The Uphill Climb by B. M. Bower

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THE UPHILL CLIMB

by

B. M. BOWER

Author of _Good Indian_, _Chip, of the Flying U_, etc.

With Illustrations by CHARLES M. RUSSELL

New York
Grosset & Dunlap
Publishers

1913

[Illustration: "Hell-o, Ford, where the blazes did you drop down from?"
a welcoming voice yelled. Frontispiece.]

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

I "Married! And I Don't Know Her Name!"
II Wanted: Information
III One Way to Drown Sorrow
IV Reaction
V "I Can Spare this Particular Girl"
VI The Problem of Getting Somewhere
VII The Foreman of the Double Cross
VIII "I Wish You'd Quit Believing in Me!"
IX Impressions
X In Which the Demon Opens an Eye and Yawns
XI "It's Going to Be an Uphill Climb!"
XII At Hand-Grips with the Demon
XIII A Plan Gone Wrong
XIV The Feminine Point of View
XV The Climb
XVI To Find and Free a Wife
XVII What Ford Found at the Top

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

"Hell-o, Ford, where the blazes did you drop down from?" a welcoming
voice yelled. (Frontispiece)

She lifted her head and looked at him, and drew away.

Dick tottered upon the step and went off backward.

"Ford, I'm no coquette," she said straightforwardly.

CHAPTER I

"Married! And I Don't Know Her Name!"

Ford lifted his arms above his head to yawn as does a man who has slept
too heavily, found his biceps stiffened and sore, and massaged them
gingerly with his finger-tips. His eyes took on the vacancy of memory
straining at the leash of forgetfulness. He sighed largely, swung his
head slowly from left to right in mute admission of failure to grasp
what lay just behind his slumber, and thereby discovered other muscles
that protested against sudden movement. He felt his neck with a careful,
rubbing gesture. One hand strayed to his left cheekbone, hovered there
tentatively, wandered to the bridge of his nose, and from there dropped
inertly to the bed.

"Lordy me! I must have been drunk last night," he said aloud,
mechanically taking the straight line of logic from effect to cause, as
much experience had taught him to do.

"You was--and then some," replied an unemotional voice from somewhere
behind him.

"Oh! That you, Sandy?" Ford lay quiet, trying to remember. His
finger-tips explored the right side of his face; now and then he winced
under their touch, light as it was.

"I must have carried an awful load," he decided, again unerringly taking
the backward trail from effect to cause. Later, logic carried him
farther. "Who'd I lick, Sandy?"

"Several." The unseen Sandy gave one the impression of a man smoking and
speaking between puffs. "Can't say just who--you did start in on. You
wound up on--the preacher."

"Preacher?" Ford's tone matched the flicker of interest in his eyes.

"Uhn-hunh."

Ford meditated a moment. "I don't recollect ever licking a preacher
before," he observed curiously.

Life, stale and drab since his eyes opened, gathered to itself the pale
glow of awakening interest. Ford rose painfully, inch by inch, until he
was sitting upon the side of the bed, got from there to his feet, looked
down and saw that he was clothed to his boots, and crossed slowly to
where a cheap, flyspecked looking-glass hung awry upon the wall. His
self-inspection was grave and minute. His eyes held the philosophic calm
of accustomedness.

"Who put this head on me, Sandy?" he inquired apathetically. "The
preacher?"

"I d' know. You had it when you come up outa the heap. You licked the
preacher afterwards, I think."

Sandy was reading a ragged-backed novel while he smoked; his interest in
Ford and Ford's battered countenance was plainly perfunctory.

Outside, the rain fell aslant in the wind and drummed dismally upon the
little window beside Sandy. It beat upon the door and trickled
underneath in a thin rivulet to a shallow puddle, formed where the floor
was sunken. A dank warmth and the smell of wet wood heating to the
blazing point pervaded the room and mingled with the coarse aroma of
cheap, warmed-over coffee.

"Sandy!"

"Hunh?"

"Did anybody get married last night?" The leash of forgetfulness was
snapping, strand by strand. Troubled remembrance peered out from behind
the philosophic calm in Ford's eyes.

"Unh-hunh." Sandy turned a leaf and at the same time flicked the ashes
from his cigarette with a mechanical finger movement. "You did." He
looked briefly up from the page. "That's why you licked the preacher,"
he assisted, and went back to his reading.

A subdued rumble of mid-autumn thunder jarred sullenly overhead. Ford
ceased caressing the purple half-moon which inclosed his left eye and
began moodily straightening his tie.

"Now what'n hell did I do that for?" he inquired complainingly.

"Search _me_," mumbled Sandy over his book. He read half a page
farther. "Do what for?" he asked, with belated attention.

Ford swore and went over and lifted the coffeepot from the stove, shook
it, looked in, and made a grimace of disgust as the steam smote him in
the face. "Paugh!" He set down the pot and turned upon Sandy.

"Get your nose out of that book a minute and talk!" he commanded in a
tone beseeching for all its surly growl. "You say I got married. I kinda
recollect something of the kind. What I want to know is who's the lady?
And what did I do it for?" He sat down, leaned his bruised head upon his
palms, and spat morosely into the stove-hearth. "Lordy me," he grumbled.
"I don't know any lady well enough to marry her--and I sure can't think
of any female lady that would marry me--not even by proxy!"

Sandy closed the book upon a forefinger and regarded Ford with that
blend of pity, amusement, and tolerance which is so absolutely
unbearable to one who has behaved foolishly and knows it. Ford would
not have borne the look if he had seen it; but he was caressing a
bruise on the point of his jaw and staring dejectedly into the meager
blaze which rimmed the lower edge of the stove's front door, and so
remained unconscious of his companion's impertinence.

"Who was the lady, Sandy?" he begged dispiritedly, after a silence.

"Search _me_" Sandy replied again succinctly. "Some stranger that blew
in here with a license and the preacher and said you was her fee-ancy."
(Sandy read romances, mostly, and permitted his vocabulary to profit
thereby.) "You never denied it, even when she said your name was a nomdy
gair; and you let her marry you, all right."

"Are you sure of that?" Ford looked up from under lowering eyebrows.

"Unh-hunh--that's what you done, all right." Sandy's voice was
dishearteningly positive.

"Lordy me!" gasped Ford under his breath.

There was a silence which slid Sandy's interest back into his book. He
turned a leaf and was half-way down the page before he was interrupted
by more questions.

"Say! Where's she at now?" Ford spoke with a certain furtive lowering of
his voice.

"I d' know." Sandy read a line with greedy interest. "She took the
'leven-twenty," he added then. Another mental lapse. "You seen her to
the train yourself."

"The hell I did!" Ford's good eye glared incredulity, but Sandy was
again following hungrily the love-tangle of an unpronounceable count in
the depths of the Black Forest, and he remained perfectly unconscious of
the look and the mental distress which caused it. Ford went back to
studying the meager blaze and trying to remember. He might be able to
extract the whole truth from Sandy, but that would involve taking his
novel away from him--by force, probably; and the loss of the book would
be very likely to turn Sandy so sullen that he would refuse to answer,
or to tell the truth, at any rate; and Ford's muscles were very, very
sore. He did not feel equal to a scuffle with Sandy, just then. He
repeated something which sounded like an impromptu litany and had to do
with the ultimate disposal of his own soul.

"Hunh?" asked Sandy.

Whereupon Ford, being harassed mentally and in great physical discomfort
as well, specifically disposed of Sandy's immortal soul also.

Sandy merely grinned at him. "You don't want to take it to heart like
that," he remonstrated cheerfully.

Ford, by way of reply, painstakingly analyzed the chief deficiencies of
Sandy's immediate relatives, and was beginning upon his grandparents
when Sandy reached barren ground in the shape of three long paragraphs
of snow, cold, and sunrise artistically blended with prismatic
adjectives. He waded through the first paragraph and well into the
second before he mired in a hopeless jumble of unfamiliar polysyllables.
Sandy was not the skipping kind; he threw the book upon a bench and gave
his attention wholly to his companion in time to save his
great-grandfather from utter condemnation.

"What's eating you, Ford?" he began pacifically--for Sandy was a
weakling. "You might be a lot worse off. You're married, all right
enough, from all I c'n hear--but she's left town. It ain't as if you had
to live with her."

Ford looked at him a minute and groaned dismally.

"Oh, I ain't meaning anything against the lady herself," Sandy hastened
to assure him. "Far as I know, she's all right--"

"What I want to know," Ford broke in, impatient of condolence when he
needed facts, "is, who _is_ she? And what did I go and marry her for?"

"Well, you'll have to ask somebody that knows. I never seen her, myself,
except when you was leadin' her down to the depot, and you and her
talked it over private like--the way I heard it. I was gitting a
hair-cut and shampoo at the time. First I heard, you was married. I
should think you'd remember it yourself." Sandy looked at Ford
curiously.

"I kinda remember standing up and holding hands with some woman and
somebody saying: 'I now pronounce you man and wife,'" Ford confessed
miserably, his face in his hands again. "I guess I must have done it,
all right."

Sandy was kind enough when not otherwise engaged. He got up and put a
basin of water on the stove to warm, that Ford might bathe his hurts,
and he made him a very creditable drink with lemon and whisky and not
too much water.

"The way I heard it," he explained further, "this lady come to town
looking for Frank Ford Cameron, and seen you, and said you was him.
So--"

"I ain't," Ford interrupted indignantly. "My name's Ford Campbell and
I'll lick any darned son-of-a-gun--"

"Likely she made a mistake," Sandy soothed. "Frank Ford Cameron, she had
you down for, and you went ahead and married her willing enough. Seems
like there was some hurry-up reason that she explained to you private.
She had the license all made out and brought a preacher down from
Garbin. Bill Wright said he overheard you tellin' her you'd do anything
to oblige a lady--"

"That's the worst of it; I'm always too damned polite when I'm drunk!"
grumbled Ford.

Sandy, looking upon his bruised and distorted countenance and recalling,
perhaps, the process by which Ford reached that lamentable condition,
made a sound like a diplomatically disguised laugh. "Not always," he
qualified mildly.

"Anyway," he went on, "you sure married her. That's straight goods. Bill
Wright and Rock was the witnesses. And if you don't know why you done
it--" Sandy waved his hands to indicate his inability to enlighten Ford.
"Right afterwards you went out to the bar and had another drink--all
this takin' place in the hotel dining-room, and Mother McGrew down with
neuralagy and not bein' present--and one drink leads to another, you
know. I come in then, and the bunch was drinkin' luck to you fast as Sam
could push the bottles along. Then you went back to the lady--and if you
don't know what took place you can search me--and pretty soon Bill said
you'd took her and her grip to the depot. Anyway, when you come back,
you wasn't troubled with no attack of politeness!

"You went in the air with Bill, first," continued Sandy, testing with
his finger the temperature of the water in the basin, "and bawled him
out something fierce for standing by and seeing you make a break like
that without doing something. You licked him--and then Rock bought in
because some of your remarks kinda included him too. I d' know," said
Sandy, scratching his unshaven jaw reflectively, "just how the fight did
go between you 'n' Rock. You was both using the whole room, I know. Near
as I could make out, you--or maybe it was Rock--tromped on Big Jim's
bunion. This cold spell's hard on bunions--and Big Jim went after you
both with blood in his eye.

"After that"--Sandy spread his arms largely--"it was go-as-you-please.
Sam and me was the only ones that kept out, near as I can recollect, and
when it thinned up a bit, you had Aleck down and was pounding the liver
outa him, and Big Jim was whanging away at you, and Rock was clawin' Jim
in the back of the neck, and you was all kickin' like bay steers in
brandin' time. I reached in under the pile and dragged you out by one
leg and left the rest of 'em fighting. They never seemed to miss you
none." He grinned. "Jim commenced to bump Aleck's head up and down on
the floor instead of you--and I knew he didn't have nothing against
Aleck."

"Bill--"

"Bill, he'd quit right in the start." Sandy's grin became a laugh.
"Seems like pore old Bill always gits in bad when you commence on your
third pint. You wasn't through, though, seems like. You was going to
start in at the beginning and en-core the whole performance, and you
started out after Bill. Bill, he was lookin' for a hole big enough to
crawl into by that time. But you run into the preacher. And you licked
him to a fare-you-well and had him crying real tears before I or anybody
else could stop you."

"What'd I lick him for?" Ford inquired in a tone of deep
discouragement.

Sandy's indeterminate, blue-gray eyes rounded with puzzlement.

"Search me," he repeated automatically. But later he inadvertently shed
enlightenment. He laughed, bending double, and slapping his thigh at the
irresistible urge of a mental picture.

"Thought I'd die," he gasped. "Me and Sam was watching from the door.
You had the preacher by the collar, shakin' him, and once in awhile
liftin' him clean off the ground on the toe of your boot; and you kept
saying: 'A sober man, and a preacher--and you'd marry that girl to a
fellow like me!' And then biff! And he'd let out a squawk. 'A drinkin',
fightin', gamblin' son-of-a-gun like me, you swine!' you'd tell him. And
when we finally pulled you loose, he picked up his hat and made a run
for it."

Ford meditated gloomily. "I'll lick him again, and lick him when I'm
sober, by thunder!" he promised grimly. "Who was he, do you know?"

"No, I don't. Little, dried-up geezer with a nose like a kit-fox's and
a whine to his voice. He won't come around here no more."

The door opened gustily and a big fellow with a skinned nose and a
whimsical pair of eyes looked in, hesitated while he stared hard at
Ford, and then entered and shut the door by the simple method of
throwing his shoulders back against it.

"Hello, old sport--how you comin'?" he cried cheerfully. "Kinda wet for
makin' calls, but when a man's loaded down with a guilty conscience--"
He sighed somewhat ostentatiously and pulled forward a chair rejuvenated
with baling-wire braces between the legs, and a cowhide seat. "What's
that cookin'--coffee, or sheep-dip?" he inquired facetiously of Sandy,
though his eyes dwelt solicitously upon Ford's bowed head. He leaned
forward and slapped Ford in friendly fashion upon the shoulder.

"Buck up--'the worst is yet to come,'" he shouted, and laughed with an
exaggeration of cheerfulness. "You can't ever tell when death or
matrimony's goin' to get a man. By hokey, seems like there's no dodgin'
either one."

Ford lifted a bloodshot eye to the other. "And I always counted you for
a friend, Bill," he reproached heavily. "Sandy says I licked you good
and plenty. Well, looks to me like you had it coming, all right."

"Well--I got it, didn't I?" snorted Bill, his hand lifting involuntarily
to his nose. "And I ain't bellering, am I?" His mouth took an abused,
downward droop. "I ain't holdin' any grudge, am I? Why, Sandy here can
tell you that I held one side of you up whilst he was leadin' the other
side of you home! And I am sorry I stood there and seen you get married
off and never lifted a finger; I'm darned sorry. I shoulda hollered
misdeal, all right. I know it now." He pulled remorsefully at his wet
mustache, which very much resembled a worn-out sharing brush.

Ford straightened up, dropped a hand upon his thigh, and thereby
discovered another sore spot, which he caressed gently with his palm.

"Say, Bill, you were there, and you saw her. On the square now--what's
she like? And what made me marry her?"

Bill pulled so hard upon his mustache that his teeth showed; his breath
became unpleasantly audible with the stress of emotion. "So help me, I
can't tell you what she's like, Ford," he confessed. "I don't remember
nothing about her looks, except she looked good to me, and I never seen
her before, and her hair wasn't red--I always remember red hair when I
see it, drunk or sober. You see," he added as an extenuation, "I was
pretty well jagged myself. I musta been. I recollect I was real put out
because my name wasn't Frank Ford--By hokey!" He laid an impressive
forefinger upon Ford's knee and tapped several times. "I never knew your
name was rightly Frank Ford Cameron. I always--"

"It ain't." Ford winced and drew away from the tapping process, as if
his knee also was sensitive that morning.

"You told her it was. I mind that perfectly, because I was so su'prised
I swore right out loud and was so damned ashamed I couldn't apologize.
And say! She musta been a real lady or I wouldn't uh felt that way about
it!" Bill glanced triumphantly from one to the other. "Take it from me,
you married a lady, Ford. Drunk or sober, I always make it a point to
speak proper before the ladies--t'other kind don't count--and when I
make a break, you betcher life I remember it. She's a real lady--I'd
swear to that on a stack uh bibles ten feet high!" He settled back and
unbuttoned his steaming coat with the air of a man who has established
beyond question the vital point of an argument.

"Did I tell her so myself, or did I just let it go that way?" Ford, as
his brain cleared, stuck close to his groping for the essential facts.

"Well, now--I ain't dead sure as to that. Maybe Rock'll remember. Kinda
seems to me now, that she asked you if you was really Frank Ford
Cameron, and you said: 'I sure am,' or something like that. The
preacher'd know, maybe. He musta been the only sober one in the
bunch--except the girl. But you done chased him off, so--"

"Sandy, I wish you'd go hunt Rock up and tell him I want to see him."
Ford spoke with more of his natural spirit than he had shown since
waking.

"Rock's gone on out to Riley's camp," volunteered Bill. "Left this
morning, before the rain started in."

"What was her name--do you know?" Ford went back to the mystery.

"Ida--or was it Jenny? Some darned name--I heard it, when the preacher
was marrying you." Bill was floundering hopelessly in mental fog, but he
persisted. "And I seen it wrote in the paper I signed my name to. I mind
she rolled up the paper afterwards and put it--well, I dunno where, but
she took it away with her, and says to you: 'That's safe, now'--or
'You're safe,' or 'I'm safe,'--anyway, some darned thing was safe. And I
was goin' to kiss the bride--mebbe I did kiss her--only I'd likely
remember it if I had, drunk or sober! And--oh, now I got it!" Bill's
voice was full of elation. "You was goin' to kiss the bride--that was
it, it was you goin' to kiss her, and she slap--no, by hokey, she
didn't slap you, she just--or was it Rock, now?" Doubt filled his eyes
distressfully. "Darn my everlastin' hide," he finished lamely, "there
was some kissin' somew'ere in the deal, and I mind her cryin'
afterwards, but whether it was about that, or--Say, Sandy, what was it
Ford was lickin' the preacher for? Wasn't it for kissin' the bride?"

"It was for marrying him to her," Sandy informed him sententiously.

Ford got up and went to the little window and looked out. Presently he
came back to the stove and stood staring disgustedly down upon the
effusively friendly Bill, leering up at him pacifically.

"If I didn't feel so rotten," he said glumly, "I'd give you another
licking right now, Bill--you boozing old devil. I'd like to lick every
darned galoot that stood back and let me in for this. You'd ought to
have stopped me. You'd oughta pounded the face off me before you let me
do such a fool thing. That," he said bitterly, "shows how much a man can
bank on his friends!"

"It shows," snorted Bill indignantly, "how much he can bank on
himself!"

"On whisky, to let him in for all kinds uh trouble," revised Sandy
virtuously. Sandy had a stomach which invariably rebelled at the second
glass and therefore, remaining always sober perforce, he took to himself
great credit for his morality.

"Married!--and I don't so much as know her name!" gritted Ford, and went
over and laid himself down upon the bed, and sulked for the rest of that
day of rain and gloom.

CHAPTER II

Wanted: Information

Sulking never yet solved a mystery nor will it accomplish much toward
bettering an unpleasant situation. After a day of unmitigated gloom and
a night of uneasy dreams, Ford awoke to a white, shifting world of the
season's first blizzard, and to something like his normal outlook upon
life.

That outlook had ever been cheerful, with the cheerfulness which comes
of taking life in twenty-four-hour doses only, and of looking not too
far ahead and backward not at all. Plenty of persons live after that
fashion and thereby attain middle life with smooth foreheads and cheeks
unlined by thought; and Ford was therefore not much different from his
fellows. Never before had he found himself with anything worse than
bodily bruises to sour life for him after a tumultuous night or two in
town, and the sensation of a discomfort which had not sprung from some
well-defined physical sense was therefore sufficiently novel to claim
all his attention.

It was not the first time he had fought and forgotten it afterwards. Nor
was it a new experience for him to seek information from his friends
after a night full of incident. Sandy he had always found tolerably
reliable, because Sandy, being of that inquisitive nature so common to
small persons, made it a point to see everything there was to be seen;
and his peculiar digestive organs might be counted upon to keep him
sober. It was a real grievance to Ford that Sandy should have chosen the
hour he did for indulging in such trivialities as hair-cuts and
shampoos, while events of real importance were permitted to transpire
unseen and unrecorded. Ford, when the grievance thrust itself keenly
upon him, roused the recreant Sandy by pitilessly thrusting an elbow
against his diaphragm.

Sandy grunted at the impact and sat bolt upright in bed before he was
fairly awake. He glanced reproachfully down at Ford, who stared back at
him from a badly crumpled pillow.

"Get up," growled Ford, "and start a fire going, darn you. You kept me
awake half the night, snoring. I want a beefsteak with mushrooms,
devilled kidneys, waffles with honey, and four banana fritters for
breakfast. I'll take it in bed; and while I'm waiting, you can bring me
the morning paper and a package of Egyptian Houris."

Sandy grunted again, slid reluctantly out into the bitterly cold room,
and crept shivering into his clothes. He never quite understood Ford's
sense of humor, at such times, but he had learned that it is more
comfortable to crawl out of bed than to be kicked out, and that
vituperation is a mere waste of time when matched against sheer
heartlessness and a superior muscular development.

"Y' ought to make your wife build the fires," he taunted, when he was
clothed and at a safe distance from the bed. He ducked instinctively
afterwards, but Ford was merely placing a match by itself on the bench
close by.

"That's one," Ford remarked calmly. "I'm going to thrash every misguided
humorist who mentions that subject to me in anything but a helpful
spirit of pure friendship. I'm going to give him a separate licking for
every alleged joke. I'll want two steaks, Sandy. I'll likely have to
give you about seven distinct wallopings. Hand me some more matches to
keep tally with. I don't want to cheat you out of your just dues."

Sandy eyed him doubtfully while he scraped the ashes from the grate.

"You may want a dozen steaks, but that ain't saying you're going to git
'em," he retorted, with a feeble show of aggression. "And 's far as
licking me goes--" He stopped to blow warmth upon his fingers, which
were numbed with their grasp of the poker. "As for licking me, I guess
you'll have to do that on the strength uh bacon and sour-dough biscuits;
if you do it at all, which I claim the privilege uh doubting a whole
lot."

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