The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Lookout Man, by B. M. Bower
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Title: The Lookout Man
Author: B. M. Bower
Release Date: April 15, 2005 [EBook #15625]
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE LOOKOUT MAN ***
Produced by Suzanne Shell, Beginners Projects, Sankar Viswanathan
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net.
~By B. M. Bower~
* * * * *
GOOD INDIAN
THE UPHILL CLIMB
THE GRINGOS
THE RANCH AT THE WOLVERINE
THE FLYING U'S LAST STAND
JEAN OF THE LAZY A
THE PHANTOM HERD
THE HERITAGE OF THE SIOUX
STARR, OF THE DESERT
THE LOOKOUT MAN
[Illustration: She was, after all, the goddess she looked, he thought
whimsically. Frontispiece. _See page_ 122.]
THE LOOKOUT MAN
By B. M. Bower
WITH FRONTISPIECE BY
H. WESTON TAYLOR
BOSTON
LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY
1917
Published, August, 1917
VAIL-BALLOU COMPANY
BINGHAMTON AND NEW YORK
U. S. A.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I SOME TIME!
II "THANKS FOR THE CAR"
III TO THE FEATHER RIVER COUNTRY AND FREEDOM
IV JACK FINDS HIMSELF IN POSSESSION OF A JOB
V "IT'S A LONG WAY TO TIPPERARY," SANG JACK
VI MISS ROSE FORWARD
VII GUARDIAN OF THE FORESTS
VIII IN WHICH A GIRL PLAYS BILLIARDS ON THE MOUNTAIN TOP
IX LIKE THE BOY HE WAS
X WHEN FORESTS ARE ABLAZE
XI SYMPATHY AND ADVICE
XII KATE FINDS SOMETHING TO WORRY OVER
XIII JACK SHOULD HAVE A HIDE-OUT
XIV MURPHY HAS A HUMOROUS MOOD
XV A CAVE DWELLER JACK WOULD BE
XVI MIKE GOES SPYING ON THE SPIES
XVII PENITENCE, REAL AND UNREAL
XVIII HANK BROWN PROVES THAT HE CAN READ TRACKS
XIX TROUBLE ROCKS THE PAN, LOOKING FOR GRAINS OF GOLD
XX IGNORANCE TAKES THE TRAIL OF DANGER
XXI GOLD OF REPENTANCE, SUNLIGHT OF LOVE AND A MAN GONE MAD
XXII THE MISERERE OF MOTHERHOOD
XXIII GRIEF, AND HOPE THAT DIED HARD
XXIV TROUBLE FINDS THE GOLD THAT WAS IN THEM
CHAPTER ONE
SOME TIME!
From the obscurity of vast, unquiet distance the surf came booming in
with the heavy impetus of high tide, flinging long streamers of kelp
and bits of driftwood over the narrowing stretch of sand where
garishly costumed bathers had lately shrieked hilariously at their
gambols. Before the chill wind that had risen with the turn of the
tide the bathers retreated in dripping, shivering groups, to appear
later in fluffs and furs and woollen sweaters; still inclined to
hilarity, still undeniably both to leave off their pleasuring at
Venice, dedicated to cheap pleasures.
But when the wind blew stronger and the surf boomed louder and nearer,
and the faint moon-path stretched farther and farther toward the
smudgy sky-line, city-going street-cars began to fill with sunburned
passengers, and motors began to purr out of the narrow side streets
lined with shoddy buildings which housed the summer sojourners. One
more Sunday night's revelry was tapering off into shouted farewells,
clanging gongs, honking horns and the shuffling of tired feet hurrying
homeward.
In cafes and grills and private dining rooms groups of revelers, whose
pleasures were not halted by the nickel alarm-clocks ticking
inexorably all over the city and its suburbs, still lingered long
after the masses had gone home yawning and counting the fullness of
past joys by the present extent of smarting sunblisters.
Automobiles loaded with singing passengers scurried after their own
beams of silver light down the boulevards. At first a continuous line
of speeding cars; then thinning with long gaps between; then longer
gaps with only an occasional car; then the quiet, lasting for minutes
unbroken, so that the wind could be heard in the eucalyptus trees that
here and there lined the boulevard.
After the last street-car had clanged away from the deserted
bunting-draped joy zone that now was stark and joyless, a belated
seven-passenger car, painted a rich plum color and splendid in
upholstering and silver trim, swept a long row of darkened windows
with a brush of light as it swung out from a narrow alley and went
purring down to where the asphalt shone black in the night.
Full throated laughter and a medley of shouted jibes and
current witticisms went with it. The tonneau squirmed with uproarious
youth. The revolving extra seats swung erratically, propelled by
energetic hands, while some one barked the stereotyped invitation to
the deserted scenic swing, and some one else shouted to the revolving
occupants to keep their heads level, and all the others laughed
foolishly.
The revolving ones rebelled, and in the scuffle some one lurched
forward against the driver at a critical turn in the road, throwing
him against the wheel. The big car swerved almost into the ditch, was
brought back just in the nick of time and sped on, while Death, who
had looked into that tonneau, turned away with a shrug.
The driver, bareheaded and with the wind blowing his thick mop of wavy
hair straight back from his forehead, glanced back with swift disfavor
at the scuffling bunch.
"Hey--you want to go in the ditch?" he expostulated, chewing
vigorously upon gum that still tasted sweet and full-flavored. "You
wanta cut out that rough stuff over this way!"
"_All_ right, Jackie, old boy, anything to please!" chanted the
offender, cuffing the cap off the fellow next him. "Some time," he
added with vague relish. "S-o-m-e time! What?"
"Some time is right!" came the exuberant chorus. "Hey, Jack! _u_ had
some time, all right--you and that brown-eyed queen that danced like
Mrs. Castle. Um-um! Floatin' round with your arms full of
sunshine--oh, you thought you was puttin' something over on the rest
of us--what?"
"Cut it out!" Jack retorted, flinging the words over his shoulder.
"Don't talk to me. Road's flopping around like a snake with its head
cut off--" He laughed apologetically, his eyes staring straight ahead
over the lowered windshield.
"Aw, step on her, Jack! Show some class, boy--show some class! Good
old boat! If you're too stewed to drive 'er, _e_ knows the way home.
Say, Jackie, if this old car could talk, wouldn't momma get an
ear-full on Monday, hey? What if she--"
"Cut it _out_--or I'll throw you out!" came back over Jack's
shirt-clad shoulder. He at least had the wit to use what little sense
he had in driving the car, and he had plenty of reason to believe that
he could carry out his threat, even if the boulevard did heave itself
up at him like the writhings of a great snake. If his head was not fit
for the job, his trained muscles would still drive with automatic
precision. Only his vision was clouded; not the mechanical skill
necessary to pilot his mother's big car safely into the garage.
Whim held the five in the rear seats absorbed in their own maudlin
comicalities. The fellow beside Jack did not seem to take any interest
in his surroundings, and the five gave the front seat no further
attention. Jack drove circumspectly, leaning a little forward, his
bare arms laid up across the wheel and grasping the top of it. Brown
as bronze, those arms, as were his face and neck and chest down to
where the open V of his sport shirt was held closed with the loose
knot of a crimson tie that whipped his shoulder as he drove. A fine
looking fellow he was, sitting there like the incarnation of strength
and youth and fullblooded optimism. It was a pity that he was
drunk--he would have been a perfect specimen of young manhood, else.
The young man on the front seat beside him turned suddenly on those
behind. The lower half of his face was covered with a black muffler.
He had a gun, and he "cut down" on the group with disconcerting
realism.
"Hands up!" he intoned fearsomely. "I am the mysterious lone bandit of
the boulevards. Your jewels are the price of your lives!" The
six-shooter wavered, looking bleakly at one and then another.
After the first stunned interval, a shout of laughter went up from
those behind. "Good! Good idea!" one approved. And another, having some
familiarity with the mechanics of screen melodrama, shouted, "Camera!"
"Lone bandit nothing! We're _all_ mysterious auto bandits out seeking
whom we may devour!" cried a young man with a naturally attractive
face and beautiful teeth, hastily folding his handkerchief cornerwise
for a mask, and tying it behind his head--to the great discomfort of
his neighbors, who complained bitterly at having their eyes jabbed out
with his elbows.
The bandit play caught the crowd. For a few tumultuous minutes elbows
were up, mufflers and handkerchiefs flapping. There emerged from the
confusion six masked bandits, and three of them flourished
six-shooters with a recklessness that would have given a Texas man
cold chills down his spine. Jack, not daring to take his eyes off the
heaving asphalt, or his hands off the wheel, retained his natural
appearance until some generous soul behind him proceeded, in spite of
his impatient "Cut it out, fellows!" to confiscate his flapping, red
tie and bind it across his nose; which transformed Jack Corey into a
speeding fiend, if looks meant anything. Thereafter they threw
themselves back upon the suffering upholstery and commented gleefully
upon their banditish qualifications.
That grew tame, of course. They thirsted for mock horrors,
and two glaring moons rising swiftly over a hill gave the
psychological fillip to their imaginations.
"Come on-let's hold 'em up!" cried the young man on the front seat.
"Naw-I'll tell you! Slow down, Jack, and everybody keep your faces
shut. When we're just past I'll shoot down at the ground by a hind
wheel. Make 'em think they've got a blowout--get the idea?"
"Some idea!" promptly came approval, and the six subsided immediately.
The coming car neared swiftly, the driver shaving as close to the
speed limit as he dared. Unsuspectingly he swerved to give plenty of
space in passing, and as he did so a loud bang startled him. The brake
squealed as he made an emergency stop. "Blowout, by thunder!" they
heard him call to his companions, as he piled out and ran to the wheel
he thought had suffered the accident.
Jack obligingly slowed down so that the six, leaning far out and
craning back at their victims, got the full benefit of their joke.
When he sped on they fell back into their seats and howled with glee.
It was funny. They laughed and slapped one another on the backs, and
the more they laughed the funnier it seemed. They rocked with mirth,
they bounced up and down on the cushions and whooped.
All but Jack. He kept his eyes on the still-heaving asphalt, and
chewed gum and grinned while he drove, with the persistent sensation
that he was driving a hydro-aeroplane across a heaving ocean. Still,
he knew what the fellows were up to, and he was perfectly willing to
let them have all the fun they wanted, so long as they didn't
interfere with his driving.
In the back of his mind was a large, looming sense of responsibility
for the car. It was his mother's car, and it was new and shiny, and
his mother liked to drive flocks of fluttery, middle-aged ladies to
benefit teas and the like. It had taken a full hour of coaxing to get
the car for the day, and Jack knew what would be the penalty if
anything happened to mar its costly beauty. A scratch would be almost
as much as his life was worth. He hoped dazedly that the fellows would
keep their feet off the cushions, and that they would refrain from
kicking the back seat.
Mrs. Singleton Corey was a large, firm woman who wore her white hair
in a marcelled pompadour, and frequently managed to have a flattering
picture of herself in the Sunday papers--on the
Society-and-Club-Doings page, of course. She figured prominently in
civic betterment movements, and was loud in her denunciation of Sunday
dances and cabarets and the frivolities of Venice and lesser beach
resorts. She did a lot of worrying over immodest bathing suits, and
never went near the beach except as a member of a purity committee, to
see how awfully young girls behaved in those public places.
She let Jack have the car only because she believed that he was going
to take a party of young Christian Endeavorers up Mount Wilson to view
the city after dark. She could readily apprehend that such a sight
might be inspiring, and that it would act as a spur upon the worthy
ambitions of the young men, urging them to great achievements. Mrs.
Singleton Corey had plenty of enthusiasm for the betterment of young
lives, but she had a humanly selfish regard for the immaculateness of
her new automobile, and she feared that the roads on the mountain
might be very dusty and rough, and that overhanging branches might
snag the top. Jack had to promise that he would be very careful of
overhanging branches.
Poor lady, she never dreamed that her son was out at Venice gamboling
on the beach with bold hussies in striped bathing trunks and no
skirts; fox-trotting with a brown-eyed imp from the telephone office,
and drinking various bottled refreshments--carousing shamelessly, as
she would have said of a neighbor's son--or that, at one-thirty in the
morning, he was chewing a strong-flavored gum to kill the odor of
alcohol.
She was not sitting up waiting for him and wondering why he did not
come. Jack had been careful to impress upon her that the party might
want to view the stars until very late, and that he, of course, could
not hurry them down from the mountain top.
You will see then why Jack was burdened with a sense of deep
responsibility for the car, and why he drove almost as circumspectly
as if he were sober, and why he would not join in the hilarity of the
party.
"Hist! Here comes a flivver!" warned the young man on the front seat,
waving his revolver backward to impress silence on the others. "Let's
_all_ shoot! Make 'em think they've run into a mess of tacks!"
"Aw, take a wheel off their tin wagon!" a laughter-hoarse voice
bettered the plan.
"Hold 'em up and take a nickel off 'em--if they carry that much on
their persons after dark," another suggested.
"You're on, bo! This is a hold-up. Hist!"
A hold-up they proceeded to make it. They halted the little car with a
series of explosions as it passed. The driver was alone, and as he
climbed out to inspect his tires, he confronted what looked to his
startled eyes like a dozen masked men. Solemnly they went through his
pockets while he stood with his hands high above him. They took his
half-plug of chewing tobacco and a ten-cent stick-pin from his tie,
and afterwards made him crank his car and climb back into the seat and
go on. He went--with the throttle wide open and the little car loping
down the boulevard like a scared pup.
"Watch him went!" shrieked one they called Hen, doubling himself
together in a spasm of laughter.
"'He was--here--when we _started_, b-but he was--gone--when we got
th'ough!'" chanted another, crudely imitating a favorite black-faced
comedian.
Jack, one arm thrown across the wheel, leaned out and looked back,
grinning under the red band stretched across the middle of his face.
"Ah, pile in!" he cried, squeezing his gum between his teeth and
starting the engine. "He might come back with a cop."
That tickled them more than ever. They could hardly get back into the
car for laughing. "S-o-m-e little bandits!--what?" they asked one
another over and over again.
"S-o-m-e little bandits is--right!" the approving answer came
promptly.
"S-o-m-e _time_, bo, s-o-m-e _time!_" a drink-solemn voice croaked in
a corner of the big seat.
Thus did the party of Christian Endeavorers return sedately from their
trip to Mount Wilson.
CHAPTER TWO
"THANKS FOR THE CAR"
They held up another car with two men in it, and robbed them of
insignificant trifles in what they believed to be a most ludicrous
manner. Afterward they enjoyed prolonged spasms of mirth, their
cachinnations carrying far out over the flat lands disturbing
inoffensive truck gardeners in their sleep. They cried "S-o-m-e time!"
so often that the phrase struck even their fuddled brains as being
silly.
They met another car--a large car with three women in the tonneau.
These, evidently, were home-going theatre patrons who had indulged
themselves in a supper afterwards. They were talking quietly as they
came unsuspectingly up to the big, shiny machine that was traveling
slowly townward, and they gave it no more than a glance as they
passed.
Then came the explosion, that sounded surprisingly like a blowout. The
driver stopped and got out to look for trouble, his companion at his
heels. They confronted six masked men, three of them displaying
six-shooters.
"Throw up your hands!" commanded a carefully disguised voice.
The driver obeyed--but his right hand came up with an automatic pistol
in it. He fired straight into the bunch--foolishly, perhaps; at any
rate harmlessly, though they heard the bullet sing as it went by.
Startled, one of the six fired back impulsively, and the other two
followed his example. Had they tried to kill, in the night and drunk
as they were, they probably would have failed; but firing at random,
one bullet struck flesh. The man with the automatic flinched backward,
reeled forward drunkenly and went down slowly, his companion grasping
futilely at his slipping body.
"Hey, you darn mutts, whatcha shootin' for? Hell of a josh, that is!"
Jack shouted angrily and unguardedly. "Cut that out and pile in here!"
While the last man was clawing in through the door, Jack let in the
clutch, slamming the gear-lever from low to high and skipping
altogether the intermediate. The big car leaped forward and Hen bit
his tongue so that it bled. Behind them was confused shouting.
"Better go back and help--what? You hit one," Jack suggested over his
shoulder, slowing down as reason cooled his first hot impulse for
flight.
"Go back _nothing!_ And let 'em get our number? Nothing doing!"
"Aw, that mark that was with him took it. I saw him give it the
once-over when he came back."
"He did not!" some one contradicted hotly. "He was too scared."
"Well, do we go back?" Jack was already edging the car to the right so
that he would have room for a turn.
"No! Step on 'er! Let 'er out, why don't yuh? Damn it, what yuh
killin' time for? Yuh trying to throw us down? Want that guy to call a
cop and pinch the outfit? Fine pal you are! We've got to beat it while
the beatin's good. Go on, Jack--that's a good boy. Step on 'er!"
With all that tumult of urging, Jack went on, panic again growing
within him as the car picked up speed. The faster he went the faster
he wanted to go. His foot pressed harder and harder on the
accelerator. He glanced at the speedometer, saw it flirting with the
figures forty-five, and sent that number off the dial and forced fifty
and then sixty into sight. He rode the wheel, holding the great car
true as a bullet down the black streak of boulevard that came sliding
to meet him like a wide belt between whirring wheels.
The solemn voice that had croaked "S-o-m-e time!" so frequently,
took to monotonous, recriminating speech. "No-body home!
No-body home! Had to spill the beans, you simps! Nobody home a-tall!
Had to shoot a man--got us all in wrong, you simps! Nobody home!" He
waggled his head and flapped his hands in drunken self-righteousness,
because he had not possessed a gun and therefore could not have
committed the blunder of shooting the man.
"Aw, can that stuff! You're as much to blame as anybody," snapped the
man nearest him, and gave the croaker a vicious jab with his elbow.
"Don't believe that guy got hep to our number! Didn't have time," an
optimist found courage to declare.
"What darn fool was it that shot first? Oughta be crowned for that!"
"Aw, the boob started it himself! He fired on us--and we were only
joshing!"
"He got his, all right!"
"Don't believe we killed him--sure, he was more scared than hurt," put
in the optimist dubiously.
"No-body home," croaked the solemn one again, having recovered his
breath.
They wrangled dismally and unconvincingly together, but no one put
into speech the fear that rode them hard. Fast as Jack drove, they
kept urging him to "Step on 'er!" A bottle that had been circulating
intermittently among the crowd was drained and thrown out on the
boulevard, there to menace the tires of other travelers. The keen wind
whipped their hot faces and cleared a little their fuddled senses, now
that the bottle was empty. A glimmer of caution prompted Jack to drive
around through Beverly Hills and into Sunset Boulevard, when he might
have taken a shorter course home. It would be better, he thought, to
come into town from another direction, even if it took them longer to
reach home. He was careful to keep on a quiet residence street when he
passed through. Hollywood, and he turned at Vermont Avenue and drove
out into Griffith Park, swung into a crossroad and came out on a road
from Glendale. He made another turn or two, and finally slid into Los
Angeles on the main road from Pasadena, well within the speed limit
and with his heart beating a little nearer to normal.
"We've been to Mount Wilson, fellows. Don't forget that," he warned
his passengers. "Stick to it. If they got our number back there we can
bluff them into thinking they got it wrong. I'll let yuh out here and
you can walk home. Mum's the word--get that?"
He had taken only a passive part in the egregious folly of their play,
but they climbed out now without protest, subdued and willing to own
his leadership. Perhaps they realized suddenly that he was the
soberest man of the lot. Only once had he drunk on the way home, and
that sparingly, when the bottle had made the rounds. Like whipped
schoolboys the six slunk off to their homes, and as they disappeared,
Jack felt as though the full burden of the senseless crime had been
dropped crushingly upon his shoulders.
He drove the big car quietly up the palm-shaded street to where his
mother's wide-porched bungalow sprawled across two lots. He was sober
now, for the tragedy had shocked him into clear thinking. He shivered
when he turned in across the cement walk and slid slowly down the
driveway to the garage. He climbed stiffly out, rolled the big doors
shut, turned on the electric lights and then methodically switched off
the lights of the car. He looked at the clock imbedded in the
instrument board and saw that it lacked twenty minutes of three. It
would soon be daylight. It seemed to him that there was a good deal to
be done before daylight.
Preoccupiedly he took a big handful of waste and began to polish the
hood and fenders of the car. His mother would want to drive, and she
always made a fuss if he left any dust to dim its glossy splendor. He
walked around behind and contemplated the number plate, wondering if
the man who was said to be "hep" would remember that there were three
ciphers together. He might see only two--being in a hurry and excited.
He rubbed the plate thoughtfully, trying to guess just how that
number, 170007, would look to a stranger who was excited by being shot
at.
No use doctoring the number now. If the man had it, he had it--and it
was easy enough to find the car that carried it. Easy enough, too, to
prove who was in the car. Jack had named every one of the fellows who
were to make up the party. He had to, before his mother would let him
take the car. The names were just names to her--since she believed
that they were Christian young men!--but she had insisted upon knowing
who was going, and she would remember them. She had a memory like
glue. She would also give the names to any officer that asked. Jack
knew that well enough. For, besides having a memory that would never
let go, Mrs. Singleton Corey had a conscience that was inexorable
toward the faults of others. She would consider it her duty as a
Christian woman and the president of the Purity League to hand those
six young men over to the law. That she had been deceived as to their
morals would add fire to her fervor.
Whether she would hand Jack over with them was a detail which did not
greatly concern her son. He believed she would do it, if thereby she
might win the plaudits of her world as a mother martyred to her fine
sense of duty. Jack had lived with his mother for twenty-two years,
and although he was very much afraid of her, he felt that he had no
illusions concerning Mrs. Singleton Corey. He felt that she would
sacrifice nearly everything to her greed for public approbation.
Whether she would sacrifice her pride of family--twist it into a lofty
pride of duty--he did not know. There are queer psychological quirks
which may not be foreseen by youth.
Looking back on the whole sickening affair while he sat on the running
board and smoked a cigarette, Jack could not see how his mother could
consistently avoid laying him on the altar of justice. He had driven
the party, and he had stopped the car for them to play their damnable
joke. The law would call him an accomplice, he supposed. His mother
could not save him, unless she pleaded well the excuse that he had
been led astray by evil companions. In lesser crises, Jack remembered
that she had played successfully that card. She might try it now....
On the other hand, she might make a virtue of necessity and volunteer
the information that he had in the first place lied about their
destination. That, he supposed, would imply a premeditated plan of
holding up automobiles. She might wash her hands of him altogether.
He could see her doing that, too. He could, in fact, see Mrs.
Singleton Corey doing several things that would work him ill and
redound to her glory. What he could not see was a mother who would
cling to him and cry over him and for him, and stick by him, just
because she loved him.
"Aw, what's the use? It'll come out--it can't help it. The cops are
out there smelling around now, I bet!"
He arose and worked over the car until it shone immaculately. A
lifetime of continual nagging over little things, while the big things
had been left to adjust themselves, had fixed upon Jack the habit of
attending first to his mother's whims. Mrs. Singleton Corey made it a
point to drive her own car. She liked the feeling of power that it
gave her, and she loved the flattery of her friends. Therefore, even a
murder problem must wait until her automobile was beautifully ready to
back out of the garage into a critical world.
Jack gave a sigh of relief when he wiped his hands on the bunch of
waste and tossed it into a tin can kept for that purpose. Time was
precious to him just now. Any minute might bring the police. Jack did
not feel that he was to blame for what had happened, but he realized
keenly that he was "in wrong" just the same, and he had no intention
of languishing heroically in jail if he could possibly keep out of it.
He hesitated, and finally he went to the house and let himself in
through a window whose lock he had "doctored" months ago. His mother
would not let him have a key. She believed that being compelled to
ring the bell and awaken her put the needful check upon Jack's habits;
that, in trailing downstairs in a silk kimono to receive him and his
explanation of his lateness, she was fulfilling her duty as a mother.
Jack nearly always humored her in this delusion, and his explanations
were always convincing. But he was not prepared to make any just now.
He crawled into the sun parlor, took off his shoes and slipped down
the hall and up the stairs to his room. There he rummaged through his
closet and got out a khaki outing suit and hurried his person into it.
In ten minutes he looked more like an overgrown boy scout than
anything else. He took a cased trout rod and fly book, stuffed an
extra shirt and all the socks he could find into his canvas creel,
slung a pair of wading boots over his shoulder and tiptoed to the
door.
There it occurred to him that it wouldn't be a bad idea to have some
money. He went back to his discarded trousers, that lay in a heap on
the floor, and by diligent search he collected two silver dollars and
a few nickels and dimes and quarters--enough to total two dollars and
eighty-five cents. He looked at the meagre fund ruefully, rubbed his
free hand over his hair and was reminded of something else. His hair,
wavy and trained to lie back from his forehead, made him easily
remembered by strangers. He took his comb and dragged the whole heavy
mop down over his eyebrows, and parted it in the middle and plastered
it down upon his temples, trying to keep the wave out of it.
He looked different when he was through; and when he had pulled a
prim, stiff-brimmed, leather-banded sombrero well down toward his
nose, he could find the heart to grin at his reflection.
The money problem returned to torment him. Of what use was this
preparation, unless he had some real money to use with it? He took off
his shoes again, and his hat; pulled on his bathrobe over the khaki
and went out and across to his mother's room.
Mrs. Singleton Corey had another illusion among her collection of
illusions about herself. She believed that she was a very light
sleeper; that the slightest noise woke her, and that she would then
lie for hours wide-eyed. Indeed she frequently declared that she did
her best mental work during "the sleepless hours of the night."
However that might be, she certainly was asleep when Jack pushed open
her door. She lay on her back with her mouth half open, and she was
snoring rhythmically, emphatically--as one would hardly believe it
possible for a Mrs. Singleton Corey to snore. Jack looked at her
oddly, but his eyes went immediately to her dresser and the purse
lying where she had carelessly laid it down on coming home from one of
her quests for impurity which she might purify.
She had a little more than forty-two dollars in her purse, and Jack
took all of it and went back to his room. There, he issued a check to
her for that amount--unwittingly overdrawing his balance at the bank
to do so--and wrote this note to his mother:
"Dear Mother:
"I borrowed some money from you, and I am leaving this check to cover
the amount. I am going on a fishing trip. Maybe to Mexico where dad
made his stake. Thanks for the car today.
"Your son,
"Jack."
He took check and note to her room and placed them on her purse to the
tune of her snoring, looked at her with a certain wistfulness for the
mothering he had never received from her, and went away.
He climbed out of the house as he had climbed in, and cut across lots
until he had reached a street some distance from his own neighborhood.
Then keeping carefully in the shadows, he took the shortest route to
the S.P. depot. An early car clanged toward him, but he waited in a
dark spot until it had passed and then hurried on. He passed an
all-night taxi stand in front of a hotel, but he did not disturb the
sleepy drivers. So by walking every step of the way, he believed that
he had reached the depot unnoticed, just when daylight was upon him
with gray wreaths of fog.
By the depot clock it was five minutes to five. A train was being
called, and the sing-song chant informed him that it was bound for
"Sa-anta Bar-bra--Sa-an Louis Oh bispo--Sa-linas--Sa-an 'Osay--Sa-an
Fransisco, and a-a-ll points north!"
Jack, with his rubber boots flapping on his back, took a run and a
slide to the ticket window and bought a ticket for San Francisco,
thinking rather feverishly of the various points north.
CHAPTER THREE
TO THE FEATHER RIVER COUNTRY AND FREEDOM
In the chair car, where he plumped himself into a seat just as the
train began to creep forward, Jack pulled his hat down over his
eyebrows and wondered if any one had recognized him while he was
getting on the train. He could not tell, because he had not dared to
seem anxious about it, and so had not looked around him. At any rate
he had not been stopped, though the police could wire ahead and have
him dragged off the train at any station they pleased. Panic once more
caught him and he did not dare look up when the conductor came for his
ticket, but held his breath until the gloomy, haggard-faced man had
tagged him and passed on. Until the train had passed Newhall and was
rattling across the flat country to the coast, he shivered when any
one passed down the aisle.
Beyond San Francisco lay the fog bank of the unknown. With his fishing
outfit he could pass unquestioned to any part of that mysterious,
vague region known as Northern California. The Russian River country,
Tahoe, Shasta Springs, Feather River--the names revolved teasingly
through Jack's mind. He did not know anything about them, beyond the
fact that they were places where fellows went for sport, and that he
hoped people would think he went for sport also. His wading boots and
his rod and creel would, he hoped, account for any haste he might
betray in losing himself somewhere.
Lose himself he must. If he did not, if his mother got the chance to
put him through the tearful third-degree system that women employ with
such deadly certainty of success, Jack knew that he would tell all
that he knew--perhaps more. The very least he could hope to reveal was
the damning fact that he had not been to Mount Wilson that day. After
that the rest would not need to be told. They could patch up the
evidence easily enough.
He tried to forget that man slipping down in the embrace of his
friend. It was too horrible to be true. It must have been a trick just
to scare the boys. The world was full of joshers--Jack knew half a
dozen men capable of playing that trick, just to turn the joke. For a
few minutes he was optimistic, almost making himself believe that the
man had not been shot, after all. The fading effect of the wines he
had drunk sent his mood swinging from the depths of panicky anguish
over the horrible affair, to a senseless optimism that refused to see
disaster when it stood by his side.
He tried again to decide where he should go from San Francisco. He
tried to remember all that he had ever heard about the various
paradises for sportsmen, and he discovered that he could not remember
anything except that they were all in the mountains, and that Tahoe
was a big lake, and lots of people went there in the summer. He
crossed Tahoe off the list, because he did not want to land in some
fashionable resort and bump into some one he knew. Besides, thirty-one
dollars would not last long at a summer resort--and he remembered he
would not have thirty-one dollars when he landed; he would have what
was left after he had paid his fare from San Francisco, and had eaten
once or twice.
Straightway he became hungry, perhaps because a porter came down the
aisle announcing the interesting fact that breakfast was now being
served in the diner--fourth car rear. Jack felt as though he could
eat about five dollars' worth of breakfast. He was only a month or so
past twenty-two, remember, and he himself had not committed any crime
save the crime of foolishness.
He slid farther down upon his spine, pulled his nice new sombrero
lower on the bridge of his tanned nose, and tried to forget that back
there in the diner they would give him grapefruit on ice, and after
that rolled oats with thick yellow cream, and after that ham and eggs
or a tenderloin steak or broiled squab on toast; and tried to remember
only that the check would make five dollars look sick. He wished he
knew how much the fare would be to some of those places where he meant
to lose himself. With all that classy-looking paraphernalia he would
not dare attempt to beat his way on a freight. He had a keen sense of
relative values; dressed as he was he must keep "in the part." He must
be able to show that he had money. He sighed heavily and turned his
back definitely upon a dining-car breakfast. After that he went to
sleep.
At noon he was awake and too ravenous to worry so much over the
possibility of being arrested for complicity in a murder. He collided
violently with the porter who came down the aisle announcing luncheon.
He raced back through two chair cars and a tourist sleeper, and he
entered the dining car with an emphasis that kept the screen door
swinging for a full half minute. He tipped the waiter who came to fill
his water glass, and told him to wake up and show some speed. Any
waiter will wake up for half a dollar, these hard times. This one
stood looking down over Jack's shoulder while he wrote, so that he was
back with the boullion before Jack had reached the bottom of the
order blank--which is the reason why you have not read anything about
a certain young man dying of starvation while seated at table number
five in a diner, somewhere in the neighborhood of Paso Robles.
When he returned to his place in the chair car he knew he must try to
find out what isolated fishing country was closest. So he fraternized
with the "peanut butcher," if you know who he is: the fellow who is
put on trains to pester passengers to death with all sorts of readable
and eatable indigestibles.
He bought two packages of gum and thereby won favor. Then,
nonchalantly picking up his wading boots and placing them in a
different position, he casually asked the boy how the fishing was, up
this way. The peanut butcher balanced his tray of chewing gum and
candy on the arm of a vacant chair beside Jack, and observed
tentatively that it was fine, and that Jack must be going fishing.
Jack confessed that such was his intention, and the vender of
things-you-never-want made a shrewd guess at his destination.
"Going up into the Feather River country, I bet. Fellow I know just
come back. Caught the limit, he claims. They say Lake Almanor has got
the best fishing in the State, right now. Fellow I know seen a
ten-pounder pulled outa there. He brought back one himself that tipped
the scales at seven-and-a-half. He says a pound is about as small as
they run up there. I'm going to try to get on the W.P. that runs up
the canyon. Then some day I'll drop off and try my luck--"
"Don't run to Lake Almanor, does it? First I ever heard--"
"No, sure it don't! The lake's away off the railroad--thirty or forty
miles. I don't look for a chance to go _there_ fishing. I mean Feather
River--anywhere along up the canyon. They say it's great. You can sure
catch fish! Lots of little creeks coming down outa the canyon, and all
of them full of trout. You'll have all kinds of sport."
"Aw, Russian River's the place to go," Jack dissented craftily, and
got the reply that he was waiting for.
"Aw, what's the use of going away up there? And not get half the fish?
Why, you can take the train at the ferry and in the morning you are
right in the middle of the best fishing in the State. Buh-lieve _me_,
it'll be Feather River for mine, if I can make the change I want to!
Them that have got the money to travel on, can take the far-off
places--me for the fish, bo, every day in the week." He took up his
tray and went down the car, offering his wares to the bored, frowsy
passengers who wanted only to reach journey's end.
The next round he made, he stopped again beside Jack. They talked of
fishing--Jack saw to that!--and Jack learned that Lake Almanor was
nothing more nor less than an immense reservoir behind a great dam put
in by a certain power company at a cost that seemed impossible. The
reservoir had been made by the simple process of backing up the water
over a large mountain valley. You could look across the lake and see
Mount Lassen as plain as the nose on your face, the peanut butcher
declared relishfully. And the trout in that artificial lake passed all
belief.
Every time the boy passed, he stopped for a few remarks. Pound by
pound the trout in Lake Almanor grew larger. Sentence by sentence Jack
learned much that was useful, a little that was needful. There were
several routes to Lake Almanor, for instance. One could get in by way
of Chico, but the winter snow had not left the high summits, so that
route was unfeasible for the time being. The best way just now was by
the way of Quincy, a little town up near the head of Feather River
Canyon. The fare was only seven or eight dollars, and since the season
had opened one could get reduced rates for the round trip. That was
the way the friend of the peanut butcher had gone in--only he had
stopped off at Keddie and had gone up to the dam with a fellow he knew
that worked there. And he had brought back a trout that weighed
practically eight pounds, dressed. The peanut butcher knew; he had
seen it with his own eyes. They had it hanging in the window of the
California Market, and there was a crowd around the window all the
time. He knew; he had seen the crowd, and he had seen the fish; and he
knew the fellow who had caught it.
Unless he could go with a crowd, Jack did not care much about fishing.
He liked the fun the gang could have together in the wilds, but that
was all; like last summer when Hen had run into the hornet's nest
hanging on a bush and thought it was an oriole's basket! Alone and
weighed down with horror as he was, Jack could not stir up any
enthusiasm for the sport. But he found out that it would not cost much
to reach the little town called Quincy, of which he had never before
heard.
No one, surely, would ever think of looking there for him. He could
take the evening train out of San Francisco, and in the morning he
would be there. And if he were not sufficiently lost in Quincy, he
could take to the mountains all around. There were mountains, he
guessed from what the boy had told him; and canyons and heavy timber.
The thought of having some definite, attainable goal cheered him so
much that he went to sleep again, sitting hunched down in the seat
with his hat over his eyes, so that no one could see his face; and
since no one but the man who sold it had ever seen him in that sport
suit, he felt almost safe.
He left the train reluctantly at the big, new station in San
Francisco, and took a street car to the ferry depot. There he kept out
of sight behind a newspaper in the entrance to the waiting room until
he was permitted to pass through the iron gate to the big, resounding
room where passengers for the train ferry were herded together like
corralled sheep. It seemed very quiet there, to be the terminal
station in a large city.
Jack judged nervously that people did not flock to the best fishing in
the State, in spite of all the peanut butcher had told him. He was
glad of that, so long as he was not so alone as to be conspicuous.
Aside from the thin sprinkling of passengers, everything was just as
the boy had told him. He was ferried in a big, empty boat across the
darkling bay to the train that stood backed down on the mole waiting
for him and the half dozen other passengers. He chose the rear seat in
another chair car very much like the one he had left, gave up his
ticket and was tagged, pulled his hat down over his nose and slept
again, stirring now and then because of his cramped legs.
When he awoke finally it was daylight, and the train was puffing into
a tunnel. He could see the engine dive into the black hole, dragging
the coaches after it like the tail of a snake. When they emerged,
Jack looked down upon a green-and-white-scurrying river; away down--so
far that it startled him a little. And he looked up steep pine-clad
slopes to the rugged peaks of the mountains. He heaved a sigh of
relief. Surely no one could possibly find him in a place like this.
After a while he was told to change for Quincy, and descended into a
fresh, green-and-blue world edged with white clouds. There was no
town--nothing but green hills and a deep-set, unbelievable valley
floor marked off with fences, and a little yellow station with a red
roof, and a toy engine panting importantly in front of its one tiny
baggage-and-passenger coach, with a freight car for ballast.
Jack threw back his shoulders and took a long, deep, satisfying
breath. He looked around him gloatingly and climbed into the little
make-believe train, and smiled as he settled back in a seat. There was
not another soul going to Quincy that morning, save the conductor and
engineer. The conductor looked at his passenger as boredly as the wife
of a professional humorist looks at her husband, took his ticket and
left him.
Jack lighted a cigarette and blew the smoke out of the open window
while the little train bore him down through the green forest into the
valley. He was in a new world. He was safe here--he was lost.
CHAPTER FOUR
JACK FINDS HIMSELF IN POSSESSION OF A JOB
Writing his name on the hotel register was an embarrassing ceremony
that had not occurred to Jack until he walked up the steps and into
the bare little office. Some instinct of pride made him shrink from
taking a name that did not belong to him, and he was afraid to write
his own in so public a place. So he ducked into the dining room whence
came the muffled clatter of dishes and an odor of fried beefsteak, as
a perfectly plausible means of dodging the issue for a while.
He ate as slowly as he dared and as long as he could swallow, and when
he left was lucky enough to find the office occupied only by a big
yellow cat curled up on the desk with the pen between its paws. It
seemed a shame to disturb the cat. He went by it on his toes and
passed on down the steps and into the full face of the town lying
there cupped in green hills and with a sunshiny quiet that made the
world seem farther away than ever.
A couple of men were walking down the street and stopping now and then
to talk to those they met. Jack followed aimlessly, his hands in his
pockets, his new Stetson--that did not look so unusual here in
Quincy--pulled well down over his eyebrows and giving his face an
unaccustomed look of purposefulness. Those he met carried letters and
papers in their hands; those he followed went empty handed, so Jack
guessed that he was observing the regular morning pilgrimage to the
postoffice--which, had he only known it, really begins the day in
Quincy.
He did not expect any mail, of course; but there seemed nothing else
for him to do, no other place for him to go; and he was afraid that if
he stayed around the hotel some one might ask him to register. He
went, therefore, to the postoffice and stood just outside the door
with his hands still in his pockets and the purposeful look on his
face; whereas no man was ever more completely adrift and purposeless
than was Jack Corey. Now that he had lost himself from the
world--buried himself up here in these wonderfully green mountains
where no one would ever think of looking for him--there seemed nothing
at all to do. He did not even want to go fishing. And as for
journeying on to that lake which the peanut butcher had talked so much
about, Jack had never for one minute intended going there.
A tall man with shrewd blue eyes twinkling behind goldrimmed glasses
came out and stood in the pleasant warmth of the sun. He had a lot of
mail under his arm and a San Francisco paper spread before him. Jack
slanted a glance or two toward the paper, and at the second glance he
gulped.
"Los Angeles Auto Bandits Trailed" stared out at him accusingly like a
pointed finger. Underneath, in smaller type, that was black as the
meaning that it bore for him, were the words: "Sensational
Developments Expected."
Jack did not dare look again, lest he betray to the shrewd eyes behind
the glasses a guilty interest in the article. He took his cigarette
from his mouth and moistened his lips, and tried to hide the trembling
of his fingers by flicking off the ash. As soon as he dared he walked
on down the street, and straightway found that he was walking himself
out of town altogether. He turned his head and looked back, saw the
tall man glancing after him, and went on briskly, with some effort
holding himself back from running like a fool. He felt that he had
blundered in coming down this way, where there was nothing but a
blacksmith shop and a few small cottages set in trim lawns. The tall
man would know that he had no business down here, and he would wonder
who he was and what he was after. And once that tall man began to
wonder....
"Auto Bandits Trailed!" seemed to Jack to be painted on his back.
That headline must mean him, because he did not believe that any of
the others would think to get out of town before daylight as he had
done. Probably that article had Jack's description in it.
He no longer felt that he had lost himself; instead, he felt trapped
by the very mountains that five minutes ago had seemed so like a
sheltering wall between him and his world. He wanted to get into the
deepest forest that clothed their sides; he wanted to hide in some
remote canyon.
He turned his head again and looked back. A man was coming behind him
down the pathway which served as a pavement. He thought it was the
tall man who had been reading about him in the paper, and again panic
seized him--only now he had but his two feet to carry him away into
safety, instead of his mother's big new car. He glanced at the houses
like a harried animal seeking desperately for some hole to crawl into,
and he saw that the little, square cottage that he had judged to be a
dwelling, was in reality a United States Forest Service headquarters.
He had only the haziest idea of what that meant, but at least it was a
public office, and it had a door which he could close between himself
and the man that followed.
He hurried up the walk laid across the neat little grass plot, sent a
humbly grateful glance up to the stars-and-stripes that fluttered
lazily from the short flagstaff, and went in as though he had business
there, and as though that business was urgent.
A couple of young fellows at wide, document-littered desks looked up
at him with a mild curiosity, said good morning and waited with an air
of expectancy for him to state his errand. Under pretense of throwing
his cigarette outside, Jack turned and opened the door six inches or
so. The man who had followed him was going past, and he did not look
toward the house. He was busy reading a newspaper while he walked, but
he was not the tall man with the shrewd blue eyes and the knowing
little smile; which was some comfort to Jack. He closed the door and
turned again toward the two; and because he knew he must furnish some
plausible reason for his presence, he said the first thing that came
to his tongue--the thing that is always permissible and always
plausible.
"Fellow told me I might get a job here. How about it?" Then he smiled
good-naturedly and with a secret admiration for his perfect aplomb in
rising to the emergency.
"You'll have to ask Supervisor Ross about that," said one. "He's in
there." He turned his thumb toward the rear room, the door of which
stood wide open, and bent again over the map he had been studying. So
far as these two were concerned, Jack had evidently ceased to exist.
He went, therefore, to the room where the supervisor was at work
filling in a blank of some kind; and because his impromptu speech had
seemed to fill perfectly his requirements, he repeated it to Ross in
exactly the same tone of careless good nature, except that this time
he really meant part of it; because, when he came to think of it, he
really did want a job of some sort, and the very atmosphere of quiet,
unhurried efficiency that pervaded the place made him wish that he
might become a part of it.
It was a vagrant wish that might have died as quickly as it had been
born; an impulse that had no root in any previous consideration of the
matter. But Ross leaned back in his chair and was regarding him
seriously, as a possible employee of the government, and Jack
instinctively squared his shoulders to meet the look.
Followed a few questions, which Jack answered as truthfully as he
dared. Ross looked him over again and asked him how he would like to
be a fireman. Whereat Jack looked bewildered.
"What I mean by that in this case," the supervisor explained, "is that
I could put you up on Mount Hough, in the lookout station. That's--do
you know anything at all about the Forest Service, young fellow?"
Jack blushed, gulped down a lie and came out with the truth. "I got
in this morning," he said. "I don't know a darned thing about it, but
I want to get to work at something. And I guess I can learn anything
that isn't too complicated."
Ross laughed to himself. "About the most complicated thing you'll have
to learn," he said, "is how to put in your time. It's hard to get a
man that will stay at lookout stations. Lonesome--that's all. It's
about as bad as being a sheepherder, only you won't have any sheep for
company. Up on Mount Hough you'll have to live in a little glass house
about the size of this room, and do your cooking on an oil stove. Your
work will be watching your district for fires, and reporting them
here--by phone. There's a man up there now, but he doesn't want to
stay. He's been hollering for some one to take his place. You're
entitled to four days relief a month--when we send up a man to take
your place. Aside from that you'll have to stay right up on that peak,
and watch for fires. The fellow up there will show you how to use the
chart and locate fires so you can tell us exactly where it is that you
see smoke. You can't leave except when you're given permission and
some one comes to take your place. We send up your supplies and mail
once a week on a pack horse. Your pay will be seventy dollars a month.
"I don't want you to take it unless you feel pretty sure you can
stick. I'm tired of sending men up there for a week or two and having
them phoning in here a dozen times a day about how lonesome it is,
then quitting cold. We can't undertake to furnish you with amusement,
and we are too busy to spend the day gossiping with you over the phone
just to help you pass the time." He snapped his mouth together as
though he meant every word of it and a great deal more. "Do you want
the job?" he asked grimly.
Jack heard a chuckle from the next room, and his own lips came
together with a snap.
"Lead me to it," he said cheerfully. "I'd stand on my head and point
the wind with my legs for seventy dollars a month! Sounds to me like a
good place to save money--what?"
"Don't know how you'd go about spending much as long as you stayed up
there," Ross retorted drily. "It's when a man comes down that his
wages begin to melt."
Jack considered this point, standing with his feet planted a little
apart and his hands in his pockets, which is the accepted pose of the
care-free scion of wealth who is about to distinguish himself. He
believed that he knew best how to ward off suspicion of his motives in
thus exiling himself to a mountain top. He therefore grinned amiably
at Ross.
"Well, then, I won't come down," he stated calmly. "What I'm looking
for is a chance to make some money without any chance of spending it.
Lead me to this said mountain with the seventy-dollar job holding down
the peak."
Ross looked at him dubiously as though he detected a false note
somewhere. Good looking young fellows with the tangible air of the
towns and easy living did not, as a rule, take kindly to living alone
on some mountain peak. He stared up into Jack's face unwinkingly,
seeking there the real purpose behind such easy acceptance.
Jack stared back, his eyes widening and sobering a little as he
discovered that this man was not so easily put off with laughing
evasion. He wondered if Ross had read the papers that morning, and if
he, like the tall man at the postoffice, was mentally fitting him into
the description of the auto bandit that was being trailed.
Instinctively he rose to the new emergency.
"On the level, I want work and I want it right away," he said. "Being
alone won't bother me--I always get along pretty well with myself. I
want to get ahead of the game about five hundred dollars, and this
looks to me like a good chance to pile up a few iron men. I'm game for
the lonesomeness. It's a cold dollars-and-cents proposition with me."
He stopped and eyed the other a minute. "Does that answer what's in
your mind?" he asked bluntly.
Forest Supervisor Ross turned away his glance and reached for his pen.
"That's all right," he half apologized. "I want you to understand what
you're going up against, that is all. What's your name?"
Having the question launched at him suddenly like that, Jack nearly
blurted out his own name from sheer force of habit. But his tongue was
his friend for once and pronounced the last word so that Ross wrote
"John Carew" without hesitation. And Jack Corey, glancing down as the
supervisor wrote, stifled a smile of satisfaction.
"It happens to be the day when we usually send up supplies," said Ross
when he had finished recording the fact of Jack's employment as
fireman. "Our man hasn't started yet, and you can go up with him. Come
back here in an hour, can you? There'll be a saddle horse for you.
Don't try to take too much baggage. Suitcase, maybe. You can phone
down for anything you need that you haven't got with you, you know. It
will go up next trip. Clothes and grub and tobacco and such as
that--use your own judgment, and common sense."
"All right. Er--thank you, sir." Jack blushed a bit over the
unaccustomed courtesy of his tone, and turned into the outer office.
"Oh--Carew! Don't fall into the fool habit of throwing rocks down into
the lake just to see them bounce! One fellow did that, and came near
getting a tourist. You'll have to be careful."
"I certainly will, Mr. Ross."
The other two men gave him a friendly nod, and Jack went out of the
office feeling almost as cheerful as he had tried to appear.
CHAPTER FIVE
"IT'S A LONG WAY TO TIPPERARY," SANG JACK
Riding at a steady, climbing walk up a winding road cut into the
wooded mountainside; with a pack-horse loaded with food and new, cheap
bedding which Jack had bought; with chipmunks scurrying over the tree
trunks that had gone crashing down in some storm and were gathering
moss on their rotting bark; with the clear, yellow sunlight of a
mountain day in spring lying soft on the upper branches, Jack had a
queer sense of riding up into a new, untroubled life that could hold
no shred of that from which he had fled. His mother, stately in her
silks and a serenely unapproachable manner, which seemed always to say
to her son that she was preoccupied with her own affairs, and that her
affairs were vastly more important than his youthful interests and
problems, swam vaguely before his consciousness, veiled by the swift
passing of events and the abrupt change from city to unspoiled
wilderness.
When his companion stopped to let the horses "get their wind," Jack
would turn in the saddle and look back over the network of gulches
and deep canyons to where the valley peeped up at him shyly through
the trees, and would think that every step made him that much safer.
He did not face calmly the terror from which he had fled. Still
mentally breathless from the very unexpectedness of the catastrophe,
he shrank from the thought of it as if thinking would betray him. He
had not so far concerned himself with his future, except as it held
the possibility of discovery. So he quizzed his companion and got him
talking about the mountains over which he was to play guardian angel.
He heard a good deal about hunting and fishing; and when they climbed
a little higher, Hank Brown pointed out to him where a bear and two
half grown cubs had been killed the fall before. He ought to have a
rifle, said Hank. There was always the chance that he might get a shot
at a bear; and as for deer, the woods were full of them. Then he told
more stories and pointed out the very localities where the incidents
had occurred.
"See that rocky peak over there? That's where the bears hole up in the
winter. Network of caves, up there. King Solomon's the name the people
that live here call it--but it's down on the map as Grizzly Peak.
Ain't any grizzlies, though--black bear mostly. They're smaller and
they ain't so fighty."
It was on the tip of Jack's tongue to observe that a man might hide
out here for months and months and never be seen, much less caught;
but he checked himself, and remarked only that he would certainly have
to get a gun. He would like, he declared, to take home some good
heads, and maybe a bear skin or two. He forced himself to speak of
home in the careless tone of one who has nothing to hide, but the
words left an ache in his throat and a dull heaviness in his chest.
Hank Brown went on talking and saw nothing wrong with his mood.
Indeed, he never saw anything wrong with a man who would listen to
Hank's hunting and fishing stories and not bore him with stories of
his own prowess. Wherefore, Jack was left alone in peace to fight the
sudden, nauseating wave of homesickness, and in a little while found
himself listening to the steady monotone of Hank Brown's voice.
So, they came to a tiny, sunken meadow, one side of which was fenced
with poles, rimmed round with hills set thick with heavy timber. On
the farther side of the meadow, almost hidden from sight, was a square
log cabin, solid, gloomily shaded and staring empty-eyed at a tiny,
clear stream where the horses scared an eight-inch trout out of a pool
when they lowered eager noses to drink thirstily.
After that they climbed up into a more open country, clothed with
interlaced manzanita bushes and buck brush and thickets of young
balsam fir. Here, said Hank Brown, was good bear country. And a little
farther on he pulled up and pointed down to the dust of the trail,
where he said a bear had crossed that morning. Jack saw the imprint of
what looked like two ill-shaped short feet of a man walking
barefooted--or perhaps two crude hands pressed into the dirt--and was
thrilled into forgetfulness of his trouble.
Before they had gone another mile, he had bought Hank's rifle and all
the cartridges he happened to have with him. He paid as much as a new
rifle would have cost, but he did not know that--though he did know
that he had scarcely enough money left in his pocket to jingle when
the transaction was completed. He carried the rifle across the saddle
in front of him and fingered the butt pridefully while his eyes went
glancing here and there hopefully, looking for the bear that had
crossed the trail that morning. The mere possession of the rifle bent
his mood toward adventure rather than concealment. He did not think
now of the lookout station as a refuge so much as a snug lair in the
heart of a wonderful hunting ground.
He wanted to hear more about the bear and deer which Hank Brown had
shot on these slopes. But Hank was no longer in the mood for
recounting his adventures. Hank was congratulating himself upon
selling that rifle, which had lately shown a tendency to jam if he
worked the lever too fast; and was trying to decide just what make and
calibre of rifle he would buy with the money now in his pocket; and he
was grinning in his sleeve at the ease with which he had "stung" this
young tenderfoot, who was unsuspectingly going up against a
proposition which Hank, with all his love for the wild, would never
attempt of his own free will.
At first sight, the odd little glass observatory, perched upon the
very tip-top of all the wilderness around, fascinated Jack. He had
never credited himself with a streak of idealism, nor even with an
imagination, yet his pulse quickened when they topped the last steep
slope and stood upon the peak of the world--this immediate, sunlit
world.
The unconcealed joy on the face of the lookout when they arrived did
not mean anything at all to him. He stood taking great breaths of the
light, heady air that seemed to lift him above everything he had ever
known and to place him a close neighbor of the clouds.
"This is great!" he said over and over, baring his head to the keen
breeze that blew straight out of the violet tinted distance. "Believe
me, fellows, this is simply _great!_"
Whereupon the fireman who had spent two weeks there looked at him and
grinned.
"You can have it," he said with a queer inflection. "Mount Lassen's
blowing off steam again. Look at her over there! She's sure on the
peck, last day or so--you can have her for company. I donate her along
with the sun-parlor and the oil stove and the telescope and the view.
And I wish you all kinds of luck. How soon you going back, Hank? I
guess I better be showing this fellow how to use the chart; maybe
you'd like something to eat. I'm all packed and ready to hit the
trail, myself."
In the center of the little square room, mounted on a high table, was
a detail map of all the country within sight of the station--and that
meant a good many miles of up and down scenery. Over it a slender
pointer was fitted to a pin, in the center of the map, that let it
move like a compass. And so cunningly was the chart drawn and placed
upon the table that wherever one sighted along the pointer--as when
pointing at a distant smudge of smoke in the valley or on the
mountainside--there on the chart was the number by which that
particular spot was designated.
"Now, you see, suppose there's a fire starts at Massack--or along in
there," Ed, the lookout fireman, explained, pointing to a distant
wrinkle in the bluish green distance, "you swing this pointer till
it's drawing a bead on the smoke, and then you phone in the number of
the section it picks up on the chart. The lookout on Claremont, he'll
draw a bead on it too, and phone in _his_ number--see? And where them
two numbers intersect on the chart, there's your fire, boy."
Jack studied the chart like a boy investigating a new mechanical toy.
He was so interested that he forgot himself and pushed his hair
straight back off his forehead with the gesture that had become an
unconscious mannerism, spoiling utterly the plastered effect which he
had with so much pains given to his hair. But Hank and the fireman
were neither suspicious nor observing, and only laughed at his
exuberance, which they believed was going to die a violent death when
Jack had spent a night or two there alone.
"Is _that_ all I have to do?" he demanded, when he had located a half
dozen imaginary fires.
"That's all you get paid for doing, but that ain't all you have to do,
by a long shot!" the fireman retorted significantly. But he would not
explain until he had packed his bed on the horse that had brought up
Jack's bedding and the fresh supplies, and was ready to go down the
mountain with Hank. Then he looked at Jack pityingly.
"Well--you sure have got my sympathy, kid. I wouldn't stay here
another month for a thousand dollars. You've got your work cut out for
you, just to keep from going crazy. So long."
Jack stood on a little jutting pinnacle of rock and watched them out
of sight. He thought the great crater behind the station looked like a
crude, unfinished cup of clay and rocks; and that Crystal Lake,
reflecting the craggy slope from the deeps below, was like blueing in
the bottom of the cup. He picked up a rock the size of his fist and
drew back his arm for the throw, remembered what the supervisor had
told him about throwing stones into the lake, and dropped the rock
guiltily. It was queer how a fellow wanted to roll a rock down and
shatter that unearthly blue mirror into a million ripples.
He looked away to the northwest, where Mount Lassen sent a lazy column
of thin, grayish vapor trailing high into the air, and thought how
little he had expected to see this much-talked-of volcano; how
completely and irrevocably the past two days had changed his life.
Why, this was only Tuesday! Day before yesterday he had been whooping
along the beach at Venice, wading out and diving under the breakers
just as they combed for the booming lunge against the sand cluttered
with humanity at play. He had blandly expected to go on playing there
whenever the mood and the bunch invited. Night before last he had
danced--and he had drunk much wine, and had made impulsive love to a
girl he had never seen in his life until just before he had held her
in his arms as they went swaying and gliding and dipping together
across the polished floor, carefree as the gulls outside on the sand.
Night before last he had driven home--but he winced there, and pulled
his thoughts back from that drive.
Here were no girls to listen to foolish speeches; no wine, no music,
no boom of breakers, no gulls. There never would be any. He was as far
from all that as though he had taken flight to the moon. There was no
sound save the whispering rush of the wind that blew over the bare
mountain top. He was above the pines and he could only faintly hear
the murmur of their branches. Below him the world lay hushed, silent
with the silence of far distances. The shadows that lay on the slope
and far canyons moved like ghosts across the tumbled wilderness.
For a minute the immensity of silence and blue distance lulled his
thoughts again with the feeling of security and peace. He breathed
deep, his nostrils flared like a thoroughbred horse, his face turned
this way and that, his eyes drinking deep, satisfying draughts of a
beauty such as he had never before known. His lips were parted a
little, half smiling at the wonderful kindness of fate, that had
picked him up and set him away up here at the top o' the world.
He glanced downward, to his right. There went two objects--three, he
counted them a moment later. He stepped inside, snatched up the
telescope and focussed it eagerly on the slow-moving, black specks.
Why, there went Hank Brown and the fireman, Ed somebody, and the pack
horse with Ed's bedding lashed on its back. For perhaps a mile he
watched them going down through the manzanita and buck brush toward
the massed line of balsam firs that marked the nearest edge of the
heavy timber line.
So that was the trail that led up to his eyrie! He marked it well,
thinking that it might be a good plan to keep an eye on that trail, in
case an officer came looking for him here.
He watched Hank and Ed go down into the balsam firs. Dark shadows
crept after them down the slope to the edge of the thicket where they
had disappeared.
He watched the shadows until they gave him a vague feeling of
discomfort and loneliness. He turned away and looked down into the
bottom of the mountain's cup. The lake lay darkling there, hooded with
shadows like a nun, the snow banks at the edge indicating the band of
white against the calm face. It looked cold and lonesome down there;
terribly cold and lonesome.
Mount Lassen, when he sent a comfort-seeking glance that way, sent up
a spurt of grayish black smoke with a vicious suddenness that made him
jump. With bulging eyes he watched it mount higher and higher until he
held his breath in fear that it would never stop. He saw the column
halt and spread and fall....
When it was over he became conscious of itching palms where his nails
had dug into them and left little red marks. He discovered that he was
shaking as with a nervous chill, and that his knees were bending under
him. He sent a wild-eyed glance to the still, purple lake down there
where the snowbanks lingered, though it was the middle of May; to the
far hills that were purpling already with the dropping of the sun
behind the high peaks; to the manzanita slope where the trail lay in
shadow now. It was terribly still and empty--this piled wilderness.
He turned and hurried into his little glass-sided house and shut the
door behind him. A red beam of the sinking sun shone in and laid a bar
of light across the chart like a grin.
The silence was terrible. The emptiness pressed upon him like a weight
that crushed from him his youth and his strength and all his youthful
optimism, and left him old and weak and faded, a shadow of humanity
like those shadows down there in the canyon.
Stealthily, as if he were afraid of some tangible shape reaching out
of the silence, his hand went to the telephone receiver. He clutched
it as drowning fingers clutch at seaweed. He leaned and jerked the
receiver to his ear, and waited for the human voice that would bring
him once more into the world of men. He did not know then that the
telephone was the kind that must be rung by the user; or if he had
been told that he had forgotten. So he waited, his ears strained to
catch the heavenly sound of a human voice.
Shame crept in on the panic of his soul; shame and something that
stiffened it into the courage of a man. He felt his cheeks burn with
the flush that stained them, and he slowly lowered the receiver into
its hook.
With his hands thrust deep into his pockets and his mouth pulled down
at the corners, he stood leaning back against the desk shelf and
forced himself to look down across the wooded slopes to the valley,
where a light twinkled now like a fallen star. After a while he found
that he could see once more the beauty, and not so much the
loneliness. Then, just to prove to himself that he was not going to be
bluffed by the silence, he began to whistle. And the tune carried
with it an impish streak of that grim humor in which, so they tell
us, the song was born. It is completely out of date now, that song,
but then it was being sung around the world. And sometimes it was
whistled just as Jack was whistling it now, to brace a man's courage
against the press of circumstances.
"It's a long way to Tipperary," sang Jack, when he had whistled the
chorus twice; and grinned at the joke upon himself. After that he
began to fuss with the oil stove and to experiment with the food they
had left him, and whistled deliberately all the while.
In this wise Jack Corey lost himself from his world and entered into
his exile on a mountain top.
CHAPTER SIX
MISS ROSE FORWARD
Times were none too prosperous with the Martha Washington Beauty Shop,
upon the sixth floor of a Broadway building. In the hairdressing
parlor half the long rows of chairs reached out empty arms except
during the rush hours of afternoon; even then impatient patrons merely
sprinkled the room with little oases of activity while the girls
busied themselves with tidying shelves already immaculate, and
prinking before the mirrors whenever they dared. An air of uncertainty
pervaded the place, swept in by the rumor that the shop was going to
cut down its force of operators. No one knew, of course, the exact
truth of the matter, but that made it all the worse.
"'For one shall be taken and the other left,'" a blonde girl quoted
into a dismal little group at the window that looked out over the
city. "Has any one heard any more about it?"
"Rumley has been checking up the appointment lists, all morning," a
short, fat girl with henna-auburn hair piled high on her head reported
cheerfully. "Of course, you could never get a word out of _her_--but
I know what she is up to. The girls that have the most steady patrons
will stay, of course. I'm certainly glad I kidded that old widow into
thinking she's puhfectly stunning with her hair hennaed. She don't
trust anybody but me to touch it up. And she's good for a scalp and
facial and manicure every week of her life, besides getting her hair
dressed every Saturday anyway, and sometimes oftener when she's going
out. And she _always_ has a marcelle after a shampoo. She'd quit
coming if I left--she told me so last week. She thinks I'm _there_ on
massages. And then I've got sevrul others that ask for me regular as
they come in. You know that big, fat--"
"Miss Rose forward," the foreman's crisp, businesslike voice
interrupted.
Miss Rose began nervously pulling her corn-colored hair into the
latest plastered effect on her temples. "This isn't any appointment. I
wonder if somebody asked for me, or if Rumley--"
"Well, kid her along, whoever she is, and talk a lot about her good
points. You never can tell when some old girl is going to pull a lot
of patronage your way," the fat girl advised practically. "Tell 'em
your name and suggest that they call for you next time. You've got to
get wise to the trick of holding what you get. Beat it, kiddo--being
slow won't help you none with Rumley, and she's got the axe,
remember."
Thus adjured, Miss Rose beat it, arriving rather breathlessly at her
chair, which was occupied by a rather sprightly looking woman with
pretty hands and a square jaw and hair just beginning to gray over the
temples. She had her hat off and was regarding herself seriously in
the mirror, wondering whether she should touch up the gray, as some of
her intimate friends advised, or let it alone as her brother Fred
insisted.
Miss Rose was too busy counting customers to notice who was in her
chair until she had come close.
"Why, hello, Kate," she said then. "I was just wondering what had
become of you."
"Oh, I've been so busy, Marion. I just had to _steal_ the time today
to come. You weren't out to my reading last night, and I was afraid
you might not be well. Do you think that I ought to touch up my hair,
Marion? Of course, I don't mind it turning, so much--but you know
appearance counts _everything_ with an audience until one begins to
speak. Fred says to leave it alone--"
"Well, you do it." Miss Rose leaned over the chair with a handful of
hairpins to place in the little box on the dressing shelf, and spoke
confidentially in the ear of her patron. "It's not my business to
knock the trade, Kate--but honestly, that sign up there, that says
'Hair Dyed at Your Own Risk' ought to say, 'to your own sorrow.' If
you start, you've got to keep it up or it looks simply frightful. And
if you keep it up it just ruins your hair. You have such _nice_ hair,
Kate!" She picked up a sterilized brush and began stroking Kate's hair
soothingly. It was not such nice hair. It was very ordinary hair of a
somewhat nondescript color; but Kate was her dearest friend, and
praise is a part of the profession. "What do you want?--a scalp,
shampoo, or just dressed, or a curl, or what?"
"What," Kate retorted pertly. "Just fuss around while I talk to you,
Marion. I--"
"Rumley won't stand for fussing. I've got to do something she can
recognize across the room. How about a scalp? You can talk while I
massage, and then I'll show you a perfectly stunning way to do your
hair--it's new, and awfully good for your type of face. How do you
like mine today?"
"Why, I like it tremendously!" Kate gave her an appraising glance in
the mirror. "It's something new, isn't it? Use plenty of tonic, won't
you, Marion? They charge awful prices here--but their tonic has done
my hair so much good! Listen, could you get off early today? I simply
must talk to you. A perfectly tremendous opportunity has literally
fallen our way, and I want you to benefit by it also. A friend of
Douglas'--of Professor Harrison's, I should say--called our attention
to it. This friend wants to go in on it, but he can't leave his
business; so the idea is to have just Fred and the professor--and you,
if you'll go--and me to go and attend to the assessments. All the
other names will be dummy names--well, silent partners is a better
word--and we can control a tremendously valuable tract that way. How
about a henna rinse, Marion? Would it be worth while?"
"Why, a henna rinse would brighten your hair, Kate--and lots of nice
women have them. But you'll have to have a shampoo, you know. The
henna rinse is used with a shampoo. I believe I'd have one if I were
you, Kate. You never could tell it in the world. And it's good for the
hair, too. It--"
"Fred is _so_ disagreeable about such things. But if it couldn't be
told--" Kate began to doubt again. "Does it cost extra?"
"Fifty cents--but it does brighten the hair. It brings out the natural
color--there is an auburn tint--"
"But I really meant to have a manicure today. And we can't talk in the
manicure parlor--those tables are crowded together so! I've a
tremendous lot to tell you, too. Which would you have, Marion?"
Miss Rose dutifully considered the matter while she continued the
scalp massage. Before they had decided definitely upon the
extravagance of a henna rinse, which was only a timid sort of
experiment and at best a mere compromise art and nature, Marion had
applied the tonic. It seemed a shame to waste that now with a shampoo,
and she did not dare to go for another dish of the tonic; so Kate
sighed and consoled herself with a dollar saved, and went without the
manicure also.
Rather incoherently she returned to her subject, but she did not
succeed in giving Miss Rose anything more than a confused idea of a
trip somewhere that would really be an outing, and a tremendous
opportunity to make thousands of dollars with very little effort. This
sounded alluring. Marion mentally cancelled a date with a party going
to Venice that evening, and agreed to meet Kate at six o'clock, and
hear more about it.
In the candy shop where they ate, her mind was even more receptive to
tremendous opportunities for acquiring comparative wealth with
practically no initial expense and no effort whatever. Not being
subjected to the distraction of a beauty parlor, Kate forgot to use
her carefully modulated, elocutionary voice, and buzzed with details.
"It's away up in the northern part of the State somewhere, in the
mountains. You know timber land is going to be tremendously
valuable--it is now, in fact. And this tract of beautiful big trees
can be gotten and flumed--or something--down to a railroad that taps
the country. It's in Forest Reserve, you see, and can't be bought by
the lumber companies. I had the professor explain it all to me again,
after I left the Martha, so I could tell you.
"A few of us can club together and take mining claims on the
land--twenty acres apiece. All we have to do is a hundred dollars'
worth of work--just digging holes around on it, or something--every
year till five hundred dollars' worth is done. Then we can get our
deed--or whatever it is--and sell the timber."
"Well, _what_ do you know about _that_!" Marion exclaimed
ecstatically, leaning forward across the little table with her hands
clasped. Nature had given her a much nicer voice than Kate's, and the
trite phrase acquired a pretty distinctiveness just from the way she
said it. "But--would you have to stay five years, Kate?" she added
dubiously.
"No, that's the beauty of it, you can do all the five hundred dollars'
worth in one year, Marion."
"Five hundred dollars' worth of digging holes in the ground!" Marion
gasped, giggling a little. "Good night!"
"Now please wait until you hear the rest of it!" Kate's tone sharpened
a little with impatience. She moved a petulant elbow while a tired
waitress placed two glasses of water and a tiny plate of white and
brown bread upon the table. The minute the girl's back was turned upon
them she cast a cautious eye around the clattering throng and leaned
forward.
"Four men--men with a little capital--are going into it, and pay Fred
and the professor for doing their assessment work. Four five-hundreds
will make two thousand dollars that we'll get out of them, just for
looking after their interests. And we'll have our twenty acres apiece
of timber--and you've no _idea_ what a tremendous lot of money that
will bring, considering the investment. Fred's worked so hard lately
that he's all run down and looks miserable. The doctor told him the
mountains would do him a world of good. And the professor wants to do
something definite and practical--they are filling up the college with
student-teachers, willing to teach some certain subject for the
instruction they'll get in some other--and they're talking about
cutting the professor's salary. He says he will not endure another
cut--he simply cannot, and--"
"And support an elocutionist?"
"Now, hush! It isn't--"
"Do I draw any salary as chaperone, Kate?"
"Now, if you don't stop, I'll not tell you another thing!" Kate took a
sip of water to help hide a little confusion, clutching mentally at
the practical details of the scheme. "Where was I?"
"Cutting Doug's salary. Is it up on a mountain, or up in the State,
that you said the place was? I'd like being on a mountain, I
believe--did you ever see such hot nights as we're having?"
"It's up both," Kate stated briefly. "You'd love it, Marion. There's a
log house, and right beside it is a trout stream. And it's only six
miles from the railroad, and _good_ road up past the place. A man who
has been up there told Doug--the professor. Tourists just _flock_ in
there. And right up on top of the mountain, within walking distance of
our claims, is a lake, Marion! And great trout in it, that long!--you
can see them swimming all around in schools, the water is so clear.
And there is no inlet or outlet, and no bottom. The water is just as
clear and as blue as the sky, the man told the professor. It's so
clear that they actually call it Crystal Lake!"
"Well, _what_ do you know about that!" breathlessly murmured Marion in
her crooning voice. "A lake like that on top of a mountain--in
weather like this, doesn't it sound like heaven?" She began to pick
the pineapple out of her fruit salad, dabbing each morsel in the tiny
mound of whipped cream.
"We'd need some outing clothes, of course. I've been thinking that a
couple of plain khaki suits--you know--and these leggings that lace
down the side, would be all we'd really need. I wish you'd go out home
with me instead of going to a show. Fred will be home, and he can
explain the details of this thing better than I can. If it were a
difficult stanza of Browning, now--but I haven't much talent for
business. And seriously, Marion, you must know all about this before
you really say yes or no. And it's time you had some real object in
life--time you settled down to regard your life seriously. I love you
just the way you are, dear, but for your own sake you must learn to
think for yourself and not act so much upon impulse. I couldn't bear
to go off without you, and stay a whole year, maybe--but if you should
go, not knowing just what it was going to be like, and then be
disappointed--you see, dear, you might come to blaming poor Kate."
"Why, I wouldn't do anything of the kind! Even if it did turn out to
be something I didn't care for, it would be so much better than
staying here with you gone, that I don't see how I could mind very
much. You know, Kate, I'm just crazy about the country. I'd like to
sleep right outside! And I think a log cabin is the dearest way to
live--don't you? And we'd hike, wouldn't we?--up to the lake and all
around. I've got enough money to buy a gun, and if there's any hunting
around there, we'll hunt! Kate, down in my heart I'm sick of massaging
old ladies' double chins and kidding them into thinking they look
young! And anyway," she added straightforwardly, "I don't suppose I'll
be at the Martha much longer. They're going to let a lot of us girls
out, and I'm almost sure to be one of them. There's enough of the
older girls to do all the work there is now, till the tourist season
begins again in the fall. I couldn't get in anywhere else, this time
of the year, so I'd just about have to go out to one of the beaches
and get a little tent house or something with some of the girls, and
fool around until something opened up in the fall. And even if you
live in your bathing suit all day, Kate, you just can't get by without
spending a little money."
"Well, of course, you'd stay with me if I were here. I wouldn't hear
to anything else. And even--why don't you come on out anyway, till we
get ready to start? We could plan so much better. And don't you think,
Marion, it would be much better for you if you didn't wait for the
Martha to let you go but gave them notice instead?"
"Quit before I'm invited to leave? I believe I'd better do that, Kate.
It won't be half bad to spring it on the girls that I'm going up in
the mountains for the summer. I'll talk about that lake till--say, I'm
just wild to start. How soon do you think it will be? Fred will have
to teach me how to trout-fish--or whatever you call it. Only think of
stepping out of our log cabin and catching trout, just any time you
want to! And, Kate, I really am going to buy a gun. Down on Spring, in
that sporting-goods house--you know, the one on the corner--they have
got the cutest rifles! And by the way, they had some of the best
looking outing suits in the window the other day. I'm going in there
when I come down in the morning."
"Let Fred advise you about the rifle before you buy. Fred's
tremendously clever about nature stuff, Marion. He'll know just what
you want. I think a gun will maybe be necessary. You know there are
bear--"
"Oh, good night!" cried Marion. But in the next breath she added, "I
wonder if there are any nice hunters after the bears!"
CHAPTER SEVEN
GUARDIAN OF THE FORESTS
In mid July the pines and spruces and firs have lost their pale green
fingertips which they wave to the world in spring, and have settled
down to the placid business of growing new cones that shall bear the
seed of future forests as stately as these. On the shadowed,
needle-carpeted slopes there is always a whispery kind of calm; the
calm of Nature moving quietly about her appointed tasks, without haste
and without uncertainty, untorn by doubts or fears or futile
questioning; like a broad-souled, deep-bosomed mother contentedly
rearing her young in a sheltered home where love abides in the peace
which passeth understanding.
Gray squirrels, sleek and bright-eyed and graceful always, lope over
the brown needles, intent upon some urgent business of their own.
Noisy little chipmunks sit up and nibble nervously at dainties they
have found, and flirt their tails and gossip, and scold the carping
bluejays that peer down from overhanging branches. Perhaps a hoot owl
in the hollow trees overhead opens amber eyes and blinks irritatedly
at the chattering, then wriggles his head farther down into his
feathers, stretches a leg and a wing and settles himself for another
nap.
Little streams go sliding down between banks of bright green grass,
and fuss over the mossy rocks that lie in their beds. Deer lift heads
often to listen and look and sniff the breeze between mouthfuls of the
tender twigs they love. Shambling, slack-jointed bears move shuffling
through the thickets, like the deer, lifting suspicious noses to test
frequently the wind, lest some enemy steal upon them unaware.
From his glass-walled eyrie, Jack Corey gazed down upon the wooded
slopes and dreamed of what they hid of beauty and menace and calm and
of loneliness. He saw them once drenched with rain; but mostly they
lay warm under the hot sunshine of summer. He saw them darkling with
night shadows, he saw them silvered with morning fogs which turned
rose tinted with the first rays of sunrise, he saw them lie
soft-shaded in the sunset's after glow, saw them held in the unearthly
beauty of the full moonlight.
Like the deer and the bear down there, his head was lifted often to
look and to sniff the wind that blew strongly over the peak. For now
the winds came too often tainted with the smoke of burning pines. The
blue haze of the far distance deepened with the thickening air. Four
times in the last ten days he had swung the pointer over the mapped
table and sighted it upon brown puffballs that rose over the
treetops--the first betraying marks of the licking flames below. He
had watched the puff balls grow until they exploded into rolling
clouds of smoke, yellow where the flames mounted high in some dead
pine or into a cedar, black where a pitch stump took fire.
After he had telephoned the alarm to headquarters he would watch
anxiously the spreading pall. To stand up there helpless while great
trees that had been a hundred years or more in the growing died the
death of fire, gave him a tragic feeling of having somehow betrayed
his trust. Every pine that fell, whether by old age, fire or the
woodmen's axe, touched him with a sense of personal loss. It was as
though he himself had made the hills and clothed them with the
majestic trees, and now stood godlike above, watching lest evil come
upon them. But he did not feel godlike when through the telescope he
watched great leaping flames go climbing up some giant pine, eating
away its very life as they climbed; he was filled then with a blind,
helpless rage at his own ineffectiveness, and he would stand and
wonder why God refused to send the rain that would save these
wonderful, living things, the trees.
At night, when the forests drew back into the darkness, he would watch
the stars slide across the terrible depth of purple infinity that
seemed to deepen hypnotically as he stared out into it. Venus, Mars,
Jupiter--at first he could not tell one from another, though he
watched them all. He had studied astronomy among other things in
school, but then it had been merely a hated task to be shirked and
slighted and forgotten as one's palate forgets the taste of bitter
medicine. Up here, with the stars all around him and above him for
many nights, he was ashamed because he could not call them all by
name. He would train his telescope upon some particularly bright star
and watch it and wonder--Jack did a great deal of wondering in those
days, after his first panicky fight against the loneliness and silence
had spent itself.
First of all, he awoke to the fact that he was about as important to
the world as one of those little brown birds that hopped among the
rocks and perked its head at him so knowingly, and preened its
feathers with such a funny air of consequence. He could not even
believe that his sudden disappearance had caused his mother any grief
beyond her humiliation over the manner and the cause of his going. She
would hire some one to take care of the car, and she would go to her
teas and her club meetings and her formal receptions and to church
just the same as though he were there--or had never been there. If he
ever went back.... But he never could go back. He never could face his
mother again, and listen to her calmly-condemnatory lectures that had
no love to warm them or to give them the sweet tang of motherly
scolding.
It sounds a strange thing to say of Jack Corey, that scattered-brained
young fellow addicted to beach dancing and joy rides and all that goes
with these essentially frothy pastimes; a strange thing to say of him
that he was falling into a more affectionate attitude of personal
nearness to the stars and to the mountains spread out below him than
he had ever felt toward Mrs. Singleton Corey. Yet that is how he
managed to live through the lonely days he spent up there in the
lookout station.
When Hank was about to start with another load of supplies up the
mountain, Jack had phoned down for all of the newspapers, magazines
and novels which Forest Supervisor Ross could buy or borrow; also a
double supply of smoking tobacco and a box of gum. When his tongue
smarted from too much smoking, he would chew gum for comfort And he
read and read, until his eyes prickled and the print blurred. But the
next week he diffidently asked Ross if he thought he could get him a
book on astronomy, explaining rather shame-facedly that there was
something he wanted to look up. On his third trip Hank carried several
government pamphlets on forestry. Which goes to prove how Jack was
slowly adapting himself to his changed circumstances, and fitting
himself into his surroundings.
He had to do that or go all warped and wrong, for he had no intention
of leaving the peak, which was at once a refuge and a place where he
could accumulate money; not much money, according to Jack's standard
of reckoning--his mother had often spent as much for a gown or a ring
as he could earn if he stayed all summer--but enough to help him out
of the country if he saved it all.
When his first four days vacation was offered him, Jack thought a long
while over the manner of spending it. Quincy did not offer much in the
way of diversion, though it did offer something in the way of risk. So
he cut Quincy out of his calculations and decided that he would phone
down for a camp outfit and grub, and visit one or two of the places
that he had been looking at for so long. For one thing, he could climb
down to the lake he had been staring into for nearly a month, and see
if he could catch any trout. Occasionally he had seen fishermen down
there casting their lines in, but none of them had seemed to have much
luck. For all that the lake lured him, it was so blue and clear, set
away down there in the cupped mountain top. Hank had advised him to
bait with a salmon-roe on a Coachman fly. Jack had never heard of that
combination, and he wanted to try it.
But after all, the lake was too near to appeal to him except by way of
passing. Away on the next ridge was the black, rocky hump called
Grizzly Peak on the map. Hank spoke of it casually as Taylor Rock, and
sometimes called it King Solomon. That was where the bears had their
winter quarters, and that was where Jack wanted to go and camp. He
wanted to see a bear's den, and if the bears were all gone--Hank
assured him that they never hung out up there in the summer, but
ranged all over the mountains--he wanted to go inside a den and see
what it was like. And for a particular, definite ambition, without
which all effort is purposeless, he wanted to kill a bear.
Hank brought him all the things he needed, talked incessantly of what
Jack should do and what he shouldn't do, and even offered to pack his
outfit over to the Peak for him. So Jack went, and got his first taste
of real camping out in a real wilderness, and gained a more intimate
knowledge of the country he had to guard.
By the time his second relief was at hand, he was tempted to take what
money he had earned and go as far as it would take him. He did not
believe he could stand another month of that terrible isolation, even
with his new friendliness toward the stars and the forest to lighten a
little of his loneliness. Youth hungers for a warmer, more personal
companionship than Nature, and Jack was never meant for a hermit. He
grew sullen. He would stand upon his pinnacle where he could look down
at Crystal Lake, and hate the tourists who came with lunches and their
fishing tackle, and scrambled over the rocks, and called shrilly to
one another, and laughed, and tried to invent new ways of stringing
together adjectives that seemed to express their enthusiasm. He would
make biting remarks to them which the distance prevented their
hearing, and he would wish savagely that they would fall in the lake,
or break a leg on some of the boulders.
When those with a surplus of energy started up the steep climb to the
peak, he would hurry into his little glass room, hastily part and
plaster his hair down as a precaution against possible recognition,
and lock his door and retire to a certain niche in a certain pile of
rocks, where he would be out of sight and yet be close enough to hear
the telephone, and would chew gum furiously and mutter savage things
under his breath. Much as he hungered for companionship he had a
perverse dread of meeting those exclamatory sightseers. It seemed to
Jack that they cheapened the beauty of everything they exclaimed over.
He could hear them gabble about Mount Lassen, and his lip would curl
with scorn over the weakness of their metaphors. He would grind his
teeth when they called his glass prison "cute," and wondered if
anybody really lived there. He would hear some man trying to explain
what he did not know anything at all about, and he would grin
pityingly at the ignorance of the human male, forgetting that he had
been just as ignorant, before fate picked him up and shoved him
head-foremost into a place where he had to learn.
Sometimes he was not forewarned of their visits, and would be trapped
fairly; and then he would have to answer their foolish questions and
show them what the map was for, and what the pointer was for, and
admit that it did get lonesome sometimes, and agree with them that it
was a fine view, and point out where Quincy lay, and all the rest of
it. It amazed him how every one who came said practically the same
things, asked the same questions, linked the same adjectives together.
Thus passed his second month, which might be called his pessimistic
month. But he did not take his money and go. He decided that he would
wait until he had grown a beard before he ventured. He realized
bitterly that he was a fugitive, and that it would go hard with him
now if he were caught. From the papers which Supervisor Ross had sent
him every week he had learned that the police were actually and
definitely looking for him. At least they had been a month ago, and he
supposed that they had not given up the search, even though later
events had pushed his disgrace out of print. The man they had shot was
hovering close to death in a hospital, the last Jack read of the case.
It certainly would be wiser to wait a while. So he took his camp
outfit to Taylor Rock again and stayed there until his four days were
gone.
That time he killed a deer and got a shot at a young bear, and came
back to his post in a fairly good humor. The little glass room had a
homey look, with the late afternoon sunlight lying warm upon the map
and his piles of magazines and papers stacked neatly on their shelf.
Since he could not be where he wanted to be, Jack felt that he would
rather be here than anywhere else. So his third month began with a
bleak kind of content.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IN WHICH A GIRL PLAYS BILLIARDS ON THE MOUNTAIN TOP
Jack heard some one coming, snatched up a magazine and his pipe and
promptly retired to his pet crevice in the rocks. Usually he locked
the door before he went, but the climber sounded close--just over the
peak of the last little knob, in fact. He pulled the door shut and
ran, muttering something about darned tourists. Drive a man crazy,
they would, if he were fool enough to stay and listen to their fool
talk.
He crawled well back into the niche, settled himself comfortably and
lighted his pipe. They never came over his way--and the wind blew from
the station. He did not believe they would smell the smoke.
Darn it all, he had the wrong magazine! He half rose, meaning to
scurry back and get the one he wanted; but it was too late now. He
heard the pebbles knocked loose where the faint trail dipped down over
the knob directly behind the station. So he settled back with his pipe
for solace, and scowled down at the world, and waited for the darn
tourists to go.
But this particular darn tourist had two reasons for lingering up
there. Her first and greatest reason was a sheer delight in the
panorama spread below and all around her, and the desire to saturate
her soul with the beauty of it, her lungs with the keen elixir of the
wind, heady with the eight thousand feet of altitude. Her second
reason was a perverse desire to show Kate that she was not to be
bossed around like a kid, and dictated to and advised and lectured
whenever she wanted to do something which Kate did not want to do.
Why, for instance, should she miss the pleasure of climbing to the
very top of the peak just because Kate began to puff before they were
half way up, and wanted to turn back?
Of course, she would do anything in the world for Kate; but that was
no reason why Kate should be selfish about little things. If she
didn't want to wait until Marion came down, she could walk home alone.
There was a good road, and Marion certainly would never think of
objecting. She believed in absolute personal liberty in little things.
Therefore she meant to stay up on the peak just exactly as long as she
wanted to stay, regardless of what Kate wanted to do. She had not
tried to force Kate to come up with her--if Kate would just stop to
think a minute. When Kate sat down on that rock and said she wouldn't
climb another step, Marion had not urged her at all. She had waited
until she was sure that Kate would not change her mind, and then she
had come on up without any fuss or argument. And she would stay until
she was ready to go down. It would be silly to spoil her pleasure now
by worrying. She would like to see a sunset from up here. She had her
gun with her, and anyway, she could get home easily before dark. She
believed she would stay, just this once. Really, it would do Kate good
to discover that Marion liked to please herself once in a while.
Which was all very well for Marion Rose, but rather hard on Jack, who
was not in a mood for company. He smoked hopefully for a half hour or
so. Most tourists got enough of it in a half hour. They began to feel
the altitude then, or found the wind disagreeable, or they were in a
hurry to climb down to the lake and fish, or they had to think about
the trip home. Besides, their vocabularies were generally exhausted in
half an hour, and without superlatives they could not gaze upon the
"view"; not with any satisfaction, that is. But this tourist could be
heard moving here and there among the rocks, with long lapses of
silence when she just stood and gazed. Jack listened and waited, and
grew more peevish as the lagging minutes passed. If he went out now,
he would have to go through the whole performance.
The telephone rang. And while Jack was sulkily getting to his feet, he
heard a girl's voice answering the phone. The nerve of her! What
business had she inside, anyway? Must a fellow padlock that door every
time he went out, to keep folks from going where they had no business
to be? He went angrily to the station; much more angrily than was
reasonable, considering the offense committed against him.
He saw a girl in a short khaki skirt and high laced boots and a pongee
blouse belted trimly with leather, bending her head over the
mouthpiece of the telephone. She had on a beach hat that carried the
full flavor of Venice in texture and tilt, and her hair was a ripe
corn color, slicked back from her temples in the fashion of the month.
Graceful and young she was, groomed as though thousands were to look
upon her. Normally Jack's eyes would have brightened at this sight,
his lips would have curved enticingly, his voice would have taken the
tone of incipient philandering. But in his present mood he snapped at
her.
"I beg your pardon. This is not a public telephone booth. It's a
private office."
She glanced inattentively his way, her smile directed mentally toward
the person on the other end of the wire. With her free hand she waved
him to silence and spoke, still smiling, into the mouthpiece.
"You're sure I won't do? I believe I could qualify, and I want--"
"If you please, this is not a public--"
But she waved her hand again impatiently and listened, engrossed and
smiling. "Oh, just because I wanted to hear a human voice, I guess.
I'd forgotten what a phone looks like, and so when I heard ... No, I
am not a tourist. I'm a neighbor, and I'm the lonesomest neighbor in
these mountains.... What?... Oh, down the road in a spooky little
valley where there's a log cabin and a trout stream--only I haven't
caught any yet. They bite, but they simply _won't_ stay hooked.
What?... Oh, just worms, and those fuzzy flies made with a hook on
them--_you_ know.... Oh, thanks! I surely do wish you could.... The
what?... Oh! well, I don't know, I'm sure. There's an excited young
man here who keeps telling me this is _not_ a public telephone
booth--do you mean him, I wonder?... He does look something like a
fireman, now you mention it. What do you use him for? a signal fire,
or something?... Oh! You _do_? Why, forevermore! Is he nice to talk
to?... No, I haven't. He just keeps telling me this is _not_ a
public ... Oh, I don't! I don't see how anybody could mind him--do
you?... Well, of course, a person doesn't look for politeness away
up ... Ha-ha--why, does the altitude make a difference? Maybe that's what
ails me, then-- That's awfully nice of you, man ... No, never mind
what my name is. Don't let's be ordinary. I'm just a voice from the
mountain top, and you're just a voice from the valley. So be it.... Without
an invitation? I only thanked you ..."
"Keep on," interjected Jack savagely, "and you'll have his wife
trailing you up with a gun!"
"Well--we'll see.... But do come sometime when you can--and bring your
wife! I'd love to meet some woman.... Oh, all right. Good-by."
With a gloved palm pressed hard over the mouthpiece she turned
reproachfully upon Jack. "Now you _did_ fix things, didn't you? Of
course, you knew I couldn't be nice to a man with a wife, so you had
to go and spoil everything. And I was just beginning to have a lovely
time!"
"Help yourself," Jack offered with heavy sarcasm. "Don't mind me at
all."
"Well, he wants to talk to you," she said. She put her lips again to
the mouthpiece and added a postscript. "Pardon me, but I held the line
a minute while I quarreled with your fireman. You're wrong--I don't
find him so nice to talk to. You may talk to him if you want to--I'm
sure you're welcome!" Whereupon she surrendered the receiver and
walked around the high, map-covered table, and amused herself by
playing an imaginary game of billiards with the pointer for a cue and
two little spruce cones which she took from her pocket for balls.
When Jack had finished talking and had hung up the receiver, he leaned
back against the shelf and watched her, his hands thrust deep into his
trousers pockets. He still scowled--but one got the impression that he
was holding that frown consciously and stubbornly and not because his
mood matched it.
Marion placed a cone at a point on the chart which was marked
Greenville, aimed for Spring Garden and landed the cone neatly in the
middle of Jack's belt.
"Missed the pocket a mile," he taunted grudgingly, hating to be
pleasant and yet helpless against the girl's perfect composure and
good humor.
"Give it back, and I'll try it again. There's a place called the
Pocket. I'll try that, for luck." Then she added carelessly--"What
would have happened, if you hadn't answered that man at all?"
"I'd have been canned, maybe."
"Forevermore." She pretended to chalk her cue with a tiny powder puff
which she took from a ridiculous vanity bag that swung from her belt.
"Wouldn't you kind of like to be canned--under the circumstances?"
"No, I wouldn't. I need the money." Jack bit his lips to keep from
grinning at the powder-puff play.
"Oh, I see." She tried another shot. "Why don't you cut the legs off
this table? I would. It's miles too high."
"I don't monkey with government property, myself." He placed a
peculiar accent on the last word, thus pointing his meaning very
clearly.
"Now, _what_ do you know about _that_? Missed it--with a government
cone, shot by a government stick on a government table, while a
government scowl fairly shrieks: 'Cut out this desecration!'" She
chalked her cue gravely, powdered her nose afterward, using a round
scrap of a mirror not much bigger than a silver dollar. "Do you stay
up here all the time and scowl, all by yourself?"
"All the time and scowl, all by myself." Jack took his hands from his
pockets that he might light his pipe; which was a sign that he was
nearly ready to treat the girl kindly. "If you object to smoke--" and
he waved one hand significantly toward the open door.
"All the time--all by yourself. And you don't want to be canned,
either." With the pointer Marion drew aimless little invisible volutes
upon the map, connecting the two spruce cones with an imaginary scroll
design. "How touching!" she said enigmatically.
"Sure, you're heart-broken over the pathos of it. I can see that. You
ought to put in about a week here--that's all I've got to say."
"Think I couldn't?" She looked across at him queerly.
"You wouldn't dare go any farther away than the spring. You'd have to
stay right here on this peak every minute of the twenty-four hours.
They call up at all kinds of ungodly times, just to see if you're on
the job, if they think you're snitching. They'd catch you gone
sometime--you couldn't get by with it--and then--"
"The can," finished Miss Marion gravely. "But what I want to know is,
what have you done?"
"Done?" Jack's jaw dropped slack away from the pipestem. "What yuh
mean, done?"
"Yes. What have you done that they should put you up here and make you
stay up here? It sounds--"
"Now, even a tourist knows that this is a Forest Service lookout
station, and that I'm here to watch out for fires down below! I'm your
guardian angel, young lady. Treat me with respect, if not with
kindness."
"I'm a member of the no-treat reform club. Honestly, don't they let
you leave here at all?"
"Four days a month." He heaved a heavy sigh and waved his pipe toward
the great outdoors. "'S big world, when it's all spread out in sight,"
he volunteered.
"Can't you--can't you even go down to the lake and fish, when you want
to?"
"Nope. Four days a month--and if they didn't happen to have a spare
man lying round handy, to send up here to take my place, I couldn't go
then even."
Marion regarded him meditatively. "You can have an hour's recess now,
if you like," she offered generously after a minute. "I'll stay and
answer the phone, and stand them off if they want to talk to you. I'm
good at that. You can go and climb down to the lake and fish, and have
fun."
"Tell me to go and jump in the lake and I might do it," Jack returned
gloomily. He found it rather pleasant to be sympathized with and
pitied. "What if a fire broke out while I was gone?"
"Well, what if? I could do what you would do, couldn't I? What do you
do when a fire breaks out?"
That gave Jack a fair excuse for leaving his place by the shelf, and
coming around to her side of the table, and for taking the pointer
from her and standing close beside her while he explained the chart.
Needless to say, he made use of the excuse immediately.
"First off," he instructed, "you don't want to be a boob and go
reporting train smoke, like I did the first day I was here. Picked up
a black smoke down below, here--right down there! I got the number on
the chart and phoned it in, and the lookout on Claremont didn't yeep
about it. So they called up and asked him to come alive and report. By
that time the smoke had moved from where I saw it, and the whole train
was in sight from his station, coming round the hill into Marston. He
never thought of that being it, he said afterward. They got busy in
the office and called me up again, and I located her again--only in a
different place. Fellow on Claremont--that's it away over there; see
that white speck? That's the station, just like this one. He's an old
crab, Hank tells me. He said I must be bugs. Had him squinting around
some, I bet! Then they got wise that I was reporting a through
freight, and they kid me about it yet. But they fell for it at first
all right!"
"What do you know about that!" Marion melodiously exclaimed, and
laughed companionably.
She wanted to know all the things that real tourists want to know, and
Jack forgot that he hated to answer foolish questions. The piles of
empty coal-oil cans, for instance--she should have known that they had
been packed up there full, to run the oil stove in the corner. The
spring--he had to take his bucket and go down with her and show her
where the spring was, but he did not seem to mind that, either. The
flag, whipping over the station on its short staff, interested her
too, and he helped her guess how long it would be before the stars and
stripes snapped themselves to ribbons. The book on astronomy she
dipped into, turning it to look at the full-page illustrations of
certain constellations that were to Jack like old friends. The books
on forestry she glanced at, and the magazines she inspected with less
interest.
"Oh, I've got the latest movie magazines. I could bring them up
sometime if you like--or send them by the man who brings your stuff
up, if you'll tell him to stop at the cabin."
"You bring them yourself," Jack urged, his eagerness so open and
unashamed that Marion blushed, and suddenly remembered Kate down the
slope there waiting for her. She must go, she said; and she went,
almost as suddenly as she came, and never mentioned her half-formed
determination to wait up there for the sunset.
Jack went with her as far as he dared, and stood under a wind-tortured
balsam fir and watched her out of sight. On the last ledge before the
trail dipped down over the hump that would hide her for good, she
turned and looked up at him. She stood there poised--so it
seemed--between mountain-crest and the sky. The lake lay quiet and
shadowed, deep below her, as though God had dropped a tear and the
mountain was holding it reverently cupped, sheltering it from the keen
winds of the heights. Beyond, painted with the delicate shadings of
distance and yellow sunlight, Indian Valley lay quietly across the lap
of the world, its farms and roads and fences sketched in lightly, as
with the swift pencil strokes of an artist; its meandering,
willowfringed streams making contrast with the yellowed fields of
early harvest time.
She stood there poised like a bird on the rim of the world. Her
slimness, her sure grace, her yellow hair shining under the beach hat
she wore tilted back from her face, struck him like a blow in the face
from that pleasurable past wherein woman beauty had been so abundant.
She was of the town; moreover, he felt that she was of the town from
which he had fled in guilt and terror. She stood for a long minute,
taking in the full sweep of the rugged peak. She was not looking at
him especially, until she turned to go on. Then she waved her hand
carelessly--slightingly, he felt in his misery--and went down the
steep slope.
Until he could no longer see the crown of her hat he looked after her.
Then, the sickness of his terrible loneliness upon him again, he
turned and slowly climbed back to his glass-walled prison.
CHAPTER NINE
LIKE THE BOY HE WAS
Down the balsam and manzanita slope toward the little valley where she
lived, Jack stared hungrily during many an empty, dragging hour. Until
the darkness had twice drawn down the black curtain that shut him away
from the world, he had hoped she would come. She had been so friendly,
so understandingly sympathetic--she must know how long the days were
up there.
On the third day Hank came riding up the trail that sought the easiest
slopes. He brought coal-oil and bacon and coffee and smoking tobacco
and the week's accumulation of newspapers, and three magazines; but he
did not bring any word from Marion Rose, nor the magazines she had
promised. When Hank had unsaddled the horses to rest their backs, and
had eaten his lunch and had smoked a cigarette in the shade of a rock,
his slow thoughts turned to the gossip of his little world.
He told of the latest encounter with the crabbed fireman on Claremont,
grinning appreciatively because the fireman's ill temper had been
directed at a tourist who had gone up with Hank. He related a small
scandal that was stirring the social pond of Quincy, and at last he
swung nearer to the four who had taken mining claims along Toll Gate
Creek.
"Too bad you can't go down to Toll-house an' git acquainted with your
neighbors," he drawled half maliciously. "There's a girl in the bunch
that's sure easy to look at. Other one is an old maid--looks too much
like a schoolma'm to suit me. But say--I'm liable to make a trip up
here twice a week, from now on! I'm liable to eat my dinner 'fore I
git here, too. Some class to that girl, now, believe me! Only trouble
is, I'm kinda afraid one of the men has got a string on her. There's
two of 'em in the outfit. One is one of them he schoolma'ms that goes
around in a boiled shirt and a hard-boiled hat, buzzin' like a
mosquito. He's sweet on the old maid. It's the other one I'm leery of.
He's the brother of the old maid, and he's the kind that don't say
much but does a lot uh thinkin'. Big, too.
"They've took up a bunch of minin' claims around there and are livin'
in that cabin. Goin' to winter there, the old maid was tellin' me. I
brought out their mail to 'em. Marion Rose is the girl's name. I guess
she's got a feller or two down in Los Angeles--I brought out a couple
letters today in men's writin'--different hands, at that.
"They's somethin' queer about 'em that I can't see through. They was
both settin' out in the sun--on that log right by the trail as you go
in to the cabin--and they'd washed their hair and had it all down
their backs dryin' it. And the girl was cleanin' the old maid's finger
nails for her! I come purty near astin' the old maid if she had to
have somebody wash her face for her too. But they didn't seem to think
it was anything outa the way at all--they went right to talkin' and
visitin' like they was fixed for company. I kinda s'picion Marion
bleaches her hair. Seems to me like it's a mite too yeller to be
growed that way. Drugstore blonde, I'd call her. You take notice first
time you see her. I'll bet you'll say--"
"Aw, can that chatter, you poor fish!" Jack exploded unexpectedly, and
smote Hank on his lantern jaw with the flat of his palm. "You hick
from hick-town! You brainless ape! You ain't a man--you're a missing
link! Give you a four-foot tail, by harry, and you'd go down the
mountain swinging from branch to branch like the monkey that you are!
What are _you_, you poor piece of cheese, to talk about a woman?"
His hand to his jaw, Hank got up from where he had sprawled on his
back. He was not a fighting man, preferring to satisfy his grudges by
slurring people behind their backs. But Jack smacked him again and
thought of a few other things to which he might liken Hank, and after
that Hank fought like a trapped bobcat, with snarls and kicks and
gouging claws. He scratched Jack's neck with his grimy fingernails,
and he tried to set his unwashed teeth into Jack's left ear while the
two of them rolled over and over on the slippery mat of squaw-carpet.
And for that he was pummeled unmercifully before Jack tore himself
loose and got up.
"Now, you beat it!" Jack finished, panting. "And after this you keep
your tongue off the subject of women. Don't dare to mention even a
squaw to me, or I'll pitch you clean off the peak!"
Hank mumbled an insult, and Jack went after him again. All the misery,
all the pent-up bitterness of the past three months rose within him in
a sudden storm that clouded his reason. He fought Hank like a crazy
man--not so much because Hank was Hank and had spoken slightingly of
that slim girl, but because Hank was something concrete, something
which Jack could beat with his fists and that could give back blow for
blow. Too long had he waged an unequal conflict with his own thoughts,
his aloneness; with regrets and soul hunger and idleness. When he had
spent his strength and most of his rage together, he let Hank go and
felt tenderly his own bruised knuckles.
He never knew how close he was to death in the next five minutes,
while Hank was saddling up to go. For Hank's fingers went several
times to his rifle and hovered there, itching to do murder, while
Hank's mind revolved the consequences. Murder would be
madness--suicide, practically. The boy would be missed when he did not
answer the telephone. Some one would be sent up from the Forest
Service and the murder would be discovered, unless--unless Hank could
hide the body. There was the lake--but the lake was so clear! Besides,
there was always the chance at this season of the year that some
tourist would be within sight. Some tourist might even hear the shot.
It would be risky--too risky. Like Jack's, his rage cooled while he
busied himself mechanically with saddling his horse. After all, Hank
was not criminally inclined, except as anger drove him. He set the
pack-saddle and empty sacks on the pack horse, led his horse a few
feet farther away and mounted, scowling.
In the saddle he turned and looked for the first time full at Jack.
"You think you're darn smart!" he snarled wryly because of a cut lip
that had swollen all on one side. "You may think you're smart, but
they's another day comin'. You wait--that's all I got to say!"
It did not make him feel any better when Jack laughed suddenly and
loud. "_R-r-r-evenge_! By my heart's blood, I shall have r-r-evenge!"
he intoned mockingly. "Gwan outa my sight, Hank. You ain't making any
hit with me at all. _Scat!"_
"All right fer you!" Hank grumbled, in the futile repartee of the
stupid. "You think you're smart, but I don't. You wait!" Then he rode
away down the trail, glowering at the world through puffy lids and
repeating to himself many crushing things he wished he had thought to
say to Jack.
Jack himself had recourse to a small bottle of iodine left there by a
predecessor, painting his scratches liberally, and grinning at himself
in the little mirror because Hank had not once landed a bruising blow
on his face. After that he washed the dishes and went to the spring
for a bucket of fresh water, whistling all the way. It was amazing how
that fight had cleared his mental atmosphere.
After that, he perched up on the little rock pinnacle just behind the
station, and stared down the mountain toward Toll-Gate Flat, where she
lived. He saw Hank ride into the balsam thicket; and he, too, thought
of several things he regretted not having said to Hank. What rotten
luck it was that he should be held up here on that pinnacle while Hank
Brown could ride at his leisure down into that tiny valley! The
government ought to gather up all the Hank Browns in the country and
put them up on such places as these, and let decent fellows do the
riding around.
Down there, beyond the trail, on a slope where the manzanita was not
quite so matted together, he saw something move slowly. Then it
stopped, and he got a gleam of light, the reflection, evidently of
some bright object. He lifted the telescope and focussed it, and his
heart came leaping up into his throat just as the figure came leaping
into close view through the powerful lense.
It was Marion Rose, up by the hydrometer that looked something like a
lone beehive perched on a wild slope by itself. She was sitting on a
rock with her feet crossed, and she was inspecting her chin in the
tiny mirror of her vanity bag. Some blemish--or more likely an insect
bite, from the way her fingertip pressed carefully a certain point of
her chin--seemed to hold all her attention. It was the sun flashing on
the bit of mirror that had made the gleam.
Jack watched her hungrily; her slim shape, leaning negligently
sidewise; her hat pushed back a little; her hair, the color of ripe
corn, fluffed where the wind had blown it; the clear, delicate, creamy
tint of her skin, her mouth curved in soft, red lines that held one's
eyes fascinated when they moved in speech. He watched her, never
thinking of the rudeness of it.
And then he saw her lift her face and look up to the peak, directly at
him, it seemed to him. His face turned hot, and he lowered the glass
guiltily. But of course she could not see him--or if she could, he
looked no more than a speck on the rock. He lifted the telescope
again, and her face jumped into close view. She was still looking up
his way, the little mirror turning idly in her hand. Her face was
thoughtful; almost wistful, he dared to think. Perhaps she was
lonesome, too. She had told him that she had spells of being terribly
lonesome.
Jack had an inspiration. He climbed hurriedly down off the rock, got
his own looking glass and climbed back again. He turned the glass so
that the sun shown on it aslant and threw a glare toward her. Then he
lifted the telescope quickly to see if she noticed the sparkle. After
a moment he decided that she had seen it but did not quite know what
had caused it. At any rate, she was still looking that way, which was
something.
Like the boy he was, he lay down on his stomach, balanced the
telescope across a splintered notch in the rock so that he could
steady it with one hand, and with the other he tilted the mirror;
inadvertently tilted the telescope also, and came near smashing the
mirror before he got the two balanced again. Well, she was still
looking, at any rate. And now she was frowning a little, as though
she was puzzled.
He signalled again, and this time he managed to keep her in the field
of the telescope. He saw her smile suddenly and glance down at her
vanity mirror. Still smiling, she lifted it and turned it to the sun,
looking from it to the peak.
"She's on! I'll be John Browned if she ain't on to it already!" Jack
chortled to the birds, and sent her a signal. She answered that with a
flash. He managed two flashes without losing her in the telescope, and
she immediately sent two flashes in reply. Three he gave, and she
answered with three. He could see her laughing like a child with a new
game. He could see the impish light in her eyes when she glanced up,
like a woman engrossed in her favorite pastime of be-deviling some
man. He laughed back at her, as though she was as near to him as she
looked to be. He quite forgot that she was not, and spoke to her
aloud.
"Some little heliographing--what? Come on up, and we'll make up a
code, so we can talk! Aw, come on--it ain't so far! Husky girl like
you can climb it in no time at all. Aw, come on!"
A couple of tourists, panting up to the peak with unsightly amber
goggles and a kodak and a dog, found him addressing empty air and
looked at him queerly. Jack could have murdered them both when he
turned his head and saw them gaping open-mouthed at his performance.
But he did not. He climbed shame-facedly down and answered the usual
questions with his usual patient courtesy, and hoped fervently that
they would either die at once of heart failure or go back to the lake
and leave him alone. Instead, they took pictures of the station and
the rocks and of him--though Jack was keen-witted enough to keep in
the shade and turn his face away from the camera.
They were such bores of tourists! The woman was sunburned and frowsy,
and her khaki outing suit was tight where it should be loose, and hung
in unsightly wrinkles where it should fit snugly. Her high-laced
mountain boots were heavy and shapeless, and she climbed here and
there, and stood dumpily and stared down at Jack's beloved woods
through her amber glasses until she nearly drove him frantic. She kept
saying: "Oh, papa, don't you wish you could get a snap of that?" and
"Oh, papa, come and see if you can't snap this!"
Papa was not much better. Papa's khaki suit had come off a pile on the
counter of some department store--the wrong pile. Papa kept taking off
his hat and wiping his bald spot, and hitching his camera case into a
different position, so that it made a new set of wrinkles in the
middle of his back. The coat belt strained against its buttons over
papa's prosperous paunch, and he wheezed when he talked.
And down there on the manzanita slope, little flashes of light kept
calling, calling, and Jack dared not answer. One, two--one, two,
three--could anything in the world be more maddening?
Then all at once a puff of smoke came ballooning up through the trees,
down beyond the girl and well to the right of the balsam thicket. Jack
whirled and dove into the station, his angry eyes flashing at the
tourists.
"There's a forest fire started, down the mountain," he told them
harshly. "You better beat it for Keddie while you can get there!" He
slammed the door in their startled faces and laid the pointer on its
pivot and swung it toward the smoke.
The smoke was curling up already in an ugly yellowish brown cloud,
spreading in long leaps before the wind. Jack's hand shook when he
reached for the telephone to report the fire. The chart and his own
first-hand knowledge of the mountainside told him that the fire was
sweeping down north of Toll-Gate Creek toward the heavily timbered
ridge beyond.
Heedless of the presence or absence of the tourists, he snatched the
telescope and climbed the rock where he could view the slope where the
girl had been. The smoke was rolling now over the manzanita slope,
and he could not pierce its murkiness. He knew that the slope was not
yet afire, but the wind was bearing the flames that way, and the
manzanita would burn with a zipping rush once it started. He knew. He
had stood up there and watched the flames sweep over patches of the
shrub.
He rushed back into the station, seized the telephone and called again
the main office.
"For the Lord sake, hustle up here and do something!" he shouted
aggressively. "The whole blamed mountain's afire!" That, of course,
was exaggeration, but Jack was scared.
Out again on the rock, he swept the slope beneath him with his
telescope. He could not see anything of the girl, and the swirling
smoke filled him with a horror too great for any clear thought. He
climbed down and began running down the pack trail like one gone mad,
never stopping to wonder what he could do to save her; never thinking
that he would simply be sharing her fate, if what he feared was
true--if the flames swept over that slope.
He stumbled over a root and fell headlong, picked himself up and went
on again, taking great leaps, like a scared deer. She was down there.
And when the fire struck that manzanita it would just go _swoosh_ in
every direction at once.... And so he, brave, impulsive young fool
that he was, rushed down into it as though he were indeed a god and
could hold back the flames until she was safe away from the place.
CHAPTER TEN
WHEN FORESTS ARE ABLAZE
It seemed to Jack that he had been running for an hour, though it
could not have been more than a few minutes at most. Where the trail
swung out and around a steep, rocky place, he left it and plunged
heedlessly straight down the hill. The hot breath of the fire swept up
in gusts, bearing charred flakes that had been leaves. The smoke
billowed up to him, then drove back in the tricky air-currents that
played impishly around the fire. When he could look down to the knoll
where the hydrometer stood, he saw that it was not yet afire, but that
the flames were working that way faster even than he had feared.
Between gasps he shouted her name as Hank Brown had repeated it to
him. He stopped on a ledge and stared wildly, in a sudden panic, lest
he should somehow miss her. He called again, even while reason told
him that his voice could not carry any distance, with all that crackle
and roar. He forced himself to stand there for a minute to get his
breath and to see just how far the fire had already swept, and how
fast it was spreading.
Even while he stood there, a flaming pine branch came whirling up and
fell avidly upon a buck bush beside him. The bush crackled and
shriveled, a thin spiral of smoke mounting upward into the cloud that
rolled overhead. Jack stood dazed, watching the yellow tongues go
licking up the smaller branches. While he stood looking, the ravaging
flames had devoured leaves and twigs and a dead branch or two, and
left the bush a charred, smoking, dead thing that waved its blackened
stubs of branches impotently in the wind. Alone it had stood, alone it
had died the death of fire.
"Marion Rose!" he shouted abruptly, and began running again. "Marion
Rose!" But the hot wind whipped the words from his lips, and the deep,
sullen roar of the fire drowned his voice. Still calling, he reached
the road that led to Crystal Lake. The wind was hotter, the roar was
deeper and louder and seemed to fill all the world. Hot, black ash
flakes settled thick around him.
Then, all at once, he saw her standing in the middle of the road, a
little farther up the hill. She was staring fascinated at the fire,
her eyes wide like a child's, her face with the rapt look he had seen
when she stood looking down from the peak into the heart of the
forest. And then, when he saw her, Jack could run no more. His knees
bent under him, as though the bone had turned suddenly to soft
gristle, and he tottered weakly when he tried to hurry to her.
"Isn't it wonderful?" she called out when she saw him. Her words came
faintly to him in all that rush and crackle of flame and wind
together. "I never saw anything like it before--did you? It sprung up
all at once, and the first I knew it was sweeping along."
"Don't stand here!" Jack panted hoarsely. "Good Lord, girl! You--"
"Why, you've been running!" she cried, in a surprised tone. "Were you
down there in it? I thought you had to stay up on top." She had to
raise her voice to make him hear her.
Her absolute ignorance of the danger exasperated him. He took her by
the arm and swung her up the trail. "We've got to beat it!" he yelled
in her ear. "Can't you see it's coming this way?"
"It can't come fast enough to catch us," she answered impatiently.
"It's away back there down the hill yet. Wait! I want to watch it for
a minute."
A bushy cedar tree ten feet away to their left suddenly burst into
flame and burned viciously, each branch a sheet of fire.
"Well, what do you know about _that_?" cried Marion Rose. "It jumped
from away down there!"
"Come on!" Pulling her by the arm, Jack began running again up the
hill, leaving the road where it swung to the east and taking a short
cut through the open space in the brush. "Run!" he urged, still
pulling at her arm. "We've--got to--swing around it--"
She ran with him, a little of their peril forcing itself upon her
consciousness and making her glance often over her shoulder. And Jack
kept pulling at her arm, helping her to keep her feet when she
stumbled, which she did often, because she would not look where she
was going.
"Don't look--run!" he urged, when another brand fell in a fir near
them and set the whole tree ablaze. The air around them was hot, like
the breath of a furnace.
She did not answer him, but she let him lead her whither he would. And
they came breathless to the rocky outcropping through which the pack
trail wormed its way farther down the hill. There he let her stop, for
he knew that they had passed around the upper edge of the fire, and
were safe unless the wind changed. He helped her upon a high,
flat-topped boulder that overlooked the balsam thicket and manzanita
slope, and together they faced the debauchery of the flames.
Even in the few minutes since Jack had stopped on that rocky knoll the
fire had swept far. It had crossed the Crystal Lake road and was now
eating its way steadily up the timbered hillside beyond. The manzanita
slope where the girl had sat and signalled with her mirror was all
charred and stripped bare of live growth, and the flames were licking
up the edges beyond.
Jack touched her arm and pointed to the place. "You said it couldn't
travel very fast," he reminded her. "Look down there where you sat
fooling with the little mirror."
Marion looked and turned white. "Oh!" she cried. "It wasn't anywhere
near when I started up the road. Oh, do you suppose it has burned down
as far as the cabin? Because there's Kate--can't we go and see?"
"We can't, and when I left the lookout the fire was away up this side
of Toll-Gate, and not spreading down that way. Wind's strong. Come
on--I expect I better beat it back up there. They might phone."
"But I must hunt Kate up! Why, she was all alone there, taking a nap
in the hammock! If it should--"
"It won't," Jack reiterated positively. "I ought to know, oughtn't I?
It's my business to watch fires and see how they're acting, isn't it?"
He saw her still determined, and tried another argument. "Listen here.
It isn't far up to the station. We'll go up there, and I'll phone down
to the office to have the firemen stop and see if she's all right.
They'll have to come right by there, to get at the fire. And you can't
cross that burning strip now--not on a bet, you couldn't. And if you
could," he added determinedly, "I wouldn't let you try it. Come
on--we'll go up and do that little thing, telephone to the office and
have them look after Kate."
Marion, to his great relief, yielded to the point of facing up hill
with him and taking a step or two. "But you don't know Kate," she
demurred, turning her face again toward the welter of burning timber.
"She'll be worried to death about me, and it would be just like her to
start right out to hunt me up. I've simply got to get back and let her
know I'm all right."
Jack threw back his head and laughed aloud--think how long it had been
since he really had laughed! "What's the matter with phoning that
you're all right? I guess the wire will stand that extra sentence,
maybe--and you can phone in yourself, if you want to convince them
ab-so-lutely. What?"
"Well, who'd ever have thought that I might phone a message to Kate!
Down there in that hole of a place where we live, one can scarcely
believe that there are telephones in the world. Let's hurry, then.
Kate will be perfectly wild till she hears that I am safe. And then--"
she quirked her lips in a little smile, "she'll be wilder still
because I'm not there where she supposed I'd be when she waked up."
Jack replied with something slangy and youthful and altogether like
the old Jack Corey, and led her up the steep trail to the peak. They
took their time, now that they were beyond the fire zone. They turned
often to watch the flames while they got their breath; and every time
Marion stopped, she observed tritely that it was a shame such
beautiful timber must burn, and invariably added, "But isn't it
beautiful?" And to both observations Jack would agree without any
scorn of the triteness. Whereas he would have been furious had a mere
tourist exclaimed about the beauty of a forest fire, which to him had
always seemed a terrible thing.
They found the telephone ringing like mad, and Jack turned red around
the ears and stuttered a good deal before he was through answering the
questions of the supervisor, and explaining why he had not answered
the phone in the last hour.
"Here, let me talk," commanded Marion suddenly, and took the receiver
out of Jack's hand. "I'll tell you where he was," she called crisply
to the accusing voice at the other end. "I was down the hill, right in
the track of the fire, and I couldn't get back to the cabin at all,
and--ah--this gentleman saw me through the telescope and ran down
there and got me out of it. And right where I had been sitting on a
rock, the fire has burned just everything! And I wish you would get
word somehow to Miss Kate Humphrey, at Toll-Gate cabin, that Marion
Rose is all right and will be home just as soon as she can get down
there without burning her shoes. And--oh, will you please tell her
that I took the bread out of the oven before I left, and that it's
under the box the cream came in? I put it there to keep the bluejays
away from it till she woke up, and she may not know where to look....
Yes, thank you, I think that will be all.... But listen! This man up
here saved my life, though of course it is a pity he was not here to
answer the phone, every minute of the day. What I want to say is that
it was my fault, and I hope you'll please excuse me for having a life
that needed to be saved just when you called! I wouldn't for the
world.... Oh, don't mention it! I just didn't want you to blame him,
is all. Good-by."
She turned to Jack with a little frown. "People seem to think, just
because you work for a living, that your whole mission in life is to
take orders on the jump. It was that way at the Martha Washington, and
every other place I ever worked. That man down there seems to think
that your life begins and ends right here in this little glass box.
What made you apologize for keeping a telephone call waiting while you
went out and saved a perfectly good life? Men are the queerest
things!"
She went out and climbed upon the rock where Jack had lain watching
her, and set herself down as comfortably as possible, and stared at
the fire while Jack located on the chart the present extent of the
blazing area, and sent in his report. When he had finished he did not
go out to her immediately. He stood staring down the hill with his
eyebrows pinched together. Now and then he lifted his hand
unconsciously and pushed his heavy thatch of hair straight back from
his forehead, where it began at once to lie wavy as of old. He was
feeling again the personal sense of tragedy and loss in that fire;
cursing again his helplessness to check it or turn it aside from that
beautiful stretch of timber over toward Genessee.
Now the shadows had crept down the slope again to where the fire glow
beat them back while it crisped the balsam thicket. Behind him the
sun, sinking low over the crest of a far-off ridge, sent flaming
banners across the smoke cloud. The sky above was all curdled with
gold and crimson, while the smoke cloud below was a turgid black shot
through with sparks and tongues of flame.
Where were the fire-fighters, that they did not check the mad race of
flames before they crossed that canyon? It seemed to Jack that never
had a fire burned with so headlong a rush. Then his eyes went to the
blackened manzanita slope where Marion had been idling, and he
shivered at what might have happened down there. To comfort himself
with the sight of her safe and serene, he turned and went out, meaning
to go up where she was.
She was still sitting on the rock, gazing down the mountain, her face
sober. Her hat was off, and the wind was blowing the short strands of
her hair around her face. She was leaning back a little, braced by a
hand upon the rock. She looked a goddess of the mountain tops, Jack
thought. He stood there staring up at her, just as he had stared down
at her when she had stood looking into the lake. Did she feel as he
felt about the woods and mountains? he wondered. She seemed rather
fond of staring and staring and saying nothing--and yet, he
remembered, when she talked she gave no hint at all of any deep sense
of the beauty of her surroundings. When she talked she was just like
other town girls he had known, a bit slangy, more than a bit
self-possessed, and frivolous to the point of being flippant. That
type he knew and could meet fairly on a level. But when she was
looking and saying nothing, she seemed altogether different. Which, he
wondered, was the real Marion Rose?
While he stood gazing, she turned and looked down at him; a little
blankly at first, as though she had just waked from sleep or from
abstraction too deep for instant recovery. Then she smiled and changed
her position, putting up both hands to pat and pull her hair into
neatness; and with the movement she ceased to be a brooding goddess of
the mountain tops, and became again the girl who had perversely taken
the telephone away from him, the girl who had played mock billiards
upon his beloved chart, the girl who said--she said it now, while he
was thinking of her melodious way of saying it.
"Well, what do you know about that?" she inquired, making a gesture
with one arm toward the fire while with the other she fumbled in her
absurd little vanity bag. "It just burns as if it had a grudge against
the country, doesn't it? But isn't it perfectly gorgeous, with all
that sunset and everything! It looks like a Bliffen ten-reel picture.
He ought to see it--he could get some great pointers for his next big
picture. Wouldn't that be just dandy on the screen?" She had found her
powder puff and her tiny mirror, and she was dabbing at her nose and
her cheeks, which no more needed powder than did the little birds that
chirped around her. Between dabs, she was looking down the mountain,
with an occasional wave of her puff toward some particularly
"striking effect" of fire and sunset and rolling smoke and tall pines
seen dimly in the background.
Jack wanted to climb up there and shake her out of her frivolity.
Which was strange when you consider that all his life, until three
months ago, he had lived in the midst of just such unthinking
flippancy, had been a part of it and had considered--as much as he
ever considered anything--that it was the only life worth living.
He went around the little rock pinnacle and stood looking somberly
down at the devastation that was being wrought, with no greater
beginning, probably, than a dropped match or cigarette stub. He was
thinking hazily that so his old life had been swept away in the
devastating effect of a passing whim, a foolish bit of play. The girl
irritated him with her chatter--yet three months ago he himself would
have considered it brilliant conversation, and would have exerted
himself to keep pace with her.
"Listen!" she cried suddenly, and Jack turned his head quickly before
he remembered that the word had come to mean nothing more than a
superfluous ejaculation hung, like a bangle on a bracelet, to the
sentences of modern youth. "Listen, it's going to be dark before that
fire burns itself out of the way. How am I going to get home? Which
way would be best to go around it, do you think?"
"No way at all," Jack replied shortly. "You can't go home."
"Why, forevermore! I'll have to go somewhere else, then--to some farm
house where I can phone. Kate would be simply wild if--"
"Forget the farm house stuff. There aren't any such trimmings to these
mountains. The next farm house is down around Keddie, somewhere.
Through the woods, and mountain all the way." He said it rather
crossly, for his nerves were what he called edgy, and the girl still
irritated him.
"Well, what do you know about that?"
He had known she would say that. Cross between a peacock and a parrot,
she must be, he thought vindictively. It was maddening that she would
not--could not, perhaps?--live up to that goddess-on-the-mountain-top
look she had sometimes.
"I don't know anything about it except that it's hard luck for us
both."
"Well, what--?" She paused in the act of putting away her
first-aid-to-the-complexion implements, and looked at him with her
wide, purple eyes. "Why, you cross, mean, little stingy boy, you! You
can have your old peak then. I'll go down and jump in the lake." She
began to climb down from the little pinnacle quite as if she meant to
do exactly as she said.
"Aw, come out of it!" Jack tried not to turn and look at her
anxiously, but he was a human being.
"I'm not in it--yet," Marion retorted with dark meaning, and jumped to
the ground.
"Hey! you wanta break a leg?" He swung toward her.
"Just to spite you, I wouldn't mind. Only you'd throw me down there
amongst all those rocks and trees and make it my neck. Oh, would you
look at that!"
"That" happened to be Mount Lassen, belching forth a stupendous column
of ashes and smoke. Up, up, up it went, as though it meant to go on
and on into infinity. Jack had seen it too often to be affected as he
had been that first night. He looked at Marion instead. She was
standing with her hands clinched by her side, and her breath sucking
in. As the black column mounted higher and higher, she lifted herself
to her toes, posing there absolutely unconscious of herself. Jack saw
her face grow pale; saw her eyes darken and glow with inner
excitement. She was once more the goddess on the mountain top, gazing
down at one of the wonders she had wrought. It was as though she
pulled that black column up and up and up with the tensity of her
desire.
The column mushroomed suddenly, rolling out in great, puffy billows
before it dipped and went streaming away on the wind. The mountain
beneath it spewed sluggish masses of vapor and ashes up into the black
moil above, until the whole mountain was obscured and only an angry,
rolling cloud churning lumpishly there, told what was hidden beneath.
Marion relaxed, took a long, deep breath and settled again to her trim
heels. She was not filled with terror as Jack had been; though that
may have been because she was not cast up here like a piece of
driftwood out of her world, nor was she alone. But Jack paid her the
tribute of bowing mentally before her splendid courage. She gazed a
while longer, awed ecstasy in her face. Then slowly she swung and
stared at that other churning cloud behind her--the crimsoned-tinted
cloud of destruction. She flung out both arms impulsively.
"Oh, you world!" she cried adoringly, unafraid yet worshipping. "I'd
like to be the wind, so I could touch you and kiss you and beat you,
and make you love me the way I love you! I'd rather be a tree and grow
up here and swing my branches in the wind and then burn, than be a
little petty, piffling human being--I would! I'm not afraid of you.
You couldn't make me afraid of you. You can storm and rage around all
you like. I only love you for it--you beautiful thing!"
It made Jack feel as though he had blundered upon a person kneeling in
prayer; she was, after all, the goddess she looked, he thought
whimsically. At least she had all the makings of a goddess of the
mountain top. He felt suddenly inferior and gross, and he turned to
leave her alone with her beautiful, terrible world. But manlike he did
a frightfully human and earthly thing; he knocked his foot against an
empty coal-oil can, and stood betrayed in his purpose of flight.
She turned her head and looked at him like one just waking from a
too-vivid dream. She frowned, and then she smiled with a little
ironical twist to her soft curving lips.
"You heard what I said about piffling human beings?" she asked him
sweetly. "That is your catalogue number. Why for goodness' sake! With
your hair done in that marcelle pompadour, and that grin, you look
exactly like Jack Corey, that Los Angeles boy that all the girls were
simply crazy about, till he turned out to be such a perfectly terrible
villain!"
CHAPTER ELEVEN
SYMPATHY AND ADVICE
Every bit of color was swept from Jack's face, save the black of his
lashes and eyebrows and the brown of his eyes that looked at her in
startled self-betrayal. He saw the consternation flash into her face
when she first understood how truly her random shot had hit the mark,
and he dropped upon the bench by the doorway and buried his face in
his shaking hands. But youth does not suffer without making some
struggle against the pain. Suddenly he lifted his head and looked at
her with passionate resentment.
"Well, why don't you run and tell?" he cried harshly. "There's the
telephone in there. Why don't you call up the office and have them
send the sheriff hot-footing it up here? If Jack Corey's such a
villain, why don't you do something about it? For the Lord's sake
don't stand there looking at me as if I'm going to swallow you whole!
Get somebody on the phone, and then beat it before I cut loose and be
the perfectly awful villain you think I am!"
Marion took a startled step away from him, turned and came
hesitatingly toward him. And as she advanced she smiled a little
ostentatiously whimsical smile and touched the butt of her
six-shooter.
"I'm heeled, so I should be agitated," she said flippantly. "I always
was crazy to get the inside dope on that affair. Tell me. Were you
boys honest-to-goodness bandits, or what?"
"What, mostly." Jack gave her a sullen, upward glance from under his
eyebrows. "Go ahead and play at cat-and-mouse, if you want to.
Nobody'll stop you, I guess. Have all the fun you want--you're getting
it cheap enough; cheaper by a darned sight than you'll get the inside
dope you're crazy for."
"_What_ do you _know_ about it!--me running on to Jack Corey, away up
here on the top of the world!" But it was hard to be flippant while
she looked down into that stricken young face of his, and saw the
white line around his lips that ought to be smiling at life; saw, too,
the trembling of his bruised hands, that he tried so hard to hold
steady. She came still closer; so close that she could have touched
his arm.
"It was the papers called you such awful things. I didn't," she said,
wistfully defensive. "I couldn't--not after seeing you on the beach
that day, playing around like a great big kid, and not making eyes at
the girls when they made eyes at you. You--you didn't act like a
villain, when I saw you. You acted like a big boy that likes to have
fun--oh, just oodles of fun, but hasn't got a mean hair in his head. I
know; I watched you and the fellows you were with. I was up on the
pier looking down at you whooping around in the surf. And next day,
when the girls at the Martha Washington read about it in the papers, I
just couldn't believe it was true, what they said about you boys being
organized into bandits and all that, and leading a double life and
everything.
"But it did look bad when you beat it--about two jumps ahead of the
police, at that. You see Fred was along with the man that was shot,
and being in the garage and around automobiles all the time, he
thought to read the number of your car, and remembered it; near enough
anyway, so that he knew for sure it was the Singleton Corey car by the
make and general appearance of it, and identified it positively when
he saw it in your garage. And that did make it look bad!"
"What did mother do when they--?" Jack did not look up while he
stammered the question that had been three months feeding his
imagination with horrors.
"Why, she didn't do anything. She went right away, that very morning,
to a sanitarium and would not see anybody but her own private nurse
and her own private doctor. They gave out bulletins about how she
slept and what she had for breakfast, and all that. But, believe me,
brother, they didn't get any dope from her! She just simply would not
be interviewed!"
Jack let out a long breath and sat up. At the corners of his mouth
there lurked the temptation to smile. "That's mother--true to form,"
he muttered admiringly.
"Of course, they scouted around and got most of the boys that were
with you, but they couldn't get right down to brass tacks and prove
anything except that they were with you at the beach. They're still
holding them on bail or something, I believe. You know how those
things kind of drop out of the news. There was a big police scandal
came along and crowded all you little bandits off the front page. But
I know the trial hasn't taken place yet, because Fred would have to be
a witness, so he'd know, of course. And, besides, the man hasn't died
or got well or anything, yet, and they're waiting to see what he's
going to do."
"Who's Fred?" Jack stood up and leaned toward her, feeling all at once
that he must know, and know at once, who Fred might be.
"Why, he's Kate's brother. He's down here at Toll-Gate cabin, working
out the assessments--"
Jack sat down again and caressed his bruised knuckles absently.
"Well, then, I guess this is the finish," he said dully, after a
minute.
"Why? He'll never climb up here--and if he did he wouldn't know you.
He couldn't recognize your face by the number of your car, you know!"
Then she added, with beautiful directness, "It wouldn't be so bad, if
you hadn't been the ringleader and put the other boys up to robbing
cars. But I suppose--"
Jack got up again, but this time he towered belligerently above her.
"Who says I was the ringleader? If it was Fred I'll go down there and
push his face into the back of his neck for him! Who--"
"Oh, just those nice friends of yours. They wouldn't own up to
anything except being with you, but told everybody that it was you
that did it. But honestly I didn't believe that. Hardly any of us
girls at the Martha did. But Fred--"
Just then the telephone rang again, and Jack had to go in and report
the present extent of the fire, and tell just where and just how fast
it was spreading, and what was the direction of the wind. The
interruption steadied him, gave him time to think.
Since the girl knew him, and knew the circumstances of his flight, and
since the boys had turned on him, Jack argued with himself that he
might just as well tell her what little there was to tell. There was
nothing to be gained by trying to keep the thing a secret from her.
Besides, he craved sympathy, though he did not admit it. He craved the
privilege of talking about that night to some one who would
understand, and who could be trusted. Marion Rose, he felt, was the
only person in the world he could tell. He could talk to her--Lord,
what a relief that would be! He could tell her all about it, and she
would understand. Her sympathy at that moment seemed the most precious
thing in the world.
So he went outside and sat down again on the bench, and told her the
exact truth about that night; how it had started in drunken foolery,
and all the rest of it. He even explained the exact route he had taken
home so as to come into town apparently from Pasadena.
"Well, _what_ do you know about _that_!" Marion murmured several times
during the recital. And Jack found the phrase soothing whenever she
uttered it, and plunged straightway into further revelations of his
ebullient past.
"I suppose," he ventured, when he could think of nothing more to tell
and so came back to the starting point, "I ought to beat it outa here
while the beating's good. I can't go back--on account of mother. I
could hotfoot it up to Canada, maybe...."
"Don't you do it!" Marion wound the string of her vanity bag so
tightly round and round her index finger that her pink, polished nail
turned purple. She next unwound the string and rubbed the nail
solicitously. "Just because we're down there at Toll-Gate doesn't mean
you aren't safe up here. Why, you're safer, really. Because if any one
got track of you, we'd hear of it right away--Kate and I walk to town
once in a while, and there's hardly a day passes that we don't see
somebody to talk to. Everybody talks when they meet you, in this
country, whether they know you or not. And I could come up right away
and tell you. Having a bandit treed up here on top would make such a
hit that they'd all be talking about it. It certainly would be keen to
listen to them and know more about it than any of them."
"Oh, would it! I'm glad it strikes you that way--it don't me." What a
fool a fellow was when he went spilling his troubles into a girl's
ears! He got up and walked glumly down to the niche in the rocks where
he hid from tourists, and stood there with his hands in his pockets,
glowering down at the fierce, ember-threaded waves of flame that
surged through the forest. Dusk only made the fire more terrible to
him. Had this new trouble not launched itself at him, he would be
filled with a sick horror of the destruction, but as it was he only
stared at it dully, not caring much about it one way or the other.
Well, he asked himself, what kind of a fool would he make of himself
next? Unloading his secret and his heartache to a girl that only
thought it would be "keen" to have a bandit treed up here at the
lookout station! Why couldn't he have kept his troubles to himself?
He'd be hollering it into the phone, next thing he knew. They'd care,
down there in the office, as much as she did, anyway. And the secret
would probably be safer with them than it would be with her.
He had a mental picture of her hurrying to tell Fred: "What do you
know about it? Jack Corey, the bandit, is treed up at the lookout
station! He told me all the inside dope--" The thought of her animated
chatter to Fred on the subject of his one real tragedy, made him
clench his hands.
The very presence of her brought it back too vividly, though that had
not struck him at first, when his hunger for human sympathy had been
his keenest emotion. What a fool he had been, to think that she would
care! What a fool he had been to think that these mountains would
shelter him; to think that he could forget, and be forgotten. And Hen
had told them that Jack Corey did it! That was about what Hen would
do--sneak out of it. And the man wasn't dead yet; not recovered
either, for that matter. There was still the chance that he might
die.
There was his mother hiding herself away from her world in a
sanitarium. It was like her to do that--but it was hard to know he had
broken up all the pleasant, well-ordered little grooves of her life;
hard to know how her pride must suffer because he was her son. She
would feel now, more than ever, that Jack was just like his father.
Being like his father meant reproach because he was not like her, and
that was always galling to Jack. And how she must hate the thought of
him now.
He wished savagely that Marion Rose could go home. He wanted to be
alone with his loneliness. It seemed to him now that being alone meant
merely peace and contentment. It was people, he told himself finally,
who had brought all this trouble and bitterness into his life.
He wished she would go and leave him alone, but that was manifestly
impossible. Angry and hurt though he was, he could not contemplate the
thought of letting her go down there into that blackened waste with
the thick sprinkling of bonfires where stumps were all ablaze, fallen
tangles of brush were smoldering, and dead trees flared like giant
torches or sent down great blazing branches. She might get through
without disaster, but it would be by a miracle of good luck. Even a
man would hesitate to attempt the feat of working his way across the
burning strip.
There was no other place where she could go. She could not go alone,
in the dark, down the mountain to any of the lower ranches. She would
get lost. A man would not try that either, unless forced to it. A man
would rather spend the night under a tree than fight through miles of
underbrush in the night. And she could not take the old Taylorville
road down to Indian Valley, either. It was too far and too dark, and a
slight change of the wind would send the fire sweeping in that
direction. She might get trapped. And none of these impossibilities
took into account the prowling wild animals that are at the best
untrustworthy in the dark.
She would have to stay. And he would have to stay, and there did not
seem to Jack to be any use in making a disagreeable matter still more
disagreeable by sulking. He discovered that he was hungry. He
supposed, now he came to think of it, that Marion Rose would be
hungry, too. The protective instinct stirred once more within him and
pushed back his anger. So he turned and went back to the little
station.
Marion had lighted the little lamp, and she was cooking supper over
the oil stove. She had found where he stored his supplies in a
tightly built box under a small ledge, and she had helped herself. She
had two plates and two cups set out upon his makeshift table, and
while he stopped in the door she turned from the stove and began
cutting slices of bread off one of the loaves which Hank had brought
that day. With her head bent toward the lamp, her hair shown like pale
gold. Her face looked very serious--a bit sad, too, Jack thought;
though he could not see where she had any reason to be sad; she was
not hiding away from the law, or anything like that.
When she became conscious of his presence she glanced up at him with
swift inquiry. "How's the fire?" she wanted to know, quite as though
that was the only subject that interested them both.
"She's all there," he returned briefly, coming in.
"Everything's ready," she announced cheerfully. "You must be half
starved. Do you see what time it is? nearly eight o'clock already. And
I never dreamed it, until a bird or something flew right past my face
and brought me to myself. I was watching Mount Lassen. Isn't it
_keen_, to have a volcano spouting off right in your front view? And a
fire on the other side, so if you get tired looking at one, you can
turn your head and look at the other one. And for a change, you can
watch the lake, or just gaze at the scenery; and say!--does the star
spangled banner still wave?"
"She still waves," Jack assented somberly, picking up the wash basin.
Why couldn't he enter the girl's foolery? He used to be full of it
himself, and he used to consider that the natural form of
companionship. He must be getting queer like all other hermits he had
ever heard of. It occurred to him that possibly Marion Rose was not
really feather-brained, but that the trouble was in himself, because
he was getting a chronic grouch.
He was thinking while he ate. He had plenty of encouragement for
thinking, because Marion herself seemed to be absorbed in her own
thoughts. When she was filling his coffee cup the second time, she
spoke quite abruptly.
"It would be terribly foolish for you to leave here, Jack Corey--or
whatever you would rather be called. I don't believe any one has the
faintest notion that you came up here into this country. If they had,
they would have come after you before this. But they're still on the
watch for you in other places, and I suppose every police station in
the country has your description tacked on the wall or some place.
"I believe you'd better stay right where you are, and wait till
something turns up to clear you. Maybe that man will get well, and
then it won't be so serious; though, of course, being right through
his lungs, the doctors claim it's pretty bad. I'll know if he dies or
not, because he's a friend of Fred's, and Fred would hear right away.
And we can make up a set of signals, and flash them with glasses, like
we were doing just for fun this afternoon. Then I won't have to climb
clear up here if something happens that you ought to know about--don't
you see? I can walk out in sight of here and signal with my vanity
mirror. It will be fun.
"And when you're through here, if I were you I'd find some nice place
here in the hills to camp. It isn't half as bad to stay right in the
mountains, as it would be to stay in town and imagine that every
strange man you see has come after you. Sometimes I wish I could get
right out where there's not a soul, and just stay there. Being in the
woods with people around is not like being in the woods with just the
woods. I've found that out. People kind of keep your mind tied down to
little things that part of you hates, don't you know? Like when I'm
with Kate, I think about facial massage and manicuring, and shows that
I'd like to see and can't, and places where I'd like to go and eat and
watch the people and dance and listen to the music, and can't; and
going to the beaches when I can't, and taking automobile trips when I
can't, and boys--and all that sort of thing. But when I'm all by
myself in the woods, I never think of those things."
"I saw you down there by the hydrometer, all by yourself. And you were
using your powder puff to beat the band." A twinkle lived for a second
or two in the somber brown of Jack's eyes.
"You did? Well, that was second nature. I wasn't thinking about it,
anyway."
"What were you thinking about when you kept staring up here? Not the
beauties of nature, I bet." A perverse spirit made Jack try to push
her back into the frivolous talk he had so lately and so bitterly
deplored.
"Well, I was wondering if you had gumption enough to appreciate being
up where you could watch the mountains all the while, and see them by
day and by night and get really acquainted with them, so that they
would tell you things they remember about the world a thousand years
ago. I wondered if you had it in you to appreciate them, and know
every little whim of a shadow and every little laugh of the sun--or
whether you just stayed up here because they pay you money for
staying. I've been so jealous of you, up here in your little glass
house! I've lain awake the last three nights, peeking through the
tree-tops at the little speck of sky I could see with stars in it, and
thinking how you had them spread out all around you--and you asleep,
maybe, and never looking!
"I'm awful sorry you're in trouble, and about your mother and all. But
I think you're the luckiest boy I know, because you just happened to
get to this place. Sometimes when I look at you I just want to take
you by the shoulder and _shake_ you!--because you don't half know how
lucky you are. Why, all that makes the world such a rotten place to
live in is because the people are starved all the while for beauty.
Not beauty you can buy, but beauty like this around us, that you can
feast on--"
"And I get pretty well fed up on it, too, sometimes," Jack put in,
still perverse.
"And for that I pity you. I was going to wash the dishes, but you can
do it yourself. I'm going out where I can forget there are any people
in the world. I'll never have another night like this--it would be too
much luck for one person."
She set down her cup, which she had been tilting back and forth in her
fingers while she spoke. She got up, pulled Jack's heavy sweater off a
nail in the corner, and went out without another word to him or a look
toward him. She seemed to be absolutely sincere in her calm disposal
of him as something superfluous and annoying. She seemed also to be
just as sincere in her desire for a close companionship with the
solitude that surrounded them.
Jack looked after her, puzzled. But he had discovered too many
contradictory moods and emotions in his own nature to puzzle long over
Marion's sudden changes. Three months ago he would have called her
crazy, or accused her of posing. Now, however, he understood well
enough the spell of that tremendous view. He had felt it too often and
too deeply to grudge her one long feast for her imagination. So he
took her at her word and let her go.
He tidied the small room and sent in another report of the headlong
rush of the fire and the direction of the wind that fanned it. He
learned that all Genessee was out, fighting to keep the flames from
sweeping down across the valley. Three hundred men were fighting it,
the supervisor told him. They would check it on the downhill slope,
where it would burn more slowly; and if the wind did not change in the
night it would probably be brought under control by morning. After
that the supervisor very discreetly inquired after the welfare of the
young lady who had telephoned. Had she found any means of getting back
to her camp, or of sending any word?
Jack replied she had not, and that there was no likelihood of her
getting away before daylight. There were too many burning trees and
stumps and brush piles on the ground in the burned strip, he
explained. It would bother a man to get down there now. But he offered
to try it, if he might be excused from the station for a few hours. He
said he would be willing to go down and tell them she was all right,
or, a little later, he might even take a chance of getting her across.
But it would take some time, he was afraid.
Ross seemed to consider the matter for a minute. Then, "N--o, as long
as she's up there, she'd better stay. We can't spare you to go. You
might call her to the phone--"
"I can't. She's off somewhere on the peak, taking in the view," Jack
replied. "She grabbed my sweater and beat it, an hour or so ago, and I
don't know where she went.... No, I don't think she tried that. She
knows she couldn't get there. She said she wanted to see all she could
of it while she had the chance.... What?... Oh, sure, she's got sense
enough to take care of herself, far as that goes. Seems to be one of
the independent kind.... All right. I'll call up if she comes back,
and she can talk to you herself."
But he did not call up the supervisor, for Marion did not come back.
At daybreak, when Jack could no longer fight down his uneasiness, and
went to look for her, he found her crouched between two boulders that
offered some shelter from the wind without obstructing the view. She
was huddled in his sweater, shivering a little with the dawn chill but
scarcely conscious of the fact that she was cold. Her lids were
red-rimmed from staring up too long, at the near stars and down at the
remote mountains--as they looked to be that night. She seemed rather
to resent interruption, but in a few minutes she became human and
practical enough to admit that she was hungry, and that she supposed
it was time to think about getting home.
When she got up to follow Jack to the station, she walked stiffly
because of her cramped muscles; but she didn't seem to mind that in
the least. She made only one comment upon her vigil, and that was when
she stopped in the door of the station and looked back at the heaving
cloud of smoke that filled the eastern sky.
"Well, whatever happens to me from now on, I'll have the comfort of
knowing that for a few hours I have been absolutely happy." Then, with
the abruptness that marked her changes of mood, she became the slangy,
pert, feather-headed Marion Rose whom Jack had met first; and remained
so until she left him after breakfast to go home to Kate, who would be
perfectly wild.
CHAPTER TWELVE
KATE FINDS SOMETHING TO WORRY OVER
Kate may have been wild, but if so she managed to maintain an
admirable composure when Marion walked up to the door of the cabin.
She did not greet her best friend with hysterical rejoicings, probably
because she had been told of her best friend's safety soon after dark
the night before, and had since found much to resent in Marion's
predicament and the worry which she had suffered before Marion's
message came.
"Well!" she said, and continued brushing her hair. "Have you had any
breakfast?"
"Ages ago. Where's everybody?" Marion flung down her hat and made
straight for the hammock.
"Helping put out the forest fire, I suppose. They had to go last
night, and I was left all alone. I hope I may never pass as horrible a
night again. I did not sleep one minute. I was so nervous that I never
closed my eyes. I walked the floor practically all night."
"Forevermore!" Marion murmured from the hammock, her cheek dropped
upon an arm. "I simply ruined my shoes, Kate, walking through all
those ashes and burnt stuff. You've no idea how long it stays hot. I
wonder what would soften the leather again. Have we any vaseline?"
Kate looked at her a minute and gave a sigh of resignation. "Sometimes
I really envy you your absolute lack of the finer sensibilities,
Marion. I should not have suffered so last night, worrying about you,
if I were gifted with your lack of temperament. Yes, I believe we have
a jar of vaseline, if that is what worries you most. But for my part,
I should think other things would concern you more."
"Why shouldn't it concern me to spoil a pair of nine dollar shoes? I
don't suppose I could get any like them in Quincy, and you know what a
time I had getting fitted in Hamburger's. And besides, I couldn't
afford another pair; not till we sell our trees anyway."
"How is the fire? Are they getting it put out?" Kate's face was veiled
behind her hair.
"I don't know, it is down the other side of the mountain now. But
three hundred men are fighting it, Jack said, so I suppose--"
"Jack!" With a spread of her two palms like a swimmer cleaving the
water, Kate parted her veil of hair and looked out at the girl. "Jack
who? Is that the man up at the lookout station, that you--"
"He's not a man. He's just a big, handsome, sulky kid. When he's
cross he pulls his eyebrows together so there's a little lump between
them. You want to pinch it. And when he smiles he's got the sweetest
expression around his mouth, Kate! As if he was just so full of the
old nick he couldn't behave if he tried. You know--little quirky
creases at the corners, and a twinkle in his eyes--oh, good night!
He's just so good looking, honestly, it's a sin. But his disposition
is spoiled. He gets awfully grouchy over the least little thing--"
"Marion, how old is he?" Kate had been holding her hair away from her
face and staring all the while with shocked eyes at Marion.
"Oh, I don't know--old enough to drive a girl perfectly crazy if he
smiled at her often enough. Do you want to go up and meet him? He'd
like you, Kate--you're so superior. He simply can't stand me, I'm such
a mental lightweight. His eyes keep saying, 'So young and lovely,
and--nobody home,' when he looks at me. You go, Kate. Take him up a
loaf of bread; that he had brought from town tastes sour."
"Marion, I don't believe a word you're saying! I can tell by your eyes
when you're trying to throw me off the track. But old or young,
handsome or ugly, it was a dreadful thing for you to spend the night
up there, alone with a strange man. I simply walked the floor all
night, worrying about you! I'd have gone up there in spite of the
altitude, if the fire had not been between. I only hope Fred and the
professor don't get to hear of it. I was so afraid they would reach
home before you did! But since they didn't, there's no need of saying
anything about it. They left right away, before any of us had gotten
anxious about you. If the man who told me doesn't blurt it to every
one he sees--what in the world possessed you, Marion, to phone down to
the Forest Service that you were up there and going to stay?"
"Well, forevermore!" Marion lifted her head from her arm to stare at
Kate. Then she laughed and lay back luxuriously. "I was afraid you
wouldn't know where to look for the bread," she explained meekly, and
turned her face away from the sunlight and took a nap.
Kate finished with her hair rather abruptly, considering the leisurely
manner in which she had been brushing it. She glanced often at Marion
sprawled gracefully and unconventionally in the hammock with one
cinder-blackened boot sticking boyishly out over the edge. Kate's eyes
held an expression of baffled curiosity. They often held that
expression when she looked at Marion.
But presently the professor came, dragging his feet wearily and
mopping his soot-blackened face with a handkerchief as black. He gave
the hammock a longing look, as though he had been counting on easing
his aching body into it. Seeing Marion there asleep, he dropped to the
pine needle carpet under a great tree, and began to fan himself with
his stiff-brimmed straw hat that was grimed with smoke and torn by
branches.
"By George!" he exclaimed, glancing toward Kate as she came hurrying
from the cabin. "That was an ordeal!"
"Oh, did you get it put out? And where is Fred? Shall I make you some
lemonade, Douglas?"
"A glass of lemonade would be refreshing, Kate, after the experience I
have gone through. By George! A forest fire is a tremendous problem,
once the conflagration attains any size. We worked like galley slaves
all night long, with absolutely no respite. Fred, by the way, is still
working like a demon."
While Kate was hurrying lemons and sugar into a pitcher, the professor
reclined his work-wearied body upon the pine needles and cast hungry
glances toward the hammock. He cleared his throat loudly once or
twice, and soliloquized aloud: "By George! I wish I could stretch out
comfortably somewhere."
But Marion did not hear him--apparently being asleep; though the
professor wondered how one could sleep and at the same time keep a
hammock swinging with one's toes, as Marion was doing. He cleared his
throat again, sighed and inquired mildly: "Are you asleep, Marion?"
Getting no answer, he sighed again and hitched himself closer to the
tree, so that a certain protruding root should not gouge him so
disagreeably in the side.
"Shall I fix you something to eat, Douglas?" The voice of Kate crooned
over him solicitously. "I can poach you a couple of eggs in just a
minute, over the oil stove, and make you a cup of tea. Is the fire
out? And, oh, Douglas! Has it burned any of our timber? I have been so
worried, I did not close my eyes once, all night."
"Our timber is safe, I'm happy to say. It really is safer, if
anything, than it was before the fire started. There will be no
further possibility of fire creeping upon us from that quarter." He
quaffed the lemonade with little, restrained sighs of enjoyment. "It
also occurred to me that every forest fire must necessarily increase
the value of what timber is left. I should say then, strictly between
you and me, Kate, that this fire may be looked upon privately as an
asset."
The hammock gave an extra swing and then stopped. Kate, being somewhat
sensitive to a third presence when she and the professor were talking
together, looked fixedly at the hammock.
"If you are awake, dear, it would be tremendously thoughtful to let
the professor have the hammock for a while. He is utterly exhausted
from fighting fire all night," she said with sugar-coated annoyance in
her tone.
"Oh, don't disturb her--I'm doing very well here for the present," the
professor made feeble protest when Marion showed no sign of having
heard the hint. "Let the child sleep."
"The child certainly needs sleep, if I am any judge," Kate snapped
pettishly, and closed her lips upon further revelations. "Shall I
poach you some eggs? And then if the child continues to sleep, I
suppose we can bring your cot out under the trees. It is terribly
stuffy in the tent. You'd roast."
"Please don't put yourself to any inconvenience at all, Kate. I am
really not hungry at all. Provisions were furnished those who fought
the fire. I had coffee, and a really substantial breakfast before I
left them. I shall lie here for a while and enjoy the luxury of doing
nothing for a while. By George, Kate! The Forest Service certainly
does make a man work! Think of felling trees all night long! That is
the way they go about it, I find. They cut down trees and clear away
a strip across the front of the fire where there seems to be the
greatest possibility of keeping the flames from jumping across. They
even go so far as to rake back the pine needles and dry cones as
thoroughly as possible, and in that manner they prevent the flames
from creeping along the ground. It is really wonderfully effective
when they can get to work in the light growth. I was astounded to see
what may be accomplished with axes and picks and rakes and shovels.
But it is work, though. By George, it is work!"
"Don't try to root in those needles for a soft spot," Kate advised him
practically. "Not when some persons have more cushions than they need
or can use." Whereupon she went over and took two pillows from under
Marion's feet, and pulled another from under her shoulder.
These made the professor comfortable enough. He lay back smiling
gratefully--even affectionately--upon her.
"You certainly do know how to make a man glad that he is alive," he
thanked her. "Now, if I could lie here and look up through these
branches and listen while a dear little woman I know recites Shelley's
_The Cloud_, I could feel that paradise holds no greater joys than
this sheltered little vale."
The hammock became suddenly and violently agitated. Marion was
turning over with a movement that, in one less gracefully slim, might
be called a flop.
"Well, good night! I hope you'll excuse me, Kate, for beating it," she
said, sitting up. "But I've heard The Cloud till I could say it
backwards with my tongue paralyzed. I'll go down by the creek and
finish my sleep." She took the three remaining cushions under her arms
and departed. At the creek she paused, her ear turned toward the shady
spot beyond the cabin. She heard Kate's elocutionary voice declaiming
brightly:
"From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds, every one--"
She went on a little farther, until she could hear only the higher
tones of Kate's voice above the happy gurgle of the stream. She
scrambled through a willow tangle, stopped on the farther side to
listen, and smiled when the water talked to her with no interruption
of human voices.
"And Doug thinks he's a real nature lover!" she commented, throwing
her cushions down into a grassy little hollow under the bank. "But if
he would rather hear Kate elocute about it than to lie and listen to
the real thing, he's nothing more or less than a nature pirate." She
curled herself down among the cushions and stared up through the
slender willow branches into the top of an alder that leaned over the
bank and dangled its finger-tip branches playfully toward her.
"You pretty thing!" she cooed to it. "What does ail people, that they
sit around and talk about you and make up rhymes about you, when you
just want them to come out and love you! You darling! Words only make
you cheap. Now whisper to me, all about when you woke up last spring
and found the sun warm and waiting--Go on--tell me about it, and what
you said to the creek, and all."
Having listened to Kate's dramatic rendition of the poem he liked, the
professor went over and made himself comfortable in the hammock and
began talking again about the fire. It was a magnificent spectacle, he
declared, although he was really too close to it to obtain the best
view. A lot of fine timber was ruined, of course; but fortunately not
a tree on any of their claims had been touched. The wind had blown the
flames in another direction.
"It would have been terrible to have a fire start in our timber," he
went on. "We should lose all that we have put into the venture so
far--and that would mean a good deal to us all. As it stands now, we
have had a narrow escape. Did you go up where you could obtain a view
of the fire, Kate?"
"No, I didn't." Kate poured herself out a glass of lemonade. "I was so
worried about Marion I couldn't think of anything else. And when the
man stopped and told me where she was, it was dark and I was afraid to
go off alone. Douglas, I never spent as miserable a night in all my
life. The tremendous risk you and Fred were taking made me fairly wild
with anxiety--and then Marion's performance coming up on top of
that--"
"What was Marion's performance? Did she sit by the creek again until
after dark, refusing to stir?" He smiled tolerantly. "I know how
trying Marion's little peculiarities can be. But you surely wouldn't
take them seriously, Kate."
"Oh, no, I suppose not. But when it comes to getting herself caught on
the other side of the fire, and going up to that lookout station and
staying all night, and nobody up there except the lookout man--"
"No! By George, did she do that?"
"Yes, she did, and I think it's perfectly awful! I don't suppose she
could get back, after the fire got started," she admitted grudgingly,
"but she might have done _something_, don't you think? She could have
gone down the other side, it seems to me. I know I'd have gotten back
somehow. And what hurts me, Douglas, is the way she passed it over, as
though it was nothing! She knew how worried I was, and she didn't
seem to care at all. She made a joke of it."
"Well! By George, I am surprised. But Marion is inclined to be a
trifle self-centered, I have noticed. Probably she doesn't realize
your point of view at all. I am sure she likes you too much to hurt
you deliberately, Kate. And young people nowadays have such different
standards of morals. She may actually feel that it isn't shocking, and
she may be hurt at your apparent lack of confidence in her."
"She couldn't possibly think that." Kate was too loyal at heart to
contemplate that possibility for a moment. "Marion knows better than
that. But it does hurt me to see her so careless of her own dignity
and good name. We're strangers in this community, and people are going
to judge us by appearances. They have nothing else to go by. I care
more for Marion, it seems to me, than she cares for herself. Why,
Douglas, that girl even telephoned down to the Forest Service that she
was up there and going to stay, and wanted them to send word to me.
And they are men in that office--human beings, that are bound to think
things. What _can_ they think, not knowing Marion at all, and just
judging by appearances?"
"I suppose they understood perfectly that it would be impossible for
her to get home across the fire, Kate. By George! I can see myself
that she couldn't do it. I shouldn't blame the girl for that, Kate.
And I can see also that it was a consideration for you that prompted
her to send word in the only way she could. Poor girl, you are
completely worn out. Now be a good girl and go in and rest, and don't
worry any more about it. I shall stay here and keep an eye on
camp--and I want you to promise that you will lie down and take a
good, long sleep. Go--you need it more than you realize."
Tears--unreasoning, woman tears--stood in Kate's eyes at the tender
solicitude of his tone. Very submissively she picked up the pitcher
and the glasses and went into the cabin. The professor sighed when she
was gone, kneaded the pillows into a more comfortable position and
proceeded to keep an eye on camp by falling into so sound a sleep that
within five minutes he was snoring gently. It would be cruel to
suspect him of wanting to be rid of Kate and her troubles so that he
could sleep, but he certainly lost no time in profiting by her
absence. Nature had skimped her material when she fashioned Professor
Harrison. He was not much taller than Kate--not so tall as Marion by a
full inch--and he was narrow shouldered and shallow chested, with
thin, bony wrists and a bulging forehead that seemed to bulge worse
than it really did because of his scanty growth of hair. He was a kind
hearted little man, but the forest rangers had worked him hard all
night. One cannot blame him for wanting to sleep in peace, with no
sound but the gurgle of the creek two rods away, and the warbling call
of a little, yellow-breasted bird in the alders near by.
It was Fred Humphrey tramping wearily into camp three hours later, who
awoke him. Fred was an altogether different type of man, and he was
not so careful to conceal his own desires. Just now he was hungry, and
so he called for Kate. Moreover, he had with him two men, and they
were just as hungry as he was, even if they did suppress the fact
politely.
"Oh, Kate! Can you scare up something right away for us to eat? Make a
lot of coffee, will you? And never mind fancy fixings--real grub is
what we want right now. Where's Marion? She can help you get it ready,
can't she?"
Kate was heard moving inside the cabin when Fred first called her. Now
she looked out of the door, and dodged back embarrassed when she saw
the two strangers. She was in a kimono, and had her hair down;
evidently she had obeyed the professor implicitly in the matter of
going to sleep.
"Oh!" she said, "I don't know where Marion is--as usual; but I can
have luncheon ready in a very short time, I'm sure. Is the fire--"
"'Luncheon!'" snorted Fred, laughing a little. "Don't you palm off any
luncheon on us! That sounds like a dab of salad and a dab of sauce and
two peas in a platter and a prayer for dinner to hurry up and come
around! Cook us some grub, old girl--lots of it. Coffee and bacon and
flour gravy and spuds. We'd rather wait a few minutes longer and get a
square meal, wouldn't we, boys? Make yourselves at home. There's all
the ground there is, to sit down on, and there's the whole creek to
wash in, if the basin down there is too small. I'm going to get some
clean clothes and go down to the big hole and take a plunge. How long
will it be before chuck's ready, Kate?"
Kate told him half an hour, and he went off down the creek, keeping at
the edge of the little meadow, with a change of clothing under his arm
and a big bath towel hung over his shoulder. The two men followed him
listlessly, too tired, evidently, to care much what they did.
Fred, leading the way, plunged through the willow fringe and came upon
the creek bank three feet from where Marion lay curled up on her
cushions. He stood for a minute looking down at her before his
present, material needs dominated his admiration of her beauty--for
beautiful she was, lying there in a nest of green, with her yellow
hair falling loosely about her face.
"Hello! Asleep?" he called to her, much as he had called to Kate.
"Afraid we'll have to ask you to move on, sister. We want to take a
swim right here. And anyway, Kate wants you right away, quick. Wake
up, like a good girl, and run along."
"I don't want to wake up. Go away and let me sleep." Marion opened her
eyes long enough to make sure that he was standing right there
waiting, and closed them again. "Go somewhere else and swim. There's
lots of creek that isn't in use."
"No sir, by heck, I'm going to take my swim right here. I'm too
doggone tired to walk another yard. Suit yourself about going, though.
Don't let me hurry you at all." He sat down and began to unlace his
shoes, grinning back over his shoulder at the other two who had not
ventured down to the creek when they heard the voice of a woman there.
Marion sat up indignantly. "Go on down the creek, why don't you?"
"Oh, this place suits me fine." Fred, having removed one shoe, turned
it upside down and shook out the sand, and began unlacing the other.
Marion waited stubbornly until he was pulling that shoe off, and then
she gathered up her cushions and fled, flushed and angry. She was
frequently angry with Fred, who never yielded an inch and never would
argue or cajole. She firmly believed that Fred would actually have
gone in swimming with her sitting there on the bank; he was just that
stubborn. For that she sometimes hated him--since no one detests
stubbornness so much as an obstinate person.
Fred looked after her, still smiling oddly because he had known so
well how to persuade her to go back to the house and help Kate. Fred
almost loved Marion Rose. He admitted to himself that he almost loved
her--which is going pretty far for a man like Fred Humphrey. But he
also admitted to himself that she could not make him happy, nor he
her. To make Marion happy he believed that he would need to have about
a million dollars to spend. To make him happy, Marion would need to
take a little more interest in home making and not so much interest in
beauty making. The frivolous vanity bag of hers, and her bland way of
using it, like the movie actresses, in public, served to check his
imagination before it actually began building air-castles wherein she
reigned the queen.
He could have loved her so faithfully if only she were a little
different! The nearest he came to building an air-castle was when he
was lying luxuriously in a shallow part of the pool, where the water
was not so cold.
"She'd be different, I believe--I'd make her different if I could
just have her to myself," he mused. "I'd take a lot of that
foolishness out of her in a little while, and I wouldn't have to be
rough with her, either. All she needs is a man she can't bluff!"
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
JACK SHOULD HAVE A HIDE-OUT
Kate, like the rest of the world, pretended to herself a good deal.
For instance, when she came into the mountains, she had hoped that
Fred and Marion would fall in love and get married. She felt that the
arrangement would be perfectly ideal in every way. Marion was such a
dear girl, so sweet-tempered and light-hearted; just the temperament
that Fred needed in a wife, to save him from becoming mentally heavy
and stolid and too unemotional. Fred was so matter-of-fact! Her
eagerness to have Marion come into the mining-claim scheme had not
been altogether a friendly desire for companionship, as she pretended.
Deep in the back of her mind was the matchmaker's belief that
propinquity would prove a mighty factor in bringing these two together
in marriage. If they did marry, that would throw Marion's timber land
with Fred's and give Fred a good bit more than he would have with his
own claim alone, which was another reason why Kate had considered
their marriage an ideal arrangement.
Three weeks had changed Kate's desire, however. Three weeks is a long
time for two women to spend in one small cabin together with almost no
intercourse with the outside world. Little by little, Kate's opinion
of Marion had changed considerably. To go to shows with Marion, to
have her at the house for dinner and to spend a night now and then, to
lie relaxed upon a cot in the Martha Washington's beauty booth while
Marion ministered to her with soothing fingertips and agreeable
chatter, was one thing; to live uncomfortably--albeit
picturesquely--with Marion in a log cabin in the woods was quite
another thing.
Kate began to doubt whether Marion would make a suitable wife for
Fred. She had discovered that Marion was selfish, for one thing; being
selfish, she was also mercenary. Kate began to fear that Marion had
designs upon Fred for the sake of his timber claim; which was
altogether different, of course, from Kate's designs upon Marion's
timber claim! Besides, Marion was inclined to shirk her share of the
cooking and dishwashing, and when she made their bed and tidied the
crude little room they called their bedroom, she never so much as
pretended to hang up Kate's clothes. She would appropriate the nails
on the wall to her own uses, and lay Kate's clothes on Kate's trunk
and let it go at that. Any woman, Kate told herself, would resent such
treatment.
Then Marion was always going off alone and never asking Kate if she
would like to go along. That was inconsiderate, to say the least. And
look how she had acted about climbing the peak at Mount Hough, the day
they had gone to see the lake! Kate had wanted to go down to the
lake--but no--Marion had declared that it was more beautiful from the
rim, and had insisted upon climbing clear to the top of the peak, when
she knew perfectly well that the altitude was affecting Kate's heart.
And she had gone off alone and stayed nearly two hours, so that they
were almost caught in the dark on the way home. It was the most
selfish thing Kate had ever heard of--until Marion perpetrated worse
selfishness which paled the incident.
More than that, Marion was always making little, sneering remarks
about the professor, and doing little things to annoy him. Kate could
not see how any one could do that, kind as Douglas was, and courteous.
And there were times when Marion seemed actually to be trying to
interest Fred; other times she purposely irritated him, as though she
were deliberately amusing herself with him. All this was not taking
into account Marion's penurious habit of charging Kate for every
facial massage and every manicure she gave her. When Kate looked ahead
to the long winter they must spend together in that cabin, she was
tempted to feel as though she, for one, would be paying an exorbitant
price for her timber claim.
With all that tucked away in the back of her mind, Kate still
believed--or at least she successfully pretended to believe--that she
liked Marion personally as much as she ever had liked her. She did not
see why any one must be absolutely blind to the faults of a friend.
She merely recognized Marion's faults. But if she ever criticised, she
condoned the criticism by saying that it was for Marion's own best
interests.
Just now, while she cleared away the litter of Fred's dinner, she
meditated upon the proper manner of dealing with Marion's latest
defection. Should she warn the professor to say nothing to Fred? It
might turn Fred against Marion to know what she had done; Fred was so
queer and old-fashioned about women. Still, he would be sure to hear
of it somehow, and it might be best to tell him herself, as tactfully
as possible, because she knew so well just how best to approach Fred.
She told Fred and was amazed at the result.
"Well, what of it?" Fred demanded with brotherly bluntness. "It takes
a woman, by thunder, to knife her friends in the back. What are you
trying to build up anyway? Take it from me, old girl, you want to cut
out this picking away at Marion behind her back--or to her face,
either, for that matter. You two women are going to see a good deal
of each other between now and spring, and you'll be ready to claw each
other's eyes out if you don't shut them to a lot you don't like."
"Well, upon my word! I was merely telling you of Marion's adventure.
I'm not saying--"
"No, but you're thinking, and you want to quit it." Whereupon Fred
went off to his tent and indulged in a much needed siesta.
Kate was angry as well as hurt. The injustice of Fred's condemnation
stirred her to action. She got hurriedly into her khaki skirt and
tramping shoes, slung a canteen over her shoulder, tied her green veil
over her hat and under her chin, put on her amber sun-glasses, and
took her stout walking stick.
She was careful not to wake Fred or the professor, though that would
have been more difficult than she imagined. She did not want them to
know where she was going. If they missed her and were worried it would
serve them both right; for now she remembered that the professor had
also been very unsympathetic. Neither of them had seemed to realize
what a terrible night she had spent there alone, with that terrible
fire raging through the forest and with Marion gone, without saying
one word to Kate about where she was going or when she expected to
return.
She meant to climb Mount Hough in spite of the altitude, and find out
for herself what sort of a fellow that lookout man was. Fred and
Douglas might make light of the matter if they wished, but she was in
a sense responsible for Marion Rose, and she considered it her duty to
think of the girl's welfare.
There was a good deal of determination in Kate's character, once you
roused her out of herself. She climbed Mount Hough, but she did not
find out what sort of a fellow the lookout man was, for Jack heard her
puffing up the pack trail and retired, with the precipitateness of a
hunted fox, to his niche between the boulders. She did not stay long.
As soon as she had rested a little and made sure that the station door
was locked, and had peered in and seen that everything was in perfect
order, she decided that the lookout man was probably off fighting fire
with the rest of the forest rangers. Convinced of that, she
straightway jumped to the conclusion that he had not been there at all
since the fire started, and Marion must have stayed up there alone,
and she had simply been trying to worry Kate over nothing.
Well, at any rate, she couldn't play that trick the second time. Kate
felt well repaid for the climb even if she did not get a glimpse of
the lookout man. Let Marion pretend, if she wanted to. Let her rave
about the lookout man's mouth and eyes and temper; Kate was armed
against all future baitings. She could go back now and be mistress of
the situation.
So she went, and Jack listened to her retreating footsteps scrunching
down the trail, and heaved a deep sigh of relief when the silence
flowed in behind her and the mountain top was all his own.
Nevertheless he felt uneasy over the incident. Kate, climbing alone to
the station, trying the door, waiting around for a few minutes and
then going back the way she had come, did not strike Jack as being a
tourist come to view the scenery. So far as he had been able to judge
as he peeped out through a narrow rift in the ledge, she had paid very
little attention to the scenery. She seemed chiefly concerned with the
station, and her concern seemed mostly an impatience over its locked
door.
He got his telescope and watched her as she came down through the
rocks into sight. No, she certainly did not strike him as being a
tourist, in spite of her tourist's khaki and amber glasses and heavy
tan boots. Women tourists did not climb mountains without an escort of
some kind, he had learned.
"By heck, I'll bet that's Kate!" he exclaimed suddenly, staring at her
retreating form. "Now, what does the old girl want--?" Straightway he
guessed what she wanted, and the guess brought his eyebrows together
with the lump between which Marion had described. If she had come up
there to see _him_, it must be because she had heard something about
him that had stirred her up considerably. He remembered how she had
refused to climb the peak with Marion, that first afternoon.
You know how self-conscious a secret makes a person. Jack could think
of only one reason why Kate should climb away up there to see him. She
must know who he was, and had come up to settle any doubt in her mind
before she did anything. If she knew who he was, then Marion Rose must
have told her. And if Marion Rose had gone straight and told her
friends--
Jack went so far as to pack everything he owned into his suitcase and
carry it to the niche in the ledge. He would not stay and give her the
satisfaction of sending the sheriff up there. He was a headlong youth,
much given to hasty judgments. All that night he hated Marion Rose
worse than he had ever hated any one in his life. He did not leave,
however. He could not quite bring himself to the point of leaving
while his beloved mountain was being scarred with fire. He knew that
it was for the sake of having him there in just such an emergency as
this fire that the government paid him a salary. Headlong as was his
nature, there was in him the quality of being loyal to a trust. He
could make all preparations for leaving--but until the fire was out
and the forest safe for the time being, he could not go.
Then, quite early the next day, Marion herself came up the trail with
three movie magazines and a loaf of bread that she had purloined from
Kate's makeshift pantry. On this day she was not so frivolous, but
helpful and full of sympathy. Jack could not believe that she had told
his secret to Kate; and because he could not believe it he asked her
point blank whether Kate had come spying up there deliberately, and
was vastly reassured by Marion's vehement denial.
They worked out a heliograph code that day, and they planned an
exploring trip to Taylor Rock the next time Jack was relieved. It
seemed very important that Jack should have a picturesque hide-out
there; a secret cave, perhaps, with a tilting rock to cover the
doorway.
"It would be great," declared Marion, clasping her hands together with
her favorite ecstatic gesture. "If we could just find a cave with a
spring away back in it, don't you know, and a ledge outside where you
could watch for enemies--wouldn't that be keen? It makes me wish I had
done something, so I had to hide out in the hills. And every day at a
certain time, I can come up here where that hydrometer thing was
before it burned, and signal to you. And we'll find a place where I
can leave magazines and things like that, and you can come and get
them. Honestly, I've always wished I could be an outlaw--if I could be
one without doing anything really bad, you know. I'd love having to
live in a cave somewhere. You're lucky, Jack--Johnny Carew--if you
only knew it."
"I do know it. I never found it out till today, though," Jack told her
with what he fancied was an enigmatic smile.
"Now listen. If you want me to help you enjoy being an outlaw, Jack
Corey, you simply must cut out the sentimental stuff. Let me tell you
how I feel about it. It's nothing new to have men make love--any kind
of a man will sit up and say 'bow-wow' if you snap your fingers at
him. That's deadly common. But here you are, a bandit and an outlaw
without being bad or tough--I don't think you are, anyway. You didn't
do such awful things to get in bad with the law, you see. But you're
hiding out just the same, with the police sleuthing around after you,
and disowned by your mother and all, just like the real thing. Why,
it's a story in real life! And I want to live in that story, too, and
help you just like a book heroine. I think we can make it awfully
interesting, being real enough so it isn't just make-believe. It's
keen, I tell you. But for once I want to see if a boy and a girl can't
cut out the love interest and be just good pals, like two boys
together." Marion got up and stood before him, plainly as ready to go
as to stay. "If you'll agree to that I'll go and help you find your
cave. Otherwise, I'll go back to camp and stay there, and you can look
after yourself."
"Be calm! Be calm!" Jack pushed back his mop of hair and grinned
derisively. "You should worry about any lovemaking from me. Take the
bunch out at the beach, or at a dance, and I can rattle off the
sentimental patter to beat the band. But it doesn't seem to fit in up
here--unless a fellow meant it honest-to-goodness. And I ain't going
to mean it, my dear girl. Not with you. I like you as a friend, but I
fear I can never be more than a step-brother to you." He pulled off a
dead twig from the bush beside him, snapped it in two and flipped the
pieces down the slope. "I'd look nice, making love to a girl, the fix
I'm in!" he added with a savage bitterness that gave the lie to his
smiling indifference. "A fellow ought to make sure his canoe is going
to stay right side up before he asks a girl to step into it."
"That's all right then. It's best to understand each other. Now, if I
were you, I'd have things brought up here, a little at a time, that
you'll need for your secret camp. Groceries, you know, and things. You
can make a place to keep them in till you get your vacation--and
listen! When I go to town I can buy you things that would look queer
if you sent for them. Towels and napkins and--"
Jack gave a whoop at that, though his ignorance of primitive living
did not fall far short of hers. But in the main, he took her advice
with praiseworthy gratitude. He had never expected to enjoy being an
outlaw. But under the influence of her enthusiasm and his own
youthfulness, he began to take a certain interest in the details of
her scheme--to plan with her as though it was going to be merely a
camping out for pleasure. That, of course, was the boy in him rising
to the bait of a secret cave in the mountains, and exchanging
heliograph signals with the heroine of the adventure, and lying upon a
ledge before his cave watching for enemies. There would be the bears,
too, that Hank Brown had said would be ambling up there to their
winter quarters. And there would be the scream of the mountain
lions--Jack had more than once heard them at night down in the forest
below him, and had thrilled to the sound. He would stalk the shy deer
and carry meat to his cave and broil the flesh over his tiny
campfire--don't tell me that the boy in any normal young man would not
rise enthusiastically to that bait!
But there were other times, when Marion was not there; when Jack was
alone with the stars and the dark bulk of the wooded slopes beneath
him; times when the adventure paled and grew bleak before his soul, so
that he shrank from it appalled. Times when he could not shut out the
picture of the proud, stately Mrs. Singleton Corey, hiding humiliated
and broken of spirit in a sanatorium, shamed before the world because
he was her son. Not all the secret caves the mountains held could dull
the pain of that thought when it assailed him in the dark stillness of
the peak.
For Jack was her true offspring in pride, if no more. He had been a
sensitive youngster who had resented passionately his mother's slights
upon his vague memory of the dad who had given him his adventurous
spirit and his rebellion against the restraints of mere convention,
which was his mother's dearest god. Unknown to Mrs. Singleton Corey,
he had ardently espoused the cause of his wandering dad, and had
withdrawn his love from the arrogant lady-mother, who never once spoke
affectionately of the man Jack loved. He had taken what money she gave
him. It was his dad's money, for his dad had suffered hardship to
wrest it from the earth, in the mines that kept Mrs. Singleton Corey
in soft, perfumed luxury. His dad would have wanted Jack to have it,
so Jack took all she would give him and did not feel particularly
grateful to her because she was fairly generous in giving.
But now the very pride that he had inherited from her turned upon him
the savage weapons of memory. He had swift visions of his mother
mounting the steps of some mansion, going graciously to make a
fashionable ten-minute call upon some friend, while Jack played
chauffeur for the occasion. She couldn't go calling now on the
Westlake millionaires' wives, taunted memory. Neither could she
preside at the club teas; nor invite forty or fifty twittery women
into her big double parlors and queen it over them as Jack had so
often seen her do. She could not do any of the things that had made up
her life, and Jack was the reason why she could not do them.
He tried to shut out the picture of his mother, and there were times
when for a few hours he succeeded. Those were the hours he spent with
Marion or in watching for her to come, or in perfecting the details of
the plan she had helped him to form. By the time he had his next four
days of freedom, he had also a good-sized cache of food ready to carry
to Grizzly Peak where his makeshift camping outfit was hidden. Marion
had told him that when the fire-season was over and the lookout
station closed for the winter, which would be when the first snow had
come to stay, he ought to be ready to disappear altogether from the
ken of the Forest Service and all of the rest of Quincy.
"You can say you're going prospecting," she planned, "and then beat it
to your cave and make it snug for the winter. Anything you must buy
after that, you can tell me about it, and I'll manage to get it and
leave it for you at our secret meeting place. I don't know how I'll
manage about Kate, but I'll manage somehow--and that'll be fun, too.
Kate will be perfectly wild if she sees me doing mysterious
things--but she won't find out what it's all about, and I'll have more
fun! I do love to badger her, poor thing. She's a dear, really, you
know. But she wants to know everything a person does and says and
thinks; and she hasn't any more imagination than a white rabbit, and
so she wouldn't understand if you told her every little thing.
"So I'll have the time of my life doing it, but I'll get things just
the same, and leave them for you. And I'll bring you reading--oh, have
you put down candles, Jack? You'll need a lot of them, so you can read
evenings."
"What's the matter with pine knots?" Jack inquired. "Daniel Boone was
great on pine-knot torches, if I remember right. One thing I wish you
would do, Marion. I'll give you the money to send for about a million
Araby cigarettes. I'll write down the address--where I always bought
them. Think you could get by with it?
"You just watch me. Say, I do think this is going to be the best kind
of a winter! I wouldn't miss being up here for anything."
Jack looked at her doubtfully, but he finally nodded his head in
assent. "It could be worse," he qualified optimistically.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MURPHY HAS A HUMOROUS MOOD
Though Fred and the professor shouldered pick and shovel at sunrise
every morning and laid them down thankfully at dusk every night, they
could not hope to work out the assessment upon eight mining claims in
a year. The professor was not a success as a pick-and-shovel man,
though he did his best. He acquired a row of callouses on each hand
and a chronic ache in his back, but beyond that he did not accomplish
very much. Fred was really the brawn of the undertaking, and in a
practical way he was the brains also. Fred saw at once that the task
required more muscle than he and the professor could furnish, so he
hired a couple of men and set them to work on the claims of the
speculators.
Two little old Irishmen, these were; men who had dried down to pure
muscle and bone as to their bodies, and to pure mining craft and
tenacious memory for the details of their narrow lives as to brains.
The mountains produce such men. In the barren plains country they
would be called desert rats, but in the mountains they are called
prospectors.
They set up their own camp half a mile down the creek, so that Kate
and Marion seldom saw them. They did their own cooking and divided
their work to suit themselves, and they did not charge as much for
their labor as Fred charged the claim-owners for the work, so Fred
considered that he had done very well in hiring them. He could turn
his attention to his own claim and the claims of Marion and Kate, and
let the professor peck away at a hole in the hillside where he vaguely
hoped to find gold. Why not? People did, in these mountains. Why,
nuggets of gold had been picked up in the main street of Quincy, so
they told him. One man in town had solemnly assured him that all these
hills were "lousy with gold"; and while the professor did not like the
phrase, he did like the heartening assurance it bore to his wistful
heart, and he began examining his twenty-acre claim with a new
interest. Surely the early-day miners had not gleaned all the gold!
Why, nearly every time he talked with any of the natives he heard of
fresh strikes. Old prospectors like Murphy and Mike were always coming
in town for supplies and then hurrying back to far canyons where they
fully expected to become rich.
The professor got a book on mineralogy and read it faithfully. Certain
points which he was not sure that he understood he memorized and meant
to ask Murphy, who had a memory like a trap and had mined from Mexico
to Alaska and from Montana to the sea.
Murphy poised his shovel, since he happened to be working, twinkled
his eyes at the professor through thick, silver-rimmed glasses, and
demanded: "For why do ye be readin' a buke about it? For why don't ye
get down wit yer pick, man, and _see_ what's in the ground? My gorry,
I been minin' now for forty-wan year, ever sence I come from the auld
country, an' _I_ never read no buke t' see what I had in me claim. I
got down inty the ground, an' I seen for meself what I got there--an'
whin I found out, my gorry, I didn't need no _buke_ t' tell me was she
wort' the powder I'd put inty 'er. An' them that made their millions
outy their mines, _they_ didn't go walkin' around wit' a buke in their
hands! My gorry, they hired jackasses like me an' Mike here t' dig fer
all they wanted t' know about.
"And if ye want to find out what's there in yer claim, I'd advise ye
t' throw away yer buke, young feller, an' git busy wit' yer two hands,
an' ye'll be like t' know a dom sight more than wit' all yer readin'.
An' if ye like to bring me a sample of what ye git, I'll be the wan t'
tell ye by sight what ye have, and I don't need no _buke_ t' tell it
by nayther."
Whereat Mike, who was silly from being struck on the head with a
railroad tie somewhere down the long trail of years behind him, gulped
his lean Adam's apple into a laugh, and began to gobble a long,
rambling tale about a feller he knew once in Minnesota who could
locate mines with a crooked stick, and wherever he pinted the stick
you could dig....
Murphy sat down upon him then--figuratively speaking--and reminded
Mike that they were not talking about crooked sticks ner no kind of
sticks, ner they didn't give a dom what happened in Minnesota fifty
year ago--if it ever had happened, which Murphy doubted. So Mike left
his story in the middle and went off to the water jug under a stubby
cedar, walking bowlegged and swinging his arms limply, palms turned
backward, and muttering to himself as he went.
"A-ah, there goes a liar if ever there was one--him and his crooked
sthick!" Murphy brought out a plug of tobacco the length of his hand
and pried off a corner with his teeth. "Mebby it was a railroad tie, I
dunno, that give him the dint in his head where he should have
brains--but I misdoubt me if iver there was more than the prospect of
a hole there, and niver a color to pay fer the diggin'." He looked at
the professor and winked prodigiously, though Mike was out of earshot.
"Him an' his crooked sthick!" he snorted, nudging the professor with
his elbow. "'S fer me, I'd a dom sight ruther go be yer buke, young
feller--and more I cannot say than thot."
The professor went back to his ledge on the hillside and began to peck
away with his pick, getting a sample for Murphy to look at. He rather
liked Murphy, who had addressed him as young feller--a term sweet to
the ears of any man when he had passed forty-five and was still going.
By George! an old miner like Murphy ought to know a fair prospect when
he saw it! The professor hoped that he might really find gold on his
claim. Gold would not lessen the timber value, and it would magnify
the profits. They expected to make somewhere near six thousand dollars
off each twenty acres; perhaps more, since they were noble trees and
good, honest pine that brought the best price from the mills. Six
thousand dollars was worth while, certainly; but think of the fortune
if they could really find gold. He would have a more honest right to
the claim, then. He wondered what Murphy thought of the shaft he was
sinking over there, where Fred had perfunctorily broken through the
leaf mold with a "prospect" hole, and had ordered Murphy and Mike to
dig to bed-rock, and stop when they had the assessment work finished.
What Murphy thought of it Murphy was succinctly expressing just then
to Mike, with an upward twinkle of his thick, convex glasses, and a
contemptuous fling of his shovelful of dirt up over the rim of the
hole.
"My gorry, I think this mine we're workin' on was located by the
bake," he chuckled. "Fer if not that, will ye tell me why else they
want 'er opened up? There's as much gold here as I've got in me
pocket, an' not a dom bit more."
"Well, that man I knowed in Minnesota, he tuk a crooked sthick,"
gobbled Mike, whose speech, as well as his mind had been driven askew
by the railroad tie; but Murphy impatiently shut him up again.
"A-ah, an' that's about as much as ye iver did know, I'm thinkin',
le's have no more av yer crooked sthick. Hand me down that other pick,
fer this wan is no sharper than me foot."
He worked steadily after that, flinging up the moist soil with an
asperated "a-ah" that punctuated regularly each heave of his shoulder
muscles. In a little he climbed out and helped Mike rig a windlass
over the hole. Mike pottered a good deal, and stood often staring
vacantly, studying the next detail of their work. When he was not
using them, his hands drooped helplessly at his sides, a sign of
mental slackness never to be mistaken. He was willing, and what Murphy
told him to do he did. But it was Murphy who did the hard work, who
planned for them both.
Presently Mike went bowlegging to camp to start their dinner, and
Murphy finished spiking the windlass to the platform on which it
rested. He still whispered a sibilant "a-ah!" with every blow of the
hammer, and the perspiration trickled down his seamed temples in
little rivulets to his chin that looked smaller and weaker than it
should because he had lost so many of his teeth and had a habit of
pinching his lower jaw up against his upper.
The professor came back with his sample of rock--with a pocketful of
samples--just as Murphy had finished and was wiping his thick glasses
on a soiled, blue calico handkerchief with large white polka-dots on
the border and little white polka-dots in the middle. He turned toward
the professor inquiringly, warned by the scrunching footsteps that
some one approached. But he was blind as a bat--so he
declared--without his glasses, so he finished polishing them and
placed them again before his bleared, powder-burned eyes before he
knew who was coming.
"An' it's you back already," he greeted, in his soft Irish voice, that
tilted up at the end of every sentence, so that, without knowing what
words he spoke, one would think he was asking question after question
and never making a statement at all. "An' what have ye dug outy yer
buke now?"
"No, by George, I dug this out of the ground," the professor declared,
going forward eagerly. "I want you to tell me frankly just what you
think of it."
"An' I will do that--though it's many the fight I've been in because
of speakin' me mind," Murphy stated, grinning a little. "An' now le's
see what ye got there. My gorry, I've been thinkin' they're all av
thim buke mines that ye have here," he bantered, peering into the
professor's face, before he took the largest piece of rock and turned
it over critically in his hands. In a minute he handed it back with a
quizzical glance.
"They's nawthin' there," he said softly. "If thot was gold-bearin'
rock, my gorry, we'd all of us be rollin' in wealth, fer the mountains
is made of such. Young feller, ye're wastin' yer time an' ivery dollar
ye're sinkin' in these here claims ye've showed me--and thot's no lie
I'm tellin' ye, but the truth, an' if ye believe it I'll soon be
huntin' another job and ye'll be takin' the train back where ye come
from."
The professor eyed him uncertainly. He looked at the great, singing
pines that laced their branches together high over their heads. Fred,
he thought, had made a mistake when he hired experienced miners to do
this work. It might be better to let Murphy in....
"Still the timber on the claims is worth proving up, and more," he
ventured cautiously, with a sharp glance at Murphy's spectacles.
"A-ah, and there yer right," Murphy assented with the upward tilt to
his voice. "An' if it's the timber ye be wantin', I'll say no more
about the mine. Four thousand acres minin' claims no better than yer
own have I seen held fer the trees on thim--an' ain't it the way some
of these ole fellers thot goes around now wit' their two hands in
their pants pockets an' no more work t' do wit' 'em than to light up
their seegars--ain't it wit' the timber on their minin' claims that
they made their pile? A-ah--but them was the good times fer them that
had brains. A jackass like me an' Mike, here, we're the fellers thot
went on a lookin' fer gold an' givin' no thought to the trees that
stood above. An' thim that took the gold an' the trees, they're the
ones thot's payin' wages now to the likes of Mike an' me."
He straightened his back and sent a speculative glance at the forest
around him. "'Tis long sence the thrick has been worked through," he
mused, turning his plug of tobacco over in his hand, looking for a
likely place to sink his stained old teeth. "Ye'll be kapin' mum about
what's in yer mind, young feller, ef ye don't want to bring the dom
Forest Service on yer trail. Ef it was me, I'd buy me a bag of salt
fer me mines--I would thot."
"Well, by George!" The professor stared. "What has salt--?"
"A-ah, an' there's where ye're ign'rant, young feller, wit' all yer
buke l'arnin'. 'Tis gold I mean--gold thot ye can show t' thim thot
gits cur'us. But if it was me, I'd sink me shaf' in a likelier spot
than what this spot is--I wuddn't be bringing up durt like this, an'
be callin' the hole a mine! I kin show ye places where ye kin git the
color an' have the luke of a mine if ye haven't the gold. There's
better men than you been fooled in these hills. I spint me a winter
meself, cuttin' timbers fer me mine--an' no more than a mile from this
spot it was--an' in the spring I sinks me shaf' an' not a dom ounce of
gold do I git fer me pains!"
"Well, by George! I'll speak to Fred about it. I--I suppose you can be
trusted, Murphy?"
Murphy spat far from him and hitched up his sagging overalls. "Kin any
man be trusted?" he inquired sardonically. "He kin, says I, if it's to
his intrust. I'm gittin' my wages fer the diggin', ain't I? Then it's
to me intrust to kape on diggin'! Sure, me tongue niver wagged me
belly outy a grub-stake yit, young feller! I'm with ye on this, an'
thot's me true word I'm givin' ye."
The professor hurried off to find Fred and urge him to let Murphy
advise them upon the exact sites of their mines. Murphy hung his
hammer up in the forked branches of a young oak, and went off to his
dinner. Arriving there, he straightway discovered that Mike, besides
frying bacon and making a pot of muddy coffee and stirring up a
bannock, had been engaged also in what passed with him for thinking.
"Them fellers don't know nothin' about minin'," he began when he had
poured himself a cup of coffee and turned the pot with the handle
toward Murphy. "They's no gold there, where we're diggin', I know
there's no gold! They's no sign of gold. They can dig a hunnerd feet
down, an' they won't find no gold! Why, in Minnesota, that time--"
"A-ah, now, le's have none av Minnesota," Murphy broke in upon Mike's
gobbling--no other word expresses Mike's manner of speech, or comes
anywhere near to giving any idea of his mushy mouthing of words. "An'
who iver said they was after gold, now?"
Mike's jaw went slack while he stared dully at his partner. "An' if
they ain't after gold, what they diggin' fer, then?" he demanded, when
he had collected what he could of his scattered thoughts.
"A-ah, now, an' thot's a diffrunt story, Mike, me boy." Murphy broke
off a piece of bannock, on the side least burned, and nodded his head
in a peculiarly knowing manner. "Av ye could kape yer tongue quiet
fr'm clappin' all ye know, Mike, I cud tell ye somethin'--I cud thot."
"Wh-why, nobudy ever heard _me_ talkin' things that's tol' in secret,"
Mike made haste to asseverate. "Why, one time in Minnesota, they was a
feller, he tol' _me_, min' yuh, things 't he wouldn't tell his own
mthrrr!" Mike, poor man, could not say mother at all. He just buzzed
with his tongue and let it go at that. But Murphy was used to his
peculiarities and guessed what he meant.
"An' there's where he showed respick fer the auld lady," he commended
drily, and winked at his cup of coffee.
"An' he tol' _me_, mind yuh, all about a mrrer" (which was as close as
he could come to murder) "an' he _knew_, mind ye, who it was, an' he
tol' _me_--an' why, _I_ wouldn't ever say nothin' an' he knew it--I
doctrrrred his eyes, mind ye, mind ye, an' the doctrrrs they couldn't
do nothin'--an' we was with this outfit that was puttin' in a bridge"
(only he couldn't say bridge to save his life) "this was 'way back in
Minnesota--"
"A-ah, now ye come back to Minnesota, ye better quit yer travelin' an'
eat yer dinner," quelled Murphy impatiently. "An' le's hear no more
'bout it."
Mike laid a strip of scorched bacon upon a chunk of scorched bannock
and bit down through the mass, chewed meditatively and stared into the
coals of his camp fire. "If they ain't diggin' fer gold, then what are
they _diggin'_ fer?" he demanded aggressively, and so suddenly that
Murphy started.
"A-ah, now, I'll tell ye what they're diggin' fer, but it's a secret,
mind ye, and ye must nivver spheak a word av it. They're diggin' fer
anguintum, me boy. An' thot's wort' more than gold, an' the likes av
me 'n you wadden't know if we was to wade through it, but it's used in
the war, I dunno, t' make gas-bags t' kill the inimy, and ye're t' say
nawthin' t' nobody er they'll likely take an' hang ye fer a spy on the
government, but ye're sa-afe, Mike, s' long as ye sthick t' me an' yer
job an' say nawthin' t' nobody, d' ye see."
"They'd nivver hang _me_ fer a spy," Mike gobbled excitedly. "They'll
nivver hang me--why I knowed--"
"A-ah, av yer ivver did ye've fergot it intirely," Murphy squelched
him pitilessly.
Mike gulped down a mouthful and took a swallow of muddy coffee. "They
better look out how they come around _me_," he threatened vaguely.
"They can't take me for a spy. I'd git the lawyers after 'em, an' I'd
make 'em trouble. They wanta look out--I'd spend ivvery cent I make
on lawyers an' courts if they took and hung me fer a spy. I'd _lawsue_
'em!"
Murphy laughed. "A-ah, would ye, now!" he cried admiringly. "My gorry,
it takes a brain like yours t' think av things. Now, av they hung me,
I'd be likes to let 'er sthand thot way. I'd nivver a thought t'
lawsue 'em fer it--I wad not!"
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A CAVE DWELLER JACK WOULD BE
Smoke-tinged sunlight and warm winds and languorous days held for
another full month in the mountains. Then the pines complained all
through one night, and in the morning they roared like the rush of
breakers in a storm, and sent dead branches crashing down, and sifted
brown needles thick upon the earth below.
"A-ah, but she's goin' t' give us the rain now, I dunno," Murphy
predicted, staring up at the leaden clouds through his thick glasses.
"Ye better git up some firewood, Mike, and make the camp snug agin
foul weather. An' av' the both of ye ain't got yer place tight an'
ready fer a sthorm, ye betther be stirrin' yerselves an' let the
diggin' go fer a day. It's firewood ye'll need, an' in a dry place.
An' while ye're talkin' 'bout wood, have yer got yer wood fer the
winter? An' yer goin' to sthay, ye bin tellin' me."
Fred looked around him at the forest where the oaks and the
cottonwoods and all the trailing vines were fluttering gay red and
yellow leaves in the wind. Fall was slipping on him unaware. He had
thought that there was plenty of time to make ready for winter, but
now he knew that the time was short--too short, maybe, with that wind
booming up from the southwest.
"You and Mike can knock off work here, and when your camp's in shape
you can come over and cut wood for us. Doug, we'll beat it and throw
that woodshed together we've been going to build. Think it'll storm
today, Murphy?"
Murphy stepped out where he could glimpse the southern sky, and eyed
the drift of heavy clouds. "She will not bust loose t'day, I'm
thinkin'," he decided. "She'll be workin' 'erself up to the pint av
shnowin' er rainin' er both. Rain in the valley, shnow up here where
we're at, I'm thinkin'. She'll be a rip when she does bust loose, me
boy, an' ye can't have things too tight an' shnug."
"I believe yuh. Come on, Doug. Murphy, you can take care of the tools
and cover up the hole, will you?"
"I will do that." Murphy grinned after the two tolerantly. "Will I
take care av me tools, an' it buildin' a sthorm?" he sarcastically
asked the swaying bushes around him. "An' do I need a pilgrim to
remind me av that? An' thim wit' no wood, I dunno, whin they shud have
thurrty tier at the very least, sawed an' sphlit an' ricked up under
cover where it can be got at whin they want it--an' they will want it,
fair enough! A-ah, but they'll find they ain't winterin' in Southern
Californy, before they're t'rough with this country. They're not got
their winter grub laid in, an' I'll bet money on't, an' no wood, an'
they're like t' be shnowed in here, whin no rig will come up thot
grade wit' a load an' I don't care how much they'll pay t' have it
hauled, an' them two not able t' pack grub on their backs as I've done
manny's the time, an' them wimmin wantin' all the nicks Lee's got in
his sthores! Cake an' pie, it's likely they must have in the house er
they think they're not eatin'." Murphy talked as he worked, putting
the tools in a pile ready to be carried to camp, picking up pieces of
rope and wire and boards and nails, and laying a plank roof over the
windlass and weighting it with rocks. Mike had gone pacing to camp,
swinging his arms and talking to himself also, though his talk was
less humanly kind under the monotonous grumble. Mike was gobbling
under his breath, something about law-suing anybody that come
botherin' him an' tryin' t' arrest him for nothin'. But Murphy
continued to harp upon the subject of domestic preparedness.
"An' that leanto them men sleep in is no better than nothin' an' if it
kapes the rain off their blankets it'll not kape off the shnow, an'
it won't kape off the wind at all. An' they've not got the beddin'
they'll be needin', an' I'll bet money on it.
"They should have a cellar dug back av the cabin where's the hill the
sun gets to, an' they should have it filled with spuds an' cabbages
an' the like--but what have they got? A dollar's worth av sugar,
maybe, an' a fifty-poun' sack av flour, an' maybe a roll av butter an'
a table full of nicknacks which they could do without--an' winter
comin' on like the lope av a coyote after a rabbit, an' them no better
prepared than the rabbit, ner so, fer the rabbit's maybe got a hole he
can duck inty an' they have nawthin' but the summer camp they've made,
an' _hammicks_, by gorry, whin they should have warrm overshoes an'
sourdough coats! Tenderfeet an' pilgrims they be, an' these mountains
is no place fer such with winter comin' on--an' like to be a bad wan
the way the squrls has been layin' away nuts."
Pilgrims and tenderfeet they were, and their lack of foresight might
well shock an oldtimer like Murphy. But he would have been still more
shocked had he seen what poor amateurish preparations for the coming
winter another young tenderfoot had been making. If he had seen the
place which Jack Corey had chosen for his winter hide-out I think he
would have taken a fit; and if he had seen the little pile of food
which Jack referred to pridefully as his grubstake I don't know what
he would have done.
Under the barren, rock-upended peak of King Solomon there was a narrow
cleft between two huge slabs that had slipped off the ledge when the
mountain was in the making. At the farther end of the cleft there was
a cave the size of a country school-house, with a jagged opening in
the roof at one side, and with a "back-door" opening that let one out
into a network of clefts and caves. It was cool and quiet in there
when Jack discovered the hiding place, and the wind blowing directly
from the south that day, did not more than whistle pleasantly through
a big fissure somewhere in the roof.
Jack thought it must have been made to order, and hastened down to
their meeting place and told Marion so. And the very next day she
insisted upon meeting him on the ridge beyond Toll-Gate basin and
climbing with him to the cave. As soon as she had breath enough to
talk, she agreed with him as emphatically as her vocabulary and her
flexible voice would permit. Made to order? She should say it was!
Why, it was perfect, and she was just as jealous of him as she could
be. Why, look at the view! And the campfire smoke wouldn't show but
would drift away through all those caves; or if it did show, people
would simply think that a new volcano had bursted loose, and they
would be afraid to climb the peak for fear of getting caught in an
eruption. Even if they did come up, Jack could see them hours before
they got there, and he could hide. And anyway, they never would find
his cave. It was perfect, just like a moonshiner story or something.
Speaking of smoke reminded Jack that he would have to lay in a supply
of wood, which was some distance below the rock crest. Manzanita was
the closest, and that was brushy stuff. He also told Marion gravely
that he must do it before any snow came, or his tracks would be a dead
give-away to the place. He must get all his grubstake in too, and
after snowfall he would have to be mighty careful about making tracks
around any place.
Marion thought that snow on the mountain would be "keen," and
suggested that Jack try a pair of her shoes, and see if he couldn't
manage to wear them whenever there was snow. His feet were very small
for a man's, and hers were--well, not tiny for a woman, and she would
spend so much time hiking around over the hills that a person would
think, of course, she had made the tracks. Being an impulsive young
woman who believed in doing things on the spot, she thereupon retired
behind a corner of rock, and presently threw one of her high-lace
boots out to Jack. It crumpled his toes, but Jack thought he could
wear it if he had to. So that point was settled satisfactorily, and
they went on planning impossibilities with a naive enthusiasm that
would have horrified Murphy.
Any man could have told Jack things to dampen his enthusiasm for
wintering on the top of King Solomon. But Jack, for perfectly obvious
reasons, was not asking any man for information or advice upon that
subject. Hank Brown would have rambled along the trail of many words
and eventually have told Jack some things that he ought to know--only
Hank Brown came no more to Mount Hough lookout station. A stranger
brought Jack's weekly pack-load of supplies; a laconic type of man who
held his mind and his tongue strictly to the business at hand. The
other men who came there were tourists, and with them Jack would not
talk at all if he could help it.
So he went blandly on with his camp building, four precious days out
of every month. He chopped dead manzanita bush and carried it on his
back to his hide-out, and was tickled with the pile he managed to store
away in one end of the cave. Working in warm weather, it seemed to be
a great deal of wood.
From the lookout station he watched the slow building of the storm
that so worried Murphy because of the Toll-Gate people. He watched the
circled sweep of the clouds rushing from mountain ridge to mountain
ridge. Straight off Claremont they came, and tangled themselves in the
treetops of the higher slopes. The wind howled over the mountain so
fiercely that he could scarcely force his way against it to the spring
for water. And when he filled his bucket the wind sloshed half of it
out before he could reach the puny shelter of his station. If he had
ever wondered why that station was banked solid to the window-sills
with rocks, he wondered no more when he felt that gale pushing and
tugging at it and shrieking as if it were enraged because it could not
pick the station up bodily and fling it down into the lake below.
"Gee! I'm glad I've got a cave the wind can't monkey with, to winter
in," he congratulated himself fatuously once, when the little boxlike
building shook in the blast.
That night the wind slept, and the mountain lay hushed after the
tumult. But the clouds hung heavy and gray at dark, and in the morning
they had not drifted on. It was as though the mountain tops had
corralled all the clouds in the country and held them penned like
sheep over the valleys. With the gray sunrise came the wind again, and
howled and trumpeted and bullied the harassed forests until dark. And
then, with dark came the stinging slap of rain upon the windows, and
pressed Jack's loneliness deep into the soul of him.
"They'll be shutting up this joint for the winter," he told himself
many times that night, half hopefully, half regretfully. "They won't
pay a man to watch forests that are soaking wet. I guess my job's done
here."
The next morning a thin white blanket of snow fresh sifted from the
clouds lay all over the summit and far down the sides. Beyond its
edges the rain beat steadily upon the matted leaves and branches.
Surely his job was ended with that storm, Jack kept telling himself,
while he stared out at his drenched world capped with white. It was
the nearest he had ever been to snow, except once or twice when he had
gone frolicking up Mount Wilson with snowballing parties. He scooped
up handfuls of it with a dreary kind of gleefulness--dreary because he
must be gleeful alone--he made tracks all around just for the novelty
of it; he snowballed the rocks. He would soon go into a different kind
of exile, without rules and regulations to hamper his movements;
without seventy-five dollars a month salary, too, by the way! But he
would have the freedom of the mountains. He would be snug and safe in
his cave over there, and Marion would climb up to meet him every day
or so and bring him magazines and news of the outside world. And he
would fill in the time hunting, and maybe do a little prospecting, as
he had vaguely hinted to the man who brought his supplies. It would
not be so bad.
But his job did not end with that storm. The storm passed after a few
days of dreary drizzle in the lower country and howling winds over the
crest and a few hours of daytime snowfall that interested Jack hugely
because he had never in his life before seen snow actually falling out
of the sky. Then the sun came out and dried the forests, and
Supervisor Ross said nothing whatever about closing the lookout
station for the winter.
A week of beautiful weather brought other beautiful weeks. He had
another four days' relief and, warned by the storm, he spent the time
in laboriously carrying dead pine wood and spruce bark up to his cave.
It wouldn't do any harm to have a lot of wood stored away. It might
get pretty cold, some stormy days. Already the nights were pretty
nippy, even to a warm blooded young fellow who had never in his life
really suffered from cold. Some instinct of self-preservation impelled
him to phone in for a canvas bed sheet--a "tarp," he had heard Hank
Brown call it--and two pairs of the heaviest blankets to be had in
Quincy. You bet a fellow ought to be prepared for the worst when he is
planning to winter in a cave! Especially when he must do his preparing
now, or tough it out till spring.
With his mirror he heliographed a signal to Marion, and when she came
he said he must have more cigarettes, because he might smoke harder
when he was really settled down to roughing it. What he should have
ordered was more bacon and flour, but he did not know that, his mind
dwelling upon the luxuries of life rather than the necessities--he who
had never met real necessity face to face.
"I'll send the order right away," Marion obligingly promised him. "But
Kate will be simply furious if she sees the package. The last lot I
made her believe was candy that was sent me, and because I didn't
offer her any of it--I couldn't, of course--she would hardly talk for
a whole day, and she hinted about selfishness. She thinks I carry my
pockets full of candy when I start off hiking through the woods, and
eat it all by myself." She laughed because it seemed a good joke on
Kate.
The next time she climbed up to the station she found him boarding up
the windows and hanging certain things from the ceiling to keep them
away from rats, under the telephone directions of the supervisor. He
expected Hank's successor up that afternoon to move down what must be
taken to town for the winter. He did not seem so cheerful over the
near prospect of hiding out on King Solomon, and Marion herself seemed
depressed a bit and more silent than usual. The wind whistled keenly
over the peak, whipping her khaki skirt around her ankles and
searching out the open places in her sweater. Claremont and the piled
ridges beyond were hooded in clouds that seemed heavy with moisture,
quite unlike the woolly fleeces of fair weather.
"Well, she's all nailed down for the winter," Jack said apathetically
when the last board was in place. "She's been a queer old summer, but
I kind of hate to leave the old peak, at that."
They turned their heads involuntarily and stared across the
fire-scarred mountainside to where Taylor Rock thrust bleakly up into
the sky. A summer unmarked by incidents worthy the name of events,
spent on one mountain top; a winter that promised as little diversion
upon another mountain top--
"Say, a ride on a real live street car would look as big to me right
now as a three-ring circus," Jack summed up his world-hunger with a
shrug. "By the time I've wintered over there I'll be running round in
circles trying to catch my shadow. Plumb bugs, that's what I'll be;
and don't I know it!"
"You'll love it," Marion predicted with elaborate cheerfulness. "I
only wish I could change places with you. Think of me, shut up in a
dark little three-room cabin with one elocutionist, one chronic grouch
and one human bluebottle fly that does nothing but buzz! You're a
lucky kid to have a whole mountain all to yourself. Think of me!"
"Oh, I'll think of you, all right!" Jack returned glumly and turned
back to the denuded little station. "I'll think of you," he repeated
under his breath, feeling savagely for the top button of his thick
gray sweater. "Don't I know it!"
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MIKE GOES SPYING ON THE SPIES
Mike sat hunched forward on a box in front of the stove in the rough
little cabin where he and Murphy were facing together the winter in
Toll-Gate flat. For an hour he had stared at the broken cook stove
where a crack disclosed the blaze within. He chewed steadily and
abstractedly upon a lump of tar-weed, and now and then he unclasped
his hands and gave his left forefinger a jerk that made the knuckle
crack. Tar-weed and knuckle-cracking were two queer little habits much
affected by Mike. The weed he chewed in the belief that it not only
kept his physical body in perfect health, but purified his soul as
well; cracking the knuckles on his left forefinger cleared the muddle
of his mind when he wanted to go deep into a subject that baffled him.
Hunched forward on another box sat Murphy nursing his elbow with one
grimy palm and his pipe with the other. He would glance at Mike now
and then and with a sour grin lifting the scraggly ends of his
grizzled mustache. Murphy was resentfully contemptuous of Mike's long
silences, but he was even more contemptuous of Mike's gobbling
indistinct speech, so he let Mike alone and comforted himself with
grinning superciliously when Mike was silent, and sneering at him
openly when he spoke, and cursing his cooking when Mike cooked.
"That gurrl," Mike blurted abruptly while he cracked his knuckles,
"she'd better look out!"
"A-ah," retorted Murphy scornfully, "belike ye'd better tell her so
thin. Or belike ye better set yerself t' look out fer the gurrl--I
dunno."
"Oh, I'll look out fer her," Mike gobbled, nodding his head
mysteriously. "I bin lookin' out fer her all the time--but she ain't
as cute as what she thinks she is. Oh, maybe she's cute, but there's
them that's cuter, an' they don't live over in Europe, neither. Don't
you worry--"
"Which I'm not doin' at all, me fine duck," vouchsafed Murphy boredly,
crowding down the tobacco in his pipe. "An' it's you that's doin' the
worryin', and fer why I dunno."
"Oh, I ain't worryin'--but that gurrl, she better look out, an' the
old un she better look out too."
"An' fer what, then, Mike, should the gurrl be lookin' out? Fer a
husband, maybe yer thinkin'."
Mike nodded his head in a way that did not mean assent, but merely
that he was not telling all his thoughts. He fell silent, staring
again at the glowing crack in the stove. Twice he snapped his knuckles
before he spoke again.
"She thinks," he began again abruptly, "that everybody's blind. But
that's where she makes a big mistake. They's nothin' the matter with
_my_ eyes. An' that old un, she better look out too. Why, the gurrl,
she goes spyin' around t' meet the other spy, an' the old un she goes
spyin' around after the gurrl, an' me I'm spyin' on--_all_ of 'em!" He
waved a dirt grimed, calloused hand awkwardly. "The whole bunch," he
chortled. "They can't fool _me_ with their spyin' around! An' the
gov'ment can't fool me nayther. I know who's the spies up here, an' I
kin fool 'em all. Why, it's like back in Minnesota one time--"
Murphy, having listened attentively thus far, settled back against the
wall, swung a rough-shod foot and began nursing his pipe and elbow
again. "A-ah, an' it's the trail to Minnesota, then," he commented
disgustedly, nodding his head derisively. "Umm-hmm--it's back in
Minnesota ye're wanderin' befuddled with yer sphies. So l'ave
Minnesota wance more, Mike, an' put some beans a-soakin' like I
explained t' ye forty-wan times a're'dy. My gorry, they're like
bullets the way ye bile them fer an hour and ask that I eat thim. An'
since yer eyes is so foine and keen, Mike, that ye can see sphies
thick as rabbits in the woods, wud ye just pick out a few of the
rocks, Mike, that will not come soft with all the b'ilin' ye can give
thim? For if I come down wance more with me teeth on a rock, it's
likely I might lose me temper, I dunno."
Mike grumbled and got out the beans, and Murphy went back to his
smoking and his meditations. He made so little of Mike's outburst
about the spies that he did not trouble to connect it with any one in
the basin. Mike was always talking what Murphy called fool gibberish,
that no man of sense would listen to it if he could help it. So Murphy
fell to calculating how much of the money he had earned might justly
be spent upon a few days' spree without endangering the grubstake he
planned to take into the farther mountains in the spring. Murphy had
been sober now for a couple of months, and he was beginning to thirst
for the liquid joys of Quincy. Presently he nodded his head slowly,
having come to a definite conclusion in his argument with himself.
"I think I'll be goin' t' town in the marnin', Mike, av I kin git a
little money from the boss," he said, lookin' up. "It's comin' cold,
an' more shnow, I'm thinkin', an' I must have shoepacs, I dunno. So
we'll be up early in the marnin', an' it's a hefty two-hours walk t'
town fer anny man--more now with the shnow. An' I be thinkin'--"
What he was thinking he did not say, and Mike did not ask. He seemed
not to hear Murphy's declaration at all. Now that he had the beans
soaking, Mike was absorbed in his own thoughts again. He did not care
what Murphy did. Murphy, in Mike's estimation, was merely a conceited
old fellow-countryman with bad eyes and a sharp tongue. Let Murphy go
to town if he liked. Mike had plans of his own.
The old un, for instance, stirred Mike's curiosity a good deal. Why
should she be following the girl, when the girl went tramping around
in the woods? They lived in the same cabin, and it seemed to Mike that
she must know all about what the girl was doing and why she was doing
it. And why didn't the men go tramping around like that, since they
were all in together? Mike decided that the two women must be spies,
and the men didn't know anything about it. Probably they were spying
on the men, to get them in trouble with the government--which to Mike
was a vast, formless power only a little less than the Almighty. It
might be that the women were spies for some other government, and
meant to have the men hanged when the time was ripe for it; in other
words, when these queer mines with no gold in them were all done.
But a spy spying on a spy smacked of complications too deep for Mike,
with all his knuckle-cracking. He was lost in a maze of conflicting
conjectures whenever he tried to figure the thing out. And who was the
other spy that stayed up on Taylor Rock? There was smoke up there
where should be no smoke. Mike had seen it. There were little flashes
of light up there on sunny days--Mike had seen them also. And there
was nothing in the nature of Taylor Rock itself to produce either
smoke or flashes of light. No one but a spy would stay in so bleak a
place. That was clear enough to Mike by this time; what he must find
out was why one spy followed another spy.
The very next day Marion left the cabin and set forth with a square
package under her arm. Mike, watching from where he was at work
getting out timbers for next year's assessment work on the claims,
waited until she had passed him at a short distance, going down the
trail toward Quincy. When she had reached the line of timber that
stood thick upon the slope opposite the basin, he saw Kate, bulky in
sweater and coat, come from the cabin and take the trail after Marion.
When she also had disappeared in the first wooded curve of the trail,
up the hill, Mike struck his axe bit-deep into the green log he was
clearing of branches, and shambled after her, going by a short cut
that brought him into the trail within calling distance of Kate.
For half a mile the road climbed through deep forest. Marion walked
steadily along, taking no pains to hide her tracks in the snow that
lay there white as the day on which it had fallen. Bluejays screamed
at her as she passed, but there was no other sound. Even the uneasy
wind was quiet that day, and the faint scrunching of Marion's feet in
the frozen snow when she doubled back on a curve in the trail, came to
Kate's ears quite plainly.
At the top of the hill where the wind had lifted the snow into drifts
that left bare ground between, Marion stopped and listened, her head
turned so that she could watch the winding trail behind her. She
thought she heard the scrunch of Kate's feet down there, but she was
not sure. She looked at the scrubby manzanita bushes at her right,
chose her route and stepped widely to one side, where a bare spot
showed between two bushes. Her left foot scraped the snow in making
the awkward step, but she counted on Kate being unobserving enough to
pass it over. She ducked behind a chunky young cedar, waited there for
a breath or two and then ran down the steep hillside, keeping always
on the bare ground as much as possible. Lower down, where the sun was
shut away and the wind was sent whistling overhead to the next
hilltop, the snow lay knee deep and even. But Kate would never come
this far off the trail, Marion was sure. She believed that Kate
suspected her of walking down to the valley, perhaps even to town,
though the distance was too great for a casual hike of three hours or
so. But there was the depot, not quite at the foot of the mountain;
and at the station was the agent's wife, who was a friendly little
person. Marion had made it a point to mention the agent's wife in an
intimate, personal way, as though she were in the habit of visiting
there. Mrs. Morton had an awful time getting her clothes dry without
having them all smudged up with engine smoke, she had said after her
last trip. Then she had stopped abruptly as though the remark had
slipped out unaware. It was easy enough to fool poor Kate.
But there was a chance that poor Kate would walk clear down to the
station, and find no Marion. In that case, Marion decided to invent a
visit to one of the nearest ranches. That would be easy enough, for if
Marion did not know any of the ranchers, neither did Kate, and she
would scarcely go so far as to inquire at all the ranches. That would
be too ridiculous; besides, Kate was not likely to punish herself by
making the trip just for the sake of satisfying her curiosity.
Marion plunged on down the hill, hurrying because she was later than
she had intended to be, and it was cold for a person standing around
in the snow. She crossed the deep gulch and climbed laboriously up the
other side, over hidden shale rock and through clumps of bushes that
snatched at her clothing like a witch's bony fingers. She had no more
than reached the top when Jack stepped out from behind a pine tree as
wide of girth as a hogshead. Marion gave a little scream, and then
laughed. After that she frowned at him.
"Say, you mustn't come down so far!" she expostulated. "You know it
isn't a bit safe--I've told you so a dozen times, and every time I
come out, here I find you a mile or so nearer to camp. Why, yesterday
there were two men up here hunting. I saw them, and so did Doug. They
gave Doug the liver of the deer they killed and the heart--so he
wouldn't tell on them, I suppose. What if they had seen you?"
"One of them was Hank Brown," Jack informed her unemotionally. "I met
him close as I am to you, and he swung off and went the other way.
Last time we met I licked the daylights out of him, and I guess he
hasn't forgotten the feel of my knuckles. Anyway, he stampeded."
"Well, forevermore!" Marion was indignant. "What's the use of your
hiding out in a cave, for goodness' sake, if you're going to let
people see you whenever they come up this way? Just for that I've a
good mind not to give you these cigarettes. I could almost smoke them
myself, anyway. Kate thinks that I do. She found out that it wasn't
candy, the last time, so I had to pretend I have a secret craving for
cigarettes, and I smoked one right before her to prove it. We had
quite a fuss over it, and I told her I'd smoke them in the woods to
save her feelings, but that I just simply must have them. She thinks
now that the Martha Washington is an awful place; that's where she
thinks I learned. She cried about it, and that made me feel like a
criminal, only I was so sick I didn't care at the time. Take them--and
please don't smoke so much, Jack! It's simply awful, the amount you
use."
"All right. I'll cut out the smoking and go plumb crazy." To prove his
absolute sincerity, he tore open the package, extracted a cigarette
and began to smoke it with a gloomy relish. "Didn't bring anything to
read, I suppose?" he queried after a minute which Marion spent in
getting her breath and in gazing drearily out over the wintry
mountainside.
"No, Kate was watching me, and I couldn't. I pretended at first that I
was lending magazines and papers to Murphy and Mike, but she has
found out that Murphy's eyes are too bad, and Mike, the ignorant old
lunatic, can't read or write. I haven't squared that with her yet.
I've been thinking that I'd invent a ranch or something to visit.
Murphy says there's one on Taylor Creek, but the people have gone down
below for the winter; and it's close enough so Kate could walk over
and find out for herself."
She began to pull bits of bark off the tree trunk and throw them
aimlessly at a snow-mounded rock. "It's fierce, living in a little pen
of a place like that, where you can't make a move without somebody
wanting to know why," she burst out savagely. "I can't write a letter
or read a book or put an extra pin in my hat, but Kate knows all about
it. She thinks I'm an awful liar. And I'm beginning to actually hate
her. And she was the very best friend I had in the world when we came
up here. Five thousand dollars' worth of timber can't pay for what
we're going through, down there!"
"You cut it out," said Jack, reaching for another cigarette. "My part
of it, I mean. It's that that's raising the deuce with you two, so you
just cut me out of it. I'll make out all right." As an afterthought he
added indifferently, "I killed a bear the other day. I was going to
bring you down a chunk. It isn't half bad; change from deer meat and
rabbits and grouse, anyway."
Marion shook her head. "There it is again. I couldn't take it home
without lying about where I got it. And Kate would catch me up on
it--she takes a perfectly fiendish delight in cornering me in a lie,
lately." She brightened a little. "I'll tell you, Jack. We'll go up to
the cave and cook some there. Kate can't," she told him grimly, "tell
what I've been eating, thank goodness, once it's swallowed!"
"It's too hard hiking up there through the snow," Jack hastily
objected. "Better not tackle it. Tell you what I can do though. I'll
whittle off a couple of steaks and bring them down tomorrow, and we'll
hunt a safe place to cook them. Have a barbecue," he grinned somberly.
"Oh, all right--if I can give Kate the slip. Did you skin him?"
reverting with some animation to the slaying of the bear. "It must
have been keen."
"It was keen--till I got the hide off the bear and onto my bed."
"You don't sound as if it was a bit thrilling." She looked at him
dubiously. "How did it happen? You act as if you had killed a
chipmunk, and I want to be excited! Did the bear come at you?"
"Nothing like that. I came at the bear. I just hunted around till I
found a bear that had gone byelow, and I killed him and borrowed his
hide. It was a mean trick on him--but I was cold."
"Oh, with all those blankets?"
Jack grinned with a sour kind of amusement at her tone, but his reply
was an oblique answer to her question.
"Remember that nice air-hole in the top where the wind whistled in and
made a kind of tune? You ought to spend a night up there now listening
to it."
Marion threw a piece of bark spitefully at a stump beyond the snow
mound. "But you have a fire," she said argumentatively. "And you have
all kinds of reading, and plenty to eat."
"Am I kicking?"
"Well, you sound as if you'd like to. You simply don't know how lucky
you are. You ought to be shut up in that little cabin with Kate and
the professor."
"Lead me to 'em," Jack suggested with suspicious cheerfulness.
"Don't be silly. Are there lots of bears up there, Jack?"
"Maybe, but I haven't happened to see any, except two or three that
ran into the brush soon as they got a whiff of me. And this one I
hunted out of a hole under a big tree root. It's a lie about them
wintering in caves. They'd freeze to death."
"You--you aren't really uncomfortable, are you, Jack?"
"Oh, no." Jack gave the "no" what Kate would have called a sliding
inflection deeply surcharged with irony.
"Well, but why don't you keep the fire going? The smoke doesn't show
at all, scarcely. And if you're going to tramp all over the mountains
and let everybody see you, it doesn't matter a bit."
Jack lit his third cigarette. "What's going on in the world, anyway?
Any news from--down South?"
"Well, the papers don't say much. There's been an awful storm that
simply ruined the beaches, they say. Fred has gone down--something
about your case, I think. And then he wanted to see the men who are in
on this timber scheme. They aren't coming through with the assessment
money the way they promised, and Fred and Doug and Kate had to dig up
more than their share to pay for the work. I didn't because I didn't
have anything to give--and Kate has been hinting things about that,
too."
"I wish you'd take--"
"Now, don't you dare finish that sentence! When I came up here with
them they agreed to do my assessment work and take it out of the
money we get when we sell, and they're to get interest on all of it.
Kate proposed it herself, because she wanted me up here with her. Let
them keep the agreement. Fred isn't complaining--Fred's just dandy
about everything. It's only--"
"Well, I guess I'll be getting back. It's a tough climb up to my
hangout." Jack's interest in the conversation waned abruptly with the
mention of Fred. "Can't you signal about ten o'clock tomorrow, if
you're coming out? Then I'll bring down some bear meat."
"Oh, and I'll bring some cake and bread, if I can dodge Kate. I'll put
up a lunch as if it were for me. Kate had good luck with her bread
this time. I'll bring all I dare. And, Jack,--you aren't really
uncomfortable up there, are you? Of course, I know it gets pretty
cold, and maybe it's lonesome sometimes at night, but--you stayed
alone all summer, so--"
"Oh, I'm all right. Don't you worry a minute about me. Run along home
now, before you make Kate sore at you again. And don't forget to let
me know if you're coming. I'll meet you right about here. So long,
pardner." He stuffed the package of cigarettes into his coat pocket
and plunged into the balsam thicket behind him as though he was eager
to get away from her presence.
Marion felt it, and looked after him with hurt questioning in her
eyes. "He's got his cigarettes--that's all he cares about," she told
herself resentfully. "Well, if he thinks _I_ care--!"
She went slipping and stumbling down the steep wall of the gulch,
crossed it and climbed the other side and came upon Kate, sitting in
the snow and holding her right ankle in both hands and moaning
pitiably.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
PENITENCE, REAL AND UNREAL
Kate rocked back and forth, and tears of pain rolled down her cheeks.
She leaned her shoulder against a tree and moaned, with her eyes shut.
It frightened Marion to look at her. She went up and put her hand on
Kate's shoulder with more real tenderness than she had felt for
months.
"What's the matter, Kate? Did you hurt yourself? Is it your ankle?"
she asked insipidly.
"O-oh! Marion, you keep me nearly distracted! You must know I only
want to guard you against--oh--gossip and trouble. You seem to look
upon me as an enemy, lately--Oh!--And I only want to consider your
best interests. Who is that man, Marion? I believe he is a criminal,
and I'm going to send word to the sheriff. If he isn't, he is welcome
at the cabin--you know it, Marion. You--you hurt me so, when you meet
him out here in this sly way--just as if you couldn't trust me. And I
have always been your friend." She stopped and began moaning again.
"Now, don't cry, dear! You're simply upset and nervous. Let me help
you up, Kate. Is it your ankle?"
"Oh, it pains dreadfully--but the shock of seeing you meet that
strange man out here and knowing that you will not trust me--"
"Why, forevermore! I do _trust you_, Kate. But you have been so
different--you don't trust _me_, is the trouble. I'm not doing
anything awful, only you won't see anything but the wrong side of
everything I do. I'd tell you about the man, only--" Marion glanced
guiltily across at the place where Jack had disappeared, "--it's his
secret, and I can't."
Kate wept in that subdued, heartbroken way which is so demoralizing to
the person who has caused the tears. Like a hurt child she rubbed her
ankle and huddled there in the snow.
"We never used to have secrets," she mourned dismally. "This place has
changed you so--oh, I am simply too miserable to care for anything any
more. Go on, Marion--I'll get home somehow. I shouldn't have followed,
but I was so hurt at your coldness and your lack of confidence! And I
was sure you were deceiving me. I simply could not endure the suspense
another day. You--you don't know what I have suffered! Go on--you'll
get cold standing here. I'll come--after awhile. But I'd as soon be
dead as go on in this way. Please go on!"
Kate may have been a bit hysterical; at any rate, she really believed
herself utterly indifferent to her sprained ankle and the chance of
freezing. She closed her eyes again and waved Marion away, and Marion
immediately held her closer and patted her shoulder and kissed her
remorsefully.
"Now, don't cry, dear--you'll have me crying in a minute. Be a good
sport and see if you can't walk a little. I'll help you. And once
you're back by the fire, and have your ankle all comfy, and a cup of
hot chocolate, you'll feel heaps better. Hang tight to me, dear, and
I'll help you up."
It was a long walk for a freshly sprained ankle, and the whiteness of
Kate's face stamped deeper into Marion's conscience the guilty sense
of being to blame for it all. She had started in by teasing Kate over
little things, just because Kate was so inquisitive and so lacking in
any sense of humor. She could see now that she had antagonized Kate
where she should have humored her little whims. It wouldn't have done
any harm, Marion reflected penitently, to have confided more in Kate.
She used to tell her everything, and Kate had always been so loyal and
sympathetic.
Penitence of that sort may go to dangerous lengths of confession if
it is not stopped in time. Nothing checked Marion's excited
conscience. The ankle which she bared and bathed was so swollen and
purple that any lurking suspicion of the reality of the hurt vanished,
and Marion cried over it with sheer pity for the torture of that long
walk. Kate's subdued sadness did the rest.
So with Kate, lying on the couch near the fire and with two steaming
cups of chocolate between them on an up-ended box that sturdily did
its duty as a table, Marion let go of her loyalty to one that she
might make amends to another. She told Kate everything she knew about
Jack Corey, down to the exact number of times she had bought
cigarettes and purloined magazines and papers for him. Wherefore the
next hour drew them closer to their old intimacy than they had been
since first they came into the mountains; so close an intimacy that
they called each other dearie while they argued the ethics of Jack's
case and the wisdom--or foolishness--of Marion's championship of the
scapegoat.
"You really should have confided in me long ago--at the very first
inkling you had of his identity," Kate reiterated, sipping her
chocolate as daintily as ever she had sipped at a reception. "I can
scarcely forgive that, dearie. You were taking a tremendous risk of
being maligned and misunderstood. You might have found yourself
terribly involved. You are so impulsive, Marion. You should have come
straight to me."
"Well, but I was afraid--"
"Afraid of Kate? Why, _dearie_!"
That is the way they talked, until they heard the professor scraping
the snow off his feet on the edge of the flat doorstep. Kate lay back
then on her piled pillows, placed a finger across her closed lips and
pulled her scanty hair braid down over her left shoulder. She shut her
eyes and held them so until the professor came in, when she opened
them languidly.
Marion carried away the chocolate cups, her heart light. She would not
have believed that a reconciliation with Kate and the unburdening of
her secret could work such a change in her feelings. She wished
fervently that she had told Kate at first. Now they could have Jack
down at the cabin sometimes, when the men were both away. They would
cook nice little dinners for him, and she could lend him all the
reading matter he wanted. She would not have to sneak it away from the
cabin. It was a great relief. Marion was very happy that evening.
Jack was not so happy. He was climbing slowly back to his comfortless
camp, wondering whether it was worth while to keep up the struggle for
sake of his freedom. Jail could not be worse than this, he kept
telling himself. At least there would be other human beings--he would
not be alone day after day. He would be warm and no worse off for food
than here. Only for his mother and the shame it would bring her, he
would gladly make the exchange. He was past caring, past the horror of
being humiliated before his fellows.
It was hard work climbing to the cave, but that was not the reason why
he had not wanted Marion to make the trip. He did not want Marion to
know that the cave was half full of snow that had blown in with the
wind, and that he was compelled to dig every stick of firewood out
from under a snowdrift. Only for that pile of wood, he would have
moved his camp to the other side of the peak that was more sheltered,
even though it was hidden from the mountain side and the lower valleys
he had learned to know so well.
But the labor of moving his camp weighed heavily against the comfort
he would gain. He did not believe that he would actually freeze here,
now that he had the bearskin; stiff and unwieldy though it was, when
he spread it with the fur next to his blankets it was warm--especially
since he had bent the edges under his bed all around and let the hide
set that way.
Marion would have been astonished had she known how many hours out of
every twenty-four Jack spent under the strong-odored hide. Jack
himself was astonished, whenever he came out of his general apathy
long enough to wonder how he endured this brutish existence. But he
had to save wood, and he had to save food, and he had to kill time
somehow. So he crawled into his blankets long before dark, short as
the days were, and he stayed there long after daylight. That is why he
smoked so many cigarettes, and craved so much reading.
Lying there under the shelter of a rock shelf that jutted out from the
cave wall, he would watch the whirling snow sift down through the
opening in the cave's roof and pack deeper the drift upon that side.
Twice he had moved his pile of supplies, and once he had moved his
wood; and after that he did not much care whether they were buried or
not.
Lying there with only his face and one hand out from under the covers
so that he might smoke, Jack had time to do a great deal of thinking,
though he tried not to think, since thinking seemed so profitless. He
would watch the snow and listen to the wind whistling in the roof, and
try to let them fill his mind. Sometimes he wondered how any one save
an idiot could ever have contemplated passing a winter apart from his
kind, in a cave on a mountain-top. Holed up with the bears, he
reminded himself bitterly. And yet he had planned it eagerly with
Marion and had looked forward to it as an adventure--a lark with a few
picturesque hardships thrown in to give snap to the thing. Well, he
had the hardships, all right enough, and the snap, but he could not
see anything picturesque or adventurous about it.
He could have given it up, of course. His two legs would have carried
him down to the valley in a matter of three hours or so, even with the
snow hampering his progress. He could, for instance, leave his cave in
the afternoon of any day, and reach Marston in plenty of time for
either of the two evening trains. He could take the "up" train, whose
headlight tempted him every evening when he went out to watch for it
wistfully, and land in Salt Lake the next night; or he could take the
"down" train a little later, and be in San Francisco the next morning.
Then, it would be strange if he could not find a boat ready to leave
port for some far-off, safe place. He could do that any day. He had
money enough in his pocket to carry him out of the country if he were
willing to forego the luxuries that come dear in travel--and he
thought he could, with all this practice!
He played with the idea. He pictured himself taking the down train,
and the next day shipping out of San Francisco on a sailing vessel
bound for Japan or Panama or Seattle--it did not greatly matter which.
He would have to make sure first that the boat was not equipped with
wireless, so he supposed he must choose a small sailing vessel, or
perhaps a tramp steamer. At other times he pictured himself landing in
Salt Lake and hiking out from there to find work on some ranch. Who
would ever identify him there as Jack Corey?
He dreamed those things over his cigarettes, smoked parsimoniously
through a cheap holder until the stub was no longer than one of
Marion's fingernails that Jack loved to look at because they were
always so daintily manicured. He dreamed, but he could not bring
himself to the point of making one of his dreams come true. He could
not, because of Marion. She had helped him to plan this retreat, she
had helped him carry some of the lighter supplies up to the cave, she
had stood by him like the game little pal she was. He could dream, but
he could not show himself ungrateful to Marion by leaving the place.
Truth to tell, when he could be with her he did not want to leave. But
the times when he could be with her were so dishearteningly few that
they could not hold his courage steady. She upbraided him for going so
far down the mountain to meet her--what would she have said if she
knew that once, when the moon was full, he had gone down to the very
walls of the cabin where she slept, and had stood there like a
lonesome ghost, just for the comfort her nearness gave him? Jack did
not tell her that!
Jack did not tell her anything at all of his misery. He felt that it
would not be "square" to worry Marion, who was doing so much for him
and doing it with such whole-souled gladness, to serve a fellow being
in distress. Jack did not flatter himself that she would not have done
exactly as much for any other likable fellow. It was an adventure that
helped to fill her empty days. He understood that perfectly, and as
far as was humanly possible he let her think the adventure a pleasant
one for him. He could not always control his tongue and his tones, but
he made it a point to leave her as soon as he saw her beginning to
doubt his contentment and well-being.
He would not even let Marion see that thoughts of his mother gnawed at
him like a physical pain. He tried to hold to his old, childish
resentment against her because she never spoke of his dad and did not
show any affection for his dad's boy. Once she had sighed and said, "I
never will forgive you, Jack, for not being a girl!" and Jack had
never forgotten that, though he did forget the little laugh and the
playful push she had given him afterwards. Such remarks had been
always in the back of his mind, hardening him against his mother. Now
they turned against Jack accusingly. Why couldn't he have been a girl?
She would have gotten some comfort out of him then, instead of being
always afraid that he would do something awful. She would have had him
with her more, and they would have become really acquainted instead of
being half strangers.
He would stare at the rock walls of the cave and remember little
things he had forgotten in his roistering quest of fun. He remembered
a certain wistfulness in her eyes when she was caught unawares with
her gaze upon him. He remembered that never had she seemed to grudge
him money--and as for clothes, he bought what he liked and never
thought of the cost, and she paid the bills and never seemed to think
them too large, though Jack was ashamed now at the recollection of
some of them.
Why, only the week before his world had come to an end, he had said at
dinner one evening that he wished he had a racing car of a certain
expensive type, and his mother had done no more than lecture him
mildly on the tendency of youth toward recklessness, and wonder
afterwards how in the world the garage was going to be made larger
without altogether destroying its symmetry and throwing it out of
proportion to the rest of the place. It would make the yard look very
cramped, she complained, and she should be compelled to have her row
of poinsettias moved. And she very much doubted whether Jack would
exercise any judgment at all about speed. Boys were so wild and rough,
nowadays!
Well, poor mother! She had not been compelled to enlarge the garage;
but Jack's throat ached when he thought of that conversation. What
kind of a mother would she have been, he wondered, if he had petted
her a little now and then? He had an odd longing to give her a real
bear-hug and rumple up her marcelled pompadour and kiss her--and see
if she wouldn't turn out to be a human-being kind of a mother, after
all. He looked back and saw what a selfish, unfeeling young cub he had
always been; how he had always taken, and had given nothing in return
save a grudging obedience when he must, and a petty kind of deception
when he might.
"Bless her heart, she'd have got me that racer and never batted an eye
over the price of it," he groaned, and turned over with his face
hidden even from his bleak cave. "I was always kicking over little
things that don't amount to a whoop--and she was always handing out
everything I asked for and never getting a square deal in her life."
Then, to mark more definitely the change that was taking place in
Jack's soul, he added a question that a year before would have been
utterly impossible. "How do I know that dad ever gave her a square
deal, either? I never saw dad since I was a kid. She's proud as the
deuce--there must be some reason--"
Once full-formed in his mind, the conviction that he had been a poor
sort of a son to a mother whose life had held much bitterness grew and
flourished. He had called her cold and selfish; but after all, her
life was spent mostly in doing things for the betterment of others--as
she interpreted the word. Showy, yes; but Jack told himself now that
she certainly got away with it better than any woman he knew. And when
it came to being cold and selfish, it struck Jack forcibly that he had
been pretty much that way himself; that he had been just as fully
occupied in playing with life as his mother had been in messing around
trying to reform life. When he came to think of it, he could see that
a woman of Mrs. Singleton Corey's type might find it rather difficult
to manifest tenderness toward a husky young son who stood off from her
the way Jack had done. Judgment is, after all, a point of view, and
Jack's viewpoint was undergoing a radical change.
That very change added much to his misery, because it robbed him of
the comfort of pitying himself. He could do nothing now but pity his
mother. As he saw it now, the crime of lying to her about that
Sunday's frolic loomed blacker than the passive part he had played in
the tragedy of the night. He had lied to her and thought it a joke. He
had taken a car worth more than five thousand dollars--more than his
young hide was worth, he told himself now--and he had driven it
recklessly in the pursuit of fun that nauseated him now just to
remember. Summing up that last display of ingratitude toward the
mother who made his selfish life soft and easy, Jack decided that he
had given her a pretty raw deal all his life, and the rawest of all on
the tenth of last May.
All the while he was coaxing his fire to burn in the little rock
fireplace he had built near his bed; all the while, he was whittling
off a slice of frozen bear meat and broiling it over the fire for his
supper, Jack was steeped in self-condemnation and in pity of his
mother. More than was usual she haunted him that night. Even when he
crept shivering under the bearskin and blankets, and huddled there for
warmth, her face was as clear before him as Marion's. Tears swelled
his eyelids and slid down his cheeks. And when he brushed away those
tears others came--since boyhood these were the first tears he had
ever shed because of a poignant longing for his mother.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
HANK BROWN PROVES THAT HE CAN READ TRACKS
To begin with, Kate knew Mrs. Singleton Corey, just as well as a
passably popular elocutionist may expect to know one of the recognized
leaders of society and club life. Kate had recited at open meetings of
the clubs over which Mrs. Singleton Corey had presided with that
smiling composure which was so invulnerable to those without the
favored circle. Kate had once talked with Mrs. Singleton Corey for at
least five minutes, but she was not at all certain that she would be
remembered the next time they met. She would like very much to be
remembered, because an elocutionist's success depends so much upon the
recognition which society gives to her personality and her talents.
Now, here was Jack Corey hiding in her very dooryard, one might say;
and his mother absolutely distracted over him. How could she make any
claim to human sympathy for a mother's sorrow if she withheld the
message that would bring relief? She was astonished that Marion had
been so thoughtless as never once to think of the terrible distress of
Mrs. Singleton Corey. Of course, she had promised--but surely that
did not exclude the boy's mother from the solace of knowing where he
was! That would be outrageous! Very carefully she sounded Marion upon
the subject, and found her unreasonable.
"Why, Jack would murder me if I told his mother! I should say I
wouldn't tell her! Why, it was because his mother was going to be so
mean about it and turn against him, that Jack ran away! He'd go back,
if it wasn't for her--he said so. He'd rather go to jail than face
her. Why, if I thought for a minute that you'd take that stand, I
never would have told you, Kate! Don't you _dare_--" Then Marion
dropped a saucer that she was wiping, and when her consternation over
the mishap had subsided she awoke to the fact that Kate had dropped
the subject also and had gone to read her limp little _Sonnets from
the Portuguese_, that Marion never could see any sense in.
Marion must have had a remarkably trustful nature, else she would have
been suspicious. Kate was not paying any attention to what she read.
She was mentally rounding periods and coining new phrases of sympathy
that should not humiliate but draw close to the writer the soul of
Mrs. Singleton Corey when she read them. She was planning the letter
she fully intended to write. Later that evening, when Marion was
curled up in bed with a book that held her oblivious to unobtrusive
deeds, such as letter-writing, Kate put the phrases and the carefully
constructed sentences upon a sheet of her thickest, creamiest
stationery. She did not feel in the slightest degree disloyal to
Marion or to Jack. Hot-headed, selfish children, what did they know
about the deeper problems of life? Of course his mother must be told.
And of course, Kate was the person who could best write so difficult a
letter. So she wrote it, and explained just how she came to know about
Jack. But the professor was a conscientious man. He believed that the
authorities should be notified at once. Jack Corey was a fugitive from
the law, and to conceal the knowledge of his whereabouts would be
nothing short of compounding a felony. It was thoughtful to write his
mother, of course. But duty demanded that the chief of police in Los
Angeles should be notified also, and as speedily as possible. By
George, the case warranted telegraphing the news!
Now, it was one thing to write sympathetically to a social leader that
her wayward son has been found, but it is quite another thing to turn
the wayward son over to the police. Kate had not considered the moral
uprightness of the professor when she showed him the letter, but she
managed the difficulty very nicely. She pleaded a little, and
flattered a little, and cried a good deal, and finally persuaded the
professor's conscience to compound a felony to the extent of writing
Fred instead of wiring the chief of police. Fred could notify the
authorities if he chose--and Kate was wise enough to pretend that she
was satisfied to leave the matter in Fred's hands.
She thought it best, however, to add a postscript to her letter,
saying that she feared for Jack's safety, as the authorities had begun
to be very inquisitive and hard to put off; but that she would do all
in her power to protect the poor boy. She did not feel that it would
be wise to write Fred, because the professor would think she was
working against him and would be angry. Besides, she knew that it
would be of no use to write Fred. He would do as he pleased anyway; he
always did.
In the face of a keen wind the professor started down the mountain to
leave the letters at Marston with the agent, who was very obliging and
would see that they were put on the "down" train that evening.
Marion did not see any sense in his going away that day, and she told
Kate so very bluntly. With the professor gone she could not meet Jack
and have those broiled bear steaks, because some one had to stay with
Kate. When Kate suggested that she have Jack come to the cabin with
his bear steaks, she discovered that she could not do that either. She
was afraid to tell Jack that Kate knew. Of course, it was all
right--Kate had promised faithfully never to tell; but Jack was
awfully queer, lately, and the least little thing offended him. He
would refuse to see that it was the best to take Kate into the secret,
because it gave Marion more freedom to do things for his comfort. He
would consider that she had been tattling secrets just because she
could not hold her tongue, and she resented in advance his attitude.
Guiltily conscious of having betrayed him, she still believed that she
had done him a real service in the betrayal.
It was a complicated and uncomfortable state of mind to be in, and
Kate's state of mind was not much more complacent. She also had broken
a promise and betrayed a trust, and she also believed she had done it
for the good of the betrayed. To their discomforting sense of guilt
was added Marion's disappointment at not meeting Jack, and Kate's
sprained ankle, which was as swollen and painful as a sprained ankle
usually is. They began by arguing, they continued by reminding each
other of past slights and injuries, they ended by speaking plain
truths that were unpalatable chiefly because they were true. When the
professor tramped home at sundown he walked into an atmosphere of icy
silence. Kate and Marion were not on speaking terms, if you please.
The next day was cold and windy, but Marion hurried the housework in a
way that made Kate sniff disgustedly, and started out to signal Jack
and bring him down to their last meeting place. Flash after flash she
sent that way, until the sun went altogether behind the clouds and she
could signal no more. Not a glimmer of an answering twinkle could she
win from the peak. The most she did was to stimulate old Mike to the
point of mumbling wild harangues to the uneasy pines, the gist of
which was that folks better look out how they went spyin' around after
_him_, an' makin' signs back and forth with glasses. They better look
out, because he had good eyes, if Murphy didn't have, and they
couldn't run over _him_ and tromp on him.
He was still gesticulating like a bear fighting yellow-jackets when
Marion walked past him, going up the trail. She looked at him and
smiled as she went by, partly because he looked funny, waving his arms
over his head like that, and partly by way of greeting. She never
talked to Mike, because she could not understand anything he said. She
did not consider him at all bright, so she did not pay much attention
to him at any time; certainly not now, when her mind was divided
between her emotions concerning Jack and her fresh quarrel with Kate.
Mike struck his axe into a log and followed her, keeping in the brush
just outside the trail. His lips moved ceaselessly under his ragged,
sandy mustache. Because Marion had smiled when she looked at him, he
called her, among other things, a she-devil. He thought she had
laughed at him because she was nearly ready to have him hanged. Marion
did not look back. She was quite certain today that Kate would not
follow her, and the professor was fagged from yesterday's tramp
through the snow. She hurried, fully expecting that Jack had gone down
early to the meeting place and was waiting for her there.
Mike had no trouble in keeping close to her, for the wind blew
strongly against her face and the pines creaked and mourned overhead,
and had he called to her she would scarcely have heard him. She left
the road at the top of the hill and went across to the gully where
Kate had sprained her ankle. Today Marion did not trouble to choose
bare ground, so she went swiftly. At the top of the gully where Jack
had met her before, she stopped, her eyes inquiring of every thicket
near her. She was panting from the stiff climb, and her cheeks tingled
with the cold. But presently she "who-whoed" cautiously, and a figure
stepped out from behind a cedar and came toward her.
"Oh, there you--oh!" she cried, and stopped short. It was not Jack
Corey at all, but Hank Brown, grinning at her while he shifted his
rifle from the right hand to the left.
"Guess you thought I was somebody else," he drawled, coming up to her
and putting out his hand. "Pretty cold, ain't it? Yuh travelin' or
just goin' somewheres?" He grinned again over the ancient witticism.
"Oh, I--I was just out for a walk," Marion laughed uneasily. "Where
are you going, Mr. Brown?"
"Me, I'm travelin' fer my health. Guess you aim t' git walkin' enough,
comin' away over here, this kind of a day."
"Why, I hike all over these mountains. It gets lonesome. I just walk
and walk everywhere."
Grinning, Hank glanced down at her feet. "Yes, I've seen lots of
tracks up around this way, and up towards Taylor Kock. But I never
thought they were made by feet as little as what yours are."
"Why, forevermore! I suppose I ought to thank you for that. I make
pretty healthy looking tracks, let me tell you. And I don't claim all
the tracks, because so many hunters come up here."
Hank looked at her from under his slant eyebrows. "Guess they's some
that ain't crazy about huntin' too," he observed shrewdly. "Feller
that had the lookout last summer, guess he hangs out somewhere around
here, don't he? Must, or you wouldn't be calling him. Got a claim,
maybe."
"Why do you think so? I go all over these hills, and I--"
"I was kinder wonderin'," said Hank. "I guess you must know 'im purty
well. I just happened to notice how clost them two sets of tracks are,
over by that big tree. Like as if somebody with kinda little feet had
stood around talking to a feller for quite a spell. I kinda make a
study of tracks, you see--'cause I hunt a good deal. Ever study
tracks?"
"Why, no--" Marion's smile became set and superficial. "I do wish
you'd teach me, Mr. Brown."
"Well, come on over here and I'll show yuh somethin'." He reached over
and laid his hand on her arm, and after an involuntarily shrinking,
Marion thought it wisest to let it pass. Very likely he did not mean
anything at all beyond eagerness to show her the tracks. Why in the
world had they forgotten to be careful, she wondered. But it was hard
to remember that this wilderness was not really so untrodden as it
looked when she and Jack found themselves alone in some remote spot.
She went fearfully, with uneasy laughter, where Hank led. They stopped
beside the tree where she and Jack had talked the other day. Hank
pointed down at the telltale snow.
"It's dead easy to read tracks," he drawled, "when they's fresh and
plain as what these are. They's four cigarette butts, even, to show
how long the feller stood here talkin' to the girl. And behind the
tree it's all tromped up, where he waited fer her to come, most
likely. You kin see where his tracks comes right out from behind the
tree to the place where they stood talkin'. An' behind the tree there
ain't no cigarette butts a-tall--an' that's when a feller most
generally smokes--when he's passin' the time waitin' fer somebody. An'
here's a string--like as if it had been pulled offn a package an'
throwed away. An' over there on that bush is the paper the string was
tied aroun'--wind blowed it over there, I guess." He waded through the
snow to where the paper had lodged, and picked it up. "It's even got a
pos'mark onto it," he announced, "and part of the address. It must
a'been quite a sizable package, 'cause it took foteen cents to send it
from Los Angeles to Miss Marion--"
"Why, what do you know about that!" cried Marion abruptly, bringing
her hands together animatedly. "All that's left of my opera fudge that
one of the girls sent me!" She took the paper and glanced at it
ruefully. "I remember now--that was the time Fred was sure he'd get
a--" she stopped herself and looked at him archly--"a jack-rabbit. And
I said I'd come out and help him carry it home. But he didn't have
any luck at all--why, of course, I remember! Meeting the professor
with the mail, and bringing the candy along to eat if we got
hungry--and we did too. And Fred hid behind the tree and scared
me--why, Mr. Brown, I think you're perfectly wonderful, to figure that
all out just from the tracks! I should think you'd be a detective. I'm
sure there isn't a detective in the country that could beat
you--really, they are stupid alongside of such work as this. But I
hope the tracks won't tell you what Fred said about not getting
the--er--the rabbit he shot at!" She laughed up into his face. "You
might tell," she accused him playfully, "and get us all into trouble.
I'm awfully afraid of you, Mr. Brown. I am really."
Hank Brown could read tracks fairly well, but he could not read women
at all. His puzzled gaze went from Marion's laughing face to the
tracks in the snow; from there to the paper in his hand; to the tree,
and back again to her face.
"The man's tracks went back towards Taylor Rock," he drawled out half
apologetically. "That's what made me kinda think maybe--"
"Oh, you know that, too! You know how he said he was going up there
and see if he couldn't run across a bear before sundown, and for me to
go straight home. And I'll bet," she added breathlessly, "you can
tell me exactly where it was that Kate waited for me across the
gulley, and which ankle it was that she sprained so I had to almost
carry her back to the house, and--why, I wouldn't be one bit surprised
if you could tell me what I put on it!"
"No," Hank confessed feebly, "I guess I couldn't just figure all that
out, not offhand like."
"But you knew about Fred forgetting his cigarettes, and about my
bringing him some so he wouldn't be grouchy all the way home," Marion
reminded him demurely. "I--I do think you are the cleverest boy!"
That finished Hank. Never within his recollection had a young woman so
much as hinted that she thought him wonderful or clever. Besides, Hank
was well past thirty, and it tickles a man of that age to be called a
boy.
He began to leer at her with amorous eyes when he spoke, and he began
to find frequent occasions for taking hold of her arm. He managed to
make himself odious in the extreme, so that in sheer self-defense
Marion made haste to bring his thoughts back to Jack.
"Did you say that lookout man has a claim up here somewhere?" She
started back to the road, Hank keeping close to her heels.
"I dunno--I just said maybe he had. He's up here, I know that--an' you
know it, too." He took her arm to help her up the hill, and Marion
felt as though a toad was touching her; yet she dared not show too
plainly her repulsion for fear of stirring his anger. She had a
feeling that Hank's anger would be worse than his boorish gallantry.
"I figure he's on the dodge. Ain't no other reason why he ain't never
been to town sence I packed him up to the lookout station las' spring.
'F he had a claim he'd be goin' to town sometime, anyway. He'd go in
to record his claim, an' he ain't never done that. I'll bet," he
added, walking close alongside, "you could tell more'n you let on.
Couldn't you, ay?"
"I could, if I knew anything to tell." Marion tried to free her arm
without actually jerking it, and failed.
"But you don't, ay? Say, you're pretty cute. What'll yuh give me if I
tell yuh what I do think?"
The fool was actually trying to slip his arm around her without being
too abrupt about it; as if he were taming some creature of the wild
which he wished not to frighten. Marion was drawing herself together,
balancing herself to land a blow on his jaw and then run. She believed
she could outrun him, now that they were in the trail. But at that
moment she caught sight of a figure slinking behind a stump, and she
exclaimed with relief at the sight.
"Why, there's Mike over there--I was wishing--I wanted to ask him--oh,
Mike! Mike!" She pulled herself free of Hank's relaxing fingers and
darted from the trail, straight up the park-like slope of the giant
pines. "Mike! Wait a minute, Mike. I was looking for you!"
It was an unfortunate sentence, that last one. Mike stopped long
enough to make sure that she was coming, long enough to hear what she
said. Then he ducked and ran, lumbering away toward a heavy
outcropping of rock that edged the slope like a halibut's fin. Marion
ran after him, glancing now and then over her shoulder, thankful
because Hank had stayed in the trail and she could keep the great tree
trunks between them.
At the rock wall, so swift was Marion's pursuit, Mike turned at bay,
both hands lifted over his head in a threatening gesture. "Don't yuh
chase me up," he gobbled frenziedly. "Yuh better look out now! Don't
yuh think yuh can take _me_ and hang me for a spy--you're a spy
yourself--You look out, now!" Then he saw that Marion kept on coming,
and he turned and ran like a scared animal.
Though she could not understand what he said, nevertheless Marion
stopped in sheer astonishment. The next moment Mike had disappeared
between two boulders and was gone. Marion followed his tracks to the
rocks; then, fearful of Hank, she turned and ran down the slope that
seemed to slant into Toll-Gate Basin. Hank could track her, of course,
but she meant to keep well ahead of him. So she ran until she must
climb the next slope. Once she saw Mike running ahead of her through
the trees. She wondered what ailed him, but she was too concerned over
her own affairs to give him much thought. Hank called to her; he
seemed to be coming after her, and she supposed he would overtake her
in time, but she kept on through brush and over fallen logs half
buried in the snow that held her weight if she was careful. And when
she was almost ready to despair of reaching the open before Hank, she
saw through the trees the little pasture with its log fence. Mike was
going across to his cabin, still running awkwardly.
Marion ploughed through the drifts in the edge of the timber and
slowed thankfully to a walk when she reached the corner of the fence.
Across the flat the cabin stood backed against the wall of heavy
forest. Hank would not dare come any farther--or if he did he would be
careful not to offend. She walked on more slowly, pulling herself back
to composure before she went in to face the critical, censuring eyes
of Kate.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
TROUBLE ROCKS THE PAN, LOOKING FOR GRAINS OF GOLD
Up on the peaks Jack was touching the heights and the depths of his
own nature, while the mountains stood back and waited, it seemed to
him, for the final answer. He had lived with them too long and too
intimately to disregard them now, uninfluenced by their varying moods.
He watched them in sunlight when they were all shining white and
violet and soft purple, with great shadows spread over their slopes
where the forests stood deepest; and they heartened him, gave him a
wordless promise that better times were to come. He saw them swathed
with clouds, and felt the chill of their cold aloofness; the world was
a gloomy place then, and friendship was all false and love a mockery.
He saw them at night--then was he an outcast from everything that made
life worth while; then was he almost ready to give up.
When he had waited until the sun was low, and Marion did not come or
send him a signal from the little knoll behind the cabin, he told
himself that he was just a whim of hers; that he merely furnished her
with a little amusement, gave her a pleasant imitation of adventure;
that if something more exciting came into her dull life there in the
Basin, she would never bother with him again. He told himself
cynically that she would merely be proving her good sense if she
stopped meeting him or sending those brief little messages; but Lord,
how they did put heart into a fellow!--those little dots of
brightness, with now and then a wider, longer splash of radiance,
which she told him meant "forevermore"; or, if it were very long and
curved, as when she waved the glass over her head, it meant a laugh,
and "here's hoping."
But when she did not come, or even run up the hill and send him the
one-two-three signal which meant she could not meet him that day, he
faced the long night feeling that the world held not one friend upon
whom he could depend. The next day he went out, but he was so
absolutely hopeless that he persuaded himself she would not come and
that he did not want her to come. He did not want to meet any human
being that he could think of--except his mother, and his punishment
was that he should never see her again. He had to walk for exercise,
and he might get a shot at a grouse. He was not going to meet Marion
at all. Let her stay at home, if she wanted to--he could stand it if
she could.
He tramped down the mountain toward the Basin. It was a dreary journey
at best, and today his perverse mood would not let him brighten it
with the hope of seeing Marion. She had fooled him the day before,
after she had promised to come, and he had carried that chunk of bear
meat all the way down from the cave, so now he was going to fool her.
If she came he would just let her stand around in the cold, and see
how funny it was to wait for some one who did not show up.
Near their last meeting place, on the brink of the deep gulley that
divided the Crystal Lake road from the first slope of Grizzly Peak, he
stopped, half tempted to turn back. She was keen-eyed, and he did not
want her to see him first. She should not have the chance, he
reflected, to think he was crazy about meeting her every day. If she
wanted to make it once a week, she wouldn't find him whining about it.
He moved warily on down to the place, his eyes searching every open
spot for a glimpse of her.
He got his glimpse just as she and Hank were climbing the side of the
gulley to the road. It was a glimpse that shocked him out of his
youthful self-pity and stood him face to face with a very real hurt.
They were climbing in plain sight, and so close to him that he could
hear Hank's drawling voice telling Marion that she was a cute one, all
right; he'd have to hand it to her for being a whole lot cuter than
he had sized her up to be. Uncouth praise it was, bald, insincere,
boorish. Jack heard Marion laugh, just as though she enjoyed Hank's
conversation and company--and all his anger at yesterday's apparent
slight seemed childish beside this hot, man's rage that filled him.
Any man walking beside Marion would have made him wild with jealousy;
but Hank Brown! Hank Brown, holding her by the arm, walking with her
more familiarly than Jack had ever ventured to do, for all their close
friendship! Calling her cute--why cute, in particular? Did Hank, by
any chance, refer to Marion's little strategies in getting things for
Jack? The bare possibility sickened him.
He stood and watched until they reached the trail and passed out of
sight among the trees, their voices growing fainter as the distance
and the wind blurred the sounds. Had they looked back while they were
climbing out of the gulley, they must have seen him, for he stood out
in the open, making no attempt at concealment, not even thinking of
the risk. When they had gone, he stood staring at the place and then
turned and tramped apathetically back to his cave.
What was Marion doing with Hank Brown, the one man in all this country
who held a definite grudge against Jack? What had she done, that Hank
should consider her so cute? Was the girl playing double? Loyalty was
a part of Jack's nature--a fault, he had come to call it nowadays,
since he firmly believed it was loyalty toward his father that had
cost him his mother's love; since it was loyalty to his friends, too,
that had sent him out of Los Angeles in the gray of the morning; since
it was loyalty to Marion that had held him here hiding miserably like
an animal. Loyalty to Marion made it hard now to believe his own eyes
when they testified against her.
There must be some way of explaining it, he kept telling himself
hopelessly. Marion--why, the girl simply couldn't pretend all the
time. She would forget herself some time, no matter how clever she was
at deception. She couldn't keep up a make-believe interest in his
welfare, the way she had done; if she could do that--well, like Hank
Brown, he would have to hand it to her for being a lot cleverer than
he had given her credit for being. "If she's been faking the whole
thing, she ought to go on the stage," he muttered tritely. "She'd make
Sarah Bernhardt look like a small-time extra. Yes, sir, all of that.
And I don't quite get it that way." Then he swore. "Hank Brown! That
hick--after having her choice of town boys, her taking up with that
Keystone yap! No, sir, that don't get by with me." But when he had
gone a little farther he stopped and looked blackly down toward the
Basin. A swift, hateful vision of the two figures walking close
together up that slope struck him like a slap in the face.
"All but had his arm around her," he growled. "And she let him get by
with it! And laughed at his hick talk. Huh! Hank Brown! I admire her
taste, I must say!"
Up near the peak the wind howled through the pines, bringing with it
the bite of cold. His shoulders drawn together with the chill that
struck through even his heavy sweater and coat, he went on, following
the tracks he had made coming down. They were almost obliterated with
the snow, that went slithering over the drifts like a creeping cloud,
except when a heavier gust lifted it high in air and flung it out in a
blinding swirl. Battling with that wind sent the warmth through his
body again, but his hands and feet were numb when he skirted the
highest, deepest, solidest drift of them all and crept into the
desolate fissure that was the opening to his lair.
Inside it was more dismal than out on the peak, if that could be. The
wind whistled through the openings in the roof, the snow swirled down
and lay uneasily where it fell. His camp-fire was cheerless, sifted
over with white. His bed under the ledge looked cold and comfortless,
with the raw, frozen hide of the bear on top, a dingy blank fringe of
fur showing at the edges.
Jack stood just inside, his shoulders again hunched forward, his
chilled fingers doubled together in his pockets, and looked around
him. He always did that when he came back, and he always felt nearly
the same heartsick shrinking away from its cold dreariness. The sun
never shone in there, for one thing. The nearest it ever came was to
gild the north rim of the opening during the middle of the day.
Today its chill desolation struck deeper than ever, but he went
stolidly forward and started a little fire with a splinter or two of
pitch that he had carried up from a log down below. Hank had taught
him the value of pitch pine, and Jack remembered it now with a wry
twist of the lips. He supposed he ought to be grateful to Hank for
that much, but he was not.
He melted snow in a smoky tin bucket and made a little coffee in
another bucket quite as black. All his food was frozen, of course, but
he stirred up a little batter with self-rising buckwheat flour and
what was left of the snow water, whittled off a few slices of bacon,
fried that and afterwards cooked the batter in the grease, watching
lest the thick cake burn before it had cooked in the center. He laid
the slices of bacon upon half of the cake, folded the other half over
upon them, squatted on his heels beside the fire and ate the ungainly
sandwich and drank the hot black coffee sweetened and with a few of
the coarser grains floating on top. While he ate he stared unseeingly
into the fire, that sputtered and hissed when an extra sifting of snow
came down upon it. The cave was dusky by now, so that the leaping
flames made strange shadows on the uneven rock walls. The whistle of
the wind had risen to a shriek.
Jack roused himself when the fire began to die; he stood up and looked
around him, and down at his ungainly clothes and heavy, high-cut shoes
laced over thick gray socks whose tops were turned down in a roll over
his baggy, dirt-stained trousers. He laughed without any sound of
mirth, thinking that this was the Jack Corey who had quarreled over
the exact shade of tie that properly belonged to a certain shade of
shirt; whose personal taste in sport clothes had been aped and
imitated by half the fellows he knew. What would they think if they
could look upon him now? He wondered if Stit Duffy would wag his head
and say "So-me cave, bo, so-me cave!"
Then his mind snapped back to Hank Brown with his hand clasping
Marion's arm in that leisurely climb to the trail. His black mood
returned, pressing the dead weight of hopelessness upon him. He might
as well settle the whole thing with a bullet, he told himself again.
After all, what would it matter? Who would care? Last night he had
thought instantly of Marion and his mother, and he had felt that two
women would grieve for him. Tonight he thought of Marion and cast the
thought away with a curse and a sneer. As for his mother--would his
mother care so very much? Had he given her any reason for caring,
beyond the natural maternal instinct which is in all motherhood? He
did not know. If he could be sure that his mother would grieve for
him--but he did not know. Perhaps she had grieved over him in the past
until she had worn out all emotions where he was concerned. He
wondered, and he wished that he knew.
CHAPTER TWENTY
IGNORANCE TAXES THE TRAIL OF DANGER
Mike, looking frequently over his shoulder, sought the sanctuary of
his own cabin, slammed the door shut and pulled the heavy table as a
barricade against it until he could find the hammer and some nails.
His hands shook so that he struck his thumb twice, but he did not seem
to notice the pain at all. When the door was nailed shut he pulled a
side off a box and nailed the two boards over the window. Then he
grabbed his rifle out of a corner and defied the spies to do their
worst, and hang him if they dared.
A long time he waited, mumbling there in the middle of the room, the
rifle pointed toward the door. Shadows flowed into the valley and
filled it so that only the tops of the tallest pines were lighted by
the sun. The lonesome gloom deepened and the pines swung their limber
tops and talked with the sound of moving waters along a sandy shore.
An owl flapped heavily into a tall pine near by, settled his feet
comfortably upon a smooth place in the limb, craned his neck and
blinked into the wind, fluffed his feathers and in a deep baritone
voice he called aloud upon his errant mate.
"Who! Who! Who-who!"
Mike jumped and swung his rifle toward the sound! "Oh, yuh needn't
think yuh can fool me, makin' si'nals like an owl," he cried in his
indistinct gobble. "I know what you're up to. Yuh can't fool me!"
Far across the basin the mate, in a lighter, more spirited tone,
called reassuring reply:
"Who-who-who-o-o!"
"Who! Who! Who-who!" admonished the owl by the cabin, and flapped away
to the other.
Mike's sandy hair lifted on the back of his neck. His face turned
pasty gray in the deep gloom of the cabin. Spies they were, and they
were laying their trap for him. The one who had called like an owl was
Hank Brown. The one who had answered across the flat was the girl,
maybe--or perhaps it was that other spy up on top of the mountain;
Mike was not sure, but the menace to himself remained as great,
whichever spy answered Hank Brown. Hank Brown had trailed him to the
cabin, and was telling the others about it. Mike was so certain of it
that he actually believed he had seen Hank's form dimly revealed
beside a pine tree.
He waited, the gun in his hands. He did not think of supper. He did
not realize that he was cold, or hungry, or that as the evening wore
on his tortured muscles cried out for rest. The sight of Hank Brown
talking intimately with Marion--allied with the spies, as Mike's
warped reason interpreted the meeting--had given him the feeling that
he was hedged about with deadly foes. The sudden eagerness which
Marion had shown when she saw him, and the way she had run after him,
to him meant nothing less than an attempt to capture him then and
there. They would come to the cabin when he was asleep--he was sure of
it. So he did not intend to sleep at all. He would watch for them with
the gun. He guessed they didn't know he had a gun, because he never
used it unless he went hunting. And since the county was filled up
with spies on the government he was too cute to let them catch him
hunting out of season.
He waited and he waited. After a long while he backed to the bed and
sat down, but he kept the gun pointed toward the door and the window.
A skunk came prowling through the trampled snow before the cabin,
hunting food where Mike had thrown out slops from the cooking. It
rattled a tin can against a half-buried rock, and Mike was on his
feet, shaking with cold and excitement.
"Oh, I c'n hear yuh, all right!" he shouted fiercely, not because he
was brave, but because he was scared and could not await calmly the
next move. "Don't yuh come around here, er I'll shoot!"
In a minute he thought he heard stealthy footsteps nearing the door,
and without taking any particular aim he lifted the hammer of the gun
and pulled the trigger, in a panicky instinct to fight. The odor that
assailed his nostrils reassured him suffocatingly. It was not the
spies after all.
He put down the gun then, convinced that if the spies had been hanging
around, they would know now that he was ready for them, and would not
dare tackle him that night. He felt vaingloriously equal to them all.
Let them come! He'd show 'em a thing or two.
Groping in the dark to the old cookstove, Mike raked together the
handful of pitch-pine shavings which he had whittled that morning for
his dinner fire. He reached up to the shelf where the matches were
kept, lighted the shavings, laid them carefully in the firebox and fed
the little blaze with dry splinters. He placed wood upon the crackling
pile, rattled the stove-lids into place and crouched shivering beside
the stove, trying to absorb some warmth into his chilled old bones. He
opened the oven door, hitched himself closer and thrust his numbed
feet into the oven. He sat there mumbling threats and puny warnings,
and so coaxed a little warmth into his courage as well as his body.
So he passed the rest of that night, huddled close to the stove,
hearing the murmur of his enemies in the uneasy swashing together of
the pine branches overhead, reading a signal into every cry of the
animals that prowled through the woods. The harsh squall of a mountain
lion, somewhere down the creek, set him shivering. He did not believe
it was a mountain lion, but the call of those who watched his cabin.
So daylight found him mumbling beside the stove, his old rifle across
his knees with the muzzle pointing toward the nailed door.
He wished that Murphy would come; and in the next moment he was
cursing Murphy for being half in league with the plotters, and hoping
Murphy never showed his face again in the cabin; making threats, too,
of what he would do if Murphy came around sneering about the spies.
With daylight came a degree of sanity, and Mike built up the fire
again and cooked his breakfast. Habit reasserted itself and he went
off to his work, muttering his rambling thoughts as he shambled along
the path he and Murphy had beaten in the snow. But he carried his
rifle, which he had never done before, and he stood it close beside
him while he worked. Also he kept an eye on the trail and on
Toll-Gate cabin. He would have been as hard to catch unaware that day
as a weasel.
Once or twice he saw the professor pottering around near the cabin,
gathering pieces of bark off fallen trees to help out their scanty
supply of dry wood. The pines still mourned and swayed to the wind,
which hung in the storm quarter, and the clouds marched soddenly in
the opposite direction or hung almost motionless for a space. The
professor did not come within hailing distance, and seemed wholly
occupied with gathering what bark he could carry home before the
storm, but Mike was not reassured, nor was he thrown off his guard.
He waited until noon, expecting to see the girl come out for more
plotting. When she did not, he went back and cooked a hot dinner,
thinking that the way to get the best of spies on the government is to
watch them closer than they watch you, and to be ready to follow them
when they go off in the woods to plot. So he ate as much as he could
swallow, and filled his pockets with bacon and bread. He meant to keep
on their trail this time, and see just what they were up to.
Marion, however, did not venture out of the cabin. She was very much
afraid that Hank Brown was suspicious of Jack and was trying to locate
Jack's camp. She was also afraid of Hank on her own account, and she
did not want to see him ever again. She was certain that he had tried
hard to overtake her when she went running after Mike, and that she
had escaped him only by being as swift-footed as he, and by having the
start of him.
Then Kate could not walk at all, and with the professor busy outside,
common decency kept Marion in the house. She would like to have sent
Jack a heliograph message, but she did not dare with the professor
prowling around hunting dry limbs and bark. She had no confidence in
the professor's potential kindness toward a fellow in Jack's
predicament--the professor was too good to be trusted. He would tell
the police.
Normally she would have told Kate about Hank Brown, would have asked
Kate's advice, for Kate was practical when she forgot herself long
enough to be perfectly natural. But she and Kate were speaking only
when it was absolutely necessary to speak, and discussion was
therefore out of the question. She felt penned up, miserable. What if
Hank Brown found out about Jack and set the sheriff on his trail? He
would, she believed, if he knew--for he hated Jack because of that
fight. Jack had told her about it, keeping the cause fogged in
generalities.
All that night the wind howled up the mountainside and ranted through
the forest so that Marion could not sleep. Twice she heard a tree go
splitting down through the outstretched arms of its close neighbors,
to fall with a crash that quivered the cabin. She was glad that Jack's
camp was in a cave. She would have been terribly worried if he had to
stay out where a tree might fall upon him. She pictured the horror of
being abroad in the forest with the dark and that raging wind. She
hoped that the morning would bring calm, because she wanted to see
Jack again and take him some magazines, and tell him about Hank.
In the morning it was snowing and raining by turns, with gusty blasts
of wind. Marion looked out, even opened the door and stood upon the
step; but the storm dismayed her so that she gave up the thought of
going, until a chance sentence overheard while she was making the
professor's bed in the little lean-to changed her plan of waiting into
one of swift action. She heard Douglas say to Kate that, if Fred did
decide to inform the chief of police, they should be hearing something
very soon now. With the trial probably started, they would certainly
waste no time. They would wire up to the sheriff here.
"Oh, I wish you hadn't told Fred," Kate began to expostulate, when
Marion burst in upon them furiously.
"You told, did you?" she accused Kate tempestuously. "Doug, of all
people! You knew the little runt couldn't keep his hands off--you knew
he'd be so darned righteous he'd make all the trouble he could for
other people, because he hasn't got nerve enough to do anything wrong
himself. You couldn't keep it to yourself, for all your promises and
your crocodile tears! I ought to have known better than trust you with
anything. But I'll tell you one thing more, you two nasty nice
creatures that are worse than scrawling snakes--I'll tell you this: It
won't do you one particle of good to set the police after Jack. So go
ahead and tell, and be just as treacherous and mean as you like. You
won't have the pleasure of sending him to jail--because they'll never
catch him. My heavens, how I despise and loathe you two!"
While she spat venom at them she was stamping her feet into her
overshoes, buttoning her sweater, snatching up this thing and that
thing she wanted, drawing a woolly Tarn O'Shanter cap down over her
ears, hooking a cheap fur neckpiece that she had to tug and twist
because it fitted so tightly over her sweater collar. She took her
six-shooter--she was still deadly afraid of Hank Brown--and she got
her muff that matched the neck fur. Her eyes blazed whenever she
looked at them.
"Marion, listen to reason! You _can't_ go out in this storm!" Kate
began to whimper.
"Will you please shut up?" Marion whirled on her, primitive, fighting
rage contorting her face. "I can go anywhere I like. I only wish I
could go where I'd never see you again." She went out and pulled the
door violently shut. Stood a minute to brace herself for what she had
to do, and went into the storm as a swimmer breasts the breakers.
After her went Mike, scuttling away from his cabin with his rifle
swinging from his right hand, his left fumbling the buttons on his
coat.
At the fence corner Marion hesitated, standing with her back to the
wind, the snow driving past her with that faint hiss of clashing
particles which is the voice of a sleeting blizzard. She could take
the old, abandoned road which led up over the ridge topped by Taylor
Rock, and she would find the walking easier, perhaps. But the road
followed the line of least resistance through the hills, and that line
was by no means straight. Jack would probably be in the cave, out of
the storm; she had no hope of meeting him over on the slope on such a
day. Still, he might start down the mountain, and at any rate it would
be the shortest way up there. She turned down along the fence,
following the trail as she had done before, with Mike coming after her
as though he was stalking game: warily, swiftly, his face set and
eager, his eyes shining with the hunting lust.
Up the hill she went, bracing herself against the wind where it swept
through open spaces, shivering with the cold of it, fearful of the
great roaring overhead where the pinetops swayed drunkenly with
clashing branches: Dead limbs broke and came crashing down, bringing
showers of snow and bark and broken twigs and stripped needles from
the resisting branches in their path. She was afraid, so she went as
fast as she could, consoling her fear with the shrewd thought that the
storm would serve to hold back the sheriff and give Jack time to get
away somewhere. No one would dream of his traveling on such a day as
this, she kept telling herself over and over. It was getting worse
instead of better; the snow was coming thicker and the sleet was
lessening. It was going to be quite a climb to the cave; the wind must
be simply terrible up there, but she could see now that Jack would
never expect her out in such weather, and so he would stay close to
the camp fire.
At the top of the hill the wind swooped upon her and flung clouds of
snow into her face so that she was half blinded. She turned her back
upon it, blinked rapidly until her vision cleared again, and stood
there panting, tempted to turn back. No one would be crazy enough to
venture out today. They would wait until the storm cleared.
She looked back down the trail she had followed. Wherever the wind
had a clean sweep her tracks were filling already with snow. If she
did not wait, and if Jack got away now, they couldn't track him at
all. She really owed him that much of a chance to beat them. She put
up her muff, shielded her face from the sting of frozen snowflakes,
and went on, buffeted down the steep slope where Kate had sprained her
ankle, and thinking that she must be careful where she set her feet,
because it would be frightful if she had such an accident herself.
She did not expect to meet Jack on the farther edge of the gulch, but
she stood a minute beside the great pine, looking at the trampled snow
and thinking of Hank Brown's leering insinuations. Whatever had
started the fellow to suspecting such things? Uneasily she followed
Hank's cunning reasoning: Because Jack had never once gone in to
Quincy, except to settle with the Forest Service for his summer's
work; because Jack had not filed upon any claim in the mountains, yet
stayed there apart from his kind; because he avoided people--such
little things they were that made up the sum of Hank's suspicions!
Well, she was to blame for this present emergency, at any rate. If she
had not told Kate something she had no right to tell, she would not
have quite so much to worry about.
She turned and began to climb again, making her way through the
thicket that fringed the long ridge beyond; like a great, swollen
tongue reaching out toward the valley was this ridge, and she followed
it in spite of the tangled masses of young trees and bushes which she
must fight through to reach the more open timber. At least the danger
of falling trees and branches was not so great here, and the wind was
not quite so keen.
Behind her Mike followed doggedly, trailing her like a hound. Days
spent in watching, nights spent crouched and waiting had brought him
to the high pitch of desperation, that would stop at nothing which
seemed to his crazed brain necessary to save his life and his freedom.
Even the disdainful Murphy would have known the man was insane; but
Murphy was sitting warm and snug beside a small table with a glass
ready to his right hand, and Murphy was not worrying about Mike's
sanity, but about the next card that would fall before him. Murphy
thought how lucky he was to be in Quincy during this storm, instead of
cooped up in the little cabin with Mike, who would sit all day and
mumble, and never say anything worth listening to. So Mike kept to the
hunt--like a gentle-natured dog gone mad and dangerous and taking the
man-trail unhindered and unsuspected.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
GOLD OF REPENTANCE, SUNLIGHT OF LOVE AND A MAN GONE MAD
Marion was up at the foot of the last grilling climb, the steep
acclivity where manzanita shrubs locked arms and laughed at the
climber. Fearful of a sprained ankle like Kate's, she had watched
carefully where she set down her feet and had not considered that it
would be wise to choose just as carefully the route she should follow
to gain the top; so long as she was climbing in that general direction
she felt no uneasiness, because Taylor Rock topped it all, and she was
bound to come out somewhere close to the point at which she was
aiming.
But the wall of manzanita stopped her before she had penetrated a rod
into it. One solid mass blanketed with snow it looked to be when she
stepped carefully upon a rock and surveyed the slope. She had borne
too far to the right, away from the staggering rush of wind. She hated
to turn now and face the storm while she made her way around to the
line of timber, but she had no choice. So she retreated from the
manzanita and fought her way around it--finding it farther than she
had dreamed; finding, too, that the storm was a desperate thing, if
one had to face it for long in the open.
She made the timber, and stood leaning against the sheltered side of a
dark-trunked spruce whose branches were thick and wide-spread enough
to shield her. The physical labor of fighting her way thus far, and
the high altitude to which she had attained, made her pant like a
runner just after the race. She held her muff to her face again for
the sense of warmth and well-being its soft fur gave to her cheeks.
Certainly, no one else would be fool enough to come out on such a day,
she thought. And what a surprise to Jack, seeing her come puffing into
his cave! She had not been there since the snow fell, just before
Thanksgiving. Now it was nearly Christmas--a month of solitary
grandeur Jack had endured.
She glanced up at the tossing boughs above her; felt the great tree
trunk quiver when a fresh blast swept the top; looked out at the misty
whiteness of the storm, clouded with swaying pine branches. What a
world it was! But she was not afraid of it; somehow she felt its big,
rough friendliness even now. It did not occur to her that the
mountains could work her ill, though she reminded herself that
standing still was not the best way to keep warm on such a day.
She started up again, ignorantly keeping among the trees, that a
mountaineer would have shunned. But straightway she stopped and looked
around her puzzled. Surely she had not come down this way when she
skirted the manzanita. She remembered coming in among the trees from
the right. She turned and went that way, saw her filling footprints in
the snow, and plodded back. There were tracks coming down the hill,
and she had not made them. They must surely be Jack's.
With the new wisdom of having tramped nearly every day through snow,
she studied these new tracks and her own where she had come to the
spruce tree. These other tracks, she decided, had been made
lately--she must have missed by minutes seeing him pass before her.
Perhaps she could overtake him. So she faced the wind and ran gasping
down the slope, following the tracks. She nearly caught Mike unaware,
but she did not know it. She hurried unsuspectingly past the tree
where he was hiding, his rifle held ready to fire if she looked his
way. He was hesitating, mumbling there with his finger on the trigger
when she went out of sight around a bush, still following where the
tracks led. Mike stepped out from behind the tree and came bowlegging
after her, walking with that peculiar, flat-footed gait of the
mountain trained man.
Luck was with her. Jack had gone down a gully rim, thinking to cross
it farther on, ran into rocks and a precipitous bank, and was coming
back upon his trail. He met Marion face to face. She gave a cry that
had in it both tears and laughter, and stood looking at him big-eyed
over her muff.
"Well, forevermore! I thought I never would catch you! I was going to
the cave--" Something in Jack's scrutinizing, unfriendly eyes stopped
her.
"Sorry, but I'm not at home," he said. There was more than a sulky
mood in his tone. Marion was long since accustomed to the boyish
gruffness with which Jack strove to hide heartaches. This was
different. It froze her superficial cheerfulness to a panicky
conviction that Jack had in some manner discovered her betrayal of
him; or else he had taken alarm at Hank's prowling.
"What's the matter, Jack? Did you find out about--anybody knowing
you're here? Are you beating it, now?"
"I don't know what you mean." Jack still eyed her with that
disconcerting, measuring look that seemed to accuse without making
clear just what the specific accusation might be. "How do you
mean--beating it?"
"I mean--oh, Jack, I did an awful thing, and I came up to tell you.
And Hank Brown knows something, I'm sure, and that worries me, too. I
came out to see if I could meet you, the other day, while Doug stayed
with Kate. And I ran right onto Hank Brown, and he began asking about
you right away, Jack, and hinting things and talking about tracks. He
showed me where you had waited behind the tree, and where we stood and
talked, and he guessed about my bringing cigarettes, even. He's the
foxiest thing--he just worked it all out and kept grinning so
mean--but I fooled him, though. I made him think it was Fred that had
been out hunting, and that I met him, and the package had candy in it.
I had to kid him away from the subject of you--and then the big rube
got so fresh--I had the awfullest time you ever saw, Jack, getting
away from the fool.
"But the point I'm getting at is that he suspects something. He said
you hadn't been near Quincy, and there must be some reason. He said
you didn't have any mine located, because you hadn't filed any claim,
or anything. But that isn't the worst--"
"I don't care what Hank thinks." Jack pulled the collar of his coat
closer to his ears, because of the seeking wind and snow. "Get under
the cedar, while I tell you. I was going without seeing you, because I
saw you and Hank together and I didn't like the looks of it. I was
sore as a goat, Marion, and that's the truth. But it's like this: I'm
going back home. I can't stand it any longer--I don't mean the way
I've been living, though that ain't any soft graft either. But it's
mother, I'm thinking of. I never gave her a square deal, Marion.
"I--you know how I have felt about her, but that's all wrong. She's
been all right--she's a brick. I'm the one that's given the raw deal.
I've been a selfish, overbearing, good-for-nothing ass ever since I
could walk, and if she wasn't a saint she'd have kicked me out long
ago. Why, I sneaked off and left a lie on her dresser, and never gave
her a chance to get the thing straight, or anything. I tell you,
Marion, if I was in her place, and had a measly cub of a son like I've
been, I'd drown him in a tub, or something. Honest to John, I wouldn't
have a brat like that on the place! How she's managed to put up with
me all these years is more than I can figure; it gets my goat to look
back at the kinda mark I've been--strutting around, spending money I
never earned, and never thanking her--feeling abused, by thunder,
because she didn't--oh, it's hell! I can't talk about it. I'm going
back and see her, and tell her where I stand. She'll kick me out if
she's got any sense, but that'll be all right. I'll see her, and then
I'm going to the chief of police and straighten out that bandit
stuff. I'm going to tell just how the play came up--just a josh, it
was. I'll tell 'em--it'll be bad enough, at that, but maybe it'll do
some good--make other kids think twice before they get to acting
smart-alecky.
"So you run along home, Marion, and maybe some day--if they don't send
me up for life, or anything like that--maybe I'll have the nerve to
tell yuh--" A dark flush showed on his cheek-bones, that were gaunt
from worry and hard living. He moved uneasily, tugging at the collar
of his sweater.
"You've got your nerve now, Jack Corey, if you want to know what I
think," Marion retorted indignantly. "Why, you're going up against an
awfully critical time! And do you think for a minute, you big silly
kid, that I'll let you go alone? I--I never did--ah--respect you as
much as I do right now. I--well, I'm going right along with you. I'm
going to see that chief of police myself, and I'm going to see your
mother. And if they don't give you a square deal, I'm going to tell
them a few things! I--"
"You can't go. Don't be a fool, sweetheart. You mustn't let on that
you've thrown in with me at all, and helped me, and all that. I
appreciate it--but my friendship ain't going to be any help to--"
"Jack Corey, I could shake you! The very idea of you talking that way
makes me wild! I am going. You can't stop me from riding on the train,
can you? And you can't stop me from seeing the chief--"
"I'd look nice, letting your name get mixed up with mine! Sweetheart,
have some sense!" Jack may not have known what name he had twice
called her, but Marion's eyes lighted with blue flames.
"Some things are better than sense--sweetheart," she said, with a shy
boldness that startled her. The last word was spoken into the
snow-matted fur of her muff, but Jack heard it.
"You--oh, God! Marion, do you--care?" He reached out and caught her by
the shoulders. "You mustn't. I'm not fit for a girl like you. Maybe
some day--"
"Some day doesn't mean anything at all. This part of today is what
counts. I'm going with you. I--I feel as if I'd die if I didn't. If
they send you to jail, I'll make them send me too--if I have to rob a
Chinaman!" She laughed confusedly, hiding her face. "It's awful, but I
simply couldn't live without--without--"
"Me? Say, that's the way I've been feeling about you, ever since Lord
knows how long. But I didn't suppose you'd ever--"
"Say, my feet are simply freezing!" Marion interrupted him.
"We'll have to start on. It would be terrible if we missed the train,
Jack."
"You oughtn't to go. Honestly, I mean it. Unless we get married, it
would--"
"Why, of course we'll get married! Have I got to simply propose to
you? We'll have to change at Sacramento anyway--or we can change there
just as well as not--and we'll get married while we're waiting for the
train south. I hope you didn't think for a minute that I'd--"
"It isn't fair to you." Jack moved out from under the sheltering cedar
and led the way up the gully's rim, looking mechanically for an easy
crossing. "I'm a selfish enough brute without letting you--"
Marion plucked at his sleeve and stopped him.
"Jack Corey, you tell me one thing. Don't you--want me to--marry you?
Don't you care--?"
"Listen here, honey, I'll get sore in a minute if you go talking that
way!" He took her in his arms, all snow as she was, and kissed her
with boyish energy. "You know well enough that I'm crazy about you. Of
course I want you! But look at the fix I'm in: with just about a
hundred dollars to my name--"
"I've got money in my muff to buy a license, if you'll pay the
preacher, Jack. We'll go fifty-fifty on the cost--"
"And a darned good chance of being sent up for that deal the boys
pulled off--"
"Oh, well, I can wait till you get out again. Say, I just love you
with that little lump between your eyebrows when you scowl! Go on,
Jack; I'm cold. My gracious, what a storm! It's getting worse, don't
you think? When does that train go down, Jack? We'll have to be at the
station before dark, or we might get lost and miss the train, and then
we would be in a fix! I wish to goodness I'd thought to put on my blue
velvet suit--but then, how was I going to know that I'd need it to get
married in?"
Jack stopped on the very edge of the bank, and held back the
snow-laden branches for her to pass. "You're the limit for having your
own way," he grinned. "I can see who's going to be boss of the camp,
all right. Come on--the sooner we get down into lower country, the
less chance we'll have of freezing. We'll cross here, and get down in
that thick timber below. The wind won't catch us quite so hard, and if
a tree don't fall on us we'll work our way down to the trail. Give me
a kiss. This is a toll gate, and you've got to pay--"
Standing so, with one arm flung straight out against the thick boughs
of a young spruce, he made a fair target for Mike back there among the
trees. Mike was clean over the edge now of sanity. The two spies had
come together--two against one, and searching for him to kill him, as
he firmly believed. When they had stood under the cedar he thought
that they were hiding there, waiting for him to walk into the trap
they had set. He would have shot them, but the branches were too
thick. When they moved out along the gulch, Mike ran crouching after,
his rifle cocked and ready for aim. You would have thought that the
man was stalking a deer. When Jack stopped and turned, with his arm
flung back against the spruce, he seemed to be looking straight at
Mike.
Mike aimed carefully, for he was shaking with terror and the cold of
those heights. The sharp pow-w of his rifle crashed through the
whispery roar of the pines, and the hills flung back muffled echoes.
Marion screamed, saw Jack sag down beside the spruce, clutched at him
wildly, hampered by her muff. Saw him go sliding down over the bank,
into the gulch, screamed again and went sliding after him.
Afterwards she remembered a vague impression she had had, of hearing
some one go crashing away down the gully, breaking the bushes that
impeded his flight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE MISERERE OF MOTHERHOOD
The up-train came shrieking out of the last tunnel in Feather River
Canyon, churned around a curve, struck a hollow roar from the trestle
that bridges the mouth of Toll-Gate creek, shrieked again when it saw,
down the white trail of its headlight, the whirling snow that swept
down the canyon, and churned up the stiff grade that would carry it
around through the Pocket at the head of the canyon and to the little
yellow station just beyond. A fight it would have to top the summit of
the Sierras and slip down into the desert beyond, but it climbed the
grade with a vicious kind of energy, twisted around the point of the
hill where the Crystal Lake trail crossed and climbed higher, and with
a last scream at the station lights it slewed past the curve, clicked
over a switch or two and stood panting there in the storm, waiting to
see whether it might go on and get the ordeal over with at once, or
whether it must wait until the down train passed.
A thin, yellow slip ordered it to wait, since it was ten minutes
behind time. The down train was just then screaming into Spring Garden
and would come straight on. So the up train stood there puffing like
the giant thing it was, while the funny little train from Quincy
fussed back upon a different siding and tried its best to puff as loud
as its big, important neighbor while it waited, too, for the down
train.
Two men and a woman plowed through the wind and the snow and mounted
wearily the steps of the little coach which comprised the branch
line's passenger service. The two men took it all as a matter of
course--the bare little coach with plush seats and an air of transient
discomfort. They were used to it, and they did not mind.
The woman, however, halted inside the door and glanced around her with
incredulous disdain. She seemed upon the point of refusing to ride in
so crude a conveyance; seemed about to complain to the conductor and
to demand something better. She went forward under protest and drew
her gloved fingers across the plush back of a seat, looked at her
fingers and said, "Hmh!" as though her worst fears were confirmed. She
looked at one of the men and spoke as she would speak to a servant.
"Is there no other coach on this train?"
"No, ma'am!" the man said, accenting the first word as though he
wished to prevent argument. "It's this or walk."
"Hmh!" said the lady, and spread a discarded newspaper upon the seat,
and sat down. "Thank you," she added perfunctorily, and looked out of
the window at what she could see of the storm.
The down train thundered in, just then, and with a squealing of brakes
stopped so that its chair car blotted her dismal view of the close
hillside. Between the two trains the snow sifted continuously, coming
out of the gray wall above, falling into the black shadows beneath.
Two or three bundled passengers with snow packed in the wrinkles of
their clothing went down the aisle of the chair-car, looking for
seats.
It was all very depressing, wearisome in the extreme. The lady settled
herself deeper into her furs and sighed.
She continued to sigh at intervals during the remainder of the trip.
The last and the heaviest sigh of all she heaved when she settled down
to sleep in a hotel bedroom and thought miserably of a certain
lovable, if somewhat headstrong, young man who was out somewhere in
these terrible mountains in the storm, hiding away from the world and
perhaps suffering cold and hunger.
Thoughts of that kind are not the best medicine for sleeplessness, and
it was long after midnight before Mrs. Singleton Corey drifted
insensibly from heartsick reflections into the inconsequent imaginings
of dreams. She did not dream about Jack, which was some comfort;
instead, she dreamed that she was presiding over a meeting of her
favorite club.
She awoke to the chill of an unheated room during a winter storm. The
quiet lulled her at first into the belief that it was yet very early,
but sounds of clashing dishes in a pan somewhere in a room beneath her
seemed to indicate breakfast. She would have telephoned down for her
breakfast to be served in her room, but there was no telephone or call
bell in sight. She therefore dressed shiveringly and groped through
narrow hallways until she found the stairs. The mournful _whoo-ooing_
of the wind outside gripped at her heartstrings. Jack was out
somewhere in this, hiding in a cave. She shivered again.
In the dining room, where two belated breakfasters hurried through
their meal, Mrs. Singleton Corey tried to pull herself together; tried
to shut out sentiment from her mind, that she might the better meet
and handle practical emergencies. It would not do, of course, to
announce her motive in coming here. She would have to find this Miss
Humphrey first of all. She unfolded her napkin, laid it across her lap
and waited.
"They can't do much till this storm lets up," a man at the next table
observed to his companion. "Uh course, I s'pose they'll make some
kinda bluff at trying--but believe me, these hills is no snap in a
snowstorm, and don't I know it! I got caught out, once,--and I like to
of stayed out. No, sir--"
"How's the trains, Barney?" the other called to a man who had just
come in from the office.
"Trains! Ain't any trains, and there won't be. There's four slides
between here and Keddie--Lord knows how many there is from there on
down. Wires are all down, so they can't get any word. Nothing moving
the other, way, either. It's the rain coming first, that softened
things up, and then the weight of the snow pulled things loose. Take
your time about your breakfast," he grinned. "You'll have quite a
board bill before you get away from here."
"Anybody starting out to hunt that girl?" the first speaker asked him.
"Can't do much till the storm lets up, can they?"
"Well, if they wait till the storm lets up," Barney retorted drily,
"they might just as well wait till spring. What kinda folks do you
think we are, around here? Forest Service started a bunch out already.
Bill Dunevant, he's getting another party made up."
"It's a fright," the second man declared, "I don't know a darn thing
about these mountains, but if somebody'll stake me to a horse, I'll
go and do what I can."
"When was it they brought word?"
"Fellow got down to the station about an hour ago and phoned in, is
the way I heard it," Barney said. "He had to wait till the office
opened up."
Mrs. Singleton Corey laid her unused napkin on the table beside her
unused knife and fork, and rose from her chair. She had a feeling that
this matter concerned her, and that she did not want to hear those
crude men pulling her trouble into their talk. With composed
obliviousness to her surroundings she walked out into the office,
quite ignoring the astonishment of the waitress who held Mrs.
Singleton Corey's butter and two biscuits in her hands by the table.
She waited, just within the office, until the man Barney sensed her
impatience and returned from the dining room.
"I should like to go to a place called Toll-Gate cabin," she told him
calmly. "Can you arrange for a conveyance of some kind? I see that an
automobile is out of the question, probably, with so much snow on the
ground. I should like to start as soon as possible."
The man looked at her with a startled expression. "Why, I don't know.
No, ma'am, I'm afraid a rig couldn't make it in this storm. It's
halfway up the mountain--do you happen to know the young lady that was
lost up there, yesterday?"
"Has a young lady been lost up there?" The eyes of Mrs. Singleton
Corey dwelt upon him compellingly.
"Yes, ma'am, since yesterday forenoon. We just got word of it a while
ago. They're sending out searching parties now. She was staying at
Toll-Gate--"
"Is Toll-Gate a town?"
"No, ma'am. Toll-Gate is just the name of a creek. There's a cabin
there, and they call it Toll-Gate cabin. The girl stayed there."
"Ah. Can you have some sort of conveyance--"
"Only conveyance I could promise is a saddle horse, and that won't be
very pleasant, either. Besides, it's dangerous to go into the woods, a
day like this. I don't believe you better try it till the weather
clears. It ain't anything a lady had ought to tackle--unless maybe it
was a matter of life and death." He looked at her dubiously.
Mrs. Singleton Corey pressed her lips together. Any recalcitrant club
member, or her son, could have told him then that surrender was the
only recourse left to him.
"Please tell your searching party that I shall go with them. Have a
saddle horse brought for me, if you can find nothing better. I shall
be ready in half an hour. Tell one of the maids to bring me coffee, a
soft-boiled egg and buttered toast to my room." She turned and went
up the stairs unhurriedly, as goes one who knows that commands will be
obeyed. She did not look back, or betray the slightest uneasiness, and
Barney, watching her slack-jawed until she had reached the top, pulled
on a cap and went off to do her bidding.
Mrs. Singleton Corey was not the woman to let small things impede her
calm progress toward a certain goal. She proved that beyond all doubt
when she ordered a saddle horse, for she had last ridden upon the back
of a horse when she was about fourteen years old. She had a vague
notion that all horses nowadays were trained from their colthood to
buck--whatever that was. Rodeo posters and such printed matter upon
the subject as her eye could not escape had taught her that much, but
she refused to be dismayed. Moreover, she was aware that it would
probably be necessary for her to ride astride, as all women seemed to
ride nowadays: yet she did not falter.
From her beautifully fitted traveling bag she produced a pair of
ivory-handled manicure scissors, lifted her three-hundred-dollar
fur-lined coat from a hook behind the door and proceeded deliberately
to ruin both scissors and coat by slitting the back of the coat up
nearly to the waist-line, so that she could wear it comfortably on
horseback. Her black broadcloth skirt was in imminent danger of the
same surgical revision when a shocked young waitress with the
breakfast tray in her hands uttered shrill protest.
"Oh, don't go and ruin your skirt that way! They've got you a
four-horse team and sleigh, Mrs. Corey. Mercy, ain't it awful about
that poor girl being lost? Excuse me--are you her mother, Mrs. Corey?"
Mrs. Singleton Corey, sitting now upon the bed, lifted her aloof
glance from the mutilated coat. "Set the things on the chair, there,
since there is no table. I do not know the girl at all." And she
added, since it seemed necessary to make oneself very plain to these
people: "I think that will be all, thank you." She even went a step
farther and gave the girl a tip, which settled all further overtures
toward conversation.
The girl went off and cried, and called Mrs. Singleton Corey a
stuck-up old hen who would freeze--and serve her right. She even hoped
that Mrs. Singleton Corey would get stuck in a snowdrift and have to
walk every step of the way to Toll-Gate. Leaving her breakfast when it
was all on the table, just as if it would hurt her to eat in the same
room with people, and then acting like that to a person! She wished
she had let the old catamaran spoil her skirt; and so on.
Mrs. Singleton Corey never troubled herself over the impression she
made upon the servant class. She regretted the publicity that seemed
to have been given her arrival and her further journey into the
hills. It annoyed her to have the girl calling her Mrs. Corey so
easily; it seemed to imply an intimate acquaintance with her errand
which was disquieting in the extreme. Was it possible that the
Humphrey woman had been talking to outsiders? Or had the police really
gotten upon the trail of Jack?
She hurried into her warmest things, drank the coffee because it would
stimulate her for the terrible journey ahead of her, and went down to
find the four-horse team waiting outside, tails whipping between
shivering hind legs, hips drawn down as for a lunge forward, heads
tossing impatiently. The red-faced driver was bundled to his eyes and
did not say a word while he tucked the robes snugly down around her
feet.
The snow was driving up the street in a steady wind, but Mrs.
Singleton Corey faced it undauntedly. She saw the white-veiled plaza
upon one side, the row of little stores huddled behind bare trees upon
the other side. It seemed a neat little town, a curiously placid
little town to be so buffeted by the storm. Behind it the mountain
loomed, a dark blur in the gray-white world. Beautiful, yes; but Mrs.
Singleton Corey was not looking for beauty that day. She was a mother,
and she was looking for her boy.
Two men, with two long-handled shovels, ran out from a little store
halfway down the street and, still running, threw themselves into the
back of the sleigh.
"Better go back and get another shovel," the driver advised them,
pulling up. "I forgot mine. Anything they want me to haul up? Where's
them blankets? And say, Hank, you better go into the drugstore and get
a bottle of the best liquor they've got. Brandy."
"I've got a bottle of rye," the man standing behind Mrs. Singleton
Corey volunteered. "Stop at the Forest Service, will you? They've got
the blankets there. We can get another shovel from them."
The driver spoke to his leaders, and they went on, trotting briskly
into the wind. Blurred outlines of cottages showed upon either hand.
Before one of these they stopped, and a young man came out with a roll
of canvas-covered bedding balanced upon his bent shoulders. Hank
climbed down, went in and got a shovel.
"Ain't heard anything more?" questioned the driver, in the tone one
involuntarily gives to tragedy.
The young man dumped his burden into the back of the sleigh and shook
his head. "Our men are going to stay up there till they find her," he
said. "There's a sack of grub I wish you'd take along."
He glanced at Mrs. Singleton Corey, whose dark eyes were staring at
him through her veil, and ran back into the house. Running so, with
his back turned, his body had a swing like Jack's, and her throat
ached with a sudden impulse toward weeping.
He was back in a minute with a knobby sack of something very heavy,
that rattled dully when he threw it in. "All right," he called. "Hope
yuh make it, all right."
"Sure, we'll make it! May have to shovel some--"
Again they started, and there were no more stops. They swung down a
straight bit of road where the wind swept bitterly and the hills had
drawn back farther into the blur. They drew near to one that slowly
disclosed snow-matted pine trees upon a hillside; skirted this and
ploughed along its foot for half a mile or so and then turned out
again into a broad, level valley. Now the mountains were more than
ever blurred and indistinct, receding into the distance.
"Do we not go into the mountains?" Mrs. Singleton Corey laid aside her
aloofness to ask, when the valley seemed to stretch endlessly before
them.
"Sure. We'll strike 'em pretty soon now. Looks a long ways, on account
of the storm. You any relation to the girl that's lost?"
"I do not know her at all." But trouble was slowly thawing the
humanity in Mrs. Singleton Corey, and she softened the rebuff a
little. "It must be a terrible thing to be lost in these mountains."
"Far as I'm concerned," spoke up Hank from behind them, 'they're
either two of 'em lost, or there ain't anybody lost. I've got it
figured that either she's at the camp of that feller that's stayin' up
there somewheres around Taylor Rock, or else the feller's lost too.
I'll bet they're together, wherever they be."
"What feller's that, Hank?" the driver twisted his head in his muffled
collar.
"Feller that had the lookout on Mount Hough las' summer. He's hidin'
out up there somewheres. Him an' the girl used to meet--I know that
fer sure. Uh course I ain't sayin' anything--but they's two lost er
none, you take it from me."
The driver grunted and seemed to meditate upon the matter. "What did
that perfessor wade clear down to Marston through the storm for, and
report her lost, if she ain't lost?"
"He come down to see if she'd took the train las' night. That's what
he come for. She'd went off somewheres before noon, and didn't show up
no more. He didn't think she was lost, till Morton told him she hadn't
showed up to take no train. That's when the perfessor got scared and
phoned in."
The driver grunted again, and called upon his leaders to shake a
leg--they'd have walking enough and plenty when they hit the hill, he
said. Again they neared the valley's rim, so that pine trees with
every branch sagging under its load of snow, fringed the background.
Like a pastel of a storm among hills that she had at home, thought
Mrs. Singleton Corey irrelevantly. But was it Jack whom the man called
Hank referred to? The thought chilled her.
"What's he hidin' out for, Hank? Funny I never heard anything about
it." The driver spoke after another season of cogitation, and Mrs.
Singleton Corey was grateful to him for seeking the information she
needed.
"Well, I dunno what _fur_, but it stands to reason he's on the dodge.
All summer long he never showed up in Quincy when he was relieved.
Stayed out in the hills--and that ain't natural for a young city
feller, is it? 'N' then he was ornery as sin. Got so't I wouldn't pack
grub up to him no more. I couldn't go 'im, the way he acted when a
feller come around. 'N' then when they closed up the station, he made
camp up there somewheres around Taylor Rock, and he ain't never showed
his nose in town. If I knowed what _fur_, I might 'a' did something
about it. They's a nigger in the woodpile somewheres, you take it from
me."
"Well, but that ain't got anything to do with the girl," the driver
contested stubbornly. "I know her--she's a mighty fine girl, too; and
good-looking as they make 'em. I hauled their stuff up last
summer--and them, too. They seem like nice enough folks, all of 'em.
And I saw her pretty near every time I hauled tourists up to the
lake."
Hank chuckled to himself. "Well, I guess I know 'er, too, mebby a
little better'n what you do. I ain't saying anything ag'inst the girl.
I say she was in the habit of meeting this feller--Johnny Carew's the
name he went by--meetin' him out around different places. They knowed
each other, that's what I'm sayin'. And the way I figure, she'd went
out to meet him, and either the two of 'em's lost, er else they're
both storm-stayed up at his camp. She's mebby home by this time. I
look for 'er to be, myself."
"You do, hey?" The driver twisted his head again to look back at Hank.
"What yuh going up to help hunt her for, then?"
"Me, I'm just goin' fur the ride," Hank grinned.
They overtook Murphy, plodding along in the horse-trampled, deep snow,
with a big, black hat pulled down to his ears, an empty gunny sack
over his shoulders like a cape, a quart bottle sticking out of each
coat pocket. They took him into the sleigh and went on, through
another half mile of lane.
After that they began abruptly to climb through pine forest. In a
little they crossed the railroad at the end of a cut through the
mountain's great toe. Dismal enough it looked under its heavy blanket
of snow that lay smoothly over ties and rails, the telegraph wires
sagging, white ropes of snow. Mrs. Singleton Corey glanced down the
desolate length of it and shivered.
After that the four horses straightened their backs to steady,
laborious climbing up a narrow road arched over with naked oak trees
set amongst pines. Here, too, the deep snow was trampled with the
passing of horses--the searching party, she knew without being told.
The driver spoke to the two behind him, after a ten-minute silence
against the heavy background of roaring overhead.
"Know that first turn, up ahead here? If we don't have to shovel
through, we'll be lucky."
From the back of the sleigh where he was sitting flat, Murphy spoke
suddenly. "A-ah, an' av ye don't have to saw yer trail through a down
tree, ye'll be luckier sthill, I dunno. An' it's likely there ain't a
saw in the hull outfit!" He spat into the storm and added grimly, "An'
how ye're to git the shled around a three-fut tree, I dunno."
"Sure takes you to think up bad luck, Murph," Hank retorted. "We ain't
struck any down timber so fur."
"An' ye ain't there yet, neither--not be four mile ye ain't."
Mrs. Singleton Corey, wrapped in her furs, with snow packing full
every fold and wrinkle of her clothing left uncovered by the robe, did
not hear the aimless argument that followed between Hank and Murphy.
The sonorous _shwoo-oosh_ of the wind-tormented pine tops surged
through the very soul of her, the diapason accompaniment to the
miserere of motherhood. Somewhere on this wild mountainside was Jack,
huddled from the wind in a cave, or wandering miserably through the
storm. Wrapped in soft luxury all her life, Mrs. Singleton Corey
shuddered as she looked forth through her silken veil, and saw what
Jack was enduring because she had never taught her son to love her;
because she had not taught him the lessons of love and trust and
obedience.
Of the girl who was lost she scarcely thought. Jack was out here in
the cold and the snow and the roaring wind; homeless because she had
driven him forth with her coldness; friendless because she had not
given him the precious friendship of a mother. Her own son, fearing
his mother so much that he was hiding away from her among these
terrible, mourning, roaring forests! Behind her veil, her delicately
powdered cheeks showed moist lines where the tears of hungry
motherhood slid swiftly down from eyes as brown as Jack's and as
direct in their gaze, but blurred now and filled with a terrible
yearning.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
GRIEF, AND HOPE THAT DIED HARD
During the months when she had hidden her shame in a sanitarium, Mrs.
Singleton Corey first learned how it felt to be unsatisfied with
herself. Had learned, too, what it meant to have her life emptied of
Jack's roisterous personality. She had learned to doubt the
infallibility of her own judgments, the justice of her own viewpoints.
She had attained a clarity of vision that enabled her to see herself a
failure where she had taken it for granted that she was a success. She
had failed as a mother. She had not taught her son to trust her, to
love her--and she had discovered how much she craved his love and his
trust.
Now she was learning other things. For the first time in her sheltered
life Mrs. Singleton Corey knew what it meant to be cold; bitterly
cold--cold to the middle of her bones. As Murphy had predicted, a tree
had fallen across the trail, so close to their passing that they had
heard the crash of it and had come up to see the branches still
quivering from the impact. Before then Mrs. Singleton Corey had
learned the feel of biting cold, when she waited on a bald nose of the
hill while three shovels lifted the snow out of the road so that they
could go on. Her unaccustomed ears had learned the sound of
able-bodied swearing because the horseman had taken a short-cut over
the hill and so had not broken the trail here for the team.
Then, because the driver had not prepared for the emergency of fallen
trees--rather, because the labor of removing a section would have been
too long even if they had brought axes and a cross-cut saw--she
learned how it felt to be plodding through snow to her aristocratic
knees. She had to walk a mile and a half to reach Toll-Gate cabin,
which was the only shelter on the mountainside, save the cabin of
Murphy and Mike, which was out of the question. She had to walk, since
she declined to ride one of the horses bareback; so she was tired, for
the first time in her pampered life, and she knew that always before
then she had merely played at being tired.
The driver, being unable to go farther with the sleigh, and having a
merciful regard for his four horses, turned back when the men had
lifted the sleigh around so that it faced townward. So Mrs. Singleton
Corey had the novel experience of walking with the assistance of
Murphy, whose hands were eager to help the lady, whose tongue was
eager to while away the wearisome journey with friendly converse,
whose breath was odorous of bad whisky. The other two men went ahead
with the blankets and the gunny-sack of supplies, and broke trail for
Murphy and the lady whose mission remained altogether a mystery, whose
manner was altogether discouraging to curiosity.
Those of us who have never experienced hardships, never plumbed the
black depths of trouble, never suffered desperate anguish, are too
prone to belittle the suffering of others. Mrs. Singleton Corey had
always secretly believed that suffering meant merely a certain
bearable degree of discomfort. In exalted moments she had contemplated
simple living as a desirable thing, good to purge one's soul of
trivialities. Life in the raw was picturesque.
She changed her mind with a suddenness that was painful when she
tottered thankfully into Toll-Gate cabin and found the main room
unswept and with the breakfast dishes cold and cluttered upon the
rough, homemade table. And Kate crying on a couch in the other room,
close enough to the heating stove so that she could keep the fire up
without putting her injured foot to the floor. She did not know this
disheveled woman with swollen eyes and a soiled breakfast cap and an
ugly bathrobe and one foot bandaged like a caricature of a gouty
member of plutocracy. The Kate Humphrey she hazily remembered had been
a careful product of refinement, attired in a black lace evening gown
and wearing very good imitation pearls.
But Mrs. Singleton Corey gave no more than one glance at Kate, who
hurriedly pulled her bathrobe together and made a half-hearted attempt
to rise and greet her properly. The stove looked like a glimpse of
paradise, and Mrs. Singleton Corey pulled up a straight-backed chair
and sat down with a groan of thankfulness, pulling her snow-sodden
skirts up above her shoetops to let a little warmth reach her
patrician limbs. She fumbled at the buttons of her coat and threw it
open, laid a palm eloquently upon her aching side and groaned again.
But the dauntless Mrs. Singleton Corey could not for long permit her
spirit to be subdued, especially since she had not yet found Jack.
"Well, can you get word to my son that I am here and should like to
see him?" she asked, as soon as the chill had left her a little. "This
is a terrible storm," she added politely.
Even when Kate had explained how impossible it was to get word to any
one just then, Mrs. Singleton Corey refused to yield one bit of her
composure to the anxiety that filled her. She simply sat and looked at
poor Kate like the chairman of a ways-and-means committee who is
waiting to hear all the reports.
"You think, then, that the young woman went to meet Jack?"
"I know she did. She was furious because I had not concealed the fact
of his being here, but I felt that I owed it--"
"Yes, to be sure. And where would she be most likely to meet him? Do
you know?"
"I know where she did meet him," Kate retorted with an edge to her
voice. "She couldn't have gotten lost, though, if she had gone there.
It is close to the road you traveled. Doug--Professor Harrison has led
a party up where Marion said Jack had his cave. If they are there, we
shall know it as soon as they come back."
"Yes, certainly. And if they are not there?" Mrs. Singleton Corey held
her voice firm though the heart within her trembled at the terrible
possibility.
"Well--she didn't take the train, we know that positively. She _must_
be up there with Jack!"
Mrs. Singleton Corey knew very well that Kate was merely propping her
hope with the statement, but she was glad enough to accept the prop
for her own hopes. So they talked desultorily and with that
arms-length amiability which is the small currency of polite
conversation between two strange women, and Mrs. Singleton Corey laid
aside her dignity with her fur-lined coat, and made tea for
them--since Kate could not walk.
Late in the afternoon men began to straggle into the cabin, fagged and
with no news of Marion. The professor was brought back so exhausted
that he could not walk without assistance, and talked incoherently of
being shot at, up near the peak, and of being unable to reach Taylor
Rock on account of the furious wind and the deep drifts.
Hank Brown declared that he could make it in the morning, and one or
two others volunteered to go with him. It began to seem more and more
likely that Marion was up there and compelled by the storm to stay, in
whatever poor refuge Jack might have. It seemed useless to make any
further attempt at hiding Jack's identity and whereabouts, although
Mrs. Singleton Corey, with a warning glance at Kate and a few
carefully constructed sentences, managed to convey the impression that
Jack had been hiding away from her, after a quarrel between them which
had proved merely a misunderstanding. She was vastly relieved to see
that her explanation was accepted, and to know that if Quincy had ever
heard of the auto-bandit affair, it had forgotten all about it long
ago.
Still, that was a small relief, and temporary. Until the next day they
were hopeful, and the physical discomfort of staying in that crude
little cabin with a lot of ungrammatical, roughly clad men, and of
having no maid to serve her and not even the comfort of privacy,
loomed large in the mind of Mrs. Singleton Corey. Never before in her
life had she drunk coffee with condensed cream in it, or eaten burned
bread with stale butter, and boiled beans and bacon. Never before had
she shared the bed of another woman, or slept in a borrowed nightgown
that was too tight in the arms. To Mrs. Singleton Corey these things
bore all the earmarks of tragedy.
But the next day real tragedy pushed small discomforts back into their
proper perspective. It still stormed, though not so furiously, and
with fitful spells of sunlight breaking through the churning clouds.
The men left the cabin at daylight, and Mrs. Singleton Corey found
herself practically compelled to wash the dishes and sweep the floor
and wait on the distracted Kate who was crushed under the realization
of Mrs. Singleton Corey's disgust at her surroundings. Conversation
languished that day. Mrs. Singleton Corey sat in a straight-backed
chair and stared out of the window that faced the little basin, and
waited for Jack to come. She had suffered much, and she felt that fate
owed her a speedy return of the prodigal.
Instead of that they brought Hank Brown to the cabin, dead on a
makeshift stretcher. When the shock of that had passed a little, so
that her mind could digest details, Mrs. Singleton Corey learned, with
a terrible, vise-like contraction of the heart, that Hank had climbed
ahead of the others and had almost reached the place they called
Taylor Rock, where Jack was said to have his cave. Those below had
heard a rifle shot, and they had climbed up to find Hank stretched
dead in the snow. Two men had searched the vicinity as well as they
could, but they had found nothing at all. The snow, they said, was
drifted twenty feet deep in some places.
They did not tell her what they thought about it, but Mrs. Singleton
Corey knew. And Kate knew. And the two women's eyes would not meet,
after that, and their voices were constrained, their words formal when
they found it necessary to have speech with each other.
Mrs. Singleton Corey forgot the crudities and the discomforts of
Toll-Gate cabin after that. She watched the trail, and her eyes
questioned dumbly every man that came in for rest and food before
going out again to the search. They always went again, fighting their
way through the storm that never quite cleared. They went forth, with
a dogged persistence and a courage that made Mrs. Singleton Corey
marvel in spite of her absorption in her own anxiety.
Men with fresh horses and fresh supplies came up from the valley, and
the search went on, settling to a loose system of signals, relief
shifts and the laying out of certain districts for certain men to
cover, yard by yard. The body of Hank Brown was lashed upon a horse
and taken down to Quincy, and in the evening the mystery of his death
was discussed in the kitchen, where the men sat in a haze of tobacco
smoke. Mike had been reported absent from his cabin, the day that
Murphy came up from the valley, and he had not returned. So there was
mystery in plenty to keep the talk going. One man shot dead from
ambush and three persons missing, were enough to stir the most
phlegmatic soul--and Mrs. Singleton Corey, however self-possessed her
manner, was not phlegmatic.
Stormy day followed stormy day, and still they found no trace of
Marion, got no glimpse of Jack. There were days when the wind made it
physically impossible to climb the peak and search for the cave under
Taylor Rock, dangerous to be abroad in the woods. Hank had said that
he knew about where the cave was--but Hank's lips were closed forever
upon garrulous conversation. Two or three others were more or less
familiar with that barren crest, having hunted bear in that locality.
They led the parties that turned their faces toward the peak whenever
the wind and the snow promised to hold back for a time.
They began to whisper together, out in the kitchen where they thought
that Mrs. Singleton Corey could not hear. They whispered about the
fight that had taken place up at the lookout station, last summer,
when Hank had ridden into town sullen and with blackened eyes and
swollen lips, and had cursed the lookout on Mt. Hough. It began to
seem imperative that they locate that cave as soon as possible, and
the man who had shot Hank.
Kate mourned because Fred was not there, and talked as though his
presence would right nearly everything. That, and the whispering and
the meaning glances among the men when she appeared in the room,
exasperated Mrs. Singleton Corey almost beyond endurance. Why did they
not find Jack and the girl? What possible use could Fred be, more than
any other man? Why didn't somebody do something? She had never seen so
inefficient a country, it seemed to her. Why, they had even let the
trains stop running, and the telegraph lines were all down! Nobody
seemed to know when communication with the outside world would be
possible. She might have to stay here a month, for all she could learn
to the contrary. There was just one cheerful thought connected with
the whole thing, and that was the fact that this Fred, of whom Kate
talked so much, could not be summoned. Mrs. Singleton Corey felt that
another Humphrey in the house would drive her quite mad.
Then one day Murphy came stumbling in to the cabin, just after three
or four disheartened searchers had arrived, and announced that he had
got on the track of the man that shot Hank Brown.
"An' it's Mike, the crazy fool thot did it, an' I'll bet money on it,"
he declared, goggling around at his audience. "An' what's more, the
rest of ye had betther be travelin' wit' yer eyes open, fer he's crazy
as a loon, an' he'll kill anny one that crosses his trail. An' didn't
I notice just this marnin' that his rifle was gone wit' him--me dom
eyes bein' so near blind thot I c'uldn't see in the corner where it
was, an' only fer wantin' a belt that hung on a nail there, I w'uldn't
av been feelin' around at all where the gun sh'uld be standin'. An'
it's gone, an' I mind me now the talk he was makin' about sphies in
the woods, an' thot the gurrl had betther look out, an' the feller up
on the peak had betther look out, an' me thinkin' he was talkin'
becawse av the railroad tie thot hit 'im wanct, an' hushed 'im up whin
I sh'uld 'a' been takin' 'im in to the crazy house, I dunno. An' if
he's kilt the gurrl an' the missus' boy, like he kilt Hank Brown, it's
like he's found the cave the lad was livin' in, an' is sthayin' holed
up there, I dunno--fer he ain't been near the cabin, an' unlest a tree
er a fallin' limb kilt him, he'd have to be sthayin' somewheres. Fer
he's kilt the gurrl an' the boy, an' I'll bet money on it, I dunno."
"Looks that way, Murphy--" began one, but he was stopped by a cry that
thrilled them with the terrible grief that was in the voice,--grief
and hope that was dying hard.
Mrs. Singleton Corey, having stood just within the other room
listening, made two steps toward Murphy and fell fainting to the
kitchen floor.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
TROUBLE FINDS THE GOLD THAT WAS IN THEM
After that nothing seemed to matter. The days slipped by and Mrs.
Singleton Corey cared so little that she did not count them or call
them by name. She would sit by the one window that faced the Basin and
watch the trail beaten in the deep snow by the passing of many feet,
and brood over the days when she might have won Jack and by the very
closeness of their love have saved him from this. Had she done her
part, Jack would not have lied to her about that trip to Venice; he
would not have dreamed of such a thing. It hurt terribly to think how
close she had been to happiness with Jack and how unthinkingly she had
let it slip from her while she centered her interest upon other things
that held no comfort for her now--now when all she asked of life was
to give her back her son alive.
Men came and went, and answered the heartbreaking question in her big
brown eyes with cheerful words that did not, somehow, cheer. The storm
was over, they told her, and now they would have a better chance. She
mustn't think of what Murphy said--Murphy was an old fool. She
mustn't give up. And even while they talked she knew by their eyes
that they had given up long ago, and only kept up the pretense of
hopeful searching for her sake.
Because the partition was only one thickness of boards she heard them
commenting one night on the grim fact that no smoke had been seen at
Taylor Rock, though many eyes had watched anxiously for the sign. She
listened, and she knew that they were going to give up--knew that they
should have given up long ago but for her. With no fire in the cave
none could live for long in this weather, she heard them muttering.
The cave was drifted full of snow, in the opinion of those who had the
most experience with mountain snows. The lost couple might be in the
cave, but they were not alive. One man said that they were probably
under some fallen tree--and they were many--or buried deep in a gulch
somewhere. Certainly after ten days neither Jack nor Marion nor Mike
could by any possibility be alive in the hills.
Kate was asleep and did not hear. The professor was out there with the
others--probably they thought that Mrs. Singleton Corey was asleep
also, for it was growing late. Her chapped knuckles pressed against
her trembling lips, she listened awhile, until she could bear no
more. How kind they were--these men of Quincy! How they had struggled
to keep alive her courage! She got up, opened the door very quietly,
and went out into the strong, bluish haze of tobacco smoke that
enveloped the men huddled there around the kitchen stove for a last
pipe before they turned in. She stood within the door, like "madam
president" risen to address the meeting. Like "madam president" she
waited for their full attention before she spoke.
"I wish to thank you gentlemen for the heroic efforts you have put
forth during the past week," she said, and her low-pitched voice had
the full resonance that was one of her charms as a leader among women.
"It would be impossible for me to express my grateful appreciation--"
She stopped, pressed her lips together for a minute, and when she felt
sure of her composure she made a fresh start. "I cannot speak of the
risks you have taken in these forests, but I--I appreciate your
bravery. I know that you have been in danger from falling trees,
nearly every day that you spent searching for--those who are lost. I
have learned from your conversations among yourselves how useless you
consider the search. I--I am forced to agree with you. Miss Humphrey
and Professor Harrison have long ago given up all hope--they say
that--that no one could possibly be alive.... I--I know that a mother
can be terribly selfish when her son...." Hard as she fought for
steadiness, she could not speak of it. She stood with the back of one
hand pressed hard against her shaking lips, swallowing the sobs that
threatened to balk her determination to speak a little of the humble
gratitude that filled her. The men looked down in embarrassed silence,
and in a minute she went on.
"Gentlemen, I know that you have gone on searching because you felt
that I wanted you to do it, and you were too kind-hearted to tell me
the truth. So I beg of you now to go back to your families. I--I must
not let my trouble keep you away from them any longer. I--I--have
given up."
Some one drew a long breath, audible in that room, where tragedy held
them in silence. It was as though those two lost ones lay stark and
cold in their midst; as though this woman was looking down upon her
son. But when the silence had tightened their nerves, she spoke again
with the quiet of utter hopelessness.
"I must ask you to help me get down the mountain somehow. If the
railroad is in operation I shall return home. I wish to say that while
I shall carry with me the bitterest sorrow of my life, I shall carry
also a deep sense of the goodness and the bravery--"
Proud, yes. But proud as she was she could not go on. She turned
abruptly and went back into the room where Kate slept heavily. A
little later the sound of stifled sobbing, infinitely sad, went out to
the men who sat with cooling pipes in their palms, constrained to
silence still by the infinite sadness of motherhood bereaved.
"Tomorrow morning we better start in clearing the road," one muttered
at last. "Somebody can ride down and have a team come up after her."
"It's no use to hunt any longer," another observed uneasily. "The snow
would cover up--"
"Sh-sh-sh!" warned the professor, and nodded his head toward the room
door.
In her own home, that had been closed for months, Mrs. Singleton Corey
folded her black veil up over the crown of her black hat and picked up
the telephone. Her white hair was brushed up from her forehead in a
smooth, cloudy fashion that had in it no more than a hint of marcelle
waving. Her face was almost as white as her hair, and her eyes were
black-shadowed and sunken. She sat down wearily upon the chair beside
the telephone stand, waited dull-eyed for Central to answer, and then
called up her doctor. Her voice was calm--too calm. It was absolutely
colorless.
Her doctor, on the other hand, became agitated to the point of
stuttering when he realized who was speaking to him. His disjointed
questions grated on Mrs. Singleton Corey, who was surfeited with
emotion and who craved nothing so much as absolute peace.
"Yes, certainly I am back," she drawled with a shade of impatience.
"Just now--from the depot.... No, I am feeling very well--No, I have
not read the papers, and I do not intend to.... Really, doctor, I can
see no necessity of your coming out here. I am perfectly all right, I
assure you. I shall call up the maids and let them know that I am
home, but first I have called you, just to ease your mind--providing,
of course, that you have one. You seem to have lost it quite
suddenly...."
She listened, and caught her breath. Her lips whitened, and her
nostrils flared suddenly with what may have been anger. "No, doctor ... I
did not--find--Jack." She forced herself to say it. He would
have to know, she reflected.
She was about to add something that would make her statement sound
less bald, but the doctor had hung up, muttering something she did not
catch. She waited, holding the receiver to her ear until Central, in
that supercilious voice we all dislike so much, asked crisply, "Are
you waiting?" Then Mrs. Singleton Corey also hung up her receiver and
sat there idly gazing at her folded hands.
"I must have a manicure at once," she said to herself irrelevantly,
though the heart of her was yearning toward Jack's room upstairs. She
wanted to go up and lie down on Jack's bed; and put her head on Jack's
pillow. It seemed to her that it would bring her a little closer to
Jack. And then she had a swift vision of Taylor Rock, where Jack was
said to have his cave. She closed her eyes and shuddered. She could
not get close to Jack--she had never been close to him, since he
passed babyhood. Perhaps.... The girl, Marion--had Jack loved her? She
was grown used to the jealousy that filled her when she thought of
Marion. She forced herself now to think pityingly of the girl, dead up
there in that awful snow.
She went upstairs, forgetting to telephone to the maids as she had
intended. She moved slowly, apathetically, pausing long before the
closed door of Jack's room. She would not go in, after all. Why dig
deeper into the grief that must be mastered somehow, if she would go
on living? She remembered the maids, and when she had put on one of
her soft, silk house gowns that she used to like so well, she went
slowly down the stairs, forgetting that she had a telephone in her
room, her mind swinging automatically to the one in the hall that she
had used as she came in. She had just reached it when the doctor came
hurrying up the steps and pressed the bell button. She saw him dimly
through the curtained glass of the door, and frowned while she let him
in. And then--
She knew that the doctor was propelled violently to one side by some
one coming behind him, and she knew that she was dreaming the rest of
it. The feel of Jack's arm around her shoulders, and Jack's warm,
young lips on her cheeks and her lips and her eyelids, and the sound
of Jack's voice calling her endearing pet names that she had never
heard him speak while she was awake and he was with her--It was a
delicious dream, and Mrs. Singleton Corey smiled tremulously while the
dream lasted.
"Gee, I'd like to give you a _real_ old bear-hug, but I've got a bum
wing and I can't. Gee, we musta passed each other on the road
somewhere, because I was streaking it down here to see you--gee, but
you look good to me!--and you were streaking it up there to see me--"
The adorable young voice hesitated and deepened to a yearning
half-whisper. "Did you go away up there just because you--_wanted_ to
see me? Did you do that, mother? Honest?"
Mrs. Singleton Corey snapped into wakefulness, but she still leaned
heavily within her curve of Jack's good arm. Her eyes--brown, and
very much like Jack's--stared up with a shining, wonderful gladness
into his face. But she was Mrs. Singleton Corey, and she would not act
the sentimental fool if she could help it!
"Yes, I--thought I should have to dig you out of a snowdrift,
you--young--scamp!"
"She'd a done it, believe _me_! Only I wasn't in any snowdrift, so she
couldn't--God love her!" He was half crying all the while and trying
to hide it; and half laughing, too, and altogether engrossed in the
joy of being able to hold his own mother like that, just as he had
hungered to do up there on the mountain.
It was the doctor who saw that emotion had reached the outer edge of
safety for Mrs. Singleton Corey. Over her head he scowled and made
warning signs to Jack, who gave her a last exuberant squeeze and let
the doctor lead her to a chair.
"I've got a wife out in the taxi, mother," he announced next. "She
wouldn't come in--she's afraid you won't like her. But you will, won't
you? Can't I tell her--"
"Bring her right in here to me, Jack," said Mrs. Singleton Corey,
gasping a bit, but fighting still for composure to face this miracle
of a pitying God.
Bit by bit the miracle resolved itself into a series of events which,
though surprising enough, could not by any stretch of the credulity be
called supernatural.
Mrs. Singleton Corey learned that, with a bullet lodged somewhere in
the upper, northwest corner of Jack's person, he had nevertheless
managed to struggle down through the storm to Marston, with Marion
helping him along and doing wonders to keep his nerve up. They had
taken the train without showing themselves at the depot, which was
perfectly easy, Jack informed her, but cold as the dickens.
She managed to grasp the fact that Jack and Marion had been married in
Sacramento, immediately after Jack had his shoulder dressed, and that
they had come straight on to Los Angeles, meaning to find her first
and face the music afterwards. She was made to understand how terribly
in earnest Jack had been, in going straight to the chief of police and
letting the district attorney know who he was, and then telling the
truth about the whole thing in court. She could not quite see how that
had settled the matter, until Jack explained that Fred Humphrey was a
good scout, if ever there was one. He had testified for the State, but
for all that he had told it so that Jack's story got over big with the
jury and the judge and the whole cheese.
Fred Humphrey had remembered what Jack had shouted at the boys when
they fired. "--And mother, that was the luckiest call-down I ever
handed the bunch. It proved, don't you see, that the hold-up was just
a josh that turned out wrong. And it proved the boys weren't planning
to shoot--oh, it just showed the whole thing up in a different light,
you know, so a blind man had to see it. So they let me go--"
"If you could have seen him, you wouldn't have wondered, Mrs. Corey!"
Marion had been dumb for an hour, but she could not resist painting
Jack into the scene with the warm hues of romance. "He went there when
he ought to have gone to the hospital. Why, he had the highest
fever!--and he was so thin and hollow-eyed he just looked simply
pathetic! Why, they wouldn't have been human if they had sent him to
jail! And he told the whole thing, and how it just started in fooling;
and why, it was the grandest, noblest thing a boy could do, when the
others had been mean enough to lay all the blame on Jack. And he had
his shoulder all bandaged and his arm in a sling, and he looked so--so
brave, Mrs. Corey, that--"
Mrs. Singleton Corey reached out and patted Marion on the hand, and
smiled strangely. "Yes, my dear--I understand. But I think you might
call me mother."
If it cost her something to say that, she was amply repaid. Marion
gave her one grateful look and fled, fearing that tears would be
misunderstood. And Jack made no move to follow her, but stayed and
gathered his mother again into a one-armed imitation of a real
bear-hug. I think Jack wiped the last jealous thought out of Mrs.
Singleton Corey's mind when he did that. So they clung to each other
like lovers, and Jack patted her white cloud of hair that he had never
made bold to touch since he was a baby.
"My own boy--that I lost from the cradle, and did not know--" She
reached up and drew her fingers caressingly down his weathered cheek,
that was losing some of its hardness in the softer air of the South.
"Jack, your poor old mother has been cheating herself all these years.
Cheating you too, dear--"
"Not much! Your cub of a son has been cheating himself and you. But
you watch him make it up. And--mother, don't you think maybe all this
trouble has been kind of a good thing after all? I mean--if it's
brought the real stuff out to the surface of me, you know--"'
"I know. The gold in us all is too often hidden away under so much
worthless--"
"Why, forev--" In the doorway Marion checked herself abruptly, because
she had resolved to purify her vocabulary of slang and all frivolous
expressions. Her eyelids were pink, her lips were moist and tremulous,
her face was all aglow. "I--may I please--mother--"
Mrs. Singleton Corey did not loosen her hold of Jack, but she held out
her free hand with a beckoning gesture. "Come. I'm going to be a
foolishly fond old lady, I know. But I want to hold both my children
close, and see if I can realize the miracle."
"Mother!" Jack murmured, as though the word held a wonderful, new
meaning. "Our own, for-keeps mother!"
THE END
NOVELS _By_ B.M. BOWER
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