WANDA'S DISCOVERY
A supreme happiness had filled Wanda Leland's heart for a few golden
hours, so thoroughly permeating every fibre of her emotional being that
when sorrow came afterward it could not entirely drive out the
whispering gladness.
Never had the forest land seemed so big, so vast and still as during
the slow days which followed. She went to it for the comfort she could
not bring herself to ask of her mother just yet, and it mothered her,
crooned and whispered and sang to her. Through the dew filled mornings
she wandered silently; rarely did she return to the house until the sun
was low in the west. Never had this world she loved seemed so vitally
close to her, so big in a new sense, so eloquently an expression of the
divine eternal. Her heart swelled and the talk of the pine tops
entered it.
They were sad, glad days. Gladness sang in her heart when in the
sun-flooded mornings she rode out alone, and perhaps her devious way
brought her to the spot where Red Reckless had swept her up into his
arms for the first time, when his kiss had brought love into full
blossom in her breast. Sadness brought its shadow and listlessness
when day after day passed and she did not see him again, when the eager
hope of the morning that he too would ride to that spot to meet her
died down in the afternoon's invariable disappointment. Gladness when
she thought of him, just of him; sadness when she thought of her
father's stern face.
Red Reckless had made no attempt to see her, or to communicate with
her. Even while she sought to find excuses for him, that hurt her more
than her loyalty would let her whisper to herself. He would come soon.
He would know where to find her, know that her woman's heart was taking
her to the spot where that heart had really become a woman's. He was
thinking of her now as she thought of him. Her heart heard his heart
talking to it across the forests and streams.
A woman's heart trusted him, but a maiden's pride permitted no question
when Garth rode over as he did twice during the following week. When
Garth remarked casually that his cousin was the same old chap he'd
always been, and that he seemed to have nothing in his rollicking brain
more serious than the breaking of a wild devil of a colt and a horse
race which he had set his heart upon, Wanda bent her head a little over
her book and gave no other sign of having heard the statement elicited
by her mother's question. But the news hurt, too, just a little.
There was a quick sting that came and was gone as her love for him
surged up again, and it was the same sort of sting, only stronger, that
she had felt as a little girl when she thought of him as happy in his
boyish pursuits with any one but her. It did not matter now whether it
was Little Saxon or Big Bill. She told herself in her own little room
that she was a jealous cat. But--
"Oh, dear God, how I love you, Wayne!"
Then, when the days passed and she did not hear from him, there came
for the first time a quick fear which was the first ally of that twinge
of jealousy. The fifth day came, the day on which he was riding to
Laughter Lake with Ruf Ettinger, and she could not know that his every
thought was of her. She only felt that, had she been the man, she
would not have stayed away. And there came the question and the fear,
"Does he love me as I love him?"
The old, lovers' question ever since Aucassin and Nicolette; the matter
for long debate and reiterated argument: "It may not be that thou
shouldst love me even as I love thee!" She found herself blushing
hotly as she rode alone through the forest at the thought that she was
again going to meet him, and that he did not come to meet her. She
felt suddenly ashamed and angry both with him and with herself. Was
she, to him, like a ripe apple that had dropped into his hand at the
touch? Did he think other--?
Her face crimson she reined the startled Gypsy around with a savage
jerk, turned her back squarely upon the Bar L-M, and without a look
behind her rode swiftly in the opposite direction. She rode for an
hour, not turning once, although many a time her heart fluttered wildly
and then grew painfully still at some slight noise which to her
yearning ears sounded like the thud of a horse's hoofs behind her.
To-day she crossed the narrow valley toward the cliffs rising like a
wall upon the far side of Echo Creek. Stubbornly she shut her mind
from its daily wanderings; her camera, that she had not used for a
week, was going to work for her to-day. The birds that had come
trooping back from wintering in the south--robins and blue birds, blue
jays and woodpeckers, larks and yellow hammers--made merry din in the
morning air. Shep, running on ahead as usual, disturbed half a dozen
grouse from the underbrush in a little cañon, and the muffled roll of
their whirring wings threw Shep into brief consternation and prolonged
subsequent joy. She saw the bob and flash of a rabbit's tail, noticed
again and again the lean, muscular body of a tree squirrel, heard upon
a wooded slope the snapping and crashing of brush that told of the
leaping flight of a deer. The woods were alive with animal folk, her
"friends" called to her from every tree and tiny valley, they peeped
out at her from burrows and hollow trees.
"We are going to quit being a little fool," she told Gypsy with
tremulous emphasis. "And we are going to get a real picture to-day."
A day or so before she had heard with scant attention and no subsequent
interest something which in the old careless, love free days sooner
would have sent her riding this way in haste. One of her father's men,
Charley or Jim, had found a dead cow under the cliffs and had seen
signs of bear. He had returned to the spot later and had killed the
animal, a she bear, and had seen one of her cubs making its swift,
awkward way into the brush. Recollecting the story, and because to-day
she yearned feverishly for something to do, Wanda turned Gypsy toward
the cliffs, thinking how she should like, if her fortune were very
great, to be able to show Wayne Shandon when he did come to her, the
picture of a bear cub playing in the woods.
"I've had so much fun hunting for him!" she would say then. And Wayne
would never know how unmaidenly she had been.
Before she had come within a thousand yards of the place where the
carcass of the cow was lying she slipped from the saddle and picketed
Gypsy. Her lunch she left tied to the saddle strings; camera and field
glasses went with her.
Already, in the fast advancing summertime, she had donned her hunting
costume. The soft green of blouse and short skirt, of cap and
stockings, blended with the many tints of green of the copses and
groves and meadows through which she went swiftly and silently. She
slipped from tree to tree, making no more sound than the chipmunk
scampering almost from under her feet. Her eyes brightened, the colour
warmed in her cheek, her heart grew eager. For, sure enough, fortune
was good to her; there were two little bear cubs, round and fat and
playful, rumpling each other where they rolled in the sunlight in a
small grassy open space.
They were a hundred yards away when she saw them, too far for a
picture; but as soon as her eyes fell upon them she vowed that she must
have a picture. There was little breeze this morning in the quiet
woods, but that little blew from where she stood straight toward the
spot where the cubs were frollicking. She must circle, come out down
yonder behind a pile of rocks, slip behind the great cedar right at the
base of the cliffs, and edge on from there on her hands and knees.
But she paused a moment, fascinated, watching them. They were sitting
up, their small brown heads shaking from side to side, their sharp eyes
watching each other, their little red tongues lolling. They were such
baby things, their awkward bodies so like the little bodies of babies
just taking the first faltering step, that she wanted to rush at them
and pick them up and hug them.
There was the angry snarl of a rifle, sudden and sharp and evil, and
one of the little brown bears made an inarticulate whining moan and its
playful spirit ran out in red to dye the grass. Its brother fell over
backwards in its fright; there came a second shot, the whining of a
bullet glancing from a rock, and the cub plunged into the brush. She
saw it a moment, lost it, saw it once more running as only the
frightened wild things can run as it sped down into a little hollow
which hid it from the hunter and thus saved its life, and then she
discerned it climbing wildly, clawing its terrified way up the great
cedar against the cliffs. When no third shot came she knew that the
hunter had not seen it and then, with an angry fire in her eyes, she
turned to learn who he might be. Approaching her from the edge of the
grove, a complacent smile upon his face, his rifle under his arm, was
Sledge Hume.
"Oh!" she cried when he had come close, thinking that he must have seen
her. "Why did you do that? It was like murder!"
He stopped dead in his tracks, and then swung toward her. He was so
close that she saw a quick, startled look leap up in his eyes.
"Murder?" he said sharply. "What do you mean?"
He had not lifted his hat, it was not Sledge Hume's way to trouble
himself with the small civilities. He came on again until he stood
quite close to her, staring coolly into her flushed face.
"They were playing just like babies!" she cried breathlessly. "Why did
you kill it?"
He laughed.
"Hardly for its skin, since I suppose it isn't worth much," he answered
carelessly. "Hardly for its meat as I'm not going to trouble with it.
Why, I suppose just for fun then. Because," his tone and eyes touched
with a hint of contempt for what to him was a woman's squemishness,
"because I wanted to."
Her eyes flashed her growing anger back at him.
"It was so unnecessary," she said bitterly. "They were playing so
prettily and happily."
"I watched them for ten minutes before I shot," he said. "Their play
was interesting, I'll admit. But they were bears, just the same.
They'd grow up some day and I wonder if they'd take mercy then on a
pretty little baby calf if they came upon it playing? Your father'd
thank me, my tender hearted Miss."
She bit her lip and turned away from him. He watched her a moment,
then called,
"Are you riding back to the house? My horse is right back there and
I'll ride with you."
"No," she answered quietly. "I'm not going back just yet."
She walked on to where the dead cub lay--stood looking down on it a
moment and then moved on. Hume watched her while he filled his pipe
and lighted it, and went in turn to look at his game. He turned the
little beast over with his foot, noted with satisfaction the hole which
the bullet had torn through the soft body, and then strolled toward his
horse. Wanda saw him ride away in the direction of her home, smoking
his pipe.
"All men like to hunt, to kill things," she mused. "Are they as cruel
about it as he is? Would Wayne have watched the little things playing
for ten minutes and then, when he tired of it, shot them in the midst
of their play?"
Not until Sledge Hume had topped a gentle rise and dropped down and out
of sight upon the farther side, did the girl turn quickly to the great
cedar up which she had seen the escaping cub scramble. She was certain
that he had not come down. When at first she did not see him she
circled the tree slowly, expecting from each new angle to catch a
glimpse of the roly-poly brown body. And when, after fifteen minutes
peering upward through the widely flung, horizontal branches, she saw
him, a swift inspiration came to her; her quarry had not escaped her
yet.
The tree, one of the giants of her father's ranch that she knew very
well, thrust its crest upward so close to the cliffs that many of the
branches had been bent this way and that, flattening against the
granite. The lowest limb, twenty feet above the girl's head, was as
thick as many a tall tree hereabouts, and was like a giant's arm, bent
at the elbow, thrusting the rocks back. She could make her way up this
far, working along a ragged fissure in the cliff; thence she could edge
out upon the broad limb until she came to the trunk itself. And once
there, to Wanda in her hunting costume and with her knowledge of tree
climbing, the rest of the way, from limb to limb, might be difficult
but would certainly not be impossible or fraught with unaccustomed
danger.
The cub had climbed until coming to a limb which like the lowest one
scraped against the rock not half a dozen feet from the tapering trunk,
he had crept out on it and was lying upon a ledge of rock. Wanda hoped
that here was the opportunity of a lifetime. She would climb as high
as that limb, and find the cub's flight shut off by the sheer wall
rising perpendicularly behind him. Then she would make him pose for
her, whether he liked it or not.
Flushed and panting the girl made her way upward until finally she
caught with both hands the big lower limb. Field glasses and camera in
their cases strapped to her belt in no way interfered with the free
play of her muscles. She tested the branch a moment, smiled at herself
for hesitating to trust her light weight to a thing which would have
carried tons, gripped a firmer hold and swung free of the rocks. Here
would have been a picture for her mother had she come with her this
morning; the lithe graceful body swinging twenty feet high in air, only
hard slab and broken boulder beneath her. Then she drew herself up as
a boy does "chinning himself," threw a heel over the limb, and in a
flash lay breathing deeply and triumphantly, the most difficult step of
her climb achieved.
Slowly, steadily she made her way upward. In the main it was simple
enough for Wanda for it was the sort of thing she did over and over
week in and week out. Once, already fifty feet from the ground, she
did something that would have been simple enough under other
circumstances and yet which put a quick flutter in her heart. It was
something which would have made the heart grow still in the breast of
Wayne Shandon had he seen, which would have brought a paralysing fear
for her to a man who loved life for the gamble in it and who took his
chances recklessly.
She was perched fearlessly upon a sturdy horizontal limb, her body
tight pressed against the trunk, her hands gripping at the roughened
bark, steadying her as she balanced. A quick glance upward showed her
a bare stretch of bole with the nearest limb on her side of the tree
just barely beyond her reach. Slowly she straightened, lengthening her
pliant body the imperceptible fraction of an inch, gradually thrusting
her two arms up high above her head, still with her hands steadying her
as they clung to the bark, her moccasined feet curving to the limb on
which she stood. And now she could just touch with the tips of her
fingers the broad branch above.
Then she did the thing which would have been simple enough had she
stood on the ground instead of balancing high in air; she measured the
few inches in distance, she drew her fingers lingeringly from the bark,
holding them still above her head, she tautened the muscles of her
splendid young body to the work they were called upon to do, bent her
knees little by little, and then fearless still but agitated, she
leaped upward, and grasped the elusive branch.
For a moment she swung there, secure now and confident, and then, as
she had gained the first step in her climb so now she made this one. A
slow tensing of biceps, a drawing up of the pendulous body, the quick
flash of a heel thrown over the limb, and she lay upon it, laughing
softly. It was good and glorious to be young, to have a body that
obeyed one's will, to have a steady heart.
Presently she began once more to clamber upward, her way comparatively
easy now. Thus at last she came to the branch upon which, as on a
bridge, the little brown bear had crossed to the ledge of rock. And
together there came to her a distinct disappointment and a pleasurable
surprise.
Again the cub had slipped away from her; perhaps by now he was half a
mile away and tumbling his awkward and terrified way among the crags.
From below the ledge had seemed to be four or five feet wide; now she
saw that it was nearer ten. The conformation of the rocks, beetling
above it, had led her to imagine that a straight wall of cliff rose
abruptly just at the back of the ledge. In reality they overhung the
rudely level space like out-jutting eaves over the sun-deck that might
have been carved to his taste by some old cliff dweller in front of his
solitary retreat. For there was a cavern here under the frowning brow
of granite, different from the many caves of which the girl knew in the
rugged mountains only in that it was so roomy and at the same time so
secret a place.
Before she left her resting place, she saw the way the cub had gone.
Leading upward from the extreme end of the ledge, at the right, there
was a deep seam or crevice in the granite, almost filled and choked
with fallen rocky debris from above, but affording a trail that even a
man might travel to the top of the cliffs another fifty feet above.
There was a quantity of fine sandy soil at the lower end of the narrow
cut and on the edge of the ledge, and her trained eyes had slight
difficulty in seeing the signs of little bruin's headlong flight. As
he scurried upward he had left the marks of his toes in long
unmistakable scratches.
"I wonder," thought the girl with a little thrill at what her fancy
pictured for her, "if any of the rest of the family are at home?"
The mother bear had been killed; one cub was dead; the second had fled
to the cliff tops. Here, where bears were growing scarcer every year,
there was little danger of her meeting the _pater familias_. And yet--
"If I should meet a bear in there," she laughed to herself, "I wonder
who'd be scared most?"
She made herself as comfortable as she could, drew her camera from its
case, focused it upon the yawning, black mouth of the cavern and waited
a patient quarter of an hour, noiseless and listening and ready. For
she was familiar enough with the California brown bear to know that he
will not attack when the way of retreat is clear; that while, after he
gets into a fight he extracts a great deal of delight from it, still if
given his choice he would rather run and keep on moving until he had
covered anywhere from ten to sixty miles.
[Illustration: She made herself as comfortable as she could, drew her
camera from its case, and waited a patient quarter of an hour.]
When nothing but silence answered her, she leaned out on the limb and
tossed her hat into the mouth of the cave. After it she threw some big
pieces of bark, making them land well inside with no little noise. As
there was still no sound she waited no longer.
The branch out upon which she edged her slow way was both sturdy in
itself and made doubly safe by the fact that it lay across the ledge,
reaching with its tips to the rock wall at the side of the natural
door. In a moment she had scrambled across, had leaped to her feet and
was peering into the vast, shadowy interior.
There are few of us for whom a cave does not have a rare attraction, an
appeal little short of fascinating, that has in it something of romance
perhaps, certainly something of mystery and a dim, vague stirring of
primitive and vital feelings, a shadowy harking back to the early life
history of mankind. To Wanda Leland, in so many essentials a child of
the wild, such a cavern as this was a bit of wonderland. Her swift
running, pioneer blood tingled; her heart gladdened with a glow of
discovery and exploration. Perhaps cave men had dwelt here, secure and
watchful, in the forgotten ages; the idea thrilled. Certainly no man
of her own time or her father's knew of the place: that thought made
the spot her own, and intensified her eager delight in finding it. It
had, to her sensitive, imaginative nature, an aura that she felt had
clung to it always. It was a bit of the wild, the retreat of the wild
things, sternly expressive of a savage grandeur.
Her sensations a strange composite of many dim, intangible,
inexpressible emotions, Wanda tiptoed to the opening, paused listening,
took two or three quick steps and was inside the cave. For a moment
she fully expected to see the sight she dreaded, a pair of gleaming
points of light blazing at her menacingly. And for a little she saw
nothing but shadowy, unreal shapes. Her heart leaped wildly as the
startling fancy came to her that these were the phantoms of the long
dead time when men had lived here, ghosts of the older race.
Then she laughed softly again, once more accused herself of being
"stupid," and began her explorations. Little by little as she grew
accustomed to the scant light here she made out dim bits of detail.
First she realised that her first conjecture had been quite right, and
that this was the biggest cave by far that she had ever seen. She
moved forward half a dozen steps, walking warily for fear of a fall and
found that the light from the entrance died into deep darkness before
it could search out the sides of the great cliff room. Then she went
back out upon the ledge and gathered from the debris choked fissure an
armful of broken bits of dry wood, twigs and needles from the cedar.
In the pocket of her blouse were the matches which she always carried
with her on her trips and in a moment a crackling flame near the cave
door shot its wavering light deep into the dark interior. Then again
she hurried in, eager to see what lay before her.
Nowhere was the rock roof lower than ten feet save where far back it
slanted toward the floor. The floor itself sloped so gently toward the
back that it seemed quite level. She judged at first glimpse, as the
firelight drew from the gloom a glinting granite surface here and
there, that the chamber was twenty feet wide, that it reached back into
the cliffs some fifty feet. She moved back toward what seemed the rear
wall, found the floor pitching steeply ahead of her, noticed a rush of
fresh air stirring her hair and paused suddenly, listening. A low
sound that at first she could neither locate nor analyse, came faintly
to her as from a great distance.
With her hand on the rock wall she moved forward again slowly and
cautiously. Still the floor pitched steeply as she went on, still the
rush of air was in her face and with it the low rumble, growing more
distinct. It was like nothing so much as rolling thunder, very far
off, or the half heard beat of the ocean on a distant, rock bound
coast. Again abruptly the way under foot grew almost level, she was on
a plane some six feet lower than the ledge outside, and as she took
another step forward, passing round a great slab of granite that jutted
out in her way, she came upon an unexpected glint of light and a sight,
seen dimly, that made her cry out in startled surprise.
From far above, from some indefinite, hidden opening; the light from
the big outdoors filtered down upon her. There was a brooding dusk
here made vibrant with the clamouring voice that was no longer like
distant thunder but resolved itself into the echoing fall of water.
Water that came from the darkness above, that flashed a few feet
through the dim light, that leaped out and plunged into the darkness
again, shouting and thundering as it dropped into a yawning ink black
void rimmed with granite boulders. She crept closer, her ears filled
with the din, her eyes bright with the strange, weird, almost unearthly
beauty of the place. She crept so close, gripping one of the boulders
with tightening fingers, that she could peer downward into the chasm
that swallowed the water. It was only a small stream, such as is born
in the High Sierra of melting snows, but its dizzy fall, its mad
leaping, the echoes that were never still, caused a murmurous sound
that swelled and lessened fitfully but was never still.
She found a loose stone and pushed it over the edge, leaning forward
swiftly to listen, seeking to trust to her ears since her eyes could
tell her nothing of the depth that lay below. She heard the stone
strike, clatter against the rocky sides, strike again and again, the
sound growing fainter until at last it was lost altogether in the noise
of the water.
She stood up, drew back and looked across the chasm which lay like a
gash upon the rocky floor. She judged it to be fifteen feet wide,
maybe wider; upon the far side and perhaps fifty feet further back,
there was a splotch of light indicating a way out there into the open
day. But the bottomless abyss shut off all passage to the other side,
its echoes growling threateningly as though they were what they seemed
to the girl's quickened fancies, the restless mutterings of giant
things imprisoned in the deepest bowels of the earth.
"If I ever wanted to run away from all the world," she mused
fantastically, "I'd come here!"
And then, suddenly shuddering, she went back hurriedly to the open.