The night of sleep was so short that it was difficult for Helen to
believe that hours had passed. Bo appeared livelier this morning, with
less complaint of aches.
“Nell, you've got color!” exclaimed Bo. “And your eyes are bright. Isn't
the morning perfectly lovely?... Couldn't you get drunk on that air? I
smell flowers. And oh! I'm hungry!”
“Bo, our host will soon have need of his hunting abilities if your
appetite holds,” said Helen, as she tried to keep her hair out of her
eyes while she laced her boots.
“Look! there's a big dog--a hound.”
Helen looked as Bo directed, and saw a hound of unusually large
proportions, black and tan in color, with long, drooping ears. Curiously
he trotted nearer to the door of their hut and then stopped to gaze at
them. His head was noble, his eyes shone dark and sad. He seemed neither
friendly nor unfriendly.
“Hello, doggie! Come right in--we won't hurt you,” called Bo, but
without enthusiasm.
This made Helen laugh. “Bo, you're simply delicious,” she said. “You're
afraid of that dog.”
“Sure. Wonder if he's Dale's. Of course he must be.”
Presently the hound trotted away out of sight. When the girls presented
themselves at the camp-fire they espied their curious canine visitor
lying down. His ears were so long that half of them lay on the ground.
“I sent Pedro over to wake you girls up,” said Dale, after greeting
them. “Did he scare you?”
“Pedro. So that's his name. No, he didn't exactly scare me. He did Nell,
though. She's an awful tenderfoot,” replied Bo.
“He's a splendid-looking dog,” said Helen, ignoring her sister's sally.
“I love dogs. Will he make friends?”
“He's shy an' wild. You see, when I leave camp he won't hang around. He
an' Tom are jealous of each other. I had a pack of hounds an' lost all
but Pedro on account of Tom. I think you can make friends with Pedro.
Try it.”
Whereupon Helen made overtures to Pedro, and not wholly in vain. The
dog was matured, of almost stern aloofness, and manifestly not used to
people. His deep, wine-dark eyes seemed to search Helen's soul. They
were honest and wise, with a strange sadness.
“He looks intelligent,” observed Helen, as she smoothed the long, dark
ears.
“That hound is nigh human,” responded Dale. “Come, an' while you eat
I'll tell you about Pedro.”
Dale had gotten the hound as a pup from a Mexican sheep-herder who
claimed he was part California bloodhound. He grew up, becoming attached
to Dale. In his younger days he did not get along well with Dale's other
pets and Dale gave him to a rancher down in the valley. Pedro was back
in Dale's camp next day. From that day Dale began to care more for the
hound, but he did not want to keep him, for various reasons, chief of
which was the fact that Pedro was too fine a dog to be left alone half
the time to shift for himself. That fall Dale had need to go to the
farthest village, Snowdrop, where he left Pedro with a friend. Then Dale
rode to Show Down and Pine, and the camp of the Beemans' and with them
he trailed some wild horses for a hundred miles, over into New Mexico.
The snow was flying when Dale got back to his camp in the mountains.
And there was Pedro, gaunt and worn, overjoyed to welcome him home. Roy
Beeman visited Dale that October and told that Dale's friend in Snowdrop
had not been able to keep Pedro. He broke a chain and scaled a ten-foot
fence to escape. He trailed Dale to Show Down, where one of Dale's
friends, recognizing the hound, caught him, and meant to keep him until
Dale's return. But Pedro refused to eat. It happened that a freighter
was going out to the Beeman camp, and Dale's friend boxed Pedro up and
put him on the wagon. Pedro broke out of the box, returned to Show Down,
took up Dale's trail to Pine, and then on to the Beeman camp. That was
as far as Roy could trace the movements of the hound. But he believed,
and so did Dale, that Pedro had trailed them out on the wild-horse hunt.
The following spring Dale learned more from the herder of a sheepman at
whose camp he and the Beemans; had rested on the way into New Mexico.
It appeared that after Dale had left this camp Pedro had arrived, and
another Mexican herder had stolen the hound. But Pedro got away.
“An' he was here when I arrived,” concluded Dale, smiling. “I never
wanted to get rid of him after that. He's turned out to be the finest
dog I ever knew. He knows what I say. He can almost talk. An' I swear he
can cry. He does whenever I start off without him.”
“How perfectly wonderful!” exclaimed Bo. “Aren't animals great?... But I
love horses best.”
It seemed to Helen that Pedro understood they were talking about him,
for he looked ashamed, and swallowed hard, and dropped his gaze. She
knew something of the truth about the love of dogs for their owners.
This story of Dale's, however, was stranger than any she had ever heard.
Tom, the cougar, put in an appearance then, and there was scarcely love
in the tawny eyes he bent upon Pedro. But the hound did not deign to
notice him. Tom sidled up to Bo, who sat on the farther side of the
tarpaulin table-cloth, and manifestly wanted part of her breakfast.
“Gee! I love the look of him,” she said. “But when he's close he makes
my flesh creep.”
“Beasts are as queer as people,” observed Dale. “They take likes an'
dislikes. I believe Tom has taken a shine to you an' Pedro begins to be
interested in your sister. I can tell.”
“Where's Bud?” inquired Bo.
“He's asleep or around somewhere. Now, soon as I get the work done, what
would you girls like to do?”
“Ride!” declared Bo, eagerly.
“Aren't you sore an' stiff?”
“I am that. But I don't care. Besides, when I used to go out to my
uncle's farm near Saint Joe I always found riding to be a cure for
aches.”
“Sure is, if you can stand it. An' what will your sister like to do?”
returned Dale, turning to Helen.
“Oh, I'll rest, and watch you folks--and dream,” replied Helen.
“But after you've rested you must be active,” said Dale, seriously. “You
must do things. It doesn't matter what, just as long as you don't sit
idle.”
“Why?” queried Helen, in surprise. “Why not be idle here in this
beautiful, wild place? just to dream away the hours--the days! I could
do it.”
“But you mustn't. It took me years to learn how bad that was for me. An'
right now I would love nothin' more than to forget my work, my horses
an' pets--everythin', an' just lay around, seein' an' feelin'.”
“Seeing and feeling? Yes, that must be what I mean. But why--what is
it? There are the beauty and color--the wild, shaggy slopes--the gray
cliffs--the singing wind--the lulling water--the clouds--the sky. And
the silence, loneliness, sweetness of it all.”
“It's a driftin' back. What I love to do an' yet fear most. It's what
makes a lone hunter of a man. An' it can grow so strong that it binds a
man to the wilds.”
“How strange!” murmured Helen. “But that could never bind ME. Why, I
must live and fulfil my mission, my work in the civilized world.”
It seemed to Helen that Dale almost imperceptibly shrank at her earnest
words.
“The ways of Nature are strange,” he said. “I look at it different.
Nature's just as keen to wean you back to a savage state as you are to
be civilized. An' if Nature won, you would carry out her design all the
better.”
This hunter's talk shocked Helen and yet stimulated her mind.
“Me--a savage? Oh no!” she exclaimed. “But, if that were possible, what
would Nature's design be?”
“You spoke of your mission in life,” he replied. “A woman's mission is
to have children. The female of any species has only one mission--to
reproduce its kind. An' Nature has only one mission--toward greater
strength, virility, efficiency--absolute perfection, which is
unattainable.”
“What of mental and spiritual development of man and woman?” asked
Helen.
“Both are direct obstacles to the design of Nature. Nature is physical.
To create for limitless endurance for eternal life. That must be
Nature's inscrutable design. An' why she must fail.”
“But the soul!” whispered Helen.
“Ah! When you speak of the soul an' I speak of life we mean the same.
You an' I will have some talks while you're here. I must brush up my
thoughts.”
“So must I, it seems,” said Helen, with a slow smile. She had been
rendered grave and thoughtful. “But I guess I'll risk dreaming under the
pines.”
Bo had been watching them with her keen blue eyes.
“Nell, it'd take a thousand years to make a savage of you,” she said.
“But a week will do for me.”
“Bo, you were one before you left Saint Joe,” replied Helen. “Don't you
remember that school-teacher Barnes who said you were a wildcat and an
Indian mixed? He spanked you with a ruler.”
“Never! He missed me,” retorted Bo, with red in her cheeks. “Nell, I
wish you'd not tell things about me when I was a kid.”
“That was only two years ago,” expostulated Helen, in mild surprise.
“Suppose it was. I was a kid all right. I'll bet you--” Bo broke up
abruptly, and, tossing her head, she gave Tom a pat and then ran away
around the corner of cliff wall.
Helen followed leisurely.
“Say, Nell,” said Bo, when Helen arrived at their little green
ledge-pole hut, “do you know that hunter fellow will upset some of your
theories?”
“Maybe. I'll admit he amazes me--and affronts me, too, I'm afraid,”
replied Helen. “What surprises me is that in spite of his evident lack
of schooling he's not raw or crude. He's elemental.”
“Sister dear, wake up. The man's wonderful. You can learn more from
him than you ever learned in your life. So can I. I always hated books,
anyway.”
When, a little later, Dale approached carrying some bridles, the hound
Pedro trotted at his heels.
“I reckon you'd better ride the horse you had,” he said to Bo.
“Whatever you say. But I hope you let me ride them all, by and by.”
“Sure. I've a mustang out there you'll like. But he pitches a little,”
he rejoined, and turned away toward the park. The hound looked after him
and then at Helen.
“Come, Pedro. Stay with me,” called Helen.
Dale, hearing her, motioned the hound back. Obediently Pedro trotted to
her, still shy and soberly watchful, as if not sure of her intentions,
but with something of friendliness about him now. Helen found a soft,
restful seat in the sun facing the park, and there composed herself for
what she felt would be slow, sweet, idle hours. Pedro curled down beside
her. The tall form of Dale stalked across the park, out toward the
straggling horses. Again she saw a deer grazing among them. How erect
and motionless it stood watching Dale! Presently it bounded away toward
the edge of the forest. Some of the horses whistled and ran, kicking
heels high in the air. The shrill whistles rang clear in the stillness.
“Gee! Look at them go!” exclaimed Bo, gleefully, coming up to where
Helen sat. Bo threw herself down upon the fragrant pine-needles and
stretched herself languorously, like a lazy kitten. There was something
feline in her lithe, graceful outline. She lay flat and looked up
through the pines.
“Wouldn't it be great, now,” she murmured, dreamily, half to herself,
“if that Las Vegas cowboy would happen somehow to come, and then an
earthquake would shut us up here in this Paradise valley so we'd never
get out?”
“Bo! What would mother say to such talk as that?” gasped Helen.
“But, Nell, wouldn't it be great?”
“It would be terrible.”
“Oh, there never was any romance in you, Nell Rayner,” replied Bo. “That
very thing has actually happened out here in this wonderful country
of wild places. You need not tell me! Sure it's happened. With the
cliff-dwellers and the Indians and then white people. Every place I look
makes me feel that. Nell, you'd have to see people in the moon through a
telescope before you'd believe that.”
“I'm practical and sensible, thank goodness!”
“But, for the sake of argument,” protested Bo, with flashing eyes,
“suppose it MIGHT happen. Just to please me, suppose we DID get shut up
here with Dale and that cowboy we saw from the train. Shut in without
any hope of ever climbing out.... What would you do? Would you give up
and pine away and die? Or would you fight for life and whatever joy it
might mean?”
“Self-preservation is the first instinct,” replied Helen, surprised at
a strange, deep thrill in the depths of her. “I'd fight for life, of
course.”
“Yes. Well, really, when I think seriously I don't want anything like
that to happen. But, just the same, if it DID happen I would glory in
it.”
While they were talking Dale returned with the horses.
“Can you bridle an' saddle your own horse?” he asked.
“No. I'm ashamed to say I can't,” replied Bo.
“Time to learn then. Come on. Watch me first when I saddle mine.”
Bo was all eyes while Dale slipped off the bridle from his horse and
then with slow, plain action readjusted it. Next he smoothed the back of
the horse, shook out the blanket, and, folding it half over, he threw
it in place, being careful to explain to Bo just the right position. He
lifted his saddle in a certain way and put that in place, and then he
tightened the cinches.
“Now you try,” he said.
According to Helen's judgment Bo might have been a Western girl all her
days. But Dale shook his head and made her do it over.
“That was better. Of course, the saddle is too heavy for you to sling
it up. You can learn that with a light one. Now put the bridle on
again. Don't be afraid of your hands. He won't bite. Slip the bit in
sideways.... There. Now let's see you mount.”
When Bo got into the saddle Dale continued: “You went up quick an'
light, but the wrong way. Watch me.”
Bo had to mount several times before Dale was satisfied. Then he told
her to ride off a little distance. When Bo had gotten out of earshot
Dale said to Helen: “She'll take to a horse like a duck takes to water.”
Then, mounting, he rode out after her.
Helen watched them trotting and galloping and running the horses round
the grassy park, and rather regretted she had not gone with them.
Eventually Bo rode back, to dismount and fling herself down, red-cheeked
and radiant, with disheveled hair, and curls damp on her temples. How
alive she seemed! Helen's senses thrilled with the grace and charm
and vitality of this surprising sister, and she was aware of a sheer
physical joy in her presence. Bo rested, but she did not rest long. She
was soon off to play with Bud. Then she coaxed the tame doe to eat
out of her hand. She dragged Helen off for wild flowers, curious and
thoughtless by turns. And at length she fell asleep, quickly, in a way
that reminded Helen of the childhood now gone forever.
Dale called them to dinner about four o'clock, as the sun was reddening
the western rampart of the park. Helen wondered where the day had gone.
The hours had flown swiftly, serenely, bringing her scarcely a thought
of her uncle or dread of her forced detention there or possible
discovery by those outlaws supposed to be hunting for her. After
she realized the passing of those hours she had an intangible and
indescribable feeling of what Dale had meant about dreaming the hours
away. The nature of Paradise Park was inimical to the kind of thought
that had habitually been hers. She found the new thought absorbing, yet
when she tried to name it she found that, after all, she had only felt.
At the meal hour she was more than usually quiet. She saw that Dale
noticed it and was trying to interest her or distract her attention. He
succeeded, but she did not choose to let him see that. She strolled
away alone to her seat under the pine. Bo passed her once, and cried,
tantalizingly:
“My, Nell, but you're growing romantic!”
Never before in Helen's life had the beauty of the evening star seemed
so exquisite or the twilight so moving and shadowy or the darkness so
charged with loneliness. It was their environment--the accompaniment of
wild wolf-mourn, of the murmuring waterfall, of this strange man of the
forest and the unfamiliar elements among which he made his home.
Next morning, her energy having returned, Helen shared Bo's lesson in
bridling and saddling her horse, and in riding. Bo, however, rode so
fast and so hard that for Helen to share her company was impossible. And
Dale, interested and amused, yet anxious, spent most of his time
with Bo. It was thus that Helen rode all over the park alone. She was
astonished at its size, when from almost any point it looked so small.
The atmosphere deceived her. How clearly she could see! And she began to
judge distance by the size of familiar things. A horse, looked at across
the longest length of the park, seemed very small indeed. Here and
there she rode upon dark, swift, little brooks, exquisitely clear and
amber-colored and almost hidden from sight by the long grass. These all
ran one way, and united to form a deeper brook that apparently wound
under the cliffs at the west end, and plunged to an outlet in narrow
clefts. When Dale and Bo came to her once she made inquiry, and she was
surprised to learn from Dale that this brook disappeared in a hole in
the rocks and had an outlet on the other side of the mountain. Sometime
he would take them to the lake it formed.
“Over the mountain?” asked Helen, again remembering that she must regard
herself as a fugitive. “Will it be safe to leave our hiding-place? I
forget so often why we are here.”
“We would be better hidden over there than here,” replied Dale. “The
valley on that side is accessible only from that ridge. An' don't worry
about bein' found. I told you Roy Beeman is watchin' Anson an' his gang.
Roy will keep between them an' us.”
Helen was reassured, yet there must always linger in the background of
her mind a sense of dread. In spite of this, she determined to make the
most of her opportunity. Bo was a stimulus. And so Helen spent the rest
of that day riding and tagging after her sister.
The next day was less hard on Helen. Activity, rest, eating, and
sleeping took on a wonderful new meaning to her. She had really never
known them as strange joys. She rode, she walked, she climbed a little,
she dozed under her pine-tree, she worked helping Dale at camp-fire
tasks, and when night came she said she did not know herself. That fact
haunted her in vague, deep dreams. Upon awakening she forgot her resolve
to study herself. That day passed. And then several more went swiftly
before she adapted herself to a situation she had reason to believe
might last for weeks and even months.
It was afternoon that Helen loved best of all the time of the day.
The sunrise was fresh, beautiful; the morning was windy, fragrant; the
sunset was rosy, glorious; the twilight was sad, changing; and night
seemed infinitely sweet with its stars and silence and sleep. But the
afternoon, when nothing changed, when all was serene, when time seemed
to halt, that was her choice, and her solace.
One afternoon she had camp all to herself. Bo was riding. Dale had
climbed the mountain to see if he could find any trace of tracks or see
any smoke from camp-fire. Bud was nowhere to be seen, nor any of the
other pets. Tom had gone off to some sunny ledge where he could bask in
the sun, after the habit of the wilder brothers of his species. Pedro
had not been seen for a night and a day, a fact that Helen had noted
with concern. However, she had forgotten him, and therefore was the more
surprised to see him coming limping into camp on three legs.
“Why, Pedro! You have been fighting. Come here,” she called.
The hound did not look guilty. He limped to her and held up his right
fore paw. The action was unmistakable. Helen examined the injured member
and presently found a piece of what looked like mussel-shell embedded
deeply between the toes. The wound was swollen, bloody, and evidently
very painful. Pedro whined. Helen had to exert all the strength of her
fingers to pull it out. Then Pedro howled. But immediately he showed his
gratitude by licking her hand. Helen bathed his paw and bound it up.
When Dale returned she related the incident and, showing the piece of
shell, she asked: “Where did that come from? Are there shells in the
mountains?”
“Once this country was under the sea,” replied Dale. “I've found things
that 'd make you wonder.”
“Under the sea!” ejaculated Helen. It was one thing to have read of
such a strange fact, but a vastly different one to realize it here among
these lofty peaks. Dale was always showing her something or telling her
something that astounded her.
“Look here,” he said one day. “What do you make of that little bunch of
aspens?”
They were on the farther side of the park and were resting under a
pine-tree. The forest here encroached upon the park with its straggling
lines of spruce and groves of aspen. The little clump of aspens did not
differ from hundreds Helen had seen.
“I don't make anything particularly of it,” replied Helen, dubiously.
“Just a tiny grove of aspens--some very small, some larger, but none
very big. But it's pretty with its green and yellow leaves fluttering
and quivering.”
“It doesn't make you think of a fight?”
“Fight? No, it certainly does not,” replied Helen.
“Well, it's as good an example of fight, of strife, of selfishness, as
you will find in the forest,” he said. “Now come over, you an' Bo, an'
let me show you what I mean.”
“Come on, Nell,” cried Bo, with enthusiasm. “He'll open our eyes some
more.”
Nothing loath, Helen went with them to the little clump of aspens.
“About a hundred altogether,” said Dale. “They're pretty well shaded by
the spruces, but they get the sunlight from east an' south. These little
trees all came from the same seedlings. They're all the same age. Four
of them stand, say, ten feet or more high an' they're as large around as
my wrist. Here's one that's largest. See how full-foliaged he is--how he
stands over most of the others, but not so much over these four next to
him. They all stand close together, very close, you see. Most of them
are no larger than my thumb. Look how few branches they have, an' none
low down. Look at how few leaves. Do you see how all the branches stand
out toward the east an' south--how the leaves, of course, face the same
way? See how one branch of one tree bends aside one from another tree.
That's a fight for the sunlight. Here are one--two--three dead trees.
Look, I can snap them off. An' now look down under them. Here are little
trees five feet high--four feet high--down to these only a foot
high. Look how pale, delicate, fragile, unhealthy! They get so little
sunshine. They were born with the other trees, but did not get an equal
start. Position gives the advantage, perhaps.”
Dale led the girls around the little grove, illustrating his words by
action. He seemed deeply in earnest.
“You understand it's a fight for water an' sun. But mostly sun, because,
if the leaves can absorb the sun, the tree an' roots will grow to grasp
the needed moisture. Shade is death--slow death to the life of trees.
These little aspens are fightin' for place in the sunlight. It is a
merciless battle. They push an' bend one another's branches aside an'
choke them. Only perhaps half of these aspens will survive, to make one
of the larger clumps, such as that one of full-grown trees over there.
One season will give advantage to this saplin' an' next year to that
one. A few seasons' advantage to one assures its dominance over the
others. But it is never sure of holdin' that dominance. An 'if wind or
storm or a strong-growin' rival does not overthrow it, then sooner or
later old age will. For there is absolute and continual fight. What is
true of these aspens is true of all the trees in the forest an' of all
plant life in the forest. What is most wonderful to me is the tenacity
of life.”
And next day Dale showed them an even more striking example of this
mystery of nature.
He guided them on horseback up one of the thick, verdant-wooded slopes,
calling their attention at various times to the different growths, until
they emerged on the summit of the ridge where the timber grew scant
and dwarfed. At the edge of timber-line he showed a gnarled and knotted
spruce-tree, twisted out of all semblance to a beautiful spruce, bent
and storm-blasted, with almost bare branches, all reaching one' way. The
tree was a specter. It stood alone. It had little green upon it. There
seemed something tragic about its contortions. But it was alive and
strong. It had no rivals to take sun or moisture. Its enemies were the
snow and wind and cold of the heights.
Helen felt, as the realization came to her, the knowledge Dale wished
to impart, that it was as sad as wonderful, and as mysterious as it was
inspiring. At that moment there were both the sting and sweetness of
life--the pain and the joy--in Helen's heart. These strange facts
were going to teach her--to transform her. And even if they hurt, she
welcomed them.