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Page 11
This attack also won the admiration of Polly Hope, who was
something of a spitfire herself. A little jealous of Dick for
the chief place he held in Bud's affection, she openly claimed
the younger brother as her sweetheart, and attempted to
constitute him her knight--though with repeated discouragements,
for Bud was a bashful lad, and, though he had a true affection
for the girl, boylike concealed it by a show of indifference.
The tender relations of these boys and girls persisted naturally
into young manhood and womanhood. No word of love passed between
Dick and Echo until that time when the "nesting impulse," the
desire to have a home of his own, prompted the young man to go
out into the world and win his fortune. For a year he had acted
as foreman of the Allen ranch, working in neighborly cooperation
with Jack Payson, of Sweetwater Ranch, a man of about his own
age. The two young men became the closest of comrades. When the
fever of adventure seized upon Lane, and he became dissatisfied
with the plodding career of a wage-earner, Payson insisted on
mortgaging Sweetwater Ranch for three thousand dollars and in
lending Dick the money for a year's prospecting in the mountains
of Sonora, Mexico, in search of a fabulous rich "Lost Mine of the
Aztecs."
Traditions of lost mines are plentiful in Arizona and northern
Mexico. First taken up by the Spanish invaders of three hundred
years ago from the native Indians, they have been passed down to
each subsequent influx of white men. The directions are always
vague. The inquirer cannot pin his informant down to any
definite data. Over the mountains always lies the road. Hundreds
of lives have been sacrificed, and cruelty unparalleled practised
upon innocent men women, and children, by gold-seekers in their
lust for conquest. Prosperous Indian villages have been laid
waste, and whole bands of adventurers have gone into the desert
in the search of these mines, never to return.
When the time for Lane's departure came Echo wept at the thought
of losing for so long a time the close companion of her childhood
and the sympathetic confidant of her youthful thoughts and
aspirations. Dick, in whom friendship for Echo had long before
ripened into conscious love, took her tears as evidence that she
was similarly affected toward him, and he allowed all the
suppressed passion of his nature full vent in a declaration of
love. The girl was deeply moved by this revelation of the heart
of a strong man made tender as a woman's by a power centering in
her own humble self, and, being utterly without experience of the
emotion even in its protective form of calf-love, which is the
varioloid of the genuine infection, she imagined through sheer
sympathy that she shared his passion. So she assented with
maidenly reserve to his plea that she promise to marry him when
he should return and provide a home for her. Her more cautious
mother secured a modification of this pledge by limiting the time
that Echo should wait for him to one year. If at the expiration
of that period Lane did not return to claim her promise, or did
not write making satisfactory arrangements for continuance of the
engagement, Echo was to be considered free to marry whom she
chose.
Soon after Lane's departure Mrs. Allen persuaded the Colonel to
send Echo east to a New England finishing-school for girls, where
her mother hoped that her budding love for Lane might be nipped
in the frigid atmosphere of intellectual culture, if not, indeed,
supplanted by a saving interest in young men in general, and,
perhaps, in some particular scion of a blue-blooded Boston
family.
The plan succeeded in part only. The companionship of her
schoolfellows, her music and art-lessons, her books (during the
limited periods allotted to serious study and reading), and,
above all, her attrition at receptions with another order of men
than that she had known in the rough, uncultured West, occupied
her mind so fully that poor Dick Lane, who was putting a thought
of Echo Allen in every blow of his pick, received only the scraps
of her attention.
Dick had few opportunities to mail a letter, and none of them for
receiving one. Unpractised in writing, his epistolary
compositions were crude in the extreme, being wholly confined to
bald statements of fact. Had he been as tender on paper as he
was in his words and accents when he kissed away her tears at
parting, her regard for him would have had fuel to feed on and
might have kindled into genuine love. As it was, she was forced
to admit that, in comparison, with the brilliant university men
with whom she conversed, Dick Lane, intellectually, was as quartz
to diamond.
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