Only once did Tish speak, and then we could hardly hear her above the
rush of water and the roar of the wind.
“There’s one comfort,” she said, wading along knee-deep in a torrent.
“These spring rains give nobody cold.”
An hour later she spoke again, but that was at the end of that journey.
“I don’t believe this is the right valley after all,” she said. “I don’t
see any cave.” We stopped to take our bearings, as you may say, and as
we stood there, looking up, I could have sworn that I saw a man with a
gun peering down at us from a ledge far above. But the next moment he
was gone, and neither Tish nor Aggie had seen him at all.
We found the cave soon after and climbed to it on our hands and knees,
pulling Modestine up by his bridle. A more outrageous quartet it would
have been impossible to find, or a more outraged one. Aggie let down her
dress, which she had pinned round her waist, releasing about a quart of
water from its folds, and stood looking about her with a sneer. “I
don’t think much of your cave,” she said. “It’s little and it’s dirty.”
“It’s dry!” said Tish tartly.
“Why stop at all?” Aggie asked sarcastically. “Why not just have kept
on? We couldn’t get any wetter.”
“Yes,” I added, “between flowering hedgerows! And of course these spring
rains give nobody cold!”
Tish did not say a word. She took off her shoes and her skirt, got her
sleeping-bag off Modestine’s back, and—went to bed with the worst
attack of neuralgia she had ever had.
That was on Wednesday, late in the afternoon.
It rained for two days!
We built a fire out of the wood that was in the cave, and dried out our
clothes, and heated stones to put against Tish’s right eye, and brought
in wet branches to dry against the time when we should need them. Aggie
sneezed incessantly in the smoke, and Tish groaned in her corner. I was
about crazy. On Thursday, when the edge of the neuralgia was gone, Tish
promised to go home the moment the rain stopped and the roads dried.
Aggie and I went to her together and implored her.
But, as it turned out, we did not go home for some days, and when we
did——
By Thursday evening Tish was much better. She ate a little potato salad
and we sat round the fire, listening to her telling how they had found
the runaways in this very cave.
“They had taken all the hatchets and kitchen knives they could find and
started to hunt Indians,” she was saying. “They got as far as this cave,
and one evening about this time they were sitting round the fire like
this when a black bear——”
We all heard it at the same moment. Something was scrambling and
climbing up the mountainside to the cave. Tish had her rifle to her
shoulder in a second, and Aggie shut her eyes. But it was not a bear
that appeared at the mouth of the cave and stood blinking in the light.
It was a young man!
“I beg your pardon,” he said, peering into the firelight, “but—you
don’t happen to have a spare box of matches, do you?”
Tish lowered the rifle.
“Matches!” she said. “Why—er—certainly. Aggie, give the gentleman some
matches.”
The young man had edged into the cave by that time and we saw that he
was limping and leaning on a stick. He looked round the cave approvingly
at our three sleeping-bags in an orderly row, with our toilet things set
out on a clean towel on a flat stone and a mirror hung above, and at
our lantern on another stone, with magazines and books grouped round it.
Aggie, finding some trailing arbutus just outside the cave that day, had
got two or three empty salmon cans about filled with it, and the fur rug
from Tish’s sleeping-bag lay in front of the fire. The effect was really
civilized.
“It looks like a drawing room,” said the young man, with a long breath.
“It’s the first dry spot I’ve seen for two days, and it looks like
Heaven to a lost soul.”
“Where are you stopping?”
“I am not stopping. I am on a walking tour, or was until I hurt my leg.”
“Don’t you think you’d better wait until things dry up?”
“And starve?” he asked.
“The woods are full of nuts and berries,” said Tish.
“Not in May.”
“And there is plenty of game.”
“Yes, if one has a weapon,” he replied. “I lost my gun when I fell into
Thunder Creek; in fact, I lost everything except my good name. What’s
that thing of Shakespeare’s: ‘Who steals my purse steals trash, ... but
he——’”
Aggie found the matches just then and gave him a box. He was almost
pathetically grateful. Tish was still staring at him. To find on Thunder
Cloud Mountain a young man who quoted Shakespeare and had lost
everything but his good name—even Stevenson could hardly have had a
more unusual adventure.
“What are you going to do with the matches?” she demanded as he limped
to the cave mouth.
“Light a fire if I can find any wood dry enough to light. If I can’t——
Well, you remember the little match-seller in Hans Christian Andersen’s
story, who warmed her fingers with her own matches until they were all
gone and she froze to death!”
Hans Christian Andersen and Shakespeare!
“Can’t you find a cave?” asked Tish.
“I had a cave,” he said, “but——”
“But what?”
“Three charming women found it while I was out on the mountainside. They
needed the shelter more than I, and so——”
“What!” Tish exclaimed. “This is your cave?”
“Not at all; it is yours. The fact that I had been stopping in it gave
me no right that I was not happy to waive.”
“There was nothing of yours in it,” Tish said suspiciously.
“As I have told you, I have lost everything but my good name and my
sprained ankle. I had them both out with me when you——”
“We will leave immediately,” said Tish. “Aggie, bring Modestine.”
“Ladies, ladies!” cried the young man. “Would you make me more wretched
than I already am? I assure you, if you leave I shall not come back. I
should be too unhappy.”
Well, nothing could have been fairer than his attitude. He wished us to
stay on. But as he limped a step or two into the night Aggie turned on
us both in a fury.
“That’s it,” she said. “Let him go, of course. So long as you are dry
and comfortable it doesn’t matter about him.”
“Well, you are dry and comfortable too,” snapped Tish. “What do you
expect us to do?”
“Call him back. Let him sleep here by the fire. Give him something to
eat; he looks starved. If you’re afraid it isn’t proper we can hang our
kimonos up for curtains and make him a separate room.”
But we did not need to call him. He had limped back and stood in the
firelight again.
“You—you haven’t seen anything of the bandits, have you?” he asked.
“Bandits!”
“Train robbers. I thought you had probably run across them.”
All at once we remembered the green automobile and the four men with
guns. We told him about it and he nodded.
“That would be they,” he said. As Tish remarked later, we knew from that
instant that he was a gentleman. Even Charlie Sands would probably have
said “them.” “They got away very rapidly, and I dare say an automobile
would be—— Did one of them have a red beard?”
“Yes,” we told him. “The one who called to us.”
Well, he said that on Monday night an express car on the C. & L.
Railroad had been held up. The pursuit had gone in another direction,
but he was convinced from what we said that they were there in Thunder
Cloud Glen!
As Tish said, the situation was changed if there were outlaws about. We
were three defenseless women, and here was a man brought providentially
to us! She asked him at once to join our party and look after us until
we got to civilization again, or at least until the roads were dry
enough to travel on.
“To look after you!” he said with a smile. “I, with a bad leg and no
weapon!”
At that Aggie brought out her new revolver and gave it to him. He
whistled when he looked at it. “Great Scott!” he said. “What a weapon
for a woman! Why, you don’t need any help. You could kill all the
outlaws in the county at one loading!”
But finally he consented to take the revolver and even to accept the
shelter of the cave for that night anyhow, although we had to beg him to
do that. “How do you know I’ll not get up in the night and take all your
valuables and gallop away on your trusty steed before morning?” he
asked.
“We’ll take a chance,” Tish said dryly. “In the first place, we have
nothing more valuable than the portable stove; and in the second place,
if you can make Modestine gallop you may have him.”
It is curious, when I look back, to think how completely he won us all.
He was young—not more than twenty-six, I think—and dressed for a
walking tour, in knickerbockers, with a blue flannel shirt, heavy low
shoes and a soft hat. His hands were quite white. He kept running them
over his chin, which was bluish, as if a day or two’s beard was
bothering him.
We asked him if he was hungry, and he admitted that he could hardly
remember when he had eaten. So we made him some tea and buttered toast,
and opened and heated a can of baked beans. He ate them all.
“Good gracious,” he said, with the last spoonful, “what a world it would
be without women!”
At that he fell into a sort of study, looking at the fire, and we all
saw that he looked sad again and rather forlorn.
“Yes,” Tish said, “you’re all ready enough to shout ‘Beware of woman’
until you are hungry or uncomfortable or hurt, and then you are all just
little boys again, crying for somebody to kiss the bump.”
“But when it is a woman who has given the—er—bump?” he asked.
Aggie is romantic. Years ago she was engaged to a Mr. Wiggins, a roofer,
who met with an accident due to an icy roof. She leaned forward and
looked at him with sympathy.
“That’s it, is it?” she asked gently.
He tried to smile, but we could all see that he was suffering.
“Yes, that’s it—partly at least,” he said.
“That is, if it were not for a woman——” He stopped abruptly. “But why
should I bother you with my troubles?”
We were curious, of course; but it is hardly good taste to ask a man to
confide his heartaches. As Tish said, the best cure for a masculine
heartache is to make the man comfortable. We did all we could. I dried
his coat by the fire, and Tish made hot arnica compresses for his ankle,
which was blue and swollen. I believe Aggie would gladly have sat by and
held his hand, but he had crawled into his shell of reserve again and
would not be coaxed out.
“I have a nephew about your age,” Tish said when he objected to her
bathing his ankle. “I’m doing for you what I should do for Charlie Sands
under the same circumstances.”
“Charlie Sands!” he said, and I was positive he started. But he said
nothing, and we only remembered that later. We were glad to have a man
about. Heaven only knows why women persist in regarding men as absolute
protection against fire, burglars and lightning. But they do. A sharp
storm came up at that time, and ordinarily Aggie would have been in her
sleeping-bag, with Modestine’s saddle on top by way of extra protection.
But now, from sheer bravado, she went to the mouth of the cave and stood
looking out at the lightning.
“Come and look at it, Tish!” she said.
“It’s—— Good gracious! There’s a man across the valley with a gun!”
We all ran to the mouth of the cave except the walking-tour gentleman,
who had his foot in a collapsible basin of arnica and hot water. But
none of us saw Aggie’s man.
When we went back: “Wouldn’t it be better to darken things up a bit?” he
suggested. “If there are bandits round it isn’t necessary to send out a
welcome to them, you know.”
This seemed only sensible. We put the fire out and sat in the warm
darkness. And that was when our gentleman told us his story.
“Ladies,” he began, “in saying that I am on a walking tour I am telling
the truth, but only part of the truth. I am on a walking tour, but not
for pleasure. To be frank, I—I am after the outlaws who robbed the
express car on the C. & L. Railroad Monday night.”