The Spenders | Page 6

time each year to three or four months would
constitute the ideal monograph on human duplicity. When hard-pushed
on his return, he had once or twice been even brazen enough to assert
that he had lost his way in the mountain fastnesses. But, for all his
protestations, no one when he left in June expected to see him again
before September at the earliest. In these solitary tours he was busy and
happy, working and playing. "Work," he would say, "is something you
want to get done; play is something you jest like to be doin'. Snoopin'
up these gulches is both of 'em to me."
And so he loitered through the mountains, resting here, climbing there,
making always a shrewd, close reading of the rocks.
It was thus Billy Brue found him at the end of his second day's search.
A little off the trail, at the entrance to a pocket of the cañon, he towered
erect to peer down when he heard the noise of the messenger's ascent.
Standing beside a boulder of grey granite, before a background of the
gnarled dwarf-cedars, his hat off, his blue shirt open at the neck, his
bare forearms brown, hairy, and muscular, a hammer in his right hand,
his left resting lightly on his hip, he might have been the Titan that had
forged the boulder at his side, pausing now for breath before another
mighty task. Well over six feet tall, still straight as any of the pines
before him, his head and broad shoulders in the easy poise of power,
there was about him from a little distance no sign of age. His lines were
gracefully full, his bearing had still the alertness of youth. One must
have come as near as Billy Brue now came to detect the marks of time
in his face. Not of age--merely of time; for here was no senility, no
quavering or fretful lines. The grey eyes shone bright and clear from far
under the heavy, unbroken line of brow, and the mouth was still
straight and firmly held, a mouth under sure control from corner to
corner. A little had the years brought out the rugged squareness of the
chin and the deadly set of the jaws; a little had they pressed in the
cheeks to throw the high bones into broad relief. But these were the
utmost of their devastations. Otherwise Peter Bines showed his
seventy-four years only by the marks of a well-ordered maturity. His
eyes, it is true, had that look of knowing which to the young seems
always to betoken the futility of, and to warn against the folly of,

struggle against what must be; yet they were kind eyes, and humourous,
with many of the small lines of laughter at their corners. Reading the
eyes and mouth together one perceived gentleness and sternness to be
well matched, working to any given end in amiable and effective
compromise. "Uncle Peter" he had long been called by the public that
knew him, and his own grandchildren had come to call him by the same
term, finding him too young to meet their ideal of a grandfather. Billy
Brue, riding up the trail, halted, nodded, and was silent. The old man
returned his salutation as briefly. These things by men who stay much
alone come to be managed with verbal economy. They would talk
presently, but greetings were awkward.
Billy Brue took one foot from its stirrup and turned in his saddle,
pulling the leg up to a restful position. Then he spat, musingly, and
looked back down the cañon aimlessly, throwing his eyes from side to
side where the grey granite ledges showed through the tall spruce and
pine trees.
But the old man knew he had been sent for.
"Well, Billy Brue,--what's doin'?"
Billy Brue squirmed in the saddle, spat again, as with sudden resolve,
and said:
"Why,--uh--Dan'l J.--_he's_ dead."
The old man repeated the words, dazedly.
"Dan'l J.--_he's_ dead;--why, who else is dead, too?"
Billy Brue's emphasis, cunningly contrived by him to avoid giving
prominence to the word "dead," had suggested this inquiry in the first
moment of stupefaction.
"Nobody else dead--jest Dan'l J.--_he's_ dead."
"Jest Dan'l J.--my boy--my boy Dan'l dead!"

His mighty shape was stricken with a curious rigidity, erected there as
if it were a part of the mountain, flung up of old from the earth's inner
tragedy, confounded, desolate, ancient.
[Illustration: "'_WELL, BILLY BRUE, WHAT'S DOIN_'?'"]
Billy Brue turned from the stony interrogation of his eyes and took a
few steps away, waiting. A little wind sprang up among the higher trees,
the moments passed, and still the great figure stood transfixed in its
curious silence. The leathers creaked as the horse turned. The
messenger, with an air of surveying the canon, stole an anxious