A man under thirty needs neighbors and to stop up the current of his
life with a long silence is like obstructing a river--eventually the
water either sweeps away the dam or rises over it, and the stronger the
dam the more destructive is that final rush to freedom. Vic Gregg was on
the danger side of thirty and he lived alone in the mountains all
that winter. He wanted to marry Betty Neal, but marriage means money,
therefore Vic contracted fifteen hundred dollars' worth of mining for
the Duncans, and instead of taking a partner he went after that stake
single handed. He is a very rare man who can turn out that amount of
labor in a single season, but Gregg furnished that exception which
establishes the rule: he did the assessment work on fourteen claims and
almost finished the fifteenth, yet he paid the price. Week after week
his set of drills was wife and child to him, and for conversation he had
only the clangor of the four-pound single-jack on the drill heads, with
the crashing of the “shots” now and then as periods to the chatter
of iron on iron. He kept at it, and in the end he almost finished the
allotted work, but for all of it he paid in full.
The acid loneliness ate into him. To be sure, from boyhood he knew the
mountain quiet, the still heights and the solemn echoes, but towards the
close of the long isolation the end of each day found him oppressed by
a weightier sense of burden; in a few days he would begin to talk to
himself.
From the first the evening pause after supper hurt him most, for a
man needs a talk as well as tobacco, and after a time he dreaded these
evenings so bitterly that he purposely spent himself every day, so as
to pass from supper into sleep at a stride. It needed a long day to
burn out his strength thoroughly, so he set his rusted alarm-clock, and
before dawn it brought him groaning out of the blankets to cook a hasty
breakfast and go slowly up to the tunnel. In short, he wedded himself to
his work; he stepped into a routine which took the place of thought, and
the change in him was so gradual that he did not see the danger.
A mirror might have shown it to him as he stood this morning at the door
of his lean-to, for the wind fluttered the shirt around his labor-dried
body, and his forehead puckered in a frown, grown habitual. It was a
narrow face, with rather close-set eyes and a slanted forehead which
gave token of a single-track mind, a single-purposed nature with one
hundred and eighty pounds of strong sinews and iron-hard muscle to give
it significance. Such was Vic Gregg as he stood at the door waiting for
the coffee he had drunk to brush away the cobwebs of sleep, and then he
heard the eagle scream.
A great many people have never heard the scream of an eagle. The only
voice they connect with the kind of the air is a ludicrously feeble
squawk, dim with distance, but in his great moments the eagle has a
war-cry like that of the hawk, but harsher, hoarser, tenfold in volume.
This sound cut into the night in the gulch, and Vic Gregg started and
glanced about for echoes made the sound stand at his side; then he
looked up, and saw two eagles fighting in the light of the morning. He
knew what it meant--the beginning of the mating season, and these two
battling for a prize. They darted away. They flashed together with
reaching talons and gaping beaks, and dropped in a tumult of wings,
then soared and clashed once more until one of them folded his wings and
dropped bulletlike out of the morning into the night. Close over Gregg's
head, the wings flirted out--ten feet from tip to tip--beat down with
a great washing sound, and the bird shot across the valley in a level
flight. The conqueror screamed a long insult down the hollow. For a
while he balanced, craning his bald head as if he sought applause, then,
without visible movement of his wings, sailed away over the peaks. A
feather fluttered slowly down past Vic Gregg.
He looked down to it, and rubbed the ache out of the back of his
neck. All about him the fresh morning was falling; yonder shone a
green-mottled face of granite, and there a red iron blow-out streaked
with veins of glittering silicate, and in this corner, still misted with
the last delicate shades of night, glimmered rhyolite, lavender-pink.
The single-jack dropped from the hand of Gregg, and his frown relaxed.
When he stretched his arms, the cramps of labor unkinked and let the
warm blood flow, swiftly, and in the pleasure of it he closed his eyes
and drew a luxurious breath. He stepped from the door with his, head
high and his heart lighter, and when his hobnailed shoe clinked on the
fallen hammer he kicked it spinning from his path. That act brought a
smile into his eyes, and he sauntered to the edge of the little plateau
and looked down into the wide chasm of the Asper Valley.
Blue shadows washed across it, though morning shone around Gregg on the
height, and his glance dropped in a two-thousand-foot plunge to a single
yellow eye that winked through the darkness, a light in the trapper's
cabin. But the dawn was falling swiftly now, and while Gregg lingered
the blue grew thin, purple-tinted, and then dark, slender points pricked
up, which he knew to be the pines. Last of all, he caught the sheen of
grass.
Around him pressed a perfect silence, the quiet of night holding over
into the day, yet he cast a glance behind him as he heard a voice.
Indeed, he felt that some one approached him, some one for whom he had
been waiting, yet it was a sad expectancy, and more like homesickness
than anything he knew.
“Aw, hell,” said Vic Gregg, “it's spring.”
A deep-throated echo boomed back at him, and the sound went down the
gulch, three times repeated.
“Spring,” repeated Gregg more softly, as if he feared to rouse that
echo, “damned if it ain't!”
He shrugged his shoulders and turned resolutely towards the lean-to,
picking up the discarded hammer on the way. By instinct he caught it
at exactly the right balance for his strength and arm, and the handle,
polished by his grip, played with an oiled, frictionless movement
against the callouses of his palm. From the many hours of drilling,
fingers crooked, he could only straighten them by a painful effort. A
bad hand for cards, he decided gloomily, and still frowning over this he
reached the door. There he paused in instant repugnance, for the place
was strange to him.
In thought and wish he was even now galloping Grey Molly over the grass
along the Asper, and he had to wrench himself into the mood of the
patient miner. There lay his blankets, rumpled, brown with dirt, and
he shivered at sight of them; the night had been cold. Before he fell
asleep, he had flung the magazine into the corner and now the wind
rustled its torn, yellowed pages in a whisper that spoke to Gregg of the
ten-times repeated stories, tales of adventure, drifts of tobacco smoke
in gaming halls, the chant of the croupier behind the wheel, deep voices
of men, laughter of pretty girls, tatoo of running horses, shouts which
only redeye can inspire. He sniffed the air; odor of burned bacon and
coffee permeated the cabin. He turned to the right and saw his discarded
overalls with ragged holes at the knees; he turned to the left and
looked into the face of the rusted alarm clock. Its quick, soft ticking
sent an ache of weariness through him.
“What's wrong with me,” muttered Gregg. Even that voice seemed ghostly
loud in the cabin, and he shivered again. “I must be going nutty.”
As if to escape from his own thoughts, he stepped out into the sun
again, and it was so grateful to him after the chill shadow in the
lean-to, that he looked up, smiling, into the sky. A west wind urged a
scattered herd of clouds over the peaks, tumbled masses of white which
puffed into transparent silver at the edges, and behind, long wraiths of
vapor marked the path down which they had traveled. Such an old cowhand
as Vic Gregg could not fail to see the forms of cows and heavy-necked
bulls and running calves in that drift of clouds. About this season the
boys would be watching the range for signs of screw worms in the cattle,
and the bog-riders must have their hands full dragging out cows which
had fled into the mud to escape the heel flies. With a new lonesomeness
he drew his eyes down to the mountains.
Ordinarily, strange fancies never entered the hard head of Gregg, but
today it seemed to him that the mountains found a solemn companionship
in each other.
Out of the horizon, where the snowy forms glimmered in the blue, they
marched in loose order down to the valley of the Asper, where some
of them halted in place, huge cliffs, and others stumbled out into
foothills, but the main range swerved to the east beside the valley,
eastward out of his vision, though he knew that they went on to the town
of Alder.
Alder was Vic Gregg's Athens and Rome in one, its schoolhouse his
Acropolis, and Captain Lorrimer's saloon his Forum. Other people talked
of larger cities, but Alder satisfied the imagination of Vic; besides,
Grey Molly was even now in the blacksmith's pasture, and Betty Neal was
teaching in the school. Following the march of the mountains and the
drift of the clouds, he turned towards Alder. The piled water shook the
dam, topped it, burst it into fragments, and rushed into freedom; he
must go to Alder, have a drink, shake hands with a friend, kiss Betty
Neal, and come back again. Two days going, two days coming, three days
for the frolic; a week would cover it all. And two hours later Vic Gregg
had cached his heavier equipment, packed his necessaries on the burro,
and was on the way.
By noon he had dropped below the snowline and into the foothills, and
with every step his heart grew lighter. Behind him the mountains slid
up into the heart of the sky with cold, white winter upon them, but here
below it was spring indubitably. There was hardly enough fresh grass
to temper the winter brown into shining bronze, but a busy, awakening
insect life thronged through the roots. Surer sign than this, the
flowers were coming. A slope of buttercups flashed suddenly when the
wind struck it and wild morning glory spotted a stretch of daisies with
purple and dainty lavender. To be sure, the blossoms never grew thickly
enough to make strong dashes of color, but they tinted and stained the
hillsides. He began to cross noisy little watercourses, empty most of
the year, but now the melting snow fed them. From eddies and quiet pools
the bright watercress streamed out into the currents, and now and
then in moist ground under a sheltering bank he found rich patches of
violets.
His eyes went happily among these tokens of the glad time of the
year, but while he noted them and the bursting buds of the aspen,
reddish-brown, his mind was open to all that middle register of calls
which the human ear may notice in wild places. Far above his scale were
shrilling murmurs of birds and insects, and beneath it ran those ground
noises that the rabbit, for instance, understands so well; but between
these overtones and undertones he heard the scream of the hawk,
spiraling down in huge circles, and the rapid call of a grouse, far off,
and the drone of insects about his feet, or darting suddenly upon his
brain and away again. He heard these things by the grace of the wind,
which sometimes blew them about him in a chorus, and again shut off all
except that lonely calling of the grouse, and often whisked away every
murmur and left Gregg, in the center of a wide hush with only the creak
of the pack-saddle and the click of the burro's accurate feet among the
rocks.
At such times he gave his full attention to the trail, and he read it
as one might turn the pages of a book. He saw how a rabbit had scurried,
running hard, for the prints of the hind feet planted far ahead of those
on the forepaws. There was reason in her haste, for here the pads of a
racing coyote had dug deeply into a bit of soft ground. The sign of both
rabbit and coyote veered suddenly, and again the trail told the reason
clearly--the big print of a lobo's paw, that gray ghost which haunts
the ranges with the wisest brain and the swiftest feet in the West. Vic
Gregg grinned with excitement; fifty dollars' bounty if that scalp were
his! But the story of the trail called him back with the sign of some
small animal which must have traveled very slowly, for in spite of
the tiny size of the prints, each was distinct. The man sniffed with
instinctive aversion and distrust for this was the trail of the skunk,
and if the last of the seven sleepers was out, it was spring indeed. He
raised his cudgel and thwacked the burro joyously.
“Get on, Marne,” he cried. “We're overdue in Alder.”
Marne switched her tail impatiently and canted back a long ear to
listen, but she did not increase her pace; for Marne had only one
gait, and if Vic occasionally thumped her, it was rather by way of
conversation than in any hope of hurrying their journey.