BOOK III

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THE CHALICE OF COURAGE

_A Romance of Colorado_

BY CYRUS TOWNSEND BRADY

Author of "The Island of Regeneration," "The Better Man," "Hearts and

the Highway," "As the Sparks Fly Upward," etc., etc.

_With Illustrations By

HARRISON FISHER and J. N. MARCHAND_

NEW YORK

DODD, MEAD AND COMPANY

1912

COPYRIGHT, 1911

BY W. G. CHAPMAN

COPYRIGHT, 1912

BY DODD, MEAD & COMPANY

_Published, February, 1912_

To My Beloved Friend

_JOHN B . WALKER, JR._

Great-hearted, Great-souled, High-spirited

Man of Colorado.

[Illustration: "Leave me to myself, I would not take the finest, noblest

man on earth--"]

PREFACE

Prefaces, like much study, are a weariness to the flesh; to some people,

not to me. I can conceive of no literary proposition more attractive

than the opportunity to write unlimited prefaces. Let me write the

preface and I care not who writes the book. Unfortunately for my

desires, I can only be prefatory in the case of my own. Happily my own

are sufficiently numerous to afford me some scope in the indulgence of

this passion for forewords.

I suppose no one ever sat down to write a preface until after he had

written the book. It is like the final pat that the fond parent gives to

the child before it is allowed to depart in its best clothes. I have

seen the said parent accompany the child quite a distance on the way,

keeping up a continual process of adjustment of raiment which it was

evidently loath to discontinue.

And that is my case exactly. Here is the novel with which I have done my

best, which I have written and rewritten after long and earnest thought,

and yet I cannot let it go forth without some final, shall I say caress?

And as it is, I really have nothing of importance to say! The final

pats and pulls and tugs and smoothings do not materially add to the

child's appearance or increase its fascination, and I am at a loss to

find a reason for the preface except it be the converse of the statement

about the famous and much disliked Dr. Fell!

Perhaps, if I admit to you that I have been in the canyon, that I have

followed the course of the brook, that I have seen that lake, that I

have tramped those trails, it will serve to make you understand, dear

reader, how real and actual it all is to me. Yes, I have even looked

over the precipice down which the woman fell. I have talked with old

Kirkby; Robert Maitland is an intimate friend of mine; I have even met

his brother in Philadelphia and as for that glorious girl Enid--well,

being a married man, I will refrain from any personal appraisement of

her qualities. But I can with propriety dilate upon Newbold, and even

Armstrong, bad as he was, has some place in my regard.

If these people shall by any chance seem real to you and become your

friends as they are mine, another of those pleasant ties that bind the

author and his public together will have been woven, knotted, forged.

Never mind the method so long as there is a tie. And with this hope,

looking out up the winter snows that might have covered the range, as I

have often seen them there, I bid you a happy good morning.

CYRUS TOWNSEND BRADY

_St. George's Rectory, Kansas City, Missouri._

_Thanksgiving Day, 1911._

CONTENTS

BOOK I

THE HIGHER LAW

I THE CUP THAT WOULD NOT PASS 1

II ALONE UPON THE TRAIL 16

BOOK II

THE EAST AND THE WEST

III THE YOUNG LADY FROM PHILADELPHIA 29

IV THE GAME PLAYED IN THE USUAL WAY 43

V THE STORY AND THE LETTERS 55

VI THE POOL AND THE WATER SPRITE 72

VII THE BEAR, THE MAN AND THE FLOOD 88

VIII DEATH, LIFE AND THE RESURRECTION 101

BOOK III

FORGETTING AND FORGOT

IX A WILD DASH FOR THE HILLS 123

X A TELEGRAM AND A CALLER 136

XI OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY 149

XII ON THE TWO SIDES OF THE DOOR 166

XIII THE LOG HUT IN THE MOUNTAINS 179

XIV A TOUR OF INSPECTION 193

XV THE CASTAWAYS OF THE MOUNTAINS 203

BOOK IV

OH YE ICE AND SNOW, PRAISE YE THE LORD

XVI THE WOMAN'S HEART 223

XVII THE MAN'S HEART 236

XVIII THE KISS ON THE HAND 248

XIX THE FACE IN THE LOCKET 261

XX THE STRENGTH OF THE WEAK 276

BOOK V

THE CUP IS DRAINED

XXI THE CHALLENGE OF THE RANGE 291

XXII THE CONVERGING TRAILS 310

XXIII THE ODDS AGAINST HIM 327

XXIV THE LAST RESORT OF KINGS AND MEN 339

XXV THE BECOMING END 357

XXVI THE DRAUGHT OF JOY 368

ILLUSTRATIONS

"LEAVE ME TO MYSELF, I WOULD NOT TAKE THE

FINEST, NOBLEST MAN ON EARTH--" _FRONTISPIECE_

"READ THE LETTERS," HE SAID. "THEY'LL TELL

THE STORY. GOOD-NIGHT." _FACING PAGE_ 70

"WAIT! I AM A WOMAN, ABSOLUTELY ALONE,

ENTIRELY AT YOUR MERCY" " " 156

IT WAS ALL UP WITH ARMSTRONG " " 354

THE CHALICE OF COURAGE

(Courtesy of _The Outlook_)

Drink of the Chalice of Courage!

Pressed to the trembling lip,

The dark-veiled fears

From the passing years,

Like a dusty garment slip.

Drink of the Chalice of Courage!

Poured for the Hero's feast,

When the strength divine

Of its subtle wine

Is shared with the last and least.

Drink of the Chalice of Courage!

The mead of mothers and men,

And the sinewed might

Of the Victor's might,

Be yours, again and again.

Marie Hemstreet

BOOK I

THE HIGHER LAW

CHAPTER I

THE CUP THAT WOULD NOT PASS

The huge concave of the rocky wall towering above them threw the woman's

scream far into the vast profound of the canyon. It came sharp to the

man's ear, yet terminated abruptly; as when two rapidly moving trains

pass, the whistle of one is heard shrill for one moment only to be cut

short on the instant. Brief as it was, however, the sound was

sufficiently appalling; its suddenness, its unexpectedness, the awful

terror in its single note, as well as its instantaneity, almost stopped

his heart.

With the indifference of experience and long usage he had been riding

carelessly along an old pre-historic trail through the canyon, probably

made and forgotten long before the Spaniards spied out the land.

Engrossed in his thoughts, he had been heedless alike of the wall above

and of the wall below. Prior to that moment neither the over-hanging

rock that curved above his head nor the almost sheer fall to the river a

thousand feet beneath the narrow ledge of the trail had influenced him

at all. He might have been riding a country road so indifferent had

been his progress. That momentary shriek dying thinly away into a

strange silence changed everything.

The man was riding a sure-footed mule, which perhaps somewhat accounted

for his lack of care, and it seemed as if the animal must also have

heard and understood the meaning of the woman's scream, for with no

bridle signal and no spoken word the mule stopped suddenly as if

petrified. Rider and ridden stood as if carved from stone.

The man's comprehending, realizing fear almost paralyzed him. At first

he could scarcely force himself to do that toward which his whole being

tended--look around. Divining instantly the full meaning of that sudden

cry, it seemed hours before he could turn his head; really her cry and

his movement were practically simultaneous. He threw an agonized glance

backward on the narrow trail and saw--nothing! Where there had been

life, companionship, comradeship, a woman, there was now vacancy.

The trail made a little bend behind him, he could see its surface for

some distance, but not what lay beneath. He did not need the testimony

of his eyes for that. He knew what was down there.

It seemed to his distorted perceptions that he moved slowly, his limbs

were like lead, every joint was as stiff as a rusty hinge. Actually he

dropped from the mule's back with reckless and life-defying haste and

fairly leaped backward on his path. Had there been any to note his

progress, they would have said he risked his own life over every foot of

the way. He ran down the narrow shelf, rock strewn and rough, swaying

upon the unfathomable brink until he reached the place where she had

been a moment since. There he dropped on one knee and looked downward.

She was there! A few hundred feet below the trail edge the canyon wall,

generally a sheer precipice, broadened out into a great butte, or

buttress, which sloped somewhat more gently to the foaming, roaring

river far beneath. About a hundred and fifty feet under him a stubby

spur with a pocket on it jutted out from the face of the cliff; she had

evidently struck on that spur and bounded off and fallen, half rolling,

to the broad top of the butte two hundred or more feet below the pocket.

Three hundred and fifty feet down to where she lay he could distinguish

little except a motionless huddled mass. The bright blue of her dress

made a splotch of unwonted color against the reddish brown monotones of

the mountain side and canyon wall. She was dead, of course; she must be

dead, the man felt. From that distance he could see no breathing, if

such there were; indeed as he stared she grew less and less distinct to

him, his eyes did not fill with tears, but to his vision the very earth

itself, the vast depths of the canyon, the towering wall on the other

side, seemed to quiver and heave before him. For the first time in his

life the elevation made him dizzy, sick. He put his hands to his face to

shut out the sight, he tore them away to look again. He lifted his eyes

toward the other side across the great gulf to the opposing wall which

matched the one upon which he stood, where the blue sky cloudless

overhung.

"God!" he whispered in futile petition or mayhap expostulation.

He was as near the absolute breaking point as a man may go and yet not

utterly give way, for he loved this woman as he loved that light of

heaven above him, and in the twinkling of an eye she was no more. And so

he stared and stared dumbly agonizing, wondering, helpless, misty-eyed,

blind.

He sank back from the brink at last and tried to collect his thoughts.

What was he to do? There was but one answer to that question. He must

go down to her. There was one quick and easy way; over the brink, the

way she had gone. That thought came to him for a moment, but he put it

away. He was not a coward, life was not his own to give or to take,

besides she might be alive, she might need him. There must be some other

way.

Determining upon action, his resolution rose dominant, his vision

cleared. Once again he forced himself to look over the edge and see

other things than she. He was a daring, skillful and experienced

mountaineer; in a way mountaineering was his trade. He searched the side

of the canyon to the right and the left with eager scrutiny and found no

way within the compass of his vision to the depths below. He shut his

eyes and concentrated his thoughts to remember what they had passed over

that morning. There came to him the recollection of a place which as he

had viewed it he had idly thought might afford a practicable descent to

the river's rim.

Forgetful of the patient animal beside him, he rose to his feet and with

one last look at the poor object below started on his wild plunge down

the trail over which some men might scarcely have crept on hands and

knees. Sweat bedewed his forehead, his limbs trembled, his pulses

throbbed, his heart beat almost to bursting. Remorse sharpened by love,

passion quickened by despair, scourged him, desperate, on the way. And

God protected him also, or he had fallen at every uncertain, hurried,

headlong step.

And as he ran, thoughts, reproaches, scourged him on. Why had he brought

her, why had he allowed her to take that trail which but for him and for

her had probably not been traversed by man or woman or beast, save the

mountain sheep, the gray wolves, or the grizzly bear, for five hundred

years. She had protested that she was as good a mountaineer as he--and

it was true--and she had insisted on accompanying him; he recollected

that there had been a sort of terror in her urgency,--he must take her,

he must not leave her alone, she had pleaded; he had objected, but he

had yielded, the joy of her companionship had meant so much to him in

his lonely journeying, and now--he accused himself bitterly as he surged

onward.

After a time the man forced himself to observe the road, he discovered

that in an incredibly short period, perhaps an hour, he had traversed

what it had taken them four times as long to pass over that very day. He

must be near his goal. Ah, there it was at last, and in all the turmoil

and torture of his brain he found room for a throb of satisfaction when

he came upon the broken declivity. Yes, it did afford a practicable

descent; some landslide centuries back had made there a sort of rude,

rough, broken, megalithic stairway in the wall of the canyon. The man

threw himself upon it and with bleeding hands, bruised limbs and torn

clothing descended to the level of the river.

Two atoms to the eye of the Divine, in that vast rift in the gigantic

mountains. One unconscious, motionless, save for faint gasping breaths;

the other toiling blindly along the river bank, fortunately here

affording practicable going, to the foot of the great butte upon whose

huge shoulder the other lay. The living and the dead in the waste and

the wilderness of the everlasting hills.

Unconsciously but unerringly the man had fixed the landmarks in his mind

before he started on that terrific journey. Without a moment of

incertitude, or hesitation, he proceeded directly to the base of the

butte and as rapidly as if he had been fresh for the journey and the

endeavor. Up he climbed without a pause for rest. It was a desperate

going, almost sheer at times, but his passion found the way. He clawed

and tore at the rocks like an animal, he performed feats of strength and

skill and determination and reckless courage marvelous and impossible

under less exacting demands. Somehow or other he got to the top at last;

perhaps no man in all the ages since the world's first morning when God

Himself upheaved the range had so achieved that goal.

The last ascent was up a little stretch of straight rock over which he

had to draw himself by main strength and determination. He fell panting

on the brink, but not for a moment did he remain prone; he got to his

feet at once and staggered across the plateau which made the head of the

butte toward the blue object on the further side beneath the wall of the

cliff above, and in a moment he bent over what had been--nay, as he saw

the slow choking uprise of her breast, what was--his wife.

He knelt down beside her and looked at her for a moment, scarce daring

to touch her. Then he lifted his head and flung a glance around the

canyon as if seeking help from man. As he did so he became aware, below

him on the slope, of the dead body of the poor animal she had been

riding, whose misstep, from whatever cause he would never know, had

brought this catastrophe upon them.

Nothing else met his gaze but the rocks, brown, gray, relieved here and

there by green clumps of stunted pine. Nothing met his ear except far

beneath him the roar of the river, now reduced almost to a murmur, with

which the shivering leaves of aspens, rustled by the gentle breeze of

this glorious morning, blended softly like a sigh of summer. No, there

was nobody in the canyon, no help there. He threw his head back and

stretched out his arms toward the blue depths of the heavens above, to

the tops of the soaring peaks, and there was nothing there but the

eternal silence of a primeval day.

"God! God!" he murmured again in his despair.

It was the final word that comes to human lips in the last extremity

when life and its hopes and its possibilities tremble on the verge. And

no answer came to this poor man out of that vast void.

He bent to the woman again. What he saw can hardly be described. Her

right arm and her left leg were bent backward and under her. They were

shattered, evidently. He was afraid to examine her and yet he knew that

practically every other bone in her body was broken as well. Her head

fell lower than her shoulders, the angle which she made with the uneven

rock on which she lay convinced him that her back was broken too. Her

clothing was rent by her contact with the rocky spur above, it was torn

from the neck downward, exposing a great red scar which ran across her

sweet white young breast, blood oozing from it, while in the middle of

it something yellow and bright gleamed in the light. Her cheek was cut

open, her glorious hair, matted, torn and bloody, was flung backward

from her down-thrown head.

She should have been dead a thousand times, but she yet lived, she

breathed, her ensanguined bosom rose and fell. Through her pallid lips

bloody foam bubbled, she was still alive.

The man must do something. He did not dare to move her body, yet he took

off his hat, folded it, lifted her head tenderly and slipped it

underneath; it made a better pillow than the hard rock, he thought. Then

he tore his handkerchief from his neck and wiped away the foam from her

lips. In his pocket he had a flask of whiskey, a canteen of water that

hung from his shoulder somehow had survived the rough usage of the

rocks. He mingled some of the water with a portion of the spirit in the

cup of the flask and poured a little down her throat. Tenderly he took

his handkerchief again, and wetting it laved her brow. Except to mutter

incoherent prayers again and again he said no word, but his heart was

filled with passionate endearments, he lavished agonized and infinite

tenderness upon her in his soul.

By and by she opened her eyes. In those eyes first of all he saw

bewilderment, and then terror and then anguish so great that it cannot

be described, pain so horrible that it is not good for man even to think

upon it. Incredible as it may seem, her head moved, her lips relaxed,

her set jaw unclenched, her tongue spoke thickly.

"God!" she said.

The same word that he had used, that final word that comes to the lips

when the heart is wrung, or the body is racked beyond human endurance.

The universal testimony to the existence of the Divine, that trouble and

sometimes trouble alone, wrings from man. No human name, not even his,

upon her lips in that first instant of realization!

"How I--suffer," she faltered weakly.

Her eyes closed again, the poor woman had told her God of her condition,

that was all she was equal to. Man and human relationships might come

later. The man knelt by her side, his hands upraised.

"Louise," he whispered, "speak to me."

Her eyes opened again.

"Will," the anguished voice faltered on, "I am--broken--to pieces--kill

me. I can't stand--kill me"--her voice rose with a sudden fearful

appeal--"kill me."

Then the eyes closed and this time they did not open, although now he

overwhelmed her with words, alas, all he had to give her. At last his

passion, his remorse, his love, gushing from him in a torrent of frantic

appeal awakened her again. She looked him once more in the face and once

more begged him for that quick relief he alone could give.

"Kill me."

That was her only plea. There has been One and only One, who could

sustain such crucifying anguish as she bore without such appeal being

wrested from the lips, yet even He, upon His cross, for one moment,

thought God had forsaken and forgotten Him!

She was silent, but she was not dead. She was speechless, but she was

not unconscious, for she opened her eyes and looked at him with such

pitiful appeal that he would fain hide his face as he could not bear it,

and yet again and again as he stared down into her eyes he caught that

heart breaking entreaty, although now she made no sound. Every twisted

bone, every welling vein, every scarred and marred part on once smooth

soft flesh was eloquent of that piteous petition for relief. "Kill me"

she seemed to say in her voiceless agony. Agony the more appalling

because at last it could make no sound.

He could not resist that appeal. He fought against it, but the demand

came to him with more and more terrific force until he could no longer

oppose it. That cup was tendered to him and he must drain it. No more

from his lips than from the lips of Him of the Garden could it be

withdrawn. Out of that chalice he must drink. It could not pass. Slowly,

never taking his eyes from her, as a man might who was fascinated or

hypnotized, he lifted his hand to his holster and drew out his revolver.

No, he could not do it. He laid the weapon down on the rock again and

bowed forward on his knees, praying incoherently, protesting that God

should place this burden on mere man. In the silence he could hear the

awful rasp of her breath--the only answer. He looked up to find her eyes

upon him again.

Life is a precious thing, to preserve it men go to the last limit. In

defense of it things are permitted that are permitted in no other case.

Is it ever nobler to destroy it than to conserve it? Was this such an

instance? What were the conditions?

There was not a human being, white or red, within five days' journey

from the spot where these two children of malign destiny confronted

each other. That poor huddled broken mass of flesh and bones could not

have been carried a foot across that rocky slope without suffering

agonies beside which all the torture that might be racking her now would

be as nothing. He did not dare even to lay hand upon her to straighten

even one bent and twisted limb, he could not even level or compose her

body where she lay. He almost felt that he had been guilty of

unpardonable cruelty in giving her the stimulant and recalling her to

consciousness. Nor could he leave her where she was, to seek and bring

help to her. With all the speed that frantic desire, and passionate

adoration, and divine pity, would lend to him, it would be a week before

he could return, and by that time the wolves and the vultures--he could

not think that sentence to completion. That way madness lay.

The woman was doomed, no mortal could survive her wounds, but she might

linger for days while high fever and inflammation supervened. And each

hour would add to her suffering. God was merciful to His Son, Christ

died quickly on the cross, mere man sometimes hung there for days.

All these things ran like lightning through his brain. His hand closed

upon the pistol, the eternal anodyne. No, he could not. And the

tortured eyes were open again, it seemed as if the woman had summoned

strength for a final appeal.

"Will," she whispered, "if you--love me--kill me."

He thrust the muzzle of his weapon against her heart, she could see his

movement and for a moment gratitude and love shone in her eyes, and then

with a hand that did not tremble, he pulled the trigger.

A thousand thunder claps could not have roared in his ear with such

detonation. And he had done it! He had slain the thing he loved! Was it

in obedience to a higher law even than that writ on the ancient tables

of stone?

For a moment he thought incoherently, the pistol fell from his hand, his

eyes turned to her face, her eyes were open still, but there was neither

pain, nor appeal, nor love, nor relief in them; there was no light in

them; only peace, calm, darkness, rest. His hand went out to them and

drew the lids down, and as he did so, something gave way in him and he

fell forward across the red, scarred white breast that no longer either

rose or fell.

CHAPTER II

ALONE UPON THE TRAIL

They had started from their last camp early in the morning. It had been

mid-day when she fell and long after noon when he killed her and lapsed

into merciful oblivion. It was dusk in the canyon when he came to life

again. The sun was still some distance above the horizon, but the

jutting walls of the great pass cut off the light, the butte top was in

ever deepening shadow.

I have often wondered what were the feelings of Lazarus when he was

called back to life by the great cry of his Lord. "Hither--Out!" Could

that transition from the newer way of death to the older habit of living

have been accomplished without exquisite anguish and pain, brief,

sudden, but too sacred, like his other experiences, to dwell upon in

mortal hours?

What he of Bethany might perhaps have experienced this man felt long

after under other circumstances. The enormous exertions of the day, the

cruel bruises and lacerations to which clothes and body gave evidence,

the sick, giddy, uncertain, helpless, feeling that comes when one

recovers consciousness after such a collapse, would have been hard

enough to bear; but he took absolutely no account of any of these things

for, as he lifted himself on his hands, almost animal-like for a moment,

from the cold body of his wife, everything came across him with a

sudden, terrific, overwhelming, rush of recollection.

She was dead, and he had killed her. There were reasons, arguments,

excuses, for his course; he forgot them confronted by that grim,

terrific, tragic fact. The difference between that mysterious thing so

incapable of human definition which we call life, and that other

mysterious thing equally insusceptible of explanation which we call

death, is so great that when the two confront each other the most

indifferent is awed by the contrast. Many a man and many a woman prays

by the bedside of some agonized sufferer for a surcease of anguish only

to be brought about by death, by a dissolution of soul and body,

beseeching God of His mercy for the oblivion of the last, long, quiet,

sleep; but when the prayer has been granted, and the living eyes look

into the dead, the beating heart bends over the still one--it is a hard

soul indeed which has the strength not to wish again for a moment, one

little moment of life, to whisper one word of abiding love, to hear one

word of fond farewell.

Since that is true, what could this man think whose hand had pointed the

weapon and pulled the trigger and caused that great gaping hole through

what had once been a warm and loving heart? God had laid upon him a

task, than which none had ever been heavier on the shoulders of man, and

he did not think as he stared at her wildly that God had given him at

the same time strength to bear his burden.

Later, it might be that cold reason would come to his aid and justify

him for what he had done, but now, now, he only realized that she was

dead, and he had killed her. He forgot her suffering in his own anguish

and reproach of himself. He found time to marvel at himself with a

strange sort of wonder. How could he have done it.

Something broke the current of his thoughts, and it was good for him

that it was so. He heard a swish through the air and he looked away from

his dead wife in the direction of the sound. A little distance off upon

a pinnacle of rock he saw a vulture, a hideous, horrible, unclean,

carrion bird. While he watched, another and another settled softly down.

He rose to his feet and far beneath him from the tree clad banks of the

river the long howl of a wolf smote upon his ear. Gluttony and rapine

were at hand. Further down the declivity the body of the dead mule was

the object of the converging attack from earth and air. The threat of

that attack stirred him to life.

There were things he had to do. The butte top was devoid of earth or

much vegetation, yet here and there in hollows where water settled or

drained, soft green moss grew. He stooped over and lifted the body of

the woman. She seemed to fall together loosely and almost break within

his hands--it was evidence of what the fall had done for her,

justification for his action, too, if he had been in a mood to reason

about it, but his only thought then was of how she must have suffered.

By a strange perversion he had to fight against the feeling that she was

suffering now. He laid her gently and tenderly down in a deep hollow in

the rock shaped almost to contain her. He straightened her poor twisted

limbs. He arranged with decent care the ragged dress, covering over the

torn breast and the frightful wound above her heart. With the last of

the water in the canteen, he washed her face, he could not wash out the

scar of course. With rude unskillful hands, yet with pitiable

tenderness, he strove to arrange her blood-matted hair, he pillowed her

head upon his hat again.

Sometimes the last impression of life is stamped on the face of death,

sometimes we see in the awful fixity of feature that attends upon

dissolution, the index of the agony in which life has passed, but more

often, thank God, death lays upon pain and sorrow a smoothing, calming

hand. It was so in this instance. There was a great peace, a great

relief, in the face he looked upon; this poor woman had been tortured

not only in body, that he knew, but she had suffered anguish of soul of

which he was unaware, and death, had it come in gentler form would

perhaps not have been unwelcome. That showed in her face. There was

dignity, composure, surcease of care, repose--the rest that shall be

forever!

The man had done all that he could for her. Stop, there was one thing

more; he knelt down by her side, he was not what we commonly call a

religious man, the habit that he had learned at his mother's knee he had

largely neglected in maturer years, but he had not altogether forgotten,

and even the atheist--and he was far from that--might have prayed then.

"God, accept her," he murmured. "Christ receive her,"--that was all but

it was enough.

He remained by her side some time looking at her; he would fain have

knelt there forever; he would have been happy at that moment if he

could have lain down by her and had someone do for them both the last

kindly office he was trying to do for her. But that was not to be, and

the growing darkness warned him to make haste. The wolf barks were

sharper and nearer, he stooped over her, bent low and laid his face

against hers. Oh that cold awful touch of long farewell. He tore himself

away from her, lifted from her neck a little object that had gleamed so

prettily amid the red blood. It was a locket. He had never seen it

before and had no knowledge of what it might contain. He kissed it,

slipped it into the pocket of his shirt and rose to his feet.

The plateau was strewn with rock; working rapidly and skillfully he

built a burial mound of stone over her body. The depression in which she

lay was deep enough to permit no rock to touch her person. The cairn, if

such it may be called, was soon completed. No beast of the earth or bird

of the air could disturb what was left of his wife. It seemed so piteous

to him to think of her so young, and so sweet and so fair, so soft and

so tender, so brave and so true, lying alone in the vast of the canyon,

weighted down by the great rocks that love's hands had heaped above her.

But there was no help for it.

Gathering up the revolver and canteen he turned and fell rather than

climbed to the level of the river. It was quite dark in the depths of

the canyon, but he pressed rapidly on over the uneven and broken rocks

until he reached the giant stairway. Up them he toiled painfully until

he attained again the trail.

It was dark when he reached the wooded recess where they had slept the

night before. There were grass and trees, a bubbling spring, an oasis

amid the desert of rocks; he found the ashes of their fire and gathering

wood heaped it upon the still living embers until the blaze rose and

roared. He realized at last that he was weary beyond measure, he had

gone through the unendurable since the morning. He threw himself down

alone where they had lain together the night before and sought in vain

for sleep. In his ears he heard that sharp, sudden, breaking cry once

more, and her voice begging him to kill her. He heard again the rasp of

her agonized breathing, the crashing detonation of the weapon. He

writhed with the anguish of it all. Dry-eyed he arose at last and

stretched out his hands to that heaven that had done so little for him

he thought.

Long after midnight he fell into a sort of uneasy, restless stupor. The

morning sun of the new and desolate day recalled him to action. He arose

to his feet and started mechanically down the trail alone--always and

forever alone. Yet God was with him though he knew it not.

Four days later a little party of men winding through the foothills came

upon a wavering, ghastly, terrifying figure. Into the mining town two

days before had wandered a solitary mule, scraps of harness dangling

from it. They had recognized it as one of a pair the man had purchased

for a proposed journey far into the unsurveyed and inaccessible

mountains--to hunt for the treasures hidden within their granite

breasts. It told too plainly a story of disaster. A relief party had

been hurriedly organized to search for the two, one of whom was much

beloved in the rude frontier camp.

The man they met on the way was the man they had come to seek. His boots

were cut to pieces, his feet were raw and bleeding for he had taken no

care to order his going or to choose his way. His clothes were in rags,

through rents and tatters his emaciated body showed its discolored

bruises. His hands were swollen and soiled with wounds and the stains of

the way. The front of his shirt was sadly and strangely discolored. He

was hatless, his hair was gray, his face was as white as the snow on the

crest of the peak, his lips were bloodless yet his eyes blazed with

fever.

For four days without food and with but little water this man had

plodded down the mountain toward the camp. All his energies were merged

in one desire, to come in touch with humanity and tell his awful story;

the keeping of it to himself, which he must do perforce because he was

alone in the world, added to the difficulty of endurance. The sun had

beaten down upon him piteously during the day. The cold dew had drenched

him in the night. Apparitions had met his vision alike in the darkness

and in the light. Voices had whispered to him as he plodded on. But

something had sustained him in spite of the awful drain, physical and

mental, which had wasted him away. Something had sustained him until he

came in touch with men, thereafter the duty would devolve upon his

brethren not upon himself.

They caught him as he staggered into the group of them, these Good

Samaritans of the frontier; they undressed him and washed him, they

bound up his wounds and ministered to him, they laid him gently down

upon the ground, they bent over him tenderly and listened to him while

he told in broken, disjointed words the awful story, of her plunge into

the canyon, of his search for her, of her last appeal to him. And then he

stopped.

"What then?" asked one of the men bending over him as he hesitated.

"God forgive me--I shot her--through the heart."

There was appalling stillness in the little group of rough men, while he

told them where she lay and begged them to go and bring back what was

left of her.

"You must bring her--back," he urged pitifully.

None of the men had ever been up the canyon, but they knew of its

existence and the twin peaks of which he had told them could be seen

from afar. He had given them sufficient information to identify the

place and to enable them to go and bring back the body for Christian

burial. Now these rude men of the mining camp had loved that woman as

men love a bright and cheery personality which dwelt among them.

"Yes," answered the spokesman, "but what about you?"

"I shall be--a dead man," was the murmured answer, "and I don't care--I

shall be glad--"

He had no more speech and no more consciousness after that. It was a

sardonic comment on the situation that the last words that fell from his

lips then should be those words of joy.

"Glad, glad!"

BOOK II

THE EAST AND THE WEST

CHAPTER III

THE YOUNG LADY FROM PHILADELPHIA

Miss Enid Maitland was a highly specialized product of the far east. I

say far, viewing Colorado as a point of departure not as identifying her

with the orient. The classic shades of Bryn Mawr had been the "Groves of

Academus where with old Plato she had walked." Incidentally during her

completion of the exhaustive curriculum of that justly famous

institution she had acquired at least a bowing acquaintance with other

masters of the mind.

Nor had the physical in her education been sacrificed to the mental. In

her at least the _mens sana_ and the _corpore sano_ were alike in

evidence. She had ridden to hounds many times on the anise-scented trail

of the West Chester Hunt! Exciting tennis and leisurely golf had engaged

her attention on the courts and greens of the Merion Cricket Club. She

had buffeted "Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste" on the beach at

Cape May and at Atlantic City.

Spiritually she was a devoted member of the Episcopal Church, of the

variety that abhors the word "Protestant" in connection therewith.

Altogether she reflected great credit upon her pastors and masters,

spiritual and temporal, and her up-bringing in the three departments of

life left little to be desired.

Upon her graduation she had been at once received and acclaimed by the

"Assembly Set," of Philadelphia, to which indeed she belonged

unquestioned by right of birth and position--and there was no other

power under heaven by which she could have effected entrance therein; at

least that is what the "outs" thought of that most exclusive circle. The

old home of the Maitlands overlooking Rittenhouse Square had been the

scene of her debut. In all the refined and decorous gayeties of

Philadelphia's ultra-fastidious society she had participated. She had

even looked upon money standardized New York in its delirium of

extravagance, at least in so far as a sedate and well-born Philadelphia

family could countenance such golden madness. During the year she had

ranged like a conqueror--pardon the masculine appellation--between Palm

Beach in the South and Bar Harbor in the North. Philadelphia was proud

of her, and she was not unknown in those unfortunate parts of the United

States which lay without.

In all this she had remained a frank, free, unspoiled young woman. Life

was full of zest for her, and she enjoyed it with the most

un-Pennsylvanian enthusiasm.

The second summer after her coming out found her in Colorado. Robert

Maitland was one of the big men of the west. He had departed from

Philadelphia at an early age and had settled in Colorado while it was

still in the formative period. There he had grown up with the state. The

Philadelphia Maitlands could never understand it or explain it. Bob

Maitland must have been, they argued, a reversion to an ancient type, a

throwback to some robber baron long antecedent to William Penn. And the

speculation was true. The blood of some lawless adventurer of the past,

discreetly forgot by the conservative section of the family, bubbled in

his veins unchecked by the repressive atmosphere of his home and his

early environment.

He had thoroughly identified himself with his new surroundings and had

plunged into all the activities of the west. During one period in his

life he had actually served as sheriff of one of the border counties,

and it was a rapid "bad man" indeed, who enjoyed any advantage over him

when it came to drawing his "gun." His skill and daring had been

unquestioned. He had made a name for himself which still abides,

especially in the mountains where things yet remained almost as

primitive as they had been from the beginning.

His fame had been accompanied by fortune, too; the cattle upon a

thousand hills were his, the treasures of mines of fabulous richness

were at his command. He lived in Denver in one of the greatest of the

bonanza palaces on the hills of that city, confronting the snow-capped

mountain range. For the rest he held stock in all sorts of corporations,

was a director in numerous concerns and so on--the reader can supply the

usual catalogue, they are all alike. He had married late in life and was

the father of two little girls and a boy, the oldest sixteen and the

youngest ten.

Going east, which he did not love, on an infrequent business trip he had

renewed his acquaintance with his brother and the one ewe lamb of his

brother's flock, to wit, the aforementioned Enid. He had been struck, as

everybody was, by the splendid personality of the girl and had striven

earnestly to disabuse her mind of the prevalent idea that there was

nothing much worth while on the continent beyond the Alleghanies except

scenery.

"What you need, Enid, is a ride across the plains, a sight of real

mountains, beside which these little foothills in Pennsylvania that

people back here make so much of wouldn't be noticed. You want to get

some of the spirited glorious freedom of the west into your conservative

straight-laced little body!"

"In my day, Robert," reprovingly remarked his brother, Enid's father,

"freedom was the last thing a young lady gently born and delicately

nurtured would have coveted."

"Your day is past, Steve," returned the younger Maitland with shocking

carelessness. "Freedom is what every woman desires now, especially when

she is married. You are not in love with anybody are you, Enid?"

"With not a soul," frankly replied the girl, greatly amused at the

colloquy between the two men, who though both mothered by the same woman

were as dissimilar as--what shall I say, the east is from the west? Let

it go at that.

"That's all right," said her uncle, relieved apparently. "I will take

you out west and introduce you to some real men and--"

"If I thought it possible," interposed Mr. Stephen Maitland in his most

austere and dignified manner, "that my daughter," with a perceptible

emphasis on the "my," as if he and not the daughter were the principal

being under consideration, "should ever so far forget what belongs to

her station in life and her family as to allow her affections to become

engaged by anyone who, from his birth and up-bringing in the

er--ah--unlicensed atmosphere of the western country would be _persona

non grata_ to the dignified society of this ancient city and--"

"Nonsense," interrupted the younger brother bluntly. "You have lived

here wrapped up in yourselves and your dinky little town so long that

mental asphyxiation is threatening you all."

"I will thank you, Robert," said his brother with something approaching

the manner in which he would have repelled a blasphemy, "not to refer to

Philadelphia as--er--What was your most extraordinary word?"

"'Dinky,' if my recollection serves."

"Ah, precisely. I am not sure as to the meaning of the term but I

conceive it to be something opprobrious. You can say what you like about

me and mine, but Philadelphia, no."

"Oh, the town's right enough," returned his brother, not at all

impressed. "I'm talking about people now. There are just as fine men and

women in the west as in New York or Philadelphia."

"I am sure you don't mean to be offensive, Robert, but really the

association of ideas in your mention of us with that common and vulgar

New York is er--unpleasant," fairly shuddered the elder Maitland.

"I'm only urging you to recognize the quality of the western people. I

dare say they are of a finer type than the average here."

"From your standpoint, no doubt," continued his brother severely and

somewhat wearily as if the matter were not worth all this argument. "All

that I want of them is that they stay in the west where they belong and

not strive to mingle with the east; there is a barrier between us and

them which it is not well to cross. To permit any intermixtures of

er--race or--"

"The people out there are white, Steve," interrupted his brother

sardonically. "I wasn't contemplating introducing Enid here to Chinese,

or Negroes, or Indians, or--"

"Don't you see," said Mr. Stephen Maitland, stubbornly waving aside this

sarcastic and irrelevant comment, "from your very conversation the vast

gulf that there is between you and me? Although you had every advantage

in life that birth can give you, we are--I mean you have changed so

greatly," he had quickly added, loath to offend.

But he mistook the light in his brother's eyes, it was a twinkle not a

flash. Robert Maitland laughed, laughed with what his brother conceived

to be indecorous boisterousness.

"How little you know of the bone and sinew of this country, Steve," he

exclaimed presently. Robert Maitland could not comprehend how it

irritated his stately brother to be called "Steve." Nobody ever spoke of

him but as Stephen Maitland--"But Lord, I don't blame you," continued

the Westerner. "Any man whose vision is barred by a foothill couldn't be

expected to know much of the main range and what's beyond."

"There isn't any danger of my falling in love with anybody," said Enid

at last, with all the confidence of two triumphant social seasons. "I

think I must be immune even to dukes," she said gayly.

"I referred to worthy young Americans of--" began her father who, to do

him justice, was so satisfied with his own position that no foreign

title 'dazzled' him in the least degree.

"Rittenhouse Square," cut in Robert Maitland with amused sarcasm. "Well,

Enid, you seem to have run the gamut of the east pretty thoroughly, come

out and spend the summer with me in Colorado. My Denver house is open to

you, we have a ranch amid the foothills, or if you are game we can

break away from civilization entirely and find some unexplored, unknown

canyon in the heart of the mountains and camp there. We'll get back to

nature, which seems to be impossible in Philadelphia, and you will see

things and learn things that you will never see or learn anywhere else.

It'll do you good, too; from what I hear, you have been going the pace

and those cheeks of yours are a little too pale for so splendid a girl,

you look too tired under the eyes for youth and beauty."

"I believe I am not very fit," said the girl, "and if father will

permit--"

"Of course, of course," said Stephen Maitland. "You are your own

mistress anyway, and having no mother"--Enid's mother had died in her

infancy--"I suppose that I could not interfere or object if I wished to,

but no marrying or giving in marriage: Remember that."

"Nonsense, father," answered the young woman lightly. "I am not anxious

to assume the bonds of wedlock."

"Well, that settles it," said Robert Maitland. "We'll give you a royal

good time. I must run up to New York and Boston for a few days, but I

shall be back in a week and I can pick you up then."

"What is the house in Denver, is it er--may I ask, provided with all

modern conveniences and--" began the elder Maitland nervously.

Robert Maitland laughed.

"What do you take us for, Steve? Do you ever read the western

newspapers?"

"I confess that I have not given much thought to the west since I

studied geography and--_The Philadelphia Ledger_ has been thought

sufficient for the family since--"

"Gracious!" exclaimed Maitland. "The house cost half a million dollars

if you must know it, and if there is anything that modern science can

contribute to comfort and luxury that isn't in it, I don't know what it

is. Shall it be the house in Denver, or the ranch, or a real camp in the

wilds, Enid?"

"First the house in Denver," said Enid, "and then the ranch and then the

mountains."

"Right O! That shall be the program."

"Will my daughter's life be perfectly safe from the Cowboys, Indians and

Desperadoes?"

"Quite safe," answered Robert, with deep gravity. "The cowboys no longer

shoot up the city and it has been years since the Indians have held up

even a trolley car. The only real desperado in my acquaintance is the

mildest, gentlest old stage driver in the west."

"Do you keep up an acquaintance with men of that class, still?" asked

his brother in great surprise.

"You know I was Sheriff in a border county for a number of years and--"

"But you must surely have withdrawn from all such society now."

"Out west," said Robert Maitland, "when we know a man and like him, when

we have slept by him on the plains, ridden with him through the

mountains, fought with him against some border terror, some bad man

thirsting to kill, we don't forget him, we don't cut his acquaintance,

and it doesn't make any difference whether the one or the other of us is

rich or poor. I have friends who can't frame a grammatical sentence, who

habitually eat with their knives, yet who are absolutely devoted to me

and I to them. The man is the thing out there." He smiled and turned to

Enid. "Always excepting the supremacy of woman," he added.

"How fascinating!" exclaimed the girl. "I want to go there right away."

And this was the train of events which brought about the change. Behold

the young lady astride of a horse for the first time in her life in a

divided skirt, that fashion prevalent elsewhere not having been accepted

by the best equestriennes of Philadelphia. She was riding ahead of a

lumbering mountain wagon, surrounded by other riders, which was loaded

with baggage, drawn by four sturdy broncos and followed by a number of

obstinate little burros at present unencumbered with packs which would

be used when they got further from civilization and the way was no

longer practicable for anything on wheels.

Miss Enid Maitland was clad in a way that would have caused her father a

stroke of apoplexy if he could have been suddenly made aware of her

dress, if she had burst into the drawing-room without announcement for

instance. Her skirt was distinctly short, she wore heavy hobnailed shoes

that laced up to her knees, she had on a bright blue sweater, a kind of

a cap known as a tam-o-shanter was pinned above her glorious hair, which

was closely braided and wound around her head. She wore a silk

handkerchief loosely tied around her neck, a knife and revolver hung at

her belt, a little watch was strapped to one wrist, a handsomely braided

quirt dangled from the other, a pair of spurs adorned her heels and,

most discomposing fact of all, by her side rode a handsome and dashing

cavalier.

How Mr. James Armstrong might have appeared in the conventional black

and white of evening clothes was not quite clear to her, for she had as

yet never beheld him in that obliterating raiment, but in the habit of

the west, riding trousers, heavy boots that laced to the knees, blue

shirt, his head covered by a noble "Stetson," mounted on the fiery

restive bronco which he rode to perfection, he was ideal. Alas for the

vanity of human proposition! Mr. James Armstrong, friend and protege

these many years of Mr. Robert Maitland, mine owner and cattle man on a

much smaller scale than his older friend, was desperately in love with

Enid Maitland, and Enid, swept off her feet by a wooing which began with

precipitant ardor so soon as he laid eyes on her, was more profoundly

moved by his suit, or pursuit, than she could have imagined.

_Omne ignotum pro magnifico!_

She had been wooed in the conventional fashion many times and oft, on

the sands of Palm Beach, along the cliffs of Newport, in the romantic

glens of Mount Desert, in the old fashioned drawing-room overlooking

Rittenhouse Square. She had been proposed to in motor cars, on the decks

of yachts and once even while riding to hounds, but there had been a

touch of sameness about it all. Never had she been made love to with the

headlong gallantry, with the dashing precipitation of the west. It had

swept her from her moorings. She found almost before she was aware of it

that her past experience now stood her in little stead. She awoke to a

sudden realization of the fact that she was practically pledged to James

Armstrong after an acquaintance of three weeks in Denver and on the

ranch.

Business of the most important and critical nature required Armstrong's

presence east at this juncture, and willy-nilly there was no way he

could put off his departure longer. He had to leave the girl with an

uneasy conscience that though he had her half-way promise, he had her

but half-way won. He had snatched the ultimate day from his business

demands to ride with her on the first stage of her journey to the

mountains.

CHAPTER IV

THE GAME PLAYED IN THE USUAL WAY

The road on which they advanced into the mountains was well made and

well kept up. The canyon through the foothills was not very deep--for

Colorado--and the ascent was gentle. Naturally it wound in every

direction following the devious course of the river which it frequently

crossed from one side to the other on rude log bridges. A brisk gallop

of a half mile or so on a convenient stretch of comparatively level

going put the two in the lead far ahead of the lumbering wagon and out

of sight of those others of the party who had elected to go a horseback.

There was perhaps a tacit agreement among the latter not to break in

upon this growing friendship or, more frankly, not to interfere in a

developing love affair.

The canyon broadened here and there at long intervals and ranch houses

were found in every clearing, but these were few and far between and for

the most part Armstrong and Enid Maitland rode practically alone save

for the passing of an occasional lumber wagon.

"You can't think," began the man, as they drew rein after a splendid

gallop and the somewhat tired horses readily subsided into a walk, "how

I hate to go back and leave you."

"And you can't think how loath I am to have you return," the girl

flashed out at him with a sidelong glance from her bright blue eyes and

a witching smile from her scarlet lips.

"Enid Maitland," said the man, "you know I just worship you. I'd like to

sweep you out of your saddle, lift you to the bow of mine and ride away

with you. I can't keep my hands off you, I--"

Before she realized what he would be about he swerved his horse toward

her, his arm went around her suddenly. Taken completely off her guard

she could make no resistance, indeed she scarcely knew what to expect

until he crushed her to him and kissed her, almost roughly, full on the

lips.

"How dare you!" cried the girl, her face aflame, freeing herself at

last, and swinging her own horse almost to the edge of the road which

here ran on an excavation some fifty feet above the river.

"How dare I?" laughed the audacious man, apparently no whit abashed by

her indignation. "When I think of my opportunity I am amazed at my

moderation."

"Your opportunity, your moderation?"

"Yes; when I had you helpless I took but one kiss, I might have held you

longer and taken a hundred."

"And by what right did you take that one?" haughtily demanded the

outraged young woman, looking at him beneath level brows while the color

slowly receded from her face. She had never been kissed by a man other

than a blood relation in her life--remember, suspicious reader, that she

was from Philadelphia--and she resented this sudden and unauthorized

caress with every atom and instinct of her still somewhat conventional

being.

"But aren't you half-way engaged to me?" he pleaded in justification,

seeing the unwonted seriousness with which she had received his impudent

advance. "Didn't you agree to give me a chance?"

"I did say that I liked you very much," she admitted, "no man better,

and that I thought you might--"

"Well, then--" he began.

But she would not be interrupted.

"I did not mean that you should enjoy all the privileges of a conquest

before you had won me. I will thank you not to do that again, sir."

"It seems to have had a very different effect upon you than it did upon

me," replied the man fervently. "I loved you before, but now, since I

have kissed you, I worship you."

"It hasn't affected me that way," retorted the girl promptly, her face

still frowning and indignant. "Not at all, and--"

"Forgive me, Enid," pleaded the other. "I just couldn't help it. You

were so beautiful I had to. I took the chance. You are not accustomed to

our ways."

"Is this your habit in your love affairs?" asked the girl swiftly and

not without a spice of feminine malice.

"I never had any love affairs before," he replied with a ready masculine

mendacity, "at least none worth mentioning. But you see this is the

west, we have gained what we have by demanding every inch that nature

offers, and then claiming the all. That's the way we play the game out

here and that's the way we win."

"But I have not yet learned to play the 'game,' as you call it, by any

such rules," returned the young woman determinedly, "and it is not the

way to win me if I am the stake."

"What is the way?" asked the man anxiously. "Show me and I'll take it

no matter what its difficulty."

"Ah, for me to point out the way would be to play traitor to myself,"

she answered, relenting and relaxing a little before his devoted wooing.

"You must find it without assistance. I can only tell you one thing."

"And what is that?"

"You do not advance toward the goal by such actions as those of a moment

since."

"Look here," said the other suddenly. "I am not ashamed of what I did,

and I'm not going to pretend that I am, either."

"You ought to be," severely.

"Well, maybe so, but I'm not. I couldn't help it any more than I could

help loving you the minute I saw you. Put yourself in my place."

"But I am not in your place, and I can't put myself there. I do not wish

to. If it be true, as you say, that you have grown to--care so much for

me and so quickly--"

"If it be true?" came the sharp interruption as the man bent toward her

fairly devouring her with his bold, ardent gaze.

"Well, since it is true," she admitted under the compulsion of his

protest, "that fact is the only possible excuse for your action."

"You find some justification for me, then!"

"No, only a possibility, but whether it be true or not, I do not feel

that way--yet."

There was a saving grace in that last word, which gave him a little

heart. He would have spoken, but she suffered no interruption, saying:

"I have been wooed before, but--"

"True, unless the human race has become suddenly blind," he said softly

under his breath.

"But never in such ungentle ways."

"I suppose you have never run up against a real red-blooded man like me

before."

"If red-blooded be evidenced mainly by lack of self-control, perhaps I

have not. Yet there are men whom I have met who would not need to

apologize for their qualities even to you, Mr. James Armstrong."

"Don't say that. Evidently I make but poor progress in my wooing. Never

have I met with a woman quite like you."--And in that indeed lay some of

her charm, and she might have replied in exactly the same language and

with exactly the same meaning to him.--"I am no longer a boy. I must be

fifteen years older than you are, for I am thirty-five."

The difference between their years was not quite so great as he

declared, but woman-like the girl let the statement pass unchallenged.

"And I wouldn't insult your intelligence by saying you are the only

woman that I have ever made love to, but there is a vast difference

between making love to a woman and loving one. I have just found that

out for the first time. I marvel at the past, and I am ashamed of it,

but I thank God that I have been saved for this opportunity. I want to

win you, and I am going to do it, too. In many things I don't match up

with the people with whom you train. I was born out here, and I've made

myself. There are things that have happened in the making that I am not

especially proud of, and I am not at all satisfied with the results,

especially since I have met you. The better I know you the less pleased

I am with Jim Armstrong, but there are possibilities in me, I rather

believe, and with you for inspiration, Heavens!"--the man flung out his

hand with a fine gesture of determination. "They say that the east and

west don't naturally mingle, but it's a lie, you and I can beat the

world."

The woman thrilled to his gallant wooing. Any woman would have done so,

some of them would have lost their heads, but Enid Maitland was an

exceedingly cool young person, for she was not quite swept off her feet,

and did not quite lose her balance.

"I like to hear you say things like that," she answered. "Nobody quite

like you has ever made love to me, and certainly not in your way, and

that's the reason I have given you a half-way promise to think about it.

I was sorry that you could not be with us on this adventure, but now I

am rather glad, especially if the even temper of my way is to be

interrupted by anything like the outburst of a few moments since."

"I am glad, too," admitted the man. "For I declare I couldn't help it.

If I have to be with you either you have got to be mine, or else you

would have to decide that it could never be, and then I'd go off and

fight it out."

"Leave me to myself," said the girl earnestly, "for a little while; it's

best so. I would not take the finest, noblest man on earth--"

"And I am not that."

"Unless I loved him. There is something very attractive about your

personality. I don't know in my heart whether it is that or--"

"Good," said the man, as she hesitated. "That's enough," he gathered up

the reins and whirled his horse suddenly in the road, "I am going back.

I'll wait for your return to Denver, and then--"

"That's best," answered the girl.

She stretched out her hand to him, leaning backward. If he had been a

different kind of a man he would have kissed it, as it was he took it

in his own hand and almost crushed it with a fierce grip.

"We'll shake on that, little girl," he said, and then without a backward

glance he put spurs to his horse and galloped furiously down the road.

No, she decided then and there, she did not love him, not yet. Whether

she ever would she could not tell. And yet she was half bound to him.

The recollection of his kiss was not altogether a pleasant memory; he

had not done himself any good by that bold assault upon her modesty,

that reckless attempt to rifle the treasure of her lips. No man had ever

really touched her heart, although many had engaged her interest. Her

experiences therefore were not definitive or conclusive. If she had

truly loved James Armstrong, in spite of all that she might have said,

she would have thrilled to the remembrance of that wild caress. The

chances, therefore, were somewhat heavily against him that morning as he

rode hopefully down the trail alone.

His experiences in love affairs were much greater than hers. She was by

no means the first woman he had kissed--remember suspicious reader that

he was _not_ from Philadelphia!--hers were not the first ears into which

he had poured passionate protestations. He was neither better nor worse

than most men, perhaps he fairly enough represented the average, but

surely fate had something better in store for such a superb woman--a

girl of such attainments and such infinite possibilities, she must mate

higher than with the average man. Perhaps there was a sub-consciousness

of this in her mind as she silently waited to be overtaken by the rest

of the party.

There were curious glances and strange speculations in that little

company as they saw her sitting her horse alone. A few moments before

James Armstrong had passed them at a gallop, he had waved his hand as he

dashed by and had smiled at them, hope giving him a certain assurance,

although his confidence was scarcely warranted by the facts.

His demeanor was not in consonance with Enid's somewhat grave and

somewhat troubled present aspect. She threw off her preoccupation

instantly and easily, however, and joined readily enough in the merry

conversation of the way.

Mr. Robert Maitland, as Armstrong had said, had known him from a boy.

There were things in his career of which Maitland did not and could not

approve, but they were of the past, he reflected, and Armstrong was

after all a pretty good sort. Mr. Maitland's standards were not at all

those of his Philadelphia brother, but they were very high. His

experiences of men had been different; he thought that Armstrong,

having certainly by this time reached years of discretion, could be

safely entrusted with the precious treasure of the young girl who had

been committed to his care, and for whom his affection grew as his

knowledge of and acquaintanceship with her increased.

As for Mrs. Maitland and the two girls and the youngster, they were

Armstrong's devoted friends. They knew nothing about his past, indeed

there were things in it of which Maitland himself was ignorant, and

which had they been known to him might have caused him to withhold even

his tentative acquiescence in the possibilities.

Most of these things were known to old Kirkby who with masterly skill,

amusing nonchalance and amazing profanity, albeit most of it under his

breath lest he shock the ladies, tooled along the four nervous excited

broncos who drew the big supply wagon. Kirkby was Maitland's oldest and

most valued friend. He had been the latter's deputy sheriff, he had been

a cowboy and a lumberman, a mighty hunter and a successful miner, and

now although he had acquired a reasonable competence, and had a nice

little wife and a pleasant home in the mountain village at the entrance

to the canyon, he drove stage for pleasure rather than for profit. He had

given over his daily twenty-five mile jaunt from Morrison to Troutdale

to other hands for a short space that he might spend a little time with

his old friend and the family, who were all greatly attached to him, on

this outing.

Enid Maitland, a girl of a kind that Kirkby had never seen before, had

won the old man's heart during the weeks spent on the Maitland ranch. He

had grown fond of her, and he did not think that Mr. James Armstrong

merited that which he evidently so overwhelmingly desired. Kirkby was

well along in years, but he was quite capable of playing a man's game

for all that, and he intended to play it in this instance.

Nobody scanned Enid Maitland's face more closely than he, sitting humped

up on the front seat of the wagon, one foot on the high brake, his head

sunk almost to the level of his knee, his long whip in his hand, his

keen and somewhat fierce brown eyes taking in every detail of what was

going on about him. Indeed there was but little that came before him

that old Kirkby did not see.

CHAPTER V

THE STORY AND THE LETTERS

Imagine, if you please, the forest primeval; yes, the murmuring pines

and the hemlocks of the poem as well, by the side of a rapidly rushing

mountain torrent fed by the eternal snows of the lofty peaks of the

great range. A level stretch of grassy land where a mountain brook

joined the creek was dotted with clumps of pines and great boulders

rolled down from the everlasting hills--half an acre of open clearing.

On the opposite side of the brook the canyon wall rose almost sheer for

perhaps five hundred feet, ending in jagged, needle-edged pinnacles of

rock, sharp, picturesque and beautiful. A thousand feet above ran the

timber line, and four thousand feet above that the crest of the greatest

peak in the main range.

The white tents of the little encampment which had gleamed so brightly

in the clear air and radiant sunshine of Colorado, now stood dim and

ghost-like in the red reflection of a huge camp fire. It was the evening

of the first day in the wilderness.

For two days since leaving the wagon, the Maitland party with its long

train of burros heavily packed, its horsemen and the steady plodders on

foot, had advanced into unexplored and almost inaccessible retreats of

the mountains--into the primitive indeed! In this delightful spot they

had pitched their tents and the permanent camp had been made. Wood was

abundant, the water at hand was as cold as ice, as clear as crystal and

as soft as milk. There was pasturage for the horses and burros on the

other side of the mountain brook. The whole place was a little

amphitheater which humanity occupied perhaps the first time since

creation.

Unpacking the burros, setting up the tents, making the camp, building

the fire had used up the late remainder of the day which was theirs when

they had arrived. Opportunity would come to-morrow to explore the

country, to climb the range, to try the stream that tumbled down a

succession of waterfalls to the right of the camp and roared and rushed

merrily around its feet until, swelled by the volume of the brook, it

lost itself in tree-clad depths far beneath. To-night rest after labor,

to-morrow play after rest.

The evening meal was over. Enid could not help thinking with what scorn

and contempt her father would have regarded the menu, how his gorge

would have risen--hers too for that matter!--had it been placed before

him on the old colonial mahogany of the dining-room in Philadelphia. But

up there in the wilds she had eaten the coarse homely fare with the zest

and relish of the most seasoned ranger of the hills. Anxious to be of

service, she had burned her hands and smoked her hair and scorched her

face by usurping the functions of the young ranchman who had been

brought along as cook, and had actually fried the bacon herself! Imagine

a goddess with a frying pan! The black thick coffee and the condensed

milk, drunk from the graniteware cup, had a more delicious aroma and a

more delightful taste than the finest Mocha and Java in the daintiest

porcelain of France. _Optimum condimentum._ The girl was frankly,

ravenously hungry, the air, the altitude, the exertion, the excitement

made her able to eat anything and enjoy it.

She was gloriously beautiful, too; even her brief experience in the west

had brought back the missing roses to her cheek, and had banished the

bister circles from beneath her eyes. Robert Maitland, lazily reclining

propped up against a boulder, his feet to the fire, smoking an old pipe

that would have given his brother the horrors, looked with approving

complacency upon her, confident and satisfied that his prescription was

working well. Nor was he the only one who looked at her that way. Marion

and Emma, his two daughters, worshiped their handsome Philadelphia

cousin and they sat one on either side of her on the great log lying

between the tents and the fire. Even Bob junior condescended to give her

approving glances. The whole camp was at her feet. Mrs. Maitland had

been greatly taken by her young niece. Kirkby made no secret of his

devotion; Arthur Bradshaw and Henry Phillips, each a "tenderfoot" of the

extremest character, friends of business connections in the east, who

were spending their vacation with Maitland, shared in the general

devotion; to say nothing of George the cook, and Pete, the packer and

"horse wrangler."

Phillips, who was an old acquaintance of Enid's, had tried his luck with

her back east and had sense enough to accept as final his failure.

Bradshaw was a solemn young man without that keen sense of humor which

was characteristic of the west. The others were suitably dressed for

adventure, but Bradshaw's idea of an appropriate costume was

distinguished chiefly by long green felt puttees which swathed his huge

calves and excited curious inquiry and ribald comment from the surprised

denizens of each mountain hamlet through which they had passed, to all

of which Bradshaw remained serenely oblivious. The young man, who does

not enter especially into this tale, was a vestryman of the church in

his home in the suburbs of Philadelphia. His piety had been put to a

severe strain in the mountains.

That day everybody had to work on the trail--everybody wanted to for

that matter. The hardest labor consisted in the driving of the burros.

Unfortunately there was no good and trained leader among them through an

unavoidable mischance, and the campers had great difficulty in keeping

the burros on the trail. To Arthur Bradshaw had been allotted the most

obstinate, cross-grained and determined of the unruly band, and old

Kirkby and George paid particular attention to instructing him in the

gentle art of manipulating him over the rocky mountain trail.

"Wall," said Kirkby with his somewhat languid, drawling, nasal voice,

"that there burro's like a ship w'ich I often seed 'em w'n I was a kid

down east afore I come out to God's country. Nature has pervided 'em

with a kind of a hellum. I remember if you wanted the boat to go to the

right you shoved the hellum over to the left. Sta'boad an' port was the

terms as I recollects 'em. It's jest the same with burros, you takes 'em

by the hellum, that's by the tail, git a good tight twist on it an' ef

you want him to head to the right, slew his stern sheets around to the

left, an' you got to be keerful you don't git no kick back w'ich if it

lands on you is worse 'n the ree-coil of a mule."

Arthur faithfully followed directions, narrowly escaping the outraged

brute's small but sharp pointed heels on occasion. His efforts not being

productive of much success, finally in his despair he resorted to brute

strength; he would pick the little animal up bodily, pack and all--he

was a man of powerful physique--and swing him around until his head

pointed in the right direction; then with a prayer that the burro would

keep it there for a few rods anyway, he would set him down and start him

all over again. The process, oft repeated, became monotonous after a

while. Arthur was a slow thinking man, deliberate in action, he stood it

as long as he possibly could. Kirkby who rode one horse and led two

others, and therefore was exempt from burro driving, observed him with

great interest. He and Bradshaw had strayed way behind the rest of the

party.

At last Arthur's resistance, patience and piety, strained to the

breaking point, gave way suddenly. Primitive instincts rose to the

surface and overwhelmed him like a flood. He deliberately sat down on a

fallen tree by the side of a trail, the burro halting obediently, turned

and faced him with hanging head apparently conscious that he merited the

disapprobation that was being heaped upon him, for from the desperate

tenderfoot there burst forth so amazing, so fluent, so comprehensive a

torrent of assorted profanity, that even the old past master in

objurgation was astonished and bewildered. Where did Bradshaw, mild and

inoffensive, get it? His proficiency would have appalled his Rector and

amazed his fellow vestrymen. Not the Jackdaw of Rheims himself was so

cursed as that little burro. Kirkby sat on his horse in fits of silent

laughter until the tears ran 'down his cheeks, the only outward and

visible expression of his mirth.

Arthur only stopped when he had thoroughly emptied himself, possibly of

an accumulation of years of repression.

"Wall," said Kirkby, "you sure do overmatch anyone I ever heard w'en it

comes to cursin'. W'y you could gimme cards an' spades an' beat me, an'

I was thought to have some gift that-a-way in the old days."

"I didn't begin to exhaust myself," answered Bradshaw, shortly, "and

what I did say didn't equal the situation. I'm going home."

"I wouldn't do that," urged the old man. "Here, you take the hosses an'

I'll tackle the burro."

"Gladly," said Arthur. "I would rather ride an elephant and drive a herd

of them than waste another minute on this infernal little mule."

The story was too good to keep, and around the camp fire that night

Kirkby drawled it forth. There was a freedom and easiness of intercourse

in the camp, which was natural enough. Cook, teamster, driver, host,

guest, men, women, children, and I had almost said burros, stood on the

same level. They all ate and lived together. The higher up the mountain

range you go, the deeper into the wilderness you plunge, the further

away from the conventional you draw, the more homogeneous becomes

society and the less obvious are the irrational and unscientific

distinctions of the lowlands. The guinea stamp fades and the man and the

woman are pure gold or base metal inherently and not by any artificial

standard.

George, the cattle man who cooked, and Peter, the horse wrangler, who

assisted Kirkby in looking after the stock, enjoyed the episode

uproariously, and would fain have had the exact language repeated to

them, but here Robert Maitland demurred, much to Arthur's relief, for he

was thoroughly humiliated by the whole performance.

It was very pleasant lounging around the camp fire, and one good story

easily led to another.

"It was in these very mountains," said Robert Maitland, at last, when

his turn came, "that there happened one of the strangest and most

terrible adventures that I ever heard of. I have pretty much forgotten

the lay of the land, but I think it wasn't very far from here that there

is one of the most stupendous canyons through the range. Nobody ever goes

there--I don't suppose anybody has ever been there since. It must have

been at least five years ago that it all happened."

"It was four years an' nine months, exactly, Bob," drawled old Kirkby,

who well knew what was coming.

"Yes, I dare say you are right. I was up at Evergreen at the time,

looking after timber interests, when a mule came wandering into the

camp, saddle and pack still on his back."

"I knowed that there mule," said Kirkby. "I'd sold it to a feller named

Newbold, that had come out yere an' married Louise Rosser, old man

Rosser's daughter, an' him dead, an' she bein' an orphan, an' this

feller bein' a fine young man from the east, not a bit of a tenderfoot

nuther, a minin' engineer he called hisself."

"Well, I happened to be there too, you remember," continued Maitland,

"and they made up a party to go and hunt up the man, thinking something

might have happened."

"You see," explained Kirkby, "we was all mighty fond of Louise Rosser.

The hull camp was actin' like a father to her at the time, so long's she

hadn't nobody else. We was all at the weddin', too, some six months

afore. The gal married him on her own hook, of course, nobody makin'

her, but somehow she didn't seem none too happy, although Newbold, who

was a perfect gent, treated her white as far as we knowed."

The old man stopped again and resumed his pipe.

"Kirkby, you tell the story," said Maitland.

"Not me," said Kirkby. "I have seen men shot afore for takin' words

out'n other men's mouths an' I ain't never done that yit."

"You always were one of the most silent men I ever saw," laughed George.

"Why, that day Pete yere got shot accidental an' had his whole breast

tore out w'en we was lumbering over on Black Mountain, all you said was,

'Wash him off, put some axle grease on him an' tie him up.'"

"That's so," answered Pete, "an' there must have been somethin' powerful

soothin' in that axle grease, for here I am, safe an' sound, to this

day."

"It takes an old man," assented Kirkby, "to know when to keep his mouth

shet. I learned it at the muzzle of a gun."

"I never knew before," laughed Maitland, "how still a man you can be.

Well, to resume the story, having nothing to do, I went out with the

posse the sheriff gathered up--"

"Him not thinkin' there had been any foul play," ejaculated the old man.

"No, certainly not."

"Well, what happened, Uncle Bob," inquired Enid.

"Just you wait," said young Bob, who had heard the story. "This is an

awful good story, Cousin Enid."

"I can't wait much longer," returned the girl. "Please go on."

"Two days after we left the camp, we came across an awful figure,

ragged, blood stained, wasted to a skeleton, starved--"

"I have seen men in extreme cases afore," interposed Kirkby, "but never

none like him."

"Nor I," continued Maitland.

"Was it Newbold?" asked Enid.

"Yes."

"And what had happened to him?"

"He and his wife had been prospecting in these very mountains, she had

fallen over a cliff and broken herself so terribly that Newbold had to

shoot her."

"What!" exclaimed Bradshaw. "You don't mean that he actually killed

her?"

"That's what he done," answered old Kirkby.

"Poor man," murmured Enid.

"But why?" asked Phillips.

"They were five days away from a settlement, there wasn't a human being

within a hundred and fifty miles of them, not even an Indian," continued

Maitland. "She was so frightfully broken and mangled that he couldn't

carry her away."

"But why couldn't he leave her and go for help?" asked Bradshaw.

"The wolves, the bears, or the vultures would have got her. These woods

and mountains were full of them then and there are some of them, left

now, I guess."

The two little girls crept closer to their grown up cousin, each casting

anxious glances beyond the fire light.

"Oh, you're all right, little gals," said Kirkby, reassuringly, "they

wouldn't come nigh us while this fire is burnin' an' they're pretty well

hunted out I guess; 'sides, there's men yere who'd like nothin' better'n

drawin' a bead on a big b'ar."

"And so," continued Maitland, "when she begged him to shoot her, to put

her out of her misery, he did so and then he started back to the

settlement to tell his story and stumbled on us looking after him."

"What happened then?"

"I went back to the camp," said Maitland. "We loaded Newbold on a mule

and took him with us. He was so crazy he didn't know what was happening,

he went over the shooting again and again in his delirium. It was

awful."

"Did he die?"

"I don't think so," was the answer, "but really I know nothing further

about him. There were some good women in that camp, and we put him in

their hands, and I left shortly afterwards."

"I kin tell the rest," said old Kirkby. "Knowin' more about the

mountains than most people hereabouts I led the men that didn't go back

with Bob an' Newbold to the place w'ere he said his woman fell, an'

there we found her, her body, leastways."

"But the wolves?" queried the girl.

"He'd drug her into a kind of a holler and piled rocks over her. He'd

gone down into the canyon, w'ich was somethin' frightful, an' then

climbed up to w'ere she'd lodged. We had plenty of rope, havin' brought

it along a purpose, an' we let ourselves down to the shelf where she was

a lyin'. We wrapped her body up in blankets an' roped it an' finally

drug her up on the old Injun trail, leastways I suppose it was made

afore there was any Injuns, an' brought her back to Evergreen camp,

w'ich the only thing about it that was green was the swing doors on the

saloon. We got a parson out from Denver an' give her a Christian

burial."

"It that all?" asked Enid as the old man paused again.

"Nope."

"Oh, the man?" exclaimed the woman with quick intuition.

"He recovered his senses so they told us, an' w'en we got back he'd

gone."

"Where?" was the instant question.

Old Kirkby stretched out his hands.

"Don't ax me," he said. "He'd jest gone. I ain't never seed or heerd of

him sence. Poor little Louise Rosser, she did have a hard time."

"Yes," said Enid, "but I think the man had a harder time than she. He

loved her?"

"It looked like it," answered Kirkby.

"If you had seen him, his remorse, his anguish, his horror," said

Maitland, "you wouldn't have had any doubt about it. But it is getting

late. In the mountains everybody gets up at daybreak. Your sleeping bags

are in the tents, ladies, time to go to bed."

As the party broke up, old Kirkby rose slowly to his feet. He looked

meaningly toward the young woman, upon whom the spell of the tragedy

still lingered, he nodded toward the brook, and then repeated his

speaking glance at her. His meaning was patent, although no one else had

seen the covert invitation.

"Come, Kirkby," said the girl in quick response, "you shall be my

escort. I want a drink before I turn in. No, never mind," she said, as

Bradshaw and Phillips both volunteered, "not this time."

The old frontiersman and the young girl strolled off together. They

stopped by the brink of the rushing torrent a few yards away. The noise

that it made drowned the low tones of their voices and kept the others,

busy preparing to retire, from hearing what they said.

"That ain't quite all the story, Miss Enid," said the old trapper

meaningly. "There was another man."

"What!" exclaimed the girl.

"Oh, there wasn't nothin' wrong with Louise Rosser, w'ich she was Louise

Newbold, but there was another man. I suspected it afore, that's why she

was sad. W'en we found her body I knowed it."

"I don't understand."

"These'll explain," said Kirkby. He drew out from his rough hunting coat

a package of soiled letters; they were carefully enclosed in an oil skin

and tied with a faded ribbon. "You see," he continued, holding them in

his hand, yet carefully concealing them from the people at the fire.

"W'en she fell off the cliff--somehow the mule lost his footin', nobody

never knowed how, leastways the mule was dead an' couldn't tell--she

struck on a spur or shelf about a hundred feet below the brink.

Evidently she was carryin' the letters in her dress. Her bosom was

frightfully tore open an' the letters was lying there. Newbold didn't

see 'em, because he went down into the canyon an' came up to the shelf,

or butte head, w'ere the body was lyin', but we dropped down. I was the

first man down an' I got 'em. Nobody else seein' me, an' there ain't no

human eyes, not even my wife's, that's ever looked on them letters,

except mine and now yourn."

"You are going to give them to me?"

"I am," said Kirkby.

"But why?"

"I want you to know the hull story."

"But why, again?"

"I rather guess them letters'll tell," answered the old man evasively,

"an' I like you, and I don't want to see you throwed away."

[Illustration: "Read the letters," he said. "They'll tell the story.

Good night."]

"What do you mean?" asked the girl, curiously, thrilling to the

solemnity of the moment, the seriousness, the kind affection of the old

frontiersman, the weird scene, the fire light, the tents gleaming

ghost-like, the black wall of the canyon and the tops of the mountain

range broadening out beneath the stars in the clear sky where they

twinkled above her head. The strange and terrible story, and now the

letters in her hand which somehow seemed to be imbued with human

feeling, greatly affected her! Kirkby patted her on the shoulder.

"Read the letters," he said. "They'll tell the story. Good-night."

CHAPTER VI

THE POOL AND THE WATER SPRITE

Long after the others in the camp had sunk into the profound slumber of

weary bodies and good consciences, a solitary candle in the small tent

occupied by Enid Maitland alone, gave evidence that she was busy over

the letters which Kirkby had handed to her.

It was a very thoughtful girl indeed who confronted the old frontiersman

the next morning. At the first convenient opportunity when they were

alone together she handed him the packet of letters.

"Have you read 'em?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Wall, you keep 'em," said the old man gravely. "Mebbe you'll want to

read 'em agin."

"But I don't understand why you want me to have them."

"Wall, I'm not quite sure myself why, but leastways I do an'--"

"I shall be very glad to keep them," said the girl still more gravely,

slipping them into one of the pockets of her hunting shirt as she

spoke.

The packet was not bulky, the letters were not many nor were they of any

great length. She could easily carry them on her person and in some

strange and inexplicable way she was rather glad to have them. She could

not, as she had said, see any personal application to herself in them,

and yet in some way she did feel that the solution of the mystery would

be hers some day. Especially did she think this on account of the

strange but quiet open emphasis of the old hunter.

There was much to do about the camp in the mornings. Horses and burros

to be looked after, fire wood to be cut, plans for the day arranged,

excursions planned, mountain climbs projected. Later on unwonted hands

must be taught to cast the fly for the mountain trout which filled the

brook and pool, and all the varied duties, details and fascinating

possibilities of camp life must be explained to the new-comers.

The first few days were days of learning and preparation, days of mishap

and misadventure, of joyous laughter over blunders in getting settled,

or learning the mysteries of rod and line, of becoming hardened and

acclimated. The weather proved perfect; it was late October and the

nights were very cold, but there was no rain and the bright sunny days

were invigorating and exhilarating to the last degree. They had huge

fires and plenty of blankets and the colder it was in the night the

better they slept.

It was an intensely new experience for the girl from Philadelphia, but

she showed a marked interest and adaptability, and entered with the

keenest zest into all the opportunities of the charming days. She was a

good sportswoman and she soon learned to throw a fly with the best of

them. Old Kirkby took her under his especial protection, and as he was

one of the best rods in the mountains, she enjoyed every advantage.

She had always lived in the midst of life. Except in the privacy of her

own chamber she had rarely ever been alone before--not twenty feet from

a man: she thought whimsically; but here the charm of solitude attracted

her, she liked to take her rod and wander off alone. She actually

enjoyed it.

The main stream that flowed down the canyon was fed by many affluents

from the mountain sides, and in each of them voracious trout appeared.

She explored them as she had opportunity. Sometimes with the others but

more often by herself. She discovered charming and exquisite nooks,

little stretches of grass, the size perhaps of a small room, flower

decked, ferny bordered, overshadowed by tall gaunt pine trees, the

sunlight filtering through their thin foliage, checkering the verdant

carpet beneath. Huge moss covered boulders, wet with the everdashing

spray of the roaring brooks, lay in mid-stream and with other natural

stepping stones hard-by invited her to cross to either shore. Waterfalls

laughed musically in her ears, deep still pools tempted her skill and

address.

Sometimes leaving rod and basket by the waterside, she climbed some

particularly steep acclivity of the canyon wall and stood poised, wind

blown, a nymph of the woods, upon some pinnacle of rock rising needle

like at the canyon's edge above the sea of verdure which the wind waved

to and fro beneath her feet. There in the bright light, with the breeze

blowing her golden hair, she looked like some Norse goddess, blue eyed,

exhilarated, triumphant.

She was a perfectly formed woman on the ancient noble lines of Milo

rather than the degenerate softness of Medici. She grew stronger of limb

and fuller of breath, quicker and steadier of eye and hand, cooler of

nerve, in these demanding, compelling adventures among the rocks in this

mountain air. She was not a tall woman, indeed slightly under rather

than over the medium size, but she was so ideally proportioned, she

carried herself with the fearlessness of a young chamois, that she

looked taller than she was. There was not an ounce of superfluous flesh

upon her, yet she had the grace of Hebe, the strength of Pallas Athene,

and the swiftness of motion of Atalanta. Had she but carried bow and

spear, had she worn tunic and sandals, she might have stood for Diana

and she would have had no cause to blush by comparison with the finest

model of Praxiteles' chisel or the most splendid and glowing example of

Appelles' brush.

Uncle Robert was delighted with her. His contribution to her western

outfit was a small Winchester. She displayed astonishing aptitude under

his instructions and soon became wonderfully proficient with that deadly

weapon and with a revolver also. There was little danger to be

apprehended in the daytime among the mountains the more experienced men

thought, still it was wise for the girl always to have a weapon in

readiness, so in her journeyings, either the Winchester was slung from

her shoulder or carried in her hand, or else the Colt dangled at her

hip. At first she took both, but finally it was with reluctance that she

could be persuaded to take either. Nothing had ever happened. Save for a

few birds now and then she had seemed the only tenant of the

wildernesses of her choice.

One night after a camping experience of nearly two weeks in the

mountains, and just before the time for breaking up and going back to

civilization, she announced that early the next morning she was going

down the canyon for a day's fishing excursion.

None of the party had ever followed the little river very far, but it

was known that some ten miles below the stream merged in a lovely

gem-like lake in a sort of crater in the mountains. From thence by a

series of waterfalls it descended through the foothills to the distant

plains beyond. The others had arranged to climb one especially dangerous

and ambition provoking peak which towered above them and which had never

before been surmounted so far as they knew. Enid enjoyed mountain

climbing. She liked the uplift in feeling that came from going higher

and higher till some crest was gained, but on this occasion they urged

her to accompany them in vain.

When the fixity of her decision was established she had a number of

offers to accompany her, but declined them all, bidding the others go

their way. Mrs. Maitland, who was not feeling very well, old Kirkby, who

had climbed too many mountains to feel much interest in that game, and

Pete, the horse wrangler, who had to look after the stock, remained in

camp; the others, with the exception of Enid, started at daybreak for

their long ascent. She waited until the sun was about an hour high and

then bade good-by to the three and began the descent of the canyon.

Traveling light for she was going far--farther indeed than she knew--she

left her Winchester at home, but carried the revolver with the fishing

tackle and substantial luncheon.

Now the river--a river by courtesy only--and the canyon turned sharply

back on themselves just beyond the little meadow where the camp was

pitched. Past the tents that had been their home for this joyous period

the river ran due east for a few hundred feet, after which it curved

sharply, doubled back and flowed westward for several miles before it

gradually swung around to the east on its proper course again.

It had been Enid's purpose to cut across the hills and strike the river

where it turned eastward once more, avoiding the long detour back. In

fact she had declared her intention of doing that to Kirkby and he had

given her careful directions so that she should not get lost in the

mountains.

But she had plenty of time and no excuse or reason for saving it; she

never tired of the charm of the canyon; therefore, instead of plunging

directly over the spur of the range, she followed the familiar trail

and after she had passed westward far beyond the limits of the camp to

the turning, she decided, in accordance with that utterly irresponsible

thing, a woman's will, that she would not go down the canyon that day

after all, but that she would cross back over the range and strike the

river a few miles above the camp and go up the canyon instead.

She had been up in that direction a few times, but only for a short

distance, as the ascent above the camp was very sharp; in fact for a

little more than a mile the brook was only a succession of waterfalls;

the best fishing was below the camp and the finest woods were deeper in

the canyon. She suddenly concluded that she would like to see what was up

in that unexplored section of the country and so, with scarcely a

momentary hesitation, she abandoned her former plan and began the ascent

of the range.

Upon decisions so lightly taken what momentous consequences depend?

Whether she should go up the stream or down the stream, whether she

should follow the rivulet to its source or descend it to its mouth, was

apparently a matter of little moment, yet her whole life turned

absolutely upon that decision. The idle and unconsidered choice of the

hour was fraught with gravest possibilities. Had that election been

made with any suspicion, with any foreknowledge, had it come as the

result of careful reasoning or far-seeing of probabilities, it might

have been understandable, but an impulse, a whim, the vagrant idea of an

idle hour, the careless chance of a moment, and behold! a life is

changed. On one side were youth and innocence, freedom and contentment,

a happy day, a good rest by the cheerful fire at night; on the other,

peril of life, struggle, love, jealousy, self-sacrifice, devotion,

suffering, knowledge--scarcely Eve herself when she stood apple in hand

with ignorance and pleasure around her and enlightenment and sorrow

before her, had greater choice to make.

How fortunate we are that the future is veiled, that the psalmist's

prayer that he might know his end and be certified how long he had to

live is one that will not and cannot be granted; that it has been given

to but One to foresee His own future, for no power apparently could

enable us to stand up against what might be, because we are only human

beings not sufficiently alight with the spark divine. We wait for the

end because we must, but thank God we know it not until it comes.

Nothing of this appeared to the girl that bright sunny morning. Fate hid

in those mountains under the guise of fancy. Lighthearted, carefree,

fitted with buoyant joy over every fact of life, she left the flowing

water and scaled the cliff beyond which in the wilderness she was to

find, after all, the world.

The ascent was longer and more difficult and dangerous than she had

imagined when she first confronted it, perhaps it was typical and

foretold her progress. More than once she had to stop and carefully

examine the face of the canyon wall for a practicable trail; more than

once she had to exercise extremest care in her climb, but she was a bold

and fearless mountaineer by this time and at last surmounting every

difficulty she stood panting slightly, a little tired but triumphant,

upon the summit.

The ground was rocky and broken, the timber line was close above her and

she judged that she must be several miles from the camp. The canyon was

very crooked, she could see only a few hundred yards of it in any

direction. She scanned her circumscribed limited horizon eagerly for the

smoke from the great fire that they always kept burning in the camp, but

not a sign of it was visible. She was evidently a thousand feet above

the river whence she had come. Her standing ground was a rocky ridge

which fell away more gently on the other side for perhaps two hundred

feet toward the same brook. She could see through vistas in the trees

the up-tossed peaks of the main range, bare, chaotic, snow covered,

lonely, majestic, terrible.

The awe of the everlasting hills is greater than that of the heaving

sea. Save in the infrequent periods of calm, the latter always moves,

the mountains are the same for all time. The ocean is quick, noisy,

living; the mountains are calm, still--dead.

The girl stood as it were on the roof of the world, a solitary human

being, so far as she knew, in the eye of God above her. Ah, but the Eyes

Divine look long and see far; things beyond the human ken are all

revealed. None of the party had ever come this far from the camp in this

direction she knew. And she was glad to be the first, as she fatuously

thought, to observe that majestic solitude.

Surveying the great range she wondered where the peak climbers might be.

Keen sighted though she was she could not discover them. The crest that

they were attempting lay in another direction hidden by a nearer spur.

She was in the very heart of the mountains; peaks and ridges rose all

about her, so much so that the general direction of the great range was

lost. She was at the center of a far flung concavity of crest and

range. She marked one towering point to the right of her that rose

massively grand above all the others. To-morrow she would climb to that

high point and from its lofty elevation look upon the heavens above and

the earth beneath, aye and the waters under the earth far below.

To-morrow!--it is generally known that we do not usually attempt the

high points in life's range at once, content are we with lower altitudes

to-day.

There was no sound above her, the rushing water over the rocks upon the

nearer side she could hear faintly beneath her, there was no wind about

her, to stir the long needles of the pines. It was very still, the kind

of a stillness of body which is the outward and visible complement of

that stillness of the soul in which men know God. There had been no

earthquake, no storm, the mountains had not heaved beneath her feet, the

great and strong wind had not passed by, the rocks had not been rent and

broken, yet Enid caught herself listening as if for a Voice. The thrall

of majesty, silence, loneliness was upon her. She stood--one stands when

there is a chance of meeting God on the way, one does not kneel until He

comes--with her raised hands clasped, her head uplifted in exultation

unspeakable, God-conquered with her face to heaven upturned.

"I will lift up mine eyes to the hills whence cometh my salvation," her

heart sang voicelessly. "We praise Thee, O God, we magnify Thy Holy Name

forever," floated through her brain, in great appreciation of the

marvelous works of the Almighty Shaping Master Hand. Caught up as it

were into the heavens, her soul leaped to meet its maker. Thinking to

find God she waited there on the heaven-kissing hill.

How long she stayed she did not realize; she took no note of time, it

did not occur to her even to look at the watch on her wrist; she had

swept the skyline cut off as it were by the peaks when first she came,

and when at last she turned away--even divinest moments must have an

end--she looked not backward. She saw not a little cloud hid on the

horizon behind the rampart of ages, as it were, no bigger than a man's

hand, a cloud full of portent and which would alarm greatly the veteran

Kirkby in the camp and Maitland on the mountain top. Both of them

unfortunately were unable to see it, one being on the other side of the

range, and the other deep in the canyon, and for both of them as for the

girl the sun still shone brightly.

The declivity to the river on the upper side was comparatively easy and

Enid Maitland went slowly and thoughtfully down to it until she reached

the young torrent. She got her tackle ready, but did no casting as she

made her way slowly up the ever narrowing, ever rising canyon. She was

charmed and thrilled by the wild beauty of the way, the spell of the

mountains was deep upon her. Thoughtfully she wandered on until,

presently she came to another little amphitheater like that where the

camp was pitched, only smaller. Strange to say the brook, or river, here

broadened into a little pool perhaps twenty feet across; a turn had

thrown a full force of water against the huge boulder wall and in ages

of effort a giant cup had been hollowed out of the native rock. The pool

was perhaps four or five feet deep, the rocky bottom worn smooth, the

clearing was upon the opposite side and the banks were heavily wooded

beyond the spur of the rock which formed the back of the pool. She could

see the trout in it. She made ready to try her fortune, but before she

did so an idea came to her--daring, unconventional, extraordinary, begot

of innocence and inexperience.

The water of course was very cold, but she had been accustomed all her

life to taking a bath at the natural temperature of the water at

whatever season. She knew that the only people in that wilderness were

the members of her own party; three of them were at the camp below, the

others were ascending a mountain miles away. The canyon was deep sunk,

and she satisfied herself by careful observation that the pool was not

overlooked by any elevations far or near.

Her ablutions in common with those of the rest of the campers had been

by piecemeal of necessity. Here was an opportunity for a plunge in a

natural bath tub. She was as certain that she would be under no

observation as if she were in the privacy of her own chamber. Here again

impulse determined the end. In spite of her assurance there was some

little apprehension in the glance that she cast about her, but it soon

vanished. There was no one. She was absolutely alone. The pool and the

chance of the plunge had brought her down to earth again; the thought of

the enlivening exhilaration of the pure cold water dashing against her

own sweet warm young body changed the current of her thoughts--the

anticipation of it rather.

Impulsively she dropped her rod upon the grass, unpinned her cap, threw

the fishing basket from her shoulder. She was wearing a stout sweater;

that too joined the rest. Nervous hands manipulated buttons and the

fastenings. In a few moments the sweet figure of youth, of beauty, of

purity and of innocence brightened the sod and shed a white luster upon

the green of the grass and moss and pines, reflecting light to the gray

brown rocks of the range. So Eve may have looked on some bright Eden

morning. A few steps forward and this nymph of the woods, this naiad of

the mountains, plunged into the clear, cold waters of the pool--a water

sprite and her fountain!

CHAPTER VII

THE BEAR, THE MAN AND THE FLOOD

The water was deep enough to receive her dive and the pool was long

enough to enable her to swim a few strokes. The first chill of the icy

water was soon lost in the vigorous motions in which she indulged, but

no mere human form however hardened and inured could long endure that

frigid bath. Reluctantly, yet with the knowledge that she must go, after

one more sweeping dive and a few magnificent strokes, she raised her

head from the water lapping her white shoulders, and shaking her face

clear from the drops of crystal, faced the shore. It was no longer

untenanted, she was no longer alone.

What she saw startled and alarmed her beyond measure. Planted on her

clothes, looking straight at her, having come upon her in absolute

silence, nothing having given her the least warning of his approach, and

now gazing at her with red, hungry, evil, vicious eyes, the eyes of the

covetous filled with the cruel lust of desire and carnal possession, and

yet with a glint of surprise in them, too, as if he did not know quite

what to make of the white loveliness of this unwonted apparition

flashing so suddenly at him out of the water, this strange invader of

the domain of which he fancied he was sole master and lord paramount,

stood a great, monstrous frightful looking Grizzly Bear. _Ursus

Horribilis_, indeed.

He was an aged monarch of the mountains, reddish brown in color

originally, but now a hoary dirty gray. His body was massive and burly,

his legs short, dark colored and immensely powerful. His broad square

head moved restlessly. His fanged mouth opened and a low hoarse growl

came from the red cavern of his throat. He was an old and terrible

monster who had tasted the blood of man and who would not hesitate to

attack even without provocation especially anything at once so harmless

and so whitely inviting as the girl in the pool.

The girl forgot the chill of the water in the horror of that moment.

Alone, naked, defenseless, lost in the mountains, with the most

powerful, sanguinary and ferocious beast of the continent in front of

her, she could neither fight nor fly, she could only wait his pleasure.

He snuffed at her clothing a moment and stood with one fore foot

advanced for a second or two growling deeply, evidently, she thought

with almost superhuman keenness of perception, preparing to leap into

the pool and seize upon her.

The rush of the current as it swirled about her caused her to sway

gently, otherwise she stood motionless and apprehensive, terribly

expectant. She had made no sound, and save for that low growl the great

beast had been equally silent. There was an awful fixity in the gaze she

turned upon him and he wavered under it. It annoyed him. It bespoke a

little of the dominance of the human. But she was too surprised, too

unnerved, too desperately frightened to put forth the full power of mind

over matter. There was piteous appeal in her gaze. The bear realized

this and mastered her sufficiently.

She did not know whether she was in the water or in the air, there were

but two points upon which her consciousness was focussed in the vast

ellipse of her imagination. Another moment or two and all coherency of

thought would be gone. The grizzly, still unsettled and uneasy before

her awful glance, but not deterred by it, turned its great head sideways

a little to escape the direct immobile stare, brought his sharp clawed

foot down heavily and lurched forward.

Scarcely had a minute elapsed in which all this happened. That huge

threatening heave of the great body toward her relieved the tension.

She found voice at last. Although it was absolutely futile she realized

as she cried, her released lips framed the loud appeal.

"Help! for God's sake."

Although she knew she cried but to the bleak walls of the canyon, the

drooping pines, the rushing river, the distant heaven, the appeal went

forth accompanied by the mightiest conjuration known to man.

"For God's sake, Help!"

How dare poor humanity so plead, the doubter cries. What is it to God if

one suffers, another bleeds, another dies. What answer could come out of

that silent sky?

Sometimes the Lord speaks with the loud voice of men's fashioning,

instead of in that still whisper which is His own and the sound of which

we fail to catch because of our own ignoble babble!

The answer to her prayer came with a roar in her nervous frightened ear

like a clap of thunder. Ere the first echo of it died away, it was

succeeded by another and another and another, echoing, rolling,

reverberating among the rocks in ever diminishing but long drawn out

peals.

On the instant the bear rose to his feet, swayed slightly and struck as

at an imaginary enemy with his weighty paws. A hoarse, frightful

guttering roar burst from his red slavering jaws, then he lurched

sideways and fell forward, fighting the air madly for a moment, and lay

still.

With staring eyes that missed no detail, she saw that the brute had been

shot in the head and shoulder three times, and that he was apparently

dead. The revulsion that came over her was bewildering; she swayed

again, this time not from the thrust of the water but with sick

faintness. The tension suddenly taken off, unstrung, the loose bow of

her spirit quivered helplessly; the arrow of her life almost fell into

the stream.

And then a new and more appalling terror swept over her. Some man had

fired that shot. Actaeon had spied upon Diana. With this sudden

revelation of her shame, the red blood beat to the white surface in

spite of the chill water. The anguish of that moment was greater than

before. She could be killed, torn to pieces, devoured, that was a small

thing, but that she should be so outraged in her modesty was

unendurable. She wished the hunter had not come. She sunk lower in the

water for a moment fain to hide in its crystal clarity and realized as

she did how frightfully cold she was. Yet, although she froze where she

was and perished with cold she could not go out on the bank to dress,

and it would avail her little she saw swiftly, since the huge monster

had fallen a dead heap on her clothes.

Now all this, although it takes minutes to tell, had happened in but a

few seconds. Seconds sometimes include hours, even a life time, in their

brief composition. She thought it would be just as well for her to sink

down and die in the water, when a sudden splashing below her caused her

to look down the stream.

She was so agitated that she could make out little except that there was

a man crossing below her and making directly toward the body of the

bear. He was a tall black bearded man, she saw he carried a rifle, he

looked neither to the right nor to the left, he did not bestow a glance

upon her. She could have cried aloud in thanksgiving for his apparent

obliviousness to her as she crouched now neck deep in the benumbing

cold. The man stepped on the bank, shook himself like a great dog might

have done and marched over to the bear. He up-rooted a small near-by

pine, with the ease of a Hercules--and she had time to mark and marvel

at it in spite of everything--and then with that as a lever he

unconcernedly and easily heaved the body of the monster from off her

clothing. She was to learn later what a feat of strength it was to move

that inert carcass weighing much more than half a ton.

Thereafter he dropped the pine tree by the side of the dead grizzly and

without a backward look tramped swiftly and steadily up the canyon

through the trees, turning at the point of it, and was instantly lost to

sight. His gentle and generous purpose was obvious even to the

frightened, agitated, excited girl.

The woman watched him until he disappeared, a few seconds longer, and

then she hurled herself through the water and stepped out upon the

shore. Her sweater, which the bear had dragged forward in its advance,

lay on top of the rest of her clothes covered with blood. She threw it

aside and with nervous, frantic energy, wet, cold, though she was, she

jerked on in some fashion enough clothes to cover her nakedness and then

with more leisurely order and with necessary care she got the rest of

her apparel in its accustomed place upon her body, and then when it was

all over she sank down prone and prostrate upon the grass by the carcass

of the now harmless monster which had so nearly caused her undoing, and

shivered, cried and sobbed as if her heart would break.

She was chilled to the bone by her motionless sojourn, albeit it had

been for scarcely more than a minute, in that icy water, and yet the

blood rushed to her brow and face, to every hidden part of her in waves

as she thought of it. It was a good thing that she cried, she was not a

weeping woman, her tears came slowly as a rule and then came hard. She

rather prided herself upon her stoicism, but in this instance the great

deeps of her nature had been undermined and the fountains thereof were

fain to break forth.

How long she lay there, warmth coming gradually to her under the direct

rays of the sun, she did not know, and it was a strange thing that

caused her to arise. It grew suddenly dark over her head. She looked up

and a rim of frightful, black, dense clouds had suddenly blotted out the

sun. The clouds were lined with gold and silver and the long rays shot

from behind the somber blind over the yet uncovered portions of the

heaven, but the clouds moved with the irresistible swiftness and

steadiness of a great deluge. The wall of them lowered above her head

while they extended steadily and rapidly across the sky toward the other

side of the canyon and the mountain wall.

A storm was brewing such as she had never seen, such as she had no

experience to enable her to realize its malign possibilities. Nay, it

was now at hand. She had no clew, however, of what was toward, how

terrible a danger overshadowed her. Frightened but unconscious of all

the menace of the hour her thoughts flew down the canyon to the camp. She

must hasten there. She looked for her watch which she had picked from

the grass and which she had not yet put on; the grizzly had stepped upon

it, it was irretrievably ruined. She judged from her last glimpse of the

sun that it must now be early afternoon. She rose to her feet and

staggered with weakness, she had eaten nothing since morning, and the

nervous shock and strain through which she had gone had reduced her to a

pitiable condition.

Her luncheon had fortunately escaped unharmed. In a big pocket of her

short skirt there was a small flask of whiskey, which her Uncle Robert

had required her to take with her. She felt sick and faint, but she knew

that she must eat if she was to make the journey, difficult as it might

prove, back to the camp. She forced herself to take the first mouthful

of bread and meat she had brought with her, but when she had tasted she

needed no further incentive, she ate to the last crumb; she thought this

was the time she needed stimulants too, and mingling the cold water from

the brook with a little of the ardent spirit from the flask she drank.

Some of the chill had worn off, some of the fatigue had gone.

She rose to her feet and started down the canyon; her bloody sweater

still lay on the ground with other things of which she was heedless. It

had grown colder but she realized that the climb down the canyon would

put her stagnant blood in circulation and all would be well.

Before she began the descent of the pass, she cast one long glance

backward whither the man had gone. Whence came he, who was he, what had

he seen, where was he now? She thanked God for his interference in one

breath and hated him for his presence in the other.

The whole sky was now black with drifting clouds, lightning flashed

above her head, muttered peals of thunder, terrifically ominous, rocked

through the silent hills. The noise was low and subdued but almost

continuous. With a singular and uneasy feeling that she was being

observed, she started down the canyon, plunging desperately through the

trees, leaping the brook from side to side where it narrowed, seeking

ever the easiest way. She struggled on, panting with sudden inexplicable

terror almost as bad as that which had overwhelmed her an hour

before--and growing more intense every moment, to such a tragic pass had

the day and its happenings brought her.

Poor girl, awful experience really was to be hers that day. The Fates

sported with her--bodily fear, outraged modesty, mental anguish and now

the terror of the storm.

The clouds seemed to sink lower, until they almost closed about her.

Long gray ghostly arms reached out toward her. It grew darker and darker

in the depths of the canyon. She screamed aloud--in vain.

Suddenly the rolling thunder peals concentrated, balls of fire leaped

out of the heavens and struck the mountains where she could actually see

them. There are not words to describe the tremendous crashings which

seemed to splinter the hills, to be succeeded by brief periods of

silence, to be followed by louder and more terrific detonations.

In one of those appalling alternations from sound to silence she heard a

human cry--an answering cry to her own! It came from the hills behind

her. It must proceed, she thought, from the man. She could not meet that

man; although she craved human companionship as never before, she did

not want his. She could not bear it. Better the wrath of God, the fury

of the tempest.

Heedless of the sharp note of warning, of appeal, in the voice ere it

was drowned by another roll of thunder, she plunged on in the darkness.

The canyon narrowed here, she made her way down the ledges, leaping

recklessly from rock to rock, slipping, falling, grazing now one side,

now the other, hurling herself forward with white face and bruised body

and torn hands and throbbing heart that would fain burst its bonds.

There was once an ancient legend of a human creature, menaced by all the

furies, pitilessly pursued by every malefic spirit of earth and air;

like him this sweet young girl, innocent, lovely, erstwhile happy, fled

before the storm.

And then the heavens opened, the fountains of the great deeps were

broken down, and with absolute literalness the floods descended. The

bursting clouds, torn asunder by the wild winds, riven by the pent up

lightning within their black and turgid breasts, disburdened themselves.

The water came down, as it did of old when God washed the face of the

world, in a flood. The narrow of the canyon was filled ten, twenty,

thirty feet in a moment by the cloud burst. The black water rolled and

foamed, surging like the rapids at Niagara.

The body of the girl, utterly unprepared, was caught up in a moment and

flung like a bolt from a catapult down the seething sea filled with the

trunks of the trees and the debris of the mountains, tossing almost

humanly in the wild confusion. She struck out strongly, swimming more

because of the instinct of life than for any other reason. A helpless

atom in the boiling flood. Growing every minute greater and greater as

the angry skies disgorged themselves of their pent up torrents upon her

devoted head.

CHAPTER VIII

DEATH, LIFE AND THE RESURRECTION

The man was coming back from one of his rare visits to the settlements.

Ahead of him he drove a train of burros who, well broken to their work,

followed with docility the wise old leader in the advance. The burros

were laden with his supplies for the approaching winter. The season was

late, the mountains would soon be impassable on account of the snow,

indeed he chose the late season always for his buying in order that he

might not be followed and it was his habit to buy in different places in

different years that his repeated and expected presence at one spot

might not arouse suspicion.

Intercourse with his fellow men was limited to this yearly visit to a

settlement and even that was of the briefest nature, confined always to

the business in hand. Even when busy in the town he pitched a small tent

in the open on the outskirts and dwelt apart. No men there in those days

pried into the business of other men too closely. Curiosity was neither

safe nor necessary. If he aroused transient interest or speculation it

soon died away. He vanished into the mountains and as he came no more to

that place, he was soon forgotten.

Withdrawing from his fellow men and avoiding their society, this man was

never so satisfied as when alone in the silent hills. His heart and

spirit rose with every step he made away from the main traveled roads or

the more difficult mountain trails.

For several days he journeyed through the mountains, choosing the

wildest and most inaccessible parts for his going. Amid the canyons and

peaks he threaded his way with unerring accuracy, ascending higher and

higher until at last he reached the mountain aerie, the lonely

hermitage, where he made his home. There he reveled in his isolation.

What had been punishment, expiation, had at last become pleasure.

Civilization was bursting through the hills in every direction, railways

were being pushed hither and thither, the precious metals were being

discovered at various places and after them came hoards of men and with

them--God save the mark--women; but his section of the country had

hitherto been unvisited even by hunters, explorers, miners or pleasure

seekers. He was glad, he had grown to love the spot where he had made

his home, and he had no wish to be forced, like little Joe, to move on.

Once a man who loved the strife, noble or ignoble, of the madding crowd,

he had grown accustomed to silence, habituated to solitude. Winter and

summer alike he roamed the mountains, delving into every forest,

exploring every hidden canyon, surmounting every inaccessible peak; no

storm, no snow, no condition of wind or weather daunted him or stopped

him. He had no human companionship by which to try his mettle, but

nevertheless over the world of the material which lay about him he was a

master as he was a man.

He found some occupation, too, in the following of old Adam's

inheritance, during the pleasant months of summer he made such garden as

he could. His profession of mining engineer gave him other employment.

Round about him lay treasures inestimable, precious metals abounded in

the hills. He had located them, tested, analyzed, estimated the wealth

that was his for the taking--it was as valueless to him as the doubloons

and golden guineas were to Selkirk on his island. Yet the knowledge that

it was there gave him an energizing sense of potential power,

unconsciously enormously flattering to his self esteem.

Sometimes he wandered to the extreme verge of the range and on clear

days saw far beneath him the smoke of great cities of the plains. He

could be a master among men as he was a master among mountains, if he

chose. On such occasions he laughed cynically, scornfully, yet rarely

did he ever give way to such emotion.

A great and terrible sorrow was upon him; cherishing a great passion he

had withdrawn himself from the common lot to dwell upon it. From a

perverted sense of expiation, in a madness of grief, horror and despair,

he had made himself a prisoner to his ideas in the desert of the

mountains. Back to his cabin he would hasten, and there surrounded by

his living memories--deathless yet of the dead!--he would recreate the

past until dejection drove him abroad on the hills to meet God if not

man--or woman. Night-day, sunshine-shadow, heat-cold, storm-calm; these

were his life.

Having disburdened his faithful animals of their packs and having seen

them safely bestowed for the winter in the corral he had built near the

base of the cliff upon which his rude home was situated, he took his

rifle one morning for one of those lonely walks across the mountains

from which he drew such comfort because he fancied the absence of man

conduced to the nearness of God. It was a delusion as old nearly as the

Christian religion. Many had made themselves hermits in the past in

remorse for sin and for love toward God; this man had buried himself in

the wilderness in part for the first of these causes, in other part for

the love of woman. In these days of swift and sudden change he had been

constant to a remembrance and abiding in his determination for five

swift moving years. The world for him had stopped its progress in one

brief moment five years back--the rest was silence. What had happened

since then out yonder where people were mated he did not know and he did

not greatly care.

In his visits to the settlements he asked no questions, he bought no

papers, he manifested no interest in the world; something in him had

died in one fell moment, and there had been, as yet, no resurrection.

Yet life, and hope, and ambition do not die, they are indeed eternal.

_Resurgam!_

Life with its tremendous activities, its awful anxieties, its wearing

strains, its rare triumphs, its opportunities for achievement, for

service; hope with its illuminations, its encouragements, its

expectations; ambition with its stimulus, its force, its power; and

greatest of all love, itself alone--all three were latent in him. In

touch with a woman these had gone. Something as powerful and as human

must bring them back.

It was against nature that a man dowered as he should so live to himself

alone. Some voice should cry to his soul in its cerements of futile

remorse, vain expiations and benumbing recollection; some day he should

burst these grave clothes self-wound about him and be once more a man

and a master among men, rather than the hermit and the recluse of the

solitudes.

He did not allow these thoughts to come into his life, indeed it is

quite likely that he scarcely realized them at all yet; such

possibilities did not present themselves to him; perhaps the man was a

little mad that morning, maybe he trembled on the verge of a

break--upward, downward I know not so it be away--unconsciously as he

strode along the range.

He had been walking for some hours, and as he grew thirsty it occurred

to him to descend to the level of the brook which he heard below him and

of which he sometimes caught a flashing glimpse through the trees. He

scrambled down the rocks and found himself in a thick grove of pine.

Making his way slowly and with great difficulty through the tangle of

fallen timber which lay in every direction, the sound of a human voice,

the last thing on earth to be expected in that wilderness, smote upon

the fearful hollow of his ear.

Any voice or any word then and there would have surprised him, but there

was a note of awful terror in this voice, a sound of frightened appeal.

The desperation in the cry left him no moment for thought, the demand

was for action. The cry was not addressed to him, apparently, but to

God, yet it was he who answered--sent doubtless by that Over-looking

Power who works in such mysterious ways His wonders to perform!

He leaped over the intervening trees to the edge of the forest where the

rapid waters ran. To the right of him rose a huge rock, or cliff, in

front of him the canyon bent sharply to the north, and beneath him a few

rods away a speck of white gleamed above the water of a deep and still

pool that he knew.

_There was a woman there!_

He had time for but the swiftest glance, he had surmised that the voice

was not that of a man's voice instantly he heard it, and now he was

sure. She stood white breast deep in the water staring ahead of her. The

next instant he saw what had alarmed her--a Grizzly Bear, the largest,

fiercest, most forbidding specimen he had ever seen. There were a few of

those monsters still left in the range, he himself had killed several.

The woman had not seen him. He was a silent man by long habit;

accustomed to saying nothing, he said nothing now. But instantly aiming

from the hip with a wondrous skill and a perfect mastery of the weapon,

and indeed it was a short range for so huge a target, he pumped bullet

after bullet from his heavy Winchester into the evil monarch of the

mountains. The first shot did for him, but making assurance doubly and

trebly sure, he fired again and again. Satisfied at last that the bear

was dead, and observing that he had fallen upon the clothes of the

bather, he turned, descended the stream for a few yards until he came to

a place where it was easily fordable, stepped through it without a

glance toward the woman shivering in the water, whose sensation, so far

as a mere man could, he thoroughly understood and appreciated, and whose

modesty he fain would spare, having not forgotten to be a gentleman in

five years of his own society--high test of quality, that.

He climbed out upon the bank, up-rooted a small tree, rolled the bear

clear of the heap of woman's clothing and marched straight ahead of him

up the canyon and around the bend.

Thereafter, being a man, he did not faint or fall, but completely

unnerved he leaned against the canyon wall, dropped his gun at his feet

and stood there trembling mightily, sweat bedewing his forehead, and the

sweat had not come from his exertions. In one moment the whole even

tenor of his life was changed. The one glimpse he had got of those white

shoulders, that pallid face, that golden head raised from the water had

swept him back five years. He had seen once more in the solitude a

woman.

Other women he had seen at a distance and avoided in his yearly visits

to the settlements of course; these had passed him by remotely, but here

he was brought in touch intimately with humanity. He who had taken life

had saved it. A woman had sent him forth, was a woman to call him back?

He cursed himself for his weakness. He shut his eyes and summoned other

memories. How long he stood there he could not have told; he was

fighting a battle and it seemed to him at last that he triumphed.

Presently the consciousness came to him that perhaps he had no right to

stand there idle, it might be that the woman needed him, perhaps she had

fainted in the water, perhaps--He turned toward the bend which concealed

him from her and then he stopped. Had he any right to intrude upon her

privacy? He must of necessity be an unwelcome visitor to her, he had

surprised her at a frightful disadvantage; he knew instinctively,

although the fault was none of his, although he had saved her life

thereby, that she would hold him and him alone responsible for the

outrage to her modesty, and although he had seen little at first glance

and had resolutely kept his eyes away, the mere consciousness of her

absolute helplessness appealed to him--to what was best and noblest in

him, too. He must go to her. Stay, she might not yet be clothed, in

which event--But no, she must be dressed, or dead, by this time and in

either case he would have a duty to discharge.

It devolved upon him to make sure of her safety, he was in a certain

sense responsible for it, until she got back to her friends wherever

they might be; but he persuaded himself that otherwise he did not want

to see her again, that he did not wish to know anything about her

future; that he did not care whether it was well or ill with her; and it

was only stern obligation which drove him toward her--oh fond and

foolish man!

He compromised with himself at last by climbing the ridge that had shut

off a view of the pool, and looking down at the place so memorable to

him. He was prepared to withdraw instantly should circumstances warrant,

and he was careful so to conceal himself as to give no possible

opportunity for her to discover his scrutiny.

With a beating heart and eager eyes he searched the spot. There lay the

bear and a little distance away prone on the grass, clothed but whether

in her right mind or not he could not tell, lay the woman. For a moment,

as he bent a concentrated eager gaze upon her, he thought she might have

fainted or that she might have died. In any event he reflected that she

had strength and nerve and will to have dressed herself before either of

these things had happened. She lay motionless under his gaze for so long

that he finally made up his mind that common humanity required him to go

to her assistance.

He rose to his feet on the instant and saw the woman also lift herself

from the grass as if moved by a similar impulse. In his intense

preoccupation he had failed to observe the signs of the times. A sense

of the overcast sky came to him suddenly, as it did to her, but with a

difference. He knew what was about to happen, his experience told him

much more as to the awful potentialities of the tempest than she could

possibly imagine. She must be warned at once, she must leave the canyon

and get up on the higher ground without delay. His duty was plain and

yet he did it not. He could not. The pressure upon him was not yet

strong enough.

A half dozen times as he watched her deliberately sitting there eating,

he opened his mouth to cry to her, yet he could not bring himself to

it. A strange timidity oppressed him, halted him, held him back. A man

cannot stay away five years from men and woman and be himself with them

in the twinkling of an eye. And when to that instinctive and acquired

reluctance against which he struggled in vain, he added the assurance

that whatever his message he would be unwelcome on account of what had

gone before, he could not force himself to go to her or even to call to

her, not yet. He would keep her under surveillance, however, and if the

worst came he could intervene in time to rescue her. He counted without

his cost, his usual judgment bewildered. So he followed her through the

trees and down the bank.

Now he was so engrossed in her and so agitated that his caution slept,

his experience was forgotten. The storm in his own breast was so great

that it overshadowed the storm brewing above. Her way was easier than

his and he had fallen some distance behind when suddenly there rushed

upon him the fact that a frightful and unlooked for cloudburst was about

to occur above their heads. A lightning flash and a thunder clap at last

arrested his attention. Then, but not until then, he flung everything to

the winds and amid the sudden and almost continuous peals of thunder he

sent cry after cry toward her which were lost in the tremendous

diapason of sound that echoed and re-echoed through the rifts of the

mountains.

"Wait," he cried again and again. "Come up higher. Get out of the canyon.

You'll be drowned."

But he had waited too long, the storm had developed too rapidly, she was

too far ahead of and beneath him. She heard nothing but the sound of a

voice, shrill, menacing, fraught with terror for her, not a word

distinguishable; scarcely to her disturbed soul even a human voice, it

seemed like the weird cry of some wild spirit of the storm. It sounded

to her overwrought nerves so utterly inhuman that she only ran the

faster.

The canyon swerved and then doubled back, but he knew its direction;

losing sight of her for the moment he plunged straight ahead through the

trees, cutting off the bend, leaping with superhuman agility and

strength over rocks and logs until he reached a point where the rift

narrowed between two walls and ran deeply. There and then the heavens

opened and the floods came and beat into that open maw of that vast

crevasse and filled it full in an instant.

As the deluge came roaring down, bearing onward the sweepings and

scourings of the mountains, he caught a glimpse of her white desperate

face rising, falling, now disappearing, now coming into view again, in

the foamy midst of the torrent. He ran to the cliff bank and throwing

aside his gun he scrambled down the wall to a certain shelf of the rock

over which the rising water broke thinly. Ordinarily it was twenty feet

above the creek bed. Bracing himself against a jagged projection he

waited, praying. The canyon was here so narrow that he could have leaped

to the other side and yet it was too wide for him to reach her if the

water did not sweep her toward his feet. It was all done in a

second--fortunately a projection on the other side threw the force of

the torrent toward him and with it came the woman.

She was almost spent; she had been struck by a log upheaved by some

mighty wave, her hands were moving feebly, her eyes were closed, she was

drowning, dying, but indomitably battling on. He stooped down and as a

surge lifted her he threw his arm around her waist and then braced

himself against the rock to sustain the full thrust of the mighty flood.

As he seized her she gave way suddenly, as if after having done all that

she could there was now nothing left but to trust herself to his hand

and God's. She hung a dead weight on his arm in the ravening water

which dragged and tore at her madly.

He was a man of giant strength, but the struggle bade fair to be too

much even for him. It seemed as if the mountain behind him was giving

way. He set his teeth, he tried desperately to hold on, he thrust out

his right hand, holding her with the other one, and clawed at the

dripping rock in vain. In a moment the torrent mastered him and when it

did so it seized him with fury and threw him like a stone from a sling

into the seething vortex of the mid-stream. But in all this he did not,

he would not, release her.

Such was the swiftness of the motion with which they were swept downward

that he had little need to swim; his only effort was to keep his head

above water and to keep from being dashed against the logs that tumbled

end over end, or whirled sideways, or were jammed into clusters only to

burst out on every hand. He struggled furiously to keep himself from

being overwhelmed in the seething madness, and what was harder, to keep

the lifeless woman in his arms from being stricken or wrenched away. He

knew that below the narrows where the canyon widened the water would

subside, the awful fury of the rain would presently cease. If he could

steer clear of the rocks in the broad he might win to land with her.

The chances against him were thousands to nothing. But what are chances

in the eyes of God. The man in his solitude had not forgotten to pray,

his habits stood him in good stead now. He petitioned shortly, brokenly,

in brief unspoken words, as he battled through the long dragging

seconds.

Fighting, clinging, struggling, praying, he was swept on. Heavier and

heavier the woman dragged in an unconscious heap. It would have been

easier for him if he had let her go; she would never know and he could

then escape. The idea never once occurred to him. He had indeed

withdrawn from his kind, but when one depended upon him all the old

appeal of weak humanity awoke quick response in the bosom of the strong.

He would die with the stranger rather than yield her to the torrent or

admit himself beaten and give up the fight. So the conscious and the

unconscious struggled through the narrow of the canyon.

Presently with the rush and hurl of a bullet from the mouth of a gun,

they found themselves in a shallow lake through which the waters still

rushed mightily, breaking over rocks, digging away shallow rooted trees,

leaping, biting, snarling, tearing at the big walls spread away on

either side. He had husbanded some of his strength for this final

effort, this last chance of escape. Below them at the other end of this

open the walls came together again; there the descent was sharper than

before and the water ran to the opening with racing speed. Once again in

the torrent and they would be swept to death in spite of all.

Shifting his grasp to the woman's hair, now unbound, he held her with

one hand and swam hard with the other. The current still ran swiftly,

but with no gigantic upheaving waves as before. It was more easy to

avoid floating timber and debris, and on one side where the ground

sloped somewhat gently the quick water flowed more slowly. He struck out

desperately for it, forcing himself away from the main stream into the

shallows and ever dragging the woman. Was it hours or minutes or seconds

after that he gained the battle and neared the shore at the lowest edge?

He caught with his forearm, as the torrent swerved him around, a stout

young pine so deeply rooted as yet to have withstood the flood.

Summoning that last reserve of strength that is bestowed upon us in our

hour of need, and comes unless from God we know not whence, he drew

himself in front of the pine, got his back against it, and although the

water thundered against him still--only by comparison could it be called

quieter--and his foothold was most precarious, he reached down carefully

and grasped the woman under the shoulders. His position was a cramped

one, but by the power of his arms alone he lifted her up until he got

his left arm about her waist again. It was a mighty feat of strength

indeed.

The pine stood in the midst of the water, for even on the farther side

the earth was overflowed but the water was stiller; he did not know what

might be there, but he had to chance it. Lifting her up he stepped out,

fortunately meeting firm ground; a few paces and he reached solid rock

above the flood. He raised her above his head and laid her upon the

shore, then with the very last atom of all his force, physical, mental

and spiritual, he drew himself up and fell panting and utterly exhausted

but triumphant by her side.

The cloud burst was over, but the rain still beat down upon them, the

thunder still roared above them, the lightning still flashed about them,

but they were safe, alive if the woman had not died in his arms. He had

done a thing superhuman--no man knowing conditions would have believed

it. He himself would have declared a thousand times its patent

impossibility.

For a few seconds he strove to recover himself; then he thought of the

flask he always carried in his pocket. It was gone; his clothes were

ragged and torn, they had been ruined by his battle with the waves. The

girl lay where he had placed her on her back. In the pocket of her

hunting skirt he noticed a little protuberance; the pocket was provided

with a flap and tightly buttoned. Without hesitation he unbuttoned it.

There was a flask there, a little silver mounted affair; by some miracle

it had not been broken. It was half full. With nervous hands he opened

it and poured some of its contents down her throat; then he bent over

her his soul in his glance, scarcely knowing what to do next. Presently

she opened her eyes.

And there, in the rain, by that raging torrent whence he had drawn her

as it were from the jaws of death by the power of his arm, in the

presence of the God above them, this man and this woman looked at each

other and life for both of them was no longer the same.

BOOK III

FORGETTING AND FORGOT