A RANDOM SHOT
FOR an instant Ross made no reply. He sat with his back to the door and
had not heard Leslie enter. Turning slowly he looked up with puzzled eyes.
"Less, there's something that I've not told you before--because--I
guess because I've thought it wasn't fair to tell. But after Weston
has brought us away off here and dumped us in this wilderness--even if
he has done it out of fear of Sandy--well, it seems to me that about
now he has forfeited all right to my silence."
Leslie fell back in astonishment, the scraps of the letter still in his
hand. "Doc, are you getting luny? What are you talking about?"
Ross laughed ruefully. "Just thinking out loud, that's all. Now I'll
get right down to business about Weston. You said you knew a fellow in
Oklahoma by his name--Lon Weston."
Leslie pursed his lips incredulously. "Yes, but as I said, our Lon Weston
had light hair and didn't murder the King's English like this man, and
he hadn't a husky voice."
"Just so!" cried Ross triumphantly. "Neither does this Lon Weston murder
the English language when he is talking like himself, nor has he a
husky voice naturally nor has he dark hair! It's colored dark--near
the roots, as I found out, it's light."
"Jiminy crickstones!" cried Leslie excitedly. "If that's true, it's
one on me! Come to think of it, Weston was forever imitating folks, but
I never have seen him in such a serious imitation as this. How do you
know all about him, anyway?"
From this Ross proceeded to tell what he knew except Weston's connection
with the note laid under the electric bulb in the bedroom of "The Irma."
That much he felt himself pledged not to relate, but its omission,
really, in no way detracted from the proof of Weston's identity.
Furthermore, Ross, concerned only with that identity, began his recital
with Sheepy's talk about Weston forgetting the photograph which had
revealed the injured man's name.
"You can see," Ross concluded, "by putting together all the evidence,
that he is the fourth man your father is after, and that Sandy has come
it over him completely, knowing that he is the fourth. The more I think
of it the more I'm convinced of Sandy's power. Sandy holds this cudgel
over his head and makes him do the dirty work. But, no matter how big
the cudgel is, he had no business to play this low-down trick on us."
"Wait till we get out of here!" declared Leslie wrathfully, "and I'll
make him pay for his trick!" Suddenly his face lighted. "Ross, see
here! Dad has been hunting for that fourth man for two years, and if I
can go to him and tell him who it is and set him on the right track,
well--I'll stand in better with dad, that's all! The five hundred
that I can't begin to earn until next summer won't be in it beside that
information!"
Then, as suddenly as it had come, the light died out of the boy's face.
He sat down on the table and rubbed his forehead in perplexity.
"But, Ross, there's another side to this. For me to do that would knock
things endwise with Sue."
"Sue," repeated Ross, "who is Sue?"
"I've got a sister," explained Leslie. "She's four or five years older.
She keeps house for us. She's an awfully good girl, Sue is, although,"
turning his head shamefacedly away, "she'd be surprised to hear me
say so, for we, dad and I, have made her a lot of trouble. Dad's as
up and down with her as with me and I--say, Ross, I've been a nuisance
at home!"
Leslie choked. He looked slowly around the cramped, dirty, ill-lighted
room, so unlike the neat, pleasant home presided over by Sue, and
swallowed hard. Ross industriously made notches in the edge of the
table with his pocket-knife.
Finally Leslie, clearing his throat, continued, "I guess all this serves
me about right. I know I ought to be kicked--and I am being--in a way.
Well, it's always been up to Sue to put up with us both, and she has.
And then three years ago Lon Weston came. You see, Ross, dad is a sheep
owner, and North Bend is on the edge of the range between sheep and
cattle, and that always means war. About three miles away is a cattle
ranch, and Peck, the owner, and dad are always by the ears. It was at
Peck's that Lon was foreman, and he used to come over to North Bend
to see my sister whenever dad would let 'im, but things were never
very smooth for 'em. Of course, I didn't see much of him because I
was off at school most of the year. I was away when the cattlemen had
their big round-up two years ago in the fall. After each had cut out
his own bunch of cattle and shipped 'em, a lot of the boys went on a
drunk and dad lost his sheep. Naturally he went up in the air at the
loss and was at the throat of every cattle owner and cowboy for miles
around. And, first thing, of course he came down on Sue about Lon's
coming to the house and forbid 'er to see him again, not because he
suspected Lon, but just because he was Peck's foreman and a cowboy.
"Well, Lon cleared out right off and Sue cried herself sick. She never
said anything, but I've guessed that Lon never has written to 'er and
I'm afraid she's foolish enough," tolerantly, "to think a lot of him.
"But I never suspected that Lon was in the bunch that sent dad's sheep
over, and I know that no one else around the ranch suspects it, because
of Lon's coming to see Sue right along. Still--there were times when
he was a pretty rough customer, and--it's a mixed up mess, ain't it,
Ross, along with Sue?"
Ross had been leaning forward on the table listening eagerly. Two or
three times he had started to interrupt, and had checked himself with
difficulty. Now he burst out:
"I had forgotten the girl's photo in Lon's pocket, Leslie. I know now
it's Sue's picture, because it looks like you. It fell out of his
pocket at Sagehen Roost, and both Hank and I saw it, and then, when
you came, you puzzled Hank because he thought he had seen you before!"
"The very idea!" exclaimed Leslie indignantly when Ross had told him
about the name on the photograph. "How dare he carry my sister's picture
around with him after doing dad such a dirty trick. Oh, I have it in for
him all right! I don't wonder the McKenzies knew they had to get rid
of me before they could make Lon come over to Meadow Creek! I see now!
I presume he thinks that dad has been on his track these two years. I
wonder if Sandy and Waymart were with Peck at the same time Lon was?"
For a long time the boys talked over the affair in all its bearings, and
as the long lonely days passed, they recalled every incident that had
occurred since they left Oklahoma and Pennsylvania. Their conversations
mostly took place in the evening by the light of one dim candle, or in
the darkness relieved only by the flicker of the firelight, as candles
were not plenty. It was at that dreary time between day and night with
the wind and the coyotes howling outside that the homesickness that they
could fight successfully in daylight had its inning.
"But what if I were here alone!" Ross exclaimed periodically.
His gratitude at having Leslie there softened his anger at Weston,
although he knew that the bringing of Leslie had been no philanthropic
move on Weston's part.
Soon, however, the boys settled to a routine of work, exercise and study
planned by Ross and acquiesced in by Leslie, all, at first, save the
study. In that Ross began with no thought of aid from the other or
partnership with him until one day when he sat with a book on anatomy
before him industriously absorbing the pages. Presently, turning his book
over on its face, he resolutely closed his eyes against the outer world,
and his ears against Leslie's lively whistle, mentally reviewing the
facts he had been conning. Suddenly Leslie, who had been lying in the
bunk, came over to the table and, picking up the text-book, lazily bade
Ross think aloud.
"It's so deadly lonely, Ross, with you poring over those dull books,"
complained Leslie, "that I'd rather hear you recite than not to hear
anything at all!"
From this trifling beginning, a student partnership grew up. At first
the task meant to Leslie only a form of passing the time away, of hearing
a human voice instead of the crackle of the fire and the sough of
the wind. Then, gradually, his interest in the subject of anatomy was
awakened. He began to look at himself with a new interest.
"I say, Ross," he burst out one day when he was frying bacon, "I never
have thought of myself before as being made up of parts that must work
together smoothly--and I never considered how they must work and that
some one or other must know just how they ought to work so that he can
put 'em together if they fall out of place. Now, about that femur,
and ball and socket joint at the hip here----"
Immediately Ross plunged into a lively description which soon led both
boys to the books for proof and illustration, and Leslie's interest
grew. From being merely the holder of the book while Ross recited and
explained what he had studied, Leslie, the "hater" of studies, began to
study also, at first, in a fitful way, and then more steadily as Ross
proved himself an enthusiastic teacher.
Neither, however, became so absorbed in his studies as to become
reconciled to his enforced residence above the seven spruces. Day
after day they ventured out and up and down the canon, or up the side
of the mountain on the side of which their shack was located, but no
discoveries resulted. The absence of snow-shoes made travel impossible
except on top of a strong crust, and even then a realization of a
constantly increasing danger resulted in making such trips shorter
and shorter. The danger was this: blizzard succeeded blizzard until
the willows, ten feet tall, which grew thickly in the canon, were
completely concealed, also the scrub hemlocks and quaking asp on the
mountainside. The tops of the bushes, lashed by the wind until they
became finally snow covered, formed each a dangerous hollow under a
crust thinner and weaker than the surrounding surface. This painful
discovery was made by Leslie.
One bright day, leaving Ross to cut off the branches of a tree that he
had felled for fire-wood, Leslie took the gun and started down the canon
on a tour of exploration.
"The crust is stout enough to hold up an ox, Doc," he declared, bringing
the butt of the gun down on it hard, "and I'm going out to see what
there is to see--and shoot."
"Shoot!" echoed Ross, poising the axe in air. "I'd like to see something
shootable up here beside coyotes, and we never see them--only hear
'em!" and the axe descended with a thud.
Leslie laughed, shouldered the gun and tramped briskly down the canon,
while Ross wielded the axe and, whistling cheerfully, thought of the
progress he was making in his studies.
Presently, he rested on his axe handle and chafed his cheeks and nose
briskly with the shaggy mittens he had found in the box of clothing left
in the shack. "I don't want any more frost bites in mine!" he muttered.
He had had several experiences of the kind that winter, the altitude
being so great that he did not realize the intense cold until nose or
cheek or ear had become frost nipped.
He was resuming his axe when a faint sound traveled up the canon on the
wings of a slow south wind. Ross straightened himself and listened. Again
came the wind and the sound. With the axe in his hand he slipped and
slid down the mountainside until he stood in the canon below the seven
spruce trees. There he paused long enough to distinguish in the sound the
faint muffled cry, "Ross!" and "Help!"
"Coming!" yelled Ross frantically. "Where are you?"
He did not await a reply but, slipping unsteadily along the icy crust,
he hurried down the canon in the general direction of Leslie's voice,
yelling intermittently, "Coming--here I am! Where are you, Less?"
As he came to the cliff over which he had been lowered into the canon, he
heard Leslie's voice again, still curiously muffled, although evidently
only a little way in advance. It seemed to rise from beneath the ground.
"Hold on, Ross. Don't come fast. I've fallen through among the willows."
Cautiously Ross advanced toward the voice, testing the strength of the
crust at every step until it gave under the stamping of his heel. Then he
stopped and found himself looking down a section of shelving crust into
a hole filled with loose snow, willow tops--and Leslie.
"Great guns!" cried Ross. "What are you doing in there?"
Leslie attempted to respond nonchalantly, but his face was nearly as
white as the bed of snow he was occupying, and his teeth chattered with
cold and fright.
"I've been flopping around here for half an hour yelling," he explained
jerkily, "and have only managed to sink deeper and break off more crust
and more willow tops."
"Rub your nose and face the next thing you do," advised Ross immediately,
"or you'll be a mass of frost bite."
He rubbed his own nose meditatively. Then grasping the axe he cried
cheerfully, "Hold the fort a while longer down there, Less, and relief
will arrive. See here! I hadn't finished the wood and I ran off with
the axe. Now I'll skiddoo and cut a pole and help you out. And don't
forget to rub your face!"
Laboriously and fearfully--lest he meet with Leslie's fate--Ross
climbed the side of the mountain until he stood among the branches of a
sturdy spruce, the depth of snow raising him to that height. Cutting
and trimming a long limb, he dragged it back to the canon. Projecting one
end over the hole he sat hard on the other. Then Leslie, by jumping
and seizing the projecting end, and bracing against the sloping sheet
of crust, climbed, breathless but relieved, to the surface of the snow.
"I tell you what, Ross," he said emphatically as they made their way
gingerly back to the shack, "I've done all the research work I want
to in this canon!" He shivered and slapped his hands smartly together.
"Without snow-shoes we are helpless here, and the McKenzies know it!"
To make snow-shoes without boards or small nails or a hammer was
impossible to workmen of their inexperience. They broke up some boxes
and put in all their spare time for days experimenting, but to no purpose.
"Even if we did succeed, Less," Ross comforted himself one day as he
looked gloomily at their latest failure, "we couldn't escape from here.
We have no idea where we are, whether we are nearer Red Lodge or Cody or
Timbuctoo. We would merely start out and leave a half-way comfortable
certainty for a mighty ticklish uncertainty."
"That's right," agreed Leslie, "and we couldn't pack enough food on
our backs to last many days, nor can we tell when a storm is coming."
In fact, storms were the order of the day. By the middle of February
immense masses of snow curled out over the cliffs on the side of the
mountain opposite the shack waiting for the warm chinooks of spring to
send them hurtling down into the canon. Fortunately, the mountain above
the shack was lower than its neighbors, and the face, heavily wooded,
sloped back more gently until it reached a great elevation.
"The trees here prove that there have been no snowslides within the
memory of this generation, at any rate," Ross broke out one day as they
were sawing the branches from a spruce on the mountainside above the
shack. "Now, if the shack were on the other side----"
"But it wouldn't be built on the other side," interrupted Leslie. "No
cabin builder would do such a thing unless he built when he first struck
this country as young and green as we were!"
Ross laughed and started the branch he had trimmed down the mountainside
on the crust. It skidded along rapidly until it wedged itself into a
great snow bank which had drifted from the shack to the trees on either
side, and through which the boys had tunneled. With the last branch sent
home in this convenient fashion, Ross shouldered the axe and picked up
the saw, while Leslie took the gun from a near-by branch where it had
been slung, and followed down the mountainside.
With the increase in the depth of the snow, the coyotes and gray wolves
had grown bolder, and without the gun the boys never went now outside
of their dooryard, as they called the spaces they had cleared around the
shack. So far, however, the coyotes had only skulked near the strongly
built lean-to, attracted by the smell of the meat, while the wolves
contented themselves by howling at night from the rocks far above the
cabin, and being answered from the mountainside opposite.
"I have always heard that the gray wolf is a coward," commented Leslie
as the two entered the shack. "We have not had a glimpse of one yet."
"Uncle Jake said they are far more afraid of people than sensible people
are afraid of them," returned Ross, "but I'd rather not be called
sensible than to meet one face to face!"
That night the boys turned in early, tired with their exertions at the
wood-pile. About midnight they were both awakened by a mysterious noise.
Leslie, in the wall bunk, came up on his elbow before he was fairly
awake. Ross, on the floor, sat up instantly, whispering sharply:
"Leslie, is that you?"
"What?" asked Leslie bewildered. "Is it you? What was that?"
Before Ross could reply again, the noise was repeated. It came from above
their heads, a soft padding and crunching on the roof logs. Suddenly
there was added a whining sound and a scratching at the side and then
an increase in the crunching on the roof.
"Wolves!" cried Ross and Leslie simultaneously.
"They smell the meat in the lean-to," added Leslie.
"Tell you what, Less," said Ross, "I'm glad we're inside a stockade.
I'll put my trust in logs rather than boards with those fellows around."
Ross's voice was decidedly husky, Leslie was glad to note. His own was
almost beyond control while cold chills ran up and down his spine. He
grunted assent and tried to yawn aloud but was unsuccessful.
Then, as the soft padding and eager sniffing continued, he found his
voice in a frightened quaver, "Ross, can they get into the window, do you
think?"
"Or break into the door?" added Ross equally uncertain as to tone. "One
thing I know, Less, they're afraid of fire."
At that both boys came out of their bunks and began to fill the stove
with wood. But at these sounds from below, the wolves departed hastily
and put in the remainder of the night howling from the side of the
mountain a safe distance away.
"Guess Uncle Jake is right. They seem as afraid of us as we are of them!"
exclaimed Leslie, lighting a candle and setting it in the window. Then
he turned on Ross with a sheepish grin. "Say, Doc, is my hair standing
straight up?"
Ross passed his hand over his own. "I don't see it stand, but if it
feels like mine it won't lie down again in a week. To-morrow, Less,
we'll let studies go by the board and have that window and the door
barricaded. Then, if a wolf or two chance to stumble against them we can
turn over and laugh in our sleep."
There was no more sleep in the shack that night, however, and before
daylight the boys were up planning the proposed barricade. They
finally hit on two cross poles for the door, fitted into crudely
carved stanchions nailed to either side. These bars were removed by
day, but when night came, it was with a feeling of relief that the boys
dropped the bars into their stanchions and knew the device could foil
any wolf that prowled about the mountains. The window, also, was
similarly barricaded.
But, secure behind these protections, the boys soon became accustomed to
their midnight visitors, and even began to look eagerly for them during
the day, Leslie being a fair shot.
"I would like to get a skin or two, Ross," he said one evening. "Sue
would like 'em as rugs, you bet!"
It was after supper, and the boys, having washed the dishes, had blown
out the candle and were sitting beside the stove. The draft in front
was open, and the blazing chunks within sent a cheerful glow dancing
past the window and flickering on the bunk and the side wall beyond.
Outside, the wind soughed among the branches of the seven spruces,
whipping them savagely. It was densely dark, darker than it would be an
hour later when the moon swung over the tops of the mountain opposite
the shack. There had been no storm for several days, but severe cold, so
that on top of a strong crust a light snow drifted about continually.
"I'm satisfied to leave the skin on the brutes if they'll agree to
leave mine on me!" laughed Ross in answer to Leslie. "Guess you're a
better sport, Less, than I am."
Leslie shook his head. "Aw, I'm no sport," he disclaimed in a pleased
tone. "If I ever think I am I shall remember the first night the wolves
came."
He was rubbing his head reminiscently when, suddenly, there came an
unexpected sound from the neighborhood of the window. There was a thump
against the outer logs, followed by the splinter of glass and the inward
rush of cold air. This was immediately succeeded by a hasty scraping
noise in the midst of which Leslie sprang to his feet shouting:
"Wolves! Quick, Ross, the door!"
While Leslie sprang to the gun hung on pegs against the logs near the
door, Ross fumbled at the door fastenings and, in a moment, both boys
were out in front in the clearing that they had shoveled in front of
the door and window. The sound was rapidly retreating down the side of
the slope toward the seven spruces. Eagerly the boys ran toward the
spruces, which, in the darkness, merely made a darker spot below them.
From the midst of the trees came the scratching sound on the crust.
Throwing the gun to his shoulder Leslie excitedly fired again and again
in the direction of the rapidly receding sounds.
"There!" he exclaimed when the chambers of the gun were emptied. "Of
course I haven't hit anything, but I have the satisfaction of knowing
I've shot at a wolf, at least!"