than Crescent City – nor yet Denver.”

She was silent. He could hear her quick, labored breathing. Satisfaction fired all the mean soul of the man.

“You think it over, Nell.”

He turned and lurched heavily away. The girl stood rooted to the place, more shaken, more terrified, than even Boss Tolley suspected. He was out of sight before she gained strength to move.

In fairylike traceries the tiny drops of a mist-like rain embroidered the broad pane of the Pullman. Betty Hunt gazed through this at the flying fields and woods, the panorama of the railroad fences, and the still nearer blur of telegraph poles with that hopeless feeling a sentenced prisoner must have as he journeys toward the prison pen.

Everything she cared for save her brother, everything she knew and that was familiar to her daily life, every object of her thought and interest, was being left behind by the onrush of the train. Time, with a big besom, was sweeping her quiet past into the discard – she felt it, she knew it! They would never go back to Ditson Corners again, or to Amberly where they had lived as children with Aunt Prudence or to any similar sanctuary.

That was what Betty had most longed for since her last term at boarding school, which had ended for her so abruptly with the death of her Aunt Prudence Mason. Her last previous journey by train had been that somber one to the funeral. When Betty and her brother had later moved to the Ditson Corners’ parsonage they had done so by motor.

The drumming of the wheels over the rail-joints kept time with the swiftly flying thoughts of the girl. She lay in the corner of the broad, tan plush seat like a crumpled flower that had been carelessly flung there. Thoughts of that last train journey seared her mind in hot flashes, as summer lightnings play about the horizon at dusk.

First one thing, then another, she glimpsed – mere jottings of the happenings that had gone before the hurried good-byes at school and the anxious trip homeward. These remembrances now were like the projection of a broken film upon the moving picture screen.

And those trying, anxious weeks which followed the funeral while Ford was completing his divinity course and received his ordination and which came to an end with his selection as pastor of the First Church at Ditson Corners! All through these weeks was the dull, miserable pain of disillusion and horror that Betty must keep to herself. She could not tell Ford. She could tell nobody. What had happened during the last few weeks at school was a secret that must be buried – buried in her mind and heart as deeply as Aunt Prudence was buried under the flowering New England sod.

Betty, with her secret, was like a hurt animal that hides away to die or recover of its wound as nature may provide. She could not die. She knew that, of course, from the first. Time, she felt, would never erase the scar upon her soul; but the wound itself must heal.

All that – that which was now such a horror in her thought – she had hoped to bury deeper as time passed. She had devoted herself to her brother’s needs. She had made his comfort her constant care. Busy mind and busy hands were her salvation from the gnawing regret for that secret happening that she believed must wither all her life.

Now this sudden and unlooked for change had come to shake up all her fragile plans like the shifting of a kaleidoscope. They were going West, toward the land she hated, toward people whom, she told herself, she had every reason to suspect and fear. Why had Ford kept up his correspondence with that Joe Hurley? Betty did not blame her brother for wishing to get away from Ditson Corners. But why need it have been that Westerner who offered the soul-sore minister the refuge that he so gladly accepted?

Betty, without a clear explanation, had no reason to oppose to Hunt’s desire for a change that would satisfy him. And such explanation she would have died rather than have given him! She was swept on toward the West, toward whatever fate had in store for her, like a chip upon a current that could not be stemmed.

Aunt Prudence had left her money – conservatively invested – to Betty; but she was not to touch the principal until she was thirty. “If the girl marries before that age, no shiftless man can get it away from her,” had been the spinster’s frank statement in her will. “If she is foolish enough to marry after that age, it is to be hoped she will then have sense at least regarding money matters.” The brother had a small nest egg left from his father’s estate after paying his college and divinity school expenses.

So they were not wholly dependent upon Hunt’s salary. He could afford to take a vacation, and it was on this ground – the need of rest – that he had resigned from the pulpit of Ditson Corners’ First Church. They had left some really good friends behind them in the little Berkshire town – some who truly appreciated the young minister. But the clique against him had shown its activity much too promptly to salve Hunt’s pride. His resignation had been accepted without question, and he had remained only to see Bardell established in his place.

Betty condemned herself that she could not enter whole-heartedly into Hunt’s high expectations of the new field that lay before him. It was adventure – high adventure – to his mind. And why should a parson not long for a bigger life and broader development as well as another healthy man?

He was going to Canyon Pass without a penny being guaranteed him. Joe Hurley urged him to come; but he told him frankly that there would be opposition. Certain Passonians would not welcome a parson or the establishment of religious worship.

But this opposition was that of the enemy. The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt was not afraid of the devil in an open fight. Opposition in the church itself was what had conquered him at Ditson Corners. Let the phalanxes of wickedness confront him at Canyon Pass, he would stand against them!

Betty saw him coming back down the aisle of the car, smiling broadly, a handsome, muscular figure of a man. He did not look the cleric. She had been so used to seeing him in the black frock-coat and immaculate white collar that she was at first rather shocked when he had donned another suit to travel in.

He was almost boyish looking. He was a big man, and she believed him capable of big things. She could almost wish he had selected some other road in life – although that thought was shocking to her, too. Ford might well have been a business man, an engineer, a banker, a promoter. Betty’s ideas were somewhat vague about business life; but she felt sure Ford would have shone in any line. She was a loyal sister.