A HAVEN OF REFUGE
Vicky was enjoying herself tremendously. All her young life she had been
chaperoned and directed. Teachers had watched over and instructed her.
She had better do this; it was not ladylike to do that. The right kind
of a girl could not be too careful what she did and how she did it. The
sweet demureness of watchful waiting was the only proper attitude of a
nice young woman toward that important and vital business of getting
married. So much she had learned at school.
It happened that Vicky did not want to get married—not yet, at any
rate. She wanted to try her own wings. She wanted to flutter out into
the world and see what it was like.
Already she had made experiments and discoveries. One of them was that
if you smiled in the right way when you asked for it you could get
anything you wanted from men. She had wanted a globe and some new seats
for the schoolroom, and the directors had voted them cheerfully even
though the district was short of funds. Jim Budd had spent two hours
building some bookshelves she needed for her bedroom, just because she
had said pretty please to him.
Now, Mrs. Budd was different. She liked Victoria and fed her well and
saw that she wore her heavy coat when it was cold, but the young woman
understood that smiles would not have the least effect on any of that
plump mother’s decisions. In this Mrs. Budd was like the rest of her
sex. They did not go out of their way to please you because you were
a—well, a not exactly plain girl.
The experiments of the young school teacher were innocent enough. She
was not by nature a coquette. But the world was her oyster, and she
meant to have a perfectly delightful time prying it open. She found that
there were a good many people, at least fifty per cent. of whom were of
the masculine gender, ready to lend a hand at operating on the bivalve.
One of the most assiduous was Ralph Dodson.
Vicky discouraged his attentions. For one thing, he was the brother of a
man she had detested all her life. She did not want to have anything
whatever to do with a Dodson. After what had taken place it was not
decent that the families should have any relationship at all.
But she found Ralph Dodson not easily disheartened. He did not lay
himself open to a direct snub. A member of the board had properly
introduced him to her. If he came out of a store as she was going down
the street and walked a block beside her she could hardly rebuff him.
Before she had been at Piodie a month, the clerk of the school district
retired and Dodson was appointed in his place. This annoyed her, because
she now had to see a good deal of him; but she could not very well
accuse him of having brought about the change merely for that purpose.
Vicky found herself studying the man. She looked in him for the same
traits that had made her as a child hate his brother. It irritated her
that she did not find them. Ralph Dodson was strong, competent,
energetic. She would have liked to discover him mean, but instead she
uncovered in his view a largeness of vision in civic affairs that
surprised her. He believed in good schools even though they cost money.
One flaw she found in him. He had kept out of the army during the war
and made money while Scot and Hugh were fighting for the Union. But this
was true of many men in the far West, which was a long way from the
fighting line.
One day an accident took place that increased her unwilling admiration
of him. Near the schoolhouse was an abandoned mine tunnel, poorly
timbered, in which she had forbidden the children to play. Little Johnny
Haxtun, playing hide and seek, ventured into it and in the darkness
stumbled against a rotten post. At his weight the support crumbled.
There was a cave-in, and Johnny lay crushed beneath a mass of rock and
timber.
Among the first of the rescuers to arrive was Ralph Dodson. He told the
young school teacher, who was standing there white and shaken, to get a
doctor and have first-aid relief at hand in case Johnny should be alive
when he was released.
Then, axe in hand, he led the men into the tunnel. It was dangerous
work. The fallen timbering had to be cut and dug away. At any moment an
avalanche of rock and dirt might pour down from above and kill them all.
Dodson did not shirk. He stood up to his job deep in the tunnel,
regardless of the little slides trickling down that might at any instant
precipitate a hundred tons upon him. The worst of it was that the more
dirt and jammed timbers were removed, the greater the peril of a second
cave-in.
Johnny was still alive. A couple of crossed timbers had protected him
from the weight of rock and dirt. Vicky heard his whimpering and came
into the tunnel to comfort him. But Dodson would have none of that. He
ordered the girl into the open instantly.
“This isn’t a woman’s job. Get out,” he told her curtly.
Perhaps she resented his manner at the moment, but when half an hour
later he emerged from the tunnel carrying the maimed body of the little
fellow she forgot her pique. The man’s hands were torn and bleeding, his
face stained with sweat and streaks of dirt. The clothes of which he was
usually so careful were daubed with yellow clay. She remembered only
that he had risked his life to save Johnny.
Nor could she forget it when he called that evening at her boarding
house, ostensibly to tell her that the doctor had set Johnny’s broken
leg and found no other injury from the accident.
“It’s going to be hard on his mother. You know she’s a widow and takes
in washing,” Vicky said. “I wonder if we couldn’t give a school
entertainment for her benefit.”
“It won’t be necessary,” he said promptly. “It’s partly my fault the
accident happened. As school clerk I should have had the mouth of the
tunnel boarded up. I’m going to pay all the bills and see that Mrs.
Haxtun doesn’t lose anything by it.”
Victoria felt a glow at her heart. It always did her good to find out
that people were kinder and more generous than she had supposed. Her
judgment of Ralph Dodson had been that he was hard and selfish. Now she
was ashamed of herself for thinking so. She thought of the “Greater love
than this” verse, and in her soul she humbled herself before him. What a
little prig she had been to set herself up as arbiter of right and
wrong.
Dodson made the most of the opportunity chance had given him. He used it
as a wedge to open up a friendship with the girl. She was still
reluctant, but this was based on some subconscious impulse. All the fine
generosity in her was in arms to be fair to him regardless of his
brother.
As soon as he learned that she had a claim on Bald Knob that she wanted
to develop Dodson put his experience at her service. He helped her
arrange with a man to do the actual assessment work and he went over the
ground with her to choose the spot for the shaft. Afterwards he kept an
eye on Oscar Sorenson to see that he did a fair day’s work for the pay
he received.
On holidays Vicky usually walked or rode out to her claim to see how
Sorenson was getting along. She was pretty apt to meet Dodson on the way
to Bald Knob or else superintending operations there. Two or three times
he came down to her prospect at noon and they strolled up a little gulch
to pick wild flowers and eat their lunch together.
He knew so much more about the world than she did that she found his
talk interesting. The glimpse she had had of San Francisco had whetted
her appetite. Were other cities like the one by the Golden Gate, gay and
full of life and fashion which young girls at a finishing school were
not permitted to see? He told her of London and Paris and Vienna, and
her innocent credulity accepted what he said at face value. He had the
gift of talk, the manner of a man of the world. From the confident ease
of his descriptions she could not guess that he had never been in Paris
or Vienna and only once in London for a flying visit to float a mining
scheme.
“You’ll not be going to the mine to-day, dearie,” Mrs. Budd said to
Vicky one Saturday morning when the hills were white with a blanket of
snow.
“Yes. I promised Oscar to bring his mail and some tobacco. Besides, I
want to see how he’s been getting along.”
“If you take my advice you’ll stay comfy at home and not go traipsing
all over the hills gettin’ your feet an’ your skirts wet.”
One of the things Vicky rarely did was to accept advice and follow it. A
fault of her years and of her temperament was that she had to gain her
wisdom through experience.
“I love to get out in the snow and tramp in it,” Vicky said cheerfully,
helping herself to another hot biscuit. “And I’ll not get wet if I wear
arctics and tuck up my skirts when I’m out of town.”
“Hmp! If you’re set on it you’ll go. I know that well enough. But you’ll
come home early, won’t you? There’s a lot more snow up in the sky yet,
and by night we’re likely to have some of it.”
Vicky promised. When she struck the trail to Bald Knob she discovered
that the snow was deeper than she had supposed. But there was a
well-beaten track as far as the shoulder of the ridge. Beyond that she
had to break a path for herself.
It was heavy work. She grew tired long before she reached the mine. But
she kept going rather than turn back. It was nearly two o’clock when
Sorenson answered her hail.
Vicky did not stay long at the mine. She did not like the look of the
sky. The wind was rising, too, and the temperature falling. Once she
thought of asking Sorenson to go back to town with her, but she scouted
the idea promptly and dismissed it. It did not agree with her view of
the self-reliance she was cultivating. Incidentally, too, Sorenson was a
lazy, sulky fellow who would resent taking any unnecessary trouble. She
did not want to put herself under an obligation to him.
The wind had sifted a good deal of snow into the tracks she had made on
the way down from the shoulder of the hill. It came now in great
swirling gusts, filling the air with the light surface snow. By the time
she had passed the Dodson properties the wind had risen to a gale, a
biting wintry hurricane that almost lifted her from her feet. A stinging
sleet swept into her face and blinded her. She found it difficult to
make out the way.
Before she reached the foot of the slope below Bald Knob she was very
tired. The wind drifts had filled the path, so that she had to break her
own trail. The fury of the storm was constantly increasing.
In the comparative shelter of a little draw she stopped to decide what
she had better do. It was still a mile and a half to town. She did not
believe she could possibly make it even if she did not lose the way. Nor
could she climb Bald Knob again to the Dodson camp. That would not be
within her power. There was a little cabin in the next draw where Ralph
slept when he did not care to go to town after spending the day on his
Bald Knob property. It was usually stocked with supplies of food and
fuel. No doubt it would be unoccupied now.
She put her head down into the white blizzard and trudged round the edge
of the ridge that divided the two small gulches. Three minutes later she
pushed open the door of the cabin and walked in.
A man sitting at a table jumped to his feet with a startled oath.
“Goddamighty, who are you?” he demanded.
Vicky was as much taken aback as he. “I thought the cabin was empty,”
she explained. “I’m Victoria Lowell, the school teacher at Piodie. I’ve
been up to my claim.”
The man’s look was half a scowl and half a leer. He was a big
round-shouldered ruffian with long hair and tangled, unkempt beard.
There floated in her mind a vague and fugitive recollection of having
seen him before somewhere.
“Better dry yorese’f,” he said ungraciously.
From the fireplace a big twisted piñon knot threw out a glow of heat.
The girl took off her coat, shook the snow from the wet skirts, and
moved forward to absorb the warmth.
Her host pushed a chair toward her with his foot.
She sank into it, worn out. Presently the moist skirts began to steam
and the warmth of the fire made her drowsy. She aroused herself to
conversation.
“Sorry I had to trouble you. I was ’fraid I couldn’t make it to town.”
“Hell’v a day,” he agreed.
On the table were a whisky bottle and a glass. He indicated them with a
sweep of his hand. “Have a nip. Warm you up, miss.”
“No, thanks. I’m all right.”
Over her stole a delightful lassitude, the reaction from her fight with
the storm. She looked sleepily into the live coals. The howling of the
storm outside was deadened enough to make a sort of lullaby. Her head
began to nod and her eyelids closed. With a start she brought herself
awake again.
“Didn’t know I was so done up,” she murmured.
“’S all right. Sleep if you want to, miss,” the man told her.
Not for an hour or more did she open her eyes again. The table was set
for a meal. A coffeepot was heating on some coals and a black kettle
hung suspended from a crane above the fire.
“Come an’ get it, miss,” the man said gruffly when he saw that she was
awake.
Vicky discovered that she was hungry. She drank the coffee he poured out
and ate the stew he ladled from the kettle. He did not eat with her.
“If the storm would break I’d try to reach town,” she said presently.
“No chance. You stay here where you’re safe, miss.”
“My friends will worry.”
“Let ’em.”
“What was that?” the girl asked.
She had heard a sound of something striking the side of the house.
“Prob’ly a limb flung by the wind. Never saw such a night.”
Victoria shuddered. But for good fortune she might have now been
perishing in the snow.
“How long do you think it will last?” she asked.
“Can’t tell. Maybe till mo’ning. Maybe two-three days.”
“Oh, it couldn’t last that long,” the girl cried, appalled.
“Hmp! Guess you don’t know a Nevada blizzard.” Again he looked at her, a
leer on his heavy face. “You’re liable to have to put up with old Sam
for quite a spell, missie.”
Vicky did not answer. Her eyes were meeting his and the blood crept into
her cheeks. There was a furtive sinister menace between his narrowed
lips that reminded her of a wolf creeping toward its kill. She looked
away, her heart hammering fast. What sort of a creature was this man
with whom she was locked up a million miles away from all the safeguards
of society? In the glowing coals she found no answer to that question.
Presently she stole a sidelong look at him. He was pouring a drink from
the whisky bottle.
“How?” he said, lifting the glass toward her. He tilted back his hairy
throat and drained the tumbler.
A heavy pounding on the door startled the drinker. He listened.
Victoria was at the door instantly. She flung it open. A man lurched
forward and crumpled up on the floor.