I
The Lennox home, in the far wilderness of the Umpqua Divide, looked
rather like an emergency hospital for the first few days after Dan's
fight with Whisperfoot. Its old sounds of laughter and talk were almost
entirely lacking. Two injured men and a girl recovering from a nervous
collapse do not tend toward cheer.
But the natural sturdiness of all three quickly came to their aid. Of
course Lennox had been severely injured by the falling log, and many
weeks would pass before he would be able to walk again. He could sit up
for short periods, however; had the partial use of one arm; and could
propel himself--after the first few weeks--at a snail's pace through the
rooms in a rude wheel chair that Bill's ingenuity had contrived. The
great livid scratches that Dan bore on his body quickly began to heal;
and before a week was done, he began to venture forth on the hills
again. Snowbird had remained in bed for three days: then she had hopped
out, one bright afternoon, swearing never to go back into it again.
Evidently the crisp, fall air of the mountains had been a nerve tonic
for them all.
Of course there had been medical attention. A doctor and a nurse had
motored up the day after the accident; the physician had set the bones
and departed, and the nurse remained for a week, to see the grizzled
mountaineer well on the way of convalescence. But it was an anxious
wait, and Lennox's car was kept constantly in readiness to speed her
away in case the snows should start. At last she had left him in
Snowbird's hands, and Bill had driven her back to the settlements in his
father's car. The die was now cast as to whether or not Dan and the
remainder of the family should winter in the mountains. The snow clouds
deepened every day, the frost was ever heavier in the dawns, and the
road would surely remain open only a few days more.
Once more the three seemingly had the Divide all to themselves. Bert
Cranston had evidently deserted his cabin and was working a trap-line on
the Umpqua side. The rangers left the little station, all danger of fire
past, and went down to their offices in the Federal building of one of
the little cities below. Because he was worse than useless in the deep
snows that were sure to come, one of the ranch hands that had driven up
with Bill rode away to the valleys the last of the live stock,--the
horse that Dan had ridden to Snowbird's defense.
Nothing had been heard of Landy Hildreth, who used to live on the trail
to the marsh, and both Lennox and his daughter wondered why. There were
also certain officials who had begun to be curious. As yet, Dan had told
no one of the grim find he had made on his return from hunting. And he
would have found it an extremely difficult fact to explain.
It all went back to those inner springs of motive that few men can see
clearly enough within themselves to recognize. Even the first day, when
he lay burning from his wounds, he worked out his own explanation in
regard to the murder mystery. He hadn't the slightest doubt but that
Cranston had killed Hildreth to prevent his testimony from reaching the
courts below. Of course any other member of the arson ring of hillmen
might have been the murderer; yet Dan was inclined to believe that
Cranston, the leader of the gang, usually preferred to do such dangerous
work as this himself. If it were true, somewhere on that tree-clad ridge
clues would be left. By a law that went down to the roots of life, he
knew, no action is so small but that it leaves its mark. Moreover, it
was wholly possible that the written testimony Hildreth must have
gathered had never been found or destroyed. Dan didn't want the aid of
the courts to find these clues. He wanted to work out the case himself.
It resolved itself into a simple matter of vengeance: Dan had his debt
to pay, and he wanted to bring Cranston to ruin by his own hand alone.
While it was true that he took rather more than the casual interest that
most citizens feel in the destruction of the forest by wanton fire, and
had an actual sense of duty to do all that he could to stop the
activities of the arson ring, his motives, stripped and bare, were
really not utilitarian. He had no particular interest in Hildreth's
case. He remembered him simply as one of Cranston's disreputable gang, a
poacher and a fire bug himself. When all is said and done, it remained
really a personal issue between Dan and Cranston. And personal issues
are frowned upon by law and society. Civilization has toiled up from the
darkness in a great measure to get away from them. But human nature
remains distressingly the same, and Dan's desire to pay his debt was a
distinctly human emotion. Sometime a breed will live upon the earth that
can get clear away from personal vengeance--from that age-old code of
the hills that demands a blow for a blow and a life for a life--but the
time is not yet. And after all, by all the standards of men as men, not
as read in idealistic philosophies, Dan's debt was entirely real. By the
light held high by his ancestors, he could not turn his other cheek.
Just as soon as he was able, he went back to the scene of the murder. He
didn't know when the snow would come to cover what evidence there was.
It threatened every hour. Every wind promised it. The air was sharp and
cold, and no drop of rain could fall through it without crystallizing
into snow. The deer had all gone, and the burrowing people had sought
their holes. The bees worked no more in the winter flowers. Of all the
greater forest creatures, only the wolves and the bear remained,--the
former because their fear of men would not permit them to go down to the
lower hills, and the latter because of his knowledge that when food
became scarce, he could always burrow in the snow. No bear goes into
hibernation from choice. Wise old bachelor, he much prefers to keep just
as late hours as he can--as long as the eating places in the berry
thickets remain open. The cougars had all gone down with the deer, the
migratory birds had departed, and even the squirrels were in hiding.
The scene didn't offer much in the way of clues. Of the body itself,
only a white heap of bones remained; for many and terrible had been the
agents at work upon them. The clothes, however, particularly the coat,
were practically intact. Gripping himself, Dan thrust his fingers into
its pockets, then into the pockets of the shirt and trousers. All papers
that would in any way serve to identify the murdered man, or tell what
his purpose had been in journeying down the trail the night of the
murder had been removed. Only one explanation presented itself. Cranston
had come before him, and searched the body himself.
Dan looked about for tracks, and he was considerably surprised to find
the blurred, indistinct imprint of a shoe other than his own. He hadn't
the least hope that the tracks themselves would offer a clue to a
detective. They were too dim for that. The surprising fact was that
since the murder had been committed immediately before the fall rains,
the water had not completely washed them out. The only possibility
remaining was that Cranston had returned to the body after the week's
rain-fall. The track had been dimmed by the lighter rains that had
fallen since.
But yet it was entirely to be expected that the examination of the body
would be an after-thought on Cranston's part. Possibly at first his
only thought was to kill and, following the prompting that has sent so
many murderers to the gallows, he had afterwards returned to the scene
of the crime to destroy any clues he might have left and to search the
body for any evidence against the arson ring.
Dan's next thought was to follow along the trail and find Cranston's
ambush. Of course it would be in the direction of the settlement from
the body, as the bullet had entered from the front. He found it hard to
believe that Hildreth had fallen in the exact spot where the body lay.
Men journeying at night keep to the trail, and the white heap itself was
fully forty feet back from the trail in the thickets. Perhaps Cranston
had dragged it there to hide it from the sight of any one who might pass
along the lonely trail again; and it was a remote possibility that
Whisperfoot, coming in the night, had tugged it into the thickets for
dreadful purposes of his own. Likely the shot was fired when Hildreth
was in an open place on the trail; and Dan searched for the ambush with
this conclusion in mind. He walked back, looking for a thicket from
which such a spot would be visible. Something over fifty yards down he
found it; and he knew it by the empty brass rifle cartridge that lay
half buried in the wet leaves.
The shell was of the same caliber as Cranston's hunting rifle. Dan's
hand shook as he put it in his pocket.
Encouraged by this amazing find, he turned up the trail toward
Hildreth's cabin. It might be possible, he thought, that Hildreth had
left some of his testimony--perhaps such rudely scrawled letters as
Cranston had written him--in some forgotten drawer in his hut. It was
but a short walk for Dan's hardened legs, and he made it before
mid-afternoon.
The search itself was wholly without result. But because he had time to
think as he climbed the ridge, because as he strode along beneath that
wintry sky he had a chance to consider every detail of the case, he was
able to start out on a new tack when, just before sunset, he returned to
the body. This new train of thought had as its basis that Cranston's
shot had not been deadly at once; that wounded, Hildreth had himself
crawled into the thickets where Whisperfoot had found him. And that
meant that he had to enlarge his search for such documents as Hildreth
had carried to include all the territory between the trail and the
location of the body.
It was possibly a distance of forty feet, and getting down on his hands
and knees, Dan looked for any break in the shrubbery that would
indicate the path that the wounded Hildreth had taken. And it was ten
minutes well rewarded, as far as clearing up certain details of the
crime. His senses had been trained and sharpened by his months in the
wilderness, and he was able to back-track the wounded man from the
skeleton clear to the clearing on the trail where he had first fallen.
But as no clues presented themselves, he started to turn home.
He walked twelve feet, then turned back. Out of the corner of his eye it
seemed to him that he had caught a flash of white, near the end of a
great, dead log beside the path that the wounded Hildreth had taken. It
was to the credit of his mountain training alone that his eye had been
keen enough to detect it; that it had been so faithfully recorded on his
consciousness; and that, knowing at last the importance of details, he
had turned back. For a moment he searched in vain. Evidently a yellow
leaf had deceived him. Once more he retraced his steps, trying to find
the position from which his eye had caught the glimpse of white. Then he
dived straight for the rotten end of the log.
Into a little hollow in the bark, on the underside of the log, some hand
had thrust a small roll of papers. They were rain soaked now, and the
ink had dimmed and blotted; but Dan realized their significance. They
were the complete evidence that Hildreth had accumulated against the
arson ring,--letters that had passed back and forth between himself and
Cranston, a threat of murder from the former if Hildreth turned State's
evidence, and a signed statement of the arson activities of the ring by
Hildreth himself. They were not only enough to break up the ring and
send its members to prison; with the aid of the empty shell and other
circumstantial evidence, they could in all probability convict Bert
Cranston of murder.
For a long time he stood with the shadows of the pines lengthening about
him, his gray eyes in curious shadow. For the moment a glimpse was given
him into the deep wells of the human soul; and understanding came to
him. Was there no balm for hatred even in the moment of death? Were men
unable to forget the themes and motives of their lives, even when the
shadows closed down upon them? Hildreth had known what hand had struck
him down. And even on the frontier of death, his first thought was to
hide his evidence where Cranston could not find it when he searched the
body, but where later it might be found by the detectives that were sure
to come. It was the old creed of a life for a life. He wanted his
evidence to be preserved,--not that right should be wronged, but so that
Cranston would be prosecuted and convicted and made to suffer. His
hatred of Cranston that had made him turn State's evidence in the first
place had been carried with him down into death.
As Dan stood wondering, he thought he heard a twig crack on the trail
behind him, and he wondered what forest creature was still lingering on
the ridges at the eve of the snows.