Those mountains above the Barry cabin were, as he told Vic Gregg,
inaccessible to men on horseback except by one path, yet there was a
single class of travelers who roamed at will through far more difficult
ground than this. Speaking in general, where a man can go a burro can
go, and where a burro can go he usually manages to carry his pack. He
crawls up a raged down-pitch of rocks that comes dangerously close to
the perpendicular; he walks securely along a crumbling ledge with half
his body over a thousand yards of emptiness. Therefore the prospectors
with their burros have combed the worst mountains of the West and it
was hardly a surprise to Kate Barry when she saw two men come down the
steepest slope above the cabin with two little pack animals scrambling
and sliding before them. It was still some time before nightfall, but
the sun had dropped out of sight fully an hour ago and now the western
mountains were blackening against a sky whose thin, clear blue grew
yellow towards evening.
Against that dark mass of the mountainside, she could not make out the
two travelers clearly, so she shaded her eyes and peered up, high up.
The slope was so sheer that if one of the four figures lost footing it
would come crashing to her very feet. When they saw her and shouted down
the sound fell as clearly as if they had called from the cabin, yet they
had a good half hour's labor between that greeting and the moment they
came out on the level before Kate. From the instant they called she
remained in motionless, deep thought, and when they came now into full
view, she cried out joyously: “Buck, oh Buck!” and ran towards them.
Even the burros stopped and the men stood statue-like; it is rarely
enough that one finds a human being in those mountains, almost an act
of Providence that lead to a house, and a miracle when the trail crosses
the path of a friend. The prospectors came out of their daze with a
shout and rushed to meet her. Each of them had her by a hand, wringing
it; they talked all together in a storm of words.
“Kate, I'm dreamin'!--Dear old Buck!--Have you forgotten me?--Lee
Haines! I should say not.--Don't pay any attention to him. Five
years. And I've been hungerin' to see you all that--.--Where have you
been?--Everywhere! but this is the best thing I've seen.--Come in.--Wait
till we get these packs off the poor little devils.--Oh, I'm so glad to
see you; so glad!--Hurry up, Lee. Your fingers asleep?--How long have
you been out?--Five months.--Then you're hungry.--We've just ate.--But a
piece of pie?--pie? I've been dreamin' of pie!”
A fire already burned in the big living-room of the cabin, for at this
season, at such an altitude, the shadows were always cold, and around
the fire they gathered, each of the men with half a huge pie before him.
They were such as one might expect that mountain region to produce, big,
gaunt, hard-muscled. They had gone unshaven for so long that their faces
were clothed not with an unsightly stubble but with strong, short beard
that gave them a certain grim dignity and made their eyes seem sunken.
They were opposite types, which is usually the case when two men strike
out together. Buck Daniels was black-haired, with an ugly, shrewd face
and a suggestion of rather dangerous possibilities of swift action; but
Lee Haines was a great bulk of a man, with tawny beard, handsome, in a
leonine fashion, more poised than Daniels, fitted to crush. The sharp
glance of Buck flitted here and there, in ten seconds he knew everything
in the room; the steady blue eye of Lee Haines went leisurely from place
to place and lingered; but both of them stared at Kate as if they could
not have enough of her. They talked without pause while they ate. A
stranger in the room would have sealed their lips in utter taciturnity,
but here they sat with a friend, five months of loneliness and labor
behind them, and they gossiped like girls.
Into the jangle of talk cut a thin, small voice from outside, a burst of
laughter. Then: “Bart, you silly dog!” and Joan stood at the open door
with her hand buried in the mane of the wolf-dog. The fork of Buck
Daniels stopped halfway to his lips and Lee Haines straightened until
the chair groaned.
They spoke together, hushed voices: “Kate!”
“Come here, Joan!” Her face glistened with pride, and Joan came forward
with wide eyes, tugging Black Bart along in a reluctant progress.
“It ain't possible!” whispered Buck Daniels. “Honey, come here and shake
hands with your Uncle Buck.” The gesture called forth deep throated
warning from Bart, and he caught back his hand with a start.
“It's always that way,” said Kate, half amused, half vexed; “Bart won't
let a soul touch her when Dan isn't home. Good old Bart, go away, you
foolish dog! Don't you see these are friends?”
He cringed a little under the shadow of the hand which waved him off but
his only answer was a silent baring of the teeth.
“You see how it is. I'm almost afraid to touch her myself when Dan's
away; she and Bart bully me all day long.”
In the meantime the glance of Joan had cloyed itself with sufficient
examination of the strangers, and now she turned back towards the door
and the meadow beyond.
“Bart!” she called softly. The sharp ears of the dog quivered; he came
to attention with a start. “Look! Get it for me!”
One loud scraping of his claws on the floor as he started, and Black
Bart went like a bolt through the door with Joan scrambling after him,
screaming with excitement; from the outside, they heard the cry of
a frightened squirrel, and then its angry chattering from a place of
safety up a tree.
“Shall I call her back again?” asked Kate.
“Not if Bart comes with her,” answered Lee Haines. “I've seen enough of
him to last me a while.”
“Well, we'll have her to ourselves when Dan comes; of course Bart leaves
her to tag around after Dan.”
“When is he comin' back?” asked Buck, with polite interest.
“Anytime. I don't know. But he's always here before it's completely
dark.”
The glance of Buck Daniels kicked over to Lee Haines, exchanged meanings
with him, and came back to Kate.
“Terrible sorry,” he said, “but I s'pose we'll have to be on our way
before it's plumb dark.”
“Go so soon as that? Why, I won't let you.”
“I--” began Haines, fumbling for words.
“We got to get down in the valley before it's dark,” filled in Buck.
Suddenly she laughed, frankly, happily.
“I know what you mean, but Dan is changed; he isn't the same man he used
to be.”
“Yes?” queried Buck, without conviction.
“You'll have to see him to believe; Buck, he doesn't even whistle any
more.”
“What?”
“Only goes about singing, now.”
The two men exchanged glances of such astonishment that Kate could not
help but notice and flush a little.
“Well,” murmured Buck, “Bart doesn't seem to have changed much from the
old days.”
She laughed slowly, letting her mind run back through such happiness as
they could not understand and when she looked up she seemed to debate
whether or not it would be worth while to let them in on the delightful
secret. The moment she dwelt on the burning logs they gazed at her and
then to each other with utter amazement as if they sat in the same room
with the dead come to life. No care of motherhood had marked her face,
but on the white, even forehead was a sign of peace; and drifting over
her hands and on the white apron across her lap the firelight pooled dim
gold, the wealth of contentment.
“If you'd been here today you would have seen how changed he is. We
had a man with us whom Dan had taken while he was running from a posse,
wounded, and kept him here until he was well, and--”
“That's Dan,” murmured Lee Haines. “He's gold all through when a man's
in trouble.”
“Shut up, Lee,” cut in Buck. He sat forward in his chair, drinking up
her story.
“Go on.”
“This morning we saw the same posse skirting through the valley and knew
that they were on the old trail. Dan sent Gregg over the hills and rode
Vic's horse down so that the posse would mistake him, and he could lead
them out of the way. I was afraid, terribly, I was afraid that if the
posse got close and began shooting Dan would--”
She stopped; her eyes begged them to understand.
“Go on,” said Lee Haines, shuddering slightly. “I know what you mean.”
“But I watched him ride down the slope,” she cried joyously, “and I saw
the posse close on him--almost on top of him when he reached the valley.
I saw the flash of their guns. I saw them shoot. I wasn't afraid that
Dan would be hurt, for he seems to wear a charm against bullets--I
wasn't much afraid of that, but I dreaded to see him turn and go back
through that posse like a storm. But--” she caught both hands to her
breast and her bright face tilted up--“even when the bullets must have
been whistling around him he didn't look back. He rode straight on and
on, out of view, and I knew”--her voice broke with emotion--“oh, Buck,
I knew that he had won, and I had won; that he was safe forever; that
there was no danger of him ever slipping back into that terrible other
self; I knew that I'd never again have to dream of that whistling in the
wind; I knew that he was ours--Joan's and mine.”
“By God,” broke out Buck, “I'm happier than if you'd found a gold mine,
Kate. It don't seem no ways--but if you seen that with your own eyes,
it's possible true. He's changed.”
“I've been almost afraid to be happy all these years,” she said, “but
now I want to sing and cry at the same time. My heart is so full that
it's overflowing, Buck.”
She brushed the tears away and smiled at them.
“Tell me all about yourselves. Everything. You first, Lee. You've been
longer away.”
He did not answer for a moment, but sat with his head fallen, watching
her thoughtfully. Women had been the special curse in Lee Haines' life;
they had driven him to the crime that sent him West into outlawry long
years before; through women, as he himself foreboded, he would come at
last to some sordid, petty end; but here sat the only one he had loved
without question, without regret, purely and deeply, and as he watched
her, more beautiful than she had been in her girlhood, it seemed, as he
heard the fitful laughter of Joan outside, the old sorrow came storming
up in him, and the sense of loss.
“What have I been doing?” he murmured at length. He shrugged away his
last thoughts. “I drifted about for a while after the pardon came down
from the governor. People knew me, you see, and what they knew about me
didn't please them. Even today Jim Silent and Jim Silent's crew isn't
forgotten. Then don't look at me like that, Kate; no, I played straight
all the time---then I ran into Buck and he and I had tried each other
out, we had at least one thing in common”--here he looked at Buck and
they both flushed--“and we made a partnership of it. We've been together
five years now.”
“I knew you could break away, Lee. I used to tell you that.”
“You helped me more than you knew,” he said quietly.
She smiled and then turned to escape him. “And now you, Buck?”
“Since then we've made a bit of coin punching cows and we've blown it in
again prospecting. Blown it in? Kate, we've shot enough powder to lift
that mountain yonder but all we've got is color. You could gild the sky
with what we've seen but we haven't washed enough dust to wear a hole in
a tissue-paper pocket. I'll tell you the whole story. Lee packs a jinx
with him. But--Haines, did you ever see a lion as big as that?”
The dimness of evening had grown rapidly through the room while they
talked and now the light from the door was far less than the glow of the
fire. The yellow flicker picked out a dozen pelts stretching as rugs on
the floor or hanging along the wall; that to which Buck pointed was an
enormous skin of a mountain lion stretched sidewise, for if it had been
hung straight up a considerable portion of the tail must have dragged on
the floor. Buck went to examine it. Presently he exclaimed in surprise
and he passed his fingers over it as though searching for something.
“Where was it shot, Kate? I don't find nothin' but this cut that looks
like his knife slipped when he was skinnin'.”
“It was a knife that killed it.”
“What!”
“Don't ask me about it; I see the picture of it in my dreams still. The
lion had dragged the trap into a cave and Bart followed it. Dan went in
pushing his rifle before him, but--when he tried to fire it jammed.”
“Yes?” they cried together.
“Don't ask me the rest!”
They would hardly have let her off so easily if it had not been for the
entrance of Joan who had come back on account of the darkness. Black
Bart went promptly to a corner of the hearth and lay down with his head
on his paws and the little girl sat beside him watching the fire, her
head leaning wearily on his shoulder. Kate went to the door.
“It's almost night,” she said. “Why isn't he here?”
“Buck, they couldn't have overtaken--”
She started. “Dan?”
Buck Daniels grinned reassuringly.
“Not unless his hoss is a pile of bones; if it has any heart in it,
Dan'll run away from anything on four legs. No call for worryin', Kate.
He's simply led 'em a long ways off and waited for evenin' before he
doubled back. He'll come back right enough. If they didn't catch him
that first run they'll never get the wind of him.”
It quieted her for a time, but as the minutes slipped away, as the
darkness grew more and more heavy until a curtain of black fell across
the open door, they could see that she was struggling to control her
trouble, they could see her straining to catch some distant sound. Lee
Haines began to talk valiantly, to beguile the waiting time, and Buck
Daniels did his share with stories of their prospecting, but eventually
more and more often silences came on the group. They began to watch the
fire and they winced when a log crackled, or when the sap in a green
place hissed. By degrees they pushed farther and farther back so that
the light would not strike so fully upon them, for in some way it became
difficult to meet each other's eyes.
Only Joan was perfectly at ease. She played for a time with the ears of
Black Bart, or pried open his mouth and made him show the great white
fangs, or scratched odd designs on the hearth with pieces of charcoal;
but finally she lost interest in all these things and let her head lie
on the rough pelt of the wolf-dog, sound asleep. The firelight made her
hair a patch of gold.
Black Bart slept soundly, too, that is, as soundly as one of his nature
could sleep, for every now and then one of his ears twitched, or he
stirred a paw, or an eyelid quivered up. Yet they all started when he
jumped from his sleep into full wakefulness; the motion made Joan sit
up, rubbing her eyes, and Black Bart reached the center of the room
noiselessly. He stood facing the door, motionless.
“It's Dan,” cried Kate. “Bart hears him! Good old Bart!”
The dog pointed up his nose, the hair about his neck bristled into a
ruff, and out of his quaking body came a sound that seemed to moan and
whimper from the distance at first, but drew nearer, louder, packed the
room with terror, the long drawn howl of a wolf.