Voice of the Intangible: The First Echoes

The Colorado River, ffestern Boundary, San Juan Co.

Chapter XVII — The First Echoes

The midwinter trip, on which Ben had gone only twice be- fore, now became his responsibility. He started with heavy packs of Navajo corn, about the nineteenth of January, expecting to meet Jud at Slickhorn, a place two days distant on the lower trail to Pagahrit.

The sandhills, though bearing but an inch of snow, had never looked so bleak and desolate before, and never before had Ben started over them to travel so far alone. The distant west, towards the junction of the two rivers, had a dreary expression, and the blue cold mist of winter rested on the whole length of jagged horizon.

No dog followed the outfit, and young Rojer's intimate horse- friends being gone, there was neither human nor brute ear to hear his lonesome emotions longing for 'expression. Buck was the sole veteran of the old force ; Snip and Ready had been bought the previous summer, and Jings was hardly more than a broncho. Of course, any one or all of these last three might creep into his affections as Alec and Flossy had done, but now they were strange, they knew no familiar tom-boy tricks, or horse-expres- sions of love; they simply jogged prosily along, while their master fairly ached to see someone or something that could answer, if no more than a dog to wag its tail and raise an attentive ear.

A mile above Rincone, where the trail winds in and out of a cotionwood fringe along the river, a Navajo and squaw came in sight from somewhere below. They rode tandem, and on the lope, true Navajo fashion, nor slacked their pace till they stopped on one jump within ten feet of Ben. The leader proved to be Jimmy, dapper and tall, ornamented with silver buckles and but- tons and trinkets from head to foot, and as tickled at meeting

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young Rojer as the puppy that wags his whole body and dances with delight.

Both horses were plump and fat, the saddles newly made, the bridles silver-mounted, but nothing in the rich fitout compared with the beaming faces and thoroughly happy smiles of this Nav- ajo youth and the girl that followed him.

The brown and the white hand had no more than struck in a friendly shake, each greeting the other with "Si vekiss," when Ben asked, "Your sister?"

"Doe tah," said the Navajo, slowly and emphatically, and feigning to be offended, "my wife." Then he told her to come up and shake hands with his brother. It probably didn't comport with her Navajo pride, but she gave her dainty hand, glittering with rings and bracelets, and looked down with a titter of embar- rassment while Ben shook it. Of course she was brown — mildly brown, like the light-complexioned of her people, but her face bore lines of rare beauty — the shy, innocent beauty of perhaps eighteen.

Young Rojer had no intention of permitting his sorrows to taint this happy atmosphere ; in fact, he felt so completely capti- vated and carried away, that he nearly forgot he had any sor- rows. He smiled his heart-felt pleasure, and wished them every good thing he could think of ; and he came within one of telling them how he would like to stay with them and keep in the light of their happiness.

But Jimmy could not be side-tracked from asking about Fred Rojer. Ben shook his head, and told the whole story in one word. The two dusky faces became sympathy at once. The bridegroom, in a soothing voice, offered such consolation as his religion and philosophy might suggest, intimating, among other things, that the loving spirit of the father would follow the son.

When it occurred to young Rojer that the greater part of his day's journey lay still ahead, he said adios to Brother and Sister Baneehlizhen and traveled on. Their words and smiles, and the mental snapshot taken of them on their mustangs served to be- guile the weary miles up Comb Wash. They lived under the trees and on the sandhills ; they perhaps had a profitable flock of sheep and a band of horses ; and their hogon, on the scenic river bank, or up among the sheltering cliffs, was no doubt an ideal lover's retreat, surrounded by all the wild fancies which gave charm to Hiawatha's wigwam. Ben fairly envied them both.

Where the trail turns westward from Comb Wash into the eastern foothills of the Cedar Ridge, the country is always deso- late and forbidding. Ben Rojer had been struggling on the ragged edge of despondency for two miles before he turned into that trail, and when he reached it, the desolation of the surrounding hills seemed to concentrate in his mind. A feeling of utter lone-

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liness came over him as he looked forward at the chilly winter mist hovering on the distant summit. He felt the downright lack of heart to camp alone in that snowy forest ahead, without so much as a devoted dog to see him recline to rest, or stay lovingly near through the long night.

After all, the best of men are much like driven cattle : they do the thing which they are compelled to do. It was easy for Ben, tall and proud, to stand like the Pharisee, and hark to the intangible Voice of comfort; but to kneel like the Publican, and implore the return of that Voice when it had been grieved to silence, was of late a matter strangely difficult to him. At home

THE EASTERN BRAKES OF THE CEDAR RIDGE, IN THE WILDS WEST OF COMB WASH, SAN JUAN, UTAH

he had friends and companions and company and comfort, till he almost forgot how he loved the Intangible. When it left him, or why, or whether it left him at all, he took no trouble to ask till the trail turned up over the hills to the west from Comb Wash.

Still he knew by virtue of many an intense experience that there really was an Intangible ; that it had positive characteristics ; that it held the keys of his welfare, and was a force more potent and actual, than any ridicule or argument men might bring against it. He knew how the J B fellows would laugh at the idea — he almost heard them as he rode along, and almost blushed with the possibility of their disclosing his old secret.

The day wore on, and the blue haze grew colder as Ben approach it. The mists of gloom thickened around him, and he reasoned more earnestlv about the dear voice of solitude, which

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now said nothing to his listening soul. He reached the crisis, of course, reined Snip to a standstill, kicked the fluffy snow from the dry leaves under a cedar, and clearing a place big enough to kneel, dropped down upon it, chaps, spurs and all.

Snip's horse-mind may have wondered in a vague way, to whom his master spoke, as there in the little patch of bare ground he held the reins and tried to see through the shades of melancholy around him. Also it may be a matter of merriment to some who read, but let them laugh only who, from the tenderness of their childhood, have been schooled in the stern silence of a wide soli- tude.

When young Rojer's earnest words had floated away on the quiet chill of that winter afternoon, a change took place in his feelings — a change as real and as welcome as the smiling pair he had met that morning on their honeymoon.

What the Voice said or sang, and just how it did it without sound in such a way as to reach and soothe young Rojer's mind, is not easily explained. But something touched his thoughts, or his recollection, and he seized eagerly upon the sentiment of that touch :

"Pa told me I'd be left alone — that it was necessary to my manhood; and he worried his dear old head for fear I'd fail. He feared I would lack the grit and vinegar to stand alone. But I don't! No, sir-ee!"

All the same, when he hauled up in front of that identical cave on the eastward slope of the Ridge, and saw the dry pine twigs where he lay sleeplessly listening to a hoot-owl four months be- fore, his courage flickered like a candle in a breeze. He saw the black coals of that same old fire, strewn about on the road, and the same old cloud of woe, like a thing waiting in ambush, seemed ready to move out and envelop him. He hesitated like the arm of a balance when it may move up or down, nor saw so much as the friendly wag of a dog's tail to cheer him upward.

But the great Something of the wilderness had been engaged for this occasion, and in its magic, mysterious way, it touched the motor nerve of Ben's tongue, and caused it resolutely to repeat, "But I don't ! No, sir-ee !"

To those who never have known the Intangible, it would be hard to describe how that cave and the trees in its mouth, as- sumed an expression of sociability and friendliness as the light of the camp-fire fell upon them. And how from that overhanging wall and those spreading cedars, there came the echo of loving words, and brave, manly sentiments, expressed many times by the departed Fred Rojer, is not to be explained, but simply told, as a matter plain only to those who, by the necessity of their sorrow, have learned to know it for themselves.

That cave became a haven of rest to the solitarv traveler, with

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comforting voices of love-songs and courage. The winter wind, sighing over the cliff-brow above, bade him welcome to the forest of the Cedar Ridge, and assured him that every tree in its vast, wide area was his particular friend. He ate a hearty supper, sang that soothing old hymn, "God is love," and, after kneeling in the warm sand, by the fire, crawled into his cosy blankets, feeling cheered and comforted as by the personal presence of a cave-full of friends. They told him to sleep secure ; that his horse would not stray away, and that no troublesome thing would disturb the peace of his camp.

When the fire died down, and darkness crept in around that solitary bed, behold someone there, yet not there, bending lovingly over the sleeping figure ; and a hand reached upward in the still- ness to shake another hand, present only by a sweet influence. In the dark, quiet hours when Ben awakened, he heard the coarse tinkling of old Buck's bell up in the flat, and he felt the kind presence of that Something still in his cave. It soothed him again to sleep with a lullaby not unlike the gentle voice which used to bless his rest in the old trundle-bed.

Slickhorn is on the westward slope of the ridge, fitting closely into the ram's-horn turns of the deep, dry chasm known as Lower Grand Gulch. It was late in the afternoon, on the eastern brow of that gulch that Ben met Jud, and the two made camp in a clump of cedars.

The crow-feet eyes stood for kindness more than ever before — a genius of kindness which bristled with grit and resolution to stand gamely up in all forms of reverse. Jud had troubles of his own, of course, for be it known that since he came up into the firelight of Ben's acquaintance, nearly seven years before, at Pagahrit, he had become the head of a little family, and the owner of a big debt. Yet he maintained his chivalrous bearing, nor cared a rap for his tattered wardrobe, so different from the dash- ing buckskin fringe and gaudy apparel of his singleness.

"Oh, you're doin' all right," he affirmed, when the subject came up, "I wus thinkin' jest today thit you're exactly the feller tu git the good out uv this change. All our trials are cal'lated fer our good, and the more straight up and down the trial, the more the good. This'll be the makin' uv you."

While Fred Rojer lived and moved in Ben's world of tangi- ble friends, he towered like a son of Anak high above them all ; and it may be that even Jud could never have been other than small in comparison. However that may be, the ride from Grand Gulch to Pagahrit, with but one tangible human creature on the whole horizon of young Rojer's vision, served to prove that one a greater and wider and warmer soul than a seven-years' ac- quaintance had indicated. -

It is true that some elements of gallantry, and buckskin fringe.

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37

and broncos and branding-irons, had come to notice casually dur- ing that time, but the greater Jud Hiles had hidden modestly be- hind those things, till young Rojer's loneliness invited him out. The tuck and putt and sich, of an off-hand, slip-shod vocabulary, had not been employed to express the feelings of true friendship which Ben now heard. Fred Rojer had heard them, for he knew "Jud was a friend to depend upon."

When they unpacked under the old tree at the lake, the cliff and the fence and a host of familiar things started a long string of tender recollections, and young Rojer had to bite his lip while they finished caring for the horses and arranging the furniture of camp.

Naturally enough, he stole away with the first chance to his

A VIEW IN LOWER GRAND GULCH, SAN JUAN CO., UTAH

cave, the mouth of which looked like a doubtful shadow on the gray background of the naked limbs. Those leafless limbs had none of the old warblers among them, and the place in general bore a woebegone expression, as the cowboy climbed the hill and crossed the little reef which marked the boundary of his strange den.

Cold and quiet reigned within. A bleak winter wind moaned over the gulch, and echoed in the lonely caves of Pagahrit. The days of warmth and birds and flowers seemed suddenly far away, and "Pa's" kind face and words were as the best features of a happy dream rudely disturbed. Ben sat on a cold stone, looking forlornly into the cheerless corners of the cavern, and as at other

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times, began to review the story from the start with his father and Stripes and Bowse for the wild cliff-country of western San Juan county. He went over the whole saw-tooth period, from Peavine and Soorowitz, through the sunny and rainy days to the time on the rock-knoll, where fate seemed to glare angrily at him, threatening to take all that made life tolerable, and give all that had filled it with dread. He reviewed the steps of his calamity thus far, and sinking sorrowfully on to one knee, bowed bitterly over the other, his face on his wrists. "And the end is not yet," he gfoaned, "I am not yet alone, and Soorowitz is not in sight."

He wished his misery might find vent in tears, but, no — the ready tears of the little Ben Rojer had poured out on the bleach- ing bones of hill and sand-bar, and the tall Ben Rojer, dry-eyed and silent, stood up to the sterner things his childhood had never known. "Oh, voice of Solitude !" he pleaded, "I found you here in times past. Oh, come to me now in my desolation !" His words struck the dry walls of the cave in a hoarse whisper.

The past, with its shape determined, could quite fill his cup of itself, and with the suspense of an unshaped, ill-boding future, he half conceded it was too much to bear alone. But much it takes to fit human ears for the voice of the great Intangible, and when, in his grief, he reached a certain stage, a still pleasing some- thing, in its incomprehensible way, sent trailing through his mind a brave thought:

"Better men than I have borne worse things than this with good grace. Trials make men, and men bear all that is, and wait bravely for all that is to be. I can bear all that is — yes, and I can face all that's coming, even if it takes the scalp along with it. I've the grit to do it ; yes, sir-ee. Mine is the strength of a man, not a thing."

He made another notch below the old date on the wall, and rising to his full height, stalked down from the cave with a firm- ness that sank his high boot-heels into the hillside.

"Well, how yu feelin' now?" Jud enquired, looking up from a frying-pan of bacon.

At ordinary times young Rojer would have cheated the ques- tion with an empty or misleading answer, but now, bubbling over with the warmth of soul his cave inspired, he unbosomed himself with a freedom which the mind is likely to regret, if ever it be- comes cold and conventional again. "I feel mighty thankful for your company," he said, frankly.

Jud looked down half plagued, with something strangely moist in his brown, crowfeet eyes. "Well, Ben," he declared with emphasis, "I tuck a fancy to you when yu was a sorry little ol' kid on that buckskin pony, an' I've liked yu ever since. I've always bleeved there was somethin' to yu, and now I bleeve it all the more."

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Actual brothers could have worked together no more smooth- ly and agreeably than Jud and Ben worked on that trip. Tt being no round-up, but simply a ride among the cattle, thev finished each short day's work with the daylight thereof, and spent hours and hours in shelter by the camp-fire, cultivating1 a friendship which grew like a sunflower in June. Thev beguiled those long evenings with stories and songs. Tud discovered young Roier's bias for a certain hvmn, and its mild notes floated awav from their camp-fire into the chill winter wind. That thev had been so long together and so little acquainted is only another proof that we mav see our friends without knowing who they are. till a change of condition points them out. The boy had unconsciously aped the man, and the man had admired the boy seven years without an acknowledgment.

On that trip, as on no other, Ben heard a re-echo of his father's words from everv trail and camp-ground. In the corral and the pasture, along the lake shore, and in "everv part of the ranee, he found the dear old voice petrified on the desert air. Tn Lake Gulch, the affair of Josh and Bowse, and the blister-footed tramn through the jungle came clearly to mind. But bigger than anv feature on that dav came a voice with undying force from the cliff or the black-willows: "Son, I want vou to be a man, not a thing."

From Little Mountain to The Idols, from West Bench to the Old Crossing, trees, stones and sandhills echoed again the details of days gone by. At each turn in the trail, and from the iuniper on the hillside, the same persuasive voice floated to Ben's ears : "Be true, son : I've alwavs hoped for you." When he found him- self gazing wistfulv at the horizon, and singing his home-made song, "A voice is calling." he would muse, unconsciouslv to him- self, "Yes, he's waiting- for me — he's waiting for me to become a man and meet him in the hazy distance."

The good or the evil in a thing is made clear by contrast ; young Rojer heard voices which came not from the Intangible, nor yet as the pleasing echo of any brave word. For often in the dark, still hours of night, he started from his sleep and raised on his elbow in blank bewilderment ; he looked at the snow-covered objects all around, listened to the coarse tinkle of Buck's bell, and to the cold wind in the naked limbs. Then he discovered Jud's bed near by, and slowly recalled how the past had slipped away, and taken his chief comfort with it. "Oh, he's gone! he's gone!" he would whisper to himself, "he's nowhere to be found in all the world !" And burying his face in his pillow, as if to find quick refuge in sleep, he would feel that bitterness of desolation which only they may appreciate whose best friend has gone from the land of the living.

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Chapter VIII — Parting of the Ways.

It is not our purpose here to consider what Ben Rojer did at home, unless those doings concern the wilds of Pagahrit or the great Intangible. After his father's death he went no more to the district school, but stuffing his saddle-pockets with gems from the poets and the scriptures, he entrusted to Shakespeare and the prophets, and the Voice of solitude, the task of directing his own diligence into all the mental growth he might hope to make.

He believed sincerely that the choicest truth in the minds of men comes directly from the Intangible ; that prophets and poets and philosophers hark earnestly in the deep silence, and give their fellows what they hear. "The man who learns only from books is only a parrot, at best," he reflected, turning instinctively in his thoughts to the weazened, tissue-paper man who taught the dis- trict school :

"He couldn't possibly ride a real, live mustang, and he couldn't see anything wonderful in the noblest horse on earth. He doesn't know the sweet smell of the wild flowers, nor the sweet songs of the wild birds ; and if he should be dropped down alone among the wild hills, their great, majestic voice 'ud kill 'im sure."

Young Rojer admired Tennyson and Longfellow, and he loved those writers who heard "a still small voice," and listened that they might put its words in a wonderful book, to be handed down as a sacred thing from ancient generations. "It is a still voice that I hear," he mused, "and it is also a small voice, — so small that sometimes I can hardly hear it at all. I believe it's the same thing."

It was about the sixth of May when the Rojer outfit, or more properly speaking, the Rojer and Hiles outfit, climbed Clay Hill and jogged down the trail to Castle Gulch on their way to the spring round-up. Juan Rido worked for Ben, and Jud had a "new hand" along, making four riders in all.

Jud's man became famous, if not really infamous, on that trip for moving slow, doing nothing, and sulking ninety-nine per cent of the time. But Juan, with his double-action and hickory-hearted buckskin, was exactly the other way in every respect. His ever- lasting song, "Chili con came y leche con pan," had the swing and time of the unfagging trot he kept up from daylight till dark. He reminded Ben of the slim black timber ants in Lake Gluch, that scorned any gait slower than a brisk lope.

Excepting a ghost or a goblin, and possibly the Catholic padre to whom he confessed his sins, there was no shape of man or beast in Juan's narrow world of knowledge or fancy that ever moved him with fear. It is not at all unlikely that his hickory-hearted buckskin contained seven devils, yet the black-eyed Rido saw only the vicious, murder-loving kind of a brute he delighted to ride.

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He had no fear of being struck or kicked or bitten by the felonious yellow horse, but he dreaded the supernatural monsters that lurked in the dark holes of Pagahrit, especially since Flossy had evaporated so mysteriously. He smiled a weak apology for his references to "cl diablo," whom he nevertheless believed might at any time, but particularly in the night-time, come stalking out of some shady cave or crevice.

Juan's two horses suited him to a remarkable degree. They were his first choice of all the horses in seven counties of New Mexico, and according to his own tell, he gave "ever' dem cent" he had and then went in debt to get them. He always insisted that the glass-eyed pintos could outrun anything that wore hair, and when he saw the outfit's incredulous smile, he resolved to pro- duce the proof with the first opportunity.

That opportunity presented itself in the shape of a sleek coyote trotting over a rock-knoll ahead of the "boys," when they started one morning for Slick Rock.

Jud and Ben knew that the fixing of a purpose in Juan's mind was much like the lighting of a fuse ; it meant a sudden explosion of energy towards that purpose in the very near future. However, when the coyote appeared the old Pinto nearly left the earth with his Mexican rider, wide sombrero, tangle of rope, and crisp words from the Spanish Bible, in such a bound and crash and swirl — the three fellows reigned up with a gasp to see what under the sun had happened. But they had to spur up to the top of that rock-knoll to see it, for the whole performance shifted to the other side of the knoll in a twinkling.

The contour of the country, mostly solid sandstone, was about as uniform as a frying-pan of scrambled eggs ; and over it, like a grain of sizzling powder, went rope, and hat, and Pinto and Tuan — the procession led by a desperate coyote, and marked be- hind by a trace of dust and the smoke of steel-shod hoofs strik- ing fire from the rock. They described a figure three and two ciphers, and then understood it all with a long dash to the right, at the bitter end of which Rido turned to the outfit, snaking the game triumphantly behind him.

In the course of his approach he flipped the rope up over a limb, through the bark of which it smoked till the canine swang forward under it, and with a crashing of bones and wood and a scattering of fur, the limb and the coyote shot forward together through the air. They followed Pinto over the sand, with no motion but that produced by the jerking rope. That coyote's con- stitution was completely ruined, and Juan's most extravagant claims for the glass-eyed horse were established beyond all pos- sible question.

Juan's smiles, and his unfagging trot, and his "Chili con came" were the sweet flavoring of an otherwise bitter dose on that

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trip, for Jud came resolved and prepared to move his entire brand to another range. The prospects of this change had a depressing effect on Ben ; he regarded it as a step nearer to the evil day when he would stand alone, and see the ugly shape materialize in the distance.

"The only thing I hate about leavin' here," Judd would say, "is thit you'll be left alone. But my goin'll mean money to you — there'll be more room fer your cows when I git out."

"I'd rather have you and your cattle, ten times over, than the room you're leaving to me," young Rojer would answer, sadly, though never feeling free to tell of the dreaded things that seemed to be coming step by step towards him. To Jud's prosy, matter- of-fact mind, Ben's idea of the Intangible might suggest only the ridiculous, and he feared that telling of what he had seemed to hear would now appear as a weakness, and possibly make a breach in this cherished confidence.

All the same he loved Jud Hiles, and hoped some happy turn of affairs would stay the proposed change. That happy turn did not occur. From each day's drive, every cow with Jud's brand went into the pasture. The two friends made it a point to be to- gether whenever they might, and put more strong spikes in the tower of their friendship. They sang Ben's favorite hymn a great deal, and while Ben enjoyed it as a stirring expression of good will, each for the other, he also heard in it a sad note of farewell — a note which rang in his ears on the heated sand hills at noonday, and when he hunted faces in the coals at night.

Ben took this, like all old troubles, to his cave — told it in sor- row to the echoing solitude, made another notch on the wall, and resolved to bear it as a part in the program not to be avoided. He told it in silence to each solitary place from Little Mountain to The Idols ; he confided it to the flowers of spring, and the birds that sang on the sand hills. He whispered it in Snip's intelligent ear, and looked through the kind windows of the horse-soul for sympathy.

From the top of many a rock-knoll, while waiting for the boys or scanning the country for cattle, he moaned his home- made song to the distance with no definite meaning but the long- ing of soul for safety from an unshaped, impending disaster. Sometimes he mused vaguely, "He's waiting for me, and it may be that from these very sand hills I shall take my flight, leaving these bones to bleach in the sun, and bearing, like Stripes and Alec, a peculiar mark in the skull." Then looking at the flowers and grass and the bloom-covered bush on the hill-side, "To be 'resolved to earth and enrich their growth,' is no mean ending if it must be so," he reflected.

The round-up came to a close in good order, and the spotted herd, like a great blanket on the sand, moved slowly onward over

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Castle Hill, and up Castle Wash. Aside from a fruitless attempt to hold up a small bunch in the mouth of Horse Canyon, nothing out of the ordinary interrupted the slow monotonous movement down Clay Hill, over the desert and into the forest of the Cedar Ridge.

When the market steers were cut from the herd, and Ben started with them in one direction, Jud went with his stock-cattle over another trail. There was time only for hurried adios, and a parting on the lope.

(to be continued)

Elder Virgil A. Fjeld, secretary of the Trondhjem Conference, Norway, writes: "We are so far north that there is one continual day for two months during the summer. Our conference is in a very pros- perous condition, though handicapped by not having a hall to hold meetings in. While the people do not like the 'Mormons' they treat us with great respect and we are doing a great deal to remove prejudice. We have eight elders on an average laboring here during the winter.

Elders, top row: T. W. Jensen. Manassa, Colo.; L. W. Johnson. Mo- roni; E. R. Sorensen, Axtel; L. L. Larsen, Salt Lake City; E. A. Cramer. Huntsville ; V. A. Fjeld, Lehi, Utah; bottom row: L. Hansen, Bear River City, Utah; J. H. Nielsen, Lincoln, Idaho, Conference Pres- ident; Martin Christopherson, Mission President; H. K. Anderson, Salt Lake Citv."