RGL e-Book Cover 2018©
RGL e-Book Cover 2018©
MY father lifted his cigar and spoke. "The Peach Creek stage was held up about an hour ago beyond Harriman's Ranch. Hank Lacey was driving. He was shot in the chest."
We were on the porch, watching summer's soft twilight deepen—my mother and father and myself, and Glory Harper who sat on the steps. This was New Hope's supper time, so still and peaceful an hour that the bell-like strokes of Rob Jenner's late-working blacksmith hammer came clearly from the far edge of town. A faint wind ran in from the west, bringing the savor of all that wild distance with it. This was 1881 when the world was young, and I was in a full and vivid boyhood that grows more and more strongly in my memory. Long ago as it was, I recall the quick turn of Glory Harper's shoulders as she looked up to Father and showed the worry in her eyes. She was twenty, and more inclined to silence than most women are.
She said: "Why, that's one of Jeff's stages."
"He rode out there immediately he heard the news," my father said and returned to his cigar. That sharp darkness that comes to the plains dropped swiftly; along our little street house lamps threw thin lanes across the tawny-silver dust. A sprinkling wagon came by, and all at once the mingled scent of water and dust and scorched boards and prairie grass was keen through the night.
Glory rose and stood a moment. Even then her presence and her personality were exciting to me, reaching out like the undertow of a current. Now that I am older, I can see that it was the inner richness of a full-bodied girl waiting for expression, waiting to be spent. Afterward, she said good night, and walked to the adjoining house where her aunt and uncle lived. Her own parents, we understood, had died long before in the East, and the Harpers had taken her as a child. They seemed to have money, for Harper lived a quiet, retired life. I recall him as a dark and kindly man who always marched in the Fourth of July parade with the Phil Sheridan G. A. R. Post, very straight and soldierly in his captain's uniform.
My mother's rocker creaked on the porch boards. I knew she was disturbed. "The Cameron boys again, Tod?"
My father said—"I suppose."—and smoked on. There was a shadow sliding along our picket fence, which was Johnny Dix waiting for me. But I held my place, for Father was talking again, and his tone was faintly sad and faintly bitter. "The war's put a curse on this country. It has made killing a noble occupation. It's made heroes out of desperadoes like Quantrell and the James gang. The Cameron boys are simply following the pattern."
After an interval I started down the steps. Mother's voice stopped and turned me around. My father had removed his cigar and was looking at me more sharply than usual. He said: "Let the boy go. He'll have little enough fun in another few years." I think he meant to speak to me. But he didn't, and it is one of my deepest regrets now that he so rarely broke through his long- maintained silences, that he was almost a stranger to me. For I have come to understand that his silence was the silence of loneliness. He was one of the few really educated men in a town that had little time or patience for education; he had nobody with whom to share his tastes, and, therefore, he fed upon himself. It is one of the tragedies of this world that people build walls around themselves and slowly starve inside.
I went out to Johnny Dix, and we trotted through the dark, back streets, on over to the south edge of town where the rest of our gang assembled. We had a ritual and a procedure, and presently we filed surreptitiously down the alleys of New Hope into the alien and dangerous territory along the river where the tough boys of Ward Two roamed. It is what comes across all the years to me, more real than anything else—the raciness, the freedom, the keen and sharp edge of that long-gone boyhood.
ALL the pieces of the story, so disjointed then, make a clear
picture now. The next day I was standing on St. Vrain Street,
across from the Beauty Belle, when old Henry Nellis turned out of
a nearby store and stopped a man whose name I have forgotten.
Nellis was very excited. He said to this other man: "Jeff McKay
brought Hale Cameron to jail this morning. Lacey's dead."
I remember the chill that ran up my spine. It was always like this in New Hope. The humdrum days ran along, and then excitement and violence burst over us, as swiftly and unexpectedly as a heat storm out of the south. Nellis was saying something else, but suddenly stopped, chopping a word between his teeth. Both men were staring across the street to the Beauty Belle, and I turned and saw Big Bill Dolliver, who owned the saloon, come out of the swinging doors, shake his big shoulders, and pause to light a cigar.
I do not know a better way to describe Big Bill Dolliver than by saying that, although the width of the street was between Dolliver and these other men, they still feared him. I heard Nellis say in a bare breath, "I wonder what Bill thinks about it?" Afterward Nellis walked on, and the other man turned into the store. Dolliver had lighted his cigar; he crossed the street, passed me with one quick, stiff survey, and went toward Linenweber's Restaurant. I still feel the striking power of that glance and the taciturn, morose quality of Big Bill Dolliver's eyes. He was a central character in our town, and everybody felt that physical jolt of his presence. I think the knowledge and the sensation of fear were left out of Big Bill Dolliver, that neither his brain nor his nerves had any way of understanding them. He was not a big man, but he seemed tremendous to me; and there was about him always a massive indifference to the opinions of other people. It was as though a corsair spirit in him chafed at the small rules of a world he found himself in and did not like. The reflection of that was in his eyes—savage and smoky and domineering. He was about forty and finely built and kept bachelor quarters at the Occidental Hotel. But he went there only to sleep; all his waking hours were spent in his saloon, which was the most glitteringly luxurious thing in our drab and dusty town.
It was noon, and I ran home, bursting with the news, and found my parents at the dinner table. I said, all in one breath: "Jeff McKay brought Hale Cameron to jail this morning, and Lacey who drove the stage is dead."
My father looked queerly at me and merely said: "Yes." But my mother seemed very worried.
"He's growing up like a savage, Tod."
I sat down to eat. Then I saw Jeff McKay ride up to our front gate on his big bay, get off, and come up the steps, and eating became impossible. The hero worship of a boy is a strange and wonderful thing, and Jeff McKay, as he stood there in the doorway, was the sort of man I wanted to be. He was twenty-three years old, which was the age of a seasoned man in those days, with Scotch-gray eyes and a tall, rawboned frame and the quietest manners imaginable. There was a deference and a humility to him, but he had—as subsequent events proved—a Calvinistic conscience and a Calvinistic will. It was these qualities that brought the storm down upon him. Like most Scotsmen he was full of ambition. He operated four stage lines into the West, and Lacey had been a driver on one of his coaches.
He bowed and smiled at my mother, and spoke to me in a way that bound me fast to him. He said to my father in his slow, careful manner: "I wanted to ask your advice."
Father motioned to a chair at the table, and Jeff McKay came forward and sat down. My mother got Father's eye and nodded at me. It was my signal to leave the table. But Father said: "Let him stay." I understood all that clearly now. My father would not preach to me, but he wanted me to see and hear for myself so that I might absorb the ways of the world.
Jeff McKay said: "Lacey died. But I got there and had a word with him first. It was Hale Cameron who held up the stage and fired the shot. I found Hale and brought him in. It's my testimony that will hang the rope around his neck. Have I done right?"
My father spoke in a wondering voice: "How did you know where to find him? When you found him, how did you get him away from the rest of the gang?"
"I found him," Jeff McKay said. It was softly said, yet behind the tone lay a terrible certainty I still remember. Then he repeated: "Have I done right?"
"According to your conscience," said my father wryly. "But conscience is a luxury in this country. The Cameron gang will never let you alone. Half the people in New Hope will hate you for trapping their hero, and the other half will despise you for not killing Hale out on the prairie where you found him."
Jeff McKay got up. "We have laws," was all he said, and went out. I was out of my chair immediately, following him to the porch, but he didn't stop this day. He went through the gate and led his bay horse to the Harpers' house. Glory was there, waiting for him, and I saw Jeff McKay bend a little and speak to her; they were both smiling, and I laugh now to think of the jealousy that flared up in me. He said something else, and they both ceased to smile. The sunlight cut down on them. They stood quite still, these two straight and robust people so much alike in their silence.
My father called me back into the house. He said gravely: "Whatever you have heard is something for our ears alone, Son."
My mother said: "It is a cruel, heartless country, Tod!" The anger was so unlike this soft-spoken woman that both my father and I were astonished. She looked at Father and seemed to accuse him. "I'm thinking of Jeff and Glory," she told him, and abruptly left the table. But in the kitchen she called back: "Why don't the men of this town do something?"
Father said: "What should we do, Mother?"
"You might start with Bill Dolliver."
I THINK something should be said about that wide and smoky land
in that high-tempered time, if the fury that burst through New
Hope is to be understood at all. We had some good blood in our
town, some families grown wealthy from the freighting trade; we
had our schools and churches and our gentility. We were a settled
community. Yet we dealt on the edge of insecurity and violence.
South of us in Kansas and Missouri the bandit gangs still
scourged the country, and the border ruffianism of the war still
smoldered. West of us lay the great prairie, reaching out its
trackless distances; a hundred and fifty miles that way the
cattle trails and the trail towns still roared. We could not
escape the impact of that raw world. Orderly as New Hope tried to
be, there was in it still a primitive concept of personal
justice. If a man injured you, you took your own vengeance upon
him.
All that Father had said to Jeff McKay was true. The jury was scarcely impaneled to try Hale Cameron for the murder of Lacey when New Hope began to burn with a strange fever. Boyhood impressions are keen, and I walked the streets and felt that excitement as clearly as though it were a hot wind rushing in from the prairie. I saw men in town I had never seen before, surly-looking fellows off the distant cattle ranches, impoverished homesteaders from the roundabout coulées. Our own teamsters and stevedores, who seldom loitered on St. Vrain Street, now ranged there restlessly. To a good many of these men Hale Cameron was a hero, a Robin Hood, as Jesse James still was; and to many of them Jeff McKay was a coward for not having exchanged bullets with Cameron as a man should out on the prairie.
There was no peace for Jeff McKay, and it was freely wagered he would die of a bullet from Dan Cameron, who was Hate's older brother, before the month was out. It was strange that the tidal wave of unreason would grip us so. But it did, and there were friends of Jeff's who dared not show their friendship for him in the bitter weeks that followed.
I recall walking down St. Vrain Street the day before the trial with Glory Harper. She wore a white dress with ruffles on the sleeves, and she held a parasol against the hot sun with a way of grace hard to describe. It was, I think, a rhythm inside this girl that flowed out of her and influenced whatever she touched. The street was crowded, as though it were a holiday, and this feeling of excitement was stronger than ever. There was a rumor in the wind that Dan Cameron intended to raid New Hope with his gang and get his brother from jail, and because of that the Phil Sheridan G.A.R.Post had turned out to guard the whole length of St. Vrain Street; every hundred yards we passed a pair of these men standing against the building walls, guns strapped at their hips, all looking very solemn. Yet solemn as they were, they lifted their hats to Glory, and spoke to her.
Then somebody else spoke to her, and I saw Big Bill Dolliver standing at the curb. He had taken off his hat, and his black hair glittered in the sunlight and made all the rest of his face dark. He had a cigar between his teeth, but his lips were hidden by the long, heavy mustache he wore. I remember feeling fear as I stared into his heavy, round eyes; I feel the strike of them now. But I remember feeling hatred of the man, too, for I clenched my hands behind my back and stood at Glory's side. I had come to feel that somehow Jeff McKay's fortune lay in this stolid man's brain. Nor was I alone in that feeling.
He said: "Good day, Miss Harper."
Glory stopped and lowered her parasol, and I looked to see her smiling at him. She had no fear. She said: "I don't believe all the stories I've heard about you. Jeff needs help."
He took out his cigar and looked down. He brushed a flake of ash from his coat and lifted his head. "I hope you never will believe all the stories you hear about me. Don't worry about Jeff."
We went on and turned in at Jeff McKay's office beyond Linenweber's Restaurant. There were two men at the door, but they stepped aside for Glory, and we walked through and found Jeff sitting on a high bookkeeper's stool, writing in a book. I remember he wore black sleeve protectors, and that there was a gun lying on his desk. He got up and shook hands with me.
Glory said: "Mister Dolliver spoke to me."
Jeff's eyes narrowed. He wasn't pleased, I could see. "It was forward of him."
But Glory smiled. "He was very courteous. You have guards at your door. Will Dan Cameron try to rescue his brother?"
"We shall soon know."
They were face to face, absorbed in each other, and I felt completely excluded. So I went out, hurt by the exclusion. But I looked back once—and it is that one glimpse of them that comes to me now as a bright picture when I am discouraged. They were two fine people standing side by side, throwing a superb gallantry back at life. Their faces were sober, and they were not talking. Well, they were two people who had little use for words for they had a perfect understanding; they had the simplicity of faith.
I walked down the street, once more in the whirlpool of excitement. I stopped by the courthouse steps, but a G.A.R. man said—"This is no place for you."—and so I crossed to the south side of St. Vrain, and started home. Dolliver was under the board awning of the Beauty Belle, speaking to a man who stood still and very attentive. Dolliver's hand closed into a solid fist, and he said something that sent the man immediately away; then Dolliver went into the saloon with a ponderous swing of his shoulders and one sidewise glance that raked the whole street. When I came up, the doors were just swinging, and I saw the flash of mirrors and crystal chandeliers; there was a crowd in the Beauty Belle and a great deal of noise. A woman walked toward me, but she crossed the street to avoid passing the saloon doors.
THAT night my father said to me—"I want you to stay off St.
Vrain Street tomorrow."—and I went to bed and dreamed of
Dan Cameron's men riding into New Hope, shooting as they came.
The next morning, which was trial day, I ran down to the corner
of St. Vrain and Prairie Streets and climbed to the loft of
Beekman's warehouse and lay on my stomach, watching the
courthouse steps. I saw crowds there but no violence, although in
the evening when Johnny Dix and I went prowling out through the
freighters' camp, he told me Dan Cameron had ridden into New Hope
alone, had vanished down an alley adjoining the Beauty Belle, and
later had gone away. I said: "Why wasn't he arrested?" Johnny
said in a mysterious way: "My old man says because Bill Dolliver
didn't want him arrested."
The following noon Father came home to dinner looking very pleased. He sat down and said grace and glanced across the table to me. "I want you to remember, when you grow up, that occasionally your father's generation did the right thing. The jury convicted Hale Cameron. He will be hung. Half of the men in that courtroom were trying to intimidate Jeff when he took the stand. But he told his story, and, by God, they couldn't scare him."
"Tod," said my mother, "you swore," and then looked at me.
"It is time," said my father, "for our boy to learn responsible people sometimes swear."
We had a week's calm in our town, but it was a scary calm. For they were building this scaffold in the park block, and its skeleton shape did something to New Hope; it seemed to waken in all of us that latent, primitive savagery of which we were so afraid, against which our daily morals so constantly struggled. At night I used to walk by the scaffold and see its gaunt frame against the sky. They hung him August 10, 1881, with the Phil Sheridan Post guarding the park block against Dan Cameron's raid. No raid came, and Hale Cameron was soon dead. But before he died, and before they put the cap on him, he turned on the platform and looked down to where Big Bill Dolliver stood, and he said, so clearly that everybody in the block heard his exact words: "When you come to hell, Bill, I'll be there to watch you burn."
My father told us this when he came home in the evening. He was speaking to Mother, but I can understand now he wanted me to feel and to see the picture as he saw it, that he wanted to harden me to the brutality of the world I was so fast growing into. I think he had been tremendously hurt when he had made the change from the dreams of youth to the realities of adult life, and I think he was determined I should not go through the same disillusionment. Certainly his training shortened my adolescent years and matured me early. Maybe I lost something; maybe I was cheated out of some of those golden days of boyhood. But at eighteen I was a man—and the education by my father saved me from many mistakes.
Mother was a gentle soul; the harshness of men always frightened her. Yet I remember how she lifted her chin at Father, and I remember the anger in her voice: "Then it is Bill Dolliver you ought to hang."
Father shook his head. He said: "You don't understand the rules of the game in our town."
Nor did I then. I was full-grown and had cut my teeth on the bones of goodness and evil, and most of the principal characters of my boyhood were dust blended with the shifting prairie soil before I understood either the rules of the game or that inscrutable, sultry-eyed man who walked our streets in silence and knew us so well and scorned us so much. The Beauty Belle made him wealthy, and wealth was a strong voice in New Hope, commanding the ears of even our best citizens. Yet the secret of his power lay not in his money, but in the circumstances that set him apart from the rest of us and shut the social door in his face. For, being a saloonkeeper, he stood on that borderline between good and evil that our town's conscience insisted on establishing. My father might drop in for a drink and a word. But the teamsters and the impoverished homesteaders and all those who formed the ragged edge of our life came there, too. The Beauty Belle was their lodge and their club, and Big Bill Dolliver, understanding them, was their leader. He knew the temper of that reckless, discontented group. He knew its secrets. He knew its lawless element. He was its spokesman and to him came our better citizens when they feared the multitude or when they wanted the votes of the multitude.
Even the outlaws came to Bill. New Hope long had suspected that Bill Dolliver shared the secrets of the Cameron gang, and, when Hale Cameron, standing on the gallows platform, had bitterly consigned Bill to hell, that suspicion became a certainty. I can understand it now. The Camerons were part of that world over which Bill ruled, and, therefore, to make his own authority more secure, Bill Big Dolliver trafficked with the Camerons. For he was a man brutally practical in his morals. I can see him now, swinging his bold shoulders down the street, his heavy-boned cheeks implacably turned to the world, his eyes scorning everything he saw. I think he admired only one thing, which was strength. Any other man New Hope would have horse-whipped and driven from town. But Dolliver walked abroad as indifferent as before while the cross currents of speculation and hatred and fear played around him.
SOMETHING happened, then, in our town hard to describe. There was
a feeling along St. Vrain Street very strong to me as a
youngster, a feeling of breath being held, of some catastrophe
hovering over us. All the boys in my gang knew something was
about to happen; it was so powerful an influence that we used to
sit around the blazing tar barrels south of town, uneasy and
afraid to prowl toward the river. And one night Johnny Dix gave
it a name.
Johnny said: "Dan Cameron is goin' to kill Jeff McKay. My father heard it."
It is queer how the smell of blood goes with the wind, how the impulse of violence flows along the earth. It was a rumor only, without substance. Yet the following evening, just before supper time, Dan Cameron and five of his men whirled off the prairie into a half-deserted St. Vrain Street and poured a volley into Jeff McKay's small office adjoining Linenweber's Restaurant. They were instantly gone, leaving Jeff unhurt behind the desk; but a man just coming out of the restaurant went down with a bullet in the ribs. There was no pursuit.
We were all sitting on the porch, only two hours later, when Jeff and Glory came out of the Harper yard and turned in to our steps. It was dark, but our lamps made a lane down the walk, and I could see Jeff McKay's face clearly. I recall now that something had happened to his expression. It was the same, yet his features seemed to stand out, and there was a thin line at the corners of his mouth. Trouble hadn't broken him; it had toughened him.
"Has Sheriff Carrigan got a posse out?" asked my father.
"He wants a warrant to follow," said Jeff quietly. "I will not swear one."
"He needs no warrant," said my father. But afterward he added: "I understand why he wants an excuse to chase the Cameron gang. You are a marked man, Jeff."
"It is my quarrel. I don't wish a posse to go out and get shot up for me."
My father was long silent. Then he said: "It could be done simpler than that. The key to this situation, I think, is in one man's pocket. Go see Bill Dolliver."
"I can't do that," said Jeff.
My father stirred in his chair. I remember the quick, bright glow of his cigar tip and the smell of its smoke. "I believe I told you a month ago that your conscience was a luxury."
"It is the only thing I have to go by," Jeff McKay said, and turned away with Glory. I watched them stroll into the darkness, side by side, and without talk. They made tall silhouettes against the shadows; and something of that deep faith they both possessed seemed to remain behind on the porch, seemed to quiet the evening. My father rose. He said—"Come with me."—and we went out, crossed to St. Vrain, and turned toward the center of town. House lamps made golden lanes all along the way, and there was a bright-splashed pool of light in front of the Beauty Belle. My father spoke to me. "It is hard sometimes to know the difference between right and wrong. A man should be slow in coming to judgment." When we got abreast the Beauty Belle, I saw Dolliver standing beside one of the awning posts, smoking a cigar. He looked around as Father came up. He said: "Hello, Tod."
It was, for him, very civilly said. Father was a little-speaking man, but there was a quality in him. I think Dolliver respected it.
Father said: "Jeff McKay will be dead before the week is out."
Dolliver only looked at him. His cigar tilted upward, and his mouth thinned and disappeared beneath the sweep of his black mustache. I felt the power of those big, impatient eyes strike my father, and I hated Dolliver again. But my father's tone was even. I was, I recall, suddenly very proud of him.
"You haven't done enough, Bill."
Dolliver said: "I have done nothing at all, Tod."
But my father's voice was sharper than usual. "I disagree. You had power enough to save Hale Cameron from the rope. But you let him hang. It was a deliberate choice on your part. New Hope doesn't understand why. I do. When you let Hale take his punishment, you were backing up Jeff McKay. But it isn't enough."
The words came growling out of Dolliver's throat. "I am no reformer."
"No," agreed my father dryly, "you are not. Nevertheless you stepped out of the part you have been playing in this town when you refused to protect Hale. I can see no other motive than a desire to give Jeff a chance. Yet the result is that you've ruined your own influence over the Cameron gang and made McKay's death as certain as the coming of night." Afterward he added very softly: "It is the penalty for allowing a kind instinct get the best of you, Bill. The situation is worse than it was."
"It may be," said Dolliver.
I UNDERSTOOD so little of that talk then, yet every word made an
indelible scratch on my memory, and every fragment of the picture
remains clear. Dolliver seemed to grow more and more surly; his
eyes showed greater restlessness. My father stood very straight
and very certain there in the bright glory of the Beauty Belle;
he was always rather handsome, with the small bitterness of
unrealized ambitions whetting the edge of his words.
"You have always played your own game," he said. "It was not like you to step aside to support Jeff's game. If you meant it as a kindness, it is not enough. As long as Dan Cameron is alive, there is no hope for Jeff. It is not only Jeff. There's Glory Harper to be considered."
Dolliver's head came forward. "I heard she was going to marry him."
"That's right."
"He has courage," said Dolliver. "I admire courage." Then he was growling again. "Someday he'll have to learn to temper his high Scotch principles with a few practical considerations. This is a hard world for principles, Tod. I've never been able to afford them."
That was all. He turned on his heels and swung into the Beauty Belle, and Father and I went slowly down St. Vrain, toward home. My father walked with his head bowed and his hands locked behind. Something in his silence impressed me, and I did not venture to speak. A fine, full moon floated low on the horizon, and the deep dust of our street was shining like flaked silver. Jeff and Glory were returning from the far shadows, their steps echoing rhythmically together. At our gate Father stopped and stared at them, and he put his hand on the gatepost and swung his glance to me. He said in a queer way: "Don't be afraid of anything, and never be too quick to judge people." We went on into the house, and presently I climbed the stairs to bed. Not long after, before I had fallen asleep, I heard voices outside, and I sat up and looked through the window. Dolliver had driven up in a buggy and was speaking to my father who stood at the edge of the walk. The moonlight made our street very clear and lovely that night, and I could even see the details of Big Bill Dolliver's face as he bent down from his buggy seat. I do not know what he said, but my father extended his arm, and they shook, and then Dolliver drove away westward at a spanking pace, lifting the quick dust behind.
It is queer how sensitive youngsters are to voice inflections, how quick they can read meaning into simple tone; when my mother called up the stairs next morning, I knew something had happened merely from the way she spoke my name. It made me dress rapidly—for in New Hope all of us lived hungrily on the hope of the unexpected—and go down. My father was already at the table, his face extraordinarily dark, clearly sad. He said grace more solemnly than usual, and then looked over the table at me.
He said: "I think you should know, Sonny, that Dolliver rode out to Camp Creek last night and shot Dan Cameron through the heart. A Cameron man killed him before he could get away. The news came from Harriman's ranch a few hours ago."
My mother had hated Dolliver, but the gentleness in her soul nevertheless grieved. She sat with her hands folded, and I heard her murmur: "God be merciful to him."
"It is the end of the gang," my father said. "Hale was the brains of it, and Dan the whip. With both of them dead the rest will run to other parts. Jeff is safe enough now."
"He was a wicked man," my mother said, thinking of Dolliver.
But my father got quickly up from the table and shook his head. "I'm not altogether sure."
Well, it was a shock that literally ran from one end of St. Vrain to the other. I do not think New Hope quite realized how central a figure this inscrutable, massive, and savage-tempered man had been until it saw the black hearse carry him out to the cemetery on Locust Hill. It was a story that never died in our town as long as I was there. And it was a story that had the sort of moral New Hope liked. Big Bill had been a silent partner of the Camerons. But he had fallen out with them over some thieves' quarrel, and he had died. Once or twice I was with my father when somebody dwelt on this oft-repeated tale, and I noticed how quietly and sadly he listened to it, saying nothing.
IT was a month or two later, I recall, that Jeff McKay and Glory
were married. He had built a house on the western edge, one of
the finest in our town at that day, and the ceremony was held
there. Everybody knew the Harpers were comfortably fixed, but it
was nevertheless a surprise when they presented Glory with a ten-
thousand-dollar check drawn on an Omaha bank, that Harper
explained was part of her people's estate long held for her. And
it was also a surprise to the town when Harper, who had never
worked, took a job as bookkeeper in the brewery. I remember his
telling us the reason for that. "Raising Glory has been our only
business for fifteen years. It's lonesome, losing a job like
that. So I got another."
There is but one other thing to tell, and this I did not learn until many years later in the farther West. My father was growing old, and the memories of New Hope were increasingly dear to him. We fell to talking about the town one night.
"As to Dolliver," he said, "New Hope was only half right. He was a power there, and he had no illusions. He stood halfway between the good folks and the rough ones... and he controlled the town because he controlled the rough ones. To hold his power he wouldn't hesitate a minute to drive a bargain with men like the Camerons. I believe he went so far as to keep some of the money they stole in his saloon safe. When he fell out with them, it wasn't over money. It was over Hale, whom he let die in order to protect Jeff. So he went deliberately out to kill Dan, well realizing he had little chance to get away alive. But it was Jeff and Glory he was thinking about when he drove out to Camp Creek in his buggy."
I said: "Why? It doesn't sound like Dolliver."
My father said: "I was one of the men appointed by the court to open the Beauty Bette safe after he was killed. We didn't find a dime of money in it, though he was supposed to have been wealthy. There wasn't anything in it, except one paper. That was a birth certificate. There were four of us on the committee. After we looked at the birth certificate, we destroyed it and swore never to mention it. Bill had supported the Harpers for years. It was his ten thousand that they passed on to Glory. She knew nothing about that. She knew nothing about him at all."
My father was a man who hated to display his emotions. But that night I noticed how strong were the feelings beneath his customary reserve. "You see," he added, "Bill Dolliver was Glory's father. But he knew himself too well, and he knew the world too well, to allow Glory to grow up as his daughter. It is why he chose the Harpers to raise her from childhood, many years before he came to New Hope. She never did know. Well, he was a crook, and he had no illusions. But he had no fear, either, and, when the time came, he played out his hand as he saw it to the complete end, without welshing."
To my father, and my father's generation, that covered everything.