in his ears, and a great incredible passing before his eyes; he could
remember that. There had been a sense that the air about him was filled
with sweeping stones as big as court-houses, that tons upon tons of
weight were crushing down about him and on him; that something else,
which was minute but unutterably dense and thick, was pressing upon
him and flattening him to death; that tree tops near at hand overhead
were whipping and winnowing in a cyclonic gale that played above all
else; and then all definitely he knew for a little while was that his
mouth was full of a sour powder and his right cheek was bleeding. Also
that the earthquake had passed on to other parts and that the avalanche
begotten of it had missed him by a margin of, say, six rods.
He lay almost on the verge of the damage. He turned over, but very
cautiously through a foolish momentary fright of jarring to life some
poised boulder near by, and sat up in a kind of nest of dead roots and
dead boughs and cleared his vision and stared fearsomely to his right.
Just over there was a raw gray pyramidal smear, narrow at the top where
a new gouge showed in the rim-rock, and broad at the base. It was slick
and it was scoured out smoothly up the steep slope, but below, closer
to him, the overturned slabs and chunks of stone had a nasty, naked
aspect to them, an obscene aspect what with their scraped bare bellies
turned uppermost.
In a minute for creation, or put it at fifty years as men measure time,
the kindly lichens and mosses would grow out on their gouged shoulders
and along their ribs, and the soil and the wood-mold would gather in
their seams, and grass would come up between them, and then shrubs and
finally evergreens from the crevices; in a few centuries more this
scarred place would be of a pattern again with its neighborhood. But
now it was artificial looking, like a mine working or the wreckage of a
tremendous nitro-glycerine blast.
The stream had turned from steel-blue in its depths and greenish white
on the rapids to a roiled muddy gray, but as Chaney rolled his eyes
that way it showed signs of clearing. Seemingly there had been only one
great splash and wave when the slide came down, and the course of the
stream had not materially been changed. Already the dust had gone out
of the air; it covered the leaves, though.
He stood up and mastered the trembling in his legs and shrugged the
stupefaction out of himself. He was not even bruised. Except for that
little scratch on his cheek he had no wound whatsoever. But in certain
regards he decidedly was out of luck. His present possessions were
reduced to precisely such garments as he stood in and what articles
he had in the pockets of those garments, and to one fishing rod which
might or might not be smashed.
The guide who had brought him into this country--Hurley was the guide's
name--and the camp which he and the guide had made an hour earlier and
their two saddle-horses and their one pack-horse and all their joint
belongings had vanished with not a single scrap left to show for them.
Chaney convinced himself of this tragic fact as soon as he scrambled up
on the lowermost breadth of the slide. Presently he balanced himself,
so he figured, directly above where the pup-tent had stood and the camp
litter had been spread about. He saw then that so far as Hurley and the
horses and the dunnage were concerned, this was their tomb for all time.
About four o'clock they had come over the top and on down the steep
drop to Cache Creek. They turned the stock loose to graze on the thin
pickings among the cottonwoods and willows. He put up the tent and
spread the bed-rolls while Hurley was making a fireplace of stones and
rustling firewood. He left Hurley at the job of cooking and went a
short distance along the creek toward its inlet in the canyon between
the west flank of Scalded Peak and the east flank of Sentinel Peak to
pick up some cut-throats for their supper. On the second cast he lashed
his leader around a springy twig. He climbed a big rock to undo the
snarl--and then this old and heretofore dependable earth began to get
up and walk.
And now here it was not five o'clock yet, and he was alone among these
mountains, and Hurley's crushed body was where neither digging nor
dynamite would bring it forth. By his calculation it was hard to say
exactly, with everything altered the way it was; but as nearly as he
could guess, he was right above where Hurley ought to be--with at least
forty feet of piled-up, wedged-in, twisted-together soil and boulders
and tree roots between him and Hurley. Probably the poor kid never knew
what hit him. He had been right in the path of the slide and now he
was beneath the thickest part of it. He had seemed to be a pretty fair
sort too, although as to that Chaney couldn't say positively, having
hired the boy only the day before at an independent outfitter's near
Polebridge on the North Fork, where he had left his car.
For him, the lone survivor of this quick catastrophe, there was nothing
to do except to get out. That part of it didn't worry Chaney much. He
was at home in this high country. He had hunted and fished and ranged
over a good part of it. With the taller peaks to guide him and the
water courses to follow--on this side of the Continental Divide they
nearly all ran west or southwest--a man could hold to his compass
points even through unfamiliar going.
He would scale the wall of the bowl right away. He didn't want darkness
to catch up with him before he was over the top; the place already
was beginning to be haunted. Except on the eastern slopes night came
late in these altitudes; it would be after nine o'clock before the
sunset altogether failed him. He would lie down until morning came,
then shove ahead, holding to the trail over which he and Hurley had
traveled in until it brought him out on the Flathead plateau. To save
time and boot-leather, he might even take a short cut down through the
timber to the foot-hills; there were ranches and ranger stations and
fire-watchers' lookouts scattered at intervals of every few miles along
the river flats.
He might be footsore by the time he struck civilization with word of
the killing and certainly he would be pretty hungry, but that was
all. He wouldn't get cold when the evening chill came on. He had on
a coat and it was a heavy blanket coat, which was lucky, and he had
matches, plenty of them. He had loose matches in the breast pocket
of his shirt and a waterproof box of matches in the fob pocket of his
riding-breeches. He even had two knives; a hunting-knife in a sheath on
his belt, a penknife in his pocket.
Chaney was a great one for doubling up on the essentials whenever he
took to the woods. He'd have a small comb and toothbrush in his folding
pocket kit; another comb and another toothbrush tucked away somewhere
in his saddle-bags or his blanket roll. He always carried two pairs of
boots too.
It was a regular passion with him, this fad for taking along spares
and extras on a camping trip or, for that matter, on any sort of
trip. People had laughed at him for being so old-maidish, as they put
it. Chaney let them laugh; the blamed fools! It was his business,
wasn't it, if he chose to be methodical about these small private
duplications? More than once his care had been repaid in dividends of
comfort. And anyhow the thing had come to be a part of him. He was
forty-five, at the age when men turn systematic and set in their ways.
The only salvage left out of the disaster was his rod. He might as well
take that along. Uncoupled and with the links tied together, it would
not encumber him on the hike. He descended from the cairn and, finding
the rod uninjured, was in the act of freeing the leader from its
entanglement in the brushy top of an aspen when all at once his nervous
hands became idle while his brain became active over a new thought.
It was a big notion and in that same instant he decided to follow after
the impulse of it.
Suppose, just suppose now for the sake of argument, that he went away
from this spot leaving no trace behind to betray that he had gone away
alive and sound? He canvassed the contingency from this angle and
that, his imagination busy with one conjecture, one speculation, one
eventuality after another, and nowhere found a flaw in the prospect.
This is what would happen--it morally was bound to happen, unless he
made a false step: Sooner or later and in all probability before a week
was up, a rescue party would come into Cache Creek looking for him and
Hurley. They were due out in four days to refit with fresh supplies for
another journey down on Pronghorn Lake, twenty miles to the southwest.
Within five days or six their prolonged absence, coupled with their
failure to send back word of their whereabouts by some passing
tourist, would be enough to cause alarm at Polebridge, where Hurley's
people lived. Besides, the earthquake surely would make the natives
apprehensive of accidents in the mountains.
So the relief force would set out on the hunt for the missing pair.
Any seasoned mountaineer could hold to their trail. There was the site
where they had camped last night, the place where they had halted
at noon today to graze the horses and eat their own luncheon; the
cigarette butts and dead matches dropped by them. Eventually, picking
up a clue here and a clue there, the searchers would arrive at this
spot--to find what? A land-slip covering the only fit camp-ground in
the Scalded Peak basin and covering it forty or fifty feet deep at that.
It would take a crew of men with tackles and hoists and explosives six
months to explore the lower part of that slide, even if you conceded
they could transport their machinery over the range and set it up.
Yes, it would take longer than that. Because as fast as they excavated
below, the smaller stuff would sift down from above and more or less
undo what they had done. So they wouldn't do it; they couldn't.
Besides, what would be the use of trying? So the searchers would argue.
Hurley and Chaney were buried in a mighty grave of the mountains' own
providing. Let them stay buried. That undoubtedly would be the final
conclusion. It had to be.
Well, Hurley eternally would be buried, but as for him, he would be
far away, released by the supposition, yes, by the seeming indubitable
proof of a violent death, from all present entanglements--his debts,
his distasteful obligations, his meager and unprofitable business back
in that dull North Dakota town, which he hated. He would have quittance
of certain private difficulties more burdensome to bear than any of
these. And for good and all he would be done with that wife of his.
And this thought was the most delectable of all the thoughts that he
shuttled in review through his mind.
Heaven knows how often he had wished he might get clear of the woman,
with her naggings and her suspicions and her jealousies. He cared for
her not at all; he was sure she cared for him only in the proprietorial
sense. She wanted him only because he was somebody to be scolded,
somebody to be managed, something to take the blame for what went
wrong. And there had been plenty going wrong, at that. She wouldn't
miss him; with her talent for dramatizing herself, she would glory in
the rôle of widowhood. As for missing her--he grinned.
Let her take the insurance. He carried a policy for five thousand, the
annual premium paid up, and sooner or later the insurance company would
have to fork over. Five thousand was enough for her and more than she
deserved. Let her collect it and save it or blow it in just as she
pleased; she was welcome to it and welcome to what few odd dollars she
might make from the sale of the shop. The prospect of an insurance
company being mulcted for money not honestly owed appealed mightily to
a phase of his nature.
Legally speaking, officially speaking, Herb Chaney would be dead
and spoiling under these rocks, with his score wiped out and his
transgressions atoned for. But the man who had been Herb Chaney
would be abroad in the world, foot-loose as a ram, free as a bird,
with no past behind him and all the future before him. Independence,
irresponsibility, liberty, a fresh start, a good time--golly, but it
sounded good!
It remained, though, not to muddle by any slip or miscue what
Providence had vouchsafed. There should be more evidence, he decided,
to support the plausible theory now provided; but no rebuttal to weaken
or upset that evidence. He set about manufacturing this added evidence.
He finished the job of getting his line loose, then broke the second
joint of the rod just below the top ferrule, making the fracture clean
and straight across so it might appear that a whizzing missile had
cut it through. By pounding it with a stone he battered the reel to
bits. Where the outflung verge of the slip met the creek he tipped up
as heavy a boulder as he could raise with the trunk of a snapped-off
lodge-pole pine for a lever, and propped the large boulder with a
smaller one. Into the cranny thus provided, he shoved the butt of the
rod and the fragments of the reel; then kicked out the prop and eased
the main boulder down again into its former place.
The broken second section stuck out, pressed flat upon the gravel in
the creek; the stout casting line held fast the rest of that section
and the tip, so that they bobbed in the shore ripples, scraping on the
wet pebbles. There was the marker plain enough to see. To any trained
eye it would be like a signal post. The finders would pry up the big
stone, but that was as far as they could go. Behind and beyond, the
mass of the slide arose. They must inevitably figure him as dropping
his fishing gear when the danger impended and fleeing blindly
rearward, not away from but directly into the path of the avalanche.
He satisfied himself that no sign of his handiwork, nothing to suggest
human connivance, was left behind at the scene of this artifice. Then
the refugee started climbing the wall down which less than an hour
before he had descended. The trail was rocky; it would register no
tell-tale retreating footprints. Even so, he took pains to leap from
stone to stone, avoiding any spots of hard-packed soil.
Two-thirds up he came to a flattish stretch where a vein of fine gravel
and coarse quartzy sand was exposed. Coming down, he recalled having
noticed that sandy streak. It presented an obstacle, being fully twenty
feet broad. Immediately, though, an old Indian device for deceiving a
pursuer occurred to him. As a boy in Iowa he had heard it described.
So he turned the other way and backed across the strip, lifting his
feet high at each step and setting them down again well apart, with
the heels pressed deeply in so that the toe impressions would be the
lighter. From the farther side he looked back and was well content.
Anybody would be willing to swear those prints had been made by a man
going down the trail, not by one returning.
After that, until the afterglow faded out and darkness caught up with
him, he traveled north, holding to the ridges whenever he could. All
along he had a nagging feeling that he had overlooked something or
failed in something. Something had been left, something forgotten. But
what was it? Or was it anything? This harassment first beset him at the
top of the rim when he was crawling over it like a fly out of an empty
teacup. He hesitated momentarily and was inclined to turn back and make
search but could not muster the will for the effort. His nerves had
had a tremendous jolt and that silent void below him, with the shadows
sliding up its sides as though to overtake him, already was peopled
with ghosts.
It abode with him, this worry did, through his flight in the sunset and
the twilight. It walked with him through the dusk, lively as a cricket
and ticking like a watch, and bothered him that night where he slept
lightly in a gully among clumped huckleberry bushes. It was next day
before it left him. He shook it off finally. Anyhow, he couldn't put
a finger on it, whatever the darn thing was, and probably it didn't
matter anyhow.
He traveled north, as I was just saying. Nobody saw the solitary
swift figure of the fugitive when occasionally it appeared against a
sky-line. There was nobody within ten miles to see it. That evening,
finishing a forced march, he passed the international boundary without
knowing it, spending the night in an abandoned shanty on an abandoned
coal prospector's claim. He had huckleberries for supper. His dinner
and breakfast had been the same.
On the second morning he was dead tired and his stomach gnawed and
fretted him, but he resisted a strong yearning to enter a very small
town which he saw below him in a wooded valley, with the Canadian flag
floating from the peaked roof of a customs agency. He was across the
line then; he had hoped he was but until now hadn't been sure.
Having mastered his temptation, Chaney swung wide of the settlement.
By good luck the detour took him through a pass in an east-and-west
spur of the foot-hills and brought him out on a flatter terrain and
presently, to a railroad track. He followed along the track and so he
came to a water-tank looming like a squatty watch-tower above an empty,
almost treeless plain. This was about the middle of the forenoon.
Chaney had the virtue of patience. He dozed in the shade of the tank
until a west-bound freight came across the prairie and stopped to water
the locomotive. He had money in his pocket; he might have tried bribing
the train crew to let him ride in the caboose. This didn't suit his
plan, though. Avoiding detection for as long as possible, his pose
after detection did come would be that of a penniless adventurer, a
vagrant wandering aimlessly. He found the door of a vacant furniture
car open and hopped nimbly in.
Sixty miles farther along, a brakeman booted the supposed tramp off
into the outskirts of a sizable British Columbia community. He walked
into the municipal center and found a lunch-wagon. He spent a solid
hour eating orders of ham and eggs and never missed a stroke. The chain
of sequences between the man who dodged the avalanche in Scalded Peak
basin and the man, a much thinner and a much dirtier man with half a
week's beard on his face, who gulped down food in this owl wagon, now
had a wide missing link in it.
Still, to make sure, he journeyed briskly on, paying his way this
time, to the coast. In Vancouver he stayed two weeks and accumulated a
wardrobe and had some dental work done. He had a different name and a
different face, for he let his whiskers grow. At Vancouver, where he
lodged in a cheap hotel, he posed as a timber cruiser on a vacation. He
had cut timber as a young fellow and knew the jargon.
Feeling perfectly secure of his disguise and his new identity, he
presently drifted over to his own side of the line, making a way down
the Pacific across Washington and Oregon to California and thence by
slow stages into Arizona. En route he earned money at various odd
jobs--helping to harvest alfalfa, picking fruit, working in a vineyard,
in a cannery. He enjoyed his vagabondage after spending so many
uncongenial years in a dead hole of a North Dakota county-seat.
He enjoyed it all the more upon reading in a Los Angeles paper a
dispatch from Helena wherein it was set forth that the insurance
company after considerable backing and filling, eventually had flinched
at the prospect of a lawsuit and had conceded his death and settled
in full with his wife. He didn't begrudge her the money. He, the
deceased, was having a pretty good time of it himself. A bunch of wise
guys, those insurance guys had been, to pay up. They'd saved themselves
lawyers' fees and court costs. Juries nearly always sided with a widow.
It was a cinch any jury would have sided with his widow. His widow--he
liked that. Gee, how he did like that! It meant he was absolutely safe.
So safe did he reckon himself to be that within four months he married
the daughter of an Arizona rancher on whose place he had been working
as a sheep-hand. Probably the girl liked his sophisticated ways, and
his white even teeth, shining through his crisp black beard when he
grinned. Probably she didn't know some of the teeth were false teeth
until after the marriage. Whether he liked her or not the fact remained
that within sixty days he deserted this wife. He knew now that he
wasn't cut out to be a husband, at least not for long. He had the
gipsy's callus on his heel.
So one night, feeling restless, he just up and went. Next morning his
father-in-law's adobe was a hundred miles of desert behind him.
Another night--this was months later, though--he was killing time with
some associate loafers in a poolroom in El Paso. His name now was
Harper; his Arizona name had been Hayes. Harper wore a mustache but no
chin beard. The original owner of the face, away back yonder, had been
smooth-shaven. It was a great convenience to be able to take on a new
personality either by using a razor or by letting it be. Harper owned a
brace of razors.
This night in the poolroom a heavy-set, sort of countrified guy, a guy
who didn't look at all as a detective should look, came in and flashed
a badge and a warrant on him and called him Chaney--Herbert H. Chaney,
that way, in full, to prove there was no mistake, and told him he was
under arrest.
Chaney was never the one to start a jam; the stranger had shown the
butt of an automatic when he was showing the badge. There was no
trouble whatsoever. With an admirable docility he submitted to being
pinched. His captor escorted him to a second-rate American-plan hotel
and took him up to a room on the third floor. Here after Chaney had
stripped to his undershirt and drawers, the other man handcuffed him by
the left wrist to the iron side-rail of one of the twin beds that were
in the room and Chaney lay down; then the officer took off his coat and
vest and collar and took a chair and sat down to talk the thing over
with him.
Almost the talk ran through a friendly groove; really across stretches
of it you might call it downright friendly. The stranger was jubilant
over his coup, having made the arrest so deftly with no mussiness or
cutting up. It seemed that there had been a long stern chase leading up
to this present culmination and he wanted a breathing space in which to
get his wind back, so to speak, and congratulate himself.
For his part, Chaney was inclined to accept the inevitable without
crabbing. Something the heavy-set man said now at the outset bent him
strongly to that course. It stilled a sudden fear in him. What charge
could these insurance people bring against him except breach of trust,
or whichever fancy name it was they called it by when a fellow kept
his mouth shut and let somebody else pay over coin that wasn't exactly
owing?
Of course, having rounded him up this way, they would have to go
through the forms of getting him extradited to Montana and getting him
indicted and then bringing him to trial or something; but from what he
knew about the law, he judged it would be more like a civil proceeding
than a criminal one. It wasn't as though he had profited in a money
way by his own duplicity. An innocent party to the transaction had
the spending of that five thousand. All along Chaney had viewed his
behavior under this head in more or less a heroic light--standing aside
and not saying a word while a dependent woman came into a mighty snug
little fortune.
And wife-desertion was no felony; he had looked that point up. Even if
Mrs. Chaney were inclined to be spiteful, they couldn't stick you away
for sliding out and leaving a woman. Thank heaven, a husband had a few
rights left in this country. Chaney even abandoned a notion he had of
denying that he was Chaney and fighting it out on that line. What would
be the good? He settled on the hillocky mattress to hear what this
hick-looking bull might have further to say about it all.
"I guess maybe you're wondering in your own mind how I come to get into
the case to begin with," the latter had said a minute or two earlier.
"Well, you might as well know it--I've been on the payroll of the
Equity and Warranty Company from back when this thing first broke. Yes,
sir, from the start back up there in Montana. It was them sent me out
with orders to keep on goin' till I'd turned you up. When you monkey
with those folks you're monkeyin' with a buzzsaw. They don't ever quit,
not that outfit don't. That's why they paid up when your wife pushed
her claim--to throw you off the track, case you heard about it. They'd
rather see you nailed than have the money back. That's them!"
He lighted a cheap cigar and then as an afterthought offered Chaney its
mate. But Chaney didn't want to smoke just then. All Chaney wanted to
do was just to listen.