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The Strength of the Pines

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Title: The Strength of the Pines

Author: Edison Marshall

Illustrator: W. Herbert Dunton


        
Release date: February 23, 2011 [eBook #35378]

Language: English

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THE STRENGTH OF THE PINES

by

EDISON MARSHALL

With Frontispiece by W. Herbert Dunton







Boston
Little, Brown, and Company
1921

Copyright, 1921,
By Little, Brown, and Company.

All rights reserved

Published February, 1921

The Colonial Press
C. H. Simonds Co., Boston, U. S. A.




    TO
    LILLE BARTOO MARSHALL
    DEAR COMRADE AND GUIDE
    WHO GAVE ME LIFE


[Illustration: He marked the little space of gray squarely between the
two reddening eyes.]




CONTENTS


BOOK ONE THE CALL OF THE BLOOD

BOOK TWO THE BLOOD ATONEMENT

BOOK THREE THE COMING OF THE STRENGTH




THE STRENGTH OF THE PINES




BOOK ONE

THE CALL OF THE BLOOD




I


Bruce was wakened by the sharp ring of his telephone bell. He heard its
first note; and its jingle seemed to continue endlessly. There was no
period of drowsiness between sleep and wakefulness; instantly he was
fully aroused, in complete control of all his faculties. And this is not
especially common to men bred in the security of civilization. Rather it
is a trait of the wild creatures; a little matter that is quite
necessary if they care at all about living. A deer, for instance, that
cannot leap out of a mid-afternoon nap, soar a fair ten feet in the air,
and come down with legs in the right position for running comes to a sad
end, rather soon, in a puma's claws. Frontiersmen learn the trait too;
but as Bruce was a dweller of cities it seemed somewhat strange in him.
The trim, hard muscles were all cocked and primed for anything they
should be told to do.

Then he grunted rebelliously and glanced at his watch beneath the
pillow. He had gone to bed early; it was just before midnight now. "I
wish they'd leave me alone at night, anyway," he muttered, as he slipped
on his dressing gown.

He had no doubts whatever concerning the nature of this call. There had
been one hundred like it during the previous month. His foster father
had recently died, his estate was being settled up, and Bruce had been
having a somewhat strenuous time with his creditors. He understood the
man's real financial situation at last; at his death the whole business
structure collapsed like the eggshell it was. Bruce had supposed that
most of the debts had been paid by now; he wondered, as he fumbled into
his bedroom slippers, whether the thousand or so dollars that were left
would cover the claim of the man who was now calling him to the
telephone. The fact that he was, at last, the penniless "beggar" that
Duncan had called him at their first meeting didn't matter one way or
another. For some years he had not hoped for help from his foster
parent. The collapse of the latter's business had put Bruce out of work,
but that was just a detail too. All he wanted now was to get things
straightened up and go away--where, he did not know or care.

"This is Mr. Duncan," he said coldly into the transmitter.

When he heard a voice come scratching over the wires, he felt sure that
he had guessed right. Quite often his foster father's creditors talked
in that same excited, hurried way. It was rather necessary to be hurried
and excited if a claim were to be met before the dwindling financial
resources were exhausted. But the words themselves, however--as soon as
they gave their interpretation in his brain--threw a different light on
the matter.

"How do you do, Mr. Duncan," the voice answered. "Pardon me if I got you
up. I want to talk to your son, Bruce."

Bruce emitted a little gasp of amazement. Whoever talked at the end of
the line obviously didn't know that the elder Duncan was dead. Bruce had
a moment of grim humor in which he mused that this voice would have done
rather well if it could arouse his foster father to answer it. "The
elder Mr. Duncan died last month," he answered simply. There was not the
slightest trace of emotion in his tone. No wayfarer on the street could
have been, as far as facts went, more of a stranger to him; there was no
sense of loss at his death and no cause for pretense now. "This is Bruce
speaking."

He heard the other gasp. "Old man, I'm sorry," his contrite voice came.
"I didn't know of your loss. This is Barney--Barney Wegan--and I just
got in from the West. Haven't had a bit of news for months. Accept my
earnest sympathies--"

"Barney! Of course." The delight grew on Bruce's face; for Barney Wegan,
a man whom he had met and learned to know on the gym floor of his club,
was quite near to being a real friend. "And what's up, Barney?"

The man's voice changed at once--went back to its same urgent, but
rather embarrassed tone. "You won't believe me if I tell you, so I won't
try to tell you over the 'phone. But I must come up--right away. May I?"

"Of course--"

"I'll jump in my car and be there in a minute."

Bruce hung up, slowly descended to his library, and flashed on the
lights.

For the first time he was revealed plainly. His was a familiar type; but
at the same time the best type too. He had the face and the body of an
athlete, a man who keeps himself fit; and there was nothing mawkish or
effeminate about him. His dark hair was clipped close about his temples,
and even two hours in bed had not disarranged its careful part. It is
true that men did look twice at Bruce's eyes, set in a brown, clean-cut
face, never knowing exactly why they did so. They had startling
potentialities. They were quite clear now, wide-awake and cool, yet they
had a strange depth of expression and shadow that might mean, somewhere
beneath the bland and cool exterior, a capacity for great emotions and
passions.

He had only a few minutes to wait; then Barney Wegan tapped at his door.
This man was bronzed by the sun, never more fit, never straighter and
taller and more lithe. He had just come from the far places. The
embarrassment that Bruce had detected in his voice was in his face and
manner too.

"You'll think I'm crazy, for routing you out at this time of night,
Bruce," he began. "And I'm going to get this matter off my chest as
soon as possible and let you go to bed. It's all batty, anyway. But I
was cautioned by all the devils of the deep to see you--the moment I
came here."

"Cigarettes on the smoking-stand," Bruce said steadily. "And tell away."

"But tell me something first. Was Duncan your real father? If he was,
I'll know I'm up a wrong tree. I don't mean to be personal--"

"He wasn't. I thought you knew it. My real father is something like
you--something of a mystery."

"I won't be a mystery long. He's not, eh--that's what the old hag said.
Excuse me, old man, for saying 'hag.' But she was one, if there is any
such. Lord knows who she is, or whether or not she's a relation of
yours. But I'll begin at the beginning. You know I was way back on the
Oregon frontier--back in the Cascades?"

"I didn't know," Bruce replied. "I knew you were somewhere in the wilds.
You always are. Go on."

"I was back there fishing for steelhead in a river they call the Rogue.
My boy, a steelhead is--but you don't want to hear that. You want to get
the story. But a steelhead, you ought to know, is a trout--a fish--and
the noblest fish that ever was! Oh, Heavens above! how they can strike!
But while way up on the upper waters I heard of a place called Trail's
End--a place where wise men do not go."

"And of course you went."

"Of course. The name sounds silly now, but it won't if you ever go
there. There are only a few families, Bruce, miles and miles apart, in
the whole region. And it's enormous--no one knows how big. Just ridge on
ridge. And I went back to kill a bear."

"But stop!" Bruce commanded. He lighted a cigarette. "I thought you were
against killing bears--any except the big boys up North."

"That's just it. I am against killing the little black fellows--they are
the only folk with any brains in the woods. But this, Bruce, was a real
bear,--a left-over from fifty years ago. There used to be grizzlies
through that country, you see, but everybody supposed that the last of
them had been shot. But evidently there was one family that still
remained--in the farthest recesses of Trail's End--and all at once the
biggest, meanest grizzly ever remembered showed up on the cattle ranges
of the plateau. With some others, I went to get him. 'The Killer', they
call him--and he certainly is death on live stock. I didn't get the
bear, but one day my guide stopped at a broken-down old cabin on the
hillside for a drink of water. I was four miles away in camp. The guide
came back and asked me if I was from this very city.

"I told him yes, and asked him why he wanted to know. He said that this
old woman sent word, secretly, to every stranger that ever came to fish
or hunt in the region of Trail's End, wanting to know if they came from
here. I was the first one that answered 'yes.' And the guide said that
she wanted me to come to her cabin and see her.

"I went--and I won't describe to you how she looked. I'll let you see
for yourself, if you care to follow out her instructions. And now the
strange part comes in. The old witch raised her arm, pointed her cane at
me, and asked me if I knew Newton Duncan.

"I told her there might be several Newton Duncans in a city this size.
You should have seen the pain grow on her face. 'After so long, after so
long!' she cried, in the queerest, sobbing way. She seemed to have
waited years to find some one from here, and when I came I didn't know
what she wanted. Then she took heart and began again.

"'This Newton Duncan had a son--a foster-son--named Bruce,' she told me.
And then I said I knew you.

"You can't imagine the change that came over her. I thought she'd die of
heart failure. The whole thing, Bruce--if you must know--gave me the
creeps. 'Tell him to come here,' she begged me. 'Don't lose a moment. As
soon as you get home, tell him to come here.'

"Of course I asked other questions, but I couldn't get much out of her.
One of 'em was why she hadn't written to Duncan. The answer was simple
enough--that she didn't know how to write. Those in the mountains that
could write wouldn't, or couldn't--she was a trifle vague on that
point--dispatch a letter. Something is up."




II


Before the gray of dawn came over the land Bruce Duncan had started
westward. He had no self-amazement at the lightning decision. He was
only strangely and deeply exultant.

The reasons why went too deep within him to be easily seen. In the first
place, it was adventure--and Bruce's life had not been very adventurous
heretofore. It was true that he had known triumphs on the athletic
fields, and his first days at a great University had been novel and
entertaining. But now he was going to the West, to a land he had dreamed
about, the land of wide spaces and great opportunities. It was not his
first western journey. Often he had gone there as a child--had engaged
in furious battles with outlaws and Indians; but those had been
adventures of imagination only. This was reality at last. The clicking
rails beneath the speeding train left no chance for doubt.

Then there was a sense of immeasurable relief at his sudden and
unexpected freedom from the financial problems his father had left. He
would have no more consultations with impatient creditors, no more would
he strive to gather together the ruins of the business, and attempt to
salvage the small remaining fragments of his father's fortune. He was
free of it all, at last. He had never known a darker hour--and none of
them that this quiet, lonely-spirited man had known had been very
bright--than the one he had spent just before going to bed earlier that
evening. He had no plans, he didn't know which way to turn. All at once,
through the message that Barney had brought him, he had seen a clear
trail ahead. It was something to do, something at last that mattered.

Finally there remained the eminent fact that this was an answer to his
dream. He was going toward Linda, at last. The girl had been the one
living creature in his memory that he had cared for and who cared for
him--the one person whose interest in him was real. Men are a gregarious
species. The trails are bewildering and steep to one who travels them
alone. Linda, the little "spitfire" of his boyhood, had suddenly become
the one reality in his world, and as he thought of her, his memory
reviewed the few impressions he had retained of his childhood.

First was the Square House--the orphanage--where the Woman had turned
him over to the nurse in charge. Sometimes, when tobacco smoke was heavy
upon him, Bruce could catch very dim and fleeting glimpses of the
Woman's face. He would bend his mind to it, he would probe and probe,
with little, reaching filaments of thought, into the dead years--and
then, all at once, the filaments would rush together, catch hold of a
fragment of her picture, and like a chain-gang of ants carrying a straw,
come lugging it up for him to see. It was only a fleeting glimpse, only
the faintest blur in half-tone, and then quite gone. Yet he never gave
up trying. He never quit longing for just one second of vivid
remembrance. It was one of the few and really great desires that Bruce
had in life.

The few times that her memory-picture did come to him, it brought a
number of things with it. One of them was a great and overwhelming
realization of some terrible tragedy and terror the nature of which he
could not even guess. There had been terrible and tragic events--where
and how he could not guess--lost in those forgotten days of his
babyhood.

"She's been through fire," the nurse told the doctor when he came in and
the door had closed behind the Woman. Bruce _did_ remember these words,
because many years elapsed before he completely puzzled them out. The
nurse hadn't meant such fires as swept through the far-spread evergreen
forests of the Northwest. It was some other, dread fire that seared the
spirit and burned the bloom out of the face and all the gentle lights
out of the eyes. It did, however, leave certain lights, but they were
such that their remembrance brought no pleasure to Bruce. They were just
a wild glare, a fixed, strange brightness as of great fear or insanity.

The Woman had kissed him and gone quickly; and he had been too young to
remember if she had carried any sort of bundle close to her breast. Yet,
the man considered, there must have been such a bundle--otherwise he
couldn't possibly account for Linda. And there were no doubts about
her, at all. Her picture was always on the first page of the photograph
album of his memory; he had only to turn over one little sheet of years
to find her.

Of course he had no memories of her that first day, nor for the first
years. But all later memories of the Square House always included her.
She must have been nearly four years younger than himself; thus when he
was taken to the house she was only an infant. But thereafter, the
nurses put them together often; and when Linda was able to talk, she
called him something that sounded like Bwovaboo. She called him that so
often that for a long time he couldn't be sure that wasn't his real
name. Now, in manhood, he interpreted.

"Brother Bruce, of course. Linda was of course a sister."

Linda had been homely; even a small boy could notice that. Besides,
Linda was nearly six when Bruce had left for good; and he was then at an
age in which impressions begin to be lasting. Her hair was quite blond
then, and her features rather irregular. But there had been a light in
her eyes! By his word, there had been!

She had been angry at him times in plenty--over some childish game--and
he remembered how that light had grown and brightened. She had flung at
him too, like a lynx springing from a tree. Bruce paused in his
reflections to wonder at himself over the simile--for lynx were no
especial acquaintances of his. He knew them only through books, as he
knew many other things that stirred his imagination. But he laughed at
the memory of her sudden, explosive ferocity,--the way her hands had
smacked against his cheeks, and her sharp little nails had scratched
him. Curiously, he had never fought back as is the usual thing between
small boys and small girls. And it wasn't exactly chivalry either,
rather just an inability to feel resentment. Besides, there were always
tears and repentance afterward, and certain pettings that he openly
scorned and secretly loved.

"I must have been a strange kid!" Bruce thought.

It was true he had; and nothing was stranger than this attitude toward
Baby Sister. He was always so gentle with her, but at the same time he
contemplated her with a sort of amused tolerance that is to be expected
in strong men rather than solemn little boys. "Little Spitfire" he
sometimes called her; but no one else could call her anything but Linda.
For Bruce had been an able little fighter, even in those days.

There was other evidence of strangeness. He was fond of drawing
pictures. This was nothing in itself; many little boys are fond of
drawing pictures. Nor were his unusually good. Their strangeness lay in
his subjects. He liked to draw animals in particular,--the animals he
read about in school and in such books as were brought to him. And
sometimes he drew Indians and cowboys. And one day--when he wasn't half
watching what he was doing--he drew something quite different.

Perhaps he wouldn't have looked at it twice, if the teacher hadn't
stepped up behind him and taken it out of his hands. It was "geography"
then, not "drawing", and he should have been "paying attention." And he
had every reason to think that the teacher would crumple up his picture
and send him to the cloak-room for punishment.

But she did no such thing. It was true that she seized the paper, and
her fingers were all set to crumple it. But when her eyes glanced down,
her fingers slowly straightened. Then she looked again--carefully.

"What is this, Bruce?" she asked. "What have you been drawing?"

Curiously, she had quite forgotten to scold him for not paying
attention. And Bruce, who had drawn the picture with his thoughts far
away from his pencil, had to look and see himself. Then he couldn't be
sure.

"I--I don't know," the child answered. But the picture was even better
than his more conscious drawings, and it did look like something. He
looked again, and for an instant let his thoughts go wandering here and
there. "Those are trees," he said. A word caught at his throat and he
blurted it out. "Pines! Pine trees, growing on a mountain."

Once translated, the picture could hardly be mistaken. There was a range
of mountains in the background, and a distinct sky line plumed with
pines,--those tall, dark trees that symbolize, above all other trees,
the wilderness.

"Not bad for a six-year-old boy," the teacher commented. "But where,
Bruce, have you ever seen or heard of such pines?" But Bruce did not
know.

Another puzzling adventure that stuck in Bruce's memory had happened
only a few months after his arrival at the Square House when a man had
taken him home on trial with the idea of adoption. Adoption, little
Bruce had gathered, was something like heaven,--a glorious and happy end
of all trouble and unpleasantness. Such was the idea he got from the
talk of the other Orphans, and even from the grown-ups who conducted the
establishment.

All the incidents and details of the excursion with this prospective
parent were extremely dim and vague. He did not know to what city he
went, nor had he any recollection whatever of the people he met there.
But he did remember, with remarkable clearness, the perplexing talk that
the man and the superintendent of the Square House had together on his
return.

"He won't do," the stranger had said. "I tried him out and he won't fill
in in my family. And I've fetched him back."

The superintendent must have looked at the little curly-haired boy with
considerable wonder; but he didn't ask questions. There was no
particular need of them. The man was quite ready to talk, and the fact
that a round-eyed child was listening to him with both ears open, did
not deter him a particle.

"I believe in being frank," the man said, "and I tell you there's
something vicious in that boy's nature. It came out the very first
moment he was in the house, when the Missus was introducing him to my
eight-year-old son. 'This is little Turner,' she said--and this boy
sprang right at him. I'd never let little Turner learn to fight, and
this boy was on top of him and was pounding him with his fists before we
could pull him off. Just like a wildcat--screaming and sobbing and
trying to get at him again. I didn't understand it at all."

Nor did the superintendent understand; nor--in these later years--Bruce
either.

He was quite a big boy, nearly ten, when he finally left the Square
House. And there was nothing flickering or dim about the memory of this
occasion.

A tall, exceedingly slender man sat beside the window,--a man well
dressed but with hard lines about his mouth and hard eyes. Yet the
superintendent seemed particularly anxious to please him. "You will like
this sturdy fellow," he said, as Bruce was ushered in.

The man's eyes traveled slowly from the child's curly head to his
rapidly growing feet; but no gleam of interest came into the thin face.
"I suppose he'll do--as good as any. It was the wife's idea, anyway, you
know. What about parentage? Anything decent at all?"

The superintendent seemed to wait a long time before answering. Little
Bruce, already full of secret conjectures as to his own parentage,
thought that some key might be given him at last. "There is nothing that
we can tell you, Mr. Duncan," he said at last. "A woman brought him
here--with an infant girl--when he was about four. I suppose she was
his mother--and she didn't wait to talk to me. The nurse said that she
wore outlandish clothes and had plainly had a hard time."

"But she didn't wait--?"

"She dropped her children and fled."

A cold little smile flickered at the man's lips.

"It looks rather damnable," he said significantly. "But I'll take the
little beggar--anyway."

And thus Bruce went to the cold fireside of the Duncans--a house in a
great and distant city where, in the years that had passed, many things
scarcely worth remembering had transpired. It was a gentleman's
house--as far as the meaning of the word usually goes--and Bruce had
been afforded a gentleman's education. There was also, for a while, a
certain amount of rather doubtful prosperity, a woman who died after a
few months of casual interest in him, and many, many hours of almost
overwhelming loneliness. Also there were many thoughts such as are not
especially good for the spirits of growing boys.

There is a certain code in all worlds that most men, sooner or later,
find it wisest to adopt. It is simply the code of forgetfulness. The
Square House from whence Bruce had come had been a good place to learn
this code; and Bruce--child though he was--had carried it with him to
the Duncans'. But there were two things he had been unable to forget.
One was the words his foster father had spoken on accepting him,--words
that at last he had come to understand.

A normal child, adopted into a good home, would not have likely given a
second thought to a dim and problematical disgrace in his unknown and
departed family. He would have found his pride in the achievements and
standing of his foster parents. But the trouble was that little Bruce
had not been adopted into any sort of home, good or bad. The place where
the Duncans lived was a house, but under no liberal interpretation of
the word could it be called a home. There was nothing homelike in it to
little Bruce. It wasn't that there was actual cruelty to contend with.
Bruce had never known that. But there was utter indifference which
perhaps is worse. And as always, the child filled up the empty space
with dreams. He gave all the love and worship that was in him to his own
family that he had pictured in imagination. Thus any disgrace that had
come upon them went home to him very straight indeed.

The other lasting memory was of Linda. She represented the one living
creature in all his assemblage of phantoms--the one person with whom he
could claim real kinship. Never a wind blew, never the sun shone but
that he missed her, with a terrible, aching longing for which no one has
ever been able to find words. He had done a bold thing, after his first
few years with the Duncans. He planned it long and carried it out with
infinite care as to details. He wrote to Linda, in care of the
superintendent of the orphanage.

The answer only deepened the mystery. Linda was missing. Whether she had
run away, or whether some one had come by in a closed car and carried
her off as she played on the lawns, the superintendent could not tell.
They had never been able to trace her. He had been fifteen then, a tall
boy with rather unusual muscular development, and the girl was eleven.
And in the year nineteen hundred and twenty, ten years after the reply
to his letter, Bruce had heard no word from her. A man grown, and his
boyish dreams pushed back into the furthest deep recesses of his mind,
where they could no longer turn his eyes away from facts, he had given
up all hope of ever hearing from her again. "My little sister," he said
softly to a memory. Then bitterness--a whole black flood of it--would
come upon him. "Good Lord, I don't even know that she _was_ my sister."
But now he was going to find her and his heart was full of joy and eager
anticipation.




III


There had not been time to make inquiry as to the land Bruce was going
to. He only knew one thing,--that it was the wilderness. Whether it was
a wilderness of desert or of great forest, he did not know. Nor had he
the least idea what manner of adventure would be his after he reached
the old woman's cabin; and he didn't care. The fact that he had no
business plans for the future and no financial resources except a few
hundred dollars that he carried in his pocket did not matter one way or
another. He was willing to spend all the money he had; after it was
gone, he would take up some work in life anew.

He had a moment's wonder at the effect his departure would have upon the
financial problem that had been his father's sole legacy to him. He
laughed a little as he thought of it. Perhaps a stronger man could have
taken hold, could have erected some sort of a structure upon the ruins,
and remained to conquer after all. But Bruce had never been particularly
adept at business. His temperament did not seem suited to it. But the
idea that others also--having no business relations with his
father--might be interested in this western journey of his did not even
occur to him. He would not be missed at his athletic club. He had
scarcely any real friends, and none of his acquaintances kept
particularly close track of him.

But the paths men take, seemingly with wholly different aims, crisscross
and become intertwined much more than Bruce knew. Even as he lay in his
berth, the first sweet drifting of sleep upon him, he was the subject of
a discussion in a far-distant mountain home; and sleep would not have
fallen so easily and sweetly if he had heard it.

       *       *       *       *       *

It might have been a different world. Only a glimpse of it, illumined by
the moon, could be seen through the soiled and besmirched window pane;
but that was enough to tell the story. There were no tall buildings,
lighted by a thousand electric lights, such as Bruce could see through
the windows of his bedroom at night. The lights that could be discerned
in this strange, dark sky were largely unfamiliar to Bruce, because of
the smoke-clouds that had always hung above the city where he lived.
There were just stars, but there were so many of them that the mind was
unable to comprehend their number.

There is a perplexing variation in the appearance of these twinkling
spheres. No man who has traveled widely can escape this fact. Likely
enough they are the same stars, but they put on different faces. They
seem almost insignificant at times,--dull and dim and unreal. It is not
this way with the stars that peer down through these high forests. Men
cannot walk beneath them and be unaware of them. They are incredibly
large and bright and near, and the eyes naturally lift to them. There
are nights in plenty, in the wild places, where they seem much more real
than the dim, moonlit ridge or even the spark of a trapper's campfire,
far away. They grow to be companions, too, in time. Perhaps after many,
many years in the wild a man even attains some understanding of them,
learning their infinite beneficence, and finding in them rare comrades
in loneliness, and beacons on the dim and intertwining trails.

There was also a moon that cast a little square of light, like a fairy
tapestry, on the floor. It was not such a moon as leers down red and
strange through the smoke of cities. It was vivid and quite white,--the
wilderness moon that times the hunting hours of the forest creatures.
But the patch that it cast on the floor was obscured in a moment because
the man who had been musing in the big chair beside the empty fireplace
had risen and lighted a kerosene lamp.

The light prevented any further scrutiny of the moon and stars. And what
remained to look at was not nearly so pleasing to the spirit. It was a
great, white-walled room that would have been beautiful had it not been
for certain unfortunate attempts to beautify it. The walls, that should
have been sweeping and clean, were adorned with gaudily framed pictures
which in themselves were dim and drab from many summers' accumulation of
dust. There was a stone fireplace, and certain massive, dust-covered
chairs grouped about it. But the eyes never would have got to these.
They would have been held and fascinated by the face and the form of
the man who had just lighted the lamp.

No one could look twice at that massive physique and question its might.
He seemed almost gigantic in the yellow lamplight. In reality he stood
six feet and almost three inches, and his frame was perfectly in
proportion. He moved slowly, lazily, and the thought flashed to some
great monster of the forest that could uproot a tree with a blow. The
huge muscles rippled and moved under the flannel shirt. The vast hand
looked as if it could seize the glass bowl of the lamp and crush it like
an eggshell.

The face was huge, big and gaunt of bone; and particularly one would
notice the mouth. It would be noticed even before the dark, deep-sunken
eyes. It was a bloodhound mouth, the mouth of a man of great and
terrible passions, and there was an unmistakable measure of cruelty and
savagely about it. But there was strength, too. No eye could doubt that.
The jaw muscles looked as powerful as those of a beast of prey. But it
was not an ugly face, for all the brutality of the features. It was even
handsome in the hard, mountain way. One would notice straight, black
hair--the man's age was about thirty-nine--long over rather dark ears,
and a great, gnarled throat. The words when he spoke seemed to come from
deep within it.

"Come in, Dave," he said.

In this little remark lay something of the man's power. The visitor had
come unannounced. His visit had been unexpected. His host had not yet
seen his face. Yet the man knew, before the door was opened, who it was
that had come.

The reason went back to a certain quickening of the senses that is the
peculiar right and property of most men who are really residents of the
wilderness. And resident, in this case, does not mean merely one who
builds his cabin on the slopes and lives there until he dies. It means a
true relationship with the wild, an actual understanding. This man was
the son of the wild as much as the wolves that ran in the packs. The
wilderness is a fecund parent, producing an astounding variety of types.
Some are beautiful, many stronger than iron, but her parentage was never
more evident than in the case of this bronze-skinned giant that called
out through the open doorway. Among certain other things he had acquired
an ability to name and interpret quickly the little sounds of the
wilderness night. Soft though it was, he had heard the sound of
approaching feet in the pine needles. As surely as he would have
recognized the dark face of the man in the doorway, he recognized the
sound as Dave's step.

The man came in, and at once an observer would have detected an air of
deference in his attitude. Very plainly he had come to see his chief. He
was a year or two older than his host, less powerful of physique, and
his eyes did not hold quite so straight. There was less savagery but
more cunning in his sharp features.

He blurted out his news at once. "Old Elmira has got word down to the
settlements at last," he said.

There was no muscular response in the larger man. Dave was plainly
disappointed. He wanted his news to cause a stir. It was true, however,
that his host slowly raised his eyes. Dave glanced away.

"What do you mean?" the man demanded.

"Mean--I mean just what I said. We should have watched closer.
Bill--Young Bill, I mean--saw a city chap just in the act of going in to
see her. He had come on to the plateaus with his guide--Wegan was the
man's name--and Bill said he stayed a lot longer than he would have if
he hadn't taken a message from her. Then Young Bill made some
inquiries--innocent as you please--and he found out for sure that this
Wegan was from--just the place we don't want him to be from. And he'll
carry word sure."

"How long ago was this?"

"Week ago Tuesday."

"And why have you been so long in telling me?"

When Dave's chief asked questions in this tone, answers always came
quickly. They rolled so fast from the mouth that they blurred and ran
together. "Why, Simon--you ain't been where I could see you. Anyway,
there was nothin' we could have done."

"There wasn't, eh? I don't suppose you ever thought that there's yet two
months before we can clinch this thing for good, and young Folger
might--I say might--have kicking about somewhere in his belongings the
very document we've all of us been worrying about for twenty years."
Simon cursed--a single, fiery oath. "I don't suppose you could have
arranged for this Wegan to have had a hunting accident, could you? Who
in the devil would have thought that yelping old hen could have ever
done it--would have ever kept at it long enough to reach anybody to
carry her message! But as usual, we are yelling before we're hurt. It
isn't worth a cussword. Like as not, this Wegan will never take the
trouble to hunt him up. And if he does--well, it's nothing to worry
about, either. There is one back door that has been opened many times to
let his people go through, and it may easily be opened again."

Dave's eyes filled with admiration. Then he turned and gazed out through
the window. Against the eastern sky, already wan and pale from the
encroaching dawn, the long ridge of a mountain stood in vivid and
startling silhouette. The edge of it was curiously jagged with many
little upright points.

There was only one person who would have been greatly amazed by that
outline of the ridge; and the years and distance had obscured her long
ago. This was a teacher at an orphanage in a distant city, who once had
taken a crude drawing from the hands of a child. Here was the original
at last. It was the same ridge, covered with pines, that little Bruce
had drawn.




IV


The train came to a sliding halt at Deer Creek, paused an infinitesimal
fraction of a second, and roared on in its ceaseless journey. That
infinitesimal fraction was long enough for Bruce, poised on the bottom
step of a sleeping car, to swing down on to the gravel right-of-way. His
bag, hurled by a sleepy porter, followed him.

He turned first to watch the vanishing tail light, speeding so swiftly
into the darkness; and curiously all at once it blinked out. But it was
not that the switchmen were neglectful of their duties. In this certain
portion of the Cascades the railroad track is constructed something
after the manner of a giant screw, coiling like a great serpent up the
ridges, and the train had simply vanished around a curve.

Duncan's next impression was one of infinite solitude. He hadn't read
any guidebooks about Deer Creek, and he had expected some sort of town.
A western mining camp, perhaps, where the windows of a dance hall would
gleam through the darkness; or one of those curious little
mushroom-growth cities that are to be found all over the West. But at
Deer Creek there was one little wooden structure with only three
sides,--the opening facing the track. It was evidently the waiting room
used by the mountain men as they waited for their local trains.

There were no porters to carry his bag. There were no shouting
officials. His only companions were the stars and the moon and, farther
up the slope, certain tall trees that tapered to incredible points
almost in the region where the stars began. The noise of the train died
quickly. It vanished almost as soon as the dot of red that had been its
tail light. It was true that he heard a faint pulsing far below him, a
sound that was probably the chug of the steam, but it only made an
effective background for the silence. It was scarcely more to be heard
than the pulse of his own blood; and as he waited even this faded and
died away.

The moon cast his shadow on the yellow grass beside the crude station,
and a curious flood of sensations--scarcely more tangible than its
silver light--came over him. The moment had a quality of enchantment;
and why he did not know. His throat suddenly filled, a curious weight
and pain came to his eyelids, a quiver stole over his nerves. He stood
silent with lifted face,--a strange figure in that mystery of moonlight.

The whole scene, for causes deeper than any words may ever seek and
reveal, moved him past any experience in his life. It was wholly new.
When he had gone to sleep in his berth, earlier that same night, the
train had been passing through a level, fertile valley that might have
been one of the river bottoms beyond the Mississippi. When darkness had
come down he had been in a great city in the northern part of the
State,--a noisy, busy place that was not greatly different from the city
whence he had come. But now he seemed in a different world.

Possibly, in the long journey to the West, he had passed through forest
before. But some way their appeal had not got to him. He was behind
closed windows, his thoughts had been busy with reading and other
occupations of travel. There had been no shading off, no gradations; he
had come straight from a great seat of civilization to the heart of the
wilderness.

He turned about until the wind was in his face. It was full of
fragrances,--strange, indescribable smells that seemed to call up a
forgotten world. They carried a message to him, but as yet he hadn't
made out its meaning. He only knew it was something mysterious and
profound: great truths that flickered, like dim lights, in his
consciousness, but whose outline he could not quite discern. They went
straight home to him, those night smells from the forest. One of them
was a balsam: a fragrance that once experienced lingers ever in the
memory and calls men back to it in the end. Those who die in its
fragrance, just as those who go to sleep, feel sure of having pleasant
dreams. There were other smells too--delicate perfumes from mountain
flowers that were deep-hidden in the grass--and many others, the nature
of which he could not even guess.

Perhaps there were sounds, but they only seemed part of the silence. The
faintest rustle in the world reached him from the forests above of many
little winds playing a running game between the trunks, and the stir of
the Little People, moving in their midnight occupations. Each of these
sounds had its message for Bruce. They all seemed to be trying to tell
him something, to make clear some great truth that was dawning in his
consciousness.

He was not in the least afraid. He felt at peace as never before. He
picked up his bag, and with stealing steps approached the long slope
behind. The moon showed him a fallen log, and he found a comfortable
seat on the ground beside it, his back against its bark. Then he waited
for the dawn to come out.

Not even Bruce knew or understood all the thoughts that came over him in
that lonely wait. But he did have a peculiar sense of expectation, a
realization that the coming of the dawn would bring him a message
clearer than all these messages of fragrance and sound. The moon made
wide silver patches between the distant trees; but as yet the forest had
not opened its secrets to him. As yet it was but a mystery, a profundity
of shadows and enchantment that he did not understand.

The night hours passed. The sense of peace seemed to deepen on the man.
He sat relaxed, his brown face grave, his eyes lifted. The stars began
to dim and draw back farther into the recesses of the sky. The round
outline of the moon seemed less pronounced. And a faint ribbon of light
began to grow in the east.

It widened. The light grew. The night wind played one more little game
between the tree trunks and slipped away to the Home of Winds that lies
somewhere above the mountains. The little night sounds were slowly
stilled.

Bruce closed his eyes, not knowing why. His blood was leaping in his
veins. An unfamiliar excitement, almost an exultation, had come upon
him. He lowered his head nearly to his hands that rested in his lap,
then waited a full five minutes more.

Then he opened his eyes. The light had grown around him. His hands were
quite plain. Slowly, as a man raises his eyes to a miracle, he lifted
his face.

The forest was no longer obscured in darkness. The great trees had
emerged, and only the dusk as of twilight was left between. He saw them
plainly,--their symmetrical forms, their declining limbs, their tall
tops piercing the sky. He saw them as they were,--those ancient, eternal
symbols and watchmen of the wilderness. And he knew them at last,
acquaintances long forgotten but remembered now.

"The pines!" he cried. He leaped to his feet with flashing eyes. "I have
come back to the pines!"




V


The dawn revealed a narrow road along the bank of Deer Creek,--a brown
little wanderer which, winding here and there, did not seem to know
exactly where it wished to go. It seemed to follow the general direction
of the creek bed; it seemed to be a prying, restless little highway,
curious about things in general as the wild creatures that sometimes
made tracks in its dust, thrusting now into a heavy thicket, now
crossing the creek to examine a green and grassy bank on the opposite
side, now taking an adventurous tramp about the shoulder of a hill,
circling back for a drink in the creek and hurrying on again. It made
singular loops; it darted off at a right and left oblique; it made
sudden spurts and turns seemingly without reason or sense, and at last
it dimmed away into the fading mists of early morning. Bruce didn't know
which direction to take, whether up or down the creek.

He gave the problem a moment's thought. "Take the road up the Divide,"
Barney Wegan had said; and at once Bruce knew that the course lay up the
creek, rather than down. A divide means simply the high places between
one water-shed and another, and of course Trail's End lay somewhere
beyond the source of the stream. The creek itself was apparently a
sub-tributary of the Rogue, the great river to the south.

There was something pleasing to his spirit in the sight of the little
stream, tumbling and rippling down its rocky bed. He had no vivid
memories of seeing many waterways. The river that flowed through the
city whence he had come had not been like this at all. It had been a
great, slow-moving sheet of water, the banks of which were lined with
factories and warehouses. The only lining of the banks of this little
stream were white-barked trees, lovely groves with leaves of glossy
green. It was a cheery, eager little waterway, and more than once--as he
went around a curve in the road--it afforded him glimpses of really
striking beauty. Sometimes it was just a shimmer of its waters beneath
low-hanging bushes, sometimes a distant cataract, and once or twice a
long, still place on which the shadows were still deep.

These sloughs were obviously the result of dams, and at first he could
not understand what had been the purpose of dam-building in this lonely
region. There seemed to be no factories needing water power, no
slow-moving mill wheels. He left the road to investigate. And he
chuckled with delight when he knew the truth.

These dams had not been the work of men at all. Rather they were
structures laid down by those curious little civil engineers, the
beavers. The cottonwood trees had been felled so that the thick branches
had lain across the waters, and in their own secret ways the limbs had
been matted and caked until no water could pass through. True, the
beavers themselves did not emerge for him to converse with. Perhaps
they were busy at their under-water occupations, and possibly the
trappers who sooner or later penetrate every wilderness had taken them
all away. He looked along the bank for further evidence of the beavers'
work.

Wonderful as the dams were, he found plenty of evidence that the beavers
had not always used to advantage the crafty little brains that nature
has given them. They had made plenty of mistakes. But these very
blunders gave Bruce enough delight almost to pay for the extra work they
had occasioned. After all, he considered, human beings in their works
are often just as short-sighted. For instance, he found tall trees lying
rotting and out of reach, many feet back from the stream. The beavers
had evidently felled them in high water, forgetting that the stream
dwindled in summer and the trees would be of no use to them. They had
been an industrious colony! He found short poles of cottonwood sharpened
at the end, as if the little fur bearers had intended them for braces,
but which--through some wilderness tragedy--had never been utilized.

But Bruce was in a mood to be delighted, these early morning hours. He
was on the way to Linda; a dream was about to come true. The whole
adventure was of the most thrilling and joyous anticipations. He did not
feel the load of his heavy suitcase. It was nothing to his magnificent
young strength. And all at once he beheld an amazing change in the
appearance of the stream.

It had abruptly changed to a stream of melted, shimmering silver. The
waters broke on the rocks with opalescent spray; the whole coloring was
suggestive of the vivid tints of a Turner landscape. The waters gleamed;
they danced and sparkled as they sped about the boulders of the river
bed; the leaves shimmered above them. And it was all because the sun had
risen at last above the mountain range and was shining down.

At first Bruce could hardly believe that just sunlight could effect such
a transformation. For no other reason than that he couldn't resist doing
so, he left his bag on the road and crept down to the water's edge.

He stood very still. It seemed to him that some one had told him, far
away and long ago, that if he wished to see miracles he had only to
stand very still. Not to move a muscle, so that his vivid shadow would
not even waver. It is a trait possessed by all men of the wilderness,
but it takes time for city men to learn it. He waited a long time. And
all at once the shining surface of a deep pool below him broke with a
fountain of glittering spray.

Something that was like light itself flung into the air and down again
with a splash. Bruce shouted then. He simply couldn't help it. And all
the time there was a strange straining and travail in his brain, as if
it were trying to give birth to a memory from long ago. He knew now what
had made that glittering arc. Such a common thing,--it was singular that
it should yield him such delight. It was a trout, leaping for an insect
that had fallen on the waters.

It was strange that he had such a sense of familiarity with trout. True,
he had heard Barney Wegan tell of them. He had listened to many tales of
the way they seized a fly, how the reel would spin, and how they would
fight to absolute exhaustion before they would yield to the landing net.
"The King among fish," Barney had called them. Yet the tales seemingly
had meant little to him then. His interest in them had been superficial
only; and they had seemed as distant and remote as the marsupials of
Australia. But it wasn't this way now. He had a sense of long and close
acquaintance, of an interest such as men have in their own townsmen.

He went on, and the forest world opened before him. Once a flock of
grouse--a hen and a dozen half-grown chickens--scurried away through the
underbrush at the sound of his step. One instant, and he had a clear
view of the entire covey. The next, and they had vanished like so many
puffs of smoke. He had a delicious game of hide-and-seek with them
through the coverts, but he was out-classed in every particular. He knew
that the birds were all within forty feet of him, each of them pressed
flat to the brown earth, but in this maze of light and shadow he could
not detect their outline. Nature has been kind to the grouse family in
the way of protective coloration. He had to give up the search and
continue up the creek for further adventure.

Once a pair of mallards winged by on a straight course above his head.
Their sudden appearance rather surprised him. These beautiful game
birds are usually habitants of the lower lakes and marshes, not
rippling mountain streams. He didn't know that a certain number of these
winged people nested every year along the Rogue River, far below, and
made rapturous excursions up and down its tributaries. Mallards do not
have to have aeroplanes to cover distance quickly. They are the very
masters of the aerial lanes, and in all probability this pair had come
forty miles already that morning. Where they would be at dark no man
could guess. Their wings whistled down to him, and it seemed to him that
the drake stretched down his bright green head for a better look. Then
he spurted ahead, faster than ever.

Once, at a distance, Bruce caught a glimpse of a pair of peculiar,
little, sawed-off, plump-breasted ducks that wagged their tails, as if
in signals, in a still place above a dam. He made a wide circle,
intending to wheel back to the creekside for a closer inspection of the
singular flirtation of those bobbing, fan-like tails. He rather thought
he could outwit these little people, at least. But when he turned back
to the water's edge they were nowhere to be seen.

If he had had more experience with the creatures of the wild he could
have explained this mysterious disappearance. These little
ducks--"ruddies" the sportsmen call them--have advantages other than an
extra joint in their tails. One of them seems to be a total and
unprincipled indifference to the available supply of oxygen. When they
wish to go out of sight they simply duck beneath the water and stay
apparently as long as they desire. Of course they have to come up some
time--but usually it is just the tip of a bill--like the top of a
river-bottom weed, thrust above the surface. Bruce gaped in amazement,
but he chuckled again when he discovered his birds farther up the creek,
just as far distant from him as ever.

The sun rose higher, and he began to feel its power. But it was a kindly
heat. The temperature was much higher than was commonly met in the
summers of the city, but there was little moisture in the air to make it
oppressive. The sweat came out on his bronze face, but he never felt
better in his life. There was but one great need, and that was
breakfast.

A man of his physique feels hunger quickly. The sensation increased in
intensity, and the suitcase grew correspondingly heavy. And all at once
he stopped short in the road. The impulse along his nerves to his leg
muscles was checked, like an electric current at the closing of a
switch, and an instinct of unknown origin struggled for expression
within him.

In an instant he had it. He didn't know whence it came. It was nothing
he had read or that any one had told him. It seemed to be rather the
result of some experience in his own immediate life, an occurrence of so
long ago that he had forgotten it. He suddenly knew where he could find
his breakfast. There was no need of toiling farther on an empty stomach
in this verdant season of the year. He set his suitcase down, and with
the confidence of a man who hears the dinner call in his own home, he
struck off into the thickets beside the creek bed. Instinct--and really,
after all, instinct is nothing but memory--led his steps true.

He glanced here and there, not even wondering at the singular fact that
he did not know exactly what manner of food he was seeking. In a moment
he came to a growth of thorn-covered bushes, a thicket that only the
she-bear knew how to penetrate. But it was enough for Bruce just to
stand at its edges. The bushes were bent down with a load of delicious
berries.

He wasn't in the least surprised. He had known that he would find them.
Always, at this season of the year, the woods were rich with them; one
only had to slip quickly through the back door--while the mother's eye
was elsewhere--to find enough of them not only to pack the stomach full
but to stain and discolor most of the face. It seemed a familiar thing
to be plucking the juicy berries and cramming them into his mouth,
impervious as the old she-bear to the remonstrance of the thorns. But it
seemed to him that he reached them easier than he expected. Either the
bushes were not so tall as he remembered them, or--since his first
knowledge of them--his own stature had increased.

When he had eaten the last berry he could possibly hold, he went to the
creek to drink. He lay down beside a still pool, and the water was cold
to his lips. Then he rose at the sound of an approaching motor car
behind him.

The driver--evidently a cattleman--stopped his car and looked at Bruce
with some curiosity. He marked the perfectly fitting suit of dark
flannel, the trim, expensive shoes that were already dust-stained, the
silken shirt on which a juicy berry had been crushed. "Howdy," the man
said after the western fashion. He was evidently simply feeling
companionable and was looking for a moment's chat. It is a desire that
often becomes very urgent and most real after enough lonely days in the
wilderness.

"How do you do," Bruce replied. "How far to Martin's store?"

The man filled his pipe with great care before he answered. "Jump in the
car," he replied at last, "and I'll show you. I'm going up that way
myself."




VI


Martin's was a typical little mountain store, containing a small sample
of almost everything under the sun and built at the forks in the road.
The ranchman let Bruce off at the store; then turned up the right-hand
road that led to certain bunch-grass lands to the east. Bruce entered
slowly, and the little group of loungers gazed at him with frank
curiosity.

Only one of them was of a type sufficiently distinguished so that
Bruce's own curiosity was aroused. This was a huge, dark man who stood
alone almost at the rear of the building,--a veritable giant with
savage, bloodhound lips and deep-sunken eyes. There was a quality in his
posture that attracted Bruce's attention at once. No one could look at
him and doubt that he was a power in these mountain realms. He seemed
perfectly secure in his great strength and wholly cognizant of the hate
and fear, and at the same time, the strange sort of admiration with
which the others regarded him.

He was dressed much as the other mountain men who had assembled in the
store. He wore a flannel shirt over his gorilla chest, and corduroy
trousers stuffed into high, many-seamed riding boots. A dark felt hat
was crushed on to his huge head. But there was an aloofness about the
man; and Bruce realized at once he had taken no part in the friendly
gossip that had been interrupted by his entrance.

The dark eyes were full upon Bruce's face. He felt them--just as if they
had the power of actual physical impact--the instant that he was inside
the door. Nor was it the ordinary look of careless speculation or
friendly interest. Mountain men have not been taught it is not good
manners to stare, but no traveler who falls swiftly into the spirit of
the forest ordinarily resents their open inspection. But this look was
different. It was such that no man, to whom self-respect is dear, could
possibly disregard. It spoke clearly as words.

Bruce flushed, and his blood made a curious little leap. He slowly
turned. His gaze moved until it rested full upon the man's eyes. It
seemed to Bruce that the room grew instantly quiet. The merchant no
longer tied up his bundles at the counter. The watching mountain men
that he beheld out of the corners of his eyes all seemed to be standing
in peculiar fixed attitudes, waiting for some sort of explosion. It took
all of Bruce's strength to hold that gaze. The moment was charged with a
mysterious suspense.

The stranger's face changed too. He did not flush, however. His lips
curled ever so slightly, revealing an instant's glimpse of strong,
rather well-kept teeth. His eyes were narrowing too; and they seemed to
come to life with singular sparkles and glowings between the lids.

"Well?" he suddenly demanded. Every man in the room--except
one--started. The one exception was Bruce himself. He was holding hard
on his nerve control, and he only continued to stare coldly.

"Are you the merchant?" Bruce asked.

"No, I ain't," the other replied. "You usually look for the merchant
behind the counter."

There was no smile on the faces of the waiting mountain men, usually to
be expected when one of their number achieves repartee on a tenderfoot.
Nevertheless, the tension was broken. Bruce turned to the merchant.

"I would like to have you tell me," he said quite clearly, "the way to
Mrs. Ross's cabin."

The merchant seemed to wait a long time before replying. His eye stole
to the giant's face, found the lips curled in a smile; then he flushed.
"Take the left-hand road," he said with a trace of defiance in his tone.
"It soon becomes a trail, but keep right on going up it. At the fork in
the trail you'll find her cabin."

"How far is it, please?"

"Two hours' walk; you can make it easy by four o'clock."

"Thank you." His eyes glanced over the stock of goods and he selected a
few edibles to give him strength for the walk. "I'll leave my suitcase
here if I may," he said, "and will call for it later." He turned to go.

"Wait just a minute," a voice spoke behind him. It was a commanding
tone--implying the expectation of obedience. Bruce half turned. "Simon
wants to talk to you," the merchant explained.

"I'll walk with you a way and show you the road," Simon continued. The
room seemed deathly quiet as the two men went out together.

They walked side by side until a turn of the road took them out of
eye-range of the store. "This is the road," Simon said. "All you have to
do is follow it. Cabins are not so many that you could mistake it. But
the main thing is--whether or not you want to go."

Bruce had no misunderstanding about the man's meaning. It was simply a
threat, nothing more nor less.

"I've come a long way to go to that cabin," he replied. "I'm not likely
to turn off now."

"There's nothing worth seeing when you get there. Just an old hag--a
wrinkled old dame that looks like a witch."

Bruce felt a deep and little understood resentment at the words. Yet
since he had as yet established no relations with the woman, he had no
grounds for silencing the man. "I'll have to decide that," he replied.
"I'm going to see some one else, too."

"Some one named--Linda?"

"Yes. You seem quite interested."

They were standing face to face in the trail. For once Bruce was glad of
his unusual height. He did not have to raise his eyes greatly to look
squarely into Simon's. Both faces were flushed, both set; and the eyes
of the older man brightened slowly.

"I am interested," Simon replied. "You're a tenderfoot. You're fresh
from cities. You're going up there to learn things that won't be any
pleasure to you. You're going into the real mountains--a man's land such
as never was a place for tenderfeet. A good many things can happen up
there. A good many things have happened up there. I warn you--go back!"

Bruce smiled, just the faint flicker of a smile, but Simon's eyes
narrowed when he saw it. The dark face lost a little of its insolence.
He knew men, this huge son of the wilderness, and he knew that no coward
could smile in such a moment as this. He was accustomed to implicit
obedience and was not used to seeing men smile when he uttered a threat.
"I've come too far to go back," Bruce told him. "Nothing can turn me."

"Men have been turned before, on trails like this," Simon told him.
"Don't misunderstand me. I advised you to go back before, and I usually
don't take time or trouble to advise any one. Now I _tell_ you to go
back. This is a man's land, and we don't want any tenderfeet here."

"The trail is open," Bruce returned. It was not his usual manner to
speak in quite this way. He seemed at once to have fallen into the
vernacular of the wilderness of which symbolic reference has such a
part. Strange as the scene was to him, it was in some way familiar too.
It was as if this meeting had been ordained long ago; that it was part
of an inexorable destiny that the two should be talking together, face
to face, on this winding mountain road. Memories--all vague, all
unrecognized--thronged through him.

Many times, during the past years, he had wakened from curious dreams
that in the light of day he had tried in vain to interpret. He was never
able to connect them with any remembered experience. Now it was as if
one of these dreams were coming true. There was the same silence about
him, the dark forests beyond, the ridges stretching ever. There was some
great foe that might any instant overwhelm him.

"I guess you heard me," Simon said; "I told you to go back."

"And I hope you heard me too. I'm going on. I haven't any more time to
give you."

"And I'm not going to take any more, either. But let me make one thing
plain. No man, told to go back by me, ever has a chance to be told
again. This ain't your cities--up here. There ain't any policeman on
every corner. The woods are big, and all kinds of things can happen in
them--and be swallowed up--as I swallow these leaves in my hand."

His great arm reached out with incredible power and seized a handful of
leaves off a near-by shrub. It seemed to Bruce that they crushed like
fruit and stained the dark skin.

"What is done up here isn't put in the newspapers down below. We're
mountain men; we've lived up here as long as men have lived in the West.
We have our own way of doing things, and our own law. Think once more
about going back."

"I've already decided. I'm going on."

Once more they stood, eyes meeting eyes on the trail, and Simon's face
was darkening with passion. Bruce knew that his hands were clenching,
and his own muscles bunched and made ready to resist any kind of attack.

But Simon didn't strike. He laughed instead,--a single deep note of
utter and depthless scorn. Then he drew back and let Bruce pass on up
the road.




VII


Bruce couldn't mistake the cabin. At the end of the trail he found
it,--a little shack of unpainted boards with a single door and a single
window.

He stood a moment in the sunlight. His shadow was already long behind
him, and the mountains had that curious deep blue of late afternoon. The
pine needles were soft under his feet; the later-afternoon silence was
over the land. He could not guess what was his destiny behind that rude
door. It was a moment long waited; for one of the few times in his life
he was trembling with excitement. He felt as if a key, long lost, was
turning in the doorway of understanding.

He walked nearer and tapped with his knuckles on the door.

If the forests have one all-pervading quality it is silence. Of course
the most silent time is at night, but just before sunset, when most of
the forest creatures are in their mid-afternoon sleep, any noise is a
rare thing. What sound there is carries far and seems rather out of
place. Bruce could picture the whole of the little drama that followed
his knock by just the faint sounds--inaudible in a less silent
land--that reached him from behind the door. At first it was just a
start; then a short exclamation in the hollow, half-whispering voice of
old, old age. A moment more of silence--as if a slow-moving, aged brain
were trying to conjecture who stood outside--then the creaking of a
chair as some one rose. The last sounds were of a strange hobbling
toward him,--a rustle of shoes half dragged on the floor and the
intermittent tapping of a cane.

The face that showed so dimly in the shadowed room looked just as Bruce
had expected,--wrinkled past belief, lean and hawk-nosed from age. The
hand that rested on the cane was like a bird's claw, the skin blue and
hard and dry. There were a few strands of hair drawn back over her lean
head, but all its color had faded out long ago. She stood bowed over her
cane.

Yet in that first instant Bruce had an inexplicable impression of being
in the presence of a power. He did not have the wave of pity with which
one usually greets the decrepit. And at first he didn't know why. But
soon he grew accustomed to the shadows and he could see the woman's
eyes. Then he understood.

They were set deep behind grizzled brows, but they glowed like coals.
There was no other word. They were not the eyes of one whom time is
about to conquer. Her bodily strength was gone; any personal beauty that
she might have had was ashes long and long ago, but some great fire
burned in her yet. As far as bodily appearance went the grave should
have claimed her long since; but a dauntless spirit had sustained her.
For, as all men know, the power of the spirit has never yet been
measured.

She blinked in the light. "Who is it?" she croaked.

Bruce did not answer. He had not prepared a reply for this question. But
it was not needed. The woman leaned forward, and a vivid light began to
dawn in her dark, furrowed face.

Even to Bruce, already succumbed to this atmosphere of mystery into
which his adventure had led him, that dawning light was the single most
startling phenomenon he had ever beheld. It is very easy to imagine a
radiance upon the face. But in reality, most all facial expression is
simply a change in the contour of lines. But this was not a case of
imagination now. The witchlike face seemed to gleam with a white flame.
And Bruce knew that his coming was the answer to the prayer of a whole
lifetime. It was a thought to sober him. No small passion, no weak
desire, no prayer that time or despair could silence could effect such a
light as this.

"Bruce," he said simply. It did not even occur to him to use the surname
of Duncan. It was a name of a time and sphere already forgotten. "I
don't know what my real last name is."

"Bruce--Bruce," the woman whispered. She stretched a palsied hand to him
as if it would feel his flesh to reassure her of its reality. The wild
light in her eyes pierced him, burning like chemical rays, and a great
flood of feeling yet unknown and unrecognized swept over him. He saw her
snags of teeth as her dry lips half-opened. He saw the exultation in her
wrinkled, lifted face. "Oh, praises to His Everlasting Name!" she
cried. "Oh, Glory--Glory to on High!"

And this was not blasphemy. The words came from the heart. No matter how
terrible the passion from which they sprang, whether it was such evil as
would cast her to hell, such a cry as this could not go unheard. The
strength seemed to go out of her as water flows. She rocked on her cane,
and Bruce, thinking she was about to fall, seized her shoulders. "At
last--at last," she cried. "You've come at last."

She gripped herself, as if trying to find renewed strength. "Go at
once," she said, "to the end of the Pine-needle Trail. It leads from
behind the cabin."

He tried to emerge from the dreamlike mists that had enveloped him. "How
far is it?" he asked her steadily.

"To the end of Pine-needle Trail," she rocked again, clutched for one of
his brown hands, and pressed it between hers.

Then she raised it to her dry lips. Bruce could not keep her from it.
And after an instant more he did not attempt to draw it from her
embrace. In the darkness of that mountain cabin, in the shadow of the
eternal pines, he knew that some great drama of human life and love and
hatred was behind the action; and he knew with a knowledge unimpeachable
that it would be only insolence for him to try further to resist it. Its
meaning went too deep for him to see; but it filled him with a great and
wondering awe.

Then he turned away, up the Pine-needle Trail. Clear until the deeper
forest closed around him her voice still followed him,--a strange
croaking in the afternoon silence. "At last," he heard her crying. "At
last, at last."




VIII


In almost a moment, Duncan was out of the thickets and into the big
timber, for really the first time. In his journey up the mountain road
and on the trail that led to the old woman's cabin, he had been many
times in the shade of the tall evergreens, but always there had been
some little intrusion of civilization, some hint of the works of man
that had kept him from the full sense of the majesty of the wild. At
first it had been the gleaming railroad tracks, and then a road that had
been built with blasting and shovels. To get the full effect of the
forest one must be able to behold wide-stretching vistas, and that had
been impossible heretofore because of the brush thickets. But this was
the virgin forest. As far as he could see there was nothing but the
great pines climbing up the long slope of the ridge. He caught glimpses
of them in the vales at either side, and their dark tops made a curious
background at the very extremity of his vision. They stood straight and
aloof, and they were very old.

He fell into their spirit at once. The half-understood emotions that had
flooded him in the cabin below died within him. The great calm that is,
after all, the all-pervading quality of the big pines came over him. It
is always this way. A man knows solitude, his thoughts come clear,
superficialities are left behind in the lands of men. Bruce was rather
tremulous and exultant as he crept softly up the trail.

It was the last lap of his journey. At the end of the trail he would
find--Linda! And it seemed quite fitting that she would be waiting
there, where the trail began, in the wildest heart of the pine woods. He
was quite himself once more,--carefree, delighting in all the little
manifestations of the wild life that began to stir about him.

No experience of his existence had ever yielded the same pleasure as
that long walk up the trail. Every curve about the shoulder of a hill,
every still glen into which he dipped, every ridge that he surmounted
wakened curious memories within him and stirred him in little secret
ways under the skin. His delight grew upon him. It was a dream coming
true. Always, it seemed to him, he had carried in his mind a picture of
this very land, a sort of dream place that was a reality at last. He had
known just how it would be. The wind made the same noise in the tree
tops that he expected. Yet it was such a little sound that it could
never be heard in a city at all. His senses had already been sharpened
by the silence and the calm.

He had always known how the pine shadows would fall across the carpet of
needles. The trees themselves were the same grave companions that he had
expected, but his delight was all the more because of his expectations.

He began to catch glimpses of the smaller forest creatures,--the Little
People that are such a delight to all real lovers of the wilderness.
Sometimes it was a chipmunk, trusting to his striped skin--blending
perfectly with the light and shadow--to keep him out of sight. These are
quivering, restless, ever-frightened little folk, and heaven alone knows
what damage they may do to the roots of a tree. But Bruce wasn't in the
mood to think of forest conservation to-day. He had left a number of his
notions in the city where he had acquired them,--and this little,
bright-eyed rodent in the tree roots had almost the same right to the
forests that he had himself. Before, he had a measure of the same
arrogance with which most men--realizing the dominance of their
breed--regard the lesser people of the wild; but something of a
disastrous nature had happened to it. He spoke gayly to the chipmunk and
passed on.

As the trail climbed higher, the sense of wilderness became more
pronounced. Even the trees seemed larger and more majestic, and the
glimpses of the wild people were more frequent. The birds stopped their
rattle-brained conversation and stared at him with frank curiosity. The
grouse let him get closer before they took to cover.

Of course the bird life was not nearly so varied as in the pretty groves
of the Middle West. Most birds are gentle people, requiring an easy and
pleasant environment, and these stern, stark mountains were no place for
them. Only the hardier creatures could flourish here. Their songs would
have been out of place in the great silences and solemnity of the
evergreen forest. This was no land for weaklings. Bruce knew that as
well as he knew that his legs were under him. The few birds he saw were
mostly of the hardier varieties,--hale-fellows-well-met and cheerful
members of the lower strata in bird society. "Good old roughnecks," he
said to them, with an intuitive understanding.

That was just the name for them,--a word that is just beginning to
appear in dictionaries. They were rough in manner and rough in speech,
and they pretended to be rougher than they were. Yet Bruce liked them.
He exulted in the easy freedom of their ways. Creatures have to be rough
to exist in and love such wilderness as this. Life gets down to a matter
of cold metal,--some brass but mostly iron! He rather imagined that they
could be fairly capable thieves if occasion arose, making off with the
edibles he had bought without a twitch of a feather. They squawked and
scolded at him, after their curiosity was satisfied. They said the most
shocking things they could think of and seemed to rejoice in it. He
didn't know their breeds, yet he felt that they were old friends. They
were rather large birds, mostly of the families of jays and magpies.

The hours passed. The trail grew dimmer. Now it was just a brown serpent
in the pine needles, coiling this way and that,--but he loved every foot
of it. It dipped down to a little stream, of which the blasting sun of
summer had made only a succession of shallow pools. Yet the water was
cold to his lips. And he knew that little brook trout--waiting until
the fall rains should make a torrent of their tiny stream and thus
deliver them--were gazing at him while he drank.

The trail followed the creek a distance, and at last he found the spring
that was its source. It was only a small spring, lost in a bed of deep,
green ferns. He sat down to rest and to eat part of his lunch. The
little wind had died, leaving a profound silence.

By a queer pounding of his blood Bruce knew that he was in the high
altitudes. He had already come six miles from the cabin. The hour was
about six-thirty; in two hours more it would be too dark to make his way
at all.

He examined the mud about the spring, and there was plenty of evidence
that the forest creatures had passed that way. Here was a little
triangle where a buck had stepped, and farther away he found two pairs
of deer tracks,--evidently those of a doe with fawn. A wolf had stopped
to cool his heated tongue in the waters, possibly in the middle of some
terrible hunt in the twilight hours.

There was a curious round track, as if of a giant cat, a little way
distant in the brown earth. It told a story plainly. A cougar--one of
those great felines that is perhaps better called puma--had had an
ambush there a few nights before. Bruce wondered what wilderness tragedy
had transpired when the deer came to drink. Then he found another huge
abrasion in the mud that puzzled him still more.

At first he couldn't believe that it was a track. The reason was simply
that the size of the thing was incredible,--as if some one had laid a
flour sack in the mud and taken it up again. He did not think of any of
the modern-day forest creatures as being of such proportions. It was
very stale and had been almost obliterated by many days of sun. Perhaps
he had been mistaken in thinking it an imprint of a living creature. He
went to his knees to examine it.

But in one instant he knew that he had not been mistaken. It was a track
not greatly different from that of an enormous human foot; and the
separate toes were entirely distinct. It was a bear track, of course,
but one of such size that the general run of little black bears that
inhabited the hills could almost use it for a den of hibernation!

His thought went back to his talk with Barney Wegan; and he remembered
that the man had spoken of a great, last grizzly that the mountaineers
had named "The Killer." No other animal but the great grizzly bear
himself could have made such a track as this. Bruce wondered if the
beast had yet been killed.

He got up and went on,--farther toward Trail's End. He walked more
swiftly now, for he hoped to reach the end of Pine-needle Trail before
nightfall, but he had no intention of halting in case night came upon
him before he reached it. He had waited too long already to find Linda.

The land seemed ever more familiar. A high peak thrust a white head
above a distant ridge, and it appealed to him almost like the face of an
old friend. Sometime--long and long ago--he had gazed often at a white
peak of a mountain thrust above a pine-covered ridge.

Another hour ended the day's sunlight. The shadows fell quickly, but it
was a long time yet until darkness. He yet might make the trail-end. He
gave no thought to fatigue. In the first place, he had stood up
remarkably well under the day's tramp for no other reason than that he
had always made a point of keeping in the best of physical condition.
Besides, there was something more potent than mere physical strength to
sustain him now. It was the realization of the nearing end of the
trail,--a knowledge of tremendous revelations that would come to him in
a few hours more.

Already great truths were taking shape in his brain; he only needed a
single sentence of explanation to connect them all together. He began to
feel a growing excitement and impatience.

For the first time he began to notice a strange breathlessness in the
air. He paused, just for an instant, his face lifted to the wind. He did
not realize that all his senses were at razor edge, trying to interpret
the messages that the wind brought. He felt that the forest was
wakening. A new stir and impulse had come in the growing shadows. All at
once he understood. It was the hunting hour.

Yet even this seemed familiar. Always, it seemed to him, he had known
this same strange thrill at the fall of darkness, the same sense of
deepening mystery. The jays no longer gossiped in the shrubs. They had
been silenced by the same awe that had come over Bruce. And now the man
began to discern, here and there through the forest, queer rustlings of
the foliage that meant the passing through of some of the great beasts
of prey.

Once two deer flashed by him,--just a streak that vanished quickly. The
dusk deepened. The further trees were dimming. The sky turned green,
then gray. The distant mountains were enfolded in gloom. Bruce headed
on--faster, up the trail.

The heaviness in his limbs had changed to an actual ache, but he gave no
thought to it. He was enthralled by the change that was on the
forest,--a whipping-back of a thousand-thousand years to a young and
savage world. There was the sense of vast and tragic events all in
keeping with the gathering gloom of the forest. He was awed and
mystified as never before.

It was quite dark now, and he could barely see the trail. For the first
time he began to despair, feeling that another night of overpowering
impatience must be spent before he could reach Trail's End. The stars
began to push through the darkening sky. Then, fainter than the gleam of
a firefly, he saw the faint light of a far distant camp fire.

His heart bounded. He knew what was there. It was the end of the trail
at last. And it guided him the rest of the way. When he reached the top
of a little rise in the trail, the whole scene was laid out in mystery
below him.

The fire had been built at the door of a mountain house,--a log
structure of perhaps four rooms. The firelight played in its open
doorway. Something beside it caught his attention, and instinctively he
followed it with his eyes until it ended in an incredible region of the
stars. It was a great pine tree, the largest he had ever
seen,--seemingly a great sentinel over all the land.

But the sudden awe that came over him at the sight of it was cut short
by the sight of a girl's figure in the firelight. He had an instant's
sense that he had come to the wilderness's heart at last, that this tall
tree was its symbol, that if he could understand the eternal watch that
it kept over this mountain world, he would have an understanding of all
things,--but all these thoughts were submerged in the realization that
he had come back to Linda at last.

He had known how the mountains would seem. All that he had beheld to-day
was just the recurrence of things beheld long ago. Nothing had seemed
different from what he had expected; rather he had a sense that a lost
world had been returned to him, and it was almost as if he had never
been away. But the girl in the firelight did not answer in the least
degree the picture he had carried of Linda.

He remembered her as a blond-headed little girl with irregular features
and a rather unreasonable allowance of homeliness. All the way he had
thought of her as a baby sister,--not as a woman in her flower. For a
long second he gazed at her in speechless amazement.

Her hair was no longer blond. Time, it had peculiar red lights when the
firelight shone through it; but he knew that by the light of day it
would be deep brown. He remembered her as an awkward little thing that
was hardly able to keep her feet under her. This tall girl had the
wilderness grace,--which is the grace of a deer and only blind eyes
cannot see it. He dimly knew that she wore a khaki-colored skirt and a
simple blouse of white tied with a blue scarf. Her arms were bare in the
fire's gleam. And there was a dark beauty about her face that simply
could not be denied.

She came toward him, and her hands were open before her. And her lips
trembled. Bruce could see them in the firelight.

It was a strange meeting. The firelight gave it a tone of unreality, and
the whole forest world seemed to pause in its whispered business as if
to watch. It was as if they had been brought face to face by the
mandates of an inexorable destiny.

"So you've come," the girl said. The words were spoken unusually soft,
scarcely above a whisper; but they were inexpressibly vivid to Bruce. In
his lifetime he had heard many words that were just so many lifeless
selections from a dictionary,--flat utterances with no overtones to give
them vitality. He had heard voices in plenty that were merely the
mechanical result of the vibration of vocal cords. But these words--not
for their meaning but because of the quality of the voice that had
spoken them--really lived. They told first of a boundless relief and joy
at his coming. But more than that, in these deep vibrant tones was the
expression of an unquenchable life and spirit. Every fiber of her body
lived in the fullest sense; he knew this fact the instant that she
spoke.

She smiled at him, ever so quietly. "Bwovaboo," she said, recalling the
name by which she called him in her babyhood, "you've come to Linda."




IX


As the fire burned down to coals and the stars wheeled through the sky,
Linda told her story. The two of them were seated in the soft grass in
front of the cabin, and the moonlight was on Linda's face as she talked.
She talked very low at first. Indeed there was no need for loud tones.
The whole wilderness world was heavy with silence, and a whisper carried
far. Besides, Bruce was just beside her, watching her with narrowed
eyes, forgetful of everything except her story.

It was a perfect background for the savage tale that she had to tell.
The long shadow of the giant pine tree fell over them. The fire made a
little circle of red light, but the darkness ever encroached upon it.
Just beyond the moonlight showed them silver-white patches between the
trees, across which shadows sometimes wavered from the passing of the
wild creatures.

"I've waited a long time to tell you this," she told him. "Of course,
when we were babies together in the orphanage, I didn't even know it. It
has taken me a long time since to learn all the details; most of them I
got from my aunt, old Elmira, whom you talked to on the way out. Part of
it I knew by intuition, and a little of it is still doubtful.

"You ought to know first how hard I have tried to reach you. Of course,
I didn't try openly except at first--the first years after I came here,
and before I was old enough to understand." She spoke the last word with
a curious depth of feeling and a perceptible hardness about her lips and
eyes. "I remembered just two things. That the man who had adopted you
was Newton Duncan; one of the nurses at the asylum told me that. And I
remembered the name of the city where he had taken you.

"You must understand the difficulties I worked under. There is no rural
free delivery up here, you know, Bruce. Our mail is sent from and
delivered to the little post-office at Martin's store--over fifteen
miles from here. And some one member of a certain family that lives near
here goes down every week to get the mail for the entire district.

"At first--and that was before I really understood--I wrote you many
letters and gave them to one of this family to mail for me. I was just a
child then, you must know, and I lived in the same house with these
people. And queer letters they must have been."

For an instant a smile lingered at her lips, but it seemed to come hard.
It was all too plain that she hadn't smiled many times in the past days.
But for some unaccountable reason Bruce's heart leaped when he saw it.
It had potentialities, that smile. It seemed to light her whole face. He
was suddenly exultant at the thought that once he understood everything,
he might bring about such changes that he could see it often.

"They were just baby letters from--from Linda-Tinda to Bwovaboo--letters
about the deer and the berries and the squirrels--and all the wild
things that lived up here."

"Berries!" Bruce cried. "I had some on the way up." His tone wavered,
and he seemed to be speaking far away. "I had some once--long ago."

"Yes. You will understand, soon. I didn't understand why you didn't
answer my letters. I understand now, though. You never got them."

"No. I never got them. But there are several Duncans in my city. They
might have gone astray."

"They went astray--but it was before they ever reached the post-office.
They were never mailed, Bruce. I was to know why, later. Even then it
was part of the plan that I should never get in communication with you
again--that you would be lost to me forever.

"When I got older, I tried other tacks. I wrote to the asylum, enclosing
a letter to you. But those letters were not mailed, either.

"Now we can skip a long time. I grew up. I knew everything at last and
no longer lived with the family I mentioned before. I came here, to this
old house--and made it decent to live in. I cut my own wood for my fuel
except when one of the men tried to please me by cutting it for me. I
wouldn't use it at first. Oh, Bruce--I wouldn't touch it!"

Her face was no longer lovely. It was drawn with terrible passions. But
she quieted at once.

"At last I saw plainly that I was a little fool--that all they would do
for me, the better off I was. At first, I almost starved to death
because I wouldn't use the food that they sent me. I tried to grub it
out of the hills. But I came to it at last. But, Bruce, there were many
things I didn't come to. Since I learned the truth, I have never given
one of them a smile except in scorn, not a word that wasn't a word of
hate.

"You are a city man, Bruce. You are what I read about as a gentleman.
You don't know what hate means. It doesn't live in the cities. But it
lives up here. Believe me if you ever believed anything--that it lives
up here. The most bitter and the blackest hate--from birth until death!
It burns out the heart, Bruce. But I don't know that I can make you
understand."

She paused, and Bruce looked away into the pine forest. He believed the
girl. He knew that this grim land was the home of direct and primitive
emotions. Such things as mercy and remorse were out of place in the game
trails where the wolf pack hunted the deer.

"When they knew how I hated them," she went on, "they began to watch me.
And once they knew that I fully understood the situation, I was no
longer allowed to leave this little valley. There are only two trails,
Bruce. One goes to Elmira's cabin on the way to the store. The other
encircles the mountain. With all their numbers, it was easy to keep
watch of those trails. And they told me what they would do if they found
me trying to go past."

"You don't mean--they threatened you?"

She threw back her head and laughed, but the sound had no joy in it.
"Threatened! If you think threats are common up here, you are a greener
tenderfoot than I ever took you for. Bruce, the law up here is the law
of force. The strongest wins. The weakest dies. Wait till you see Simon.
You'll understand then--and you'll shake in your shoes."

The words grated upon him, yet he didn't resent them. "I've seen Simon,"
he told her.

She glanced toward him quickly, and it was entirely plain that the quiet
tone in his voice had surprised her. Perhaps the faintest flicker of
admiration came into her eyes.

"He tried to stop you, did he? Of course he would. And you came anyway.
May Heaven bless you for it, Bruce!" She leaned toward him, appealing.
"And forgive me what I said."

Bruce stared at her in amazement. He could hardly realize that this was
the same voice that had been so torn with passion a moment before. In an
instant all her hardness was gone, and the tenderness of a sweet and
wholesome nature had taken its place. He felt a curious warmth stealing
over him.

"They meant what they said, Bruce. Believe me, if those men can do no
other thing, they can keep their word. They didn't just threaten death
to me. I could have run the risk of that. Badly as I wanted to make them
pay before I died, I would have gladly run that risk.

"You are amazed at the free way I speak of death. The girls you know, in
the city, don't even know the word. They don't know what it means. They
don't understand the sudden end of the light--the darkness--the
cold--the awful fear that it is! It is no companion of theirs, down in
the city. Perhaps they see it once in a while--but it isn't in their
homes and in the air and on the trails, like it is here. It's a reality
here, something to fight against every hour of every day. There are just
three things to do in the mountains--to live and love and hate. There's
no softness. There's no middle ground." She smiled grimly. "Let them
live up here with me--those girls you know--and they'd understand what a
reality Death is. They'd know it was something to think about and fight
against. Self-preservation is an instinct that can be forgotten when you
have a policeman at every corner. But it is ever present here.

"I've lived with death, and I've heard of it, and I've seen it all my
life. If there hadn't been any other way, I would have seen it in the
dramas of the wild creatures that go on around me all the time. You'll
get down to cases here, Bruce--or else you'll run away. These men said
they'd do worse things to me than kill me--and I didn't dare take the
risk.

"But once or twice I was able to get word to old Elmira--the only ally I
had left. She was of the true breed, Bruce. You'll call her a hag, but
she's a woman to be reckoned with. She could hate too--worse than a
she-rattlesnake hates the man that killed her mate--and hating is all
that's kept her alive. You shrink when I say the word. Maybe you won't
shrink when I'm done. Hating is a thing that gentlefolk don't do--but
gentlefolk don't live up here. It isn't a land of gentleness. Up here
there are just men and women, just male and female.

"This old woman tried to get in communication with every stranger that
visited the hills. You see, Bruce, she couldn't write herself. And the
one time I managed to get a written message down to her, telling her to
give it to the first stranger to mail--one of my enemies got it away
from her. I expected to die that night. I wasn't going to be alive when
the clan came. The only reason I didn't was because Simon--the greatest
of them all and the one I hate the most--kept his clan from coming. He
had his own reasons.

"From then on she had to depend on word of mouth. Some of the men
promised to send letters to Newton Duncan--but there was more than one
Newton Duncan--as you say--and possibly if the letters were sent they
went astray. But at last--just a few weeks ago--she found a man that
knew you. And it is your story from now on."

They were still a little while. Bruce arose and threw more wood on the
fire.

"It's only the beginning," he said.

"And you want me to tell you all?" she asked hesitantly.

"Of course. Why did I come here?"

"You won't believe me when I say that I'm almost sorry I sent for you."
She spoke almost breathlessly. "I didn't know that it would be like
this. That you would come with a smile on your face and a light in your
eyes, looking for happiness. And instead of happiness--to find _all
this_!"

She stretched her arms to the forests. Bruce understood her perfectly.
She did not mean the woods in the literal sense. She meant the primal
emotions that were their spirit.

She went on with lowered tones. "May Heaven forgive me if I have done
wrong to bring you here," she told him. "To show you--all that I have to
show--you who are a city man and a gentleman. But, Bruce, I couldn't
fight alone any more. I had to have help.

"To know the rest, you've got to go back a whole generation. Bruce, have
you heard of the terrible blood-feuds that the mountain families
sometimes have?"

"Of course. Many times."

"These mountains of Trail's End have been the scene of as deadly a
blood-feud as was ever known in the West. And for once, the wrong was
all on one side.

"A few miles from here there is a wonderful valley, where a stream
flows. There is not much tillable land in these mountains, Bruce, but
there, along that little stream, there are almost five sections--three
thousand acres--of as rich land as was ever plowed. And Bruce--the home
means something in the mountains. It isn't just a place to live in, a
place to leave with relief. I've tried to tell you that emotions are
simple and direct up here, and love of home is one of them. That tract
of land was acquired long ago by a family named Ross, and they got it
through some kind of grant. I can't be definite as to the legal aspects
of all this story. They don't matter anyway--only the results remain.

"These Ross men were frontiersmen of the first order. They were virtuous
men too--trusting every one, and oh! what strength they had! With their
own hands they cleared away the forest and put the land into rich
pasture and hay and grain. They built a great house for the owner of the
land, and lesser houses for his kinsfolk that helped him work it on
shares. Then they raised cattle, letting them range on the hills and
feeding them in winter. You see, the snow is heavy in winter, and unless
the stock are fed many of them die. The Rosses raised great herds of
cattle and had flocks of sheep too.

"It was then that dark days began to come. Another family--headed by the
father of the man I call Simon--migrated here from the mountain
districts of Oklahoma. But they were not so ignorant as many mountain
people, and they were _killers_. Perhaps that's a word you don't know.
Perhaps you didn't know it existed. A killer is a man that has killed
other men. It isn't a hard thing to do at all, Bruce, after you are used
to it. These people were used to it. And because they wanted these great
lands--my own father's home--they began to kill the Rosses.

"At first they made no war on the Folgers. The Folgers, you must know,
were good people too, honest to the last penny. They were connected, by
marriage only, to the Ross family. They were on our side clear through.
At the beginning of the feud the head of the Folger family was just a
young man, newly married. And he had a son after a while.

"The newcomers called it a feud. But it wasn't a feud--it was simply
murder. Oh, yes, we killed some of them. Folger and my father and all
his kin united against them, making a great clan--but they were nothing
in strength compared to the usurpers. Simon himself was just a boy when
it began. But he grew to be the greatest power, the leader of the enemy
clan before he was twenty-one.

"You must know, Bruce, that my own father held the land. But he was so
generous that his brothers who helped him farm it hardly realized that
possession was in his name. And father was a dead shot. It took a long
time before they could kill him."

The coldness that had come over her words did not in the least hide her
depth of feeling. She gazed moodily into the darkness and spoke almost
in a monotone.

"But Simon--just a boy then--and Dave, his brother, and the others of
them kept after us like so many wolves. There was no escape. The only
thing we could do was to fight back--and that was the way we learned to
hate. A man can hate, Bruce, when he is fighting for his home. He can
learn it very well when he sees his brother fall dead, or his father--or
a stray bullet hit his wife. A woman can learn it too, as old Elmira
did, when she finds her son's body in the dead leaves. There was no law
here to stop it. The little semblance of law that was in the valleys
below regarded it as a blood-feud, and didn't bother itself about it.
Besides--at first we were too proud to call for help. And after our
numbers were few, the trails were watched--and those who tried to go
down into the valleys--never got there.

"One after another the Rosses were killed, and I needn't make it any
worse for you than I can help--by telling of each killing. Enough to say
that at last no one was left except a few old men whose eyes were too
dim to shoot straight, and my own father. And I was a baby then--just
born.

"Then one night my father--seeing the fate that was coming down upon
him--took the last course to defeat them. Matthew Folger--a connection
by marriage--was still alive. Simon's clan hadn't attacked him yet. He
had no share in the land, but instead lived in this house I live in now.
He had a few cattle and some pasture land farther down the Divide. There
had been no purpose in killing him. He hadn't been worth the extra
bullet.

"One night my father left me asleep and stole through the forests to
talk to him. They made an agreement. I have pieced it out, a little at a
time. My father deeded all his land to Folger.

"I can understand now. The enemy clan pretended it was a blood-feud
only--and that it was fair war to kill the Rosses. Although my father
knew their real aim was to obtain the land, he didn't think they would
dare kill Matthew Folger to get it. He knew that he himself would fall,
sooner or later, but he thought that to kill Folger would show their
cards--and that would be too much, even for Simon's people. But he
didn't know. He hadn't foreseen to what lengths they would go."

Bruce leaned forward. "So they killed--Matthew Folger?" he asked.

He didn't know that his face had gone suddenly stark white, and that a
curious glitter had come to his eyes. He spoke breathlessly. For the
name--Matthew Folger--called up vague memories that seemed to reveal
great truths to him. The girl smiled grimly.

"Let me go on. My father deeded Folger the land. The deed was to go on
record so that all the world would know that Folger owned it, and if the
clan killed him it was plainly for the purposes of greed alone. But
there was also a secret agreement--drawn up in black and white and to be
kept hidden for twenty-one years. In this agreement, Folger promised to
return to me--the only living heir of the Rosses--the lands acquired by
the deed. In reality, he was only holding them in trust for me, and was
to return them when I was twenty-one. In case of my father's death,
Folger was to be my guardian until that time.

"Folger knew the risk he ran, but he was a brave man and he did not
care. Besides, he was my father's friend--and friendship goes far in the
mountains. And my father was shot down before a week was past.

"The clan had acted quick, you see. When Folger heard of it, before the
dawn, he came to my father's house and carried me away. Before another
night was done he was killed too."

The perspiration leaped out on Bruce's forehead. The red glow of the
fire was in his eyes.

"He fell almost where this fire is built, with a thirty-thirty bullet in
his brain. Which one of the clan killed him I do not know--but in all
probability it was Simon himself--at that time only eighteen years of
age. And Folger's little boy--something past four years old--wandered
out in the moonlight to find his father's body."

The girl was speaking slowly now, evidently watching the effect of her
words on her listener. He was bent forward, and his breath came in
queer, whispering gusts. "Go on!" he ordered savagely. "Tell me the
rest. Why do you keep me waiting?"

The girl smiled again,--like a sorceress. "Folger's wife was from the
plains' country," she told him slowly. "If she had been of the mountains
she might have remained to do some killing on her own account. Like old
Elmira herself remained to do--killing on her own account! But she was
from cities, just as you are, but she--unlike you--had no mountain blood
in her. She wasn't used to death, and perhaps she didn't know how to
hate. She only knew how to be afraid.

"They say that she went almost insane at the sight of that strong, brave
man of hers lying still in the pine needles. She hadn't even known he
was out of the house. He had gone out on some secret business--late at
night. She had only one thing left--her baby boy and her little
foster-daughter--little Linda Ross who is before you now. Her only
thought was to get those children out of that dreadful land of bloodshed
and to hide them so that they could never come back. And she didn't even
want them to know their true parentage. She seemed to realize that if
they had known, both of them would return some time--to collect their
debts. Sooner or later, that boy with the Folger blood in him and that
girl with the Ross blood would return, to attempt to regain their
ancient holdings, and to make the clan pay!

"All that was left were a few old women with hate in their hearts and a
strange tradition to take the place of hope. They said that sometime, if
death spared them, they would see Folger's son come back again, and
assert his rights. They said that a new champion would arise and right
their wrongs. But mostly death didn't spare them. Only old Elmira is
left.

"What became of the secret agreement I do not know. I haven't any hope
that you do, either. The deed was carried down to the courts by Sharp,
one of the witnesses who managed to get past the guard, and put on file
soon after it was written. The rest is short. Simon and his clan took up
the land, swearing that Matthew Folger had deeded it to them the day he
had procured it. They had a deed to show for it--a forgery. And the one
thing that they feared, the one weak chain, was that this secret
agreement between Folger and my father would be found.

"You see what that would mean. It would show that he had no right to
deed away the land, as he was simply holding it in trust for me. Old
Elmira explained the matter to me--if I get mixed up on the legal end
of it, excuse it. If that document could be found, their forged deed
would be obviously invalid. And it angered them that they could not find
it.

"Of course they never filed their forged deed--afraid that the forgery
would be discovered--but they kept it to show to any one that was
interested. But they wanted to make themselves still safer.

"There had been two witnesses to the agreement. One of them, a man named
Sharp, died--or was killed--shortly after. The other, an old trapper
named Hudson, was indifferent to the whole matter--he was just passing
through and was at Folger's house for dinner the night Ross came. He is
still living in these mountains, and he might be of value to us yet.

"Of course the clan did not feel at all secure. They suspected the
secret agreement had been mailed to some one to take care of, and they
were afraid that it would be brought to light when the time was ripe.
They knew perfectly that their forged deed would never stand the test,
so one of the things to do was to prevent their claim ever being
contested. That meant to keep Folger's son in ignorance of the whole
matter.

"I hope I can make that clear. The deed from my father to Folger was on
record, Folger was dead, and Folger's son would have every right and
opportunity to contest the clan's claim to the land. If he could get the
matter into court, he would surely win.

"The second thing to do was to win me over. I was just a child, and it
looked the easiest course of all. That's why I was stolen from the
orphanage by one of Simon's brothers. The idea was simply that when the
time came I would marry one of the clan and establish their claim to the
land forever.

"Up to a few weeks ago it seemed to me that sooner or later I would win
out. Bruce, you can't dream what it meant! I thought that some time I
could drive them out and make them pay, a little, for all they have
done. But they've tricked me, after all. I thought that I would get word
to Folger's son, who by inheritance would have a clear title to the
land, and he, with the aid of the courts, could drive these usurpers
out. But just recently I've found out that even this chance is all but
gone.

"Within a few more weeks, they will have been in possession of the land
for a full twenty years. Through some legal twist I don't understand, if
a man pays taxes and has undisputed possession of land for that length
of time, his title is secure. They failed to win me over, but it looks
as if they had won, anyway. The only way that they can be defeated now
is for that secret agreement--between my father and Folger--to reappear.
And I've long ago given up all hope of that.

"There is no court session between now and October thirtieth--when their
twenty years of undisputed possession is culminated. There seems to be
no chance to contest them--to make them bring that forged deed into the
light before that time. We've lost, after all. And only one thing
remains."

He looked up to find her eyes full upon him. He had never seen such
eyes. They seemed to have sunk so deep into the flesh about them that
only lurid slits remained. It was not that her lids were partly down.
Rather it was because the flesh-sacks beneath them had become charged
with her pounding blood. The fire's glow was in them and cast a strange
glamour upon her face. It only added to the strangeness of the picture
that she sat almost limp, rather than leaning forward in appeal. Bruce
looked at her in growing awe.

But as the second passed he seemed no longer able to see her plainly.
His eyes were misted and blurred, but they were empty of tears as
Linda's own. Rather the focal points of his brain had become seared by a
mounting flame within himself. The glow of the fire had seemingly spread
until it encompassed the whole wilderness world.

"What is the one thing that remains?" he asked her, whispering.

She answered with a strange, terrible coldness of tone. "The blood
atonement," she said between back-drawn lips.




X

When the minute hand of the watch in his pocket had made one more
circuit, both Bruce and Linda found themselves upon their feet. The
tension had broken at last. Her emotion had been curbed too long. It
broke from her in a flood.

She seized his hands, and he started at their touch. "Don't you
understand?" she cried. "You--you--you are Folger's son. You are the boy
that crept out--under this very tree--to find him dead. All my life
Elmira and I have prayed for you to come. And what are you going to do?"

Her face was drawn in the white light of the moon. For an instant he
seemed dazed.

"Do?" he repeated. "I don't know what I'm going to do."

"You don't!" she cried, in infinite scorn. "Are you just clay? Aren't
you a man? Haven't you got arms to strike with and eyes to see along a
rifle barrel? Are you a coward--and a weakling; one of your mother's
blood to run away? Haven't you anything to avenge? I thought you were a
mountain man--that all your years in cities couldn't take that quality
away from you! Haven't you any answer?"

He looked up, a strange light growing on his face. "You mean--killing?"

"What else? To kill--never to stop killing--one after another until they
are gone! Till Simon Turner and the whole Turner clan have paid the
debts they owe."

Bruce recoiled as if from a blow. "Turner? Did you say Turner?" he asked
hoarsely.

"Yes. That's the clan's name. I thought you knew."

There was an instant of strange truce. Both stood motionless. The scene
no longer seemed part of the world that men have come to know in these
latter years,--a land of cities and homes and peaceful twilights over
quiet countrysides. The moon was still strange and white in the sky; the
pines stood tall and dark and sad,--eternal emblems of the wilderness.
The fire had burned down to a few lurid coals glowing in the gray ashes.
No longer were these two children of civilization. Their passion had
swept them back into the immeasurable past; they were simply human
beings deep in the simplest of human passions. They trembled all over
with it.

Bruce understood now his unprovoked attack on the little boy when he had
been taken from the orphanage on trial. The boy had been named Turner,
and the name had been enough to recall a great and terrible hatred that
he had learned in earliest babyhood. The name now recalled it again; the
truth stood clear at last. It was the key to all the mystery of his
life; it stirred him more than all of Linda's words. In an instant all
the tragedy of his babyhood was recalled,--the hushed talk between his
parents, the oaths, the flames in their eyes, and finally the body he
had found lying so still beneath the pines. It was always the Turners,
the dread name that had filled his baby days with horror. He hadn't
understood then. It had been blind hatred,--hatred without understanding
or self-analysis.

As she watched, his mountain blood mounted to the ascendancy. A strange
transformation came over him. The gentleness that he had acquired in his
years of city life began to fall away from him. The mountains were
claiming him again.

It was not a mental change alone. It was a thing to be seen with the
unaided eyes. His hand had swept through his hair, disturbing the part,
and now the black locks dropped down on his forehead, almost to his
eyes. The whole expression of his face seemed to change. His look of
culture dropped from him; his eyes narrowed; he looked grotesquely out
of place in his soft, well-tailored clothes.

But he was quite cold now. His passion was submerged under a steel
exterior. His voice was cold and hard when he spoke.

"Then you and I are no relation whatever?"

"None."

"But we fight the same fight now."

"Yes. Until we both win--or both die."

Before he could speak again, a strange answer came out of the darkness.
"Not two of you," a croaking old voice told them. It rose, shrill and
cracked, from the shadows beyond the fire. They turned, and the
moonlight showed a bent old figure hobbling toward them.

It was old Elmira, her cane tapping along in front of her; and something
that caught the moonlight lay in the hollow of her left arm. Her eyes
still glowed under the grizzled brows.

"Not two, but three," she corrected, in the hollow voice of uncounted
years. In the magic of the moonlight it seemed quite fitting to both of
them that she should have come. She was one of the triumvirate; they
wondered why they had not missed her before. It was farther than she had
walked in years, but her spirit had kept her up.

She put the glittering object that she carried into Bruce's hands. It
was a rifle--a repeating breechloader of a famous make and a model of
thirty years before. It was such a rifle as lives in legend, with sights
as fine as a razor edge and an accuracy as great as light itself. Loving
hands had polished it and kept it in perfect condition.

"Matthew Folger's rifle," the old woman explained, "for Matthew Folger's
son."

And that is how Bruce Folger returned to the land of his birth--as most
men do, unless death cheats them first--and how he made a pact to pay
old debts of death.




BOOK TWO

THE BLOOD ATONEMENT




XI


"Men own the day, but the night is ours," is an old saying among the
wild folk that inhabit the forests of Trail's End. And the saying has
really deep significances that can't be discerned at one hearing.
Perhaps human beings--their thoughts busy with other things--can never
really get them at all. But the mountain lion--purring a sort of queer,
singsong lullaby to her wicked-eyed little cubs in the lair--and the
gray wolf, running along the ridges in the mystery of the moon--and
those lesser hunters, starting with Tuft-ear the lynx and going all the
way down to that terrible, white-toothed cutthroat, Little Death the
mink--_they_ know exactly what the saying means, and they know that it
is true. The only one of the larger forest creatures that doesn't know
is old Ashur, the black bear (_Ashur_ means black in an ancient tongue,
just as _Brunn_ means brown, and the common Oregon bear is usually
decidedly black) and the fact that he doesn't is curious in itself. In
most ways Ashur has more intelligence than all the others put together;
but he is also the most indifferent. He is not a hunter; and he doesn't
care who owns anything as long as there are plenty of bee trees to mop
out with his clumsy paw, and plenty of grubs under the rotten logs.

The saying originated long and long ago when the world was quite young.
Before that time, likely enough, the beasts owned both the day and the
night, and you can imagine them denying man's superiority just as long
as possible. But they came to it in the end, and perhaps now they are
beginning to be doubtful whether they still hold dominion over the night
hours. You can fancy the forest people whispering the saying back and
forth, using it as a password when they meet on the trails, and trying
their best to believe it. "Man owns the day but the night is ours," the
coyotes whisper between sobs. In a world where men have slowly, steadily
conquered all the wild creatures, killed them and driven them away,
their one consolation lies in the fact that when the dark comes down
their old preeminence returns to them.

Of course the saying is ridiculous if applied to cities or perhaps even
to the level, cleared lands of the Middle West. The reason is simply
that the wild life is practically gone from these places. Perhaps a
lowly skunk steals along a hedge on the way to a chicken pen, but he
quivers and skulks with fear, and all the arrogance of hunting is as
dead in him as his last year's perfume. And perhaps even the little
bobwhites, nestling tail to tail, know that it is wholly possible that
the farmer's son has marked their roost and will come and pot them while
they sleep. But a few places remain in America where the reign of the
wild creatures, during the night hours at least, is still supreme. And
Trail's End is one of them.

It doesn't lie in the Middle West. It is just about as far west as one
can conveniently go, unless he cares to trace the rivers down to their
mouths. Neither was it cleared land, nor had its soil ever been turned
by a plow. The few clearings that there were--such as the great five
sections of the Rosses--were so far apart that a wolf could run all
night (and the night-running of a wolf is something not to speak of
lightly) without passing one. There is nothing but forest,--forest that
stretches without boundaries, forest to which a great mountain is but a
single flower in a meadow, forest to make the brain of a timber cruiser
reel and stagger from sheer higher mathematics. Perhaps man owns these
timber stretches in the daytime. He can go out and cut down the trees,
and when they don't choose to fall over on top of him, return safely to
his cabin at night. He can venture forth with his rifle and kill Ashur
the black bear and Blacktail the deer, and even old Brother Bill, the
grand and exalted ruler of the elk lodge. The sound of his feet disturbs
the cathedral silence of the tree aisles, and his oaths--when the
treacherous trail gives way beneath his feet--carry far through the
coverts. But he behaves somewhat differently at night. He doesn't feel
nearly so sure of himself. The sound of a puma screaming a few dozen
feet away in the shadows is likely enough to cause an unpleasant
twitching of the skin of his back. And he feels considerably better if
there are four stout walls about him. At nighttime, the wild creatures
come into their own.

Bruce sensed these things as he waited for the day to break. For all the
hard exertion of the previous day, he wakened early on the first morning
of his return to his father's home. Through the open window he watched
the dawn come out. And he fancied how a puma, still hungry, turned to
snarl at the spreading light as he crept to his lair.

All over the forest the hunting creatures left their trails and crept
into the coverts. Their reign was done until darkness fell again. The
night life of the forest was slowly stilled. The daylight
creatures--such as the birds--began to waken. Probably they welcomed the
sight of day as much as Bruce himself. The man dressed slowly. He
wouldn't waken the two women that slept in the next room, he thought. He
crept slowly out into the gray dawn.

He made straight for the great pine that stood a short distance from the
house. For reasons unknown to him, the pine had come often into his
dreams. He had thought that its limbs rubbed together and made
words,--but of the words themselves he had hardly caught the meaning.
There was some high message in them, however; and the dream had left him
with a vague curiosity, an unexplainable desire to see the forest
monarch in the daylight.

As he waited, the mist blew off of the land; the gray of twilight was
whisked away to a twilightland that is hidden in the heart of the
forest. He found to his delight that the tree was even more impressive
in the vivid morning light than it had been at night. It was not that
the light actually got into it. Its branches were too thick and heavy
for that. It still retained its air of eternal secrecy, an impression
that it knew great mysteries that a thousand philosophers would give
their lives to learn. He was constantly awed by the size of it. He
guessed its circumference as about twenty-five feet. The great lower
limbs were themselves like massive tree trunks. Its top surpassed by
fifty feet any pine in the vicinity.

As he watched, the sun came up, gleaming first on its tall spire. It
slowly overtook it. The dusk of its green lightened. Bruce was not a
particularly imaginative man; but the impression grew that this towering
tree had an answer for some great question in his own heart,--a question
that he had never been able to shape into words. He felt that it knew
the wholly profound secret of life.

After all, it could not but have such knowledge. It was so incredibly
old; it had seen so much. His mind flew back to some of the dramas of
human life that had been enacted in its shade, and his imagination could
picture many more. His own father had lain here dead, shot down by a
murderer concealed in the distant thicket. It had beheld his own wonder
when he had found the still form lying in the moonlight; it had seen his
mother's grief and terror. Wilderness dramas uncounted had been enacted
beneath it. Many times the mountain lion had crept into its dark
branches. Many times the bear had grunted beneath it and reached up to
write a challenge with his claws in its bark. The eyes of Tuft-ear the
lynx had gleamed from its very top, and the old bull-elk had filed off
his velvet on the sharp edges of the bark. It had seen savage battles
between the denizens of the wood; the deer racing by with the wolf pack
in pursuit. For uncounted years it had stood aloft, above all the
madness and bloodshed and passion that are the eternal qualities of the
wilderness, somber, stately, unutterably aloof.

It had known the snows. When the leaves fell and the wind came out of
the north, it would know them again. For the snow falls for a depth of
ten feet or more over most of Trail's End. For innumerable winters its
limbs had been heaped with the white load, the great branches bending
beneath it. The wind made faint sounds through its branches now, but
would be wholly silent when the winter snows weighted the limbs. He
could picture the great, white giant, silent as death, still keeping its
vigil over the snow-swept wilderness.

Bruce felt a growing awe. The great tree seemed so wise, it gave him
such a sense of power. The winds had buffeted it in vain. It had endured
the terrible cold of winter. Generation after generation of the
creatures who moved on the face of the earth had lived their lives
beneath it; they had struggled and mated and fought their battles and
felt their passions, and finally they had died; and still it
endured,--silent, passionless, full of thoughts. Here was real
greatness. Not stirring, not struggling, not striving; only standing
firm and straight and impassive; not taking part, but only watching,
knowing no passion but only strength,--ineffably patient and calm.

But it was sad too. Such knowledge always brings sadness. It had seen
too much to be otherwise. The pines are never cheerful trees, like the
apple that blossoms in spring, or the elm whose leaves shimmer in the
sunlight; and this great monarch of all the pines was sad as great
music. In this quality, as well as in its strength, it was the symbol of
the wilderness itself. But it was more than that. It was the Great
Sentinel, and in its unutterable impassiveness it was the emblem and
symbol of even mightier powers. Bruce's full wisdom had not yet come to
him, so he couldn't name these powers. He only knew that they lived far
and far above the world and, like the tree itself, held aloof from all
the passion of Eve and the blood-lust of Cain. Like the pine itself,
they were patient, impassive, and infinitely wise.

He felt stilled and calmed himself. Such was its influence. And he
turned with a start when he saw Linda in the doorway.

Her face was calm too in the morning light. Her dark eyes were lighted.
He felt a curious little glow of delight at the sight of her.

"I've been talking to the pine--all the morning," he told her.

"But it won't talk to you," she answered. "It talks only to the stars."




XII


Bruce and Linda had a long talk while the sun climbed up over the great
ridges to the east and old Elmira cooked their breakfast. There was no
passion in their words this morning. They had got down to a basis of
cold planning.

"Let me refresh my memory about a few of those little things you told
me," Bruce requested. "First--on what date does the twenty-year
period--of Turners' possession of the land--expire?"

"On the thirtieth of October, of this year."

"Not very long, is it? Now you understand that on that date they will
have had twenty years of undisputed possession of the land; they will
have paid taxes on it that long; and unless their title is proven false
between now and that date, we can't ever drive them out."

"That's just right."

"And the fall term of court doesn't begin until the fifth of the
following month."

"Yes, we're beaten. That's all there is to it. Simon told me so the last
time he talked to me."

"It would be to his interest to have you think so. But Linda--we mustn't
give up yet. We must try as long as one day remains. The law is full of
twists; we might find a way to checkmate them, especially if that secret
agreement should show up. It isn't just enough--to have vengeance. That
wouldn't put the estate back in your hands; they would have won, after
all. It seems to me that the first thing to do is to find the trapper,
Hudson--the one witness that is still alive. You say he witnessed that
secret agreement between your father and mine."

"Yes."

"His testimony would be invaluable to us. He might be able to prove to
the court that as my father never owned the land in reality, he couldn't
possibly have deeded it to the Turners. Do you know where this Hudson
is?"

"I asked old Elmira last night. She thinks she knows. A man told her he
had his trap line on the upper Umpqua, and his main headquarters--you
know that trappers have a string of camps--was at the mouth of Little
River, that flows into the Umpqua. But it is a long way from here."

Bruce was still a moment. "How far?" he asked.

"Two full days' tramp at the least--barring out accidents. But if you
think it is best--you can start out to-day."

Bruce was a man who made decisions quickly. He had learned the wisdom of
it,--that after all the evidence is gathered on each side, a single
second is all the time that is needed for any kind of decision. Beyond
that point there is only vacillation. "Then I'll start--right away. Can
you tell me how to find the trail?"

"I can only tell you to go straight north. Use your watch as a compass
in the daytime and the North Star at night."

"I didn't suppose that it was wisdom to travel at night."

She looked at him in sudden astonishment. "And where did you learn that
fact, Bruce?"

The man tried hard to remember. "I don't know. I suppose it was
something I heard when I was a baby--in these mountains."

"It is one of the first things a mountaineer has to know--to make camp
at nightfall. You would want to, anyway, Bruce. You've got enough real
knowledge of the wilderness in you--born in you--to want a camp and a
fire at night. Besides, the trails are treacherous."

"Then the thing to do is to get ready at once. And then try to bring
Hudson back with me--down to the valley. After we get there we can see
what can be done."

Linda smiled rather sadly. "I'm not very hopeful. But he's our last
chance--and we might as well make a try. There is no hope that the
secret agreement will show up in these few weeks that remain. We'll get
your things together at once."

They breakfasted, and after the simple meal was finished, Bruce began to
pack for the journey. He was very thankful for the months he had spent
in an army camp. He took a few simple supplies of food: a piece of
bacon, a little sack of dried venison--that delicious fare that has held
so many men up on long journeys--and a compact little sack of prepared
flour. There was no space for delicacies in the little pack. Besides, a
man forgets about such things on the high trails. Butter, sugar, even
that ancient friend coffee had to be left behind. He took one little
utensil for cooking--a small skillet--and Linda furnished him with a
camp ax and a long-bladed hunting knife. These things (with the
exception of the knife and ax) he tied up in one heavy, all-wool
blanket, making a compact pack for carrying on his back.

In his pocket he carried cartridges for the rifle, pipe, tobacco, and
matches. Linda took the hob-nails out of her own shoes and pounded them
into his. For there are certain trails in Trail's End that to the
unnailed shoe are quite like the treadmills of ancient days; the foot
slips back after every step.

One thing more was needed: tough leggings. The soft flannel trousers had
not been tailored for wear in the brush coverts. And there is still
another reason why the mountain men want their ankles covered. In
portions of Trail's End there are certain rock ledges--gray, strange
stone heaps blasted by the summer sun--and some of the paths that Bruce
would take crossed over them. These ledges are the home of a certain
breed of forest creatures that Bruce did not in the least desire to
meet. Unlike many of the wild folk, they are not at all particular about
getting out of the way, and they are more than likely to lash up at a
traveler's instep. It isn't wise to try to jump out of the way. If a man
were practiced at dodging lightning bolts he might do it, but not an
ordinary mortal. For that lunging head is one of the swiftest things in
the whole swift-moving animal world. And it isn't entirely safe to rely
on a warning rattle. Sometimes the old king-snake forgets to give it.
These are the poison people--the gray rattlesnakes that gather in
mysterious, grim companies on the rocks--and the only safety from them
is thick covering to the knees that the fangs cannot penetrate.

But the old woman solved this problem with a deer hide that had been
curing for some seasons on the wall behind the house. Her eyes were
dimmed with age, her fingers were stiff, but in an astonishingly short
period of time she improvised a pair of leathern puttees, fastening with
a strap, that answered the purpose beautifully. The two women walked
with him, out under the pine.

Bruce shook old Elmira's scrawny hand; then she turned back at once into
the house. The man felt singularly grateful. He began to credit the old
woman with a great deal of intuition, or else memories from her own
girlhood of long and long ago. He _did_ want a word alone with this
strange girl of the pines. But when Elmira had gone in and the coast was
clear, it wouldn't come to his lips.

He felt curious conjecturings and wonderment arising within him. He
couldn't have shaped them into words. It was just that the girl's face
intrigued him, mystified him, and perhaps moved him a little too. It was
a frank, clear, girlish face, wonderfully tender of feature, and at
first her eyes held him most of all. They gave an impression of
astounding depth. They were quite serious now; and they had a luster
such as can be seen on cold spring water over dark moss,--and few other
places on earth.

"It seems strange," he said, "to come here only last night--and then to
be leaving again."

It seemed to his astonished gaze that her lips trembled ever so
slightly. "We have been waiting for each other a long time, Bwovaboo,"
she replied. She spoke rather low, not looking straight at him. "And I
hate to have you go again so soon."

"But I'll be back--in a few days."

"You don't know. No one ever knows when they start out in these
mountains. Promise me, Bruce--to keep watch every minute. Remember
there's nothing--_nothing_--that Simon won't stoop to do. He's like a
wolf. He has no rules of fighting. He'd just as soon strike from ambush.
How do I know that you'll ever come back again?"

"But I will." He smiled at her, and his eyes dropped from hers to her
lips. His heart seemed to miss a beat. He hadn't noticed these lips in
particular before. The mouth was tender and girlish, its sensitiveness
scarcely seeming fitting in a child of these wild places. He reached out
and took her hand.

"Good-by, Linda," he said, smiling.

She smiled in reply, and her old cheer seemed to return to her.
"Good-by, Bwovaboo. Be careful."

"I'll be careful. And this reminds me of something."

"What?"

"That for all the time I've been away--and for all the time I'm going to
be away now--I haven't done anything more--well, more intimate--than
shake your hand."

Her answer was to pout out her lips in the most natural way in the
world. Bruce was usually deliberate in his motions; but all at once his
deliberation fell away from him. There seemed to be no interlude of time
between one position and another. His arms went about her, and he kissed
her gently on the lips.

But it was not at all as they expected. Both had gone into it
lightly,--a boy-and-girl caress such as is usually not worth thinking
about twice. He had supposed it would be just like the other kisses he
had known in his growing-up days: a moment's soft pressure of the lips,
a moment's delight, and nothing either to regret or rejoice in. But it
was far more than this, after all. Perhaps because they had been too
long in one another's thoughts; perhaps--living in a land of hated
foes--because Linda had not known many kisses, this little caress
beneath the pine went very straight home indeed to them both. They fell
apart, both of them suddenly sobered. The girl's eyes were tender and
lustrous, but startled too.

"Good-by, Linda," he told her.

"Good-by--Bwovaboo," she answered. He turned up the trail past the pine.

He did not know that she stood watching him a long time, her hands
clasped over her breast.




XIII


Miles farther than Linda's cabin, clear beyond the end of the trail that
Duncan took, past even the highest ridge of Trail's End and in the
region where the little rivers that run into the Umpqua have their
starting place, is a certain land of Used to Be. Such a name as that
doesn't make very good sense to a tenderfoot on the first hearing.
Perhaps he can never see the real intelligence of it as long as he
remains a tenderfoot. Such creatures cannot exist for long in the
silences and the endless ridges and the unbeaten trails of this land;
they either become woodsmen or have communication with the buzzards.

It isn't a land of the Present Time at all. It is a place that has never
grown old. When a man passes the last outpost of civilization, and the
shadows of the unbroken woods drop over him, he is likely to forget that
the year is nineteen hundred and twenty, and that the day before
yesterday he had seen an aeroplane passing over his house. It is true
that in this place he sees winged creatures in the air, seeming masters
of the aerial tracts, but they are not aeroplanes. Instead they are the
buzzards, and they are keeping even a closer watch on him than he is on
them. They know that many things may happen whereby they can get
acquainted before the morning breaks. The world seems to have kicked off
its thousand-thousand years as a warm man at night kicks off covers; and
all things are just as they used to be. It is the Young World,--a world
of beasts rather than men, a world where the hand of man has not yet
been felt.

Of course it won't be that way forever. Sometime the forests will fall.
What will become of the beasts that live in them there is no telling;
there are not many places left for them to go. But at present it is just
as savage, just as primitive and untamed as those ancient forests of the
Young World that a man recalls sometimes in dreams.

On this particular early-September day, the age-old drama of the
wilderness was in progress. It was the same play that had been enacted
day after day, year upon year, until the centuries had become too many
to count, and as usual, there were no human observers. There were no
hunters armed with rifles waiting on the deer trails to kill some of the
players. There were no naturalists taking notes that no one will believe
in the coverts. It was the usual matinee performance; the long, hot day
was almost at a close. The play would get better later in the evening,
and really would not be at its best until the moon rose; but it was not
a comedy-drama even now. Rather it was a drama of untamed passions and
bloodshed, strife and carnage and lust and rapine; and it didn't,
unfortunately, have a particularly happy ending. Mother Nature herself,
sometimes kind but usually cruel, was the producer; she furnished the
theater, even the spotted costume by which the fawn remained invisible
in the patches of light and shadow; and she had certain great purposes
of her own that no man understands. As the play was usually complicated
with many fatalities, the buzzards were about the only ones to benefit.
They were the real heroes of the play after all. Everything always
turned out all right for them. They always triumphed in the end.

The greatest difference between this wilderness drama and the dramas
that human beings see upon a stage is that one was reality and the other
is pretense. The players were beasts, not men. The only human being
anywhere in the near vicinity was the old trapper, Hudson, following
down his trap line on the creek margin on the way to his camp. It is
true that two other men, with a rather astounding similarity of purpose,
were at present coming down two of the long trails that led to the
region; but as yet the drama was hidden from their eyes. One of these
two was Bruce, coming from Linda's cabin. One was Dave Turner,
approaching from the direction of the Ross estates. Turner was much the
nearer. Curiously, both had business with the trapper Hudson.

The action of the play was calm at first. Mostly the forest creatures
were still in their afternoon sleep. Brother Bill, the great stag elk,
had a bed in the very center of a thick wall of buckbush, and human
observers at first could not have explained how his great body, with his
vast spread of antlers, had been able to push through. But in reality
his antlers aided rather than hindered. Streaming almost straight back
they act something like a snow-plow, parting the heavy coverts.

The bull elk is in some ways the master of the forest, and one would
wonder why he had gone to such an out-of-the-way place to sleep. Unless
he is attacked from ambush, he has little to fear even from the Tawny
One, the great cougar, and ordinarily the cougar waits until night to do
his hunting. The lynx is just a source of scorn to the great bull, and
even the timber wolf--except when he is combined with his relatives in
winter--is scarcely to be feared. Yet he had been careful to surround
himself with burglar alarms,--in other words, to go into the deep
thicket that no beast of prey could penetrate without warning him--by
the sound of breaking brush--of its approach. It would indicate that
there was at least one living creature in this region--a place where men
ordinarily did not come--that the bull elk feared.

The does and their little spotted fawns were sleeping too; the blacktail
deer had not yet sought the feeding grounds on the ridges. The cougar
yawned in his lair, the wolf dozed in his covert, even the poison-people
lay like long shadows on the hot rocks. But these latter couldn't be
relied upon to sleep soundly. One of the many things they can do is to
jump straight out of a dream like a flicking whiplash, coil and hit a
mark that many a good pistol shot would miss.

Yet there was no chance of the buzzards, at present spectators in the
clouds and waiting for the final act, to become bored. Particularly the
lesser animals of the forest--the Little People--were busy at their
occupations. A little brown-coated pine marten--who is really nothing
but an overgrown weasel famous for his particularly handsome coat--went
stealing through the branches of a pine as if he had rather questionable
business. Some one had told him, and he couldn't remember who, that a
magpie had her nest in that same tree, and Red Eye was going to look and
see. Of course he merely wanted to satisfy his curiosity. Perhaps he
would try to arrange to get a little sip of the mother's blood, just as
it passed through the big vein of the throat,--but of course that was
only incidental. He felt some curiosity about the magpie's eggs too, the
last brood of the year. It might be that there were some little magpies
all coiled up inside of them, that would be worth investigation by one
of his scientific turn of mind. Perhaps even the male bird, coming
frantically to look for his wife, might fly straight into the nest
without noticing his brown body curled about the limb. It offered all
kinds of pleasing prospects, this hunt through the branches.

Of course it is doubtful if the buzzards could detect his serpent-like
form; yet it is a brave man who will say what a buzzard can and cannot
see. Anything that can remain in the air as they do, seemingly without
the flutter of a wing, has powers not to speak of lightly. But if they
could have seen him they would have been particularly interested. A
marten isn't a glutton in his feeding, and often is content with just a
sip of blood from the throat. That leaves something warm and still for
the buzzard's beak.

A long, spotted gopher snake slipped through the dead grass on the
ground beneath. He didn't seem to be going anywhere in particular. He
was just moseying--if there is such a word--along. Not a blade of grass
rustled. Of course there was a chipmunk, sitting at the door of his
house in the uplifted roots of a tree; but the snake--although he was
approaching in his general direction--didn't seem at all interested in
him. Were it not for two things, the serpent would have seemed to be
utterly bored and indifferent to life in general. One of these things
was its cold, glittering, reptile eyes. The other was its darting,
forked tongue.

It may be, after all, that this little tongue was of really great
importance in the serpent's hunting. Many naturalists think that quite
often the little, rattle-brained birds and rodents that it hunts are so
interested in this darting tongue that they quite fail to see the slow
approach of the mottled body of the snake behind it. At least it was
perfectly evident that the chipmunk did not see Limber-spine at present.
Otherwise he wouldn't have been enjoying the scenery with quite the same
complacency. If all went well, there might be a considerable lump in the
snake's throat yet this afternoon. But it would be a quite different
kind of lump from the one the chipmunk's little mate, waiting in vain
for her lord to come to supper, would have in _her_ throat.

An old raccoon wakened from his place on a high limb, stretched himself,
scratched at his fur, then began to steal down the limb. He had a long
way to go before dark. Hunting was getting poor in this part of the
woods. He believed he would wander down toward Hudson's camp and look
for crayfish in the water. A coyote is usually listed among the larger
forest creatures, but early though the hour was--early, that is, for
hunters to be out--he was stalking a fawn in a covert. The coyote has
not an especially high place among the forest creatures, and he has to
do his hunting early and late and any time that offers. Most of the
larger creatures pick on him, all the time detesting him for his
cunning. The timber wolf, a rather close relation whom he cordially
hates, is apt to take bites out of him if he meets him on the trail. The
old bull elk would like nothing better than to cut his hide into rag
patches with the sharp-edged front hoofs. Even the magpies in the tree
tops made up ribald verses about him. But nevertheless the spotted fawn
had cause to fear him. The coyote is an infamous coward; but even the
little cotton tail rabbit does not have to fear a fawn.

All these hunts were progressing famously when there came a curious
interruption. It was just a sound at first. And strangely, not one of
the forest creatures that heard it had ears sharp enough to tell exactly
from what direction it had come. And that made it all the more
unpleasant to listen to.

It was a peculiar growl, quite low at first. It lasted a long time, then
died away. There was no opposition to it. The forest creatures had
paused in their tracks at its first note, and now they stood as if the
winter had come down upon them suddenly and frozen them solid. All the
other sounds of the forest--the little whispering noises of gliding
bodies and fluttering feet, and perhaps a bird's call in a shrub--were
suddenly stilled. There was a moment of breathless suspense. Then the
sound commenced again.

It was louder this time. It rose and gathered volume until it was almost
a roar. It carried through the silences in great waves of sound. And in
it was a sense of resistless power; no creature in the forest but what
knew this fact.

"The Gray King," one could imagine them saying among themselves. The
effect was instantaneous. The little raccoon halted in his descent, then
crept out to the end of a limb. Perhaps he knew that the gray monarch
could not climb trees, but nevertheless he felt that he would be more
secure clear at the swaying limb-tip. The marten forgot his curiosity in
regard to the nest of the magpie. The gopher snake coiled, then slipped
away silently through the grass.

The coyote, an instant before crawling with body close to the earth,
whipped about as if he had some strange kind of circular spring inside
of him. His nerves were always rather ragged, and the sound had
frightened out of him the rigid control of his muscles that was so
necessary if he were to make a successful stalk upon the fawn. The
spotted creature bleated in terror, then darted away; and the coyote
snarled once in the general direction of the Gray King. Then he lowered
his head and skulked off deeper into the coverts.

The blacktail deer, the gray wolf, even the stately Tawny One, stretched
in grace in his lair, wakened from sleep. The languor died quickly in
the latter's eyes, leaving only fear. These were braver than the Little
People. They waited until the thick brush, not far distant from where
the bull elk slept, began to break down and part before an enormous,
gray body.

No longer would an observer think of the elk as the forest monarch. He
was but a pretender, after all. The real king had just wakened from his
afternoon nap and was starting forth to hunt.

Even his little cousins, the black bears (who, after all is said and
done, furnish most of the comedy of the deadly forest drama) did not
wait to make conversation. They tumbled awkwardly down the hill to get
out of his way. For the massive gray form--weighing over half a ton--was
none other than that of the last of the grizzly bears, that terrible
forest hunter and monarch, the Killer himself.




XIV


Long ago, when Oregon was a new land to white men, in the days of the
clipper ships and the Old Oregon Trail, the breed to which the Killer
belonged were really numerous through the little corner north of the
Siskiyous and west of the Cascades. The land was far different then. The
transcontinental lines had not yet been built; the only settlements were
small trading posts and mining camps, and people did not travel over
paved highways in automobiles. If they went at all it was in a
prairie-schooner or on horseback. And the old grizzly bears must have
found the region a veritable heaven.

They were a worthy breed! It is doubtful if any other section of the
United States offered an environment so favorable to them. Game was in
abundance, they could venture down into the valleys at the approach of
winter and thus miss the rigors of the snow, and at first there were no
human enemies. Unfortunately, stories are likely to grow and become
sadly addled after many tellings; but if the words of certain old men
could be believed, the Southern Oregon grizzly occasionally, in the
bountiful fall days, attained a weight of two thousand pounds. No doubt
whatever remains that thousand-pound bears were fairly numerous. They
trailed up and down the brown hillsides; they hunted and honey-grubbed
and mated in the fall; they had their young and fought their battles and
died, and once in a long while the skeleton of a frontiersman would be
found with his skull battered perfectly flat where one of the great
beasts had taken a short-arm pat at him.

But unlike the little black bears, the grizzlies developed displeasing
habits. They were much more carnivorous in character than the blacks,
and their great bodily strength and power enabled them to master all of
the myriad forms of game in the Oregon woods. By the same token, they
could take a full-grown steer and carry it off as a woman carries her
baby.

It couldn't be endured. The cattlemen had begun to settle the valleys,
and it was either a case of killing the grizzlies or yielding the
valleys to them. In the relentless war that followed, the breed had been
practically wiped out. A few of them, perhaps, fled farther and farther
up the Cascades, finding refuges in the Canadian mountains. Others
traveled east, locating at last in the Rocky Mountains, and countless
numbers of them died. At last, as far as the frontiersmen knew, only one
great specimen remained. This was a famous bear that men called
Slewfoot,--a magnificent animal that ranged far and hunted relentlessly,
and no one ever knew just when they were going to run across him. It
made traveling in the mountains a rather ticklish business. He was apt
suddenly to loom up, like a gray cliff, at any turn in the trail, and
his disposition grew querulous with age. In fact, instead of fleeing as
most wild creatures have learned to do, he was rather likely to make
sudden and unexpected charges.

He was killed at last; and seemingly the Southern Oregon grizzlies were
wiped out. But it is rather easy to believe that in some of his
wanderings he encountered--lost and far in the deepest heart of the land
called Trail's End--a female of his own breed. There must have been cubs
who, in their turn, mated and fought and died, and perhaps two
generations after them. And out of the last brood had emerged a single
great male, a worthy descendant of his famous ancestor. This was the
Killer, who in a few months since he had left his fastnesses, was
beginning to ruin the cattle business in Trail's End.

As he came growling from his bed this September evening he was not a
creature to speak of lightly. He was down on all fours, his vast head
was lowered, his huge fangs gleamed in the dark red mouth. The eyes were
small, and curious little red lights glowed in each of them. The Killer
was cross; and he didn't care who knew it. He was hungry too; but hunger
is an emotion for the beasts of prey to keep carefully to themselves. He
walked slowly across the little glen, carelessly at first, for he was
too cross and out of temper to have the patience to stalk. He stopped,
turning his head this way and that, marking the flight of the wild
creatures. He saw a pair of blacktail bucks spring up from a covert and
dash away; but he only made one short, angry lunge toward them. He knew
that it would only cost him his dignity to try to chase them. A grizzly
bear can move astonishingly fast considering his weight--for a short
distance he can keep pace with a running horse--but a deer is light
itself. He uttered one short, low growl, then headed over toward a great
wall of buckbush at the base of the hill.

But now his hunting cunning had begun to return to him. The sun was
setting, the pines were growing dusky, and he began to feel the first
excitement and fever that the fall of night always brings to the beasts
of prey. It is a feeling that his insignificant cousins, the black
bears, could not possibly have,--for the sole reason that they are
berry-eaters, not hunters. But the cougar, stealing down a deer trail on
the ridge above, and a lean old male wolf--stalking a herd of deer on
the other side of the thicket--understood it very well. His blood began
to roll faster through his great veins. The sullen glare grew in his
eyes.

It was the beginning of the hunting hour of the larger creatures. All
the forest world knew it. The air seemed to throb and tingle, the
shadowing thickets began to pulse and stir with life. The Fear--the
age-old heritage of all the hunted creatures--returned to the deer.

The Killer moved quite softly now. One would have marveled how silently
his great feet fell upon the dry earth and with what slight sound his
heavy form moved through the thickets. Once he halted, gazing with
reddening eyes. But the coyote--the gray figure that had broken a twig
on the trail beside him--slipped quickly away.

He skirted the thicket, knowing that no successful stalk could be made
where he had to force his way through dry brush. He moved slowly,
cautiously--all the time mounting farther up the little hill that rose
from the banks of the stream. He came to an opening in the thicket, a
little brown pathway that vanished quickly into the shadows of the
coverts.

The Killer slipped softly into the heavy brush just at its mouth. It was
his ambush. Soon, he knew, some of the creatures that had bowers in the
heart of the thicket would be coming along that trail toward the feeding
grounds on the ridge. He only had to wait.

As the shadows grew and the twilight deepened, the undercurrent of
savagery that is the eternal quality of the wilderness grew ever more
pronounced. A thrill and fever came in the air, mystery in the deepening
shadows, and brighter lights into the eyes of the hunting folk. The dusk
deepened between the trees; the distant trunks dimmed and faded quite
away. The stars emerged. The nightwind, rising somewhere in the region
of the snow banks on the highest mountains, blew down into the Killer's
face and brought messages that no human being may ever receive. Then his
sharp ears heard the sound of brush cracked softly as some one of the
larger forest creatures came up the trail toward him.

The steps drew nearer and the Killer recognized them. They were plainly
the soft footfall of some member of the deer tribe, yet they were too
pronounced to be the step of any of the lesser deer. The bull elk had
left his bed. The red eyes of the grizzly seemed to glow as he waited.
Great though the stag was, only one little blow of the massive forearm
would be needed. The huge fangs would have to close down but once. The
long, many-tined antlers, the sharp front hoofs would not avail him in a
surprise attack such as this would be. Best of all, he was not
suspecting danger. He was walking down wind, so that the pungent odor of
the bear was blown away from him.

The bear did not move a single telltale muscle. He scarcely breathed.
And the one movement that there was was such that not even the keen ears
of an elk could discern, just a curious erection of the gray hairs on
his vast neck.

The bull was almost within striking range now. The wicked red eyes could
already discern the dimmest shadow of his outline through the thickets.
But all at once he stopped, head lifting.

Perhaps a grizzly bear does not have mental processes as human
beings know them. Perhaps all impulse is the result of instinct
alone,--instinct tuned and trained to a degree that human beings find
hard to imagine. But if the bear couldn't understand the sudden halt
just at the eve of his triumph, at least he felt growing anger. He knew
perfectly that the elk had neither detected his odor nor heard him, and
he had made no movements that the sharp eyes could detect. Just a
glimpse of gray in the heavy brush would not have been enough in itself
to arouse the stag's suspicions. For the lower creatures are rarely able
to interpret outline alone; there must be movement too.

Yet the bull was evidently alarmed. He stood immobile, one foot lifted,
nostrils open, head raised. Then, the wind blowing true, the grizzly
understood.

A pungent smell reached him from below,--evidently the smell of a living
creature that followed the trail along the stream that flowed through
the glen. He recognized it in an instant. He had detected it many times,
particularly when he went into the cleared lands to kill cattle. It was
man, an odor almost unknown in this lonely glen. Dave Turner, brother of
Simon, was walking down the stream toward Hudson's camp.

The elk was widely traveled too, and he also realized the proximity of
man. But his reaction was entirely different. To the grizzly it was an
annoying interruption to his hunt; and a great flood of rage swept over
him. It seemed to him that these tall creatures were always crossing his
path, spoiling his hunting, even questioning his rule of the forests.
They did not seem to realize that he was the wilderness king, and that
he could break their slight forms in two with one blow of his paw. It
was true that their eyes had strange powers to disquiet him; but his
isolation in the fastnesses of Trail's End had kept him from any full
recognition of their real strength, and he was unfortunately lacking in
the awe with which most of the forest creatures regard them. But to the
elk this smell was Fear itself. He knew the ways of men only too well.
Too many times he had seen members of his herd fall stricken at a word
from the glittering sticks they carried in their hands. He uttered a
far-ringing snort.

It was a distinctive sound, beginning rather high on the scale as a loud
whistle and descending into a deep bass bawl. And the Killer knew
perfectly what that sound meant. It was a simple way of saying that the
elk would progress no further down _that_ trail. The bear leaped in wild
fury.

A growl that was more near a puma-like snarl came from between the bared
teeth, and the great body lunged out with incredible speed. Although the
distance was far, the charge was almost a success. If one second had
intervened before the elk saw the movement, if his muscles had not been
fitted out with invisible wings, he would have fought no more battles
with his herd brethren in the fall. The bull seemed to leap straight up.
His muscles had been set at his first alarm from Turner's smell on the
wind, and they drove forth the powerful limbs as if by a powder
explosion. He was full in the air when the forepaws battered down where
he had been. Then he darted away into the coverts.

The grizzly knew better than to try to overtake him. Almost rabid with
wrath he turned back to his ambush.




XV


Simon Turner had given Dave very definite instructions concerning his
embassy to Hudson. They were given in the great house that Simon
occupied, in the same room, lighted by the fire's glow, from which
instructions had gone out to the clan so many times before. "The first
thing this Bruce will do," Simon had said, "is to hunt up Hudson--the
one living man that witnessed that agreement between Ross and old
Folger. One reason is that he'll want to verify Linda's story. The next
is to persuade the old man to go down to the courts with him as his
witness. And what you have to do is line him up on our side first."

Dave had felt Simon's eyes upon him, so he didn't look straight up. "And
that's what the hundred is for?" he asked.

"Of course. Get the old man's word that he'll tell Bruce he never
witnessed any such agreement. Maybe fifty dollars will do it; the old
trapper is pretty hard up, I reckon. He'd make us a lot of trouble if
Bruce got him as a witness."

"You think--" Dave's eyes wandered about the room, "you think that's the
best way?"

"I wouldn't be tellin' you to do it if I didn't think so." Simon
laughed,--a sudden, grim syllable. "Dave, you're a blood-thirsty devil.
I see what you're thinking of--of a safer way to keep him from telling.
But you know the word I sent out. 'Go easy!' That's the wisest course to
follow at present. The valley people pay more attention to such things
than they used to; the fewer the killings, the wiser we will be. If
he'll keep quiet for the hundred let him have it in peace."

Dave hadn't forgotten. But his features were sharper and more ratlike
than ever when he came in sight of Hudson's camp, just after the fall of
darkness of the second day out. The trapper was cooking his simple
meal,--a blue grouse frying in his skillet, coffee boiling, and flapjack
batter ready for the moment the grouse was done. He was kneeling close
to the coals; the firelight cast a red glow over him, and the picture
started a train of rather pleasing conjectures in Dave's mind.

He halted in the shadows and stood a moment watching. After all he
wasn't greatly different from the wolf that watched by the deer trail or
the Killer in his ambush, less than a mile distant in the glen. The same
strange, dark passion that was over them both was over him also. One
could see it in the almost imperceptible drawing back of his dark lips
over his teeth. There was just a hint of it in the lurid eyes.

Dave's thought returned to the hundred dollars in his pocket,--a good
sum in the hills. A brass rifle cartridge, such as he could fire in the
thirty-thirty that he carried in the hollow of his arm, cost only about
six cents. The net gain would be--the figures flew quickly through his
mind--ninety-nine dollars and ninety-four cents; quite a good piece of
business for Dave. But the trouble was that Simon might find out.

It was not, he remembered, that Simon was adverse to this sort of
operation when necessary. Perhaps the straight-out sport of the thing
meant more to him than to Dave; he was a braver man and more primitive
in impulse. There were certain memory pictures in Dave's mind of this
younger, more powerful brother of his; and he smiled grimly when he
recalled them. They had been wild, strange scenes of long ago, usually
in the pale light of the moon, and he could recall Simon's face with
singular clearness. There had always been the same drawing back of the
lips, the same gusty breathing, the same strange little flakes of fire
in the savage eyes. He had always trembled all over too, but not from
fear; and Dave remembered especially well the little drama outside
Matthew Folger's cabin in the darkness. He was no stranger to the blood
madness, this brother of his, and the clan had high hopes for him even
in his growing days. And he had fulfilled those hopes. Never could the
fact be doubted! He could still make a fresh notch in his rifle stock
with the same rapture. But the word had gone out, for the present at
least, to "go easy." Such little games as occurred to Dave now--as he
watched the trapper in the firelight with one hundred dollars of the
clan's money in his own pocket--had been prohibited until further
notice.

The thing looked so simple that Dave squirmed all over with annoyance.
It hurt him to think that the hundred dollars that he carried was to be
passed over, without a wink of an eye, to this bearded trapper; and the
only return for it was to be a promise that Hudson would not testify in
Bruce's behalf. And a hundred dollars was real money! It was to be
thought of twice. On the other hand, it would be wholly impossible for
one that lies face half-buried in the pine needles beside a dead fire to
make any kind of testimony whatsoever. It would come to the same thing,
and the hundred dollars would still be in his pocket. Just a little
matter of a single glance down his rifle barrel at the figure in the
silhouette of the fire glow--and a half-ounce of pressure on the hair
trigger. Half jesting with himself, he dropped on one knee and raised
the weapon. The trapper did not guess his presence. The blood leaped in
Dave's veins.

It would be so easy; the drawing back of the hammer would be only the
work of a second; and an instant's peering through the sights was all
that would be needed further. His body trembled as if with passion, as
he started to draw back the hammer.

But he caught himself with a wrench. He had a single second of vivid
introspection; and what he saw filled his cunning eyes with wonder.
There would have been no holding back, once the rifle was cocked and he
saw the man through the sights. The blood madness would have been too
strong to resist. He felt as might one who, taking a few injections of
morphine on prescription, finds himself inadvertently with a loaded
needle in his hands. He knew a moment of remorse--so overwhelming that
it was almost terror--that the shedding of blood had become so easy to
him. He hadn't known how easy it had been to learn. He didn't know that
a vice is nothing but a lust that has been given free play so many times
that the will can no longer restrain it.

But the sight of Hudson's form, sitting down now to his meal, dispelled
his remorse quickly. After all, his own course would have been the
simplest way to handle the matter. There would be no danger that Hudson
would double-cross them then. But he realized that Simon had spoken true
when he said that the old days were gone, that the arm of the law
reached farther than formerly, and it might even stretch to this far
place. He remembered Simon's instructions. "The quieter we can do these
things, the better," the clan leader had said. "If we can get through to
October thirtieth with no killings, the safer it is for us. We don't
know how the tenderfeet in the valley are going to act--there isn't the
same feeling about blood-feuds that there used to be. Go easy, Dave.
Sound this Hudson out. If he'll keep still for a hundred, let him have
it in peace."

Dave slipped his rifle into the hollow of his arm and continued on down
the trail. He didn't try to stalk. In a moment Hudson heard his step and
looked up. They met in a circle of firelight.

It is not the mountain way to fraternize quickly, nor are the mountain
men quick to show astonishment. Hudson had not seen another human being
since his last visit to the settlements. Yet his voice indicated no
surprise at this visitation.

"Howdy," he grunted.

"Howdy," Dave replied. "How about grub?"

"Help yourself. Supper just ready."

Dave helped himself to the food of the man that, a moment before, he
would have slain; and in the light of the high fire that followed the
meal, he got down to the real business of the visit.

Dave knew that a fairly straight course was best. It was general
knowledge through the hills that the Turners had gouged the Rosses of
their lands and it was absurd to think that Hudson did not realize the
true state of affairs. "I suppose you've forgotten that little deed you
witnessed between old Mat Folger and Ross--twenty years ago," Dave began
easily, his pipe between his teeth.

Hudson turned with a cunning glitter in his eyes. Dave saw it and grew
bolder. "Who wants me to forget it?" Hudson demanded.

"I ain't said that anybody wants you to," Dave responded. "I asked if
you had."

Hudson was still a moment, stroking absently his beard. "If you want to
know," he said, "I ain't forgotten. But there wasn't just a deed. There
was an agreement too."

Dave nodded. Hudson's eyes traveled to his rifle,--for the simple reason
that he wanted to know just how many jumps he would be obliged to make
to reach it in case of emergencies. Such things are good to know in
meetings like this.

"I know all about that agreement," Dave confessed.

"You do, eh? So do I. I ain't likely to forget."

Dave studied him closely. "What good is it going to do you to remember?"
he demanded.

"I ain't saying that it's going to do me any good. At present I ain't
got nothing against the Turners. They've always been all right to me.
What's between them and the Rosses is past and done--although I know
just in what way Folger held that land and no transfer from him to you
was legal. But that's all part of the past. As long as the Turners
continue to be my friends I don't see why anything should be said about
it."

Dave did not misunderstand him. He didn't in the least assume that these
friendly words meant that he could go back to the ranches with the
hundred dollars still in his pocket. It meant merely that Hudson was
open to reason and it wouldn't have to be a shooting affair.

Dave speculated. It was wholly plain that the old man had not yet heard
of Bruce's return. There was no need to mention him. "We're glad you are
our friend," Dave went on. "But we don't expect no one to stay friends
with us unless they benefit to some small extent by it. How many furs do
you hope to take this year?"

"Not enough to pay to pack out. Maybe two hundred dollars in bounties
before New Year--coyotes and wolves. Maybe a little better in the three
months following in furs."

"Then maybe fifty or seventy-five dollars, without bothering to set the
traps, wouldn't come in so bad."

"It wouldn't come in bad, but it doesn't buy much these days. A hundred
would do better."

"A hundred it is," Dave told him with finality.

The eyes above the dark beard shone in the firelight. "I'd forget I had
a mother for a hundred dollars," he said. He watched, greedily, as
Dave's gaunt hand went into his pocket. "I'm gettin' old, Dave. Every
dollar is harder for me to get. The wolves are gettin' wiser, the mink
are fewer. There ain't much that I wouldn't do for a hundred dollars
now. You know how it is."

Yes, Dave knew. The money changed hands. The fire burned down. They sat
a long time, deep in their own thoughts.

"All we ask," Dave said, "is that you don't take sides against us."

"I'll remember. Of course you want me, in case I'm ever subpoenaed, to
recall signing the deed itself."

"Yes, we'd want you to testify to that."

"Of course. If there hadn't been any kind of a deed, Folger couldn't
have deeded the property to you. But how would it be, if any one asks me
about it, to swear that there _never was_ no secret agreement, but a
clear transfer; and to make it sound reasonable for me to say--to say
that Ross was forced to deed the land to Folger because he'd had
goings-on with Folger's wife, and Folger was about to kill him?"

The only response, at first, was the slightest, almost imperceptible
narrowing of Dave's eyes. He had considerable native cunning, but such
an idea as this had never occurred to him. But he was crafty enough to
see its tremendous possibilities at once. All that either Simon or
himself had hoped for was that the old man would not testify in Bruce's
behalf. But he saw that such a story, coming from the apparently honest
old trapper, might have a profound effect upon Bruce. Dave understood
human nature well enough to know that he would probably lose faith in
the entire enterprise. To Bruce it had been nothing but an old woman's
story, after all; it was wholly possible that he would relinquish all
effort to return the lands to Linda Ross. Men always can believe
stranger things of sex than any other thing; Bruce would in all
probability find Hudson's story much more logical than the one Linda had
told him under the pine. It was worth one hundred dollars, after all.

"I'll bet you could make him swallow it, hook, bait, and sinker," Dave
responded at last, flattering. They chuckled together in the darkness.
Then they turned to the blankets.

"I'll show you another trail out to-morrow," Hudson told him. "It comes
into the glen that you passed to-night--the canyon that the Killer has
been using lately for a hunting ground."




XVI


The Killer had had an unsuccessful night. He had waited the long hours
through at the mouth of the trail, but only the Little People--such as
the rabbits and similar folk that hardly constituted a single bite in
his great jaws--had come his way. Now it was morning and it looked as if
he would have to go hungry.

The thought didn't improve his already doubtful mood. He wanted to
growl. The only thing that kept him from it was the realization that it
would frighten away any living creature that might be approaching toward
him up the trail. He started to stretch his great muscles, intending to
leave his ambush. But all at once he froze again into a lifeless gray
patch in the thickets.

There were light steps on the trail. Again they were the steps of
deer,--but not of the great, wary elk this time. Instead it was just a
fawn, or a yearling doe at least, such a creature as had not yet learned
to suspect every turn in the trail. The morning light was steadily
growing, the stars were all dimmed or else entirely faded in the sky,
and it would have been highly improbable that a full-grown buck in his
wisdom would draw within leaping range without detecting him. But he
hadn't the slightest doubt about the fawn. They were innocent
people,--and their flesh was very tender. The forest gods had been good
to him, after all.

He peered through the thickets, and in a moment more he had a glimpse of
the spotted skin. It was almost too easy. The fawn was stealing toward
him with mincing steps--as graceful a creature as dwelt in all this
wilderness world of grace--and its eyes were soft and tender as a
girl's. It was evidently giving no thought to danger, only rejoicing
that the fearful hours of night were done. The mountain lion had already
sought its lair. The fawn didn't know that a worse terror still lingered
at the mouth of the trail.

But even as the Killer watched, the prize was simply taken out of his
mouth. A gray wolf--a savage old male that also had just finished an
unsuccessful hunt--had been stealing through the thickets in search of a
lair, and he came out on the trail not fifty feet distant, halfway
between the bear and the fawn. The one was almost as surprised as the
other. The fawn turned with a frightened bleat and darted away; the wolf
swung into pursuit.

The bear lunged forward with a howl of rage. He leaped into the trail
mouth, then ran as fast as he could in pursuit of the running wolf. He
was too enraged to stop to think that a grizzly bear has never yet been
able to overtake a wolf, once the trim legs got well into action. At
first he couldn't think about anything; he had been cheated too many
times. His first impulse was one of tremendous and overpowering
wrath,--a fury that meant death to the first living creature that he
met.

But in a single second he realized that this wild chase was fairly good
tactics, after all. The chances for a meal were still rather good. The
fawn and the wolf were in the open now, and it was wholly evident that
the gray hunter would overtake the quarry in another moment. It was true
that the Killer would miss the pleasure of slaying his own game,--the
ecstatic blow to the shoulder and the bite to the throat that followed
it. In this case, the wolf would do that part of the work for him. It
was just a simple matter of driving the creature away from his dead.

The fawn reached the stream bank, then went bounding down the margin.
The distance shortened between them. It was leaping wildly, already
almost exhausted; the wolf raced easily, body close to the ground, in
long, tireless strides. The grizzly bear sped behind him.

But at that instant fate took a hand in this merry little chase. To the
fawn, it was nothing but a sharp clang of metal behind him and an
answering shriek of pain,--sounds that in its terror it heard but dimly.
But it was an unlooked-for and tragic reality to the wolf. His leap was
suddenly arrested in mid-air, and he was hurled to the ground with
stunning force. Cruel metal teeth had seized his leg, and a strong chain
held him when he tried to escape. He fought it with desperate savagery.
The fawn leaped on to safety.

But there was no need of the grizzly continuing its pursuit. Everything
had turned out quite well for him, after all. A wolf is ever so much
more filling than any kind of seasonal fawn; and the old gray pack
leader was imprisoned and helpless in one of Hudson's traps.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the first gray of morning, Dave Turner started back toward his home.
"I'll go with you to the forks in the trail," Hudson told him. "I want
to take a look at some of my traps, anyhow."

Turner had completed his business none too soon. At the same hour--as
soon as it was light enough to see--Bruce was finishing his breakfast in
preparation for the last lap of his journey. He had passed the night by
a spring on a long ridge, almost in eye range of Hudson's camp. Now he
was preparing to dip down into the Killer's glen.

Turner and Hudson followed up the little creek, walking almost in
silence. It is a habit all mountain men fall into, sooner or later,--not
to waste words. The great silences of the wild places seem to forbid it.
Hudson walked ahead, Turner possibly a dozen feet behind him. And
because of the carpet of pine needles, the forest creatures could hardly
hear them come.

Occasionally they caught glimpses of the wild life that teemed about
them, but they experienced none of the delight that had made the two-day
tramp such a pleasure to Bruce. Hudson thought in terms of pelts only;
no creature that did not wear a marketable hide was worth a glance.
Turner did not feel even this interest.

The first of Hudson's sets proved empty. The second was about a turn in
the creek, and a wall of brush made it impossible for him to tell at a
distance whether or not he had made a catch. But when still a quarter of
a mile distant, Hudson heard a sound that he thought he recognized. It
was a high, sharp, agonized bark that dimmed into a low whine. "I
believe I've got a coyote or a wolf up there," he said. They hastened
their steps.

"And you use that little pea-gun for wolves?" Dave Turner asked. He
pointed to the short-barreled, twenty-two caliber rifle that was slung
on the trapper's back. "It doesn't look like it would kill a mosquito."

"A killer gun," Hudson explained. "For polishin' 'em off when they are
alive in the traps. Of course, it wouldn't be no good more'n ten feet
away, and then you have to aim at a vital spot. But I've heard tell of
animals I wouldn't want to meet with that thirty-thirty of yours."

This was true enough. Dave had heard of them also. A thirty-thirty is a
powerful weapon, but it isn't an elephant gun. They hurried on, Dave
very anxious to watch the execution that would shortly ensue if whatever
animal had cried from the trap was still alive. Such things were only
the day's work to Hudson, but Dave felt a little tingle of anticipation.
And the thought damned him beyond redemption.

But instead of the joy of killing a cowering, terror-stricken animal,
helpless in the trap, the wilderness had made other plans for Hudson and
Dave. They hastened about the impenetrable wall of brush, and in one
glance they knew that more urgent business awaited them.

The whole picture loomed suddenly before their eyes. There was no wolf
in the trap. The steel had sprung, certainly, but only a hideous
fragment of a foot remained between the jaws. The bone had been broken
sharply off, as a man might break a match in his fingers. There was no
living wolf for Hudson to execute with his killer gun. Life had gone out
of the gray body many minutes before. The two men saw all these things
as a background only,--dim details about the central figure. But the
thing that froze them in their tracks with terror was the great, gray
form of the Killer, not twenty feet distant, beside the mangled body of
the wolf.

The events that followed thereafter came in such quick succession as to
seem simultaneous. For one fraction of an instant all three figures
stood motionless, the two men staring, the grizzly half-leaning over his
prey, his head turned, his little red eyes full of hatred. Too many
times this night he had missed his game. It was the same intrusion that
had angered him before,--slight figures to break to pieces with one
blow. Perhaps--for no man may trace fully the mental processes of
animals--his fury fully transcended the fear that he must have
instinctively felt; at least, he did not even attempt to flee. He
uttered one hoarse, savage note, a sound in which all his hatred and his
fury and his savage power were made manifest, whirled with incredible
speed, and charged.

The lunge seemed only a swift passing of gray light. No eye could
believe that the vast form could move with such swiftness. There was
little impression of an actual leap. Rather it was just a blow; the
great form, huddled over the dead wolf, had simply reached the full
distance to Hudson.

The man did not even have time to turn. There was no defense; his
killer-gun was strapped on his back, and even if it had been in his
hands, its little bullet would not have mattered the sting of a bee in
honey-robbing. The only possible chance of breaking that deadly charge
lay in the thirty-thirty deer rifle in Dave's arms; but the craven who
held it did not even fire. He was standing just below the outstretched
limb of a tree, and the weapon fell from his hands as he swung up into
the limb. The fact that Hudson stood weaponless, ten feet away in the
clearing, did not deter him in the least.

No human flesh could stand against that charge. The vast paw fell with
resistless force; and no need arose for a second blow. The trapper's
body was struck down as if felled by a meteor, and the power of the
impact forced it deep into the carpet of pine needles. The savage
creature turned, the white fangs caught the light in the open mouth. The
head lunged toward the man's shoulder.

No man may say what agony Hudson would have endured in the last few
seconds of his life if the Killer had been given time and opportunity.
His usual way was to linger long, sharp fangs closing again and again,
until all living likeness was destroyed. The blood-lust was upon him;
there would have been no mercy to the dying creature in the pine
needles. Yet it transpired that Hudson's flesh was not to know those
rending fangs a second time. Although it is an unfamiliar thing in the
wilderness, the end of Hudson's trail was peaceful, after all.

On the hillside above, a stranger to this land had dropped to his knee
in the shrubbery, his rifle lifted to the level of his eyes. It was
Bruce, who had come in time to see the charge through a rift in the
trees.




XVII


There were deep significances in the fact that Bruce kept his head in
this moment of crisis. It meant nothing less than an iron self-control
such as only the strongest men possess, and it meant nerves steady as
steel bars.

The bear was on Hudson, and the man had gone down, before Bruce even
interpreted him. Then it was just a gray patch, a full three hundred
yards away. His instinct was to throw the gun to his shoulder and fire
without aiming; yet he conquered it with an iron will. But he did move
quickly. He dropped to his knee the single second that the gun leaped to
his shoulder. He seemed to know that from a lower position the target
would be more clearly revealed. The finger pressed back against the
trigger.

The distance was far; Bruce was not a practiced rifle shot, and it
bordered on the miraculous that his lead went anywhere near the bear's
body. And it was true that the bullet did not reach a vital place. It
stung like a wasp at the Killer's flank, however, cutting a shallow
flesh wound. But it was enough to take his dreadful attention from the
mortally wounded trapper in the pine needles.

He whirled about, growling furiously and biting at the wound. Then he
stood still, turning his gaze first to the pale face of Dave Turner
thirty feet above him in the pine. The eyes glowed in fury and hatred.
He had found men out at last; they died even more easily than the fawn.
He started to turn back to the fallen, and the rifle spoke again.

It was a complete miss, this time; yet the bear leaped in fear when the
bullet thwacked into the dust beside him. He did not wait for a third.
His caution suddenly returning to him, and perhaps his anger somewhat
satiated by the blow he had dealt Hudson, he crashed into the security
of the thicket.

Bruce waited a single instant, hoping for another glimpse of the
creature; then ran down to aid Hudson. But in driving the bear from the
trapper's helpless body he had already given all the aid that he could.
Understanding came quickly. He had arrived only in time for the
Departure,--just a glimpse of a light as it faded. The blow had been
more than any human being could survive; even now Hudson was entering
upon that strange calm which often, so mercifully, immediately precedes
death.

He opened his eyes and looked with some wonder into Bruce's face. The
light in them was dimming, fading like a twilight, yet there was
indication of neither confusion nor delirium. Hudson, in that last
moment of his life, was quite himself.

There was, however, some indication of perplexity at the peculiar turn
affairs had taken. "You're not Dave Turner," he said wonderingly.

Dim though the voice was, there was considerable emphasis in the tone.
Hudson seemed quite sure of this point, whether or not he knew anything
concerning the dark gates he was about to enter. He wouldn't have spoken
greatly different if he had been sitting in perfect health before his
own camp fire and the shadow was now already so deep his eyes could
scarcely penetrate it.

"No," Bruce answered. "Dave Turner is up a tree. He didn't even wait to
shoot."

"Of course he wouldn't." Hudson spoke with assurance. The words dimmed
at the end, and he half-closed his eyes as if he were too sleepy to stay
awake longer. Then Bruce saw a strange thing. He saw, unmistakable as
the sun in the sky, the signs of a curious struggle in the man's face.
There was a singular deepening of the lines, a twitching of the muscles,
a queer set to the lips and jaws. They were as much signs of battle as
the sound of firing a general hears from far away.

The trapper--a moment before sinking into the calm of death--was
fighting desperately for a few moments of respite. There could be no
other explanation. And he won it at last,--an interlude of half a dozen
breaths. "Who are you?" he whispered.

Bruce bowed his head until his ear was close to the lips. "Bruce
Folger," he answered,--for the first time in his knowledge speaking his
full name. "Son of Matthew Folger who lived at Trail's End long ago."

The man still struggled. "I knew it," he said. "I saw it--in your face.
I see--everything now. Listen--can you hear me?"

"Yes."

"I just did a wrong--there's a hundred dollars in my pocket that I just
got for doing it. I made a promise--to lie to you. Take the money--it
ought to be yours, anyway--and hers; and use it toward fighting the
wrong. It will go a little way."

"Yes," Bruce looked him full in the eyes. "No matter about the money.
What did you promise Turner?"

"That I'd lie to you. Grip my arms with your hands--till it hurts. I've
only got one breath more. Your father held those lands only in
trust--the Turners' deed is forged. And the secret agreement that I
witnessed is hidden--"

The breath seemed to go out of the man. Bruce shook him by the
shoulders. Dave, still in the tree, strained to hear the rest.
"Yes--where?"

"It's hidden--just--out--" The words were no longer audible to Dave, and
what followed Bruce also strained to hear in vain. The lips ceased
moving. The shadow grew in the eyes, and the lids flickered down over
them. A traveler had gone.

Bruce got up, a strange, cold light in his eyes. He glanced up. Dave
Turner was climbing slowly down the tree. Bruce made six strides and
seized his rifle.

The effect on Dave was ludicrous. He clung fast to the tree limbs, as if
he thought a bullet--like a grizzly's claws--could not reach him there.
Bruce laid the gun behind him, then stood waiting with his own weapon
resting in his arms.

"Come down, Dave," he commanded. "The bear is gone."

Dave crept down the trunk and halted at its base. He studied the cold
face before him. "Better not try nothing," he advised hoarsely.

"Why not?" Bruce asked. "Do you think I'm afraid of a coward?" The man
started at the words; his head bobbed backward as if Bruce had struck
him beneath the jaw with his fist.

"People don't call the Turners cowards and walk off with it," the man
told him.

"Oh, the lowest coward!" Bruce said between set teeth. "The yellowest,
mongrel coward! Your own confederate--and you had to drop your gun and
run up a tree. You might have stopped the bear's charge."

Dave's face twisted in a scowl. "You're brave enough now. Wait to see
what happens later. Give me my gun. I'm going to go."

"You can go, but you don't get your gun. I'll fill you full of lead if
you try to touch it."

Dave looked up with some care. He wanted to know for certain if this
tenderfoot meant what he said. The man was blind in some things, his
vision was twisted and dark, but he made no mistake about the look on
the cold, set face before him. Bruce's finger was curled about the
trigger, and it looked to Dave as if it itched to exert further
pressure.

"I don't see why I spare you, anyway," Bruce went on. His tone was
self-reproachful. "God knows I hadn't ought to--remembering who and what
you are. If you'd only give me one little bit of provocation--"

Dave saw lurid lights growing in the man's eyes; and all at once a
conclusion came to him. He decided he'd make no further effort to regain
the gun. His life was rather precious to him, strangely, and it was
wholly plain that a dread and terrible passion was slowly creeping over
his enemy. He could see it in the darkening face, the tight grip of the
hands on the rifle stock. His own sharp features grew more cunning. "You
ought to be glad I didn't stop the bear with my rifle," he said
hurriedly. "I had Hudson bribed--you wouldn't have found out something
that you did find out if he hadn't lain here dying. You wouldn't have
learned--"

But the sentence died in the middle. Bruce made answer to it. For once
in his life Dave's cunning had not availed him; he had said the last
thing in the world that he should have said, the one thing that was
needed to cause an explosion. He hadn't known that some men have
standards other than self gain. And some small measure of realization
came to him when he felt the dust his full length under him.

Bruce's answer had been a straight-out blow with his fist, with all his
strength behind it, in the very center of his enemy's face.




XVIII


In his years of residence at Trail's End, Dave Turner had acquired a
thorough knowledge of all its paths. That knowledge stood him in good
stead now. He wished to cross the ridges to Simon's house at least an
hour before Bruce could return to Linda.

He traveled hard and late, and he reached Simon's door just before
sundown of the second day. Bruce was still a full two hours distant. But
Dave did not stay to knock. It was chore-time, and he thought he would
find Simon in his barn, supervising the feeding and care of the
livestock. He had guessed right, and the two men had a moment's talk in
the dusky passage behind the stalls.

"I've brought news," Dave said.

Simon made no answer at first. The saddle pony in the stall immediately
in front of them, frightened at Dave's unfamiliar figure, had crowded,
trembling, against his manger. Simon's red eyes watched him; then he
uttered a short oath. He took two strides into the stall and seized the
halter rope in his huge, muscular hand. Three times he jerked it with a
peculiar, quartering pull, a curbing that might have been ineffective by
a man of ordinary strength, but with the incomprehensible might of the
great forearm behind it was really terrible punishment. Dave thought for
a moment his brother would break the animal's neck; the whites began to
show about the soft, dark pupils of its eyes. The strap over the head
broke with the fourth pull; then the horse recoiled, plunging and
terrified, into the opposite corner of the stall.

Simon leaped with shattering power at the creature's shoulders, his huge
arms encircled its neck, his shoulders heaved, and he half-threw it to
the floor. Then, as it staggered to rise, his heavy fist flailed against
its neck. Again and again he struck, and in the half-darkness of the
stable it was a dreadful thing to behold. The man's fury, always quickly
aroused, was upon him; his brawny form moved with the agility of a
panther. Even Dave, whose shallow eyes were usually wont to feast on
cruelty, viewed the scene with some alarm. It wasn't that he was moved
by the agony of the horse. But he did remember that horses cost money,
and Simon seemed determined to kill the animal before his passion was
spent.

The horse cowered, and in a moment more it was hard to remember he was a
member of a noble, high-spirited breed,--a swift runner, brainy as a
dog, a servant faithful and worthy. It was no longer easy to think of
him as a creature of beauty,--and there is no other word than beauty for
these long-maned, long-tailed, trim-lined animals. He stood quiet at
last, his head hanging low, knees bent, eyes curiously sorrowful and
dark. Simon fastened the broken strap about his neck, gave it one more
jerk that almost knocked the animal off his feet, then turned back to
Dave. Except for a higher color in his cheeks, darker lights in his
eyes, and an almost imperceptible quickening of his breathing, it did
not seem as if he had moved.

"You're always bringing news," he said.

Dave opened his eyes. He had forgotten his own words in the tumult of
the fight he had just watched, but plainly Simon hadn't forgotten. He
opened his mouth to speak.

"Well, what is it? Out with it," his brother urged. "If it's as
important as some of the other news you've brought don't take my time."

"All right," the other replied sullenly. "You don't have to hear it. But
I'm telling you it's of real importance this time--and sometime you'll
find out." He scowled into the dark face. "But suit yourself."

He turned as if to go. He rather thought that Simon would call him back.
It would be, in a measure, a victory. But Simon went back to his
inspection of the stalls.

Dave walked clear to the door, then turned. "Don't be a fool, Simon," he
urged. "Listen to what I have to tell you. Bruce Folger knows where that
secret agreement is."

For once in his life Dave got a response of sufficient emphasis to
satisfy him. His brother whirled, his whole expression undergoing an
immediate and startling change. If there was one emotion that Dave had
never seen on Simon's face it was fear,--and he didn't know for certain
that he saw it now. But there was alarm--unmistakable--and surprise
too.

"What do you mean?" he demanded.

Dave exulted inwardly. His brother's response had almost made up for the
evil news that he brought. For Dave's fortunes, as well as Simon's,
depended on the vast fertile tract being kept in the clan's possession.
His eyes narrowed ever so slightly. For the first time in his life, as
far as Dave could remember, Simon had encountered a situation that he
had not immediately mastered. Perhaps it was the beginning of Simon's
downfall, which meant--by no great stretch of the imagination--the
advancement of Dave. But in another second of clear thinking Dave knew
that in his brother's strength lay his own; if this mighty force at the
head of the clan was weakening, no hope remained for any of them. His
own face grew anxious.

"Out with it," Simon stormed. His tone was really urgent now, not
insolent as usual. "Good Lord, man, don't you know that if Bruce gets
that down to the settlements before the thirtieth of next month we're
lost--and nothing in this world can save us? We can't drive _him_ off,
like we drove the Rosses. There's too much law down in the valleys. If
he's got that paper, there's only one thing to do. Help me saddle a
horse."

"Wait a minute. I didn't say he had it. I only said he knew where it
was. He's still an hour or two walk from here, toward Little River, and
if we have to wait for him on the trail, we've got plenty of time. And
of course I ain't quite sure he _does_ know where it is."

Simon smiled mirthlessly. "The news is beginning to sound like the rest
of yours."

"Old Hudson is dead," Dave went on. "And don't look at me--I didn't do
it. I wish I had, though, first off. For once my judgment was better
than yours. The Killer got him."

"Yes. Go on."

"I was with him when it happened. My gun got jammed so I couldn't
shoot."

"Where is it now?"

Dave scrambled in vain for a story to explain the loss of his weapon to
Bruce, and the one that came out at last didn't do him particular
credit. "I--I threw the damn thing away. Wish I hadn't now, but it made
me so mad by jamming--it was a fool trick. Maybe I can go back after it
and find it."

Simon smiled again. "Very good so far," he commented.

Dave flushed. "Bruce was there too--fact is, creased the bear--and the
last minute before he died Hudson told him where the agreement was
hidden. I couldn't hear all he said--I was too far away--but I heard
enough to think that he told Bruce the hiding, place. It was natural
Hudson would know it, and we were fools for not asking him about it long
ago."

"And why didn't you get that information away from Bruce with your gun?"

"Didn't I tell you the thing was jammed? If it hadn't of been for that,
I'd done something more than find out where it is. I'd stopped this
nonsense once and for all, and let a hole through that tenderfoot big
enough to see through. _Then_ there'd never be any more trouble. It's
the thing to do now."

Simon looked at his brother's face with some wonder. More crafty and
cunning, Dave was like the coyote in that he didn't yield so quickly to
fury as that gray wolf, his brother. But when it did come, it seared
him. It had come now. Simon couldn't mistake the fact; he saw it plain
in the glowing eyes, the clenched hands, the drawn lips. Dave was
remembering the pain of the blow Bruce had given him, and the smart of
the words that had preceded it.

"You and he must have had a little session down there by the creek,"
Simon suggested slowly, "when your gun was jammed. Of course, he took
the gun. What's the use of trying to lie to me?"

"He did. What could I do?"

"And now you want him potted--from ambush."

"What's the use of waiting? Who'd know?" The two men stood face to face
in the quiet and deepening dusk of the barn; and there was growing
determination on each face. "Every day our chance is less and less,"
Dave went on. "We've been thinking we're safe, but if he knows where
that agreement is, we're not safe at all. How would you like to get
booted off these three thousand acres now, just after we've all got
attached to them? To start making our living as day laborers--and maybe
face a hangin' for some things of long ago? With this land behind him,
he'd be in a position to pay old debts, I'm telling you. We

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