The Heart of Canyon Pass. Thomas K. Holmes

hits had finally reached Canyon Pass.

      “I hate this place, Dick,” she said again, now wearily dropping into a chair at his elbow.

      Nell Blossom possessed one of those rare complexions that remind one of nothing so much as a ripe Alberta peach. The crimson of her cheeks was vivid, but tinted away into the creaminess of her satin skin. Her lips were not too red. Her nose was a nose to be proud of without being large. Her ears were visible and like the blossoms of the dogwood tree in texture and coloring.

      “You know how I feel, Nell,” said Dick, with a calm that belied his heartbeats. “I’m sick of all this, too.” He gestured gracefully with the hand that held his cigarette. A jewel sparkled on that hand. “Canyon Pass is a dirty hole. If you say the word we’ll get out of it. I’ve made a good stake. My rake-off has given me a full poke at last. We’ll go away from here, and I’ll get into some paying business. I’ll never turn a card again—for Boss Tolley or any other man. I mean it!”

      The girl was looking straight into his eyes. He met that searching gaze as inscrutably as he had learned to endure the scrutiny of his opponent at the poker table.

      “Do you mean it, Dick?”

      “Just that.” He nodded. “As I told you yesterday, say the word and we’ll light out—now—this morning. You don’t know much about the world outside of Canyon Pass, Nell, but I’ll show it to you. And I love you—love you like the devil!”

      There was a force in his final phrase, although he did not stir in his chair, that made her tremble. A vivid flush slowly dyed her cheeks and throat. It passed, to leave her blue eyes humid and her lips smiling.

      “If you don’t believe me—”

      “I do,” she interrupted. “I believed you yesterday. My saddlebags are all packed, Dick, and I’m ready just whenever you are.”

      A sudden electric tremor passed through the man’s nerves. He veiled his eyes for a moment that she might not see what flared into them. He rose with her.

      “Get into your riding clothes and we’ll start. I’ll meet you with my horse in half an hour,” he said almost sternly.

      But his eyes now answered her look of gratefulness and adoration with what she thought was a reflection of her own chaste desire.

      So it came about that two other riders left Canyon Pass on this spring morning while the sun still lingered abed, and, crossing the West Fork an hour behind Andy McCann, unlike him chose the wagon-track to the summit of the canyon wall on that side of Runaway River.

      “Which way do we go, Dick? To Crescent City?”

      “South,” he returned, without looking at her.

      “We-ell. Lamberton is further but there’s a parson there, too. That’s another reason why I’ve come to hate Canyon Pass. It isn’t decent like other towns—or even up-to-date. It never had a church or a parson. It’s got everything else—saloons, gambling halls, honkytonks, stores, a bank, a hotel, a stamp mill, an express office, even a school, such as it is. But it’s heathen—plumb heathen, Dick.”

      He smiled at her then, rather a superior smile. “It’s not the only mining town that answers your description.”

      “I know it,” Nell rejoined. “But I want to see the other kind of towns. Mother Tubbs says Canyon Pass ain’t got no heart, and she’s right. She says she can’t even tell when Sunday comes, only that Sam always comes home drunk that day. This is Sunday, Dick. It’s a good day on which to begin a new life.”

      “Oh, life’s all right,” the gambler said easily. “Take it as you find it, Nell.”

      They came up into the sunlight on the rim of the canyon wall. Once on the level trail their horses broke into a canter. They could look down at certain points into the sink of the canyon where Runaway River foamed in its narrow channel. They spied Steve Siebert with his outfit traveling on the river trail. McCann, of course, they could not see, for the canyon wall on this side was almost sheer.

      Ahead, as they rode on, was the Overhang—that monstrous projection capping the scarp of the cliff, left ages ago when the canyon was roughed out by the glacial floods to threaten the pass below with utter extinction if its bulk ever fell. Parts of it had fallen some twenty years previous. This was the “big slide” which had for a time choked the river channel with soil and rubble and threatened to flood out Canyon Pass.

      The scar on the steep slope of the west wall down which that slide had fallen was now masked by a hardy growth of scrubby trees and brush. But the two old prospectors never passed the place, either going out of or returning to Canyon Pass, without keenly studying the scar.

      Halfway up the height had been a shelf with a hollow behind it—an ideal spot for a secret camp, for it could be observed neither from the trail on the opposite side of the river nor from the rim of the west wall of the canyon. Buried as this shelf had been by the slide, Steve Siebert and Andy McCann now marked the spot—and what it hid—and then glanced sardonically at each other across the foaming river. They snarled at each other like a pair of toothless old wolves. The fruit of their joint toil that lay behind that slide, one could not reach, and the other could not compass. The secret had festered in their hearts and poisoned the very souls of the two ancients for these twenty years.

      Above, the two in the plane of sunshine and freer air rode along the brink of the Overhang.

      “Say!” Dick said jerkily. “Let’s not go to Lamberton—not direct.”

      “What?”

      There was a sharp note in her voice. She turned in her saddle to face him. Her gaze narrowed. Was there after all a doubt in the very depths of Nell’s soul about the man?

      “I know a fine place—better hotel than at Lamberton—really a nice place to stop. We can reach it before night. Hoskins. You know?”

      He still spoke nervously. Nell’s gaze no more left his face. She said evenly, as though her mind was quite placid again:

      “There’s no parson at Hoskins, either.”

      He darted her another side-glance. How was she taking it? Was she, after all, going to be “sensible?” Nell was seventeen, but a woman grown.

      “Shucks, honey,” Dick said, putting out a hand to touch her for the first time. “We’ll ride on and find a parson later. We’re in no rush. We’re out for a grand, good time—”

      She pulled her horse across the path with a fierce jerk of the bridle-rein, and so escaped the defilement of his touch. Her right hand clutched the handle of her quirt, the knuckles bone-white.

      “Do you mean—you won’t marry me?”

      Dick smiled his most disarming smile, his brown eyes even twinkled. That frank and humorous look was what had first won his advantage with Nell Blossom.

      “Shucks, honey,” he drawled again. “Why so serious? Don’t worry about that. I’m free to confess I’m not a marrying man. Seen too much trouble for both parties when they are tied to one another with any silly string of the law. It’s love that will hold us together.”

      “That’s heathen, Dick!” she exclaimed hotly. “Just as heathen as Canyon Pass.”

      “Nonsense!” He laughed. “You’re just as safe with me, whether we’re married or not.”

      Which might have been quite true, but Nell stared at him, her expression as inscrutable as his own when he worked behind the green table. Dick the Devil was a shrewd gambler, but Nell Blossom had played poker herself ever since she could read the pips on the cards. And she had been fighting her own battles in harsh environment and against men almost from the same tender age. Her cold rage now sprang from the fact that he should so mistake her character.

      “Come on, honey!” he said coaxingly.

      The quirt came up slowly; then it sang through the air.

      “You