It had been in the small hours of the night that Sheldon woke. The fire
he had replenished before turning in was a mere bed of coals. He threw a
log across it, and at last dozed. Again he was up and about with the
first streaks of dawn. The sky was pearl-pink when he threw the diamond
hitch and was ready to take up the trail again.
And now, calm-thoughted with the light of day, he hesitated. Should he
go on? Or should he turn back?
As though for an answer, he went to the crossing where the scattered
bones lay close to the water. And the answer to his question came to
him, presenting him a fresh riddle. If he had stared wonderingly when he
came upon the skull at the cliffs back yonder, now did he stare
stupefied. There came a vague, misty fear that he was growing fanciful,
that he was seeing things which did not exist. He got down on his knees,
his face not two feet from the track in the sandy margin of the creek.
Something had passed there last night; the track was very fresh.
Whatever it was that had wakened him had crossed here. And what was it?
He sought to be certain; he must be conservative. The track was
imperfect; the lapping of the water broke down the little ridges of sand
the passing foot had pushed up; the imprint would be gone entirely in a
few hours. And there was no other here, for the grass came close down to
the water.
He looked quickly across the stream. There there was a little strip of
wet soil. The water boiling unheeded about his boots, he strode across.
Despite the man’s quiet nerves, his heart was beating like mad. For he
saw that there was a track here, fresh, made last night. And another.
Now he did not need to go down on his knees. The imprints were clearly
outlined, as definite as though drawn upon a sheet of paper.
And they were the tracks of a bare, human foot.
If it had been the big track of a big man, Sheldon’s heart would not
have hammered so. But it was the track that might have marked the
passing here of a boy of ten or twelve—or of a girl!
“A child or a woman came last night and looked at me as I slept,”
muttered the man wonderingly. “Here, God knows how many miles from
anywhere! Barefooted, prowling around in the middle of the night! Good
God! The cursed thing is uncanny!”
As he had felt it before, but now more overwhelmingly, was his soul
oppressed with the bigness of the solitude about him. He was a pygmy who
had blundered into a giant’s land. He was as a little boy in the
inscrutable presence of majesty and mystery. For a little it seemed to
him that in the still, white dawn he stood hemmed about by the
supernatural.
Why should there be two white piles of unburied human bones here in a
day’s travel? Why should there be a fresh track in the wet soil made by
a little naked foot in the night? Why should every bit of metallic
substance disappear from the presence of those dead men? Why should his
visitor of last night peer down at him and then slip away, with no word?
He frowned. Unconsciously he was connecting the bleached skeleton and
the fresh track. The man had been dead perhaps half a dozen years; the
track had not been there so many hours. He was growing fanciful with a
vengeance.
It was with an effort of will that he cleared his mind of the wild tales
which he had heard told of the Sasnokee-keewan. For a little he sought
to believe that he had been so hopelessly confused in his sense of
direction that he had made a great curve and had come back to some one
of the outposts of civilization; that even now he was separated only by
a ridge, or by a bend in the cañon, from a lumber-camp or mining
settlement. But he knew otherwise. One doesn’t find bleaching human
bones lying disinterred upon the edge of a village.
He sought to follow the tracks across the bed of the cañon and could
not. They here were lost in the grass, which was not tall enough to bow
to the light passing. But a hundred yards farther down the creek he came
upon them again, fresh tracks of little bare feet, clearly outlined in a
muddy crossing. The imprint of the heel was faint; the toes had sunk
deep.
“Running,” grunted Sheldon. “And going like the very devil, too, I’ll
bet.”
He went back for Buck.
“We’re going on, old horse,” he informed his animal. “The Lord knows
what we’re getting into. But if a kid of a boy can make it, I guess we
can.”
For he preferred to think of it as a boy. That a barefoot woman should
be running about here in the heart of the mountains, peering down at a
man sleeping, scampering away as he woke—“prowling around,” as he put
it—well, it was simpler to think of a half-grown boy doing it.
“Or a man stunted in his growth,” he thought for the first time.
And the thought remained with him. One could conceive of a man who had
never got his full growth physically, who was stunted mentally as well,
a half-crazed, half-wild being, who fled here, who subsisted in a state
little short of savagery, who crept through the moonlit forests subtly
stirred by the weird moon-madness, who hunted like the other wild
things.
“Who slipped up behind a man and drove a knife into his back! Who even
made way with the clothing, everything, leaving the bones to whiten
through summer and winter as other animals of prey left the creatures
they had killed!”
Big were the forests, limitless, seeming as vast as infinity itself,
resting heavy and still upon a man’s soul. The feeling of last night,
the loneliness, the sort of unnamed dread came back upon John Sheldon.
He shook it off with an impatient imprecation. But all day it hovered
about him. Again he was glad of his horse’s companionship.
Not a nervous man, still he was not without imagination. He began to be
oppressed with the stillness of the wilderness. As he pushed on
downstream, watchful for other tracks, he came into a valley which
widened until it was perhaps a mile across, carpeted with grass,
timbered with the biggest trees he had seen since leaving Belle Fortune,
their boles five and six and seven feet through, every one a monument of
majesty, planted centuries before some long-forgotten ancestor of John
Sheldon learned of a land named America.
There were wide, open spaces. One looking through the giant trunks
seemed always looking down the long, dimly lit aisle of the chief temple
of the gods of the world. Power, and venerable age—and silence! A
silence so eternal that it seemed veritably tangible and indomitable.
A man wanted at once to call out, to shatter the heavy stillness which
bore upon his soul, and felt his lips grown mute. The creek gurgled,
here and there a cone fell or there was the twitter of a bird; these
sounds passed through the silence, accentuated it, were a part of it, a
foil to it, but in no way disturbed the ancient reign of silence.
Through this world, which might have come at dawn from the hand of its
Maker, Sheldon pushed on swiftly, his brain alive with a hundred
questions and fancies. Where there was loose, soft dirt, where there was
a likely crossing, he looked for tracks. And as hour after hour passed
he found nothing to indicate that he was not, as he had imagined until
this morning, alone in this part of the Sasnokee-keewan.
And yet he thought that last night’s visitor was ahead of him. True, a
half-demented, supercunning wild man might have hidden behind any of
those big tree-trunks, might even now be watching him with feverishly
bright eyes. Sheldon must chance that; he could not seek behind every
tree in this forest of countless thousands. But he could feel pretty
well assured that the creature he sought had not fled to east or to west
any considerable distance. For on either hand, seen here and there
through the trees, the sides of the cañon rose to steep cliffs where a
man would have to toil for hours to make his way half-way up.
Noon came. Again Sheldon was in a swiftly narrowing gorge. No longer was
the world silent about him. The roar and thunder of water shouting and
echoing through the rocky defile nearly deafened him. Suddenly his path
seemed shut off in front. It was impossible to get a horse over the
ridge here on either hand; impossible to ford the torrent where many a
treacherous hole hid under boiling water. He lunched and rested here,
wondering if he must turn back.
While Buck browsed, Sheldon sought the way out. He turned to his right,
climbing the flank of the mountain. A man could go up readily enough at
this spot, clambering from one rock to another. The boulders were not
unlike easily imagined steps placed by the giant deity of the wild. But
it took no second look to be sure that never was the horse foaled that
could follow its master here.
Tempting the man there rose from the ridge a tall, bare, and barren peak
from which he could hope to have an extended sweep of world about him.
He thought that he could come to it within an hour. And if he were to
retrace his steps a little, seeking an escape from the _cul de sac_ into
which the stream had led him, it was well to have a look at the country
now from some such peak.
He had done this before, perhaps half a dozen times, always selecting
carefully the peak which promised the widest expanse of view with the
least brush to struggle through. But never had he had the unlimited
panorama which rewarded him now. At last he was at the top, after not
one but two hours’ hard climb; and he felt that, in sober truth, he had
found the top of the world, that he had surmounted it, that he was less
in its realm than in that of the wide, blue sky.
Far below the thunder of the stream he had just left was lost, smothered
in the walls of its own cañon, stifled among the forests. Here there
mounted only the whisper from the imperceptibly stirring millions of
branches, not unlike the vague murmur in a sea shell. The peak itself
might have been the altar of the god of silence.
East, west, south, whence he had come, Sheldon saw ridge on ridge, peak
after peak, No-Luck Land running away until, with other ridges and
peaks, it melted into the sky-line.
Looking north, and almost at his feet, the mountainside fell away
precipitously. He estimated that he was at an altitude not less than
eleven thousand feet. There was snow here, plenty of it, thawing so
slowly that not nearly all of it would be gone when the winter came
again.
Below him, in the tumbled boulders, were pockets of snow, with bare
spaces, and the hardy mountain flowers in the shallow soil. Down he
looked and down, until it seemed as though the steep-sided mountains
fell away many thousands of dizzy feet. And there below was the wide
valley, all one edge of it meadow-land, all the other edge given over to
a mighty forest, and at the jagged line lying between wood and field a
little lake, calm and blue, with white rocks along the farther rim.
On all sides of the valley lay the sheer mountains, shutting it in so
that a man might look down and see the beauties beneath him and yet
hesitate to descend, thinking of the difficulties of getting both in and
out.
Sheldon had not forgotten the imprint of the bare foot. Nor was he ready
to give up the search he had begun, there being no little stubbornness
in the man’s nature.
But he stared long down into the valley before him, thinking of the
solitude to be found there; the game to be hunted if a man sought game;
thinking that some time he would make his way down yonder, joying in the
thought that his foot would be the first for years, perhaps generations
or even centuries, to travel there. No, however, he would turn back to
where Buck waited; seek the pass that must lead out, and learn, if it
was fated that he should know, who had made the tracks at the crossing.
His eyes, sweeping now across the field of tumbled rocks which topped
the ridge at the base of his peak, were arrested by a flat piece of
granite resting on top of a boulder which rose conspicuously above its
neighbors.
_A monument!_
Here, where only a second ago he had told himself that perhaps no other
human foot than his own had come! The old sign of a man-made trail, the
sign to be read from afar, to last on into eternity. For the shrieking
winds of winter and the racing snows do not budge the flat rock laid
carefully upon flat-topped stone.
Was he tricking himself? Had nature, in some one of her mad moods, done
this trick? He strode over to it swiftly, sliding down the side of the
slope up which he had clambered, making his way by leaps and bounds from
rock to rock.
The monument was man-made.
Nature doesn’t go out of her way, as some man had done, to get a block
of granite, carry it a hundred yards _up-hill_, and place it upon a rock
of another kind and shade where it can be the more conspicuous.
One monument calls for another in a trackless field of stone. In a
moment, farther along the ridge, he found the second monument. He
hurried to it. Yonder, lower on the slope, was the third; a hundred
yards farther on, the fourth!
He got the trend of the trail now, for it curved only a bit, and then
ran straight, straight toward the eastern rim of the valley lying far
below him. And the other way, the trail ran back toward the cañon from
which he had climbed. A trail here, in the very innermost heart of the
Sasnokee-keewan, where men said there were no trails!
Eagerly he turned back toward the cañon. Monument after monument he
found, leading cunningly between giant boulders, under cliffs, down a
little, upward a little, down again, slowly, gradually seeking the lower
altitude. Again and again Sheldon lost the way, which had but rock set
on rock to indicate it; but always, going back, he picked it up again.
There were a dozen monuments to show the way before he came down into
the meadow a mile above the spot where he had left Buck. And here also,
at the base of the slope fully two hundred yards from the willows of the
creek, he found a fresh, green willow-rod. It had been dropped here not
more than a few hours ago, for the white wood where the bark had been
torn away was not dried out. A bit of the bark itself he could tie into
a knot without breaking it. And the stick had been cut with a sharp
knife, the smooth end showing how one stroke had cut evenly through the
half-inch branch.
“My wild man came this way,” was Sheldon’s eager thought. “He knew the
trail over the mountain, and has gone on ahead. And that knife of his—”
He shuddered in spite of himself, and again cursed himself for getting
what he called “nerves.” But he thought that it was a fair bet that same
knife had been driven into the backs of at least two men.
He went back for his horse, walking swiftly. Three hours had slipped
away since noon. But he told himself that he was not “burning daylight.”
He had found a way over the mountain, a way he believed his horse could
go with him. And if luck was good, he’d camp to-night in the valley down
into which he had looked from the peak.
And somewhere, far ahead of him, perhaps not a thousand feet away,
watching him from behind some tree or rock, was his “wild man!” He was
beginning to be certain that it was a man, a little fellow, dwarfed in
body and mind and soul, and yet—
And yet the track might have been that of a boy of ten, or of a woman.
Right then he swore that he was going to find out whose track that was
before he turned his back on the Sasnokee-keewan.
“I’d never be able to get it out of my head if I lived to be a thousand
years old if I didn’t get a look at the thing,” he assured himself.
“Thank God it’s early in the season.”
When he stopped to rest, he already had the habit of keeping his back to
a tree.