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."