He was popularly nicknamed Morg, and it may be understood that strangers were apt to spell the name Morgue; yet his full name, as he signed it on the day of his wedding and never again, before or after, was Morgan Algernon Valentine. Someone discovered that hidden and forbidden signature and once addressed the rancher as Algie, and the result was a violent accident.
Yet Morgan Valentine was a peaceful man. He was one of those who accomplish romantic results in an everyday manner. Banish his mountains from his horizon, and he would have been a wretched man, and yet when he thought about the mountains at all, it was only to remember the trails that netted them and the sweat of the hard climbs. His labor in life had been noble and was apt to prove enduring. Thirty years before— he and his brother, John, followed the Crane River, where it splits through the higher mountains and comes out upon the lower, rolling hills on the farther side— it occurred to John Valentine, who was the dreamer of the family, that the slopes might not be too steep to preclude cultivation with the plow! and though the regions of the hill crests were a jagged soil, much broken by rocks, there might be enough grass to graze cattle on. Five minutes later he was painting a picture of the house which might be built there— one for Morgan and one for John, on opposite sides of the Crane River. There they could live in eyeshot, each with a broad domain separated by the arrowy, yellow waters of the Crane. There was ample room for both— a hundred thousand acres of hill and valley land.
And still another five minutes found John Valentine already tired of his dream and ready to spur on. But Morgan would not stir. There he resolved to pitch his tent. And though John tried valiantly to dissuade him, the tent was pitched and the two brothers remained. Forthwith, the empire which John had seen, the younger brother proceeded to build. Who are the greater men— the empire seers or the empire makers? At any rate the thing was done; front to front, a couple of miles apart, and with the noisy river splitting the landscape in the middle, rose the two houses. The house of John Valentine was planned as a nobly proportioned structure, and though it had never progressed beyond the columns of the entrance and the first story of the original, it was nevertheless beautiful even in the piece. On the other hand, practical Morgan Valentine built himself a plain shack and gradually extended it. Now it stumbled up the hills on either side, big enough to shelter a whole clan of Valentines and their supporters.
From which it may be gathered that John Valentine lived his life as Byron wrote his poems— he leaped once, tigerlike, and if he failed in the first attempt, or grew weary of labor, he was off to fresh fields and pastures new. He was the sort of man of whom people can easily expect great things; he could have sat on a throne; he could have painted pictures or written verse or made shoes for his own horses; but in accomplishment he was continually falling short. But Morgan Valentine seemed to have reached above his height; people wondered at what he had done. Yet perhaps his neighbors overlooked this fact: that simplicity may be profound; and though few thoughts came to him, those he had worked deep into the roots of his being.
For instance, there was only one human being whom he had ever truly loved, and that was his brother. And when John died, Morgan transferred a portion of that love to the orphan daughter of the dead man.
But Morgan's own wife and children were merely incidents in his life.
It is necessary to be so explicit about this Morgan Valentine, because, in spite of his simplicity, this narrative could never have been written were it not that he did some astonishing things. Indeed, so unusual were some of the things that he did, that one is tempted to add fact to fact so that there will be no misapprehension— no tendency to call him a dream figure. On this night he was exactly fifty-one years and three months old. He stood five feet nine and three-quarter inches and weighed one hundred and eighty pounds; he had a gray head and a young, stern face; he was slow in speech and agile in movement; and at this particular moment he was smoking a stubby corncob pipe on the front porch of his house, with his heels cocked upon the top of the railing.
His wife was in bed; the servants dared not make a sound in the house even if they were awake; the songs and the laughter of the men in the bunkhouse had long since died out; but Morgan Valentine, who slept never more than five hours a night, was still wakeful at twelve.
But if his body waked, his mind slept indeed, and only his eye roved lazily through the valley. A broad moon, nearing the full, had rolled like a wheel up the side of Grizzly Peak, and it cast enough light for him to make out the details of his possessions. In the heart of each valley there was the black-plowed land in narrow strips— incredibly rich loam; and over the rest of the unfenced ground where the cattle ranged, the moon flashed here and there on a bit of outcropping quartz, or twinkled along a line of new-strung barbed wire. But far and wide, over the neighboring hollows, all to his right was his, over range after range of hills, rocking away toward a dim horizon. And looking straight ahead all was his to the silver streak of the river. Indeed, this was little more than an imaginary boundary, for though the great district beyond belonged to his niece, it would be, by all prospects, many and many a year before Mary Valentine was married, and until such a time, he was the executor, his will was law through all the rich region of that valley.
No wonder that the bowl of the pipe tilted up as he set his teeth, and he was filled with the solid sense of possession.
Into his quiet thought beat the swift tattoo of a horse coming across the valley road; it rounded the hill, and at once the hoofbeats rang loudly through the night with the speed of the fugitive— the speed of the pursuer— the speed of anger, perhaps. Now the horseman lurched into view, a black form, with a black shadow trailing beside it over the white road. Straight up to the front of Morgan Valentine's house; then out of the saddle with a leap; then heavy heels and ringing spurs on the high flight of steps. He caught sight of the figure of Morgan.
"Morgan Valentine?" he called.
Now, midnight hushes voices and makes men walk lightly, but the ring in this question was uncontrolled, as if the fellow had a right to waken the entire house if he felt so inclined.
"Gus Norman?" queried the rancher, rising.
"That's me!"
He came along the porch more slowly now, with the slowness of one who deliberates and prepares words. But when he came close, the calmness of Morgan Valentine snapped his self-control, and he burst out: "Valentine, it's got to stop!"
"What's got to stop?"
"That— that girl!"
He turned his head as he spoke mechanically and looked across the shining strip of the Crane River toward the unfinished house of John Valentine which stood on the crest of a hill, white under the moon, and with a solemn, Doric beauty.
"What girl?" persisted Valentine obtusely.
"What girl? Mary Valentine; your niece! That's what!"
"Stop? How stop?"
"Stop her from going about— man-killing—"