days of dreary drizzle in the lower country and howling winds over the
crest and a few hours of daytime snowfall that interested Jack hugely
because he had never in his life before seen snow actually falling out
of the sky. Then the sun came out and dried the forests, and
Supervisor Ross said nothing whatever about closing the lookout
station for the winter.
A week of beautiful weather brought other beautiful weeks. He had
another four days' relief and, warned by the storm, he spent the time
in laboriously carrying dead pine wood and spruce bark up to his cave.
It wouldn't do any harm to have a lot of wood stored away. It might
get pretty cold, some stormy days. Already the nights were pretty
nippy, even to a warm blooded young fellow who had never in his life
really suffered from cold. Some instinct of self-preservation impelled
him to phone in for a canvas bed sheet--a "tarp," he had heard Hank
Brown call it--and two pairs of the heaviest blankets to be had in
Quincy. You bet a fellow ought to be prepared for the worst when he is
planning to winter in a cave! Especially when he must do his preparing
now, or tough it out till spring.
With his mirror he heliographed a signal to Marion, and when she came
he said he must have more cigarettes, because he might smoke harder
when he was really settled down to roughing it. What he should have
ordered was more bacon and flour, but he did not know that, his mind
dwelling upon the luxuries of life rather than the necessities--he who
had never met real necessity face to face.
"I'll send the order right away," Marion obligingly promised him. "But
Kate will be simply furious if she sees the package. The last lot I
made her believe was candy that was sent me, and because I didn't
offer her any of it--I couldn't, of course--she would hardly talk for
a whole day, and she hinted about selfishness. She thinks I carry my
pockets full of candy when I start off hiking through the woods, and
eat it all by myself." She laughed because it seemed a good joke on
Kate.
The next time she climbed up to the station she found him boarding up
the windows and hanging certain things from the ceiling to keep them
away from rats, under the telephone directions of the supervisor. He
expected Hank's successor up that afternoon to move down what must be
taken to town for the winter. He did not seem so cheerful over the
near prospect of hiding out on King Solomon, and Marion herself seemed
depressed a bit and more silent than usual. The wind whistled keenly
over the peak, whipping her khaki skirt around her ankles and
searching out the open places in her sweater. Claremont and the piled
ridges beyond were hooded in clouds that seemed heavy with moisture,
quite unlike the woolly fleeces of fair weather.
"Well, she's all nailed down for the winter," Jack said apathetically
when the last board was in place. "She's been a queer old summer, but
I kind of hate to leave the old peak, at that."
They turned their heads involuntarily and stared across the
fire-scarred mountainside to where Taylor Rock thrust bleakly up into
the sky. A summer unmarked by incidents worthy the name of events,
spent on one mountain top; a winter that promised as little diversion
upon another mountain top--
"Say, a ride on a real live street car would look as big to me right
now as a three-ring circus," Jack summed up his world-hunger with a
shrug. "By the time I've wintered over there I'll be running round in
circles trying to catch my shadow. Plumb bugs, that's what I'll be;
and don't I know it!"
"You'll love it," Marion predicted with elaborate cheerfulness. "I
only wish I could change places with you. Think of me, shut up in a
dark little three-room cabin with one elocutionist, one chronic grouch
and one human bluebottle fly that does nothing but buzz! You're a
lucky kid to have a whole mountain all to yourself. Think of me!"
"Oh, I'll think of you, all right!" Jack returned glumly and turned
back to the denuded little station. "I'll think of you," he repeated
under his breath, feeling savagely for the top button of his thick
gray sweater. "Don't I know it!"
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MIKE GOES SPYING ON THE SPIES
Mike sat hunched forward on a box in front of the stove in the rough
little cabin where he and Murphy were facing together the winter in
Toll-Gate flat. For an hour he had stared at the broken cook stove
where a crack disclosed the blaze within. He chewed steadily and
abstractedly upon a lump of tar-weed, and now and then he unclasped
his hands and gave his left forefinger a jerk that made the knuckle
crack. Tar-weed and knuckle-cracking were two queer little habits much
affected by Mike. The weed he chewed in the belief that it not only
kept his physical body in perfect health, but purified his soul as
well; cracking the knuckles on his left forefinger cleared the muddle
of his mind when he wanted to go deep into a subject that baffled him.
Hunched forward on another box sat Murphy nursing his elbow with one
grimy palm and his pipe with the other. He would glance at Mike now
and then and with a sour grin lifting the scraggly ends of his
grizzled mustache. Murphy was resentfully contemptuous of Mike's long
silences, but he was even more contemptuous of Mike's gobbling
indistinct speech, so he let Mike alone and comforted himself with
grinning superciliously when Mike was silent, and sneering at him
openly when he spoke, and cursing his cooking when Mike cooked.
"That gurrl," Mike blurted abruptly while he cracked his knuckles,
"she'd better look out!"
"A-ah," retorted Murphy scornfully, "belike ye'd better tell her so
thin. Or belike ye better set yerself t' look out fer the gurrl--I
dunno."
"Oh, I'll look out fer her," Mike gobbled, nodding his head
mysteriously. "I bin lookin' out fer her all the time--but she ain't
as cute as what she thinks she is. Oh, maybe she's cute, but there's
them that's cuter, an' they don't live over in Europe, neither. Don't
you worry--"
"Which I'm not doin' at all, me fine duck," vouchsafed Murphy boredly,
crowding down the tobacco in his pipe. "An' it's you that's doin' the
worryin', and fer why I dunno."
"Oh, I ain't worryin'--but that gurrl, she better look out, an' the
old un she better look out too."
"An' fer what, then, Mike, should the gurrl be lookin' out? Fer a
husband, maybe yer thinkin'."
Mike nodded his head in a way that did not mean assent, but merely
that he was not telling all his thoughts. He fell silent, staring
again at the glowing crack in the stove. Twice he snapped his knuckles
before he spoke again.
"She thinks," he began again abruptly, "that everybody's blind. But
that's where she makes a big mistake. They's nothin' the matter with
_my_ eyes. An' that old un, she better look out too. Why, the gurrl,
she goes spyin' around t' meet the other spy, an' the old un she goes
spyin' around after the gurrl, an' me I'm spyin' on--_all_ of 'em!" He
waved a dirt grimed, calloused hand awkwardly. "The whole bunch," he
chortled. "They can't fool _me_ with their spyin' around! An' the
gov'ment can't fool me nayther. I know who's the spies up here, an' I
kin fool 'em all. Why, it's like back in Minnesota one time--"
Murphy, having listened attentively thus far, settled back against the
wall, swung a rough-shod foot and began nursing his pipe and elbow
again. "A-ah, an' it's the trail to Minnesota, then," he commented
disgustedly, nodding his head derisively. "Umm-hmm--it's back in
Minnesota ye're wanderin' befuddled with yer sphies. So l'ave
Minnesota wance more, Mike, an' put some beans a-soakin' like I
explained t' ye forty-wan times a're'dy. My gorry, they're like
bullets the way ye bile them fer an hour and ask that I eat thim. An'
since yer eyes is so foine and keen, Mike, that ye can see sphies
thick as rabbits in the woods, wud ye just pick out a few of the
rocks, Mike, that will not come soft with all the b'ilin' ye can give
thim? For if I come down wance more with me teeth on a rock, it's
likely I might lose me temper, I dunno."
Mike grumbled and got out the beans, and Murphy went back to his
smoking and his meditations. He made so little of Mike's outburst
about the spies that he did not trouble to connect it with any one in
the basin. Mike was always talking what Murphy called fool gibberish,
that no man of sense would listen to it if he could help it. So Murphy
fell to calculating how much of the money he had earned might justly
be spent upon a few days' spree without endangering the grubstake he
planned to take into the farther mountains in the spring. Murphy had
been sober now for a couple of months, and he was beginning to thirst
for the liquid joys of Quincy. Presently he nodded his head slowly,
having come to a definite conclusion in his argument with himself.
"I think I'll be goin' t' town in the marnin', Mike, av I kin git a
little money from the boss," he said, lookin' up. "It's comin' cold,
an' more shnow, I'm thinkin', an' I must have shoepacs, I dunno. So
we'll be up early in the marnin', an' it's a hefty two-hours walk t'
town fer anny man--more now with the shnow. An' I be thinkin'--"
What he was thinking he did not say, and Mike did not ask. He seemed
not to hear Murphy's declaration at all. Now that he had the beans
soaking, Mike was absorbed in his own thoughts again. He did not care
what Murphy did. Murphy, in Mike's estimation, was merely a conceited
old fellow-countryman with bad eyes and a sharp tongue. Let Murphy go
to town if he liked. Mike had plans of his own.
The old un, for instance, stirred Mike's curiosity a good deal. Why
should she be following the girl, when the girl went tramping around
in the woods? They lived in the same cabin, and it seemed to Mike that
she must know all about what the girl was doing and why she was doing
it. And why didn't the men go tramping around like that, since they
were all in together? Mike decided that the two women must be spies,
and the men didn't know anything about it. Probably they were spying
on the men, to get them in trouble with the government--which to Mike
was a vast, formless power only a little less than the Almighty. It
might be that the women were spies for some other government, and
meant to have the men hanged when the time was ripe for it; in other
words, when these queer mines with no gold in them were all done.
But a spy spying on a spy smacked of complications too deep for Mike,
with all his knuckle-cracking. He was lost in a maze of conflicting
conjectures whenever he tried to figure the thing out. And who was the
other spy that stayed up on Taylor Rock? There was smoke up there
where should be no smoke. Mike had seen it. There were little flashes
of light up there on sunny days--Mike had seen them also. And there
was nothing in the nature of Taylor Rock itself to produce either
smoke or flashes of light. No one but a spy would stay in so bleak a
place. That was clear enough to Mike by this time; what he must find
out was why one spy followed another spy.
The very next day Marion left the cabin and set forth with a square
package under her arm. Mike, watching from where he was at work
getting out timbers for next year's assessment work on the claims,
waited until she had passed him at a short distance, going down the
trail toward Quincy. When she had reached the line of timber that
stood thick upon the slope opposite the basin, he saw Kate, bulky in
sweater and coat, come from the cabin and take the trail after Marion.
When she also had disappeared in the first wooded curve of the trail,
up the hill, Mike struck his axe bit-deep into the green log he was
clearing of branches, and shambled after her, going by a short cut
that brought him into the trail within calling distance of Kate.
For half a mile the road climbed through deep forest. Marion walked
steadily along, taking no pains to hide her tracks in the snow that
lay there white as the day on which it had fallen. Bluejays screamed
at her as she passed, but there was no other sound. Even the uneasy
wind was quiet that day, and the faint scrunching of Marion's feet in
the frozen snow when she doubled back on a curve in the trail, came to
Kate's ears quite plainly.
At the top of the hill where the wind had lifted the snow into drifts
that left bare ground between, Marion stopped and listened, her head
turned so that she could watch the winding trail behind her. She
thought she heard the scrunch of Kate's feet down there, but she was
not sure. She looked at the scrubby manzanita bushes at her right,
chose her route and stepped widely to one side, where a bare spot
showed between two bushes. Her left foot scraped the snow in making
the awkward step, but she counted on Kate being unobserving enough to
pass it over. She ducked behind a chunky young cedar, waited there for
a breath or two and then ran down the steep hillside, keeping always
on the bare ground as much as possible. Lower down, where the sun was
shut away and the wind was sent whistling overhead to the next
hilltop, the snow lay knee deep and even. But Kate would never come
this far off the trail, Marion was sure. She believed that Kate
suspected her of walking down to the valley, perhaps even to town,
though the distance was too great for a casual hike of three hours or
so. But there was the depot, not quite at the foot of the mountain;
and at the station was the agent's wife, who was a friendly little
person. Marion had made it a point to mention the agent's wife in an
intimate, personal way, as though she were in the habit of visiting
there. Mrs. Morton had an awful time getting her clothes dry without
having them all smudged up with engine smoke, she had said after her
last trip. Then she had stopped abruptly as though the remark had
slipped out unaware. It was easy enough to fool poor Kate.
But there was a chance that poor Kate would walk clear down to the
station, and find no Marion. In that case, Marion decided to invent a
visit to one of the nearest ranches. That would be easy enough, for if
Marion did not know any of the ranchers, neither did Kate, and she
would scarcely go so far as to inquire at all the ranches. That would
be too ridiculous; besides, Kate was not likely to punish herself by
making the trip just for the sake of satisfying her curiosity.
Marion plunged on down the hill, hurrying because she was later than
she had intended to be, and it was cold for a person standing around
in the snow. She crossed the deep gulch and climbed laboriously up the
other side, over hidden shale rock and through clumps of bushes that
snatched at her clothing like a witch's bony fingers. She had no more
than reached the top when Jack stepped out from behind a pine tree as
wide of girth as a hogshead. Marion gave a little scream, and then
laughed. After that she frowned at him.
"Say, you mustn't come down so far!" she expostulated. "You know it
isn't a bit safe--I've told you so a dozen times, and every time I
come out, here I find you a mile or so nearer to camp. Why, yesterday
there were two men up here hunting. I saw them, and so did Doug. They
gave Doug the liver of the deer they killed and the heart--so he
wouldn't tell on them, I suppose. What if they had seen you?"
"One of them was Hank Brown," Jack informed her unemotionally. "I met
him close as I am to you, and he swung off and went the other way.
Last time we met I licked the daylights out of him, and I guess he
hasn't forgotten the feel of my knuckles. Anyway, he stampeded."
"Well, forevermore!" Marion was indignant. "What's the use of your
hiding out in a cave, for goodness' sake, if you're going to let
people see you whenever they come up this way? Just for that I've a
good mind not to give you these cigarettes. I could almost smoke them
myself, anyway. Kate thinks that I do. She found out that it wasn't
candy, the last time, so I had to pretend I have a secret craving for
cigarettes, and I smoked one right before her to prove it. We had
quite a fuss over it, and I told her I'd smoke them in the woods to
save her feelings, but that I just simply must have them. She thinks
now that the Martha Washington is an awful place; that's where she
thinks I learned. She cried about it, and that made me feel like a
criminal, only I was so sick I didn't care at the time. Take them--and
please don't smoke so much, Jack! It's simply awful, the amount you
use."
"All right. I'll cut out the smoking and go plumb crazy." To prove his
absolute sincerity, he tore open the package, extracted a cigarette
and began to smoke it with a gloomy relish. "Didn't bring anything to
read, I suppose?" he queried after a minute which Marion spent in
getting her breath and in gazing drearily out over the wintry
mountainside.
"No, Kate was watching me, and I couldn't. I pretended at first that I
was lending magazines and papers to Murphy and Mike, but she has
found out that Murphy's eyes are too bad, and Mike, the ignorant old
lunatic, can't read or write. I haven't squared that with her yet.
I've been thinking that I'd invent a ranch or something to visit.
Murphy says there's one on Taylor Creek, but the people have gone down
below for the winter; and it's close enough so Kate could walk over
and find out for herself."
She began to pull bits of bark off the tree trunk and throw them
aimlessly at a snow-mounded rock. "It's fierce, living in a little pen
of a place like that, where you can't make a move without somebody
wanting to know why," she burst out savagely. "I can't write a letter
or read a book or put an extra pin in my hat, but Kate knows all about
it. She thinks I'm an awful liar. And I'm beginning to actually hate
her. And she was the very best friend I had in the world when we came
up here. Five thousand dollars' worth of timber can't pay for what
we're going through, down there!"
"You cut it out," said Jack, reaching for another cigarette. "My part
of it, I mean. It's that that's raising the deuce with you two, so you
just cut me out of it. I'll make out all right." As an afterthought he
added indifferently, "I killed a bear the other day. I was going to
bring you down a chunk. It isn't half bad; change from deer meat and
rabbits and grouse, anyway."
Marion shook her head. "There it is again. I couldn't take it home
without lying about where I got it. And Kate would catch me up on
it--she takes a perfectly fiendish delight in cornering me in a lie,
lately." She brightened a little. "I'll tell you, Jack. We'll go up to
the cave and cook some there. Kate can't," she told him grimly, "tell
what I've been eating, thank goodness, once it's swallowed!"
"It's too hard hiking up there through the snow," Jack hastily
objected. "Better not tackle it. Tell you what I can do though. I'll
whittle off a couple of steaks and bring them down tomorrow, and we'll
hunt a safe place to cook them. Have a barbecue," he grinned somberly.
"Oh, all right--if I can give Kate the slip. Did you skin him?"
reverting with some animation to the slaying of the bear. "It must
have been keen."
"It was keen--till I got the hide off the bear and onto my bed."
"You don't sound as if it was a bit thrilling." She looked at him
dubiously. "How did it happen? You act as if you had killed a
chipmunk, and I want to be excited! Did the bear come at you?"
"Nothing like that. I came at the bear. I just hunted around till I
found a bear that had gone byelow, and I killed him and borrowed his
hide. It was a mean trick on him--but I was cold."
"Oh, with all those blankets?"
Jack grinned with a sour kind of amusement at her tone, but his reply
was an oblique answer to her question.
"Remember that nice air-hole in the top where the wind whistled in and
made a kind of tune? You ought to spend a night up there now listening
to it."
Marion threw a piece of bark spitefully at a stump beyond the snow
mound. "But you have a fire," she said argumentatively. "And you have
all kinds of reading, and plenty to eat."
"Am I kicking?"
"Well, you sound as if you'd like to. You simply don't know how lucky
you are. You ought to be shut up in that little cabin with Kate and
the professor."
"Lead me to 'em," Jack suggested with suspicious cheerfulness.
"Don't be silly. Are there lots of bears up there, Jack?"
"Maybe, but I haven't happened to see any, except two or three that
ran into the brush soon as they got a whiff of me. And this one I
hunted out of a hole under a big tree root. It's a lie about them
wintering in caves. They'd freeze to death."
"You--you aren't really uncomfortable, are you, Jack?"
"Oh, no." Jack gave the "no" what Kate would have called a sliding
inflection deeply surcharged with irony.
"Well, but why don't you keep the fire going? The smoke doesn't show
at all, scarcely. And if you're going to tramp all over the mountains
and let everybody see you, it doesn't matter a bit."
Jack lit his third cigarette. "What's going on in the world, anyway?
Any news from--down South?"
"Well, the papers don't say much. There's been an awful storm that
simply ruined the beaches, they say. Fred has gone down--something
about your case, I think. And then he wanted to see the men who are in
on this timber scheme. They aren't coming through with the assessment
money the way they promised, and Fred and Doug and Kate had to dig up
more than their share to pay for the work. I didn't because I didn't
have anything to give--and Kate has been hinting things about that,
too."
"I wish you'd take--"
"Now, don't you dare finish that sentence! When I came up here with
them they agreed to do my assessment work and take it out of the
money we get when we sell, and they're to get interest on all of it.
Kate proposed it herself, because she wanted me up here with her. Let
them keep the agreement. Fred isn't complaining--Fred's just dandy
about everything. It's only--"
"Well, I guess I'll be getting back. It's a tough climb up to my
hangout." Jack's interest in the conversation waned abruptly with the
mention of Fred. "Can't you signal about ten o'clock tomorrow, if
you're coming out? Then I'll bring down some bear meat."
"Oh, and I'll bring some cake and bread, if I can dodge Kate. I'll put
up a lunch as if it were for me. Kate had good luck with her bread
this time. I'll bring all I dare. And, Jack,--you aren't really
uncomfortable up there, are you? Of course, I know it gets pretty
cold, and maybe it's lonesome sometimes at night, but--you stayed
alone all summer, so--"
"Oh, I'm all right. Don't you worry a minute about me. Run along home
now, before you make Kate sore at you again. And don't forget to let
me know if you're coming. I'll meet you right about here. So long,
pardner." He stuffed the package of cigarettes into his coat pocket
and plunged into the balsam thicket behind him as though he was eager
to get away from her presence.
Marion felt it, and looked after him with hurt questioning in her
eyes. "He's got his cigarettes--that's all he cares about," she told
herself resentfully. "Well, if he thinks _I_ care--!"
She went slipping and stumbling down the steep wall of the gulch,
crossed it and climbed the other side and came upon Kate, sitting in
the snow and holding her right ankle in both hands and moaning
pitiably.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
PENITENCE, REAL AND UNREAL
Kate rocked back and forth, and tears of pain rolled down her cheeks.
She leaned her shoulder against a tree and moaned, with her eyes shut.
It frightened Marion to look at her. She went up and put her hand on
Kate's shoulder with more real tenderness than she had felt for
months.
"What's the matter, Kate? Did you hurt yourself? Is it your ankle?"
she asked insipidly.
"O-oh! Marion, you keep me nearly distracted! You must know I only
want to guard you against--oh--gossip and trouble. You seem to look
upon me as an enemy, lately--Oh!--And I only want to consider your
best interests. Who is that man, Marion? I believe he is a criminal,
and I'm going to send word to the sheriff. If he isn't, he is welcome
at the cabin--you know it, Marion. You--you hurt me so, when you meet
him out here in this sly way--just as if you couldn't trust me. And I
have always been your friend." She stopped and began moaning again.
"Now, don't cry, dear! You're simply upset and nervous. Let me help
you up, Kate. Is it your ankle?"
"Oh, it pains dreadfully--but the shock of seeing you meet that
strange man out here and knowing that you will not trust me--"
"Why, forevermore! I do _trust you_, Kate. But you have been so
different--you don't trust _me_, is the trouble. I'm not doing
anything awful, only you won't see anything but the wrong side of
everything I do. I'd tell you about the man, only--" Marion glanced
guiltily across at the place where Jack had disappeared, "--it's his
secret, and I can't."