Another day of wilderness wandering. A cabin sighted, but so far away
that it was merely a vague dot upon a distant ridge; miner's shack
or sheepman's or wood-cutter's? Housing an occupant or deserted for
years? No smoke from the rock chimney; no sign of any human being near
it. And all view of it so soon lost!... And, afterward, no other human
habitation of any kind; no road man-made; only trees and rocks, gorges
and ridges and brush, and a winding way to be chosen between them.
With, always, Bruce Standing driving on and on, relentlessly on, ever
deeper into the wilderness.
A day of life like a leaf torn out of the book of hell for Lynette. He
did not speak to her as they went on from dawn to noon and from noon
until afternoon shadows gathered; he did not so much as turn his eyes
full upon her own; for the most part he seemed altogether forgetful of
the fact that, besides himself, there was another of his species in all
the wide sweep of this land of mighty solitudes. For his dog, Thor, he
had a kindly though rough-spoken word now and then; for his horse a
word or a rude pat upon the shoulder or hip; for her nothing but his
utter, unruffled silence.... At times she hummed little snatches of gay
tunes, hoping to irritate him; at times she strove for an aloofness to
match his own. Countless times she looked over her shoulder, looking
for Babe Deveril. And so the day, a long day, went by until at last it
was late afternoon.
"Here we stop," said Standing abruptly. "Get down."
He would seem to have all advantage over her; yet she understood that
in one way, and in one way only, could she rob him of his advantage,
and that was by giving him swift and cheerful obedience. So she slipped
out of the saddle on the instant, giving him for answer only the light
gay words:
"Oh, it is beautiful here!" ...
It was beautiful.... He glared at her and led his horse away to
unsaddle; his big dog, Thor, had trotted along at Daylight's heels all
day and now slumped down, ears erect and suspicious, while he watched
his master and made certain of never losing sight for a second of his
master's new companion, whom he tolerated but did not trust. Lynette,
stiff from so many hours in the saddle, looked about her. They were
in the upper, brief space of a valley; above reared the mountains
steeply, rugged slopes with pines here and there, with more open
spaces and tumbled boulders. The valley itself was a pretty, pleasant
place, soft in short green grass, flower-dotted, smoothly curving down
into the more open level lands below. Yet here was no proper place to
pitch camp, especially at so early an hour when it was allowed to seek
further; it was too open, it would be unsheltered and cold; there was
no water....
"Come on!"
She started and turned again toward Standing. He had slung his small
pack across his shoulders and was going on. She looked forward toward
the ridge, which he faced; it rose sheer and forbidding. And she saw
that his face was white and drawn; she wondered quickly how sorely his
wound hurt him.
"Brute?" He could have been far more brutal to her.... He was
dead-tired, white-faced; he had fought hard last night, scorning the
advantage of an armed man against an unarmed; he had not harmed a hair
of her head! Almost ... _almost_ it lay within her to whisper "Poor
fellow!" And if only Bruce Standing could have known that!...
He led the way. She followed, since there was nothing else to think of
doing.
They climbed steadily upward out of this narrow green valley, finding
a steep but open way among the trees. Now and then they paused briefly
to breathe, and Lynette, looking back, saw more and more of the long,
winding valley, as it revealed itself to her from new vantage points.
Far away she caught the glint of the sunlight upon a little wandering
creek. They went on, and came to the crest of the ridge, in full
sunshine now; Standing led an unhesitating way through a natural pass,
and down on the other side, into shadows of a thick grove; through
thickets; they splashed across a creek, a thin line of clear, cool
water slipping through mountain willows, a tributary of the larger
stream in the valley below. Down here it was almost dark. But twenty
minutes later, climbing another slope where the larger timber stood
widely spaced, they came again into the full sunshine.... Lynette
began to wonder why he had left his horse so far back; how far did
the silent, tireless man mean to walk? Also, she began to welcome the
coming night with an eagerness which she was at all pains to conceal
from him; he was always ten steps ahead of her; if he walked on another
half-hour, she began to hope that they would come into a place of
shadows and clumps of trees among which she might dare make the attempt
for escape which had been denied her all day....
They came into a little upland flat, well watered, emerald-carpeted
with tender grass, shot through with lingering flowers and studded with
magnificent trees; it seemed the very heart of the great wilderness;
here was such glorious forest land as Lynette had never seen and did
not know existed in all the broad scope of the great Southwest mountain
country. She looked upward. Dark branches towered into the sky, the
tips still shot through with soft summer light. She heard the gush of
water--the tumble and splash and fall of water. Somewhere above, at the
upper end of the flat, where a dark ravine was an ebon-shadow-filled
gash through the hills, was a waterfall. She could not see it, but its
musical waters proclaimed it through the still air. She looked swiftly
down the other way; there it was growing dark. She glanced hurriedly at
Standing. And he, as though he had read her thought, stopped and turned
and, before she could stir, was at her side.
After that, with never a word, they went on, deeper into this shadowy
realm of big trees. He watched her at every step. Fury filled her
heart, but with compressed lips she maintained a silence like his own.
Thor trotted along with them, now in front of his master, as though
this were a way he had travelled before and knew well, now questing far
afield, now in the rear, eying his master's captive and setting his
dog's brains to the riddle.
Before they had walked another ten minutes, Standing threw down his
pack and said abruptly:
"This is as far as we go."
She sat down, her back to a tree, her face averted from him. She was
very tired and now she could have put her face into her hands and cried
from very weariness. But instead she caught her lip up between her
teeth and hid her face from him and ignored him. But in her heart she
was wondering; had he travelled all day long and then this far from the
spot where he had released his horse, just to pitch camp in a clump of
trees? Was this the spot toward which he had striven on so stubbornly
since daylight? Where was he going? Why? Old queries and doubts rushed
back upon her.... She was vaguely grateful that they were questions
which he and not she had to answer; that responsibilities were his
instead of hers. She was tired enough to lie down where she was and
cease to care what happened.... It was not as yet pitch-dark; the sun
was not down on the heights. But here, among the tall pines, in this
hollow, the shadows were thick; nothing stood out in detail to her
slowly closing eyes; here was a place of black blots, distorted glooms,
the weird formless outriders of the night.... She had not the remotest
suspicion that, where she had slumped down, she was almost at the door
of a cabin.
Rather, it would have been surprising had she known. For surely
there was never cabin like this hermit camp of Bruce Standing's! Two
sky-scraping pines stood close together; between them was the door,
framed by their own straight trunks. Smaller trees grew about the
ancient parents; these hid the walls which to escape notice required
little enough hiding at any time; a man might have passed here within
a few yards at noonday and not noticed all this which Lynette failed
to see in the dusk. For the walls of the tiny cabin were of rough logs
from which the bark had never been stripped, walls which blended so
perfectly with the greater note struck by the woodland that they failed
to draw the eye; the chimney, of loose-piled rocks, was viewless at
this time of day behind the tree trunks and inconspicuous at any time.
And low, over the flat roof drooped the concealing branches of the
trees. Of all this Lynette glimpsed nothing until Timber-Wolf said,
looking down at her:
"When all the tavern is prepared within,
Why nods the drowsy worshipper outside?"
She had striven in one way and another since she had had her first view
of him, axe in hand, for a clew to the real Bruce Standing. Now, again,
he set her jaded faculties to work: Bruce Standing, Timber-Wolf, and
man of violence, quoting poetry to her! And at such a moment and under
such circumstances!... It is not merely the feminine soul which is
indeterminable, mystifying, intriguing into the ultimate bournes of
speculation; rather the human soul....
"I don't fancy guessing riddles this evening," she told him. "All
that I can think of by way of repartee is: 'What meanest thou, Sir
Tent-maker?'"
She thought that she heard him stifle a chuckle!
But, in this thickening gloom and through those heavy shadows which lay
across her soul in an hour of doubtings and uncertainties, she could be
certain of nothing.... He was saying merely:
"If you're not clean done in, I'd suggest you walk three steps into my
cabin. On the other hand, if you can't make it, I'll pick you up and
carry you in!"
At that she sprang to her feet; through the gathering dark he could
feel the burning look in her eyes.
Then, groping mentally and physically, it was given to her to
understand. For already he stood upon the rude threshold. She followed
after him.
She gasped, astonished, when she realized that already, in so few
steps, she had passed into the embrasure of four walls! Sturdy walls;
walls rude and unbeautiful, but rising stalwart bulwarks against
the cold of night mountain air. He, a blurred, gigantic form in the
dusk, was before her; his wolfish dog was at her heels. She heard the
scratch, she saw the blue and yellow spurt of a sulphur match. His
form suddenly loomed larger, leaped into grotesque giganticness; the
tiny room sprang waveringly out of darkness into the unreality of
half-light; he found a candle; a steady golden flame sent the shadows
racing into limbo; she looked about her wonderingly....
A room, bound in rough logs; a hastily, roughly hewn log set on other
logs, offering its surly service as table; a stump which obviously made
pretense at being a stool; a bunk against a wall, thick-padded with the
tips from pines; a tin cup, a tin plate, an imitation of a box against
a wall. And, hanging over a pole ... her first certainty that Bruce
Standing, though animal as she named him in her heart, was a clean
animal ... two or three blankets which, on last leaving this hut of
his, he had stretched to air.... A primitive room, and yet clean. And,
across from the narrow bunk, a deep, wide-mouthed fireplace made of big
rocks.... He himself must have made that fireplace, for what other man
could have lifted those rocks into place?
"I'm hungry," said Standing. "As hungry as a bear."
Already she was sitting on the edge of the bunk. She expected to hear
for his next words: "Get me my dinner." But, instead, he said, his
voice harsher than she had ever heard it before:
"And that's why I'm cooking for myself instead of making you do it! I
don't want you to get it into your head it's because I'm getting sorry
for you...."
She lay back, unanswering, and watched him. And presently, though not
for him to see, a little smile touched her lips and for a short instant
lighted her big gray eyes.... And in her heart she said: "He is so
obvious, with all his thinking that he is a man whom a girl cannot see
through! All day he has made me ride, while he walked! He said that
that was to make better time! And, with every opportunity to harm me,
he has not harmed a hair of my head! He has not even touched me with
his big, blundering hands!... And he looks white and sick from his
hurt...."
He rummaged in a corner; he made a fire in his fireplace; he ripped
open a couple of cans and set coffee to boil in a battered pot as black
as an African negro. Suddenly Lynette, who had been silent a long
while, exclaimed:
"I know now! We are still on your land. This is the very cabin where,
six years ago, you robbed Babe Deveril of three thousand dollars!"
"No!" he said. "You have guessed wrong!" And then: "So your little
friend, Baby Devil, told you many a tale about my wickedness?"
"He told me that one."
"And did he tell you the sequel? How I squared with him?"
So he wanted her to think well of him! She made herself comfortable,
leaning back against the wall.
"Have you the vaguest inkling of the difference between right and
wrong, Bruce Standing?" she asked him impudently.
He laughed at her--become suddenly harsh.
"Come," he said, "it is time for food. And then, for a man who does not
break his word, blow high, blow low, to keep an appointment."
With that conversation ceased. He drove Thor into a corner, and with a
word and a glance made the dog lie down. He boiled his coffee and set a
hurried meal; he caught up a tin plate and brought it to Lynette. She
was about to thank him when she saw how he was planning to serve a tin
platter like hers to his dog; then she could have screamed at him in
nerve-pent-up anger.
The three--master, captive, and dog--ate their late dinners while the
candle flame, pale yellow with its bluish centre, swayed gently in the
mild draft of air through the open door. Windows there were none,
saving the one square aperture over the bunk, boarded up now.
"What about Jim Taggart?" said Standing brusquely out of a long silence
toward the end of which the weary girl was near dozing. "What do you
know about him? Did he overhaul Mexicali Joe after all?"
She looked at him steadily; suddenly she was glad when a pine branch in
the fireplace, full of pitch, flared up so that he must have seen her
face more clearly than he could have done by mere pale candle-light;
she wanted him to see it and read something of the defiance which she
meant to offer him.
"So, after all, you have your engagement with Mexicali Joe? It was for
that that you set him free? That you, instead of others, might steal
his golden secret!"
"Then you won't answer, girl? You, whom I could crush between thumb and
finger, refuse to answer me?"
"Yes!" she cried out at him. "Yes! I am not afraid of you, Bruce
Standing!"
"Not afraid?" He glared at her, his flashing blue eyes full of threat.
Then he laughed contemptuously, saying: "And yet, were I minded to, I
could in a second have you on your knees, begging, pleading...."
"But you won't!" she dared fling at him. "And that is why I am not
afraid!"
"I am not so sure!" he muttered. "Not so sure. Before morning, girl,
you may come to know what fear is!"
She tried to toss back her fearless laughter, but at that look of his
and at that stern tone of his voice her laughter caught in her throat.
"You've got nerve," he said grudgingly. "More nerve than I thought any
girl could have ... since it's far and away more than most men have.
But just the same there's one thing you are afraid of! I've seen it a
dozen times to-day, no matter how well you thought you hid it! You are
afraid to death of old Thor, there!"
She shivered; she laid a quick command upon her muscles as upon her
spirit, but they failed her; she tried to tell herself and to show him
through her bearing, head up, eyes steady, that it was only fatigue and
the growing chill of the coming night that put that tremor upon her.
But he laughed at her and called his big dog to him and said heavily:
"Watch her, Thor! Watch her!"
Thor growled, a growl coming from deep down in the powerful throat; the
red eyes grew hot; bristles stood up along neck and back; there came
the gleam of the wolfish teeth. She shrank back against the wall.
"I have my appointment!... In an hour I must go. I give you your choice
of coming along with me, in leash! or of staying here, with only Thor
to guard, and taking your chances with him! Which is it?"
And she cried quickly:
"I'll go with you!" And then, lest he should think that he had
triumphed, she added swiftly: "For I, too, am interested in Mexicali
Joe!"
He caught down the blankets which had hung airing since last he came
here and tossed two of them to the bunk where she half lay; the third
he folded and placed on the floor, stretching out his own great bulk
upon it, his shoulders against the wall. He found his pipe, filled and
lighted it, and lay staring into the fire....
And she, drawing a blanket over her knees, crouched, looking into
the same dancing flames, overwhelmed for the moment by a total
sense-engulfing feeling of unreality. Could all of this which had
happened, which was still happening, be an actual experience for her,
Lynette Brooke? More did it resemble a long-drawn-out ugly dream than
actuality! To be here to-night, so far from the world, her own world,
in the heart of a gigantic wilderness, in a rude cabin; a giant of
a man who, as he had said truly, might have crushed her between his
powerful forefinger and thumb; a savage wolf of a dog watching her with
unblinking eyes; another man, somewhere, with vengeance in his heart,
following them; another man, clutching to his breast his golden secret,
not far away; ... nightmare ingredients! Did this man, Bruce Standing,
Timber-Wolf as men called him, really know where to find Mexicali
Joe? And, when he found him, would he come upon Taggart and Gallup
and that hawk-faced man whom they called Cliff Shipton? And with them
would there be Babe Deveril, who must have gone somewhere in his mad,
hungering hope to have a rifle in his hands?... Above all else, was
she the plaything of fate? Or the director of fate? Now it lay within
the scope of her power to cry out to Bruce Standing: "When you find
Mexicali Joe you will find others, no friends of yours, with him! With
them, probably, Babe Deveril! And more than one rifle ready to stand
between you and the Mexican!" ... If she kept her silence, there might
be bloodshed before morning; if she spoke her warning, she might be
doubly arming Timber-Wolf. She grew restless; so restless that Thor,
distrusting her, began growling.
And Bruce Standing, regarding her fixedly, demanded sharply:
"Well, what is it?"
Well ... what should she say? Anything or nothing? If she kept her
silence, would she in after-days know herself to blame for to-night's
bloodshed in that, keeping shut lips, she allowed him to stumble upon
all Taggart's crowd.
He was eying her sharply. She must make some answer, and so at last
she prefaced her reply by asking him:
"You say that we are not on your land?"
"I did not say that. I said that this is not the cabin in which I had
some years ago the pleasant experience of borrowing some money from
Babe Deveril. He has never been here; has never heard of this place. No
man other than myself, and until now no woman ever came here."
"That narrow end of a valley we crossed this afternoon ... that was the
upper end of Buck Valley? And the creek which came next was Big Bear
Creek? And, right near us somewhere is Grub Stake Cañon?"
"You know the country like a map!" He spoke carelessly enough and yet
was puzzled to understand how she knew; of course Deveril could have
told her something of it and yet Deveril's knowledge was restricted to
the slim gleanings of one short excursion of years ago, and he did not
believe that even Deveril had ever heard of Grub Stake Cañon.
"And," she ran on swiftly, "you were to meet Mexicali Joe to-night at
that other cabin of yours? Is that it?"
"Witch, are you? Picker of thoughts from men's brains?" He laughed
shortly and got to his feet. "And so you elect to go along and see what
happens? Rather than rest here with Thor to keep you company?"
She, too, rose swiftly.
"Yes!"
He took up his rifle, caught her hand and extinguished the candle.
"Down, Thor, old boy," he said as he might have spoken to a man,
without raising his voice. "Wait for me. Good dog, Thor."
Thor whined, but Lynette heard the sound he made in lying down
obediently; heard the thumping of his tail as he whined again. Standing
began leading the way through the dark among the big trees, his fingers
about her wrist.... She wondered how far they must go; suddenly as her
great weariness bore down upon her spirit that was become the greatest
of all considerations; greater, even, than what they should find at
the end of their walk. Almost she regretted not having remained in the
cabin ... with Thor.
Standing, despite the dark and the uneven ground underfoot, seemed to
have no difficulty in finding his way; he walked swiftly; she could
sense his eager impatience. She began wondering listlessly if he were
late to his appointment....
She had faint idea how far they had gone, a mile or two miles or but
half a mile, a weary time of heavily dragging footsteps, when suddenly
the silence was broken by men's voices. Far away, dimmed and all but
utterly hidden by the interval of forest, was a vague glow of light.
Standing came to a dead stop; she stumbled against him. There came,
throbbing through the night, a man's scream. Standing stiffened; she
felt a tremor run through his big body. A voice again, an evil voice in
evil laughter; a deeper voice, too far away for the words to carry any
meaning, not too far for the voice itself to be recognized by a man who
hated it.
"Taggart and Young Gallup," Standing muttered. "They've got Joe! They'd
cut his throat for ten cents!... Look here; what do you know about all
this?"
She answered hurriedly; that thin scream still echoed in her ears; she
remembered only too vividly Taggart's treatment of Joe at the dugout
and Taggart's threats; she shivered, saying:
"All I know.... Jim Taggart and Gallup and another man caught up with
Joe at his cabin; they made him bring them here ... to show them his
gold ... Taggart threatened him with torture...."
"Come! Hurry! Why in hell's name didn't you tell me?"
Still with her hand caught in his own he turned and ran, making her run
with him, back to his own cabin. Again they heard, fainter now since
the distance was greater, that thin cry bursting from Joe's lips; she
felt the hand on her own shut down, mercilessly hard.... Running, they
returned to his hidden cabin.
He went in with her; hurriedly he lighted the candle; the fire was
almost out. Wondering, she sank down upon the bunk.
"Down, Thor," he commanded; he made the dog lie again across the
threshold. "Watch her, Thor!" Thor growled; the red eyes watched her.
"Don't you move from that bunk until I get back!" Standing told her
sternly.
He ran out of the cabin. She heard him breaking through brush, going
the shortest, straightest way down toward the spot from which voices
had come up to them. Thor growled. She looked at the dog, fascinated
with fear of him. The big head was down now, resting between the big
fore paws; the unwinking eyes were on her.... She lay back on the bunk,
staring up at the smoke-blackened rafters.
It was very quiet. No longer could she hear the sound of Timber-Wolf's
running.... He, one man, pitting himself in blazing anger against at
least three men, ... perhaps four!... What if he were killed? Leaving
her here, under the relentless guard of Thor? She was taken with a long
fit of shivering. Thor growled.