Voice of the Intangible IX

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Chapter IX —Around the Bend When the Rojer outfit crossed Castle Hill for the fall roundup, Alec and Bowse were Ben's full team the force with which :

he expected to do a generous quarter of the work. The dog and horse formed a combination of affability and service which Ben and his father could not be blamed for regarding as a cash asset. They did regard it as such, not only because the bay colt dovetailed into the outfit like a thing made to order, but because these years on the range had taught Bowse to be all help and no hindrance. The four places in the force were filled in the usual way two :

by Ben and his father, one by Jud, and the other one gorged to nausea by Josh Widder. Widder was -no smaller in body nor larger in soul than on all the previous trips to Pagahrit. He boasted sociably when everything catered to his bilious whims, and he sulked and pouted and swore when they didn't. He descended like a vulture on the beef and slickum, and always carried a decaying cargo of food in his congested ventricle. He waddled around the corral, and wallowed around the fire, and grunted, and puffed, worse than any "fat paunch" Shakespeare ever knew. To young Rojer and his dog, if to no one else, Widder seemed a more and more intolerable bag of offense every day. From his high-heeled boots to his bullet head where germs of mischief were incubated, a hundred hateful things inspired Ben with a "mouthfilling oath," and his dog with a menacing growl. Ben's unspoken oath became a hard thing indeed to hold, when he and his father rode over a sand-hill and found their offensive co-laborer smearing his brand on a yearling bull to which

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he had no right whatever. "I thot I'd brand this one to maself," he growled, as they rode up, and young Rojer bit hard on the venomous word in his teeth. His father looked from the reeking brand to Widder's thick-nosed face. "Do you expect to keep my confidence and carry on this sort of thing?" he asked. "You've got more confidence in me than I have in you," snarled the fat man. Fred Rojer moved his lips to speak again, but, closing them firmly, signaled Ben to follow him away. Verily "no creature smarts so little as a fool," for as the welldisciplined father left the thief to his plunder, that impregnable bullet-head swelled with all the exultation of honorable victory. Ben looked back at the gloating smile, and felt the hot blood boil in his very finger-tips. He fairly ached to turn himself and his horse and his dog, like three furies, loose on the grinning bloat, but Fred Rojer's authority, a right secured by fatherly love, could not be ignored. — For all that, Ben expressed his views on the subject views to be modified only by kind words and persuasive measures. "I don't think we ought to endure it," he insisted. "He thinks we're afraid to stand up for our rights, and I'd just like a chance — "But look here, son," interrupted his father. "It wouldn't do. I know he steals calves here every year, and I know he robs our

panniers every trip. I've known it all along. He's robbed us of enough to pay all our debts, if we had it, but this is the first time I've caught him in the act, and now it's only a maverick. We agreed to divide the mavericks between the three of us. He's broken his agreement, of course, but I can't use the law for any- thing but to make a big stink, and we have too much stink. already. We can't protect ourselves by lawful measures, and I tell you, son, we can't afford to resort to unlawful measures, when matters are no worse than they are. I've seen men in this fix before, and whenever they became a law to themselves, they came to grief sooner or later. No, son, we can't afford it. Do you remember what I told you at Peavine?" His father's persuasive words, and the calm influence of the cave, when he went there to think it over, did much to restore Ben to his usual state of passive disgust, and doubtless would have drawn all this new canker from his mind if nothing else had happened. Widder's churlish soul knew neither the kind words of a father, nor the soothing influence of a gracious Intangible. He hated to think he had been caught he ; hated himself for what he had said, and especially because he hadn't the manhood to offer any kind of apology. In camp he was glum and sour as an old saddle-blanket, and on the hills he rode apart just too far to hear or be heard. He sulked while they rode Little Mountain and

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West Bench, and showed no symptoms of improvement when they started for Lake Gulch. Ben didn't know, but he imagined this sulking had driven Jud almost to the limit of his wide-smiled patience. Lake Gulch used to be a jungle throughout most of its length between the lake and the Colorado river, a distance of ten or twelve miles. It was always infested with a breed of cows that pretended to be wild, though they ran only till they could hide in the willows, and there they stopped, quiet as mice, nor moved a peg till a dog or man crawled into their retreat and gave them a kick or a bite. Since a man had to be afoot, if he followed them, clearing the gulch without a clog was a trying and difficult business. These are the reasons why, as a matter of course, young Rojer went on with Bowse to the river, instead of riding the sidecanyons. But how the fat man came to accompany him is not exactly clear, for that same fat-brained man made it a point never tO' go farther than his own selfish ends demanded. However, he went with Ben, and no one wondered at it till afterwards. Few words ever passed between these two, and now, as they rode tandem along the dim trail among the gnarled black-willows, neither spoke nor cared how far he rode from the other. The old wag-tail made it his business to come every so often to young Rojer's stirrup, and look his ever-constant love and trust into his master's face. As to that master, he much prefered the dog, and the dog's face and sentiments, to the great coarse nature churning along on Pancho just ahead. In fact, he wished Josh had decided to take one of his customary naps in the shade up the gulch, and had left himself and Bowse and Alex alone to the task of clearing the canyon. The mouth of Lake Gulch is an imposing sight, and always, even to the accustomed eye, it brings men from the saddle, and holds them in wrapt awe and admiration the massive cliffs tow- :

ering straight to the sky, the broad Colorado reaching from wall to wall, the voice of the water, the echo, the mystery of this deep — chasm cut in the solid rock the human mind is lost in gazing upon them. Technically speaking, Josh Widder's was a human mind, but it is highly probable he lowered his ponderous self from the saddle with feelings quite different to those that brought the l;oy to the ground. However that may be, the two stood on the/bank, their horses behind them, the great pussy man and the slender boy and between them the dog, with one ear cocked up ha. stu- ;

dious contemplation of the boiling current four feet below.; -.The bank rose perpendicular, with no chance of footing at the -^faterline, the stream shot rapidly by, and three rods below, it surged against the smooth cliff.

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Young Rojer would have believed any evil report of the thick-nosed cow-puncher by his side, though he was too charitable and unsuspecting to foresee the trick in time to avoid it. The slightest suspicion would have saved him. He had no suspicion — he harked with the ears of his soul to the great Intangible in the mighty tone of this ancient stream, nor dreamed of lurking danger till a cry from Bowse brought him back from his reverie, in time to see the old dog go over the bank at the toe of Widder's boot. Believing, even as he did that Widder's corpulent form contained not one good intention, the boy could not at once recognize this as malice aforethought he took it only as a rough joke, ;

and looked for the struggling creature to find his way out for;

he had not taken account of the bank and the stream and the cliff, all of which had been traced by the black eyes of the other. Bowse went steadily down, despite his heroic effort, and young Rojer whirled to his saddle and reached for his lasso. Alas it had been tied to some bars up the gulch. Then he called frantically for Widder's rope, but that mallet-headed gentleman had raised himself to the saddle, and started to jog back up the trail. He did deign, however, to grin over his shoulder, "Let the son of a learn to swim." Ben snatched the bridle from Alec's head, and flew down along the bank, hoping to have Bowse catch the reins in his teeth. It was but a gleam of hope, which nothing but desperation would reach after, like a drowning man for a straw, and the brave old dog reached with all his 'might for the two little strap-ends waving just above him on the water. Young Ro'er h:ld the top of the head-stall and watched with breathl ,c s onlseless anxiety, but when the strong current swept his old friend roughly against the cliff, he dropped on the bank and cried with all the grief and rage that boiled within him. On and on he saw the black head going, and just before it turned the bend in the river below, he heard a mournful howl echo among the cliffs. Ben knew of no bar below where the dog might land —that is,

no bar to which he might descend, or from which the old wagtail might climb up. That river glided away into unknown narrows and rapids, all of them enclosed by dizzy walls. The first human dwellings on the banks below were far in the distant wilds of Arizona, and the long and lonely bends intervening would see Bowse drown in the stream or starve miserably to death on a sand-bar. Not at all relieved by his bitter expressions of wrath, Ben took a last look at the place where the old dog disappeared, and turned back up along the bank. Alec had gone, of course, and hot with the quick pulse of anger, young Rojer started up through the jungle afoot. He kept close watch on the bay colt's track, and

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saw where Josh turned out to let him pass. In less than half a mile from the river, a bunch of cows lay hidden in the willows. The thick-nose had done away with the dog, and now he evi- dently intended the boy to do the dog's work, while he rode com- fortably along the trail, driving the boy's horse. Ben waxed poisonous with rage. He wallowed through the tangled masses of jasmine; he slipped down the bank, waded the creek, climbed the bank again on the other side, only to strike another bend and cross back the same way and over and back ;

he went again till he was full of thorns and scratches, and soaked to the knees. Often, when he heard cattle hiding in the tangle of underbrush across the canyon, he would whistle for Bowse before he thought, and his sorrow and indignation would foam up afresh. He wished he had a gun but Josh kept safely ahead ;

out of sight with the two horses. A quarter of a mile below the place appointed for meeting his father, he found Alec tied to a tree, and Widder waiting in the shade on one side, ready to appear behind the herd the same as if he had helped to bring it. Young Rojer felt like shooting away the whole ventral hemisphere of that fat hulk, grinning from old Pancho but he was weak and faint. Moreover, he had ;

firmly resolved to do nothing before consulting his father, for he felt sure he would now be given full license to retaliate. He climbed wearily into the saddle, and placed his blistered feet in the stirrups without a word. The thickest of the jungle lay behind the two as they started silently after the bunch. Fred Rojer saw in a minute that something had gone wrong, and as soon as he found himself with Ben alone, he asked what it was. Ben told it all over, getting more angry as he recalled each exasperating feature of the affair. He saw the fire of indignation blaze in his father's kind eyes, yet it burned as a flame secured by a fire-box from scorching the reason out of any word, nor did it leap beyond its bounds when young Rojer ended his speech by saying: "There are times when patience ain't a virtue at all, an' this is one of them times. I think we ought to run 'im

out of camp with a shot-gun." "Well, he is thoroughly contemptible," agreed the father, "but that's no reason we should do anything rash. If he were a man of any honor or intelligence, we might reason with him. We can't do that — his mind is dwarfed. As to driving him away, I feel like it but that won't do. ; You know that in this new country I've worked hard for peace, and I've never come to blows with white man or Indian. After preaching good-will so long in meeting, I couldn't afford to spoil it all now on the spur of the moment." "Then let me drive 'im away. You'll think more of me, and I'll think more of myself, if I just hold 'im up and make 'im hit

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the trail for Clay Hill. We'd be doing- right to clear the atmosphere of such an element." Ben had made sure that this prize offense would not be winked at, and he clung to the hope of revenge. "It wouldn't do, son," affirmed Fred Rojer, kindly, yet firmly, "the only argument to move him is a club, or a knife, or a gun, — and we can't afford to deal in that sort of thing at all. No we must show our wisdom. The Lord allows us to meet conditions of this kind, for the express purpose of seeing whether we have wisdom. I've been tied up with that man for seven or eight years, and at first I thought I'd be compelled to give up my peace policy and carry a gun, but I've come this far without doing anything rash, and I'd hate now to spoil that record. I'd hate just as bad to see you spoil it, for I've hoped and expected that you'd love me and my ways well enough to adopt them, and be a factor for peace in this country after I pass on. Josh has habits that I might have, if he hadn't shown me how contemptible they are, and I've learned more patience from him than any one person. When I think of how much worth those lessons are to me, and how Josh is going down all the time, I think I ought to pity him and not push him lower. You'll see the time when he hasn't a friend, his stolen property will slip out of his hands like a fish." "Look at that," and young Rojer held out his scratched and bleeding hands, and his water-soaked boot, from which the overalls had been torn away, while the moisture of new anger rose up in his eyes, "and my feet are blistered from heel to toe. Isn't that, on top of all the rest, worth any notice at all?" he half pleaded and half demanded. "Son, that's worth all reasonable notice," replied Fred Rojer, the parental sympathy beaming in his face, "your sore hands and feet and aching muscles pain me as they pain you. Don't be angry, son. Because you've acted a man so far and given me cause to be proud, is no reason that I should consent for you to take an opposite course and make me ashamed. What you want to do, is what Josh or any weakling would want to do, and would do. It is easy, and would be no credit to you, and do no good to anyone. The thing I want you to do is more difficult, and more in keeping with the high order of manhood I want you to reach. Since you were a little helpless babe, I have loved you as part of my own self, and hoped you would grow up to be a man — — not a thing a real man." "Well, Pa, what is a man?" young Rojer enquired, somewhat more mildly. "Won't a man fight when he's had insult and injury straight along a hundred times?" And then, getting a brilliant idea which he felt must surely win the case, "Wasn't it a man that said, 'I repeat it, sir, we must fight?' If he wasn't a real man,

then where do we find 'em?"

564 [ M PR O V E M E N T E R A "Now, son," and Fred Rojer took full account of Ben's beliefthat the matter was settled, "you've asked a question, and I'm afraid you're not in a fit humor to hear the answer." They came to a full stop at the mouth of a fork, up which Jud's track followed some cows. Josh nursed his poison thoughts off ahead or behind, and probably drew comfort from his mental picture of a broken-hearted dog howling in desperation on some desolate bar of sand. "Well, I want to hear it, anyway," pursued Ben, with confidence and fear in his voice. The father leaned on his saddle-horn and stared at the tracks in the sand. "Who said, 'My kingdom is not of this world, else would my servants fight?'' He straightened up and made sure that Ben recognized the quotation. "I've macl~ a close study of manhood, and I'm holding up for you the very highest type. So far you have been with me, meeting the very opposite influence, and so far you've followed me, and made my choice your choice. But now you want to turn squarely around and choose the very course Josh would choose. You hate him, and you love me. He's trying by the power of hate, to get you to do wrong and I'm ;

trying by the power of love to get you to do right. Now, if your hatred for him is stronger than your love for me, you'll forsake my way of peace and follow his way of misery. By doing that, — you admit that he has stepped between us that he has more influence with you than I have, that he is the one to frame your desires, and your feelings and your life. In my love I offer what I know to be good. In his hatred he offers the vile things of his vile nature. Now, which are you going to take ?" Those kind eyes looked straight at Ben, and from somewhere behind them a great, warm, fatherly soul seemed t~> say, "Oh. my son! my son!" It was not a sound that struck the ear, yet Ben heard it, and soul spoke to soul. For from those parted, silent lips, and wide-open, boyish eyes, there went out a firm and g-lad response. The father grasped it all in thankful silence, and Jud was but a rod away. As they drove on up the gulch, young Rojer looked again and again at the slightly stooped shoulders of his father. He noticed a trace of gray in the beard and on the temoles. He saw the calloused hands and the fingers stiffened with honest toil. Bigger than all else, he saw the soul that prayed for him and loved him. He recalled the many gross indignities borne by that man with good grace, and the high place he held in the confidence and esteem of good men. "But who loves Josh?" he reflected. "I'm mighty sure I don't. Everybody but Pa hates him, and if I'm really to the place of choosing between the two of 'em, I'll take Pa a hundred times over and let Josh rot."

The branding and supper-time passed, and young Rojer

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crawled into bed fully believing that a calamity overhung- their thick-nosed co-laborer. He had small idea, however, of how or when that punishment would come, or what it would be. Pushing the old wagtail over the bank was, to Ben's impulsive fifteen years, the climax to a long list of offenses. lie did not appreciate the worth of the stolen calves, for the need of which his father had lain awake many times under that same tree. At a late hour Ben sat up in bed to nfake sure that the comfortable snores came from the most bloated bed in camp, and sank back on his sleepless pillow. If he dozed, he saw a lost dog crying on a sand-bar, and heard a mournful wail echo up the great walls of the Colorado. Four days after riding Lake Gulch, the round-up drove out over the rocks and sand, packs, horses, cow-bells, a hundred and fifty head of steers, and started across the desert stretch for Castle Wash, about seven o'clock in the morning. Widder still sulked. He loomed sullenly up behind the herd like a dangerous abcess on the outfit, while the pronounced alteration in Jud's wide-mouthed smile declared emphatically that these sulks were growing stale and nauseating to him. The day was a hard one. The steers, being so near their accustomed haunts, seemed determined to scatter in every direction, making it necessary for each horseman to ride at a lively gait over the hot sand and rock all day long. The dinner ceremony consisted only of pulling a sack of bread and "jerky" (jerked beef) from one of the packs, and leaving each man to appease his gnawing hunger while he rode on the "lope" around the restless herd. The salt "jerky" aggravated an already raging thirst, and the canteen ran dry, with Greenwater ten miles away. The steers — wanted to travel they wanted to travel straight back to the Pagahrit, and they moved desperately slow and reluctantly in the opposite direction. When the blessed cool of evening spread over the scorched sand-hills, the nearest water was still six miles ahead. To drive those steers on in the darkness, would be risking a big: drop in their number, to say nothing of the profound weariness it would entail on men and horses already dead tired and burning with thirst. Night-herding would call for more nerve-power and horseflesh than the outfit could afford, for what with the thirst of the weaker cattle, and the vinegar of the stronger ones, and the intolerable home-sickness of the whole bawling bunch, they could keep four men on the keen jump all night. So it was decided to shove them into a little box-canyon off over the hills to the right, and guard the mouth of that canyon till morning. At the very entrance to this natural corral, the whoH herd mutinied.They wouldn't move a peg. ideas Then Tosh was attacked with one of those brilliant

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common to his plethoric mind. He said, "Turn 'em loose up the wash an' hunt 'em tomorrow." Everybody knew that would be a sure way of scattering the steers- from Castle Hill to the Idols before morning," but Widder insisted and spluttered and swore in his whining, thick-nosed wav. till the other three went on the "lope" to collect the herd, and

shove it into the canyon. Then the fat man decided that his own ponderous self, along* with the herd, would form an overwhelming majority, and he joined the mutiny. He stopped old Pancho in such a position as to frighten the cattle from the mouth of the can von, and there he leaned his "fat paunch" on the saddle-horn and watched the others work. "We can't git 'em in no way," h-3 growled, "an' I ain't goin' to waste no horse-flesh on no such fool enterprise." Tt was not enough that he should pilfer the camp and plunder the range, but he must have his own sweet, thick-nosed will all the day long, or sulk and curse till he got it. And he fully expected to get it, and to wag the outfit like a dog wags its tail, for he had done it many times before. Some thick knot rose up in Jud's heavy jaw, and the crowfeet by his eyes seemed somehow to bristle with talons, but after one fierce look, he "loped" back around the herd, and tried to head them for the gulch. When some of the leaders would have gone, but for Pancho, he of the buckskin shirt rode into the bunch, and by the strength of his horse and the heavy end of his lariat, put ten head beyond the narrow entrance. All ten came promptly back, however, as soon as he had turned away. "I told ye ye. couldn't do nothin'," Josh gloated, his face full of satisfaction at Jud's failure. "Ye'll be compelled to take my advice an' turn 'em loose." At that particular second the buckskin fringe was passing six feet from Pancho's nose, and all at once it waved anew as by an electric shock. Jud yanked his branding-iron from under his right fender, and descended on the fat hulk like a hawk on a sparrow. He planted three ringing biffs on the northeast corner of Widder's dodging countenance, and a half-dozen resounding thumps on the cross of his suspenders. When the fat man's spurs struck Pancho, the fringe and branding-iron followed close up. The wide hat flew off and out of the mix-up, leaving Widder's bald head exposed to the bark-peeling licks. At this juncture Ben guarded the bunch alone, for Fred Rojer became alarmed for the safety of the few bilious brains under the iron, and "loped" away to plead their cause before the buckskin shirt. He rounded them up before they got out of Ben's hearing, and effected a temporary stay of hostilities. "I'll tell ye, Mr. Rojer," puffed Jud, with heavy-jawed firm-

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ness, "if he'll go back to the herd and behave like a man, it'll be !" all right. If 'e won't, I'll scatter 'im all over this sand Widder's mallet head was somewhat more susceptible than usual to impressions. He knew Jud "was there with the goods" he felt it keenly and when the buckskin fringe began to bristle ;

again, and turned from Fred Rojer to his own smarting, bleeding self and demanded "Are ye goin' to get busy ?" "Yes," sniv- :

eled the fat man, and peace alighted again on the Pagahrit round-up. In spite of young Rojer's love for his father, and his father's ways of peace, he couldn't quite suppress a feeling of genuine satisfaction when he saw the blue lumps and bloody cuts on Widder's globe-like head, and he rejoiced all the more when he saw what a wholesome effect they had on the thick-nosed disposition. The herd was crowded into and held in the box-canyon, the horses driven to Greenwater, and a canteen of water brought back, and the homeward drive became a howling success. (to be continued)

Elder Ernest A. Hoare, secretary Australian mission, Sydney, Australia, December 16: "The New South Wales annual conference convened December 15, 1912, in which a large number of elders partici- II

pated. During the year 1912, the following work was done as per statis- tics rendered: The el-

ders spent 2,256 hours in tracting; visited 22,794 families; spent 1,975 hours in gospel conver- sations; distributed 62,1 14 tracts, 39 Church works, and 751 other books. They held 342 meet-

ings, baptized 15 and blessed 10 children. This work was done by seven elders. Following the regular sessions of the conference a Charles H. Hyde Priesthood meeting was held at which President instructions, urging the elders to labor gave some very pertinent President and Mrs. Hyde arduously to bring wanderers into the fold." the front row, the others being are the second and third from the left in

the seven elders referred to.

The Hawaiian Mission Headquarters BY J. BRYAN BARTON

Every tourist and traveler who visits the Hawaiian Islands usually devotes the greater part of his sight-seeing to the city of Ilonolulu and to the volcanoes, both active and extinct, which are to be found in various places upon the islands. As a result, readers frequently find vivid descriptions of the surpassing beauty of Honolulu and of the wonders of the active volcano Kilauea, upon the island of Hawaii which descriptions, for the most ;

Photo by II. W. Waymsnt. A FIELD OF SUGAR CANE IN BLOSSOM

part, truthfully portray the beauty and grandeur of these noted places. But the placs of the greatest interest, perhaps, to Latter-day Saints, and the place about which little is written, is Laie, the Hawaiian mission-headquarters. Laie is of unusual interest because of the uncommon nature of the work being done there by our missionaries. Laie. then the Dougherty ranch, was chosen as a fit gatheringplace for the Saints, in 1864, by Joseph F. Smith. W. W. Cluft and Alma L. Smith, who reported to President Brigham Young. He sent Francis A. Hammond, George Nebeker, Alfred Randall and Phillip Pugsley to investigate. They purchased the ranch for $30.C00, on time. For a number of years it was conducted as