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[Illustration: “Things have broken loose quicker than we thought”]
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THE HILL OF ADVENTURE
BY ADAIR ALDON
Author of “At The Sign of the Two Heroes,” etc.
ILLUSTRATED BY
J. CLINTON SHEPHERD
NEW YORK
THE CENTURY CO.
1922
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Copyright, 1922, by
The Century Co.
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
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LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“Things have broken loose quicker than we thought”
“It is you who do not understand,” he returned gravely
He had only to lift his voice, and the long spell would be broken
Beatrice found herself telling what had happened
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THE HILL OF ADVENTURE
CHAPTER I
GRAY CLOUD MOUNTAIN
It was with feelings of doubt that were not very far from dismay that
Beatrice Deems watched her new acquaintance, Dan O’Leary, saddle her
recently acquired horse. She had ridden before, of course, in the
tan-bark ring of the riding-school or on shady bridle-paths in the park,
always on well-broken steeds whose beauty and grooming were equaled only
by their good manners. But now, as she stood in her short khaki
riding-skirt and her high boots, waiting outside the great dilapidated
shed that, in this little Montana town, did duty as a livery-stable, she
was beginning to wonder whether she really knew anything about horses at
all. Certainly she had never thought of riding anything like this
plunging creature who stood straight up on his hind legs one moment,
then dropped to his forefeet and stood on them in turn, with the ease of
a circus performer.
She had spent only two days in Ely, the little town planted beside
Broken Bow Creek, in the foot-hills of the Rocky Mountains. At first she
had thought that the village, with its scattered box-like houses and
dusty, shadeless street, was disappointingly unlike the West of the
pictures-books and the movies. The antics of her new horse, however,
were disturbingly like what she had witnessed in Wild West shows.
“’Name’s Buck,” volunteered the man who was struggling with the saddle,
and added, though in a tone that seemed to indicate the explanation as
quite unnecessary, “It’s on account of his color, you know.”
“Oh!” returned Beatrice, a little blankly. For the life of her, she
could think of nothing else to say. She had yet to learn that all
Western ponies of that golden buckskin shade of coat bear the same name.
At the moment she was tempted to believe that the title had something to
do with the way in which the horse was humping his back like a gigantic
cat and jumping up and down on his nimble white forefeet.
“Your father went out on the range and chose the horse himself when he
was out here getting your house ready,” Dan went on. “He couldn’t have
found another pony in the valley that could go like this one.”
“Did he—did he try him?” Beatrice wished to know.
Her feelings in the matter were oddly mixed, for she dreaded the moment
when she must actually mount to the big, unfamiliar saddle, and yet she
was all on fire to try the horse’s speed.
“No, he didn’t try him,” was the answer. “He just said he wanted a safe
horse for his daughter, liked the looks of this one—and well he
might,—and took my word for it that the horse would suit and would go
like greased lightning, besides. There, now, the saddle’s firm. You
mustn’t think anything of the way he acts when you pull up the cinch;
they all do that!”
For all her misgivings, Beatrice was no coward. She stepped forward,
discovered in one violent second that a Western pony sets off the moment
he feels the rider’s weight on the stirrup, then flung herself, somehow,
into the saddle and was away.
“I did not do that very well,” she was thinking. “Another time—oh, oh!”
For her very thought was interrupted by the sudden rush of wordless
delight as the horse beneath her stretched himself to that long easy
lope that is like nothing else in the world. The fresh mountain wind,
sweeping down from the clean, high peaks above, sang in her ears; the
stony road swung past below; the motion was as easy as a rocking-chair
but seemed as swift as thought itself. Motoring she had always loved,
but she confessed with sudden disloyalty that it was bumpy business
compared to the measured swaying of this living creature between her
knees. Buck’s personal prejudices seemed, indeed, to be directed solely
against the cinching of the saddle. That process once over he was as
eager and happy as she to clatter across the bridge, pass the last of
the ugly little houses and the high-fronted store buildings, and turn
his white-blazed face toward the mounting trail that led out of the
valley.
Beatrice drew rein when they had breasted the first rise, and paused a
moment to look back. The houses strewn haphazard across the slope below
her made more of a town than she had thought. There was the packing-box
railroad station where she and her sister, Nancy, and their Aunt Anna
had arrived so recently; there was the house where they were living, a
little larger than the others, but square, hideous, and unshaded like
the rest.
“We mustn’t care for architecture,” Nancy had said when they first
surveyed their dwelling rather ruefully, “when the Rocky Mountains begin
in our back yard.”
There was also the winding stream with its abrupt bend that warranted
the title of Broken Bow Creek, a mere trickle of water just now, in that
wide, dry valley down which the thin line of the railroad stretched
away, with the straight parallel of the rails seeming to bend and quiver
in the hot clearness of the sunshine. South of the town was a portion of
Ely that she had not seen before, a group of warehouses, some office
buildings, and a huddle of workmen’s bunk-houses. She could see the
cobweb lines of temporary railroad, a steam-shovel moving on a flat-car,
and innumerable men toiling like black ants along the sides of the raw
cut that had been made in the red soil of the valley.
“That must be the irrigation ditch that Dan O’Leary was telling us
about,” she reflected. “How hot it looks down there! I did not dream
they had so many men. And how clear the air is! Oh, surely, surely, Aunt
Anna will get well here as fast as we hope!”
The wind lifted Buck’s yellow mane and her own brown hair, while the
horse pawed the stony ground impatiently. She let him go on, for she was
in truth as eager as he. This was the first day that she had found time
to go far from their own house, and she had now a most fascinating goal
before her. What girl of sixteen would not feel excited over the
prospect of exploring a tract of mountainside woods of which she was
sole owner?
Beatrice had never quite understood how her father had come to purchase
that stretch of land above Ely; she had not, indeed, thought to ask. She
had come into his study one Sunday morning when he was going over his
papers and had surprised him with the announcement that she was sixteen
that day. Having no other present ready, he had brought out some dusty
title-deeds and had made them over to her.
“It will never be of the least use to you, my dear,” he said, “so do not
consider it much of a present. Twenty-three acres with timber, cabin,
and a waterfall, so the description reads, but you must not think they
are worth anything. I have never seen the place myself.”
She had believed that it was on account of this talk about Ely that they
thought of the town again when the doctors had prescribed for Aunt Anna
“a change of climate—some dry, bracing place in the West.” She was their
only aunt, Mr. Deems’s younger sister, and she had cared for his
household ever since the death of the two girls’ mother years ago. She
was a slim, frail person of indomitable spirit, and had begun to look as
though she were far more spirit than body ever since the influenza
epidemic had swept through the family. Beatrice had always thought that
going to Ely was her own suggestion, though she could not deny that it
was Aunt Anna who had carried the plan through in the face of some
rather unaccountable opposition from her father. Mr. Deems had finally
given in, and had made a flying trip to Ely to be sure that the air and
climate were what they wanted, to choose a house, engage a Chinese cook,
and make all preparations for a summer’s stay for his sister and the two
girls.
“I did not have time to visit your estate on the hill, Beatrice,” he
said on his return. “You will have to explore it yourself. Dan O’Leary
has charge of it and said he rented it to some engineers who were
surveying the mountain, but it is unoccupied now. The place may prove to
be a good picnic ground but I fear it has no other possibilities.”
He might say what he chose, Beatrice was thinking, but he could not
destroy her eagerness to see the place. The trail ran crookedly upward
before her, disappeared in some dense pine woods, then slanted across
the spur of the mountain and vanished again. Higher above rose the bare,
rocky slopes of the tall peak that dominated the whole valley, Gray
Cloud Mountain, on one of whose lower, rugged shoulders lay her land and
her cabin. After climbing for a quarter of a mile, she was obliged to
hesitate at a fork in the way, uncertain which of the steep paths she
was to take.
A little cottage clung to the bare hillside by the road—a shabby place
with no paint and a patched roof. The door was swinging open as she
passed and a man just going in, a short-set, foreign-looking person, who
scowled at her over his shoulder when she asked the way.
“That one,” he said briefly, pointing to the right-hand fork and
speaking with a heavy foreign accent. “Up toward John Herrick’s house,
only not so far.”
He went in and shut the door abruptly. Beatrice could hear his voice
inside calling roughly, “Christina, Christina!”
He had a roll of large papers in his hand, posters that he had evidently
been putting up along the way, for she had observed them on trees and
fence-posts nearer town. They seemed to announce a meeting of some sort,
with English words at the top and odd foreign printing at the bottom in
more than one language. She had felt a hot flash of indignant anger at
the man’s surly tone, but in a moment she had forgotten him completely,
as she and Buck went scrambling up the steep and difficult road.
She came at last to a tiny bridge. Broken Bow Creek, which was little
more than a series of pools in the parched stream-bed in the valley, was
here a singing rivulet, flowing below the rude crossing amid a group of
silvery aspen-trees. At the left of the trail she could see a gate, a
set of bars hung between two rough posts. It was with a beating heart
that she dismounted to take them down for Buck to pass. Once inside she
would be on her own ground.
The agility of a mountain-bred pony was so new to her that she was much
astonished, after she had removed two of the bars, to have Buck step
over the remaining three as neatly as a dog would have done. She slipped
into the saddle again, making a greater success than at the first
attempt, and followed the nearly invisible path. The huge straight
pine-trees stood in uneven ranks all about her, their branches
interweaving overhead, the ground covered with their red-brown needles
that muffled the sound of the horse’s hoofs. Up they went, with the
splash of falling water sounding louder and ever louder. Here at last
was the place she sought, a square, sturdy cabin of gray logs chinked
with white plaster, with a solid field stone chimney and a sloping roof
drifted over with pine-needles. She slid from the saddle and stood upon
the rugged doorstep. Here was her house, her very own!
It was a larger dwelling than she had expected and very solidly and
substantially built. She found that wooden bars had been nailed across
the doors and windows, and she had, moreover, forgotten to obtain the
keys from Dan O’Leary, so that she could not go in. She could, however,
peep through the easement windows and see the low-ceilinged rooms, the
rough stairs, and the wide fireplace. The big trees nodded overhead, the
roar of the waterfall came from beyond the house, the creek, rushing and
tumbling, slid away down the mountainside. Somebody had planted pansies
on both sides of the step, pansies that crowded and jostled each other
as they only can in the cool air of the high mountains, spreading sheets
of gleaming color over the barren soil. With a quivering sigh, Beatrice
sat down upon the step.
“Mine!” she said aloud, just to see how it would sound. “Mine!”
It would take a long time to explore the place thoroughly.
“I must be able to tell Nancy about every bit of it,” she told herself.
Yet first she sat very quietly, for a little, on the rough stone step.
She had hurried up the hill, eager to see the new place; she had been
hurrying for the last two days, getting the house in the village
settled; she had hurried before the journey: when indeed had she not
been hurrying? It was very pleasant to sit so still and let the silent
minutes march by to the tune of rustling pine branches and the murmuring
waterfall. As she sat looking down into the valley, time seemed very big
and calm and empty, instead of bustling and full.
She rose at last to go on with her explorations. Behind the cabin was
the tumbling cascade that identified the place, a plunge of foaming
waters over a high ledge with a still black pool below, shot with gleams
of sunshine and full of darting trout. Beyond the stream, almost hidden
from sight by the high slope of the ravine, was the roof of another
house, a larger one than hers, with a whole group of chimneys sending
forth a curl of smoke to indicate that here were neighbors. Looking up
the course of the brook she could see where the dense shadows of the
pine grove ended and the waters ran in brighter sunshine on the higher
slope.
“I should like to see what it is like up there,” she thought, “but I
must be quick; it is getting late.”
She went scrambling up the rocky slope, feeling a little breathless, but
forgetting entirely that in such a high altitude haste is far from wise.
In a moment her lungs seemed entirely empty and her heart began to pound
against her side, but she pressed on, determined to reach a certain high
rock before she turned back. It was a rash desire, for presently she was
obliged to lie down upon the rough grass to gasp and rest and gather
herself together for another effort. She got up to struggle forward
again, for she was not used to abandoning a fixed purpose, but after a
few yards she was forced to lie down once more, panting and completely
exhausted.
“I don’t believe I understand the Rocky Mountains,” she reflected as she
lay, limp and flat, looking across the barren valley, the sparsely
wooded slopes, to the rising peaks opposite. She had been accustomed to
mountains like the Adirondacks, round and covered thick with forest
almost to the summit, friendly heights that invited one to climb them.
It was a far cry from them to the precipitate slopes of Gray Cloud
Mountain.
When she had recovered a little she gave up her project and slid humbly
down the steep way she had come. Buck, with his bridle over the post at
the cabin door, whinnied an anxious welcome as she came back to him. He
had been searching for tufts of grass between the stones, and had also
nipped at the pansies, but had found them not to his liking. His
impatience, as well as the creeping shadows in the valley below,
reminded her that evening was near despite the clear sunshine higher up
the mountainside. Reluctantly she mounted and, with many a glance
backward at her house, rode down the trail.
Through an opening in the trees Beatrice caught a glimpse, as she
descended, of the house beyond the stream. She could even see a man ride
up to the door and a girl come running out to greet him. Then a drop in
the trail hid both house and people abruptly from her view.
The warm sun seemed to be left completely behind as she and Buck pressed
onward with all possible haste. Something new caught her curious
attention in a moment, however, and made her stop again. To the right of
the pathway, in a little clearing among the pines, she had spied the
glow of a tiny fire.
“Who is burning brush on my land?” she questioned inwardly, with a throb
of pride at the thought of her proprietorship.
Guiding her horse among the trees, she rode a little nearer to
investigate. The blaze was kindled skilfully between two stones,
evidently by the hands of some one who knew the dangers of careless
camp-fires in a pine grove. Bending over the crackling flame was a
woman, with a yellow handkerchief covering her hair and a green shawl
slanting about her hips above a shabby skirt. A big basket stood beside
her, showing that she had been gathering berries in the wood, while an
appetizing smell rising from the fire told of a supper of bacon and
fresh trout. The smoke was in her eyes and she was, moreover, intent on
balancing the frying-pan between the stones, so that she did not see
Beatrice. For this the girl was thankful, since, after a glance at the
other’s broad, brown face, she concluded that one ill-mannered foreigner
was all she wished to encounter that day and that she would push her
investigations no further. She turned her pony to make for the path
again, but a rolling stone, dislodged by Buck’s foot, attracted the
woman’s attention. Beatrice looked back to see that the stranger had
abandoned her cooking and was standing erect, staring intently after
them.
“At least she cannot follow,” thought the girl with some relief; then
observed, with a sinking of the heart, that the woman had turned
abruptly and was hurrying down the hill through the underbrush. It was
plain that she intended to reach the road first and intercept the horse
and rider at the bridge.