"So the sheriff, Jim Taggart, is not dead, after all. And you...."
Deveril looked across their tiny fire at her, a strange expression in
his eyes, and said quietly:
"No; he is not dead. All along I judged that unlikely. Though I slung
your gun at him hard enough, if it hit a lucky spot. It's hard to kill
a man, you know.... And, to finish your thought, I am not running wild
with a hangman's noose hanging about my neck! And you...."
He took a certain devilish glee in concluding with an echo of her own
words. And with the added insinuation poured into them from his own. He
saw her jerk her head up defiantly.
"I told you...."
Again she broke off. He made no remark, but sat looking at her
intently. They had eaten and drunk their fill; there remained to them a
goodly stock of provisions; Deveril was smoking his cigarette.
"What now?" demanded Lynette, as one tired of a subject and impatient
to look forward.
He shrugged.
"All troubles have slipped off my shoulders. The worst they could
do to me, if they could lay me by the heels, would be to charge me
with assault and battery! And we're in a neck of the woods where men
laugh at a charge like that, and ask the assaulted one why the devil
he didn't hit back! What now? For you I'd advise keeping right on
travelling. For if Bruce Standing is dead it's up to you to keep
on the move! As for me, I never met up with a sweeter travelling
companion, nor yet with a nervier, nor yet, by God, with a lovelier!
Say the word, Lynette Brooke, and we strike on together, over the ridge
and deeper into the wilderness, headed for the land beyond Buck Valley,
beyond Big Bear Creek. For the wild lands beyond the last holdings
of the late Timber-Wolf, to be on the ground when Mexicali Joe leads
Taggart and Gallup and Shipton to his gold!"
She understood how Babe Deveril, as any man should be, was relieved
at knowing that the man he had stricken down was not dead; that
he, himself, was not hunted as a murderer. And yet she was vaguely
distressed and uneasy. She felt a change in him, and in his attitude
toward her.... When he awaited her reply, she made none. Again fatigue
swept over her, and with it a new stirring of uneasiness....
There was a drop of coffee left; she leaned forward and took it,
thinking: "He had his tobacco, and it has bolstered up his nerves." She
drank and then sat back, leaning against a tree, her face hidden from
him, while she searched his face in the dim light, searched it with a
stubborn desire to read the most hidden thought in his brain.
"I am tired," she said after a long while. He could make nothing of her
voice, low and impersonal, and with no inflection to give it expression
beyond the brief meanings of the words themselves. "Very tired. Yet
necessity drives. And it is not safe here, so near them. I can go on
for another hour, perhaps two or three hours. That will mean ... how
far? Four or five miles; maybe six, seven?"
Not only for one hour, not alone for just two or three hours did they
push on. But for half of that silent, starry night. A score of times
Babe Deveril said to her: "We've done our stunt; if any girl on earth
ever earned rest, you've done it." But always there was that driving
force and that allure, and another ridge just ahead, and her answer:
"Another mile.... I can do it."
Deveril, with a lighted match cupped in his hand, looked at his watch.
"It's long after midnight; nearly one o'clock."
They found a sheltered spot among the tall pines; above them the
keen edge of an up-thrust ridge; just below a thick-grown clump of
underbrush; underfoot dry needles, fallen and drifted from the pines.
Again he was all courtesy and kindliness toward her, seeing her hard
pressed, judging her, despite her mask of hardihood, near collapse. So
he cut pine boughs with his knife and broke them with his hands, and of
them piled her a couch. She thanked him gently; impulsively she gave
him her hand ... though, as his caught it eagerly, she jerked it away
quickly.... He watched her lie down, snuggling her cheek against the
curve of her arm. Near by he lay down on his back, his two hands under
his head, his eyes on the stars. A curious smile twitched at his lips.
And then, just as they were dropping off to sleep, they heard far off
a long-drawn, howling cry piercing through the great hush. Lynette
started up, her blood quickening; as she had heard Bruce Standing's
warning call that first time, so now did she think to hear it again.
Deveril leaped to his feet, no less startled. A moment later he called
softly to her, and it seemed to Lynette that he forced a tone of
lightness which did not ring true:
"A timber wolf ... but one that runs on four legs! It won't come near."
Then, as she made no answer and he could not see her face, he asked
sharply: "What did you think it was?"
She shivered and lay back.
"I didn't know."
And to herself she whispered:
"And I don't know now!"
Here among the uplands it was a night of piercing cold. The nearer the
dawn drew on, the icier grew the fingers of the wind which swept the
ridges and probed into the cañons. For a little while both Lynette
and Deveril slept the heavy sleep of exhaustion. But, after the first
couple of hours, neither slept beyond brief, uncomfortable dozes. They
shivered and woke and stirred; they found a growing torture in the rude
couches they slept upon, in the hard ground and stones, which seemed
always thrusting up in new places. Long before the night had begun to
thin to the first of daybreak's hint, Lynette was sitting, her back to
a tree, torn between the two impossibilities, that of remaining awake,
that of remaining asleep. Deveril got up and began stamping about,
trying to get warm and drive the cramp and soreness out of his muscles.
"A few more days and nights like this," he grumbled, "would be enough
to kill a pair of Esquimos! We've got to find us some sort of half-way
decent shelter for another night, and we've got to arrange to take a
holiday and rest up."
It was all that she could do to keep her teeth from chattering by
shutting them hard together; her only answer was a shivery sigh. She
could scarcely make him out, where he trod back and forth, the darkness
held so thick. She began to think so longingly of a fire that in
comparison with its cheer and warmth she felt that possible discovery
by Taggart would be a small misfortune. She could almost welcome being
put under arrest; taken back to Big Pine and jail; given a bed and
covers and one long sleep.
"Awake?" queried Deveril.
She nodded, as though he could see her nod through the dark. Then, with
an effort, she said an uncertain: "Y-e-s."
"I'll tell you," he said presently, coming close to her and looking
down upon the blot in the darkness which her huddled figure made at
the base of the pine. "Taggart will be on his way soon; he'll hardly
wait for day. He'll go the straightest, quickest way to the Big Bear
country. That means he'll steer on straight into Buck Valley. If you
and I went that way, we'd have him and his crowd at our heels all day,
and never know how close they were; and I, for one, am damned sick of
that _feeling_ that somebody's creeping up on us all the time! So we
swerve out from the direct way as soon as we start; we curve off to
the north for a couple of miles; then we make a bend around toward the
upper end of what I fancy must be the Grub Stake Cañon Joe is headed
for. That way we'll always have two or three miles between our trail
and theirs; at times we'll be five or six miles off to the side. That
means, of course, that they're pretty sure to get to Joe's diggings
ahead of us; not over half a day at that. For we're well ahead of them
now. And, in any case, you can bet the last sardine we've got that
they'll be a day or two just poking around, prospecting and trying to
make sure of what they've grabbed off.... Agreed, pardner?"
"Yes. I could even start now, just to get those few miles between our
trail and theirs. Then, when the sun was up and it was warm, we could
have a rest and an hour's sleep."
So, walking slowly, painfully, carrying what was left of their small
stock of provisions, they started on in the dark. Up a ridge they went
and into the thinning edge of the coming dawn; they picked their way
among trees and rocks; little by little they were able to see in more
detail what lay about them. Along the ridge they tramped northward.
They were warmer now that they walked; or, rather, they were some
degrees less cold. Gradually their paces grew swifter, as some of the
stiffness went out of their bodies; gradually the shadows thinned; the
stars paled, the east asserted itself above the other points of the
compass, softly tinted. The sleeping world began to awake all about
them; birds stirred with the first drowsy twitterings. The pallid
eastern tints grew brighter; as from a wine-cup, life was spilled again
upon the mountain tops. A bird began a clear-noted, joyous singing;
all of a sudden the morning breeze seemed sweeter and softer; there
came a brilliant, flaming glory in the sky which drew their eyes; all
life forces which had been at ebb began to flow strongly once more;
the sun thrust a gleaming golden edge up into the upper world, rolling
majestically from the under world. Deveril looked into her eyes and
laughed softly; her eyes smiled back into his.... She felt as though
she had had a bad dream, but was awake now; as though last night her
nerves had tricked her into wrongly judging her companion. Doubtings
always flock in the night; joy is never more joyous than when breaking
forth with the new day.
"It isn't so bad, after all," said Deveril. "Now, if we only had a
pack-mule and a roll of blankets and a bit of canvas.... What more
would you ask, Lynette Brooke, for a lark and a holiday to remember
pleasantly when we grew to be doddering old folks?"
"As long as you are wishing," returned Lynette lightly, "why not place
an order with the King of Ifs for a gun and some fishing-tackle and a
frying-pan and some more coffee? And a couple of hats; an outing suit
for me." She looked down at her suit; it was torn in numerous places;
it was gummed and sticky here and there with the resin from pines; it
caught upon every bush. "Then, you know, a needle and some thread; a
dozen fresh eggs, bread, and butter...."
"Too much soft living has spoiled you!" he laughed.
"If so, I am in ideal training to get unspoiled in short order!" she
laughed back.
And for all of this was the rising sun and the new, bright day
responsible; for the ancient way of youth playing up to youth.
What was happening within both of them was a great nervous relaxation.
They knew where Taggart and Gallup were, or at least were confident
that there was no immediate danger of Taggart and Gallup overhauling
them; they knew where Mexicali Joe was and where he was going. For the
moment they were freed from that crushing sense of uncertainty welded
to menace which had borne down upon them ever since they fled from Big
Pine. And consequently joy of life sprang up as a spring leaps the
instant that the weight is plucked from it.
"It's our lucky day!" said Deveril.
For the sun was scarcely up when a plump young rabbit hopped square
into their path, and Deveril, with a lucky throw, killed it with a
rock. And just as they were speaking of thirst, they came to a tiny
trickle of water among the rocks; and while Lynette was boiling coffee
over a tiny blaze, Deveril was preparing grilled cottontail for
breakfast. Savory odors floating out through the woodlands. Lynette was
singing softly:
"_Merry it is in the good Greenwood!_"
They ate and rested and the sun warmed them. For a full two hours they
scarcely stirred. Then they drank again; Lynette bathed her hands and
face and arms; she set her hair in order, refashioning the two thick
braids. She shut one eye and then the other, striving to make certain
that there was not a black smudge somewhere upon her nose. They were
starting on when Deveril said soberly:
"Shall I save the rabbit skin?"
"Why?" she asked innocently.
A twinkle came into his eyes.
"A few more days of this sort of life, and My Lady Linnet is going to
require a new gown! Perhaps rabbit furs, if hunting is good, will do
it!"
She laughed at him, and her eyes were daring as she sang, improvising
as to melody:
"And for vest of pall, thy fingers small,
That wont on harp to stray,
A cloak must sheer from the slaughtered deer,
To keep the cold away!"
"_Lynette!_"
A flash from her gay mood had set his eyes on fire. He sprang up and
came toward her, his two hands out. But as a black cloud can run over
the face of the young moon, so did a sudden change of mood wipe the
tempting look out of her eyes and darken them. Her spirit had peeped
forth at him, merry-making; as quick as bird-flight it was gone, and
she stepped back and looked at him steadily, cool now and aloof and
dampening to a man's ardent nonsense.
"You have a way of saying something, Babe Deveril," she told him
coolly, "which appeals to me. In your own upstanding words: 'Let's go!'"
He laughed back at her lightly, hiding under a light cloak his own
chagrin. At that moment he had wanted her in his arms; had wanted
that as he wanted neither Mexicali Joe's gold nor any other coldly
glittering thing. Now he felt himself growing angry with her....
"Right. You've said it. Let's go."
He made short work of catching up the few articles they were to carry
with them and of stamping into dead coals the few remaining glowing
embers of their fire. Then, striding ahead, he led the way. And for a
matter of a mile or more she was hard beset to keep up with him.
The day was filled with happenings to divert their thoughts from any
one channel. They startled, in a tiny meadow, three deer, which shot
away through a tangle of brush, leaping, plunging, shooting forward
and down a slope like great, gleaming, graceful arrows. "A man could
live like a king here, with a rifle," said Deveril longingly. They
saw a tall, thin wisp of smoke an hour before noon; it stood against
the sky to the southwest of them, at a distance of perhaps two miles.
"Taggart's noonday camp," they decided, deciding further that Taggart
must have insisted on an early start, and therefore had found his
stomach demanding lunch well before midday. Later, some two or three
hours after twelve, they heard the long, reverberating crack and rumble
and echo of a rifle-shot. "Taggart's crowd, killing a deer or bear or
rabbit," they imagined. And all along they were contented, making what
time they could through the open spaces, over the ridges, down through
tiny green valleys and up long, dreary slopes, resting frequently,
never hastening beyond their powers, secure in knowing that the Taggart
trail and the Lynette-Deveril trail, though paralleling, would have no
common point of contact before both trails ran into the country in the
vicinity of the Big Bear Creek, the rim of the Timber-Wolf country.
"The whole thing," exulted Babe Deveril, "lies in the fact that we
know where they are and they haven't the least idea where we are! We
know where they are going, and they haven't a guess which way we are
steering...."
"Do you know," said Lynette thoughtfully, "I don't believe that
Mexicali Joe intends for a minute to lead them to his gold!"
Deveril looked at her in astonishment.
"You don't! Why, couldn't you see that Taggart put the fear of the Lord
into him? That Gallup, slick as wet soap, tricked him? That...."
She broke in impatiently, saying:
"Yet Joe.... He seemed to me to give in to them in something too much
of a hurry ... as though he had his own wits about him, his own last
card in the hole, as dad used to say. I wonder...."
He stared at her, puzzled.
"When you _feel_ things," he muttered, none too pleasantly, "you get me
guessing. I don't know yet how you came to know that the Taggart bunch
was at our heels yesterday. But you did know; and you were right. As to
this other hunch of yours...."
"You'll see," said Lynette serenely. "Joe isn't the biggest fool in
that crowd of four. You wait and see."
"You'll give me the creeps yet," said Deveril.
They both laughed and went on--through brushy tangles; over rocky
ridges; through spacious forests; across soft, springy meadows; up
slope, down slope; on and on and endlessly on. Once they frightened a
young bear that was tearing away as if its life depended upon it upon
an old stump; the bear snorted and went lumbering away, as Deveril
said, like a young freight-train gone mad; Lynette, as she admitted
afterward, was twice as frightened, but did not run, herself, because
the bear ran first and because she couldn't get the hang of her feet as
quickly as he could! They came upon several bands of mountain-quail,
which shot away, buzzing like overgrown bees; Deveril hurled stones
and curses at many a scampering rabbit; once she and once he caught a
glimpse of that dark gleam, come and gone in a flash, which might have
been coyote or timber-wolf.... They did not speak of Bruce Standing.
But they wondered, both of them....
Toward four o'clock in the afternoon they heard for the second time the
crack of a rifle-shot. Farther to the south of them this time; a hint
farther eastward; fainter than when first heard. Taggart, they held in
full confidence, was following the trail which they had mapped for him;
he was going on steadily; he was forging ahead of them. And yet they
were content that this was so. They rested more often; they relaxed
more and more.
And before the brief reverberations of a distant rifle-shot had done
echoing through the gorges, they came to a full stop and determined to
make camp. Not for a second, all day long, had Deveril swerved from his
determination to "dig in in comfort for the night." They were, as both
were willing to admit, "done in."
Deveril employed his pocket-knife, long ago dulled, and now whetted
after a fashion upon a rough stone, to whack off small pine and willow
and the more leafy of sage branches. He made of them a goodly heap.
Then he gathered dead limbs, fallen from the parent trees, making his
second pile. All the while Lynette kept a small dry-wood and pine-cone
fire going hotly; little smoke, little swirl of sparks to rise above
the grove in which they were encamping; plenty of heat for body warmth
and for cooking. She was preoccupied, moving about listlessly. So
this was Bruce Standing's country? She looked about her with an
ever-deepening interest; this was a fitting land for such a man.
Bigness and dominance and a certain vital freshness struck altogether
the key-note here--and suggested Timber-Wolf. If he were not dead after
all---- Well, then, he would be somewhere near now for like a wounded
animal, he would have returned to his solitudes.
Deveril found near by a level space under the pines. Here he sought out
a scraggly tree which expressed an earth-loving soul in low-drooped
branches. Against a low arm which ran out horizontally from the trunk
he began placing his longer dead limbs, the butts in the ground,
sloping, the effect soon that of a tent. Against these a high-piled
wall of leafy branches. He stood back, judging from which direction
the wind would come. He piled more branches. Into his nostrils, filled
with the resinous incense of broken pine twigs, floated the tempting
aromas which spread out in all directions from Lynette's cooking. He
cocked his eye at the slanting sun; it was still early. He yielded to
the insistent invitation, and came down into the little cup of a meadow
to her, and she watched him coming: a picturesque figure in the forest
land, his black hair rumpled, his slender figure swinging on, his
sleeves rolled back, his eyes full of the flicker of his lively spirit.
When Deveril was hard pressed along the trail, worn out and on the
alert for oncoming danger from any quarter, he was impersonal; a mere
ally on whom she could depend. At moments like this one, when he was
rested and relaxed, and grasped in his eager hands a bit of the swift
life flowing by, he became different. A man now--a young man--one with
quick lights in his eyes and a lilting eagerness in his voice.
"It would be great sport," he said, "all life long ... to come home to
you and find you waiting ... with a smile and a wee cup o' tea! And...."
He was half serious, half laughing; she made a hasty light rejoinder,
and invited him to a hot supper waiting him.
They made a merry, frivolously light meal of it. There was plenty to
eat; water near by; there was coffee; above them the infinity of blue,
darkening skies, about them the peace and silence of the solitudes. And
within their souls security, if only for the swiftly passing moment.
They chose to be gay; they laughed often; Deveril asked her where
she had learned to quote Scott and she asked him, in obvious retort,
if he thought that she had never been to school! He sang for her,
low-voiced and musically, a Spanish love-song; she made high pretense
at missing the significance of the impassioned southern words. He,
having finished eating and having nearly finished his cigarette, lying
back upon the thick-padded pine-needles, jerked himself up, of a mood
for free translation; she, being quick of intuition, forestalled him,
crying out: "While I clean up our can dishes, if you will finish making
camp...."
He laughed at her, but got up and went back, whistling his love-song
refrain to his house-building. She, busied over her own labors, found
time more than once to glance at him through the trees ... wondering
about him, trying to probe her own instinctive distrust of one who had
all along befriended her.
When she joined him a few minutes later, coming up the slope slowly,
she looked tired, he thought, and listless. She sat down and watched
him finishing his labors; all of her spontaneous gaiety had fled; she
was silent and did not smile and appeared preoccupied. She sighed two
or three times, unconsciously, but her sighs did not escape him. Always
he had held her sex to be an utterly baffling, though none the less an
equally fascinating one. Now he would have given more than a little for
a clew to her thoughts ... or dreamings ... or vague preoccupation....
"My lady's bower!" he said lightly. "And what does my lady have to say
of it?"
A truly bowery little shelter it was, on leaning poles in an inverted
V, with leafy boughs making thick walls, through which only slender
sun-rays slipped in a golden dust; within a high-heaped pile of
fragrant boughs, with a heap of smaller green twigs and resinous
pine-tips for her couch.
"You are so good to me, Babe Deveril," was her grave answer.
And not altogether did her answer please him, for a quick hint of frown
touched his eyes, though he banished it almost before she was sure of
it. Those words of hers, though they thanked him, most of all reminded
him of his goodness and gentleness with her, and thus went farther and
assured him that she still counted upon his goodness and gentleness.
"I am afraid, Babe Deveril," she added quickly, though still her eyes
were grave and her lips unsmiling, "that I am pretty well tired out ...
all sort of let-down like, as an old miner I once knew used to say!
It's going to be sundown in a few minutes; can't we treat ourselves to
the luxury of a good blazing camp-fire, and sit by it, and get good and
warm and rested?"
Had she spoken her true thought she would have cried out instead:
"What troubles me, Babe Deveril, is that I am half afraid of you.
And, all of a sudden, of the wilderness. And of life and of all the
mysteries of the unknown! I am as near screaming from sheer nervousness
at this instant as I ever was in my life."
But Deveril, who could glean of her emotions only what she allowed to
lie among her spoken words, cried heartily:
"You just bet your sweet life we'll have a crackling, roaring fire.
Taggart and his crowd are half a dozen miles away right now and still
going; our fire down in that hollow will never cast a gleam over the
big ridge yonder and the other ridges which lie in between him and us.
Come ahead, my dear; here's for a real bonfire."
That "my dear" escaped him; but she did not appear to have noted it.
She rose and followed him back to their dying fire. He began piling
on dead branches; they caught and crackled and shot showering sparks
aloft. He brought more fuel, laying it close by. Already the blaze had
driven her back; she sat down by a pine, her knees in her hands, her
head tipped forward so that her face was shadowed, her two curly braids
over her shoulders.
Deveril lay near her, his hand palming his chin.
"Tell me, pretty maiden," he said lightly, "how far to the nearest
barber shop?"
"And tell me," she returned, looking at her fingers, "if in that same
shop they have a manicurist?"
Having glanced at her hands, she sighed, and then began working with
her hair; there was one thing which must not be utterly neglected. She
knew that if once it became snarled, she had small hope of saving it;
no comb, no brush, no scissors to snip off a troublesome lock; only the
inevitable result of such an utter snarl that she, too, in a week of
this sort of thing, must needs seek a barber who understood bobbing a
maid's hair. And with hair such as Lynette's, glorious, bronzy, with
all the brighter glowing colors of the sunlight snared in it, any true
girl should shudder at the barber's scissors.
All without warning a great booming voice crashed into their ears,
shattering the silence, as Bruce Standing bore down upon them from the
ridge, shouting:
"So, now I've got you! Got both of you! Got you where I want you, by
the living God!"