The day was quite dead when Dave Turner reached his post on top of the
ridge. The gray of twilight had passed, the forest was lost in darkness,
the stars were all out. The only vestige of daylight that remained was a
pale, red glow over the Western mountains,--and this was more like red
flowers that had been placed on its grave in remembrance.
Fortunately, the moon rose early. Otherwise Dave's watch would have been
in vain. The soft light wrought strange miracles in the forest: bathing
the tree tops in silver, laying wonderful cobweb tapestries between the
trunks, upsetting the whole perspective as to distance and contour. Dave
didn't have long to wait. At the end of a half-hour he saw, through the
field glasses, the wavering of a strange black shadow on the distant
meadow. Only the vivid quality of the full moon enabled him to see it at
all.
He tried to get a better focus. It might be just the shadow of deer,
come to browse on the parched grass. Dave felt a little tremor of
excitement at the thought that if it were not Bruce, it was more likely
the last of the grizzlies, the Killer. The previous night the gray
forest king had made an excursion into Simon's pastures and had killed a
yearling calf; in all probability he would return to-night to finish his
feast. In fact, this night would in all probability see the end of the
Killer. Some one of the Turners would wait for him, with a loaded rifle,
in a safe ambush.
But it wasn't the Killer, after all. It was before his time; besides,
the shadow was too slender to be that of the huge bear. Dave Turner
watched a moment longer, so that there could be no possibility of a
mistake. Bruce was returning; he was little more than a half-hour's walk
from Linda's home.
Turner swung on his horse, then lashed the animal into a gallop. Less
than five minutes later he drew up to a halt beneath the Sentinel Pine,
almost a mile distant. For the first time, Dave began to move
cautiously.
It would complicate matters if the two women had already gone to bed.
The hour was early--not yet nine--but the fall of darkness is often the
going-to-bed time of the mountain people. It is warmer there and safer;
and the expense of candles is lessened. Incidentally, it is the natural
course for the human breed,--to bed at nightfall and up at dawn; and
only distortion of nature can change the habit. It is doubtful if even
the earliest men--those curious, long-armed, stiff-thumbed, heavy-jowled
forefathers far remote--were ever night hunters. Like the hawks and most
of the other birds of prey they were content to leave the game trails to
the beasts at night. As life in the mountains gets down to a primitive
basis, most of the hill people soon fall into this natural course. But
to-night Linda and old Elmira were sitting up, waiting for Bruce's
return.
A candle flame flickered at the window. Dave went up to the door and
knocked.
"Who's there?" Elmira called. It was a habit learned in the dreadful
days of twenty years ago, not to open a door without at least some
knowledge of who stood without. A lighted doorway sets off a target
almost as well as a field of white sets off a black bull's-eye.
Dave knew that truth was the proper course. "Dave Turner," he replied.
A long second of heavy, strange silence ensued. Then the woman spoke
again. There was a new note in her voice, a curious hoarseness, but at
the same time a sense of exultation and excitement. But Dave didn't
notice it. Perhaps the oaken door that the voice came through stripped
away all the overtones; possibly his own perceptions were too blunt to
receive it. He might, however, have been interested in the singular look
of wonder that flashed over Linda's face as she stared at her aged aunt.
Linda was not thinking of Dave. She had forgotten that he stood outside.
His visit was the last thing that either of them expected--except,
perhaps, on some such deadly business as the clan had come years
before--yet she found no space in her thought for him. Her whole
attention was seized and held by the unfamiliar note in her aunt's
voice, and a strange drawing of the woman's features that the closed
door prevented Dave from seeing. It was a look almost of rapture, hardly
to be expected in the presence of an enemy. The dim eyes seemed to glow
in the shadows. It was the look of one who had wandered steep and
unknown trails for uncounted years and sees the distant lights of his
home at last.
She got up from her chair and moved over to the little pack she had
carried on her back when she had walked up from her cabin. Linda still
gazed at her in growing wonder. The long years seemed to have fallen
away from her; she slipped across the uncarpeted floor with the agility
and silence of a tiger. She always had given the impression of latent
power, but never so much as now. She took some little object from the
bag and slipped it next to her withered and scrawny breast.
"What do you want?" she called out into the gloom.
Dave had been getting a little restless in the silence; but the voice
reassured him. "I'll tell you when you open the door. It's something
about Bruce."
Linda remembered him then. She leaped to the door and flung it wide. She
saw the stars without, the dark fringe of pines against the sky line
behind. She felt the wind and the cool breath of the darkness. But most
of all she saw the cunning, sharp-featured face of Dave Turner, with the
candlelight upon him. The yellow beams were in his eyes too. They seemed
full of guttering lights.
The few times that Linda had talked to Dave she had always felt uneasy
beneath his speculative gaze. The same sensation swept over her now. She
knew perfectly what she would have had to expect, long since, from this
man, were it not that he had lived in fear of his brother Simon. The
mighty leader of the clan had set a barrier around her as far as
personal attentions went,--and his reasons were obvious. The mountain
girls do not usually attain her perfection of form and face; his desire
for her was as jealous as it was intense and real. This dark-hearted man
of great and terrible emotions did not only know how to hate. In his own
savage way he could love too. Linda hated and feared him, but the
emotion was wholly different from the dread and abhorrence with which
she regarded Dave. "What about Bruce?" she demanded.