The trail was long and steep into Back There for Jeffery Neilson and his
men. Day after day they traveled with their train of pack horses,
pushing deeper into the wilds, fording mighty rivers, traversing silent
and majestic mountain ranges, climbing slopes so steep that the packs
had to be lightened to half before the gasping animals could reach the
crest. They could go only at a snail's pace,--even in the best day's
travel only ten miles, and often a single mile was a hard, exhausting
day's work.
Of course there was no kind of a trail for them to follow. As far as
possible they followed the winding pathways of big game--as long as
these led them in their general direction--but often they were obliged
to cut their way through the underbrush. Time after time they
encountered impassable cliffs or rivers from which they were obliged to
turn back and seek new routes; they found marshes that they could not
penetrate; ranges they could not climb; wastes of slide rock where they
could make headway only at a creeping pace and with hourly risk of their
lives.
They had counted on slow travel, but the weeks grew into the months
before they even neared the obscure heart of Back There where they
thought Ben and Beatrice might be hidden. The way was hard as they had
never dreamed. Every day, it seemed to them, brought its fresh tragedy:
a long back-trailing to avoid some impassable place, a fatiguing
digression, perhaps several hours of grinding work with the axe in order
to cut a trail. Sometimes the harness broke, requiring long stops on
the trail to repair it, the packs slipped continually from the hard
going; and they found it increasingly difficult to secure horse feed for
the animals.
Even Indian ponies cannot keep fat on such grass as grows in the deep
shade of the spruce. They need the rich growths of the open park lands
to stiffen them for the grinding toil; and even with good feeding,
foresters know that pack animals must not be kept on the trail for too
many days in succession. Jeffery Neilson and his men disregarded both
these facts, with the result that the animals lost flesh and strength,
cutting down the speed of their advance. Oaths and shouts were
unavailing now: only cruel blows could drive them forward at all.
They seemed to sense a great hopelessness in their undertaking. Usually
well-trained pack horses will follow their leader without question, walk
almost in his tracks, and the rider in front only has to show the way.
After the first few days of grinding toil, the morale of the entire
outfit began to break. The horses broke away into thickets on each side;
and time after time, one hour upon another, the horsemen had to round
them up again. When they came to the great rivers--wild tributaries of
the Yuga--they had to follow up the streams for days in search of a
place to ford. Then they were obliged to carry the packs across in small
loads, making trip after trip with the utmost patience and toil. The
horses, broken in spirit, took the wild waters just as they climbed the
steep slopes, with little care whether they lived or died.
The days passed, June and July. Ever they moved at a slower pace. One of
the horses, giving up on a steep pitch and frenzied by Ray's cruel,
lashing blows, fell off the edge of the trail and shot down like a
plummet two hundred feet into the canyon below--and thereupon it became
necessary not only to spend the rest of the day in retrieving and
repairing the supplies that had fallen with him, but also to heap bigger
loads on the backs of the remaining horses. And always they were faced
by the cruel possibility that this whole, mighty labor was in
vain,--that Ben and Beatrice might have gone to their deaths in the
rapids, weeks before.
The food stores brought for the journey were rapidly depleted. The
result was that they had to depend more and more upon a diet of meat.
Men can hold up fairly well on meat alone, particularly if it has a fair
amount of fat, but the effort of hunting and drying the flesh into jerky
served to cut down their speed.
The constant delays, the grinding, blasting toil of the day's march, and
particularly the ever-recurring crises of ford and steep, made serious
inroads on the morale of the three men. Just the work of urging on the
exhausted horses drained their nervous energy in a frightful stream: the
uncertainty of their quest, the danger, the scarcity of any food but
meat, and most of all the burning hatred in their hearts for the man who
had forced the expedition upon them combined to torment them; even now,
Ben Darby had received no little measure of vengeance.
No experience of their individual lives had ever presented such a daily
ordeal of physical distress; none had ever been so devastating to hope
and spirit. There was not one moment of pleasure, one instant of relief
from the day's beginning to its end. At night they went to sleep on
hastily made beds, cursing at all things in heaven and earth; they
blasphemed with growing savagery all that men hold holy and true; and
degeneracy grew upon them very swiftly. They quarreled over their
tasks, and they hated each other with a hatred only second to that they
bore Darby himself. All three had always been reckless, wicked, brutal
men; but now, particularly in the case of Ray and Chan, the ordeal
brought out and augmented the latent abnormalities that made them
criminals in the beginning, developing those odd quirks in human minds
that make toward perversion and the most fiendish crime.
Jeffery Neilson had almost forgotten the issue of the claim by now. He
had told the truth, those weary weeks before, when he had wished he had
never seen it. His only thought was of his daughter, the captive of a
relentless, merciless man in these far wilds. Never the moon rose or the
sun declined but that he was sick with haunting fear for her. Had she
gone down to her death in the rapids? This was Neilson's fondest wish:
the enfolding oblivion of wild waters would be infinitely better than
the fate Ben had hinted at in his letter. Yet he dared not turn back.
She might yet live, held prisoner in some far-off cave.
At first all three agreed on this point: that they must not turn back
until either Ben was crushed under their heels or they had made sure of
his death. Ray had not forgotten that Ben alone stood between him and
the wealth and power he had always craved. He dreamed, at first, that
the deadly hardships of the journey could be atoned for by years of
luxury and ease. His mind was also haunted with dark conjectures as to
the fate of Beatrice, but jealousy, rather than concern for her, was the
moving impulse.
Neilson knew his young partner now. He saw clearly at last that Ray was
not and had never been a faithful confederate, but indeed a malicious
and bitter enemy, only waiting his chance to overthrow his leader. They
were still partners in their effort to rescue the girl and slay her
abductor; otherwise they were at swords' points. And there would be
something more than plain, swift slaying, now. If Neilson could read
aright, the actual, physical change that had been wrought in Ray's face
foretold no ordinary end for Ben. His features were curiously drawn; and
his eyes had a fixed, magnetic, evil light. Occasionally in his darker
hours Neilson foresaw even more sinister possibilities in this change in
Ray: the abnormal intensity manifest in every look and word, the weird,
evil preoccupation that seemed ever upon him. There was not only the
fate of Ben to consider, but that of Beatrice too, out in these desolate
forests. But surely Ray's degenerate impulses could be mastered. Neilson
need not fear this, at least.
Chan Heminway, also, had developed marvelously in the journey. He also
was more assertive, less the underling he had been. He had developed a
brutality that, though it contained nothing of the exquisite fineness of
cruelty of which Ray's diseased thought might conceive, was nevertheless
the full expression of his depraved nature. He no longer cowered in fear
of Neilson. Rather he looked to Ray as his leader, took him as his
example, tried to imitate him, and at last really began to share in his
mood. In cruelty to the horses he was particularly adept; but he was
also given to strange, savage bursts of insane fury.
"We must be close on them now," Neilson said one morning when they had
left the main gorge of the Yuga far behind them. "If they're not dead
we're bound to find trace of 'em in a few days."
The hope seemed well-founded. It is impossible for even most of the wild
creatures--furtive as twilight shadows--to journey through wood spaces
without leaving trace of their goings and comings: much less clumsy
human beings. Ultimately the searchers would find their tracks in the
soft earth, the ashes of a camp fire, or a charred cooking rack.
"And when we get 'em, we can wait and live on meat until the river goes
up in fall--then float on down to the Indian villages in their canoe,"
Chan answered. "It will carry four of us, all right."
Ray, Chan, Neilson and Neilson's daughter--these made four. What
remained of Ben when Ray was through could be left, silent upon some
hushed hillside, to the mercy of the wild creatures and the elements.
Surely they were in the enemy-country now; and now a fresh fear began to
oppress them. They might expect an attack from their implacable foe at
any moment. It did not make for ease of mind to know that any brush
clump might be their enemy's ambush; that any instant a concealed rifle
might speak death to them in the silence. Ben would have every advantage
of fortress and ambush. They had not thought greatly of this matter at
first; but now the fear increased with the passing days. Even Neilson
was not wholly exempt from it. It seemed a hideous, deadly thing,
incompatible with life and hope, that they should be plunging deeper,
farther into helplessness and peril.
If mental distress and physical discomfort can constitute vengeance Ben
was already avenged. Now that they were in the hill-lands, out from the
gorge and into a region of yellow beaver meadows lying between gently
sloping hills, their apprehension turned to veritable terror. A blind
man could see how small was their fighting chance against a hidden foe
who had prepared for their coming. The skin twitched and crept when a
twig cracked about their camp at night, and a cold like death crept
over the frame when the thickets crashed under a leaping moose.
Ray found himself regretting, for the first time, that murderous crime
of his of months before. Even riches might not pay for these days of
dread and nights of terror: the recovery of the girl from Ben's arms
could not begin to recompense. Indeed, the girl's memory was
increasingly hard to call up. The mind was kept busy elsewhere.
"We're walking right into a death trap," he told Neilson one morning.
"If he is here, what chance have we got; he'd have weeks to explore the
country and lay an ambush for us. Besides, I believe he's dead. I don't
believe a human being could have got down this far, alive."
Chan too had found himself inclining toward this latter belief; without
Ray's energy and ambition he had less to keep him fronted to the chase.
Neilson, however, was not yet ready to turn back. He too feared Ben's
attack, but already in the twilight of advancing years, he did not
regard physical danger in the same light as these two younger men.
Besides, he was made of different stuff. The safety of his daughter was
the one remaining impulse in his life.
And more and more, in the chill August nights, the talk about the camp
fire took this trend: the folly of pushing on. It was better to turn
back and wait his chances to strike again, Ray argued, than to walk
bald-faced into death. Sometime Ben must return to the claim: a chance
might come to lay him low. Besides, ever it seemed more probable that
the river had claimed him.
One rainy, disagreeable morning, as they camped beside the river near
the mouth of a small creek, affairs reached their crisis. They had
caught and saddled the horses; Ray was pulling tight the last hitch.
Chan stood beside him, speaking in an undertone. When he had finished
Ray cursed explosively in the silence.
Neilson turned. He seemed to sense impending developments. "What now?"
he asked.
"I'm not going on, that's what it is," Ray replied. "Neilson, it's two
against one--if you want to go on you can--but Ray and I are going back.
That devil's dead. Beatrice is, too--sure as hell. If they ain't dead,
he'll get us. I was a fool ever to start out. And that's final."
"You're going back, eh--scared out!" Neilson commented coldly.
"I'm going back--and don't say too much about being scared out, either."
"And you too, Chan? You're against me, too?"
Chan cursed. "I'd gone a week ago if it'd been me. We knew the way
home, at least."
The old man looked a long time into the river depths. Only too well he
realized that their decision was final. But there was no answer, in the
swirling depths, to the question that wracked his heart: whether or not
in these spruce-clad hills his daughter still lived. It could only
murmur and roar, without shaping words that human ears could grasp,
never relieving the dreadful uncertainty that would be his life's curse
from henceforth. He sighed, and the lines across his brow were dark and
deep.
"Then turn the horses around, you cowards," he answered. "I can't go on
alone."
For once neither Ray nor Chan had outward resentment for the epithet.
Secretly they realized that old Neilson was to the wall at last, and
like a grizzly at bay, it was safer not to molest him. Chan went down
to the edge of the creek to water his saddle horse.
But presently they heard him curse, in inordinate and startled
amazement, as he gazed at some imprint in the mud of the shore. They saw
the color sweep from his face. In an instant his two companions were
beside him.
Clear and unmistakable in the mud they saw the stale imprint of Ben's
canoe as they had landed, and the tracks of both the man and the girl as
they had turned into the forest.