The Seventh Man | Page 2

hand of Gregg, and his frown relaxed.
When he stretched his arms, the cramps of labor unkinked and let the
warm blood flow, swiftly, and in the pleasure of it he closed his eyes
and drew a luxurious breath. He stepped from the door with his, head
high and his heart lighter, and when his hobnailed shoe clinked on the
fallen hammer he kicked it spinning from his path. That act brought a
smile into his eyes, and he sauntered to the edge of the little plateau and
looked down into the wide chasm of the Asper Valley.
Blue shadows washed across it, though morning shone around Gregg
on the height, and his glance dropped in a two-thousand-foot plunge to
a single yellow eye that winked through the darkness, a light in the
trapper's cabin. But the dawn was falling swiftly now, and while Gregg
lingered the blue grew thin, purple-tinted, and then dark, slender points
pricked up, which he knew to be the pines. Last of all, he caught the
sheen of grass.
Around him pressed a perfect silence, the quiet of night holding over
into the day, yet he cast a glance behind him as he heard a voice.
Indeed, he felt that some one approached him, some one for whom he
had been waiting, yet it was a sad expectancy, and more like
homesickness than anything he knew.
"Aw, hell," said Vic Gregg, "it's spring."
A deep-throated echo boomed back at him, and the sound went down
the gulch, three times repeated.
"Spring," repeated Gregg more softly, as if he feared to rouse that echo,
"damned if it ain't!"
He shrugged his shoulders and turned resolutely towards the lean-to,
picking up the discarded hammer on the way. By instinct he caught it at
exactly the right balance for his strength and arm, and the handle,
polished by his grip, played with an oiled, frictionless movement

against the callouses of his palm. From the many hours of drilling,
fingers crooked, he could only straighten them by a painful effort. A
bad hand for cards, he decided gloomily, and still frowning over this he
reached the door. There he paused in instant repugnance, for the place
was strange to him.
In thought and wish he was even now galloping Grey Molly over the
grass along the Asper, and he had to wrench himself into the mood of
the patient miner. There lay his blankets, rumpled, brown with dirt, and
he shivered at sight of them; the night had been cold. Before he fell
asleep, he had flung the magazine into the corner and now the wind
rustled its torn, yellowed pages in a whisper that spoke to Gregg of the
ten-times repeated stories, tales of adventure, drifts of tobacco smoke in
gaming halls, the chant of the croupier behind the wheel, deep voices of
men, laughter of pretty girls, tatoo of running horses, shouts which only
redeye can inspire. He sniffed the air; odor of burned bacon and coffee
permeated the cabin. He turned to the right and saw his discarded
overalls with ragged holes at the knees; he turned to the left and looked
into the face of the rusted alarm clock. Its quick, soft ticking sent an
ache of weariness through him.
"What's wrong with me," muttered Gregg. Even that voice seemed
ghostly loud in the cabin, and he shivered again. "I must be going
nutty."
As if to escape from his own thoughts, he stepped out into the sun
again, and it was so grateful to him after the chill shadow in the lean-to,
that he looked up, smiling, into the sky. A west wind urged a scattered
herd of clouds over the peaks, tumbled masses of white which puffed
into transparent silver at the edges, and behind, long wraiths of vapor
marked the path down which they had traveled. Such an old cowhand
as Vic Gregg could not fail to see the forms of cows and heavy-necked
bulls and running calves in that drift of clouds. About this season the
boys would be watching the range for signs of screw worms in the
cattle, and the bog-riders must have their hands full dragging out cows
which had fled into the mud to escape the heel flies. With a new
lonesomeness he drew his eyes down to the mountains.

Ordinarily, strange fancies never entered the hard head of Gregg, but
today it seemed to him that the mountains found a solemn
companionship in each other.
Out of the horizon, where the snowy forms glimmered in the blue, they
marched in loose order down to the valley of the Asper, where some of
them halted in place, huge cliffs, and others stumbled out into foothills,
but the main range swerved to the east beside the valley, eastward out
of