The Freebooters of the Wilderness eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 400 pages of information about The Freebooters of the Wilderness.

The Freebooters of the Wilderness eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 400 pages of information about The Freebooters of the Wilderness.

Were the amethyst portals still ajar to the infinite life; or did the shadow of the Cross, of the time-old ever-recurring crucifixion, darken the vista of a glad future?  The Indian children filed in through the gate of the Mission school.  At the gate, the mother looked up the Saddle back.  She had no time for the pampered luxury of self conscious grief.  She had directed the making of the coffin and the carving of the sandstone and had led the funeral hymn to the end; but now she looked back.  Ashes of roses across the sky, creeping phantom shadows, and in her heart, the sombre presence of the after-desolation which neither faith nor fortitude casts out.  She would go to sleep dull with the woe of it and dream depressed of its loneliness, to waken heavy with the memory.  Then, by and by, would come the peace that the dead send, which is not forgetfulness.  But now she looked back, looked back with the wrench that was the tearing of flesh and spirit asunder.  Above the new-made grave, across those topaz sunset gates, stood the figure of the native woman, shawl thrown from her head reaving the long black hair; and from the hill crest came such a long low cry as might have been a ghost echo of all the age-old world sorrows.  Eleanor felt the quick twitch on her arm.  Without a word, without a tear, the boy’s mother had fainted.

“We ought to have looked out for that,” explained one of the girl teachers from the school.  “We ought to have left Calamity home.  She has always done that since they took her child away.”

“Had she a child?” asked Eleanor.

“Yes; and they took it away when she went insane.”

Eleanor slept with the leaves of the field-book under her pillow that night; but she slept the heavy dreamless sleep of baffled hope.

CHAPTER X

THE HANDY MAN GETS BUSY

If you think the Senator had had anything to do with the terrible events of the Rim Rocks, you are jumping to conclusions and must surely have failed to follow the activities of Mr. Bat Brydges the morning after the tragedy.

The first newspaper office that the handy man visited was owned by the Senator.  That was easy.  Bat went into the reporters’ long room where the typewriters usually clicked.  This morning they were silent.  The men were out on their assignments.  The news editor was taking a message over the telephone.  Bat sat down on the table and waited.  The news editor was thin-faced and nervous and alert and immaculately groomed.  Bat was round-faced and sleepy-eyed—­tortoise-shell eyes—­and all that prevented his suit from looking positively slovenly was that his own ample avoirdupois filled every wrinkle.

The news editor adjusted his glasses to his nose and answered, “Yes, Yes,” impatiently over the telephone.

“It’s a parson,” he explained with an irritable snap of his black eyes towards Bat.

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The Freebooters of the Wilderness from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.