Dale stood with face and arm upraised, and he watched Helen ride off the
ledge to disappear in the forest. That vast spruce slope seemed to have
swallowed her. She was gone! Slowly Dale lowered his arm with gesture
expressive of a strange finality, an eloquent despair, of which he was
unconscious.
He turned to the park, to his camp, and the many duties of a hunter. The
park did not seem the same, nor his home, nor his work.
“I reckon this feelin's natural,” he soliloquized, resignedly, “but it's
sure queer for me. That's what comes of makin' friends. Nell an' Bo,
now, they made a difference, an' a difference I never knew before.”
He calculated that this difference had been simply one of
responsibility, and then the charm and liveliness of the companionship
of girls, and finally friendship. These would pass now that the causes
were removed.
Before he had worked an hour around camp he realized a change had come,
but it was not the one anticipated. Always before he had put his mind on
his tasks, whatever they might be; now he worked while his thoughts were
strangely involved.
The little bear cub whined at his heels; the tame deer seemed to regard
him with deep, questioning eyes, the big cougar padded softly here and
there as if searching for something.
“You all miss them--now--I reckon,” said Dale. “Well, they're gone an'
you'll have to get along with me.”
Some vague approach to irritation with his pets surprised him. Presently
he grew both irritated and surprised with himself--a state of mind
totally unfamiliar. Several times, as old habit brought momentary
abstraction, he found himself suddenly looking around for Helen and
Bo. And each time the shock grew stronger. They were gone, but their
presence lingered. After his camp chores were completed he went over to
pull down the lean-to which the girls had utilized as a tent. The spruce
boughs had dried out brown and sear; the wind had blown the roof awry;
the sides were leaning in. As there was now no further use for
this little habitation, he might better pull it down. Dale did not
acknowledge that his gaze had involuntarily wandered toward it many
times. Therefore he strode over with the intention of destroying it.
For the first time since Roy and he had built the lean-to he stepped
inside. Nothing was more certain than the fact that he experienced a
strange sensation, perfectly incomprehensible to him. The blankets
lay there on the spruce boughs, disarranged and thrown back by hurried
hands, yet still holding something of round folds where the slender
forms had nestled. A black scarf often worn by Bo lay covering the
pillow of pine-needles; a red ribbon that Helen had worn on her hair
hung from a twig. These articles were all that had been forgotten. Dale
gazed at them attentively, then at the blankets, and all around the
fragrant little shelter; and he stepped outside with an uncomfortable
knowledge that he could not destroy the place where Helen and Bo had
spent so many hours.
Whereupon, in studious mood, Dale took up his rifle and strode out to
hunt. His winter supply of venison had not yet been laid in. Action
suited his mood; he climbed far and passed by many a watching buck
to slay which seemed murder; at last he jumped one that was wild and
bounded away. This he shot, and set himself a Herculean task in packing
the whole carcass back to camp. Burdened thus, he staggered under the
trees, sweating freely, many times laboring for breath, aching with
toil, until at last he had reached camp. There he slid the deer carcass
off his shoulders, and, standing over it, he gazed down while his breast
labored. It was one of the finest young bucks he had ever seen. But
neither in stalking it, nor making a wonderful shot, nor in packing home
a weight that would have burdened two men, nor in gazing down at his
beautiful quarry, did Dale experience any of the old joy of the hunter.
“I'm a little off my feed,” he mused, as he wiped sweat from his heated
face. “Maybe a little dotty, as I called Al. But that'll pass.”
Whatever his state, it did not pass. As of old, after a long day's hunt,
he reclined beside the camp-fire and watched the golden sunset glows
change on the ramparts; as of old he laid a hand on the soft, furry head
of the pet cougar; as of old he watched the gold change to red and then
to dark, and twilight fall like a blanket; as of old he listened to
the dreamy, lulling murmur of the water fall. The old familiar beauty,
wildness, silence, and loneliness were there, but the old content seemed
strangely gone.
Soberly he confessed then that he missed the happy company of the girls.
He did not distinguish Helen from Bo in his slow introspection. When
he sought his bed he did not at once fall to sleep. Always, after a
few moments of wakefulness, while the silence settled down or the wind
moaned through the pines, he had fallen asleep. This night he found
different. Though he was tired, sleep would not soon come. The
wilderness, the mountains, the park, the camp--all seemed to have lost
something. Even the darkness seemed empty. And when at length Dale fell
asleep it was to be troubled by restless dreams.
Up with the keen-edged, steely-bright dawn, he went at the his tasks
with the springy stride of the deer-stalker.
At the end of that strenuous day, which was singularly full of the old
excitement and action and danger, and of new observations, he was bound
to confess that no longer did the chase suffice for him.
Many times on the heights that day, with the wind keen in his face, and
the vast green billows of spruce below him, he had found that he was
gazing without seeing, halting without object, dreaming as he had never
dreamed before.
Once, when a magnificent elk came out upon a rocky ridge and, whistling
a challenge to invisible rivals, stood there a target to stir any
hunter's pulse, Dale did not even raise his rifle. Into his ear just
then rang Helen's voice: “Milt Dale, you are no Indian. Giving yourself
to a hunter's wildlife is selfish. It is wrong. You love this lonely
life, but it is not work. Work that does not help others is not a real
man's work.”
From that moment conscience tormented him. It was not what he loved,
but what he ought to do, that counted in the sum of good achieved in the
world. Old Al Auchincloss had been right. Dale was wasting strength and
intelligence that should go to do his share in the development of the
West. Now that he had reached maturity, if through his knowledge of
nature's law he had come to see the meaning of the strife of men for
existence, for place, for possession, and to hold them in contempt, that
was no reason why he should keep himself aloof from them, from some work
that was needed in an incomprehensible world.
Dale did not hate work, but he loved freedom. To be alone, to live with
nature, to feel the elements, to labor and dream and idle and climb
and sleep unhampered by duty, by worry, by restriction, by the petty
interests of men--this had always been his ideal of living. Cowboys,
riders, sheep-herders, farmers--these toiled on from one place and
one job to another for the little money doled out to them. Nothing
beautiful, nothing significant had ever existed in that for him. He had
worked as a boy at every kind of range-work, and of all that humdrum
waste of effort he had liked sawing wood best. Once he had quit a job
of branding cattle because the smell of burning hide, the bawl of the
terrified calf, had sickened him. If men were honest there would be no
need to scar cattle. He had never in the least desired to own land and
droves of stock, and make deals with ranchmen, deals advantageous to
himself. Why should a man want to make a deal or trade a horse or do a
piece of work to another man's disadvantage? Self-preservation was the
first law of life. But as the plants and trees and birds and beasts
interpreted that law, merciless and inevitable as they were, they had
neither greed nor dishonesty. They lived by the grand rule of what was
best for the greatest number.
But Dale's philosophy, cold and clear and inevitable, like nature
itself, began to be pierced by the human appeal in Helen Rayner's words.
What did she mean? Not that he should lose his love of the wilderness,
but that he realize himself! Many chance words of that girl had depth.
He was young, strong, intelligent, free from taint of disease or the
fever of drink. He could do something for others. Who? If that mattered,
there, for instance, was poor old Mrs. Cass, aged and lame now; there
was Al Auchincloss, dying in his boots, afraid of enemies, and wistful
for his blood and his property to receive the fruit of his labors; there
were the two girls, Helen and Bo, new and strange to the West, about to
be confronted by a big problem of ranch life and rival interests. Dale
thought of still more people in the little village of Pine--of others
who had failed, whose lives were hard, who could have been made happier
by kindness and assistance.
What, then, was the duty of Milt Dale to himself? Because men preyed on
one another and on the weak, should he turn his back upon a so-called
civilization or should he grow like them? Clear as a bell came the
answer that his duty was to do neither. And then he saw how the little
village of Pine, as well as the whole world, needed men like him. He had
gone to nature, to the forest, to the wilderness for his development;
and all the judgments and efforts of his future would be a result of
that education.
Thus Dale, lying in the darkness and silence of his lonely park, arrived
at a conclusion that he divined was but the beginning of a struggle.
It took long introspection to determine the exact nature of that
struggle, but at length it evolved into the paradox that Helen Rayner
had opened his eyes to his duty as a man, that he accepted it, yet found
a strange obstacle in the perplexing, tumultuous, sweet fear of ever
going near her again.
Suddenly, then, all his thought revolved around the girl, and, thrown
off his balance, he weltered in a wilderness of unfamiliar strange
ideas.
When he awoke next day the fight was on in earnest. In his sleep his
mind had been active. The idea that greeted him, beautiful as the
sunrise, flashed in memory of Auchincloss's significant words, “Take
your chance with the girl!”
The old rancher was in his dotage. He hinted of things beyond the range
of possibility. That idea of a chance for Dale remained before his
consciousness only an instant. Stars were unattainable; life could
not be fathomed; the secret of nature did not abide alone on the
earth--these theories were not any more impossible of proving than that
Helen Rayner might be for him.
Nevertheless, her strange coming into his life had played havoc, the
extent of which he had only begun to realize.
For a month he tramped through the forest. It was October, a still
golden, fulfilling season of the year; and everywhere in the vast dark
green a glorious blaze of oak and aspen made beautiful contrast. He
carried his rifle, but he never used it. He would climb miles and go
this way and that with no object in view. Yet his eye and ear had
never been keener. Hours he would spend on a promontory, watching
the distance, where the golden patches of aspen shone bright out
of dark-green mountain slopes. He loved to fling himself down in an
aspen-grove at the edge of a senaca, and there lie in that radiance like
a veil of gold and purple and red, with the white tree-trunks striping
the shade. Always, whether there were breeze or not, the aspen-leaves
quivered, ceaselessly, wonderfully, like his pulses, beyond his control.
Often he reclined against a mossy rock beside a mountain stream to
listen, to watch, to feel all that was there, while his mind held a
haunting, dark-eyed vision of a girl. On the lonely heights, like an
eagle, he sat gazing down into Paradise Park, that was more and more
beautiful, but would never again be the same, never fill him with
content, never be all and all to him.
Late in October the first snow fell. It melted at once on the south side
of the park, but the north slopes and the rims and domes above stayed
white.
Dale had worked quick and hard at curing and storing his winter supply
of food, and now he spent days chopping and splitting wood to burn
during the months he would be snowed-in. He watched for the dark-gray,
fast-scudding storm-clouds, and welcomed them when they came. Once there
lay ten feet of snow on the trails he would be snowed-in until spring.
It would be impossible to go down to Pine. And perhaps during the long
winter he would be cured of this strange, nameless disorder of his
feelings.
November brought storms up on the peaks. Flurries of snow fell in
the park every day, but the sunny south side, where Dale's camp lay,
retained its autumnal color and warmth. Not till late in winter did the
snow creep over this secluded nook.
The morning came at last, piercingly keen and bright, when Dale saw
that the heights were impassable; the realization brought him a poignant
regret. He had not guessed how he had wanted to see Helen Rayner again
until it was too late. That opened his eyes. A raging frenzy of action
followed, in which he only tired himself physically without helping
himself spiritually.
It was sunset when he faced the west, looking up at the pink snow-domes
and the dark-golden fringe of spruce, and in that moment he found the
truth.
“I love that girl! I love that girl!” he spoke aloud, to the distant
white peaks, to the winds, to the loneliness and silence of his prison,
to the great pines and to the murmuring stream, and to his faithful
pets. It was his tragic confession of weakness, of amazing truth, of
hopeless position, of pitiful excuse for the transformation wrought in
him.
Dale's struggle ended there when he faced his soul. To understand
himself was to be released from strain, worry, ceaseless importuning
doubt and wonder and fear. But the fever of unrest, of uncertainty, had
been nothing compared to a sudden upflashing torment of love.
With somber deliberation he set about the tasks needful, and others
that he might make--his camp-fires and meals, the care of his pets and
horses, the mending of saddles and pack-harness, the curing of buckskin
for moccasins and hunting-suits. So his days were not idle. But all this
work was habit for him and needed no application of mind.
And Dale, like some men of lonely wilderness lives who did not
retrograde toward the savage, was a thinker. Love made him a sufferer.
The surprise and shame of his unconscious surrender, the certain
hopelessness of it, the long years of communion with all that was wild,
lonely, and beautiful, the wonderfully developed insight into nature's
secrets, and the sudden-dawning revelation that he was no omniscient
being exempt from the ruthless ordinary destiny of man--all these showed
him the strength of his manhood and of his passion, and that the life
he had chosen was of all lives the one calculated to make love sad and
terrible.
Helen Rayner haunted him. In the sunlight there was not a place
around camp which did not picture her lithe, vigorous body, her dark,
thoughtful eyes, her eloquent, resolute lips, and the smile that was so
sweet and strong. At night she was there like a slender specter, pacing
beside him under the moaning pines. Every camp-fire held in its heart
the glowing white radiance of her spirit.
Nature had taught Dale to love solitude and silence, but love itself
taught him their meaning. Solitude had been created for the eagle on his
crag, for the blasted mountain fir, lonely and gnarled on its peak, for
the elk and the wolf. But it had not been intended for man. And to
live always in the silence of wild places was to become obsessed with
self--to think and dream--to be happy, which state, however pursued by
man, was not good for him. Man must be given imperious longings for the
unattainable.
It needed, then, only the memory of an unattainable woman to render
solitude passionately desired by a man, yet almost unendurable. Dale was
alone with his secret; and every pine, everything in that park saw him
shaken and undone.
In the dark, pitchy deadness of night, when there was no wind and the
cold on the peaks had frozen the waterfall, then the silence seemed
insupportable. Many hours that should have been given to slumber were
paced out under the cold, white, pitiless stars, under the lonely pines.
Dale's memory betrayed him, mocked his restraint, cheated him of
any peace; and his imagination, sharpened by love, created pictures,
fancies, feelings, that drove him frantic.
He thought of Helen Rayner's strong, shapely brown hand. In a thousand
different actions it haunted him. How quick and deft in camp-fire tasks!
how graceful and swift as she plaited her dark hair! how tender and
skilful in its ministration when one of his pets had been injured! how
eloquent when pressed tight against her breast in a moment of fear on
the dangerous heights! how expressive of unutterable things when laid on
his arm!
Dale saw that beautiful hand slowly creep up his arm, across his
shoulder, and slide round his neck to clasp there. He was powerless to
inhibit the picture. And what he felt then was boundless, unutterable.
No woman had ever yet so much as clasped his hand, and heretofore no
such imaginings had ever crossed his mind, yet deep in him, somewhere
hidden, had been this waiting, sweet, and imperious need. In the bright
day he appeared to ward off such fancies, but at night he was helpless.
And every fancy left him weaker, wilder.
When, at the culmination of this phase of his passion, Dale, who
had never known the touch of a woman's lips, suddenly yielded to the
illusion of Helen Rayner's kisses, he found himself quite mad, filled
with rapture and despair, loving her as he hated himself. It seemed as
if he had experienced all these terrible feelings in some former life
and had forgotten them in this life. He had no right to think of her,
but he could not resist it. Imagining the sweet surrender of her lips
was a sacrilege, yet here, in spite of will and honor and shame, he was
lost.
Dale, at length, was vanquished, and he ceased to rail at himself, or
restrain his fancies. He became a dreamy, sad-eyed, camp-fire gazer,
like many another lonely man, separated, by chance or error, from what
the heart hungered most for. But this great experience, when all its
significance had clarified in his mind, immeasurably broadened his
understanding of the principles of nature applied to life.
Love had been in him stronger than in most men, because of his keen,
vigorous, lonely years in the forest, where health of mind and body were
intensified and preserved. How simple, how natural, how inevitable! He
might have loved any fine-spirited, healthy-bodied girl. Like a tree
shooting its branches and leaves, its whole entity, toward the sunlight,
so had he grown toward a woman's love. Why? Because the thing he revered
in nature, the spirit, the universal, the life that was God, had created
at his birth or before his birth the three tremendous instincts of
nature--to fight for life, to feed himself, to reproduce his kind. That
was all there was to it. But oh! the mystery, the beauty, the torment,
and the terror of this third instinct--this hunger for the sweetness and
the glory of a woman's love!