The Heart of Canyon Pass, Page 2

  CHAPTER II--DISCONTENT AT DITSON CORNERS

  The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt read twice these closing words of thelong letter.

  ... and so, my dear Willie, to use your own way of expressing it, I am steering straight for the devil--and enjoying the trip immensely.

  Wishing you were with me, Willie, I am, even after your rather bitter castigation,

  Sincerely your friend, Joe Hurley.

  He laid the missive on his desk with a full-bosomed sigh. Nor was thatsigh wholly because of the reprobate Joe. Joe's flowers of speech didnot much ruffle the parson's spirit.

  Joe Hurley might be gay, irresponsible, reckless, even downright wicked;but he never could fail to be kind. Two years of close contact with theblithe Westerner--those final two years at college before Hunt went tothe divinity school--had assured the latter that Joe Hurley owned a heartof gold. The gold might be tarnished, but it was true metalnevertheless.

  Hunt's mental picture of his college friend, and never had scholasticfriendship been more astounding, could not include any great blemish oflater-developed character. It was five years since they had seen eachother. Those five years could not have made of Joe Hurley the"roughneck" that he intimated he had become. That was Joe's penchant forpainting with a wide brush.

  The reputation the Westerner had left behind him at college when he wasrequested by a horrified governing board to depart for the sake of thegeneral welfare of the undergraduate body, revealed Joe's characterunequivocally.

  When Joe had been "bounced" by the faculty he had celebrated theoccasion by giving a farewell banquet at one of the shadiest hotels inthe college town, to the wildest crowd of students he could gettogether. On his own part Joe had dressed in full cowboy regalia, and asthe apex of the evening's entertainment he had "shot up" the banquetroom, paying the bill for damages the next morning with a cheerfulsmile.

  The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt remembered the occasion now with a littleshiver of apprehension. Suppose the people of Ditson Corners should everlearn that he, their pastor, had been one of that company who had helpedJoe Hurley celebrate his dismissal from scholastic halls!

  Joe's father, a cattleman, had left him a considerable fortune. Joe hadinvested much of it in a certain mining claim called the Great Hope, forthe young fellow had been keen enough to see that the day of the smallcattleman was gone. The mine was paying a comfortable income with thepromise of doing more than that in the future, so Joe wrote. But hewrote more--much more that was exceedingly interesting to Hunt in hispresent discontented state of mind.

  He picked up the letter again to re-read a part of the third page, thisbroken sentence first meeting his envious eye:

  ... and if ever there was a peach, she surely is one, Willie. Golden-brown hair, big blue eyes, and a voice--Say! No songbird ever had anything on Nell. If you once saw her and heard her sing, you'd go crazy about her, old sobersides. All Canyon Pass--I mean the men-folks--are at her feet again, now she has returned to town and is singing in Colorado Brown's cabaret. Sounds sort of devilish and horrid, doesn't it, Willie? Believe me, Nell Blossom is some girl. But wild--say! You can't get near her. She's got a laugh that plays the deuce with a man's heart strings--accelerates the pit-a-pat of the cardiac nerve to top-notch and then some! She's got us all on her string, from gray-bearded sour doughs to the half-grown grocery clerk at the Three Star, who would commit suicide to-morrow at her behest--believe me!

  But no man, Willie, has seemed yet to put the come hither on Nell Blossom. She just won't be led, coaxed, or driven. She's as hard as molded glass. A man-hater, if ever you heard of one. With all your famed powers of persuasion, reverend, I'd like to make a wager that you couldn't mold our Nell into a pattern of the New England virtues, such as your own prim little sister has become by this time, I've no doubt. No insult to Miss Betty intended, Willie. But our Nell--well, you'd have your hands full in trying to make her do a thing that she did not want to do.

  The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt was stung here, not by the good-naturedraillery aimed at his own traits of character by his old college mate.But why had Joe gone out of his way to drag Betty's name into it? Itseemed to be a mild slur upon his sister's character, and Hunt had anuneasy feeling that he ought to resent it.

  Betty had met Joe Hurley but once--to Hunt's knowledge. It was anoccasion when she had stopped at the college town on her way home fromboarding school. Hunt had met her at the station, and Joe had shown up,too. The three of them had sought a restaurant where they ate, and Bettyhad chattered like--well, just as a girl of her age and fresh from theexcitement of boarding school would chatter. When her first fear of thebig Westerner had worn off she had usurped the conversation almostcompletely. Hunt had often thought since that Joe Hurley was quiteattracted by his lively sister.

  But how did Joe know that Betty had changed so?

  That his sister was not the same cheerful, brisk, chatterbox of a girlshe had been when Joe met her, Hunt quite well knew. And the changepuzzled him.

  He visualized their Aunt Prudence Mason, who had lived all her long lifein the rut of New England spinsterhood, molding more or less thecharacters of the orphaned brother and sister left at an early age toher sole care. Was Betty, here in the straitened environment of DitsonCorners, doomed to jog along the well-beaten track Aunt Prudence hadfollowed? The brother shuddered as he thought of it.

  He glanced at Joe's letter once more. A golden-haired, blue-eyed girlwho really sang--not shrieked as did Miss Pelter whose top notes in thechurch choir rasped Hunt's nerves like a cross-cut saw dragged through apine knot.

  There was always a quarrel of some kind in that choir--the bickerings andheart-burnings of his volunteer church choir were perennial.

  Then, there was the feud over the Ditson pew--which branch of theinfluential Ditson family should hold the chief seats in the church.Hunt could not satisfy everybody. There was still a clique, even afterhis two years' pastorate, who let it be frankly known that they haddesired to call Bardell, instead of him, to the pulpit of the FirstChurch.

  These continued faultfindings and disputes were getting on Hunt'snerves. And they must be affecting Betty--influencing her more than hehad heretofore considered.

  This letter from Joe Hurley had come at a moment when Hunt wasdesperately and completely out of tune with his environment. He hadbrought to his first pastorate a modicum of enthusiasm which, during thefirst year, had expanded into an earnest and purposeful determination todo his duty as he saw it and to carry his congregation in spirit to theheights he would achieve.

  He--and they--had risen to a certain apex of spiritual experience throughthe first months of his earnest endeavor, and then the cogs had begun toslip. Suddenly Willett Ford Hunt's castles toppled and collapsed abouthim. He found himself, half stunned, wholly mazed, wallowing in thedebris of his first church row, the renewed war over the Ditson pew.

  Hunt had extricated himself from this cataclysm with difficulty, almostlike a man lifting himself off the earth by his bootstraps. The Ditsonfeud was by no means at an end even now, and it never would be ended aslong as two Ditsons of different branches of the family remained alive.Hunt had sought to renew his own and his congregation's spiritual life.It was then and not until then that he discovered the fire was out.

  Oh, for a church where one might preach as one pleased, so long as onefollowed the spiritual instincts aroused by right living and a truedesire to help one's fellow men! That is what Hunt said he longed for.

  But actually what he longed for is what perhaps we all long for whetherwe know it or not--appreciation. Not fulsome praise, not a mawkishlysentimental fawning flattery. He desired to feel that the understandingheart of the community apprehended what he wished to do and respectedhis effort though he might fall short of the goal.

  There seemed to be no heart--understanding or otherwise--in DitsonCorners. Why! A wild Western mining c
amp, such as Joe said Canyon Passwas, could be no more ungrateful a soil to cultivate than thiscase-hardened, hide-bound, self-centered and utterly uncharitableBerkshire community.

  The thought--not even audibly expressed--nevertheless shocked Hunt.

  Hunt reached for the letter again. What had Joe said about there being afield for religious endeavor in Canyon Pass? It was along in the firstpart of the screed, and when he had found it he read:

  Joshing aside, Willie, I believe you might dig down to the very heart of Canyon Pass--and I believe it has a heart. You were such a devil of a fellow for getting at the tap-root of a subject. If anybody can electrify the moral fiber of Canyon Pass--as some of them say I have the business part--it will be a man like you. You could do the "Lazarus, arise!" stunt if anybody could--make the composite moral man of Canyon Pass get up, put on a boiled shirt, and go forth a decent citizen. And believe me, the composite figure of the moral man here sadly needs such an awakening.

  There was something that gripped Hunt in the rough and ready diction ofthis letter--something that aroused his imagination. It brought to hismind, too, a picture of Joe himself--a picture of both his physical andhis mental proportions.

  The Reverend Willett Ford Hunt was no pigmy himself, nor did he lackcourage and vigor. He was good to look upon, dark without being sallow,crowned with a thick brush of dull black hair--there were some brownlights in it--possessing good features, keen gray eyes, broad shoulders,a hundred and eighty pounds of gristle and flesh on a perfect bonystructure, and could look over a six-barred gate before he vaulted it.He had not allowed his spiritual experiences, neither rising norfalling, to interfere with his gymnastics or his daily walk.

  But Joe Hurley topped Hunt by two inches, was broader, hardier, a whollyout-of-door man. Joe was typically of the West and the wilderness. Heknew the open places and the tall timber, the mountains and the canyons,the boisterous waters of cascade and rock-hemmed river. He was such anentirely different being from Hunt that the latter had often wonderedwhy the Westerner had made such a chum and confidant of him during thosetwo years at college.

  And now the pastor of Ditson Corners' First Church realized that JoeHurley had something that he wanted. He wished he was with Joe, outthere in that raw country. He felt that he could get nearer to mankindout there and perhaps--he said it reverently--nearer to the God he humblydesired to serve. He thought of Betty.

  "She needs a change as much as I do. How does Joe guess that she isbecoming exactly a prim, repressed, narrow-thinking woman, and a Marthacumbered by many cares? She needs her chance as much as I need mine."

  He heard Betty's step on the porch, and in a moment she entered thestudy, her hands full of those grateful mid-spring flowers, the lily ofthe valley.

  Betty Hunt was not a fragile girl, but she did not possess much of thatembonpoint the Greeks considered so necessary to beauty of figure. Norwas she angular. At least, her grace of carriage and credibly tailoredfrock masked any lack of flesh.

  Slim hands she had, too,--beautiful hands, very white and with only afaint tracery of blue veins upon them. Really, they were a musician'shands--pliable, light of touch, but strong. The deftness with which theyarranged the flowers suggested that she did not need vision to aid inthe task.

  Therefore she kept her gaze on Hunt. He felt it, turned, and smiled upat her. He shook the leaves of the letter in his hand.

  "Bet," he said, "I've got another letter from Joe Hurley."

  Betty's countenance changed in a flash.

  "Oh! That Westerner?"

  There was more than disapproval in her tone. She looked away from himquickly. Her own gray eyes filmed. A shocked, almost terrifiedexpression seemed to stiffen all her face. But Hunt did not see this.

  "There is no use talking, Bet," her brother pursued in an argumentativeway, thoughtfully staring at the letter again. "There is no use talking.Joe has it right. We are vegetating here. Most people in towns likethis, here in the East, might honestly be classified among the _flora_rather than the _fauna_. We're like rows of cabbages in a kitchengarden."

  "Why, Ford!"

  He grinned up at her--a suddenly recalled grimace of his boyhood.

  "There speaks the cabbage, Bet! We're all alike--or most of us are. Herein the old Commonwealth I mean. We're afraid to step aside from therutted path, to accept a new idea; really afraid to be and live out eachhis own individuality.

  "Ah! Out in this place Joe writes about----"

  He fingered the sheets of the letter again. She watched with the slowfading of all animation from her face--just as though a veil were drawnacross it by invisible fingers. Her expression was not so much one ofdisapproval--her eyes held something entirely different in their depths.Was it fear?

  "This Canyon Pass is a real field for a man's efforts," burst out Huntwith sudden exasperation. "I tell you, Bet, I feel as though myusefulness here had evaporated. I haven't a thing in common with thesepeople. Carping criticism and little else confronts me whichever way Iturn."

  "You--you are nervous, Ford."

  "Nerves! What right has a man like me with nerves?" he demanded hotly.

  "But, Ford--your work here?"

  "Is a failure. Oh, yes. I can see better than you do, Bet--moreclearly--that I have lost my grip on these people."

  "Surely there are other churches in the East that would welcome a man ofyour talents."

  "Aye! Another little hard-baked community in which I shall find exactlythe elements that have made my pastorate here a failure."

  "You are not a failure!" she cried loyally.

  "That's nice of you, Bet. You are a mighty good sister. But I am lettingyou in for a share of the very difficulties that would soon put gray inmy hair and a stone in my bosom instead of a heart."

  "Oh, Ford!"

  "Out there--in some place like this Joe writes about--would be a new andunplowed field. A place where a man could develop--grow, not vegetate."

  "But--but must it necessarily be the West, Ford? I am not fond of theWest."

  "You've never seen it."

  "I'm not fond of Western people."

  He looked at her with a dawning smile. "You're afraid of them, Bet."

  "Yes. I am afraid of them," whispered his sister, turning her face awayfrom his gaze. "They are not our kind, Ford."

  "That's exactly it," he cried, smiting the desk with the flat of hispalm. "We need to get out into the world, among people who are just asdifferent from 'our kind,' as you term them, as possible. There we canexpand. Out in Canyon Pass. I believe I could be a real help to thatcommunity. What is it Joe says?" He glanced again at the letter beforehim. "Yes! I might dig down to the very heart of Canyon Pass. DitsonCorners has merely a pumping station to circulate the blood of thecommunity, patterned after the one at the reservoir on Knob Hill."

  She did not speak again. When Hunt looked around she had stolen from theroom.

  "Poor Bet!" he muttered. "The idea of change alarms her as it might havealarmed Aunt Prudence. Joe Hurley is right--he's right beyond a doubt!"