upon the sixth floor of a Broadway building. In the hairdressing
parlor half the long rows of chairs reached out empty arms except
during the rush hours of afternoon; even then impatient patrons merely
sprinkled the room with little oases of activity while the girls
busied themselves with tidying shelves already immaculate, and
prinking before the mirrors whenever they dared. An air of uncertainty
pervaded the place, swept in by the rumor that the shop was going to
cut down its force of operators. No one knew, of course, the exact
truth of the matter, but that made it all the worse.
"'For one shall be taken and the other left,'" a blonde girl quoted
into a dismal little group at the window that looked out over the
city. "Has any one heard any more about it?"
"Rumley has been checking up the appointment lists, all morning," a
short, fat girl with henna-auburn hair piled high on her head reported
cheerfully. "Of course, you could never get a word out of _her_--but
I know what she is up to. The girls that have the most steady patrons
will stay, of course. I'm certainly glad I kidded that old widow into
thinking she's puhfectly stunning with her hair hennaed. She don't
trust anybody but me to touch it up. And she's good for a scalp and
facial and manicure every week of her life, besides getting her hair
dressed every Saturday anyway, and sometimes oftener when she's going
out. And she _always_ has a marcelle after a shampoo. She'd quit
coming if I left--she told me so last week. She thinks I'm _there_ on
massages. And then I've got sevrul others that ask for me regular as
they come in. You know that big, fat--"
"Miss Rose forward," the foreman's crisp, businesslike voice
interrupted.
Miss Rose began nervously pulling her corn-colored hair into the
latest plastered effect on her temples. "This isn't any appointment. I
wonder if somebody asked for me, or if Rumley--"
"Well, kid her along, whoever she is, and talk a lot about her good
points. You never can tell when some old girl is going to pull a lot
of patronage your way," the fat girl advised practically. "Tell 'em
your name and suggest that they call for you next time. You've got to
get wise to the trick of holding what you get. Beat it, kiddo--being
slow won't help you none with Rumley, and she's got the axe,
remember."
Thus adjured, Miss Rose beat it, arriving rather breathlessly at her
chair, which was occupied by a rather sprightly looking woman with
pretty hands and a square jaw and hair just beginning to gray over the
temples. She had her hat off and was regarding herself seriously in
the mirror, wondering whether she should touch up the gray, as some of
her intimate friends advised, or let it alone as her brother Fred
insisted.
Miss Rose was too busy counting customers to notice who was in her
chair until she had come close.
"Why, hello, Kate," she said then. "I was just wondering what had
become of you."
"Oh, I've been so busy, Marion. I just had to _steal_ the time today
to come. You weren't out to my reading last night, and I was afraid
you might not be well. Do you think that I ought to touch up my hair,
Marion? Of course, I don't mind it turning, so much--but you know
appearance counts _everything_ with an audience until one begins to
speak. Fred says to leave it alone--"
"Well, you do it." Miss Rose leaned over the chair with a handful of
hairpins to place in the little box on the dressing shelf, and spoke
confidentially in the ear of her patron. "It's not my business to
knock the trade, Kate--but honestly, that sign up there, that says
'Hair Dyed at Your Own Risk' ought to say, 'to your own sorrow.' If
you start, you've got to keep it up or it looks simply frightful. And
if you keep it up it just ruins your hair. You have such _nice_ hair,
Kate!" She picked up a sterilized brush and began stroking Kate's hair
soothingly. It was not such nice hair. It was very ordinary hair of a
somewhat nondescript color; but Kate was her dearest friend, and
praise is a part of the profession. "What do you want?--a scalp,
shampoo, or just dressed, or a curl, or what?"
"What," Kate retorted pertly. "Just fuss around while I talk to you,
Marion. I--"
"Rumley won't stand for fussing. I've got to do something she can
recognize across the room. How about a scalp? You can talk while I
massage, and then I'll show you a perfectly stunning way to do your
hair--it's new, and awfully good for your type of face. How do you
like mine today?"
"Why, I like it tremendously!" Kate gave her an appraising glance in
the mirror. "It's something new, isn't it? Use plenty of tonic, won't
you, Marion? They charge awful prices here--but their tonic has done
my hair so much good! Listen, could you get off early today? I simply
must talk to you. A perfectly tremendous opportunity has literally
fallen our way, and I want you to benefit by it also. A friend of
Douglas'--of Professor Harrison's, I should say--called our attention
to it. This friend wants to go in on it, but he can't leave his
business; so the idea is to have just Fred and the professor--and you,
if you'll go--and me to go and attend to the assessments. All the
other names will be dummy names--well, silent partners is a better
word--and we can control a tremendously valuable tract that way. How
about a henna rinse, Marion? Would it be worth while?"
"Why, a henna rinse would brighten your hair, Kate--and lots of nice
women have them. But you'll have to have a shampoo, you know. The
henna rinse is used with a shampoo. I believe I'd have one if I were
you, Kate. You never could tell it in the world. And it's good for the
hair, too. It--"
"Fred is _so_ disagreeable about such things. But if it couldn't be
told--" Kate began to doubt again. "Does it cost extra?"
"Fifty cents--but it does brighten the hair. It brings out the natural
color--there is an auburn tint--"
"But I really meant to have a manicure today. And we can't talk in the
manicure parlor--those tables are crowded together so! I've a
tremendous lot to tell you, too. Which would you have, Marion?"
Miss Rose dutifully considered the matter while she continued the
scalp massage. Before they had decided definitely upon the
extravagance of a henna rinse, which was only a timid sort of
experiment and at best a mere compromise art and nature, Marion had
applied the tonic. It seemed a shame to waste that now with a shampoo,
and she did not dare to go for another dish of the tonic; so Kate
sighed and consoled herself with a dollar saved, and went without the
manicure also.
Rather incoherently she returned to her subject, but she did not
succeed in giving Miss Rose anything more than a confused idea of a
trip somewhere that would really be an outing, and a tremendous
opportunity to make thousands of dollars with very little effort. This
sounded alluring. Marion mentally cancelled a date with a party going
to Venice that evening, and agreed to meet Kate at six o'clock, and
hear more about it.
In the candy shop where they ate, her mind was even more receptive to
tremendous opportunities for acquiring comparative wealth with
practically no initial expense and no effort whatever. Not being
subjected to the distraction of a beauty parlor, Kate forgot to use
her carefully modulated, elocutionary voice, and buzzed with details.
"It's away up in the northern part of the State somewhere, in the
mountains. You know timber land is going to be tremendously
valuable--it is now, in fact. And this tract of beautiful big trees
can be gotten and flumed--or something--down to a railroad that taps
the country. It's in Forest Reserve, you see, and can't be bought by
the lumber companies. I had the professor explain it all to me again,
after I left the Martha, so I could tell you.
"A few of us can club together and take mining claims on the
land--twenty acres apiece. All we have to do is a hundred dollars'
worth of work--just digging holes around on it, or something--every
year till five hundred dollars' worth is done. Then we can get our
deed--or whatever it is--and sell the timber."
"Well, _what_ do you know about _that_!" Marion exclaimed
ecstatically, leaning forward across the little table with her hands
clasped. Nature had given her a much nicer voice than Kate's, and the
trite phrase acquired a pretty distinctiveness just from the way she
said it. "But--would you have to stay five years, Kate?" she added
dubiously.
"No, that's the beauty of it, you can do all the five hundred dollars'
worth in one year, Marion."
"Five hundred dollars' worth of digging holes in the ground!" Marion
gasped, giggling a little. "Good night!"
"Now please wait until you hear the rest of it!" Kate's tone sharpened
a little with impatience. She moved a petulant elbow while a tired
waitress placed two glasses of water and a tiny plate of white and
brown bread upon the table. The minute the girl's back was turned upon
them she cast a cautious eye around the clattering throng and leaned
forward.
"Four men--men with a little capital--are going into it, and pay Fred
and the professor for doing their assessment work. Four five-hundreds
will make two thousand dollars that we'll get out of them, just for
looking after their interests. And we'll have our twenty acres apiece
of timber--and you've no _idea_ what a tremendous lot of money that
will bring, considering the investment. Fred's worked so hard lately
that he's all run down and looks miserable. The doctor told him the
mountains would do him a world of good. And the professor wants to do
something definite and practical--they are filling up the college with
student-teachers, willing to teach some certain subject for the
instruction they'll get in some other--and they're talking about
cutting the professor's salary. He says he will not endure another
cut--he simply cannot, and--"
"And support an elocutionist?"
"Now, hush! It isn't--"
"Do I draw any salary as chaperone, Kate?"
"Now, if you don't stop, I'll not tell you another thing!" Kate took a
sip of water to help hide a little confusion, clutching mentally at
the practical details of the scheme. "Where was I?"
"Cutting Doug's salary. Is it up on a mountain, or up in the State,
that you said the place was? I'd like being on a mountain, I
believe--did you ever see such hot nights as we're having?"
"It's up both," Kate stated briefly. "You'd love it, Marion. There's a
log house, and right beside it is a trout stream. And it's only six
miles from the railroad, and _good_ road up past the place. A man who
has been up there told Doug--the professor. Tourists just _flock_ in
there. And right up on top of the mountain, within walking distance of
our claims, is a lake, Marion! And great trout in it, that long!--you
can see them swimming all around in schools, the water is so clear.
And there is no inlet or outlet, and no bottom. The water is just as
clear and as blue as the sky, the man told the professor. It's so
clear that they actually call it Crystal Lake!"
"Well, _what_ do you know about that!" breathlessly murmured Marion in
her crooning voice. "A lake like that on top of a mountain--in
weather like this, doesn't it sound like heaven?" She began to pick
the pineapple out of her fruit salad, dabbing each morsel in the tiny
mound of whipped cream.
"We'd need some outing clothes, of course. I've been thinking that a
couple of plain khaki suits--you know--and these leggings that lace
down the side, would be all we'd really need. I wish you'd go out home
with me instead of going to a show. Fred will be home, and he can
explain the details of this thing better than I can. If it were a
difficult stanza of Browning, now--but I haven't much talent for
business. And seriously, Marion, you must know all about this before
you really say yes or no. And it's time you had some real object in
life--time you settled down to regard your life seriously. I love you
just the way you are, dear, but for your own sake you must learn to
think for yourself and not act so much upon impulse. I couldn't bear
to go off without you, and stay a whole year, maybe--but if you should
go, not knowing just what it was going to be like, and then be
disappointed--you see, dear, you might come to blaming poor Kate."
"Why, I wouldn't do anything of the kind! Even if it did turn out to
be something I didn't care for, it would be so much better than
staying here with you gone, that I don't see how I could mind very
much. You know, Kate, I'm just crazy about the country. I'd like to
sleep right outside! And I think a log cabin is the dearest way to
live--don't you? And we'd hike, wouldn't we?--up to the lake and all
around. I've got enough money to buy a gun, and if there's any hunting
around there, we'll hunt! Kate, down in my heart I'm sick of massaging
old ladies' double chins and kidding them into thinking they look
young! And anyway," she added straightforwardly, "I don't suppose I'll
be at the Martha much longer. They're going to let a lot of us girls
out, and I'm almost sure to be one of them. There's enough of the
older girls to do all the work there is now, till the tourist season
begins again in the fall. I couldn't get in anywhere else, this time
of the year, so I'd just about have to go out to one of the beaches
and get a little tent house or something with some of the girls, and
fool around until something opened up in the fall. And even if you
live in your bathing suit all day, Kate, you just can't get by without
spending a little money."
"Well, of course, you'd stay with me if I were here. I wouldn't hear
to anything else. And even--why don't you come on out anyway, till we
get ready to start? We could plan so much better. And don't you think,
Marion, it would be much better for you if you didn't wait for the
Martha to let you go but gave them notice instead?"
"Quit before I'm invited to leave? I believe I'd better do that, Kate.
It won't be half bad to spring it on the girls that I'm going up in
the mountains for the summer. I'll talk about that lake till--say, I'm
just wild to start. How soon do you think it will be? Fred will have
to teach me how to trout-fish--or whatever you call it. Only think of
stepping out of our log cabin and catching trout, just any time you
want to! And, Kate, I really am going to buy a gun. Down on Spring, in
that sporting-goods house--you know, the one on the corner--they have
got the cutest rifles! And by the way, they had some of the best
looking outing suits in the window the other day. I'm going in there
when I come down in the morning."
"Let Fred advise you about the rifle before you buy. Fred's
tremendously clever about nature stuff, Marion. He'll know just what
you want. I think a gun will maybe be necessary. You know there are
bear--"
"Oh, good night!" cried Marion. But in the next breath she added, "I
wonder if there are any nice hunters after the bears!"
CHAPTER SEVEN
GUARDIAN OF THE FORESTS
In mid July the pines and spruces and firs have lost their pale green
fingertips which they wave to the world in spring, and have settled
down to the placid business of growing new cones that shall bear the
seed of future forests as stately as these. On the shadowed,
needle-carpeted slopes there is always a whispery kind of calm; the
calm of Nature moving quietly about her appointed tasks, without haste
and without uncertainty, untorn by doubts or fears or futile
questioning; like a broad-souled, deep-bosomed mother contentedly
rearing her young in a sheltered home where love abides in the peace
which passeth understanding.
Gray squirrels, sleek and bright-eyed and graceful always, lope over
the brown needles, intent upon some urgent business of their own.
Noisy little chipmunks sit up and nibble nervously at dainties they
have found, and flirt their tails and gossip, and scold the carping
bluejays that peer down from overhanging branches. Perhaps a hoot owl
in the hollow trees overhead opens amber eyes and blinks irritatedly
at the chattering, then wriggles his head farther down into his
feathers, stretches a leg and a wing and settles himself for another
nap.
Little streams go sliding down between banks of bright green grass,
and fuss over the mossy rocks that lie in their beds. Deer lift heads
often to listen and look and sniff the breeze between mouthfuls of the
tender twigs they love. Shambling, slack-jointed bears move shuffling
through the thickets, like the deer, lifting suspicious noses to test
frequently the wind, lest some enemy steal upon them unaware.
From his glass-walled eyrie, Jack Corey gazed down upon the wooded
slopes and dreamed of what they hid of beauty and menace and calm and
of loneliness. He saw them once drenched with rain; but mostly they
lay warm under the hot sunshine of summer. He saw them darkling with
night shadows, he saw them silvered with morning fogs which turned
rose tinted with the first rays of sunrise, he saw them lie
soft-shaded in the sunset's after glow, saw them held in the unearthly
beauty of the full moonlight.
Like the deer and the bear down there, his head was lifted often to
look and to sniff the wind that blew strongly over the peak. For now
the winds came too often tainted with the smoke of burning pines. The
blue haze of the far distance deepened with the thickening air. Four
times in the last ten days he had swung the pointer over the mapped
table and sighted it upon brown puffballs that rose over the
treetops--the first betraying marks of the licking flames below. He
had watched the puff balls grow until they exploded into rolling
clouds of smoke, yellow where the flames mounted high in some dead
pine or into a cedar, black where a pitch stump took fire.
After he had telephoned the alarm to headquarters he would watch
anxiously the spreading pall. To stand up there helpless while great
trees that had been a hundred years or more in the growing died the
death of fire, gave him a tragic feeling of having somehow betrayed
his trust. Every pine that fell, whether by old age, fire or the
woodmen's axe, touched him with a sense of personal loss. It was as
though he himself had made the hills and clothed them with the
majestic trees, and now stood godlike above, watching lest evil come
upon them. But he did not feel godlike when through the telescope he
watched great leaping flames go climbing up some giant pine, eating
away its very life as they climbed; he was filled then with a blind,
helpless rage at his own ineffectiveness, and he would stand and
wonder why God refused to send the rain that would save these
wonderful, living things, the trees.
At night, when the forests drew back into the darkness, he would watch
the stars slide across the terrible depth of purple infinity that
seemed to deepen hypnotically as he stared out into it. Venus, Mars,
Jupiter--at first he could not tell one from another, though he
watched them all. He had studied astronomy among other things in
school, but then it had been merely a hated task to be shirked and
slighted and forgotten as one's palate forgets the taste of bitter
medicine. Up here, with the stars all around him and above him for
many nights, he was ashamed because he could not call them all by
name. He would train his telescope upon some particularly bright star
and watch it and wonder--Jack did a great deal of wondering in those
days, after his first panicky fight against the loneliness and silence
had spent itself.
First of all, he awoke to the fact that he was about as important to
the world as one of those little brown birds that hopped among the
rocks and perked its head at him so knowingly, and preened its
feathers with such a funny air of consequence. He could not even
believe that his sudden disappearance had caused his mother any grief
beyond her humiliation over the manner and the cause of his going. She
would hire some one to take care of the car, and she would go to her
teas and her club meetings and her formal receptions and to church
just the same as though he were there--or had never been there. If he
ever went back.... But he never could go back. He never could face his
mother again, and listen to her calmly-condemnatory lectures that had
no love to warm them or to give them the sweet tang of motherly
scolding.
It sounds a strange thing to say of Jack Corey, that scattered-brained
young fellow addicted to beach dancing and joy rides and all that goes
with these essentially frothy pastimes; a strange thing to say of him
that he was falling into a more affectionate attitude of personal
nearness to the stars and to the mountains spread out below him than
he had ever felt toward Mrs. Singleton Corey. Yet that is how he
managed to live through the lonely days he spent up there in the
lookout station.
When Hank was about to start with another load of supplies up the
mountain, Jack had phoned down for all of the newspapers, magazines
and novels which Forest Supervisor Ross could buy or borrow; also a
double supply of smoking tobacco and a box of gum. When his tongue
smarted from too much smoking, he would chew gum for comfort And he
read and read, until his eyes prickled and the print blurred. But the
next week he diffidently asked Ross if he thought he could get him a
book on astronomy, explaining rather shame-facedly that there was
something he wanted to look up. On his third trip Hank carried several
government pamphlets on forestry. Which goes to prove how Jack was
slowly adapting himself to his changed circumstances, and fitting
himself into his surroundings.
He had to do that or go all warped and wrong, for he had no intention
of leaving the peak, which was at once a refuge and a place where he
could accumulate money; not much money, according to Jack's standard
of reckoning--his mother had often spent as much for a gown or a ring
as he could earn if he stayed all summer--but enough to help him out
of the country if he saved it all.
When his first four days vacation was offered him, Jack thought a long
while over the manner of spending it. Quincy did not offer much in the
way of diversion, though it did offer something in the way of risk. So
he cut Quincy out of his calculations and decided that he would phone
down for a camp outfit and grub, and visit one or two of the places
that he had been looking at for so long. For one thing, he could climb
down to the lake he had been staring into for nearly a month, and see
if he could catch any trout. Occasionally he had seen fishermen down
there casting their lines in, but none of them had seemed to have much
luck. For all that the lake lured him, it was so blue and clear, set
away down there in the cupped mountain top. Hank had advised him to
bait with a salmon-roe on a Coachman fly. Jack had never heard of that
combination, and he wanted to try it.
But after all, the lake was too near to appeal to him except by way of
passing. Away on the next ridge was the black, rocky hump called
Grizzly Peak on the map. Hank spoke of it casually as Taylor Rock, and
sometimes called it King Solomon. That was where the bears had their
winter quarters, and that was where Jack wanted to go and camp. He
wanted to see a bear's den, and if the bears were all gone--Hank
assured him that they never hung out up there in the summer, but
ranged all over the mountains--he wanted to go inside a den and see
what it was like. And for a particular, definite ambition, without
which all effort is purposeless, he wanted to kill a bear.
Hank brought him all the things he needed, talked incessantly of what
Jack should do and what he shouldn't do, and even offered to pack his
outfit over to the Peak for him. So Jack went, and got his first taste
of real camping out in a real wilderness, and gained a more intimate
knowledge of the country he had to guard.
By the time his second relief was at hand, he was tempted to take what
money he had earned and go as far as it would take him. He did not
believe he could stand another month of that terrible isolation, even
with his new friendliness toward the stars and the forest to lighten a
little of his loneliness. Youth hungers for a warmer, more personal
companionship than Nature, and Jack was never meant for a hermit. He
grew sullen. He would stand upon his pinnacle where he could look down
at Crystal Lake, and hate the tourists who came with lunches and their
fishing tackle, and scrambled over the rocks, and called shrilly to
one another, and laughed, and tried to invent new ways of stringing
together adjectives that seemed to express their enthusiasm. He would
make biting remarks to them which the distance prevented their
hearing, and he would wish savagely that they would fall in the lake,
or break a leg on some of the boulders.