The Claim Jumpers: A Romance | Page 4

"I've always wanted to go West. I want to write, and I'm sure, in that great, free country, I'll get a chance for development. I had to work hard to induce father and mother to consent, but it's done now, and I leave next week. Father procured me a position out there in one of the camps. I'm to be local treasurer, or something like that; I'm not quite sure, you see, for I haven't talked with Bishop yet. I go to his office for directions to-morrow."
At the mention of Bishop the Leslies glanced at each other behind the young man's back.
"Bishop?" repeated Jim. "Where's your job located?"
"In the Black Hills of South Dakota, somewhere near a little place called Spanish Gulch."
This time the Leslies winked at each other.
"It's a nice country," commented Bert vaguely; "I've been there."
"Oh, have you?" cried the young man. "What's it like?"
"Hills, pines, log houses, good hunting--oh, it's Western enough."
A clock struck in a church tower outside. In spite of himself, Bennington started.
"Better run along home," laughed Jim; "your mamma will be angry."
To prove that this consideration carried no weight, Bennington stayed ten minutes longer. Then he descended the five flights of stairs deliberately enough, but once out of earshot of his friends, he ran several blocks. Before going into the house he took off his shoes. In spite of the precaution, his mother called to him as he passed her room. It was half past ten.
Beck and Hench kicked de Laney's chair aside, and drew up more comfortably before the fire; but James would have none of it. He seemed to be excited.
"No," he vetoed decidedly. "You fellows have got to get out! I've got something to do, and I can't be bothered."
The visitors grumbled. "There's true hospitality for you," objected they; "turn your best friends out into the cold world! I like that!"
"Sorry, boys," insisted James, unmoved. "Got an inspiration. Get out! Vamoose!"
They went, grumbling loudly down the length of the stairs, to the disgust of the Lady with the Piano on the floor below.
"What're you up to, anyway, Jimmie?" inquired the brother with some curiosity.
James had swept a space clear on the table, and was arranging some stationery.
"Don't you care," he replied; "you just sit down and read your little Omar for a while."
He plunged into the labours of composition, and Bert sat smoking meditatively. After some moments the writer passed a letter over to the smoker.
"Think it'll do?" he inquired.
Bert read the letter through carefully.
"Jeems," said he, after due deliberation, "Jeems, you're a blooming genius."
James stamped the envelope.
"I'll mail it for you when I go out in the morning," Bert suggested.
"Not on your daily bread, sonny. It is posted now by my own hand. We won't take any chances on this layout, and that I can tell you."
He tramped down four flights and to the corner, although it was midnight and bitter cold. Then, with a seraphic grin on his countenance, he went to bed and slept the sleep of the just.
The envelope was addressed to a Mr. James Fay, Spanish Gulch, South Dakota.
CHAPTER II
THE STORY-BOOK WEST
When a man is twenty-one, and has had no experience, and graduates from a small college where he roomed alone in splendour, and possesses a gift of words and a certain delight in reading, and is thrown into new and, to him, romantic surroundings--when all these stars of chance cross their orbits, he begins to write a novel. The novel never has anything to do with the aforesaid new and romantic surroundings; neither has it the faintest connection with anything the author has ever seen. That would limit his imagination.
Once he was well settled in his new home, and the first excitement of novel impressions had worn off, Bennington de Laney began to write regularly three hours a day. He did his scribbling with a fountain pen, on typewriter paper, and left a broad right-hand margin, just as he had seen Brooks do. In it he experienced, above all, a delightful feeling of power. He enjoyed to the full his ability to swing gorgeous involved sentences, phrase after phrase, down the long arc of rhetoric, without a pause, without a quiver, until they rushed unhasting up the other slope to end in beautiful words, polysyllabic, but with just the right number of syllables. Interspersed were short sentences. He counted the words in one or the other of these two sorts, carefully noting the relations they bore to each other. On occasions he despaired because they did not bear the right relations. And he also dragged out, squirming, the Anglo-Saxon and Latin derivations, and set them up in a row that he might observe their respective numbers. He was uneasily conscious that he ought, in the dread of college anathema, to use the former, but he