Don't you care--?"
"Listen here, honey, I'll get sore in a minute if you go talking that
way!" He took her in his arms, all snow as she was, and kissed her
with boyish energy. "You know well enough that I'm crazy about you. Of
course I want you! But look at the fix I'm in: with just about a
hundred dollars to my name--"
"I've got money in my muff to buy a license, if you'll pay the
preacher, Jack. We'll go fifty-fifty on the cost--"
"And a darned good chance of being sent up for that deal the boys
pulled off--"
"Oh, well, I can wait till you get out again. Say, I just love you
with that little lump between your eyebrows when you scowl! Go on,
Jack; I'm cold. My gracious, what a storm! It's getting worse, don't
you think? When does that train go down, Jack? We'll have to be at the
station before dark, or we might get lost and miss the train, and then
we would be in a fix! I wish to goodness I'd thought to put on my blue
velvet suit--but then, how was I going to know that I'd need it to get
married in?"
Jack stopped on the very edge of the bank, and held back the
snow-laden branches for her to pass. "You're the limit for having your
own way," he grinned. "I can see who's going to be boss of the camp,
all right. Come on--the sooner we get down into lower country, the
less chance we'll have of freezing. We'll cross here, and get down in
that thick timber below. The wind won't catch us quite so hard, and if
a tree don't fall on us we'll work our way down to the trail. Give me
a kiss. This is a toll gate, and you've got to pay--"
Standing so, with one arm flung straight out against the thick boughs
of a young spruce, he made a fair target for Mike back there among the
trees. Mike was clean over the edge now of sanity. The two spies had
come together--two against one, and searching for him to kill him, as
he firmly believed. When they had stood under the cedar he thought
that they were hiding there, waiting for him to walk into the trap
they had set. He would have shot them, but the branches were too
thick. When they moved out along the gulch, Mike ran crouching after,
his rifle cocked and ready for aim. You would have thought that the
man was stalking a deer. When Jack stopped and turned, with his arm
flung back against the spruce, he seemed to be looking straight at
Mike.
Mike aimed carefully, for he was shaking with terror and the cold of
those heights. The sharp pow-w of his rifle crashed through the
whispery roar of the pines, and the hills flung back muffled echoes.
Marion screamed, saw Jack sag down beside the spruce, clutched at him
wildly, hampered by her muff. Saw him go sliding down over the bank,
into the gulch, screamed again and went sliding after him.
Afterwards she remembered a vague impression she had had, of hearing
some one go crashing away down the gully, breaking the bushes that
impeded his flight.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
THE MISERERE OF MOTHERHOOD
The up-train came shrieking out of the last tunnel in Feather River
Canyon, churned around a curve, struck a hollow roar from the trestle
that bridges the mouth of Toll-Gate creek, shrieked again when it saw,
down the white trail of its headlight, the whirling snow that swept
down the canyon, and churned up the stiff grade that would carry it
around through the Pocket at the head of the canyon and to the little
yellow station just beyond. A fight it would have to top the summit of
the Sierras and slip down into the desert beyond, but it climbed the
grade with a vicious kind of energy, twisted around the point of the
hill where the Crystal Lake trail crossed and climbed higher, and with
a last scream at the station lights it slewed past the curve, clicked
over a switch or two and stood panting there in the storm, waiting to
see whether it might go on and get the ordeal over with at once, or
whether it must wait until the down train passed.
A thin, yellow slip ordered it to wait, since it was ten minutes
behind time. The down train was just then screaming into Spring Garden
and would come straight on. So the up train stood there puffing like
the giant thing it was, while the funny little train from Quincy
fussed back upon a different siding and tried its best to puff as loud
as its big, important neighbor while it waited, too, for the down
train.
Two men and a woman plowed through the wind and the snow and mounted
wearily the steps of the little coach which comprised the branch
line's passenger service. The two men took it all as a matter of
course--the bare little coach with plush seats and an air of transient
discomfort. They were used to it, and they did not mind.
The woman, however, halted inside the door and glanced around her with
incredulous disdain. She seemed upon the point of refusing to ride in
so crude a conveyance; seemed about to complain to the conductor and
to demand something better. She went forward under protest and drew
her gloved fingers across the plush back of a seat, looked at her
fingers and said, "Hmh!" as though her worst fears were confirmed. She
looked at one of the men and spoke as she would speak to a servant.
"Is there no other coach on this train?"
"No, ma'am!" the man said, accenting the first word as though he
wished to prevent argument. "It's this or walk."
"Hmh!" said the lady, and spread a discarded newspaper upon the seat,
and sat down. "Thank you," she added perfunctorily, and looked out of
the window at what she could see of the storm.
The down train thundered in, just then, and with a squealing of brakes
stopped so that its chair car blotted her dismal view of the close
hillside. Between the two trains the snow sifted continuously, coming
out of the gray wall above, falling into the black shadows beneath.
Two or three bundled passengers with snow packed in the wrinkles of
their clothing went down the aisle of the chair-car, looking for
seats.
It was all very depressing, wearisome in the extreme. The lady settled
herself deeper into her furs and sighed.
She continued to sigh at intervals during the remainder of the trip.
The last and the heaviest sigh of all she heaved when she settled down
to sleep in a hotel bedroom and thought miserably of a certain
lovable, if somewhat headstrong, young man who was out somewhere in
these terrible mountains in the storm, hiding away from the world and
perhaps suffering cold and hunger.
Thoughts of that kind are not the best medicine for sleeplessness, and
it was long after midnight before Mrs. Singleton Corey drifted
insensibly from heartsick reflections into the inconsequent imaginings
of dreams. She did not dream about Jack, which was some comfort;
instead, she dreamed that she was presiding over a meeting of her
favorite club.
She awoke to the chill of an unheated room during a winter storm. The
quiet lulled her at first into the belief that it was yet very early,
but sounds of clashing dishes in a pan somewhere in a room beneath her
seemed to indicate breakfast. She would have telephoned down for her
breakfast to be served in her room, but there was no telephone or call
bell in sight. She therefore dressed shiveringly and groped through
narrow hallways until she found the stairs. The mournful _whoo-ooing_
of the wind outside gripped at her heartstrings. Jack was out
somewhere in this, hiding in a cave. She shivered again.
In the dining room, where two belated breakfasters hurried through
their meal, Mrs. Singleton Corey tried to pull herself together; tried
to shut out sentiment from her mind, that she might the better meet
and handle practical emergencies. It would not do, of course, to
announce her motive in coming here. She would have to find this Miss
Humphrey first of all. She unfolded her napkin, laid it across her lap
and waited.
"They can't do much till this storm lets up," a man at the next table
observed to his companion. "Uh course, I s'pose they'll make some
kinda bluff at trying--but believe me, these hills is no snap in a
snowstorm, and don't I know it! I got caught out, once,--and I like to
of stayed out. No, sir--"
"How's the trains, Barney?" the other called to a man who had just
come in from the office.
"Trains! Ain't any trains, and there won't be. There's four slides
between here and Keddie--Lord knows how many there is from there on
down. Wires are all down, so they can't get any word. Nothing moving
the other, way, either. It's the rain coming first, that softened
things up, and then the weight of the snow pulled things loose. Take
your time about your breakfast," he grinned. "You'll have quite a
board bill before you get away from here."
"Anybody starting out to hunt that girl?" the first speaker asked him.
"Can't do much till the storm lets up, can they?"
"Well, if they wait till the storm lets up," Barney retorted drily,
"they might just as well wait till spring. What kinda folks do you
think we are, around here? Forest Service started a bunch out already.
Bill Dunevant, he's getting another party made up."
"It's a fright," the second man declared, "I don't know a darn thing
about these mountains, but if somebody'll stake me to a horse, I'll
go and do what I can."
"When was it they brought word?"
"Fellow got down to the station about an hour ago and phoned in, is
the way I heard it," Barney said. "He had to wait till the office
opened up."
Mrs. Singleton Corey laid her unused napkin on the table beside her
unused knife and fork, and rose from her chair. She had a feeling that
this matter concerned her, and that she did not want to hear those
crude men pulling her trouble into their talk. With composed
obliviousness to her surroundings she walked out into the office,
quite ignoring the astonishment of the waitress who held Mrs.
Singleton Corey's butter and two biscuits in her hands by the table.
She waited, just within the office, until the man Barney sensed her
impatience and returned from the dining room.
"I should like to go to a place called Toll-Gate cabin," she told him
calmly. "Can you arrange for a conveyance of some kind? I see that an
automobile is out of the question, probably, with so much snow on the
ground. I should like to start as soon as possible."
The man looked at her with a startled expression. "Why, I don't know.
No, ma'am, I'm afraid a rig couldn't make it in this storm. It's
halfway up the mountain--do you happen to know the young lady that was
lost up there, yesterday?"
"Has a young lady been lost up there?" The eyes of Mrs. Singleton
Corey dwelt upon him compellingly.
"Yes, ma'am, since yesterday forenoon. We just got word of it a while
ago. They're sending out searching parties now. She was staying at
Toll-Gate--"
"Is Toll-Gate a town?"
"No, ma'am. Toll-Gate is just the name of a creek. There's a cabin
there, and they call it Toll-Gate cabin. The girl stayed there."
"Ah. Can you have some sort of conveyance--"
"Only conveyance I could promise is a saddle horse, and that won't be
very pleasant, either. Besides, it's dangerous to go into the woods, a
day like this. I don't believe you better try it till the weather
clears. It ain't anything a lady had ought to tackle--unless maybe it
was a matter of life and death." He looked at her dubiously.
Mrs. Singleton Corey pressed her lips together. Any recalcitrant club
member, or her son, could have told him then that surrender was the
only recourse left to him.
"Please tell your searching party that I shall go with them. Have a
saddle horse brought for me, if you can find nothing better. I shall
be ready in half an hour. Tell one of the maids to bring me coffee, a
soft-boiled egg and buttered toast to my room." She turned and went
up the stairs unhurriedly, as goes one who knows that commands will be
obeyed. She did not look back, or betray the slightest uneasiness, and
Barney, watching her slack-jawed until she had reached the top, pulled
on a cap and went off to do her bidding.
Mrs. Singleton Corey was not the woman to let small things impede her
calm progress toward a certain goal. She proved that beyond all doubt
when she ordered a saddle horse, for she had last ridden upon the back
of a horse when she was about fourteen years old. She had a vague
notion that all horses nowadays were trained from their colthood to
buck--whatever that was. Rodeo posters and such printed matter upon
the subject as her eye could not escape had taught her that much, but
she refused to be dismayed. Moreover, she was aware that it would
probably be necessary for her to ride astride, as all women seemed to
ride nowadays: yet she did not falter.
From her beautifully fitted traveling bag she produced a pair of
ivory-handled manicure scissors, lifted her three-hundred-dollar
fur-lined coat from a hook behind the door and proceeded deliberately
to ruin both scissors and coat by slitting the back of the coat up
nearly to the waist-line, so that she could wear it comfortably on
horseback. Her black broadcloth skirt was in imminent danger of the
same surgical revision when a shocked young waitress with the
breakfast tray in her hands uttered shrill protest.
"Oh, don't go and ruin your skirt that way! They've got you a
four-horse team and sleigh, Mrs. Corey. Mercy, ain't it awful about
that poor girl being lost? Excuse me--are you her mother, Mrs. Corey?"
Mrs. Singleton Corey, sitting now upon the bed, lifted her aloof
glance from the mutilated coat. "Set the things on the chair, there,
since there is no table. I do not know the girl at all." And she
added, since it seemed necessary to make oneself very plain to these
people: "I think that will be all, thank you." She even went a step
farther and gave the girl a tip, which settled all further overtures
toward conversation.
The girl went off and cried, and called Mrs. Singleton Corey a
stuck-up old hen who would freeze--and serve her right. She even hoped
that Mrs. Singleton Corey would get stuck in a snowdrift and have to
walk every step of the way to Toll-Gate. Leaving her breakfast when it
was all on the table, just as if it would hurt her to eat in the same
room with people, and then acting like that to a person! She wished
she had let the old catamaran spoil her skirt; and so on.
Mrs. Singleton Corey never troubled herself over the impression she
made upon the servant class. She regretted the publicity that seemed
to have been given her arrival and her further journey into the
hills. It annoyed her to have the girl calling her Mrs. Corey so
easily; it seemed to imply an intimate acquaintance with her errand
which was disquieting in the extreme. Was it possible that the
Humphrey woman had been talking to outsiders? Or had the police really
gotten upon the trail of Jack?
She hurried into her warmest things, drank the coffee because it would
stimulate her for the terrible journey ahead of her, and went down to
find the four-horse team waiting outside, tails whipping between
shivering hind legs, hips drawn down as for a lunge forward, heads
tossing impatiently. The red-faced driver was bundled to his eyes and
did not say a word while he tucked the robes snugly down around her
feet.
The snow was driving up the street in a steady wind, but Mrs.
Singleton Corey faced it undauntedly. She saw the white-veiled plaza
upon one side, the row of little stores huddled behind bare trees upon
the other side. It seemed a neat little town, a curiously placid
little town to be so buffeted by the storm. Behind it the mountain
loomed, a dark blur in the gray-white world. Beautiful, yes; but Mrs.
Singleton Corey was not looking for beauty that day. She was a mother,
and she was looking for her boy.
Two men, with two long-handled shovels, ran out from a little store
halfway down the street and, still running, threw themselves into the
back of the sleigh.
"Better go back and get another shovel," the driver advised them,
pulling up. "I forgot mine. Anything they want me to haul up? Where's
them blankets? And say, Hank, you better go into the drugstore and get
a bottle of the best liquor they've got. Brandy."
"I've got a bottle of rye," the man standing behind Mrs. Singleton
Corey volunteered. "Stop at the Forest Service, will you? They've got
the blankets there. We can get another shovel from them."
The driver spoke to his leaders, and they went on, trotting briskly
into the wind. Blurred outlines of cottages showed upon either hand.
Before one of these they stopped, and a young man came out with a roll
of canvas-covered bedding balanced upon his bent shoulders. Hank
climbed down, went in and got a shovel.
"Ain't heard anything more?" questioned the driver, in the tone one
involuntarily gives to tragedy.
The young man dumped his burden into the back of the sleigh and shook
his head. "Our men are going to stay up there till they find her," he
said. "There's a sack of grub I wish you'd take along."
He glanced at Mrs. Singleton Corey, whose dark eyes were staring at
him through her veil, and ran back into the house. Running so, with
his back turned, his body had a swing like Jack's, and her throat
ached with a sudden impulse toward weeping.
He was back in a minute with a knobby sack of something very heavy,
that rattled dully when he threw it in. "All right," he called. "Hope
yuh make it, all right."
"Sure, we'll make it! May have to shovel some--"
Again they started, and there were no more stops. They swung down a
straight bit of road where the wind swept bitterly and the hills had
drawn back farther into the blur. They drew near to one that slowly
disclosed snow-matted pine trees upon a hillside; skirted this and
ploughed along its foot for half a mile or so and then turned out
again into a broad, level valley. Now the mountains were more than
ever blurred and indistinct, receding into the distance.
"Do we not go into the mountains?" Mrs. Singleton Corey laid aside her
aloofness to ask, when the valley seemed to stretch endlessly before
them.
"Sure. We'll strike 'em pretty soon now. Looks a long ways, on account
of the storm. You any relation to the girl that's lost?"
"I do not know her at all." But trouble was slowly thawing the
humanity in Mrs. Singleton Corey, and she softened the rebuff a
little. "It must be a terrible thing to be lost in these mountains."
"Far as I'm concerned," spoke up Hank from behind them, 'they're
either two of 'em lost, or there ain't anybody lost. I've got it
figured that either she's at the camp of that feller that's stayin' up
there somewheres around Taylor Rock, or else the feller's lost too.
I'll bet they're together, wherever they be."
"What feller's that, Hank?" the driver twisted his head in his muffled
collar.
"Feller that had the lookout on Mount Hough las' summer. He's hidin'
out up there somewheres. Him an' the girl used to meet--I know that
fer sure. Uh course I ain't sayin' anything--but they's two lost er
none, you take it from me."
The driver grunted and seemed to meditate upon the matter. "What did
that perfessor wade clear down to Marston through the storm for, and
report her lost, if she ain't lost?"
"He come down to see if she'd took the train las' night. That's what
he come for. She'd went off somewheres before noon, and didn't show up
no more. He didn't think she was lost, till Morton told him she hadn't
showed up to take no train. That's when the perfessor got scared and
phoned in."
The driver grunted again, and called upon his leaders to shake a
leg--they'd have walking enough and plenty when they hit the hill, he
said. Again they neared the valley's rim, so that pine trees with
every branch sagging under its load of snow, fringed the background.
Like a pastel of a storm among hills that she had at home, thought
Mrs. Singleton Corey irrelevantly. But was it Jack whom the man called
Hank referred to? The thought chilled her.
"What's he hidin' out for, Hank? Funny I never heard anything about
it." The driver spoke after another season of cogitation, and Mrs.
Singleton Corey was grateful to him for seeking the information she
needed.
"Well, I dunno what _fur_, but it stands to reason he's on the dodge.
All summer long he never showed up in Quincy when he was relieved.
Stayed out in the hills--and that ain't natural for a young city
feller, is it? 'N' then he was ornery as sin. Got so't I wouldn't pack
grub up to him no more. I couldn't go 'im, the way he acted when a
feller come around. 'N' then when they closed up the station, he made
camp up there somewheres around Taylor Rock, and he ain't never showed
his nose in town. If I knowed what _fur_, I might 'a' did something
about it. They's a nigger in the woodpile somewheres, you take it from
me."
"Well, but that ain't got anything to do with the girl," the driver
contested stubbornly. "I know her--she's a mighty fine girl, too; and
good-looking as they make 'em. I hauled their stuff up last
summer--and them, too. They seem like nice enough folks, all of 'em.
And I saw her pretty near every time I hauled tourists up to the
lake."
Hank chuckled to himself. "Well, I guess I know 'er, too, mebby a
little better'n what you do. I ain't saying anything ag'inst the girl.
I say she was in the habit of meeting this feller--Johnny Carew's the
name he went by--meetin' him out around different places. They knowed
each other, that's what I'm sayin'. And the way I figure, she'd went
out to meet him, and either the two of 'em's lost, er else they're
both storm-stayed up at his camp. She's mebby home by this time. I
look for 'er to be, myself."
"You do, hey?" The driver twisted his head again to look back at Hank.
"What yuh going up to help hunt her for, then?"
"Me, I'm just goin' fur the ride," Hank grinned.
They overtook Murphy, plodding along in the horse-trampled, deep snow,
with a big, black hat pulled down to his ears, an empty gunny sack
over his shoulders like a cape, a quart bottle sticking out of each
coat pocket. They took him into the sleigh and went on, through
another half mile of lane.
After that they began abruptly to climb through pine forest. In a
little they crossed the railroad at the end of a cut through the
mountain's great toe. Dismal enough it looked under its heavy blanket
of snow that lay smoothly over ties and rails, the telegraph wires
sagging, white ropes of snow. Mrs. Singleton Corey glanced down the
desolate length of it and shivered.
After that the four horses straightened their backs to steady,
laborious climbing up a narrow road arched over with naked oak trees
set amongst pines. Here, too, the deep snow was trampled with the
passing of horses--the searching party, she knew without being told.
The driver spoke to the two behind him, after a ten-minute silence
against the heavy background of roaring overhead.
"Know that first turn, up ahead here? If we don't have to shovel
through, we'll be lucky."
From the back of the sleigh where he was sitting flat, Murphy spoke
suddenly. "A-ah, an' av ye don't have to saw yer trail through a down
tree, ye'll be luckier sthill, I dunno. An' it's likely there ain't a
saw in the hull outfit!" He spat into the storm and added grimly, "An'
how ye're to git the shled around a three-fut tree, I dunno."
"Sure takes you to think up bad luck, Murph," Hank retorted. "We ain't
struck any down timber so fur."
"An' ye ain't there yet, neither--not be four mile ye ain't."
Mrs. Singleton Corey, wrapped in her furs, with snow packing full
every fold and wrinkle of her clothing left uncovered by the robe, did
not hear the aimless argument that followed between Hank and Murphy.
The sonorous _shwoo-oosh_ of the wind-tormented pine tops surged
through the very soul of her, the diapason accompaniment to the
miserere of motherhood. Somewhere on this wild mountainside was Jack,
huddled from the wind in a cave, or wandering miserably through the
storm. Wrapped in soft luxury all her life, Mrs. Singleton Corey
shuddered as she looked forth through her silken veil, and saw what
Jack was enduring because she had never taught her son to love her;
because she had not taught him the lessons of love and trust and
obedience.