Collected Works of Zane Grey, page 1282
During that ride Huett’s love and pride of country welled up again. The impressive Government buildings, the Capitol, the White House, the Soldiers’ Monument filled him with awe and delight. His sons were fighting for what they represented.
Once more on his feet in the crowds, Huett came down to earth. Accosted by beggars, hawk-eyed men, and suave strangers who offered to pilot him around, Huett came to see with chagrin that he was as much of a tenderfoot as any one of them would have been in his country. Then the loss of his watch awakened him to another aspect of the great city. He buttoned his wallet inside his vest and resolved to have his eyes about him.
About mid-afternoon Huett found the Army Building. It was immense. Men in uniform and civilian dress buzzed in and out like bees. Cars whizzed by. Overhead, airplanes droned about like monstrous bees. Despite Huett’s grim strength, he had his first glimmering of the futility of his errand there. Uniformed attendants listened to him courteously and put him off with excuses. At length he was forced to leave the building without having seen a single army official.
Outside, in the rush of the closing hour, the traffic astonished and alienated Huett. A city was no place for him. And it seemed to him that across a dirty, snow-piled park he passed there came a vision of his clean, sweet, silent Arizona forest. A sick longing such as he had never before experienced overwhelmed him. What was he doing there, just a miserable outsider among this swarm of grabbing humanity? It was long after dark when Huett, after getting lost twice, found his hotel. The hard pavements made his legs weak, he found his nostrils clogged with dirt, and he marvelled that people could breathe and live in such an atmosphere. Night was as hideous to him as day had been: the roar of automobiles and electric cars murdered sleep.
For days Huett haunted the Army Building. He had patience and stubbornness. He resented being taken for a crank, for an old geezer from the West, for a lunatic who raved about thirty thousand head of cattle. But such was Huett’s persistence that at last he was ushered through one office after another into the presence of some army official connected with the commissary department.
“My name is Logan Huett,” replied Huett, in answer to a curt query as to what was his business. “I’m a cattleman from Flagg, Arizona, I sold thirty thousand head of cattle to your buyer, named Mitchell. He cheated me out of that money.”
“How did he cheat you?” asked the official.
“I asked for cash. He got me to sign the receipt, had it witnessed by his man Caddell, then gave me a package of bogus money.”
“Well, Mr. Huett, I can do nothing for you. It will be necessary for you to take court action against the Government and prove your claim. Good day, sir.”
Huett went out, a slow fire of wrath burning deep within him. He began to appreciate what a wall obstructed him in his just hopes and demands. Then, in reading over Little’s instructions, he found that he had forgotten an important one — to call on the congressman from Arizona. At once Huett set out up that mission. He was told that Senator Spellman had left the city, during the adjournment of Congress, and would not be back for some weeks.
Thus baffled at every turn, Huett set out to put his case in the hands of a lawyer. Little’s advice in this regard was to engage some reliable lawyer recommended by Spellman. Upon inquiry Huett discovered that Washington was full of lawyers of every degree. He took the bull by the horns, making a blind choice of counsel.
A retainer’s fee of five thousand dollars was asked. Huett could not pay that, unless his money was recovered. The deal was compromised on half that sum. Huett left the office of the high-sounding firm, Highgate and Stanfield, cheered by a promise to recover his money soon, and worried over the fact that his bank account in Flagg had dwindled to less than two thousand dollars.
Then began a test of Huett’s patience. He had to wait. And while waiting he read the war news, walked the streets, sat on park benches. Only his dogged indomitable spirit sustained him.
Huett received disturbing letters from Lucinda and Barbara. His wife begged him to come home, without giving any reason, and Barbara wrote pitifully that they had not had any word from the boys in over a month.
Spring came early in Washington, D.C. Huett sat on a park bench, listening to the sparrows, feeling the welcome warmth of the sun, watching the slow green tinge the grass and trees.
Every day he called at his lawyer’s office to inquire if his suit had begun. The last time he distinctly heard himself announced as “that farmer from Arizona,” and when an answer was brought to him by the girl that his suit would be delayed until September, then Huett became a victim of helpless rage and bewilderment. September! If he stayed in Washington that long he would go crazy. Still — his money — his fortune — payment for his thirty thousand cattle and his years of toil — he could not abandon that.
Then Senator Spellman returned. He received Huett warmly. He was western; he had been a cattleman himself; he heard Huett’s long story with strong feeling, at the conclusion of which he emitted some genuine Arizona range profanity.
“Huett, I regret to say your case is hopeless. Absolutely hopeless,” he went on. “Little should have made that clear to you. He has not the slightest doubt that you have been robbed. Bilked!...Nor have I. The whole country is rampant with graft and crooked work. Your case is one in a thousand. According to these buyers, you signed for the cash. You received it, and were seen drinking in an Arizona joint. You’d stand no chance in court.”
“I’ve started a suit already,” replied Huett, heavily. “Paid two thousand five hundred as a fee.”
“My word! Huett, you sure are a Western lamb among Eastern wolves. Who gipped you out of that much money?”
“Gipped?”
“Yes. You’re a sucker. Washington is full of shyster lawyers. It’s a hundred to one you fell into the hands of some of them. Who?”
“Highgate and Stanfield. Here’s their card. One of them — I don’t know which — guaranteed recovery of my money. I’ve been waiting weeks. Yesterday I was told the suit had been delayed until September.”
“Humph,” grunted the Senator, and taking the card, he resorted to the telephone. He called one number after another. Huett did not listen. He was too sick and dazed to listen. Finally Senator Spellman hung up the receiver and took up his cigar.
“That firm is not rated among Washington’s reliable lawyers. And no suit has been registered under your name. You’ve been duped again.”
“Ahuh...I’d begun to feel a hunch.”
“Huett, this is a hell of a break. It’d kill most men. But you’re a Westerner. One of Arizona’s old hard pioneers! It won’t kill you. It’s just another knock — the toughest of your life, sure. But it involves only loss of cattle. That’s nothing to an Arizona range man. Go back to your range and your cows. Cattle prices will climb sky-high. A few good seasons of rain and grass — and you’re jake, old-timer!”
After the blow fell, Huett felt calm and strange. “Luce was right,” he soliloquized, as he sat down on a park bench. “We’re ruined.”
“Boss, could you stake me to a nickel?” came in an oily voice from a man beside him. Logan turned to see a ragged tramp sitting there. His hard blue eyes expressed a humorous curiosity.
“Nickel? How much’s that?” asked Huett, fingering in his vest pocket.
“Five cents. But if you don’t happen to have it I’ll take a dime.”
“Two-bits. Smallest I’ve got, friend,” replied Huett, handing the beggar a quarter.
“Thanks. Two-bits, eh?...Then you’re from the West?” he returned, curiously.
“Arizona.”
“You’re kinder than you look, mister. Are you sick or in trouble?”
“Wal, so help me Gawd!” exclaimed Huett. “Somebody down here has seen that at last!...Here’s a dollar, my friend. If you come to Arizona I’ll give you a job.”
“I’ll bet you would at that...What’s ailing you, Mister?”
But Logan had left.
He went back to his hotel, beginning a desperate fight against his stubborn bulldog desire to stay in Washington and never give up his demand for that money owed him. There was a telegram on the floor of his room just inside the door. He took it to the window, the better to see, and tore it open. The message was from Flagg and read:
“GEORGE AND GRANT KILLED IN ACTION ABE MISSING. LUCINDA.”
Huett watched the dark hours pale and the dawn break with soft rosy greyness behind the grand spire of the Soldiers’ Monument.
He hated the light of day. Beaten down, crushed by an unexpected blow that dwarfed the sum of all his life’s calamities, he had paced the endless black hours away at last to sink on a park bench, realizing that as he had forsaken God in his wild youth, now God had forsaken him in his troubled age.
The flush of sunrise, clear and bright with spring radiance, grew like the illumination of his mind.
In the very beginning of that Western range career he had started with a driving passion, a single selfish purpose to which all else was subservient. He had sacrificed his wife, his sons, and Barbara. This tragedy, this devastation of his life in one crushing blow, must have been just punishment, just retribution. He confessed it with anguish, and an exceeding bitterness flooded his soul.
That noble spire of stone, sunrise-flushed, rising sheer against the rosy sky; an imperishable monument of honour to a nation’s dead — how empty and futile its meaning to Logan Huett in that hour? It was a symbol of the great Government. Of the man of zealots, of patriots like himself, blinded by the leaders of powerful cliques and parties, who played politics as Westerners played poker, who fostered war because their war lords wanted war. Huett saw that the men who furnished the money to waste and the young men for gun-fodder were patriotic fools like himself. These boys had flashed up like fire, virile, trenchant, wonderful, imbued with the glory of fighting for their country. They had been misled. War in modern times held no glory for the boys who faced the firing line.
All these weeks in Washington, watching, listening, reading, had been working imperceptibly on Huett’s mind, summing up incredible and bewildering changes in his thoughts that did not clarify until this rending bolt of death.
His strong heart broke.
The scene before his eyes strangely altered. The lofty, shiny shaft, the faint tinge of foliage, the wide park and the gleam of water, the early cats and pedestrians that had begun to appear — these all faded. And in their place shone a stonewalled, pine-rimmed canyon, with winding ribbon of stream and herds of browsing cattle, and a grey, moss-roofed log cabin nestling on the wooded bench, all dim and unreal like the remembered scenes of a dream.
Nevertheless it was home. And his pang of agony was appalling. He should have lived for his family, and not for cattle. His great ambition had been a blunder. His greed had broken him. He had been clubbed down in the prime of his marvellous physical manhood. And as his vision sharpened he saw three dirty-faced, ragged little boys playing beside the brook. And he cried out in his soul: Oh, my sons, my sons! Would God I had died for you! Oh, my sons, my sons!
Huett had telegraphed his wife the day he would arrive in Flagg, which no doubt accounted for his being met at the train by Al Doyle, Holbert, Hardy, and other friends. But Lucinda did not come. No observer could have discerned from their greeting that they thought the world had come to an end for Logan Huett. Arizonians took hard knocks as incidents of range experience. They did not mention the loss of Huett’s three sons.
“Old-timer, how’d you make out in Washington?” asked Al, hopefully.
“No good, Al,” replied Huett, wearily. “Senator Spellman said my case against the Government was useless. When I signed that receipt and took that package I ruined myself...Some shyster lawyer down there said he could recover my money, and he fleeced me out of twenty-five hundred.”
“By God, Logan, I was agin thet trip East,” said Holbert glumly.
“It’s over — and I’m done,” said Logan, aware of their close scrutiny of his face.
“Wal, you reckon so now,” returned Doyle, sagely wagging his grey head, “but a cowman who has bucked the Tonto for thirty years gets habits that can’t be changed overnight.”
“How are my women-folk?” asked Huett.
“Lucinda shows surprisin’ strength. She must have known it was comin’. But I heah Barbara took it bad.”
“Aghh!” grunted Huett, clearing his throat, and moved to leave the platform. Doyle and Holbert walked up street with him.
“Logan, what you reckon about this?” queried Holbert. “None of us, an’ shore not one of the cattle-buyers, had the prices of beef on the hoof figgered. Cattle are up to forty dollars a haid, an’ goin’ up.”
“What did I say?” exclaimed Huett, stung out of his apathy. “I had it figured. I wanted to hold on for another year. My Gawd, if I only had!”
“Too late. But heh’s somethin’. Cattle prices will not go down for years.”
“Ha! Too late for me, in more ways than one.”
“Aw no! Why, Logan, you’re far younger’n me, an’ I’m hangin’ on,” said Holbert, earnestly. “You know the cattle game. Twenty-five years ago I was rich. Then I was poor for twenty years. Now with these high prices an’ a growin’ herd I’m sittin’ pretty.”
“Quien sabe, Logan?” added Al. “You can never tell. But I reckon how cattle gossip makes you sick. So we’ll cut it.”
“Thanks, Al. There are some words I never want to hear again, so long as I live. They are cattle, money, Government, war.”
“Wal, then, you’ll have to get back into the woods again. For this burg is full of war news. It’s been hard hit, Logan...Last Tonto cowboy to go was Jack Campbell. He crawled up on a nest-hole of machine-guns, an’ threw a bomb in on the Boches, just as they riddled him. That was jack’s finish. We’re all forgettin’ what once was his bad name.”
“Well we may!” sighed Huett.
At the gate of Huett’s yard Al and Holbert bade him good day and hurried away. Logan went in slowly, like a man walking a narrow log over a deep gulch, and who dreaded the opposite side. He mounted the porch, and as he hesitated, wiping his clammy face, the door opened to disclose Lucinda.
“Luce!” he cried, with tremendous relief and gladness that she did not look as he expected. And he staggered in, dropping his bag to reach for her. Lucinda closed the door and then took him in her arms.
“Poor old darling Logan!” she murmured, and held him close and kissed him and wept over him.
“Wife,” he replied, huskily, as he held her away to gaze into her face. It was like marble, thinner, showing traces of havoc, sad and marvellously strong. Huett found home, love, Understanding, mother, in her deep, dark eyes. “I — I don’t know just how I expected to see you, but not like this.”
“Logan dear, I always knew. It was a relief of torture when the news came...No other word about Abe. Missing. That was all.”
“Missing! What does it mean?”
“Almost hopeless. They say it means a soldier might be blown to bits, or buried in a trench, or lost in a river.”
“Ah!...No chance of having been made a prisoner?”
“In that case we’d have known long since.”
“Where’s Barbara? — Al said it went bad with her.”
“Wait, dear, a little...It’s hard to tell.”
Logan sat down heavily and averted his eyes from Lucinda’s intense and pitiful gaze. She came close and pressed his head against her. “I’m so glad you’re back,” she said. “There is something serious to talk over...Would you take us back to Sycamore?”
A keen blade could not have made Logan wince more violently. How terribly the question hurt! But Logan let it sink in before he asked her why.
“There are a number of reasons. We can earn our living there. We’ll be away from this hot-pressed war news day and night...Back in our quiet canyon!...I can garden again. And you can farm. It’s not so cold down there. We nearly froze here...I think Barbara might get better there. And the baby would thrive.”
“Baby!”
“Yes. Barbara’s baby. A lovely boy like Abe. But not so dark, and he has Barbara’s eyes.”
“Ah. I forgot about Bab. I forgot...Abe’s boy! Well, now, isn’t that just fine?...Luce, it makes me a grandfather.”
“Logan, I’m afraid it was high time...Will you take us back?”
“Sure I will, Lucinda,” returned Huett, his mind halting ponderingly at practical ideas. “It’s a good idea. We got to stay somewhere...Mebbe it wouldn’t hurt for long — going back to Sycamore...Let’s see. Hardy has my wagon. My horses are running in Doyle’s pasture. We can pack the stuff here that’s ours. And buy what we need along with supplies...Supplies! My Gawd, what does that make you think of, Luce?...How about money?”
“I have over a thousand of what you left me.”
Huett took out his cheque book and looked at his balance. “I’ve about the same. Ha! That’s a fortune for us homesteaders. When shall we — —”
A piercingly sweet, droning little song interrupted Huett. “Is that — the new baby?” he whispered, with a thrill.
“No, dear. That is Barbara. She sings a good deal of the time...You see — she has lost her mind!”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
LUCINDA WAS NO less shocked at Logan’s aberration of mind than at his changed appearance. He appeared a ghost of his old stalwart, virile, giant self. And he forgot even the errands she sent him on. When he came home from down town she smelled liquor on his breath. She realized then, in deep alarm, that Logan had cracked. All his life he had leaned too far over on one side; now in this major catastrophe of his life he had toppled over the other way to collapse.
