VI

ON THE TRAIL

"That's the trail. Loon Lake lies yonder."

Shock's Convener, who had charge for his Church of this district, stood by the buck-board wheel pointing southwest. He was a man about middle life, rather short but well set up, with a strong, honest face, tanned and bearded, redeemed abundantly from commonness by the eye, deep blue and fearless, that spoke of the genius in the soul. It was a kindly face withal, and with humour lurking about the eyes and mouth. During the day and night spent with him Shock had come to feel that in this man there was anchorage for any who might feel themselves adrift, and somehow the great West, with its long leagues of empty prairie through which he had pa.s.sed, travelling by the slow progress of construction trains, would now seem a little less empty because of this man. Between the new field toward which this trail led and the home and folk in the far East there would always be this man who would know him, and would sometimes be thinking of him. The thought heartened Shock more than a little.

"That's the trail," repeated the Convener; "follow that; it will lead you to your home."

"Home!" thought Shock with a tug at his heart and a queer little smile on his face.

"Yes, a man's home is where his heart is, and his heart is where his work lies."

Shock glanced quickly at the man's tanned face. Did he suspect, Shock wondered, the homesickness and the longing in his heart?

Last night, as they had sat together in late talk, he had drawn from Shock with cunning skill (those who knew him would recognise the trick) the picture of his new missionary's home, and had interpreted aright the thrill in the voice that told of the old lady left behind. But now, as Shock glanced at his Convener's face, there was nothing to indicate any hidden meaning in his words. The speaker's eyes were far down the trail that wound like a wavering white ribbon over the yellow-green billows of prairie that reached to the horizon before and up to the great mountains on the right.

"Twenty miles will bring you to Spruce Creek stopping-place; twenty miles more and you are at Big River--not so very big either. You will see there a little school and beside it, on the left, a little house--you might call it a shack, but we make the most of things out here. That's Mr. McIntyre's manse, and proud of it they all are, I can tell you. You will stay with him over night--a fine fellow you will find him, a Nova Scotian, very silent; and better than himself is the little brave woman he has for a wife; a really superior woman. I sometimes wonder--but never mind, for people doubtless wonder at our wives: one can never get at the bottom of the mystery of why some women do it. They will see you on your way. Up to this time he was the last man we had in that direction. Now you are our outpost--a distinction I envy you."

The Convener's blue eye was alight with enthusiasm. The call of the new land was ever ringing in his heart, and the sound of the strife at the front in his ear.

Unconsciously Shock drew in a long breath, the homesickness and heart-longing gave back before the spirit of high courage and enterprise which breathed through the words of the little man beside him, whose fame was in all the Western Church.

"Up these valleys somewhere," continued the Convener, waving his hands towards the southern sky-line, "are the men--the ranchers and cowboys I told you of last night. Some good men, and some of them devils--men good by nature, devils by circ.u.mstance, poor fellows. They won't want you, perhaps, but they need you badly. And the Church wants them, and"--after a little pause--"G.o.d wants them."

The Convener paused, still looking at the distant flowing hills. Then he turned to Shock and said solemnly, "We look to you to get them."

Shock gasped. "To me! to get them!"

"Yes, that's what we expect. Why! do you remember the old chap I told you about--that old prospector who lives at Loon Lake?--you will come across him, unless he has gone to the mountains. For thirteen years that man has hunted the gulches for mines. There are your mines,"

waving his hand again, "and you are our prospector. Dig them up.

Good-bye. G.o.d bless you. Report to me in six months."

The Convener looked at his fingers after Shock had left, spreading them apart. "Well, what that chap grips he'll hold until he wants to let it go," he said to himself, wrinkling his face into a curious smile.

Now and then as he walked along the trail he turned and looked after the buckboard heading toward the southern horizon, but never once did his missionary look back.

"I think he will do. He made a mess of my service last night, but I suppose he was rattled, and then no one could be more disgusted than he, which is not a bad sign. His heart's all right, and he will work, but he's slow. He's undoubtedly slow. Those fellows will give him a time, I fear," and again the Convener smiled to himself. As he came to the brow of the hill, where the trail dipped into the river bottom in which the little town lay that const.i.tuted the nucleus of his parish, he paused and, once more turning, looked after the diminishing buckboard. "He won't look back, eh! All right, my man. I like you better for it. It must have been a hard pull to leave that dear old lady behind. He might bring her out. There are just the two of them.

Well, we will see. It's pretty close shaving."

He was thinking of the threatened cut in the already meagre salaries of his missionaries, rendered necessary by the disproportion between the growth of the funds and the expansion of the work.

"It's a shame, too," he said, turning and looking once more after Shock in case there should be a final signal of farewell, which he would be sorry to miss.

"They're evidently everything to each other." But it was an old problem with the Convener, whose solution lay not with him, but with the church that sent him out to do this work.

Meantime Shock's eyes were upon the trail, and his heart was ringing with that last word of his Convener. "We expect you to get them. You are our prospector, dig them up." As he thought of the work that lay before him, and of all he was expected to achieve, his heart sank.

These wild, independent men of the West were not at all like the degraded men of the ward, fawning or sullen, who had been his former and only parishioners. A horrible fear had been growing upon him ever since his failure, as he considered it, with the Convener's congregation the night before. It helped him not at all to remember the kindly words of encouragement spoken by the Convener, nor the sympathy that showed in his wife's voice and manner. "They felt sorry for me,"

he groaned aloud. He set his jaws hard, as men had seen him when going into a scrim on the football field. "I'll do my best whatever," he said aloud, looking before him at the waving horizon; "a man can only fail.

But surely I can help some poor chap out yonder." His eyes followed the waving foot-hill line till they rested on the mighty ma.s.ses of the Rockies. "Ay," he said with a start, dropping into his mother's speech, "there they are, 'the hills from whence cometh my help.' Surely, I do not think He would send me out here to fail."

There they lay, that mighty wrinkling of Mother Earth's old face, huge, jagged ma.s.ses of bare grey rock, patched here and there, and finally capped with white where they pierced the blue. Up to their base ran the lumbering foot-hills, and still further up the grey sides, like attacking columns, the dark daring pines swarmed in ma.s.sed battalions; then, where ravines gave them footing, in regiments, then in outpost pickets, and last of all in lonely rigid sentinels. But far above the loneliest sentinel pine, cold, white, serene, shone the peaks. The Highland blood in Shock's veins stirred to the call of the hills.

Glancing around to make sure he was quite alone--he had almost never been where he could be quite sure that he would not be heard--Shock raised his voice in a shout, again, and, expanding his lungs to the full, once again. How small his voice seemed, how puny his strength, how brief his life, in the presence of those silent, mighty, ancient ranges with their h.o.a.ry faces and snowy heads. Awed by their solemn silence, and by the thought of their ancient, eternal, unchanging endurance, he repeated to himself in a low tone the words of the ancient Psalm:

"Lord, Thou hast been our dwelling-place, In generations all, Before Thou ever hadst brought forth The mountains, great or small!"

How exalting are the mountains and how humbling! How lonely and how comforting! How awesome and how kindly! How relentless and how sympathetic! Reflecting every mood of man, they add somewhat to his n.o.bler stature and diminish somewhat his ign.o.bler self. To all true appeal they give back answer, but to the heart regarding iniquity, like G.o.d, they make no response. They never obtrude themselves, but they smile upon his joys, and in his sorrow offer silent sympathy, and ever as G.o.d's messengers they bid him remember that with all their ma.s.s man is mightier than they, that when the slow march of the pines shall have trod down their might's dust, still with the dew of eternal youth fresh upon his brow will he be with G.o.d.

Then and there in Shock's heart there sprang up a kindly feeling for the mountains that through all his varying experiences never left him.

They were always there, steadfastly watchful by day like the eye of G.o.d, and at night while he slept keeping unslumbering guard like Jehovah himself. All day as he drove up the interminable slopes and down again, the mountains kept company with him, as friends might. So much so that he caught himself, more than once after moments of absorption, glancing up at them with hasty penitence. He had forgotten them, but unoffended they had been watching and waiting for him.

A little after noon Shock found the trail turn in toward a long, log, low-roofed building, which seemed to have been erected in sections, with an irregular group of sod-roofed out-houses cl.u.s.tering about.

An old man lounged against the jamb of the open door.

"Good day," said Shock politely.

The old man looked him over for a moment or two and then answered as if making a concession of some importance, "Good day, good day! From town?

Want to eat?"

A glance through the door, showing the remains of dinner on a table, determined Shock. "No, I guess I'll push on."

"All right," said the old man, his tone suggesting that while it was a matter of supreme indifference to him, to Shock it might be a somewhat serious concern to neglect to eat in his house.

"This is Spruce Creek?" enquired Shock.

"Yes, I believe that's what they call it," said the old man with slow deliberation, adding after a few moments silence "because there ain't no spruces here."

Shock gave the expected laugh with such heartiness that the old man deigned to take some little interest in him.

"Cattle?" he enquired.

"No."

"Sport?"

"Well, a little, perhaps."

"Oh! Prospectin', eh? Well, land's pretty well taken up in this vicinity, I guess."

To this old man there were no other interests in life beyond cattle, sport, and prospecting that could account for the stranger's presence in this region.

"Yes," laughed Shock, "prospecting in a ways too."

The old man was obviously puzzled.