Part 1 (1/2)
The Land of Frozen Suns.
by Bertrand W. Sinclair.
CHAPTER I-THE GENESIS OF TROUBLE
Who was it, I wonder, made that sagacious remark about the road to h.e.l.l being paved with good intentions? He might have added an amendment to the effect that there's always a plentiful supply of material for that much travelled highway. We all contribute, more or less. I know I have done so. And so did my people before me. My father's intentions were good, but he didn't live long enough to carry them out. If he hadn't fallen a victim to an inborn streak of recklessness, a habit of taking chances,-well, I can't say just how things would have panned out. I'm not fatalist enough to believe that we crawl or run or soar through our allotted span of years according to some prearranged scheme which we are powerless to modify. Oh, no! It's highly probable, however, that if my father and mother had lived I should have gone into some commercial pursuit or taken up one of the professions. Either way, I should likely have pegged along in an uneventful sort of way to the end of the chapter-lots of men do. Not that I would have taken with enthusiasm to chasing the nimble dollar for the pure love of catching it, but because I was slated for something of the sort, and as the twig is bent so is the tree inclined; a man can't sit down and twiddle his thumbs and refuse to perform any useful act, because there is no glory in it. The heroic age has gone a-glimmering down the corridors of time.
As it happened, my feet were set in other paths by force of circ.u.mstances. Only for that the sage-brush country, the very place where I was born might have remained a terra incognita. I should always have felt, though, that I'd missed something, for I was ushered into this vale of tears at the Summer ranch on the Red River of the South.
Sumner _here_ hadn't developed into a cow monarch those days, but he was on the way. My earliest impressions were all of log and 'dobe buildings, _of long-horned cattle_, of wild, s.h.a.ggy-maned horses, and of wilder men who rode the one and drove the other in masterly fas.h.i.+on. For landscape there was rolling prairie, and more rolling prairie beyond; and here and there the eternal brown of it was broken by gray sage-grown flats and stretches of greasewood-as if Nature had made a feeble effort to break the monotony. I knew only this until I was big enough to tease for a pony. I cannot remember seeing a town when I was small. The world to me was a place of great plains, very still, and hot, and dry, a huddle of cabins, and corrals, and a little way to the south Red River slinking over its quicksands-except in time of storm; then it raged.
So that when my father bundled mother and myself off to a place called St. Louis, where great squadrons of houses stood in geometrical arrangement over a vast area, I had already begun to look upon things with the eyes of cattleland. I recollect that when we were settled in a roomy, old-fas.h.i.+oned house I cried because my mother would not let me go out to the corral and play.
”There are no corrals in a city, dear,” she explained-and I cried the harder. I could conceive of no joy in a place where I could not go out to the corrals and have some brown-faced cowpuncher hoist me up on a gentle horse and let me hold the reins while the pony moved sedately about.
Left to himself, I think my father would have made a cowman of me, but mother had known the range when it was a place to try the nerves of strong men, and she hated it. I didn't know till I was nearly grown that she had made dad promise when I was born that if the cattle made money for us, I should never know the plains. She came of an old Southern family, and her life had been a sheltered one till she met and married Jack Sumner. And she would have had me walk in pleasant places, as the men of her family had done-doctors, lawyers, planters, and such. The life was too hard, too much of an elemental struggle, she said-and I was to be saved some of the knocks that my dad had taken in the struggling years. Poor mother mine-her son was the son of his father, I'm afraid.
But Sumner _pere_ made good on his promise when the Sumner herds fattened his bank account sufficiently; and I gyrated through school, with college and a yet-to-be-determined career looming on the horizon.
So my childish memories of the great open, that lies naked to the sun-glare and the chilling breath of the _northers_ year on year, grew fainter and more like something of which I had dreamed. Dad would come home occasionally, stay a day or two, perhaps a week, sometimes even a month; but my mother never went west of the Mississippi-nor did I. I often plagued them to let me go to the ranch during vacation, but they evidently considered it best to keep me away from the round-ups and horse-breaking and such, till I was old enough to see that there was another side to the life besides the suns.h.i.+ny, carefree one that makes an irresistible appeal to a youngster.
And then, just a week after my twentieth birthday, my dad, slow-voiced, easy-going old Jack Sumner rode his horse into the smiling Red and drowned under the eyes of twenty men.
I was sitting on our front steps grouching about the heat when the messenger brushed by me with the telegram in his hand. Mother signed for it, and he ran down the steps whistling, and went about his business.
There was no sound within. I had no hint of trouble, till a maid screamed. Then, I rushed in. Mother was drooping over the arm of a Morris chair, and the bit of yellow paper lay on the rug where it had fluttered from her hand. I carried her to a couch, and called a doctor.
But he could do nothing. Her heart was weak, he said, and might have stopped any time; the shock had merely hastened her end.
I'm going to pa.s.s lightly over the week that followed. I was just a kid, remember, and I took it pretty hard. It was my first speaking acquaintance with death. A few of my mother's people came, and when it was over with I went to Virginia with an uncle, a kindly, absent-minded, middle-aged bachelor. But I couldn't settle down. For a week or ten days I fidgeted about the sleepy Southern village, and then I bade my uncle an abrupt good-bye and started for St. Louis. Little as I knew of business and legal matters I was aware that now the Sumner herds and ranches were mine, and I had a hankering to know where I stood. Except that there was a ranch and cattle in Texas I knew nothing of my father's business. It didn't even occur to me, at first, that I was a minor and consequently devoid of power to transact any business of importance. I knew that certain property was rightfully mine, and that was all.
Once in St. Louis, however, I began to get the proper focus on my material interests. It occurred to me that Sumner _pere_ had done more or less business with a certain bank, a private concern engineered by two ultra-conservative citizens named Bolton and Kerr. I hunted them up, thinking that they would likely be able to tell me just what I needed to know. And it happened that by luck I came in the nick of time. A clerk took in my card, and returned immediately for me. I found the senior member, wrapping the bit of pasteboard around his forefinger when I was ushered in. We shook hands, and he motioned to a chair. I asked for information, and I got it, straight from the shoulder. Bolton was very economical in the use of words.
”Yes, I knew your father well. There is a sum of money to his account in the bank. He died intestate,” he told me bluntly. ”In view of a communication I have just received, you will have little to do with any property until you are of age. The estate is now in the hands of an administrator-appointed by a Texas court. The court will probably order that you be allowed a certain monthly sum until your majority.”
”I see,” said I thoughtfully; I hadn't considered that phase of it, although in a hazy way I knew something of the regular procedure. ”Will our place here be managed by this administrator?”
”Very likely,” Bolton returned. ”He has served us with a court order for the estate funds now in our hands. But you are legally ent.i.tled to the use and occupancy of the family residence until such time as the estate is appraised and the inventory returned. After that the administrator has discretionary power; he can make any disposition of the property, meanwhile making provision for your support.”
”It seems to me,” I hazarded, ”that some relative should have been appointed.”
”Exactly,” Bolton nodded. ”They made no move, though. And this Texas person acted at once: I dare say it's all right. However, you're a minor. Better have some responsible person appointed your guardian. Then if there's any mismanagement, you can take court action to have it remedied. Frankly, I don't like the look of this haste to administer.
May be all right; may be all wrong.”
”See here,” I burst out impulsively, for I had taken a sudden liking to this short-spoken individual who talked to me with one foot on a desk and a half-smoked cigar tucked in the corner of his mouth, ”what's the matter with you becoming my guardian? None of my people seem to have thought of it. I'm sure we'd get along all right. It would be a mere matter of form, anyway.”
He smiled. My naive way of saddling myself upon him, along with a lot of possible responsibilities was doubtless amusing to a hard-headed financier like Bolton. I saw nothing out of the way in such an arrangement at the time. It struck me as a splendid idea, in fact. But he made allowance for my juvenile point of view. s.h.i.+fting his cigar to the other corner of his mouth he surveyed me critically for a few seconds, crinkling his black brows thoughtfully.
”I'll do it,” he finally a.s.sented. ”The position ought to be a sinecure.
Run in to-morrow morning at ten-thirty, and we'll step around to the courthouse and have the thing legally executed. You're staying at the old place, I suppose?”
”I'm going to,” I replied. ”I haven't been at the house; I came straight here from the train.”