“OLD FRIENDS AND OLD TIMES”
A riderless brown pony, very cautious and very wise, stepping carefully
from ledge to ledge, testing his footing and picking his way with the
greatest of skill, was the messenger upon whom depended all hope of
safety for Beatrice, Nancy, and John Herrick. Tucked under his stirrup
leather was a note that Beatrice had scrawled hastily on the scrap of
paper that had wrapped their sandwiches. It was addressed to Dr. Minturn
and told where they were and how desperate was their need. She had
knotted the bridle reins on Presto’s neck, turned up the stirrups over
the saddle, given him a slap on the flank and told him to “go home.”
Every well-trained Western horse knows that order, and will find his way
over the steepest trails back to his own stable, nor will he allow
himself to be stopped or molested on the way.
“It is lucky we had Presto,” Beatrice said to her sister. “Buck or your
horse would have taken twice as long to get home, and Hester and Aunt
Anna would be so frightened, though Olaf would have known what to do. As
it is, they won’t worry, for I said I might stay another day. I wonder
how soon help can come.”
John Herrick, lying very still among the blankets, made no comment. They
began to realize that he had summoned all his strength to pretend he was
not much hurt and to persuade them to leave him. It was plain that he
was suffering intensely, and was resting before trying to go on with
what he had to say.
“Unsaddle Nancy’s pony,” he directed at last, “and turn him loose.
Without his saddle he will know he is turned out to graze and will not
go home. He will drift down the mountain and find shelter somewhere in
the timber, for he could not go through the storm here on the hill.”
The sides of the tent flapped and quivered in the eddies of the wind as
the gale began to blow heavier. Under John Herrick’s direction, they
rolled stones on the edge of the canvas to keep the blast from creeping
under it, and laid larger logs of wood at the back of the fire to make a
slower, steadier blaze.
The smoke of the fire, with most of its heat also, was tossed and
whirled out into the void, but they were able finally to hang up a spare
tarpaulin to reflect the warmth into the tent. The site of the camp had
been chosen wisely, being sheltered by a high shoulder of rock, with a
nook between two stones to hold the fire, and a small stream pouring
over a cliff near by. Yet, even in this corner, there was not complete
protection from the roaring blast that was beginning to carry the first
flakes of snow. More than once Beatrice saw the injured man’s eyes turn
anxiously toward the pile of fuel, gathered in abundance for ordinary
purposes, but pitifully small for the need that had arisen now. She knew
that he would not tell them of the necessity for gathering more, since
to seek fire-wood on that windswept mountain was a dangerous and
difficult task.
“Go into the tent and talk to him, Nancy. Keep him looking another way,”
she whispered as she fed the blaze. “I am going down the trail a little
way to cut some brush.”
Taking up the small ax from where he had left it beside the fire and
turning her coat collar up to her ears, she slipped away before her
sister could protest.
The wind whipped about her the moment she passed beyond the sheltering
rock, buffeting and blinding her until she thought she would be flung
from the ledge. She had never felt such piercing cold. It cut through
her coat and made her fingers and feet ache in a moment. Valiantly she
struggled forward, getting her bearings gradually and peering this way
and that through the driving snow to find the fuel that was so
desperately needed. Among the tufts of scrubby bushes that clung here
and there to the stony slope, it was difficult to discover anything dry
enough to burn. Nor was it easy to cut through the tough, fibrous stems
that had clung to the mountain in defiance of so many storms. As she
became more used to her task, however, she began to see more and more
what she could use; the brisk exercise warmed her, and the armfuls of
brush that she carried back and heaped up by the tent began to grow
encouragingly high.
“Don’t go again,” Nancy begged at last. “It is getting dark, and you are
going farther and farther away. I know you should not try it any more.”
“Only one more trip,” Beatrice returned blithely. “I won’t leave this
upper stretch of trail, and that is safe enough.”
She was beginning to enjoy her task, to feel a glowing defiance of the
wind that pushed and swayed her; and she was conscious of a warming
pride in that heap of fuel that meant comfort, even life, to the three
of them. This time she went farther afield than before, beyond where she
had found John Herrick, along the ledge to a spur of rock where she had
guessed a good growth of underbrush might be found in the sheltered
hollow. She found that her surmise was correct and harvested a generous
fagot of dry brush and some heavier branches. Then she scrambled further
along the slope, where a dry, stunted little tree held up its dead and
twisted arms against the sky.
“Its trunk will burn famously,” she told herself, perhaps to quiet any
misgivings she felt concerning the treacherous ground over which she
must pass. Bracing herself, she swung the short-handled ax and cut deep
into the wood. Once she struck, and again, then heard the preliminary
crack that signaled the surrender of the tough old tree. She leaned
forward for the last blow—and felt the ground crumble under foot so that
she lost her balance and fell. Over and over she rolled, down a long
slope of sharp stones that cut her hands and bruised her face, offering
no support as, with outstretched hands, she snatched at any hold that
would stop her fall.
A little juniper bush, whose branch caught her dress and to whose roots
she clung with bleeding, frantic hands, held her at last. Beyond, in a
great well of shadows, she could peer down and down, but could see
nothing beneath her, could only hear the tinkle of the ax as it struck a
stone far below. She shuddered as she looked into that dusky emptiness,
then resolutely turned away and clambered up the slope.
“Though how I managed it,” she confessed to Nancy some time afterward,
“I simply couldn’t tell you. When I rolled down the hill, my heart
seemed to be rolling over and over, too, inside me, and it was still
doing it all the time I was crawling up again. The stones slipped under
my feet, and every bush I took hold of seemed to give way in my hand. It
was only because I had to get back to you that I ever scrambled up
again.”
Yet when she reached the steadier footing of the trail, she saw the dead
tree that had been the cause of her undoing, and setting her teeth,
climbed out once more, inch by inch, gave the half-severed trunk a jerk,
and brought it away in triumph. She had almost more than she could
carry, and her heart was beating fast as she struggled up the path once
more, warm, excited, and happy.
“I thought you were never coming back,” said Nancy anxiously. She was
kneeling by the fire, stirring something in a tin cup.
“I—I went further than I intended,” Beatrice answered and, for the
moment, offered no more extensive report of her adventure. When she went
into the tent, however John Herrick opened his eyes to look at her with
troubled questioning.
“Where have you been so long?” he asked. “Nancy would not tell me, so I
know it was something unsafe.”
“I was just cutting some brush for the fire,” she returned cheerfully.
“I took your ax and I—I didn’t bring it back with me.”
His observant blue eyes went over her from head to foot, and his face,
drawn with pain though it was, wrinkled to a smile. He did not overlook,
as Nancy had done, her damaged skirt and her bleeding knuckles. When he
spoke it was so low that she had to stoop down to hear.
“Have I not enough to blame myself for, without having to see some
terrible thing happen to you here on this cruel mountain? I am proud
that you belong to me, you and that blessed, warm-hearted Nancy. Can you
ever forgive me?”
“Forgive you for what?” she asked protestingly.
“For all that I have done.”
Nancy came in at this moment, carrying something very carefully.
“Christina told me that when people camp in the snow,” she said, “they
warm their beds with hot stones, so I have raked some out of the fire,
nice, flat ones, piping hot.”
She packed them in among the blankets with the deftness of a trained
nurse, for Nancy was possessed, by nature, of a comforting touch.
“I am better now,” he declared, trying to smile reassuringly upon them
both, although the color of his face, ghastly white under the sunburn,
belied his words. “I want you to sit down and tell me—” his voice
faltered, but in a moment he went on again—“and tell me about Anna. Is
she getting well? How long has she been ill? Did she really come here
to—to——”
His voice trailed away to a gasping whisper, but Beatrice knew what he
wished to ask.
“She came to find you,” she answered. “You shall hear all about it. No,
don’t move; it will make your arm begin to bleed again. Lie still and we
will tell you everything.”
With the wind howling over their heads, but with the slow heat of the
fire keeping the worst of the cold at bay, they sat there by him and
told the whole of their tale. Sometimes one of them would get up to
throw some more fuel upon the flame and the other would take up the
story in the interval. Now and then he would ask a half-audible
question, but mostly he lay quite quiet, his steady eyes—how like they
were to Aunt Anna’s!—fixed upon the face of the girl who was speaking.
When the account was finished, he had various things to ask, often with
long pauses for rest between the words.
“Do you live in the same house—it was the one where your father and Anna
and I were born? Does Bridget Flynn still stay with you? Which of you
sleeps in the blue room where on stormy nights you can hear the rain in
the big chimney?”
Yes, they lived in the house he knew. Bridget Flynn, the old nurse who
had cared for them all, was not with them but was still alive. Beatrice
had the big south room—it was green now,—but the rain in the chimney was
just the same.
“How it does come back!” he said at last with a sigh; “and to think that
I have been such a fool as to believe that I could put all that I loved
so much behind me.”
His voice failed after that and his questions ceased. They could hear
his faint breathing and feel the thin, uneven pulse in his wrist, but he
did not move or give other sign of life. The night had closed about
them, the storm was still blowing louder, and the cold growing more
intense. Snow was piling about the tent, eddying through the opening,
lying in white drifts even among the folds of the blankets.
They crept back to the fire at last, both of them wondering miserably at
the heaviness of his stupor, but trying to assure themselves that it was
really sleep. Very closely they huddled together, sharing the single
blanket that was wrapped about them, saying very little but thinking
very much.
“Aunt Anna will be going to bed now,” Nancy observed, after such long
quiet that Beatrice had thought she was nodding. “Christina will be
lighting the lamps and tucking in the fur rugs on the sleeping-porch.”
Since Beatrice scarcely answered, but sat staring, though with unseeing
eyes, at the red coals, Nancy spoke again.
“Are you cold, Beatrice? Are you afraid? How soon do you think help will
come?”
“It will come soon,” her sister answered confidently. “No, I am not
cold, and I am not afraid.”
Nancy, willing to be reassured, crept closer and allowed her heavy
eyelids, weighed down by drowsiness, to fall lower and lower. Beatrice,
however, sat erect and wide awake. She was counting the number of hours
before Dr. Minturn could get her message, calculating the time their
fuel would last. By midnight the final log would be burned, the last
bundle of brush would have gone up in windswept sparks. And what was to
come when the fire was dead?
She felt strangely quiet in spite of all the dread possibilities before
her. She thought over, one by one, all the events in that long, twisted
chain of circumstances that had brought her here, and realized all that
she had learned, how much she had changed. Could it be possible that she
had once been so absorbed in her own affairs, in the pleasures and
interests of her single, restricted circle, as to have been blind to her
father’s anxiety and to Aunt Anna’s slowly breaking heart? She had left
behind, also, that restless discontent and nameless dissatisfaction that
used suddenly to spring up in the midst of the careless happiness of the
old life. Even when they first came to live in the cabin she had been
filled with anxiety and the weight of unfamiliar responsibility, but
such misgivings had disappeared also, blown completely away into the
past by the winds of Gray Cloud Mountain. Here she had learned new
things, had felt new strength, had begun to play a part in the real
affairs of life.
Nancy, leaning against her, had dropped sound asleep and Beatrice
herself dozed at last. Her last clear thought had been of Dabney Mills.
Even the puzzle of his suspicions would be solved, she felt sure. But
why had he thought——?
Her eyes closed and opened again with a start upon a different world.
She could not tell how long a time had passed. The storm was over, the
moon was up and the whole mountain-side was bathed in light. Leaning
forward, she attempted to look down into the valley and was surprised to
see no valley there. A level floor of clouds, as smooth as the surface
of a lake, but of a strange, shadowy whiteness that no water could ever
show, lay below her, a flood of mist that filled Broken Bow Valley to
the brim. Fascinated, she sat watching, while the moonlight grew clearer
and the soft white turned to glistening silver. Although she thought
herself awake, she dozed again, for she had a dim idea that she could
walk forth on the smooth level of that white floor, past the mountain
tops, straight away toward the moon, while all the time another self sat
cold and nodding by the fire, feeding the failing flame mechanically,
with one arm around the slumbering Nancy. Vaguely she knew that complete
oblivion would mean the end of the fire, the quenching of the warmth
that kept them alive and of the light that was to be a signal to their
rescuers.
How she longed to lay down her head and give herself up to slumber! How
far away her dream was carrying her, out across that white sea whose
further edge seemed to roll across the peaks and break against the
stars! Some inward spirit kept her faithful to her task, even after real
consciousness had vanished. When she did give up to heavy slumber it was
only when her work was done, when her drowsy ears heard afar the chink
of iron hoofs upon the trail, heard the scrambling of feet and the sound
of men’s voices coming nearer.
“They are coming; they see us,” she thought, and her head dropped upon
her arm in absolute exhaustion.
It must have been only for a moment that she slept, although it seemed
that hours must have passed when she awoke with a jump to a bewildered
confusion of sights and sounds. The red light of a lantern was flashing
in her face, the huge, grotesque shadow of a horse’s head danced back
and forth on the rock wall beside her, and Dr. Minturn’s voice sounded
in her ear.
“Beatrice, are you safe? Are you alive?”
Dazzled and confused, she rubbed her eyes, then motioned toward the tent
where John Herrick lay, since words of explanation would not come
quickly enough. She held her breath, so it seemed to her, through all
the minutes that the doctor was bending to examine the unconscious man.
When he straightened up again to speak to her, how comforting it was to
hear that big voice booming out where the last sound had been John
Herrick’s failing whisper!
“He has gone a long way,” the old doctor said, “but please heaven, we’ll
bring him back again.”