A TOUR OF INSPECTION
The first thing necessary, she decided, when she had satisfied her
hunger and finished her meal, was to get word of her plight and her
resting place to her uncle and the men of the party; and the next thing
was to get away, where she would never see this man again and perhaps be
able to forget what had transpired--yet there was a strange pang of pain
in her heart at that thought!
No man on earth had ever so stimulated her curiosity as this one. Who
was he? Why was he there? Who was the woman whose picture he had so
quickly taken from her gaze? Why had so splendid a man buried himself
alone in that wilderness? These reflections were presently interrupted
by the reappearance of the man himself.
"Have you finished?" he asked unceremoniously, standing in the doorway
as he spoke.
"Yes, thank you, and it was very good indeed."
Dismissing this politeness with a wave of his hand but taking no other
notice, he spoke again.
"If you will tell me your name--"
"Maitland, Enid Maitland."
"Miss Maitland?"
The girl nodded.
"And where you came from, I will endeavor to find your party and see
what can be done to restore you to them."
"We were camped down that canyon at a place where another brook, a large
one, flows into it, several miles I should think below the place
where--"
She was going to say "where you found me," but the thought of the way in
which he had found her rushed over her again; and this time with his
glance directly upon her, although it was as cold and dispassionate and
indifferent as a man's look could well be, the recollection of the
meeting to which she had been about to allude rushed over her with an
accompanying wave of color which heightened her beauty as it covered her
with shame.
She could not realize that beneath his mask of indifference so
deliberately worn, the man was as agitated as she, not so much at the
remembrance of anything that had transpired, but at the sight, the
splendid picture, of the woman as she stood, there in the little cabin
then. It seemed to him as if she gathered up in her own person all the
radiance and light and beauty, all the purity and freshness and
splendor of the morning, to shine and dazzle in his face. As she
hesitated in confusion, perhaps comprehending its causes he helped out
her lame and halting sentence.
"I know the canyon well," he said. "I think I know the place to which you
refer; is it just about where the river makes an enormous bend upon
itself?"
"Yes, that is it. In that clearing we have been camped for ten days. My
uncle must be crazy with anxiety to know what has become of me and--"
The man interposed.
"I will go there directly," he said. "It is now half after ten. That
place is about seven miles or more from here across the range, fifteen
or twenty by the river; I shall be back by nightfall. The cabin is your
own."
He turned away without another word.
"Wait," said the woman, "I am afraid to stay here."
She had been fearless enough before in these mountains but her recent
experiences had somehow unsettled her nerves.
"There is nothing on earth to hurt you, I think," returned the man.
"There isn't a human being, so far as I know, in these mountains."
"Except my uncle's party."
He nodded.
"But there might be another--bear," she added desperately, forcing
herself.
"Not likely, and they wouldn't come here if there were any. That's the
first grizzly I have seen in years," he went on unconcernedly,
studiously looking away from her, not to add to her confusion at the
remembrance of that awful episode which would obtrude itself on every
occasion. "You can use a rifle or gun?"
She nodded; he stepped over to the wall and took down the Winchester
which he handed her.
"This one is ready for service, and you will find a revolver on the
shelf. There is only one possible way of access to this cabin, that's
down those rock stairs; one man, one woman, a child even, with these
weapons could hold it against an army."
"Couldn't I go with you?"
"On that foot?"
Enid pressed her wounded foot upon the ground; it was not so painful
when resting, but she found she could not walk a step on it without
great suffering.
"I might carry you part of the way," said the man. "I carried you last
night, but it would be impossible, all of it."
"Promise me that you will be back by nightfall with Uncle Bob and--"
"I shall be back by nightfall, but I can't promise that I will bring
anybody with me."
"You mean?"
"You saw what the cloud burst nearly did for you," was the quick answer.
"If they did not get out of that pocket there is nothing left of them
now."
"But they must have escaped," persisted the girl, fighting down her
alarm at this blunt statement of possible peril. "Besides, Uncle Robert
and most of the rest were climbing one of the peaks and--"
"They will be all right then, but if I am to find the place and tell
them your story, I must go now."
He turned and without another word or a backward glance scrambled down
the hill. The girl limped to the brink of the cliff over which he had
plunged and stared after him. She watched him as long as she could see
him until he was lost among the trees. If she had anybody else to depend
upon she would certainly have felt differently toward him. When Uncle
Robert and her Aunt and the children and old Kirkby and the rest
surrounded her again she could hate that man in spite of all he had done
for her, but now, as she stared after him determinedly making his way
down the mountain and through the trees, it was with difficulty she
could restrain herself from calling him back.
The silence was most oppressive, the loneliness was frightful; she had
been alone before in these mountains, but from choice; now the fact that
there was no escape from them made the sensation a very different one.
She sat down and brooded over her situation until she felt that if she
did not do something and in some way divert her thoughts she would break
down again. He had said that the cabin and its contents were hers. She
resolved to inspect them more closely. She hobbled back into the great
room and looked about her again. There was nothing that demanded careful
scrutiny; she wasn't quite sure whether she was within the proprieties
or not, but she seized the oldest and most worn of the volumes on the
shelf. It was a text book on mining and metallurgy she observed, and
opening it at the fly leaf, across the page she saw written in a firm
vigorous masculine hand a name, "William Berkeley Newbold," and beneath
these words, "Thayer Hall, Harvard," and a date some seven years back.
The owner of that book, whether the present possessor or not, had been a
college man. Say that he had graduated at twenty-one or twenty-two, he
would be twenty-eight or twenty-nine years old now, but if so, why that
white hair? Perhaps though the book did not belong to the man of the
cabin.
She turned to other books on the shelf. Many of them were technical
books which she had sufficient general culture to realize could be only
available to a man highly educated and a special student of mines and
mining--a mining engineer, she decided, with a glance at those
instruments and appliances of a scientific character plainly, but of
whose actual use she was ignorant.
A rapid inspection of the other books confirmed her in the conclusion
that the man of the mountains was indeed the owner of the collection.
There were a few well worn volumes of poetry and essays. A Bible,
Shakespeare, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Tennyson, Keats, a small
dictionary, a compendious encyclopedia, just the books, she thought,
smiling at her conceit, that a man of education and culture would want
to have upon a desert island where his supply of literature would be
limited.
The old ones were autographed as the first book she had looked in;
others, newer editions to the little library if she could judge by their
condition, were unsigned.
Into the corner cupboard and the drawers of course she did not look.
There was nothing else in the room to attract her attention, save some
piles of manuscript neatly arranged on one of the shelves, each one
covered with a square of board and kept in place by pieces of glistening
quartz. There were four of these piles and another half the size of the
first four on the table. These of course she did not examine, further
than to note that the writing was in the same bold free hand as the
signature in the books. If she had been an expert she might have deduced
much from the writing; as it was she fancied it was strong, direct,
manly.
Having completed her inspection of this room, she opened the door and
went into the other; it was smaller and less inviting. It had only one
window and a door opening outside. There was a cook stove here and
shelves with cooking utensils and granite ware, and more rude box
receptacles on the walls which were filled with a bountiful and well
selected store of canned goods and provisions of various kinds. This was
evidently the kitchen, supply room, china closet. She saw no sign of a
bed in it and wondered where and how the man had spent the night.
By rights her mind should have been filled with her uncle and his party
and in their alarm she should have shared, but she was so extremely
comfortable, except for her foot, which did not greatly trouble her so
long as she kept it quiet, that she felt a certain degree of contentment
not to say happiness. The Adventure was so romantic and thrilling--save
for those awful moments in the pool--especially to the soul of a
conventional woman who had been brought up in the most humdrum and
stereotyped fashion of the earth's ways, and with never an opportunity
for the development of the spirit of romance which all of us exhibit
some time in our life and which thank God some of us never lose, that
she found herself reveling in it.
She lost herself in pleasing imaginations of the tales of her adventures
that she could tell when she got back to her uncle and when she got
further back to staid old Philadelphia. How shocked everybody would be
with it all there! Of course she resolved that she would never mention
one episode of that terrible day, and she had somehow absolute
confidence that this man, in spite of his grim, gruff taciturnity, who
had shown himself so exceedingly considerate of her feelings would never
mention it either.
She had so much food for thought, that not even in the late afternoon of
the long day, could she force her mind to the printed pages of the book
she had taken at random from the shelf which lay open before her, where
she sat in the sun, her head covered by an old "Stetson" that she had
ventured to appropriate. She had dragged a bear skin out on the rocks in
the sun and sat curled up on it half reclining against a boulder
watching the trail, the Winchester by her side. She had eaten so late a
breakfast that she had made a rather frugal lunch out of whatever had
taken her fancy in the store room, and she was waiting most anxiously
now for the return of the man.
The season was late and the sun sank behind the peaks quite early in the
afternoon, and it grew dark and chill long before the shadows fell upon
the dwellers of the lowlands.
Enid drew the bear skin around her and waited with an ever growing
apprehension. If she should be compelled to spend the night alone in
that cabin, she felt that she could not endure it. She was never so glad
of anything in her life as when she saw him suddenly break out of the
woods and start up the steep trail, and for a moment her gladness was
not tempered by the fact, which she was presently to realize with great
dismay, that as he had gone, so he now returned, alone.