THE DEBT
I
September was at its last days on the Umpqua Divide,—that far wilderness of endless, tree-clad ridges where Dan Failing had gone for his last days. September, in this place, was a season all by itself. It wasn't exactly summer, because already a little silver sheath of ice formed on the lakes in the morning; and the days were clamping down in length so fast that Whisperfoot the cougar had time for a dozen killings in a single night. Fall only begins when the rains start; and there hadn't been a trickle of rain since April. It was rather a cross between the two seasons,—the rag-tail of summer and the prelude of fall.
It was true that the leaves were shedding from the underbrush. They came yellow and they came red, and the north wind, always the first breath of winter, blew them in all directions. They made a perfect background for the tawny tints of Whisperfoot, and quite often the near-sighted deer would walk right up to him without detecting him. But the cougar always saw to it they didn't do it a second time. It had been a particularly bad season for Whisperfoot, and he was glad that his luck had changed. The woods were so dry from the long drought that even he—and as all men know, he is one of the most silent creatures in the wilderness when he wants to be, which are the times that he doesn't want to make as much noise as a steam engine—found it hard to crawl down a deer trail without being heard. The twigs would sometimes crack beneath his feet, and this is a disgrace with any cougar. Their first lessons are to learn to walk with silence.
Woof the bear loved this month above all others. It wasn't that he needed protective coloring. He was not a hunter at all, except of grubs and berries and such small fry. He had a black coat and a clumsy stride; and he couldn't have caught a deer if his life had depended upon it. But he did like to shuffle through the fallen leaves and make beds of them in the warm afternoons; and besides, the berries were always biggest and ripest in September. The bee trees were almost full of honey. Even the fat beetles under the stumps were many and lazy.
Everywhere the forest people were preparing for the winter that would fall so quickly when these golden September days were done. The Under Plane of the forest—those smaller peoples that live in the dust and have beautiful, tropical forests in the ferns—found themselves digging holes and filling them with stores of food. Of course they had no idea on earth why they were doing it, except that a quiver at the end of their tails told them to do so; but the result was entirely the same. They would have a shelter for the winter. Certain of the birds were beginning to wonder what the land was like to the south, and now and then waking up in the crisp dawns with decided longings for travel. The young mallards on the lakes were particularly restless, and occasionally a long flock of them would rise in the morning from the blue waters with a glint of wings,—and quite fail to come back. And one night all the forest listened to the wail of the first flock of south-going geese. But the main army of waterfowl would of course not pass until fall came in reality.
But the most noticeable change of all, in these last days of summer, was a distinct tone of sadness that sounded throughout the forest. Of course the wilderness note is always somewhat sad; but now, as the leaves fell and the grasses died, it seemed particularly pronounced. All the forest voices added to it,—the wail of the geese, the sad fluttering of fallen leaves, and even the whisper of the north wind. The pines seemed darker, and now and then gray clouds gathered, promised rain, but passed without dropping their burdens on the parched hillsides. Of course all the tones and voices of the wilderness sound clearest at night—for that is the time that the forest really comes to life—and Dan Failing, sitting in front of Lennox's house, watching the late September moon rise over Bald Mountain, could hear them very plainly.
It was true that in the two months he had spent in the mountains he had learned to be very receptive to the voices of the wilderness. Lennox had not been mistaken in thinking him a natural woodsman. He had imagination and insight and sympathy; but most of all he had a heritage of wood lore from his frontiersmen ancestors. Two months before he had been a resident of cities. Now the wilderness had claimed him, body and soul.
These had been rare days. At first he had to limit his expeditions to a few miles each day, and even then he would come in at night staggering from weariness. He climbed hills that seemed to tear his diseased lungs to shreds. Lennox wouldn't have been afraid, in a crisis, to trust his marksmanship now. He had the natural cold nerve of a marksman, and one twilight he brought the body of a lynx tumbling through the branches of a pine at a distance of two hundred yards. A shotgun is never a mountaineer's weapon—except a sawed-off specimen for family contingencies—yet Dan acquired a certain measure of skill at small game hunting, too. He got so he could shatter a grouse out of the air in the half of a second or so in which its bronze wings glinted in the shrubbery; and when a man may do this a fair number of times out of ten, he is on the straight road toward greatness.
Then there came a day when Dan caught his first steelhead in the North Fork. There was no finer sport in the whole West than this,—the play of the fly, the strike, the electric jar that carries along the line and through the arm and into the soul from where it is never quite effaced, and finally the furious strife and exultant throb when the fish is hooked. There is no more beautiful thing in the wilderness world than a steelhead trout in action. He simply seems to dance on the surface of the water, leaping again and again, and racing at an unheard-of speed down the ripples. He weighs only from three to fifteen pounds. But now and again amateur fishermen without souls have tried to pull him in with main strength, and are still somewhat dazed by the result. It might be done with a steel cable, but an ordinary line or leader breaks like a cobweb. When his majesty the steelhead takes the fly and decides to run, it can be learned after a time that the one thing that may be done is to let out all the line and with prayer and humbleness try to keep up with him.
Dan fished for lake trout in the lakes of the plateau; he shot waterfowl in the tule marshes; he hunted all manner of living things with his camera. But most of all he simply studied, as his frontiersmen ancestors had done before him. He found unceasing delight in the sagacity of the bear, the grace of the felines, the beauty of the deer. He knew the chipmunks and the gray squirrels and the snowshoe rabbits. And every day his muscles had hardened and his gaunt frame had filled out.
He no longer wore his glasses. Every day his eyes had strengthened. He could see more clearly now, with his unaided eyes, than he had ever seen before with the help of the lens. And the moonlight came down through a rift in the trees and showed that his face had changed too. It was no longer so white. The eyes were more intent. The lips were straighter.
"It's been two months," Silas Lennox told him, "half the four that you gave yourself after you arrived here. And you're twice as good now as when you came."
Dan nodded. "Twice! Ten times as good! I was a wreck when I came. To-day I climbed halfway up Baldy—within a half mile of Snowbird's cabin—without stopping to rest."
Lennox looked thoughtful. More than once, of late, Dan had climbed up toward Snowbird's cabin. It was true that his guest and his daughter had become the best of companions in the two months; but on second thought, Lennox was not in the least afraid of complications. The love of the mountain women does not go out to physical inferiors. "Whoever gets her," he had said, "will have to tame her," and his words still held good. The mountain women rarely mistook a maternal tenderness for an appealing man for love. It wasn't that Dan was weak except from the ravages of his disease; but he was still a long way from Snowbird's ideal.
And the explanation was simply that life in the mountains gets down to a primitive basis, and its laws are the laws of the cave. Emotions are simple and direct, dangers are real, and the family relations have remained unchanged since the first days of the race. Men do not woo one another's wives in the mountains. There is no softness, no compromise: the male of the species provides, and the female keeps the hut. It is good, the mountain women know, when the snows come, to have a strong arm to lean upon. The man of strong muscles, of quick aim, of cool nerve in a crisis is the man that can be safely counted on not to leave a youthful widow to a lone battle for existence. Although Dan had courage and that same rigid self-control that was an old quality in his breed, he was still a long way from a physically strong man. It was still an even break whether he would ever wholly recover from his malady.
But Dan was not thinking about this now. All his perceptions had sharpened down to the finest focal point, and he was trying to catch the spirit of the endless forest that stretched in front of the house. The moon was above the pines at last, and its light was a magic. He sat breathless, his eyes intent on the silvery patches between the trees. Now and then he saw a shadow waver.
His pipe had gone out, and for a long time Lennox hadn't spoken. He seemed to be straining too, with ineffective senses, trying to recognize and name the faint sounds that came so tingling and tremulous out of the darkness. As always, they heard the stir and rustle of the gnawing people: the chipmunks in the shrubbery, the gophers who, like blind misers, had ventured forth from their dark burrows; and perhaps even the scaly glide of those most-dreaded poison people that had lairs in the rock piles.
Then, more distinct still, they heard the far-off yowl of a cougar. Yet it wasn't quite like the cougar utterances that Dan had heard on previous nights. It was not so high, so piercing and triumphant; but had rather an angry, snarling tone made up of ows and broad, nasal yahs. It came tingling up through hundreds of yards of still forest; and both of them leaned forward.
"Another deer killed," Dan suggested softly.
"No. Not this time. He missed, and he's mad about it. They often snarl that way when they miss their stroke, just like an angry cat. But listen—"
Again they heard a sound, and from some far-lying ridge, they heard a curious echo. So far it had come that only a tremor of it remained; yet every accent and intonation was perfect, and Dan was dimly reminded of some work of art cunningly wrought in miniature. In one quality alone it resembled the cougar's cry. It was unquestionably a wilderness voice,—no sound made by men or the instruments of men; and like the cougar's cry, it was simply imbued with the barbaric spirit of the wild. But while the cougar had simply yowled in disappointment, a sound wholly without rhythm or harmony, this sound was after the manner of a song, rising and falling unutterably wild and strange.
II
Dan felt that at last the wilderness itself was speaking to him. He had waited a long time to hear its voice. His thought went back to the wise men of the ancient world, waiting to hear the riddle of the universe from the lips of the Sphinx, and how he himself—more in his unconscious self, rather than conscious—had sought the eternal riddle of the wilderness. It had seemed to him that if once he could make it speak, if he could make it break for one instant its great, brooding silence, that the whole mystery and meaning of life would be in a measure revealed. He had asked questions—never in the form of words but only ineffable yearnings of his soul—and at last it had responded. The strange rising and falling song was its own voice, the articulation of the very heart and soul of the wilderness.
And because it was, it was also the song of life itself,—life in the raw, life as it is when all the superficialities that blunt the vision had been struck away. Dan had known that it would be thus. It brought strange pictures to his mind. He saw the winter snows, the spirits of Cold and Famine walking over them. He saw Fear in many guises—in the forest fire, in the landslide, in the lightning cleaving the sky. In the song were centered and made clear all the many lesser voices with which the forest had spoken to him these two months and which he had but dimly understood,—the passion, the exultation, the blood-lust, the strength, the cruelty, the remorseless, unceasing struggle for existence that makes the wilderness an eternal battle ground. But over it all was sadness. He couldn't doubt that. He heard it all too plainly. The wild was revealed to him as it never had been before.
"It's the wolf pack," Lennox told him softly. "As long as I have been in the mountains, it always hits me the same. The wolves have just joined together for the fall rutting. There's not another song like it in the whole world."
Dan could readily believe it. The two men sat still a long time, hoping that they might hear the song again. And then they got up and moved across the cleared field to the ridge beyond. The silence closed deeper around them.
"Then it means the end of the summer?" Dan asked.
"In a way, but yet we don't count the summer ended until the rains break. Heavens, I wish they would start! I've never seen the hills so dry, and I'm afraid that either Bert Cranston or some of his friends will decide it's time to make a little money fighting forest fires. Dan, I'm suspicious of that gang. I believe they've got a regular arson ring, maybe with unscrupulous stockmen behind them, and perhaps just a penny-winning deal of their own. I suppose you know about Landy Hildreth,—how he's promised to turn State's evidence that will send about a dozen of these vipers to the penitentiary?"
"Snowbird told me something about it."
"He's got a cabin over toward the marshes, and it has come to me that he's going to start to-morrow, or maybe has already started to-day, down into the valley to give his evidence. Of course, that is deeply confidential between you and me. If the gang knew about it, he'd never get through the thickets alive."
But Dan was hardly listening. His attention was caught by the hushed, intermittent sounds that are always to be heard, if one listens keenly enough, in the wilderness at night. "I wish the pack would sound again," he said. "I suppose it was hunting."
"Of course. And there is no living thing in these woods that can stand against a wolf pack in its full strength."
"Except man, of course."
"A strong man, with an accurate rifle, of course, and except possibly in the starving times in winter he'd never have to fight them. All the beasts of prey are out to-night. You see, Dan, when the moon shines, the deer feed at night instead of in the twilights and the dawn. And of course the wolves and the cougars hunt the deer. It may be that they are running cattle, or even sheep."
But Dan's imagination was afire. He wasn't content yet. "They couldn't be—hunting man?" he asked.
"No. If it was midwinter and the pack was starving, we'd have to listen better. It always looked to me as if the wild creatures had a law against killing men, just as humans have. They've learned it doesn't pay—something the wolves and bear of Europe and Asia haven't found out. The naturalists say that the reason is rather simple—that the European peasant, his soul scared out of him by the government he lived under, has always fled from wild beasts. They were tillers of the soil, and they carried hoes instead of guns. They never put the fear of God into the animals and as a result there are quite a number of true stories about tigers and wolves that aren't pleasant to listen to. But our own frontiersmen were not men to stand any nonsense from wolves or cougars. They had guns, and they knew how to use them. And they were preceded by as brave and as warlike a race as ever lived on the earth—armed with bows and arrows. Any animal that hunted men was immediately killed, and the rest found out it didn't pay."
"Just as human beings have found out the same thing—that it doesn't pay to hunt their fellow men. The laws of life as well as the laws of nations are against it."
But the words sounded weak and dim under the weight of the throbbing darkness; and Dan couldn't get away from the idea that the codes of life by which most men lived were forgotten quickly in the shadows of the pines. Even as he spoke, man was hunting man on the distant ridge where Whisperfoot had howled.
Bert Cranston, head of the arson ring that operated on the Umpqua Divide, was not only beyond the pale in regard to the laws of the valleys, but he could have learned valuable lessons from the beasts in regard to keeping the laws of the hills. The forest creatures do not hunt their own species, nor do they normally hunt men. The moon looked down to find Bert Cranston waiting on a certain trail that wound down to the settlements, his rifle loaded and ready for another kind of game than deer or wolf. He was waiting for Landy Hildreth; and the greeting he had for him was to destroy all chances of the prosecuting attorney in the valley below learning certain names that he particularly wanted to know.
There is always a quality of unreality about a moonlit scene. Just what causes it isn't easy to explain, unless the soft blend of light and shadow entirely destroys the perspective. Old ruins will sometimes seem like great, misty ghosts of long-dead cities; trees will turn to silver; phantoms will gather in family groups under the cliffs; plain hills and valleys will become, in an instant, the misty vales of Fairyland. The scene on that distant ridge of the Divide partook of this quality to an astounding degree; and it would have made a picture no mortal memory could have possibly forgotten.
There was no breath of wind. The great pines, tall and dark past belief, stood absolutely motionless, like strange pillars of ebony. The whole ridge was splotched with patches of moonlight, and the trail, dimming as the eyes followed it, wound away into the utter darkness. Bert Cranston knelt in a brush covert, his rifle loaded and ready in his lean, dark hands.
No wolf that ran the ridges, no cougar that waited on the deer trails knew a wilder passion, a more terrible blood-lust than he. It showed in his eyes, narrow and never resting from their watch of the trail; it was in his posture; and it revealed itself unmistakably in the curl of his lips. Something like hot steam was in his brain, blurring his sight and heating his blood.
The pine needles hung wholly motionless above his head; but yet the dead leaves on which he knelt crinkled and rustled under him. Only the keenest ear could have heard the sound; and possibly in his madness, Cranston himself was not aware of it. And one would have wondered a long time as to what caused it. It was simply that he was shivering all over with hate and fury.
A twig cracked, far on the ridge above him. He leaned forward, peering, and the moonlight showed his face in unsparing detail. It revealed the deep lines, the terrible, drawn lips, the ugly hair long over the dark ears. His strong hands tightened upon the breech of the rifle. His wiry figure grew tense.
Of course it wouldn't do to let his prey come too close. Landy Hildreth was a good shot too, young as Cranston, and of equal strength; and no sporting chance could be taken in this hunting. Cranston had no intention of giving his enemy even the slightest chance to defend himself. If Hildreth got down into the valley, his testimony would make short work of the arson ring. He had the goods; he had been a member of the disreputable crowd himself.
The man's steps were quite distinct by now. Cranston heard him fighting his way through the brush thickets, and once a flock of grouse, frightened from their perches by the approaching figure, flew down the trail in front. Cranston pressed back the hammer of his rifle. The click sounded loud in the silence. He had grown tense and still, and the leaves no longer rustled.
His eyes were intent on a little clearing, possibly one hundred yards up the trail. The trail itself went straight through it. And in an instant more, Hildreth pushed through the buckbrush and stood revealed in the moonlight.
If there is one quality that means success in the mountains it is constant, unceasing self-control. Cranston thought that he had it. He had known the hard schools of the hills; and he thought no circumstance could break the rigid discipline in which his mind and nerves held his muscles. But perhaps he had waited too long for Hildreth to come; and the strain had told on him. He had sworn to take no false steps; that every motion he made should be cool and sure. He didn't want to attract Hildreth's attention by any sudden movement. All must be cautious and stealthy. But in spite of all these good resolutions, Cranston's gun simply leaped to his shoulder in one convulsive motion at the first glimpse of his enemy as he emerged into the moonlight.
The end of the barrel struck a branch of the shrubbery as it went up. It was only a soft sound; but in the utter silence it traveled far. But a noise in the brush might not have been enough in itself to alarm Hildreth. A deer springing up in the trail, or even a lesser creature, might make as pronounced a sound. It was true that even unaccompanied by any other suspicious circumstances, the man would have become instantly alert and watchful; but it was extremely doubtful that his muscular reaction would have been the same. But the gun barrel caught the moonlight as it leaped, and Hildreth saw its glint in the darkness.
It was only a flash. But yet there is no other object in the material world that glints exactly like a gun barrel in the light. It has a look all its own. It is even more distinctive in the sunlight, and now and again men have owed their lives to a momentary glitter across a half-mile of forest. Of course the ordinary, peaceful, God-fearing man, walking down a trail at night, likely would not have given the gleam more than an instant's thought, a momentary breathlessness in which the throat closes and the muscles set; and it is more than probable that the sleeping senses would not have interpreted it at all. But Hildreth was looking for trouble. He had dreaded this long walk to the settlements more than any experience of his life. He didn't know why the letter he had written, asking for an armed escort down to the courts, had not brought results. But it was wholly possible that Cranston would have answered this question for him. This same letter had fallen into a certain soiled, deadly pair of hands which was the last place in the world that Hildreth would have chosen, and it had been all the evidence that was needed, at the meeting of the ring the night before, to adjudge Hildreth a merciless and immediate end. Hildreth would have preferred to wait in the hills and possibly to write another letter, but a chill that kept growing at his finger tips forbade it. And all these things combined to stretch his nerves almost to the breaking point as he stole along the moonlit trail under the pines.
A moment before the rush and whir of the grouse flock had dried the roof of his mouth with terror. The tall trees appalled him, the shadows fell upon his spirit. And when he heard this final sound, when he saw the glint that might so easily have been a gun-barrel, his nerves and muscles reacted at once. Not even a fraction of a second intervened. His gun flashed up, just as a small-game shooter hurls his weapon when a mallard glints above the decoys, and a little, angry cylinder of flame darted, as a snake's head darts, from the muzzle.
Hildreth didn't take aim. There wasn't time. The report roared in the darkness; the bullet sang harmlessly and thudded into the earth; and both of them were the last things in the world that Cranston had expected. And they were not a moment too soon. Even at that instant, his finger was closing down upon the trigger, Hildreth standing clear and revealed through the sights. The nervous response that few men in the world would be self-disciplined enough to prevent occurred at the same instant that he pressed the trigger. His own fire answered, so near to the other that both of them sounded as one report.
Most hunters can usually tell, even if they cannot see their game fall, whether they have hit or missed. This was one of the few times in his life that Cranston could not have told. He knew that as his finger pressed he had held as accurate a "bead" as at any time in his life. He did not know still another circumstance,—that in the moonlight he had overestimated the distance to the clearing, and instead of one hundreds yards it was scarcely fifty. He had held rather high. And he looked up, unknowing whether he had succeeded or whether he was face to face with the prospect of a duel to the death in the darkness.
And all he saw was Hildreth, rocking back and forth in the moonlight,—a strange picture that he was never entirely to forget. It was a motion that no man could pretend. And he knew he had not missed.
He waited till he saw the form of his enemy rock down, face half-buried in the pine needles. It never even occurred to him to approach to see if he had made a clean kill. He had held on the breast and he had a world of confidence in his great, shocking, big-game rifle. Besides, the rifle fire might attract some hunter in the hills; and there would be time in the morning to return to the body and make certain little investigations that he had in mind. And running back down the trail, he missed the sight of Hildreth dragging his wounded body, like an injured hare, into the shelter of the thickets.
III
Whisperfoot, that great coward, came out of his brush-covert when the moon rose. It was not his usual rising time. Ordinarily he found his best hunting in the eerie light of the twilight hour; but for certain reasons, his knowledge of which would be extremely difficult to explain, he let this time go by in slumber. The general verdict of mankind has decreed that animals cannot reason. Therefore it is somewhat awkward to explain how Whisperfoot knew that he needn't be in a hurry, that the moon would soon be up, and the deer would be feeding in their light. But know all these things he did, act upon them he also did, and it all came to the same in the end. Whether or not he could reason didn't affect the fact that a certain chipmunk, standing at the threshold of his house to glimpse the moonlit forest, saw him come slipping like a cloud of brown smoke from his lair a full hour after the little creature had every right to think that he had gone to his hunting,—and straightway tumbled back into his house with a near attack of heart failure.
But the truth was that the chipmunk was presuming upon his own desirability as food. His fear really wasn't justified. It would not be altogether true to say that Whisperfoot never ate chipmunks. Sometimes in winter, and sometimes in the dawns after an unsuccessful hunt, he ate things a great deal smaller and many times more disagreeable than chipmunks. But the great cat is always very proud when he first leaves his lair. He won't look at anything smaller than a horned buck. He is a great deal like a human hunter who will pass up a lone teal on the way out and slay a pair of his own live-duck decoys on the way back.
Whisperfoot had slept almost since dawn. It is a significant quality in the felines that they simply cannot keep in condition without hours and hours of sleep. It is true that they are highly nervous creatures, sensualists of the worst, and living intensely from twilight to dawn; and they burn up more nervous energy in a night than Urson, the porcupine, does in a year. In this matter of sleeping, they are in a direct contrast to the wolves, who seemingly never sleep at all, unless it is with one eye open, and in still greater contrast to the king of all beasts, the elephant, who is said to slumber less per night than that great electrical wizard whom all men know and praise.
The great cat came out yawning, as graceful a thing as treads upon the earth. He was almost nine feet long from the tip of his nose to the end of his tail, and he weighed as much as many a full-grown man. And he fairly rippled when he walked, seemingly without effort, almost without resting his cushions on the ground. He stood and yawned insolently, for all the forest world to see. He rather hoped that the chipmunk, staring with beady eyes from his doorway, did see him. He would just as soon that Woof's little son, the bear cub, should see him too. But he wasn't so particular about Woof himself, or the wolf pack whose song had just wakened him. And above all things, he wanted to keep out of the sight of men.
For when all things are said and done, there were few bigger cowards in the whole wilderness world than Whisperfoot. A good many people think that Graycoat the coyote could take lessons from him in this respect. But others, knowing how a hunter is brought in occasionally with almost all human resemblance gone from him because a cougar charged in his death agony, think this is unfair to the larger animal. And it is true that a full-grown cougar will sometimes attack horned cattle, something that no American animal cares to do unless he wants a good fight on his paws and of which the very thought would throw Graycoat into a spasm; and there have been even stranger stories, if one could quite believe them. A certain measure of respect must be extended to any animal that will hunt the great bull elk, for to miss the stroke and get caught beneath the churning, lashing, slashing, razor-edged front hoofs is simply death, painful and without delay. But the difficulty lies in the fact that these things are not done in the ordinary, rational blood of hunting. What an animal does in its death agony, or to protect its young, what great game it follows in the starving times of winter, can be put to neither its debit nor its credit. A coyote will charge when mad. A raccoon will put up a wicked fight when cornered. A hen will peck at the hand that robs her nest. When hunting was fairly good, Whisperfoot avoided the elk and steer almost as punctiliously as he avoided men, which is saying very much indeed; and any kind of terrier could usually drive him straight up a tree.
But he did like to pretend to be very great and terrible among the smaller forest creatures. And he was Fear itself to the deer. A human hunter who would kill two deer a week for fifty-two weeks would be called a much uglier name than poacher; but yet this had been Whisperfoot's record, on and off, ever since his second year. Many a great buck wore the scar of the full stroke,—after which Whisperfoot had lost his hold. Many a fawn had crouched panting with terror in the thickets at just a tawny light on the gnarled limb of a pine. Many a doe would grow great-eyed and terrified at just his strange, pungent smell on the wind.
He yawned again, and his fangs looked white and abnormally large in the moonlight. His great, green eyes were still clouded and languorous from sleep. Then he began to steal up the ridge toward his hunting grounds. Dry as the thickets were, still he seemed to traverse them with almost absolute silence. It was a curious thing that he walked straight in the face of the soft wind that came down from the snow fields, and yet there wasn't a weathercock to be seen anywhere. And neither had the chipmunk seen him wet a paw and hold it up, after the approved fashion of holding up a finger. He had a better way of knowing,—a chill at the end of his whiskers.
In fact, the other forest creatures did not see him at all. He took very great precautions that they shouldn't. Whisperfoot was not a long-distance runner, and his whole success depended on a surprise attack, either by stalking or from ambush. In this he is different from his fellow cowards, the wolves. Whisperfoot catches his meat fresh, before terror has time to steal out of the heart and poison it; and thus, he tells his cubs, he is a higher creature than the wolves. He kept to the deepest shadow, sometimes the long, strange profile of a pine, sometimes just the thickets of buckbrush.
And by now, he no longer cared to yawn. He was wide awake. The sleep had gone out of his eyes and left them swimming in a curious, blue-green fire. And the hunting madness was getting to him: that wild, exultant fever that comes fresh to all the hunting creatures as soon as the night comes down.
The little, breathless night sounds in the brush around him seemed to madden him. They made a song to him, a strange, wild melody that even such frontiersmen as Dan and Lennox could not experience. A thousand smells brushed down to him on the wind, more potent than any wine or lust. He began to tremble all over with rapture and excitement. But unlike Cranston's trembling, no wilderness ear was keen enough to hear the leaves rustling beneath him.
His excitement did not affect his hunting skill at all. In fact, he couldn't succeed without it. A human hunter, with the same excitement and fever, would have been rendered impotent long since. His aim would be shattered, he would make false steps to frighten the game, and not even Urson, the porcupine, would really have cause to fear him. The reason is rather simple. Man has lived a civilized existence for so long that many of the traits that make him a successful hunter have to be laboriously re-learned. As soon as he becomes excited, he forgets his training. The hunting cunning of a cougar, however, is inborn, and like a great pianist, he can usually do better when he is warmed up to his work.
Men would cross many seas for a few minutes of such wild, nerve-tingling rapture as Whisperfoot knew as he crept into his hunting grounds. Ever he went more cautiously, his tawny body lowering. And just as he reached the ridge top he heard his first game.
It was just a rustle in the thickets at one side. Whisperfoot stopped dead still, then slowly lowered his body. The only motion left was the sinuous whipping of his tail. But he couldn't identify his game yet. He peered with fiery eyes into the darkness. He was almost in leaping range already.
But at once he knew that the creature that grunted and stirred in the brush was not a deer. A deer would have detected his presence long since, as the animal was at one side of him, instead of in front, and would have caught his scent. Then, the wind blowing straighter, he recognized the creature. It was just old Urson, the porcupine.
For very good reasons, Whisperfoot never attacked Urson except in moments of utmost need. It was extremely doubtful that he spared him for the same reason that he was spared by the wisest of the mountaineers,—that he was game to be taken when starving and when no other could be procured. It was rather that he was very awkward to kill and considerably worse to eat.
It is better to dine on nightshade, says a forest law, than to eat a porcupine; for the former innocent-looking little berry is almost as fast a death as a rifle bullet, and the flesh of the latter animal will torture with a hundred red-hot fires in the vitals before its eater is driven to its eternal lair. But it isn't that the porcupine's flesh is poison. It is just that an incautious bite on its armored body will fill the throat and mouth with spines, needle points that work ever deeper until they result in death. And so it is quite a tribute to Whisperfoot's intelligence that he had killed and devoured no less than a dozen porcupines and still lived to tell the tale.
He simply knew how to handle them. He knew an upward scoop with the end of his claws that would tip the creature over; and then he would pounce on the unprotected abdomen. But it was considerable trouble, and he had to be careful of the spines all the time he was eating,—a particular annoyance to one who habitually and savagely bolts his food. So he made a careful detour about Urson and continued on his way. He heard the latter squealing and rattling his quills behind him.
IV
Shortly after nine o'clock, Whisperfoot encountered his first herd of deer. But they caught his scent and scattered before he could get up to them. He met Woof, grunting through the underbrush, and again he punctiliously, but with wretched spirit, left the trail. A fight with Woof the bear was one of the most unpleasant experiences that could be imagined. He had a pair of strong arms of which one embrace of a cougar's body meant death in one long shriek of pain. Of course they didn't fight often. They had entirely opposite interests. The bear was a berry-eater and a honey-grubber, and the cougar cared too much for his own life and beauty to tackle Woof in a hunting way.
A fawn leaped from the thicket in front of him, startled by his sound in the thicket. The truth was, Whisperfoot had made a wholly unjustified misstep on a dry twig, just at the crucial moment. Perhaps it was the fault of Woof, whose presence had driven Whisperfoot from the trail, and perhaps because old age and stiffness was coming upon him. But neither of these facts appeased his anger. He could scarcely suppress a snarl of fury and disappointment.
He continued along the ridge, still stealing, still alert, but his anger increasing with every moment. The fact that he had to leave the trail again to permit still another animal to pass, and a particularly insignificant one too, didn't make him feel any better. This animal had a number of curious stripes along his back, and usually did nothing more desperate than steal eggs and eat bird fledglings. Whisperfoot could have crushed him with one bite, but this was one thing that the great cat, as long as he lived, would never try to do. He got out of the way politely when Stripe-back was still a quarter of a mile away; which was quite a compliment to the little animal's ability to introduce himself. Stripe-back was familiarly known as a skunk.
Shortly after ten, the mountain lion had a remarkably fine chance at a buck. The direction of the wind, the trees, the thickets and the light were all in his favor. It was old Blacktail, wallowing in the salt lick; and Whisperfoot's heart bounded when he detected him. No human hunter could have laid his plans with greater care. He had to cut up the side of the ridge, mindful of the wind. Then there was a long dense thicket in which he might approach within fifty feet of the lick, still with the wind in his face. Just beside the lick was another deep thicket, from which he could make his leap.
Blacktail was wholly unsuspecting. No creature in the Oregon woods was more beautiful than he. He had a noble spread of antlers, limbs that were wings, and a body that was grace itself. He was a timid creature, but he did not even dream of the tawny Danger that this instant was creeping through the thickets upon him.
Whisperfoot drew near, with infinite caution. He made a perfect stalk clear to the end of the buckbrush. Thirty feet more—thirty feet of particularly difficult stalking—and he would be in leaping range. If he could only cross this last distance in silence, the game was his.
His body lowered. The tail lashed back and forth, and now it had begun to have a slight vertical motion that frontiersmen have learned to watch for. He placed every paw with consummate grace, and few sets of human nerves have sufficient control over leg muscles to move with such astounding, exacting patience. He scarcely seemed to move at all.
The distance slowly shortened. He was almost to the last thicket, from which he might spring. His wild blood was leaping in his veins.
But when scarcely ten feet remained to stalk, a sudden sound pricked through the darkness. It came from afar, but it was no less terrible. It was really two sounds, so close together that they sounded as one. Neither Blacktail nor Whisperfoot had any delusions about them. They recognized them at once, in strange ways under the skin that no man may describe, as the far-off reports of a rifle. Just to-day Blacktail had seen his doe fall bleeding when this same sound, only louder, spoke from a covert from which Bert Cranston had poached her,—and he left the lick in one bound.
Terrified though he was by the rifle shot, still Whisperfoot sprang. But the distance was too far. His outstretched paw hummed down four feet behind Blacktail's flank. Then forgetting everything but his anger and disappointment, the great cougar opened his mouth and howled.
Howling, the forest people know, never helped one living thing. Of course this means such howls as Whisperfoot uttered now, not that deliberate long singsong by which certain of the beasts of prey will sometimes throw a herd of game into a panic and cause them to run into an ambush. All Whisperfoot's howl of anger achieved was to frighten all the deer out of his territory and render it extremely unlikely that he would have another chance at them that night. Even Dan and Lennox, too far distant to hear the shots, heard the howl very plainly, and both of them rejoiced that he had missed.
The long night was almost done when Whisperfoot even got sight of further game. Once a flock of grouse exploded with a roar of wings from a thicket; but they had been wakened by the first whisper of dawn in the wind, and he really had no chance at them. Soon after this, the moon set.
The larger creatures of the forest are almost as helpless in absolute darkness as human beings. It is very well to talk of seeing in the dark, but from the nature of things, even vertical pupils may only respond to light. No owl or bat can see in absolute darkness. Although the stars still burned, and possibly a fine filament of light had spread out from the East, the descending moon left the forest much too dark for Whisperfoot to hunt with any advantage. It became increasingly likely that he would have to retire to his lair without any meal whatever.
But still he remained, hoping against hope. After a futile fifteen minutes of watching a trail, he heard a doe feeding on a hillside. Its footfall was not so heavy as the sturdy tramp of a buck, and besides, the bucks would be higher on the ridges this time of morning. He began a cautious advance toward it.
For the first fifty yards the hunt was in his favor. He came up wind, and the brush made a perfect cover. But the doe unfortunately was standing a full twenty yards farther, in an open glade. For a long moment the tawny creature stood motionless, hoping that the prey would wander toward him. But even in this darkness, he could tell that she was making a half-circle that would miss him by forty yards, a course that would eventually take her down wind in almost the direction that Whisperfoot had come.
Under ordinary circumstances, Whisperfoot would not have made an attack. A cougar can run swiftly, but a deer is light itself. The big cat would have preferred to linger, a motionless thing in the thickets, hoping some other member of the deer herd to which the doe must have belonged would come into his ambush. But the hunt was late, and Whisperfoot was very, very angry. Too many times this night he had missed his kill. Besides, the herd was certainly somewhere down wind, and for certain very important reasons a cougar might as well hunt elephants as try to stalk down wind. The breeze carries his scent more surely than a servant carries a visiting card. In desperation, he leaped from the thicket and charged the deer.
In spite of the preponderant odds against him, the charge was almost a success. He went fully half the distance between them before the deer perceived him. Then she leaped. There seemed to be no interlude of time between the instant that she beheld the dim, tawny figure in the air and that in which her long legs pushed out in a spring. But she didn't leap straight ahead. She knew enough of the cougars to know that the great cat would certainly aim for her head and neck in the same way that a duck-hunter leads a fast-flying duck,—hoping to intercept her leap. Even as her feet left the ground she seemed to whirl in the air, and the deadly talons whipped down in vain. Then, cutting back in front, she raced down wind.
It is usually the most unmitigated folly for a cougar to chase a deer against which he has missed his stroke; and it is also quite fatal to his dignity. And whoever doubts for a minute that the larger creatures have no dignity, and that it is not very dear to them, simply knows nothing about the ways of animals. They cling to it to the death. And nothing is quite so amusing to old Woof, the bear—who, after all, has the best sense of humor in the forest—as the sight of a tawny, majestic mountain lion, rabid and foaming at the mouth, in an effort to chase a deer that he can't possibly catch. But to-night it was too dark for Woof to see. Besides, one disappointment after another had crumbled, as the rains crumble leaves, the last vestige of Whisperfoot's self-control. Snarling in fury, he bounded after the doe.
She was lost to sight at once in the darkness, but for fully thirty yards he raced in her pursuit. And it is true that deep down in his own well of instincts—those mysterious waters that the events of life can hardly trouble—he really didn't expect to overtake her. If he had stopped to think, it would have been one of the really great surprises of his life to hear the sudden, unmistakable stir and movement of a large, living creature not fifteen feet distant in the thicket.
He didn't stop to think at all. He didn't puzzle on the extreme unlikelihood of a doe halting in her flight from a cougar. It is doubtful whether, in the thickets, he had any perceptions of the creature other than its movements. He was running down wind, so it is certain that he didn't smell it. If he saw it at all, it was just as a shadow, sufficiently large to be that of a deer. It was moving, crawling as Woof sometimes crawled, seemingly to get out of his path. And Whisperfoot leaped straight at it.
It was a perfect shot. He landed high on its shoulders. His head lashed down, and the white teeth closed. All the long life of his race he had known that pungent essence that flowed forth. His senses perceived it, a message shot along his nerves to his brain. And then he opened his mouth in a high, far-carrying squeal of utter, abject terror.
He sprang a full fifteen feet back into the thickets; then crouched. The hair stood still at his shoulders, his claws were bared; he was prepared to fight to the death. He didn't understand. He only knew the worst single terror of his life. It was not a doe that he had attacked in the darkness. It was not Urson, the porcupine, or even Woof. It was that imperial master of all things, man himself. Unknowing, he had attacked Landy Hildreth, lying wounded from Cranston's bullet beside the trail. Word of the arson ring would never reach the settlements, after all.
And as for Whisperfoot,—the terror that choked his heart with blood began to wear off in a little while. The man lay so still in the thickets. Besides, there was a strange, wild smell in the air. Whisperfoot's stroke had gone home so true there had not even been a fight. The darkness began to lift around him, and a strange exultation, a rapture unknown before in all his hunting, began to creep into his wild blood. Then, as a shadow steals, he went creeping back to his dead.
V
Dan Failing had been studying nature on the high ridges; and he went home by a back trail that led to old Bald Mountain. Many a man of longer residence in the mountains wouldn't have cared to strike off through the thickets with no guide except his own sense of direction. The ridges are too many, and they look too much alike. It is very easy to walk in a great circle—because one leg tires before the other—with no hope whatever of anything except the spirit ever rising above the barrier of the pines. But Dan always knew exactly where he was. It was part of his inheritance from his frontiersmen ancestors, and it freed his wings in the hills.
The trail was just a narrow serpent in the brush; and it had not been made by gangs of laborers, working with shovels and picks. Possibly half a dozen white men, in all, had ever walked along it. It was just the path of the wild creatures, worn down by hoof and paw and cushion since the young days of the world.
It was covered, like a sheep lane, with little slit triangles in the yellow dirt. Some of them were hardly larger than the print of a man's thumb, and they went all the way up to a great imprint that Dan could scarcely cover with his open hand. All manner of deer, from seasonal fawns with spotted coats and wide, startled eyes to the great bull elk, monarch of the forest, had passed that way before him. Once he found the traces of an old kill, where a cougar had dined and from which the buzzards had but newly departed. And once he saw where Woof had left his challenge in the bark of a great pine.
This is a very common thing for Woof to do,—to go about leaving challenges as if he were the most warlike creature in the world. In reality, he never fights until he is driven to it, and then his big, furry arms turn out to be steel compressors of the first order; he is patient and good-natured and ordinarily all he wants to do is sleep in the leaves and grunt and soliloquize and hunt berries. But woe to the man or beast who meets him in a rough-and-tumble fight. Unlike his great cousin the Grizzly, that American Adamzad that not only walks like a man but kills cattle like a butcher, he almost never eats meat. No one ever pays any attention to his challenges either, and likely he never thought any one would. They seemed to be the result of an inherited tendency with him, just as much as to grow drowsy in winter, or to scratch fleas from his furry hide.
He sees a tree that suits his fancy and immediately stands on his hind legs beside it. Then he scratches the bark, just as high up as he can reach. The idea seemed to be that if any other bear should journey along that way, should find that he couldn't reach as high, he would immediately quit the territory. But it doesn't work out in practice. Nine times out of ten there will be a dozen Woofs in the same neighborhood, no two of equal size, yet they hunt their berries and rob their bee trees in perfect peace. Perhaps the impulse still remains, a dim, remembered instinct, long after it has outlived its usefulness,—just as man, ten thousand years after his arboreal existence, will often throw his arms into the air as if to seize a tree branch when he is badly frightened.
It was a roundabout trail home, but yet it had its advantages. It took him within two miles of Snowbird's lookout station, and at this hour of day he had been particularly fortunate in finding her at a certain spring on the mountain side. It was a rather singular coincidence. Along about four he would usually find himself wandering up that way. Strangely enough, at the same time, it was true that she had an irresistible impulse to go down and sit in the green ferns beside the same spring. They always seemed to be surprised to see one another. In reality, either of them would have been considerably more surprised had the other failed to put in an appearance. And always they had long talks, as the afternoon drew to twilight.
"But I don't think you ought to wait so late before starting home," the girl would always say. "You're not a human hawk, and it is easier to get lost than you think."
And this solicitude, Dan rightly figured, was a good sign. There was only one objection to it. It resulted in an unmistakable inference that she considered him unable to take care of himself,—and that was the last thing on earth that he wanted her to think. He understood her well enough to know that her standards were the standards of the mountains, valuing strength and self-reliance above all things. He didn't stop to question why, every day, he trod so many weary miles to be with her.
She was as natural as a fawn; and many times she had quite taken away his breath. And once she did it literally. He didn't think that so long as death spared him he would ever be able to forget that experience. It was her birthday, and knowing of it in time he had arranged for the delivery of a certain package, dear to a girlish heart, at her father's house. In the trysting hour he had come trudging over the hills with it, and few experiences in his life had ever yielded such unmitigated pleasure as the sight of her, glowing white and red, as she took off its wrapping paper. It was a jolly old gift, he recollected.—And when she had seen it, she fairly leaped at him. Her warm, round arms around his neck, and the softest, loveliest lips in the world pressed his. But in those days he didn't have the strength that he had now. He felt he could endure the same experience again with no embarrassment whatever. His first impression then, besides abounding, incredible astonishment, was that she had quite knocked out his breath. But let it be said for him that he recovered with notable promptness. His own arms had gone up and closed around,—and the girl had wriggled free.
"But you mustn't do that!" she told him.
"But, good Lord, girl! You did it to me! Is there no justice in women?"
"But I did it to thank you for this lovely gift. For remembering me—for being so good—and considerate. You haven't any cause to thank me."
He had many very serious difficulties in thinking it out. And only one conclusion was obtainable,—that Snowbird kissed as naturally as she did anything else, and the kiss meant exactly what she said it did and no more. But the fact remained that he would have walked a good many miles farther if he thought there was any possibility of a repeat.
But all at once his fantasies were suddenly and rudely dispelled by the intrusion of realities. Even a man in the depths of concentration cannot be inattentive to the wild sounds of the mountains. They have a commanding, a penetrating quality all their own. A mathematician cannot walk over a mountain trail pondering on the fourth dimension when some living creature is consistently cracking brush in the thickets beside him. Human nature is directly opposed to such a thing, and it is too much to expect of any man. He has too many race memories of saber-tooth tigers, springing from their lairs, and likely he has heard too many bear stories in his youth.
Dan had been walking silently himself in the pine needles. As Lennox had wondered at long ago, he knew how by instinct; and instinctively he practiced this attainment as soon as he got out into the wild. The creature was fully one hundred yards distant, yet Dan could hear him with entire plainness. And for a while he couldn't even guess what manner of thing it might be.
A cougar that made so much noise would be immediately expelled from the union. A wolf pack, running by sight, might crack brush as freely; but a wolf pack would also bay to wake the dead. Of course it might be an elk or a steer, and still more likely, a bear. He stood still and listened. The sound grew nearer.
Soon it became evident that the creature was either walking with two legs, or else was a four-footed animal putting two feet down at the same instant. Dan had learned to wait. He stood perfectly still. And gradually he came to the conclusion that he was listening to the footfall of another man.
But it was rather hard to imagine what a man might be doing on this lonely hill. Of course it might be a deer hunter; but few were the valley sportsmen who had penetrated to this far land. The footfall was much too heavy for Snowbird. The steps were evidently on another trail that intersected his own trail one hundred yards farther up the hill. He had only to stand still, and in an instant the man would come in sight.
He took one step into the thickets, prepared to conceal himself if it became necessary. Then he waited. Soon the man stepped out on the trail.
Even at the distance of one hundred yards, Dan had no difficulty whatever in recognizing him. He could not mistake this tall, dark form, the soiled, slouchy clothes, the rough hair, the intent, dark features. It was a man about his own age, his own height, but weighing fully twenty pounds more, and the dark, narrow eyes could belong to no one but Bert Cranston. He carried his rifle loosely in his arms.
He stopped at the forks in the trail and looked carefully in all directions. Dan had every reason to think that Cranston would see him at first glance. Only one clump of thicket sheltered him. But because Dan had learned the lesson of standing still, because his olive-drab sporting clothes blended softly with the colored leaves, Cranston did not detect him. He turned and strode on down the trail.
He didn't move quite like a man with innocent purposes. There was something stealthy, something sinister in his stride, and the way he kept such a sharp lookout in all directions. Yet he never glanced to the trail for deer tracks, as he would have done had he been hunting. Without even waiting to meditate on the matter, Dan started to shadow him.
Before one hundred yards had been traversed, he could better understand the joy the cougar takes in his hunting. It was the same process,—a cautious, silent advance in the trail of prey. He had to walk with the same caution, he had to take advantage of the thickets. He began to feel a curious excitement.
Cranston seemed to be moving more carefully now, examining the brush along the trail. Now and then he glanced up at the tree tops. And all at once he stopped and knelt in the dry shrubbery.
At first all that Dan could see was the glitter of a knife blade. Cranston seemed to be whittling a piece of dead pine into fine shavings. Now he was gathering pine needles and small twigs, making a little pile of them. And then, just as Cranston drew his match, Dan saw his purpose.
Cranston was at his old trade,—setting a forest fire.
VI
For two very good reasons, Dan didn't call to Cranston at once. The two reasons were that Cranston had a rifle and that Dan was unarmed. It might be extremely likely that Cranston would choose the most plausible and effective means of preventing an interruption of his crime, and by the same token, prevent word of the crime ever reaching the authorities. The rifle contained five cartridges, and only one was needed.
But the idea of backing out, unseen, never even occurred to Dan. The fire would have a tremendous headway before he could summon help. Although it was near the lookout station, every condition pointed to a disastrous fire. The brush was dry as tinder, not so heavy as to choke the wind, but yet tall enough to carry the flame into the tree tops. The stiff breeze up the ridge would certainly carry the flame for miles through the parched Divide before help could come. In the meantime stock and lives and homes would be endangered, besides the irreparable loss of timber. There were many things that Dan might do, but giving up was not one of them.
After all, he did the wisest thing of all. He simply came out in plain sight and unconcernedly walked down the trail toward Cranston. At the same instant, the latter struck his match.
As Dan was no longer stalking, Cranston immediately heard his step. He whirled, recognized Dan, and for one long instant in which the world seemed to have time in plenty to make a complete revolution, he stood perfectly motionless. The match flared in his dark fingers, his eyes—full of singular conjecturing—rested on Dan's face. No instant of the latter's life had ever been fraught with greater peril. He understood perfectly what was going on in Cranston's mind. The fire-fiend was calmly deciding whether to shoot or whether to bluff it out. One required no more moral courage than the other. It really didn't make a great deal of difference to Cranston.
He had been born in the hills, and his spirit was the spirit of the wolf,—to kill when necessary, without mercy or remorse. Besides, Dan represented, in his mind, all that Cranston hated,—the law, gentleness, the great civilized world that spread below. But in spite of it, he decided that the killing was not worth the cartridge. The other course was too easy. He did not even dream that Dan had been shadowing him and had seen his intention. He would have laughed at the idea that a "tenderfoot" could thus walk behind him, unheard. Without concern, he scattered with his foot the little heap of kindling, and slipping his pipe into his mouth, he touched the flaring match to it. It was a wholly admirable little piece of acting, and would have deceived any one who had not seen his previous preparations. The fact that the pipe was empty mattered not one way or another. Then he walked on down the trail toward Dan.
Dan stopped and lighted his own pipe. It was a curious little truce. And then he leaned back against the great, gray trunk of a fallen tree.
"Well, Cranston," he said civilly. The men had met on previous occasions, and always there had been the same invisible war between them.
"How do you do, Failing," Cranston replied. No perceptions could be so blunt as to miss the premeditated insult in the tone. He didn't speak in his own tongue at all, the short, guttural "Howdy" that is the greeting of the mountain men. He pronounced all the words with an exaggerated precision, an unmistakable mockery of Dan's own tone. In his accent he threw a tone of sickly sweetness, and his inference was all too plain. He was simply calling Failing a milksop and a white-liver; just as plainly as if he had used the words.
The eyes of the two men met. Cranston's lips were slightly curled in an unmistakable leer. Dan's were very straight. And in one thing at least, their eyes looked just the same. The pupils of both pairs had contracted to steel points, bright in the dark gray of the irises. Cranston's looked somewhat red; and Dan's were only hard and bright.
Dan felt himself straighten; and the color mounted somewhat higher in his brown cheeks. But he did not try to avenge the insult—yet. Cranston was still fifteen feet distant, and that was too far. A man may swing a rifle within fifteen feet. The fact that they were in no way physical equals did not even occur to him. When the insult is great enough, such considerations cannot possibly matter. Cranston was hard as steel, one hundred and seventy pounds in weight. Dan did not touch one hundred and fifty, and a deadly disease had not yet entirely relinquished its hold upon him.
"I do very well, Cranston," Dan answered in the same tone. "Wouldn't you like another match? I believe your pipe has gone out."
Very little can be said for the wisdom of this remark. It was simply human,—that age-old creed to answer blow for blow and insult for insult. Of course the inference was obvious,—that Dan was accusing him, by innuendo, of his late attempt at arson. Cranston glanced up quickly, and it might be true that his fingers itched and tingled about the barrel of his rifle. He knew what Dan meant. He understood perfectly that Dan had guessed his purpose on the mountain side. And the curl at his lips became more pronounced.
"What a smart little boy," he scorned. "Going to be a Sherlock Holmes when he grows up." Then he half turned and the light in his eyes blazed up. He was not leering now. The mountain men are too intense to play at insult very long. Their inherent savagery comes to the surface, and they want the warmth of blood upon their fingers. The voice became guttural. "Maybe you're a spy?" he asked. "Maybe you're one of those city rats—to come up and watch us, and then run and tell the forest service. There's two things, Failing, that I want you to know."
Dan puffed at his pipe, and his eyes looked curiously bright through the film of smoke. "I'm not interested in hearing them," he said.
"It might pay you," Cranston went on. "One of 'em is that one man's word is good as another's in a court—and it wouldn't do you any good to run down and tell tales. A man can light his pipe on the mountain side without the courts being interested. The second thing is—just that I don't think you'd find it a healthy thing to do."
"I suppose, then, that is a threat?"
"It ain't just a threat." Cranston laughed harshly,—a single, grim syllable that was the most terrible sound he had yet uttered. "It's a fact. Just try it, Failing. Just make one little step in that direction. You couldn't hide behind a girl's skirts then. Why, you city sissy, I'd break you to pieces in my hands!"
Few men can make a threat without a muscular accompaniment. Its very utterance releases pent-up emotions, part of which can only pour forth in muscular expression. And anger is a primitive thing, going down to the most mysterious depths of a man's nature. As Cranston spoke, his lip curled, his dark fingers clenched on his thick palm, and he half leaned forward.
Dan knocked out his pipe on the log. It was the only sound in that whole mountain realm; all the lesser sounds were stilled. The two men stood face to face, Dan tranquil, Cranston shaken by passion.
"I give you," said Dan with entire coldness, "an opportunity to take that back. Just about four seconds."
He stood very straight as he spoke, and his eyes did not waver in the least. It would not be the truth to say that his heart was not leaping like a wild thing in his breast. A dark mist was spreading like madness over his brain; but yet he was striving to keep his thoughts clear. It was hard to do, under insult. But he knew that only by craft, by cool thinking and planning, could he even hope to stand against the brawny Cranston. He kept a remorseless control over his voice and face. Stealthily, without seeming to do so, he was setting his muscles for a spring.
The only answer to his words was a laugh,—a roaring laugh of scorn from Cranston's dark lips. In his laughter, his intent, catlike vigilance relaxed. Dan saw a chance; feeble though it was, it was the only chance he had. And his long body leaped like a serpent through the air.
Physical superior though he was, Cranston would have repelled the attack with his rifle if he had had a chance. His blood was already at the murder heat—a point always quickly reached in Cranston—and the dark, hot fumes in his brain were simply nothing more nor less than the most poisonous, bitter hatred. No other word exists. If his class of degenerate mountain men had no other accomplishment, they could hate. All their lives they practiced the emotion: hatred of their neighbors, hatred of law, hatred of civilization in all its forms. Besides, this kind of hillman habitually fought his duels with rifles. Hands were not deadly enough.
But Dan was past his guard before he had time to raise his gun. The whole attack was one of the most astounding surprises of Cranston's life. Dan's body struck his, his fists flailed, and to protect himself, Cranston was obliged to drop the rifle. They staggered, as if in some weird dance, on the trail; and their arms clasped in a clinch.
For a long instant they stood straining, seemingly motionless. Cranston's powerful body had stood up well under the shock of Dan's leap. It was a hand-to-hand battle now. The rifle had slid on down the hillside, to be caught in a clump of brush twenty feet below. Dan called on every ounce of his strength, because he knew what mercy he might expect if Cranston mastered him. The battles of the mountains were battles to the death.
They flung back and forth, wrenching shoulders, lashing fists, teeth and feet and fingers. There were no Marquis of Queensbury rules in this battle. Again and again Dan sent home his blows; but they all seemed ineffective. By now, Cranston had completely overcome the moment's advantage the other had obtained by the power of his leap. He hurled Dan from the clinch and lashed at him with hard fists.
It is a very common thing to hear of a silent fight. But it is really a more rare occurrence than most people believe. It is true that serpents will often fight in the strangest, most eerie silence; but human beings are not serpents. They partake more of the qualities of the meat-eaters,—the wolves and the felines. After the first instant, the noise of the fight aroused the whole hillside. The sound of blows was in itself notable, and besides, both of the men were howling the primordial battle cries of hatred and vengeance.
For two long minutes Dan fought with the strength of desperation, summoning at last all that mysterious reserve force with which all men are born. But he was playing a losing game. The malady with which he had suffered had taken too much of his vigor. Even as he struggled, it seemed to him that the vista about him, the dark pines, the colored leaves of the perennial shrubbery, the yellow path were all obscured in a strange, white mist. A great wind roared in his ears,—and his heart was evidently about to shiver to pieces.
But still he fought on, not daring to yield. He could no longer parry Cranston's blows. The latter's arms went around him in one of those deadly holds that wrestlers know; and Dan struggled in vain to free himself. Cranston's face itself seemed hideous and unreal in the mist that was creeping over him. He did not recognize the curious thumping sound as Cranston's fists on his flesh. And now Cranston had hurled him off his feet.
Nothing mattered further. He had fought the best he could. This cruel beast could pounce on him at will and hammer away his life. But still he struggled. Except for the constant play of his muscles, his almost unconscious effort to free himself that kept one of Cranston's arms busy holding him down, that fight on the mountain path might have come to a sudden end. Human bodies can stand a terrific punishment; but Dan's was weakened from the ravages of his disease. Besides, Cranston would soon have both hands and both feet free for the work, and when these four terrible weapons are used at once, the issue—soon or late—can never be in doubt.
But even now, consciousness still lingered. Dan could hear his enemy's curses,—and far up the trail, he heard another, stranger sound. It was that second of acute sensibilities that usually immediately precedes unconsciousness, and he heard it very plainly. It sounded like some one running.
And then he dimly knew that Cranston was climbing from his body. Voices were speaking,—quick, commanding voices just over him. Above Cranston's savage curses another voice rang clear, and to Dan's ears, glorious beyond all human utterance.
He opened his tortured eyes. The mists lifted from in front of them, and the whole drama was revealed. It had not been sudden mercy that had driven Cranston from his body, just when his victim's falling unconsciousness would have put him completely in his power. Rather it was something black and ominous that even now was pointed squarely at Cranston's breast.
None too soon, a ranger of the hill had heard the sounds of the struggle, and had left the trysting place at the spring to come to Dan's aid. It was Snowbird, very pale but wholly self-sufficient and determined and intent. Her pistol was quite cocked and ready.
VII
Dan Failing was really not badly hurt. The quick, lashing blows had not done more than severely bruise the flesh of his face; and the mists of unconsciousness that had been falling over him were more nearly the result of his own tremendous physical exertion. Now these mists were rising.
"Go—go away," the girl was commanding. "I think you've killed him."
Dan opened his eyes to find her kneeling close beside him, but still covering Cranston with her pistol. Her hand was resting on his bruised cheek. He couldn't have believed that a human face could be as white, while life still remained, as hers was then. All the lovely tints that had been such a delight to him, the play of soft reds and browns, had faded as an after-glow fades on the snow.
Dan's glance moved with hers to Cranston. He was standing easily at a distance of a dozen feet; and except for the faintest tremble all over his body, a muscular reaction from the violence of his passion, he had entirely regained his self-composure. This was quite characteristic of the mountain men. They share with the beasts a passion of living that is wholly unknown on the plains; but yet they have a certain quality of imperturbability known nowhere else. Nor is it limited to the native-born mountaineers. No man who intimately knows a member of that curious, keen-eyed little army of naturalists and big-game hunters who go to the north woods every fall, as regularly and seemingly as inexorably as the waterfowl go in spring, can doubt this fact. They seem to have acquired from the silence and the snows an impregnation of that eternal calm and imperturbability that is the wilderness itself. Cranston wasn't in the least afraid. Fear is usually a matter of uncertainty, and he knew exactly where he stood.
It is extremely doubtful if a plainsman would have possessed this knowledge. But a plainsman has not the knowledge of life itself that the mountaineer has, simply because he does not see it in the raw. And he has not half the intimate knowledge of death, an absolute requisite of self-composure. The mountaineer knows life in its simple phases with little tradition or convention to blur the vision. Death is a very intimate acquaintance that may be met in any snowdrift, on any rocky trail; and these conditions are very deadly to any delusions that he has in regard to himself. He acquires an ability to see just where he stands, and of course that means self-possession. This quality had something to do with the remarkable record that the mountain men, such as that magnificent warrior from Tennessee, made in the late war.
Cranston knew exactly what Snowbird would do. Although of a higher order, she was a mountain creature, even as himself. She meant exactly what she said. If he hadn't climbed from Dan's prone body, she would have shot quickly and very straight. If he tried to attack either of them now, her finger would press back before he could blink an eye, and she wouldn't weep any hysterical tears over his dead body. If he kept his distance, she wouldn't shoot at all. He meant to keep his distance. But he did know that he could insult her without danger to himself. And by now his lips had acquired their old curl of scorn.
"I'll go, Snowbird," he said. "I'll leave you with your sissy. But I guess you saw what I did to him—in two minutes."
"I saw. But you must remember he's sick. Now go."
"If he's sick, let him stay in bed—and have a wet nurse. Maybe you can be that."
The lids drooped halfway over her gray eyes, and the slim finger curled more tightly about the trigger. "Oh, I wish I could shoot you, Bert!" she said. She didn't whisper it, or hiss it, or hurl it, or do any of the things most people are supposed to do in moments of violent emotion. She simply said it, and her meaning was all the clearer.
"But you can't. And I'll pound that milksop of yours to a jelly every time I see him. I'd think, Snowbird, that you'd want a man."
He started up the trail; and then she did a strange thing. "He's more of a man than you are, right now, Bert," she told him. "He'll prove it some day." Then her arm went about Dan's neck and lifted his head upon her breast; and in Cranston's plain sight, she bent and kissed him, softly, on the lips.
Cranston's answer was an oath. It dripped from his lips, more poisonous, more malicious than the venom of a snake. His late calm, treasured so much, dropped from him in an instant. His features seemed to tighten, the dark lips drew away from his teeth. No words could have made him such an effective answer as this little action of hers. And as he turned up the trail, he called down to her a name,—that most dreadful epithet that foul tongues have always used to women held in greatest scorn.
Dan struggled in her arms. The kiss on his lips, the instant before, had not called him out of his half-consciousness. It had scarcely seemed real, rather just an incident in a blissful dream. But the word called down the trail shot out clear and vivid from the silence, just as a physician's face will often leap from the darkness after the anesthesia. The whole scene in an instant became incredibly vivid,—the dark figure on the trail, the girl's white face above him, narrow-eyed and drawn-lipped, and the dark pines, silent and sad, overhead. Something infinitely warm and tender was holding him, pressing him back against a holy place that throbbed and gave him life and strength; but he knew that this word had to be answered. And only actions, not other words, could be its payment. All the voices of his body called to him to lie still, but the voices of the spirit, those higher, nobler promptings from which no man, to the glory of the breed from which he sprung, can ever quite escape, were stronger yet. He tugged upward, straining. But he didn't even have the strength to break the hold that the soft arm had about his neck.
"Oh, if I could only pull the trigger!" she was crying. "If I could only kill him—"
"Let me," he pleaded. "Give me the pistol. I'll kill him—"
And he would. There was no flinching in the gray eyes that looked up to her. She leaned forward, as if to put the weapon in his hands, but at once drew it back. And then a single sob caught at her throat. An instant later, they heard Cranston's laughter as he vanished around the turn of the trail.
For long minutes the two of them were still. The girl still held the man's head upon her breast. The pistol had fallen in the pine needles, and her nervous hand plucked strangely at the leaves of a mountain flower. To Dan's eyes, there was something trancelike, a hint of paralysis and insensibility about her posture. He had never seen her eyes like this. The light that he had always beheld in them had vanished. Their utter darkness startled him.
He sat up straight, and her arm that had been about his neck fell at her side. He took her hand firmly in his, and their eyes met.
"We must go home, Snowbird," he told her simply. "I'm not so badly hurt but that I can make it."
She nodded; but otherwise scarcely seemed to hear. Her eyes still flowed with darkness. And then, before his own eyes, their dark pupils began to contract. The hand he held filled and throbbed with life, and the fingers closed around his. She leaned toward him.
"Listen, Dan," she said quickly. "You heard—didn't you—the last thing that he said?"
"I couldn't help but hear, Snowbird."
Her other hand sought for his. "Then if you heard—payment must be made. You see what I mean, Dan. Maybe you can't see, knowing the girls that live on the plains. You were the cause of his saying it, and you must answer—"
It seemed to Dan that some stern code of the hills, unwritten except in the hearts of their children, inexorable as night, was speaking through her lips. This was no personal thing. In some dim, half-understood way, it went back to the basic code of life.
"People must fight their own fights, up here," she told him. "The laws of the courts that the plains' people can appeal to are all too far away. There's no one that can do it, except you. Not my father. My father can't fight your battles here, if your honor is going to stand. It's up to you, Dan. You can't pretend that you didn't hear him. Such as you are, weak and sick to be beaten to a pulp in two minutes, you alone will have to make him answer for it. I came to your aid—and now you must come to mine."
Her fingers no longer clasped his. Strength had come back to him, and his fingers closed down until the blood went out of hers, but she was wholly unconscious of the pain. In reality, she was conscious of nothing except the growing flame in his face. It held her eyes, in passionate fascination. His pupils were contracting to little bright dots in the gray irises. The jaw was setting, as she had never seen it before.
"Do you think, Snowbird, that you'd even have to ask me?" he demanded. "Don't you think I understand? And it won't be in your defense—only my own duty."
"But he is so strong—and you are so weak—"
"I won't be so weak forever. I never really cared much about living before. I'll try now, and you'll see—oh, Snowbird, wait and trust me: I understand everything. It's my own fight—when you kissed me, and he cried down that word in anger and jealousy, it put the whole thing on me. No one else can make him answer; no one else has the right. It's my honor, no one else's, that stands or falls."
He lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it again and again.
And for the first time he saw the tears gathering in her dark eyes. "But you fought here, didn't you, Dan?" she asked with painful slowness. "You didn't put up your arms—or try to run away? I didn't come till he had you done, so I didn't see." She looked at him as if her whole joy of life hung on his answer.
"Fought! I would have fought till I died! But that isn't enough, Snowbird. It isn't enough just to fight, in a case like this. A man's got to win! I would have died if you hadn't come. And that's another debt that I have to pay—only that debt I owe to you."
She nodded slowly. The lives of the mountain men are not saved by their women without incurring obligation. She attempted no barren denials. She made no effort to pretend he had not incurred a tremendous debt when she had come with her pistol. It was an unavoidable fact. A life for a life is the code of the mountains.
"Two things I must do, before I can ever dare to die," he told her soberly. "One of them is to pay you; the other is to pay Cranston for the thing he said. Maybe the chance will never come for the first of the two; only I'll pray that it will. Maybe it would be kinder to you to pray that it wouldn't; yet I pray that it will! Maybe I can pay that debt only by being always ready, always watching for a chance to save you from any danger, always trying to protect you. You didn't come in time to see the fight I made. Besides—I lost, and little else matters. And that debt to you can't be paid until sometime I fight again—for you—and win." He gasped from his weakness, but went on bravely. "I'll never be able to feel at peace, Snowbird, until I'm tested in the fire before your eyes! I want to show you the things Cranston said of me are not true—that my courage can stand the test.
"It wouldn't be the same, perhaps, with an Eastern girl. Other things matter in the valleys. But I see how it is here; that there is only one standard for men and by that standard they rise or fall. Things in the mountains are down to the essentials."
He paused and struggled for strength to continue. "And I know what you said to him," he went on. "Half-unconscious as I was, I remember every word. Each word just seems to burn into me, Snowbird, and I'll make every one of them good. You said I am a better man than he, and sometime it would be proved—and it's the truth! Maybe in a month, maybe in a year. I'm not going to die from this malady of mine now, Snowbird. I've got too much to live for—too many debts to pay. In the end, I'll prove your words to him."
His eyes grew earnest, and the hard fire went out of them. "It's almost as if you were a queen, a real queen of some great kingdom," he told her, tremulous with a great awe that was stealing over him, as a mist steals over water. "And because I had kissed your fingers, for ever and ever I was your subject, living only to fight your fights—maybe with a dream in the end to kiss your fingers again. When you bent and kissed me on that hillside—for him to see—it was the same: that I was sworn to you, and nothing mattered in my life except the service and love I could give to you. And it's more than you ever dream, Snowbird. It's all yours, for your battles and your happiness."
The great pines were silent above them, shadowed and dark. Perhaps they were listening to an age-old story, those vows of service and self-gained worth by which the race has struggled upward from the darkness.
"But I kissed you—once before," she reminded him. The voice was just a whisper, hardly louder than the stir of the leaves in the wind.
"But that kiss didn't count," he told her. "It wasn't at all the same. I loved you then, I think, but it didn't mean what it did to-day."
"And what—" she leaned toward him, her eyes full on his, "does it mean now?"
"All that's worth while in life, all that matters when everything is said that can be said, and all is done that can be done. And it means, please God, when the debts are paid, that I may have such a kiss again."
"Not until then," she told him, whispering.
"Until then, I make oath that I won't even ask it, or receive it if you should give it. It goes too deep, dearest—and it means too much."
This was their pact. Not until the debts were paid and her word made good would those lips be his again. There was no need for further words. Both of them knew. The soldier of the queen must be tried with fire, before he may return to kiss her fingers. The light burns clear in this. No instances of degeneracy, no exceptions brought to pass by thwarted nature, can affect the truth of this.
In the skies, the gray clouds were gathering swiftly, as always in the mountains. The rain-drops were falling one and one, over the forest. The summer was done, and fall had come in earnest.
VIII
The rains fell unceasingly for seven days: not a downpour but a constant drizzle that made the distant ridges smoke. The parched earth seemed to smack its lips, and little rivulets began to fall and tumble over the beds of the dry streams. The Rogue and the Umpqua flooded and the great steelhead began to ascend their smaller tributaries. Whisperfoot hunted with ease, for the wet shrubbery did not crack and give him away. The air was filled with the call of the birds of passage.
All danger of forest fire was at once removed, and Snowbird was no longer needed as a lookout on old Bald Mountain. She went to her own home, her companion back to the valley; and now that his sister had taken his place as housekeeper, Bill had gone down to the lower foothills with a great part of the live stock. Dan spent these rainy days in toil on the hillsides, building himself physically so that he might pay his debts.
It was no great pleasure, these rainy days. He would have greatly liked to have lingered in the square mountain house, listening to the quiet murmur of the rain on the roof and watching Snowbird at her household tasks. She could, as her father had said, make a biscuit. She could also roll up sleeves over trim, brown arms and with entire good humor do a week's laundry for three hardworking men. He would have liked to sit with her, through the long afternoons, as she knitted beside the fireplace—to watch the play of her graceful fingers and perhaps, now and then, to touch her hands when he held the skeins. But none of these things transpired. He drove himself from daylight till dark, developing his body for the tests that were sure to come.
The first few days nearly killed him. He over-exercised in the chill rain, and one anxious night he developed all the symptoms of pneumonia. Such a sickness would have been the one thing needed to make the doctor's prophecy come true. But with Snowbird's aid, and numerous hot drinks, he fought it off.
She had made him go to bed, and no human memory could be so dull as to forget the little, whispered message that she gave him with his last spoonful of medicine. She said she'd pray for him, and she meant it too,—literal, entreating prayer that could not go unheard. She was a mountain girl, and her beliefs were those of her ancestors,—simple and true and wholly without affectation. But he hadn't relaxed thereafter. He knew the time had come to make the test. Night after night he would go to bed half-sick from fatigue, but the mornings would find him fresh. And after two weeks, he knew he had passed the crisis and was on the direct road to complete recovery.
Sometimes he cut wood in the forest: first the felling of some tall pine, then the trimming and hewing into two-foot lengths. The blisters came on his hands, broke and bled, but finally hardened into callosities. He learned the most effective stroke to hurl a shower of chips from beneath the blade. His back and limbs hardened from the handling of heavy wood—and the cough was practically gone.
Sometimes he mended fences and did other manual labor about the ranch; but not all his exercise was taken out in work. He didn't forget his friends in the forest, creatures of talon and paw and wing. He spent long days roaming the ridges and fighting through the buckbrush, and the forest yielded up its secrets, one by one. But he knew that no mortal span of years was long enough to absorb them all. Sometimes he shot ducks over the marshes; and there was no greater sport for him in the wilds than the first sight of a fine, black-pencil line upon the distant sky, the leap through the air that it made until, in an instant's flash, it evolved into a flock of mallard passing with the wind; and then the test of eye and nerve as he saw them over the sights.
His frame filled out. His face became swarthy from constant exposure. He gained in weight. A month glided by, and he began to see the first movement of the largest forest creatures down to the foothills. For not even the animals, with the exception of the hardy wolf pack, can survive if unprotected from the winter snow and cold of the high levels. The first snow sifted from the gray sky and quickly melted on the wet pine needles. And then the migration of the deer began in earnest. Before another week was done, Whisperfoot had cause to marvel where they had all gone.
One cloudy afternoon in early November found Silas Lennox cutting wood on the ridge behind his house. It was still an open question with him whether he and his daughter would attempt to winter on the Divide. Dan of course wanted to remain, yet there were certain reasons, some very definite and others extremely vague, why the prospect of the winter in the snow fields did not appeal to the mountaineer. In the first place, all signs pointed to a hard season. Although the fall had come late, the snows were exceptionally early. The duck flight was completed two weeks before its usual time, and the rodents had dug their burrows unusually deep. Besides, too many months of snow weigh heavily upon the spirit. The wolf packs sing endlessly on the ridges, and many unpleasant things may happen. On previous years, some of the cabins on the ridges below had human occupants; this winter the whole region, for nearly seventy miles across the mountains to the foothills, would be wholly deserted by human beings. Even the ranger station, twelve miles across a steep ridge, would soon be empty. Of course a few ranchers had homes a few miles beyond the river, but the wild cataracts did not freeze in the coldest of seasons, and there were no bridges. Besides, most of the more prosperous farmers wintered in the valleys. Only a few more days would the road be passable for his car; and no time must be lost in making his decision.
Once the snows came in reality, there was nothing to do but stay. Seventy miles across the uncharted ridges on snowshoes is an undertaking for which even a mountaineer has no fondness. It might be the wisest thing, after all, to load Snowbird and Dan into his car and drive down to the valleys. The fall round-up would soon be completed, Bill would return for a few days from the valleys with new equipment to replace the broken lighting system on the car, and they could avoid the bitter cold and snow that Lennox had known so long. Of course he would miss it somewhat. He had a strong man's love for the endless drifts, the crackling dawns and the hushed, winter forest wherein not even Woof or Whisperfoot dares to go abroad. He chopped at a great log and wondered what would suit him better,—the comfort and safety of the valleys or the rugged glory of the ridges.
But at that instant, the question of whether or not he would winter on the Divide was decided for him. And an instant was all that was needed. For the period of one breath he forgot to be watchful,—and a certain dread Spirit that abides much in the forest saw its chance. Perhaps he had lived too long in the mountains and grown careless of them: an attitude that is usually punished with death. He had just felled a tree, and the trunk was still attached to the stump by a stripe of bark to which a little of the wood adhered. He struck a furious blow at it with his ax.
He hadn't considered that the tree lay on a steep slope. As the blade fell, the great trunk simply seemed to leap. Lennox leaped too, in a frenzied effort to save his life; but already the leafy bows, like the tendrils of some great amphibian, had whipped around his legs. He fell, struggling; and then a curious darkness, streaked with flame, dropped down upon him.
An hour later he found himself lying on the still hillside, knowing only a great wonderment. At first his only impulse was to go back to sleep. He didn't understand the grayness that had come upon the mountain world, his own strange feeling of numbness, of endless soaring through infinite spaces. But he was a mountain man, and that meant he was schooled, beyond all things, to keep his self-control. He made himself remember. It was the cruelest work he had ever done, and it seemed to him that his brain would shiver to pieces from the effort. Yes—he had been cutting wood on the hillside, and the shadows had been long. He had been wondering whether or not they should go down to the valleys.
He remembered now: the last blow and the rolling log. He tried to turn his head to look up to the hill.
He found himself wholly unable to do it. Something wracked him in his neck when he tried to move. But he did glance down. And yes, he could turn in this direction. And he saw the great tree trunk lying twenty feet below him, wedged in between the young pines.
He was surrounded by broken fragments of limbs, and it was evident that the tree had not struck him a full blow. The limbs had protected him to some extent. No man is of such mold as to be crushed under the solid weight of the trunk and live to remember it. He wondered if this were the frontier of death,—the grayness that lingered over him. He seemed to be soaring.
He brought himself back to earth and tried again to remember. Of course, the twilight had fallen. It had been late afternoon when he had cut the tree. His hand stole along his body; and then, for the first time, a hideous sickness came upon him. His hand was warm and wet when he brought it up. The other hand he couldn't stretch at all.
The forest was silent around him, except a bird calling somewhere near the house—a full voice, rich and clear, and it seemed to him that it had a quality of distress. Then he recognized it. It was the voice of his own daughter, Snowbird, calling for him. He tried to answer her.
It was only a whisper, at first. Yet she was coming nearer; and her own voice sounded louder. "Here, Snowbird," he called again. She heard him then: he could tell by the startled tone of her reply. The next instant she was at his side, her tears dropping on his face.
With a tremendous effort of will, he recalled his speeding faculties. "I don't think I'm badly hurt," he told her very quietly. "A few ribs broken—and a leg. But we'll have to winter here on the Divide, Snowbird mine."
"What does it matter, if you live," she cried. She crawled along the pine needles beside him, and tore his shirt from his breast. He was rapidly sinking into unconsciousness. The thing she dreaded most—that his back might be broken—was evidently not true. There were, as he said, broken ribs and evidently one severe fracture of the leg bone. Whether he had sustained internal injuries that would end his life before the morning, she had no way of knowing.
At that point, the problem of saving her father's life fell wholly into her hands. It was perfectly plain that he could not aid himself in the slightest way. It was evident, also, he could not be moved, except possibly for the distance to the house. She banished all impulse toward hysteria and at once began to consider all phases of the case.
His broken body could not be carried over the mountain road to physicians in the valleys. They must be transported to the ranch. It would take them a full day to make the trip, even if she could get word to them at once; and twenty-four hours without medical attention would probably cost her father his life. The nearest telephone was at the ranger station, twelve miles distant over a mountain trail. The telephone line to Bald Mountain, four miles off, had been disconnected when the rains had ended the peril of the forest fire.
It all depended upon her. Bill was driving cattle into the valleys, and he and his men had in use all the horses on the ranch with one exception. The remaining horse had been ridden by Dan to some distant marshes, and as Dan would shoot until sunset, that meant he would not return until ten o'clock. There was no road for a car to the ranger station, only a rough steep trail, and she remembered, with a sinking heart, that one of Bill's missions in the valley was to procure a new lighting system. By no conceivable possibility could she drive down that mountain road in the darkness. But she was somewhat relieved by the thought that in all probability she could walk twelve miles across the mountains to the ranger station in much less time than she could drive, by automobile, seventy miles down to the ranches at the foothills about the valley.
Besides, she remembered with a gladdening heart that Richards, one of the rangers, had been a student at a medical college and had taken a position with the Forest Service to regain his health. She would cross the ridge to the station, 'phone for a doctor in the valleys, and would return on horseback with Richards for such first aid as he could give. The only problem that remained was that of getting her father into the house.
He was stirring a little now. Evidently consciousness was returning to him. And then she thanked Heaven for the few simple lessons in first aid that her father had taught her in the days before his carelessness had come upon him. He had been wise enough to know that rare would be her fortune if sometime she did not have need of such knowledge.
One of his lessons had been that of carrying an unconscious human form,—a method by which even a woman may carry, for a short distance, a heavy man. It was approximately the method used in carrying wounded in No Man's Land: the body thrown over the shoulders, one arm through the fork of the legs to the wounded man's hand. Her father was not a particularly heavy man, and she was an exceptionally strong young woman. She knew at once that this problem was solved.
The hardest part was lifting him to her shoulders. Only by calling upon her last ounce of strength, and tugging upward with her arms, was she able to do it. But it was fairly easy, in her desperation, to carry him down the hill. What rest she got she took by leaning against a tree, the limp body still across her shoulders.
It was a distance of one hundred yards in all. No muscles but those trained by the outdoors, no lungs except those made strong by the mountain air, could have stood that test. She laid him on his own bed, on the lower floor, and set his broken limbs the best she could. She covered him up with thick, fleecy blankets, and set a bottle of whisky beside the bed. Then she wrote a note to Dan and fastened it upon one of the interior doors.
She had learned, long ago, the value of frequent rests. She did not fly at once to her long tramp. For three minutes she lay perfectly limp on the fireplace divan, resting from the exertion of carrying her father down the hill. Then she drew on her hob-nailed boots—needed sorely for the steep climb—and pocketed her pistol. She thrust a handful of jerked venison into the pocket of her coat and lighted the lantern. The forest night had fallen, soft and vibrant and tremulous, over the heads of the dark trees when she started out.
Far away on a distant hillside, Whisperfoot the cougar howled and complained because he could find no deer.
IX
Snowbird felt very glad of her intimate, accurate knowledge of the whole region of the Divide. In her infancy the winding trails had been her playground, and long ago she had acquired the mountaineer's sixth sense for traversing them at night. She had need of that knowledge now. The moon was dim beneath thin clouds, and the lantern she carried did not promise much aid. The glass was rather smoked from previous burnings, and its flame glowed dully and threatened to go out altogether. It cast a few lame beams on the trail beneath her feet; but they perished quickly in the expanse of darkness.
She slipped into her free, swinging stride; and the last beams from the windows of the house were soon lost in the pines behind her. It was one of those silent, breathless nights with which no mountaineer is entirely unacquainted, and for a long tune the only sound she could hear was her own soft tramp in the pine needles. The trees themselves were motionless. That peculiar sound, not greatly different from that of running water which the wind often makes in the pine tops, was entirely lacking. Not that she could be deceived by it,—as stories tell that certain tenderfeet, dying of thirst in the barren hills, have been. But she always liked the sound; and she missed it especially to-night.
She felt that if she would stop to listen, there would be many faint sounds in the thickets,—those little hushed noises that the wild things make to remind night-wanderers of their presence. But she did not in the least care to hear these sounds. They do not tend toward peace of mind on a long walk over the ridges.
The wilderness began at once. Whatever influence toward civilization her father's house had brought to the wilds chopped off as beneath a blade in the first fringe of pines. This is altogether characteristic of the Oregon forests. They are much too big and too old to be tamed in any large degree by the presence of one house. No one knew this fact better than Lennox himself who, in a hard winter of four years before, had looked out of his window to find the wolf pack ranged in a hungry circle about his house. Within two hundred yards after she had passed through her father's door, she was perfectly aware that the wild was stirring and throbbing with life about her. At first she tried very hard to think of other things. But the attempt wasn't entirely a success. And before she had covered the first of the twelve miles, the sounds that from the first had been knocking at the door of her consciousness began to make an entrance.
If a person lies still long enough, he can usually hear his heart beating and the flow of his blood in his arteries. Any sound, no matter how faint, will make itself heard at last. It was this way with a very peculiar noise that crept up through the silence from the trail behind her. She wouldn't give it any heed at first. But in a very little while indeed, it grew so insistent that she could no longer disregard it.
Some living creature was trotting along on the trail behind, keeping approximately the same distance between them.
Foregoing any attempt to ignore it, she set her cool young mind to thinking what manner of beast it might be. Its step was not greatly different from that of a large dog,—except possibly a dog would have made slightly more noise. Yet she couldn't even be sure of this basic premise, because this animal, whatever it might be, had at first seemingly moved with utmost caution, but now took less care with its step than is customary with the wild denizens of the woods. A wolf, for instance, can simply drift when it wishes, and the silence of a cougar is a name. Yet unless her pursuer were a dog, which seemed entirely unlikely, it was certainly one of these two. She would have liked very much to believe the step was that of Old Woof, the bear, suddenly curious as to what this dim light of hers might be; but she couldn't bring herself to accept the lie. Woof, except when wounded or cornered, is the most amiable creature in the Oregon woods, and it would give her almost a sense of security to have him waddling along behind her. The wolves and cougar, remembering the arms of Woof, would not be nearly so curious. But unfortunately, the black bear had never done such a thing in the memory of man, and if he had, he would have made six times as much noise. He can go fairly softly when he is stalking, but when he is obliged to trot—as he would be obliged to do to keep up with a swift-walking human figure—he cracks twigs like a rolling log. She had the impression that the animal behind had been passing like smoke at first, but wasn't taking the trouble to do it now.
The sound was a soft pat-pat on the trail,—sometimes entirely obliterated but always recurring when she began to believe that she had only fancied its presence. Sometimes a twig, rain-soaked though it was, cracked beneath a heavy foot, and again and again she heard the brush crushing and rustling as something passed through. Behind it all, a weird motif, remained the pat-pat of cushioned feet. Sometimes, when the trail was covered with soft pine needles, it was practically indistinguishable. She had to strain to hear it,—and it is not pleasing to the spirit to have to strain to hear any sound. On the bare, rain-packed earth, even untrained plainsmen's ears could not possibly doubt the reality of the sound.
The animal was approximately one hundred feet behind. It wasn't a wolf, she thought. The wolves ran in packs this season, and except in winter were more afraid of human beings than any other living creature. It wasn't a lynx—one of those curiosity-devoured little felines that will mew all day on a trail and never dare come near. It was much too large for a lynx. The feet fell too solidly. She had already given up the idea that it could be Woof. There were no dogs in the mountains to follow at heel; and she had no desire whatever to meet Shag, the faithful hybrid that used to be her guardian in the hills. For Shag had gone to his well-deserved rest several seasons before. Two other possibilities remained. One was that this follower was a human being, the other that it was a cougar.
Ordinarily a human being is much more potentially dangerous to a woman in the hills at night than a cougar. A cougar is an abject coward and some men are not. But Snowbird felt herself entirely capable of handling any human foes. They would have no advantage over her; they would have no purpose in killing from ambush; and she trusted to her own marksmanship implicitly. While it is an extremely difficult thing to shoot at a cougar leaping from the thicket, a tall man standing on a trail presents an easy target. Besides, she had a vague sense of discomfort that if this animal were a cougar, he wasn't acting true to form. He was altogether too bold.
She knew perfectly that many times since men came to live in the pine-clad mountains they have been followed by the great, tawny cats. Curiosity had something to do with it, and perhaps less pleasing reasons. But any dreadful instincts that such a cat may have, he utterly lacks courage to obey. He has an inborn fear of men, a fear that goes down to the roots of the world, and he simply doesn't dare make an attack. It was always a rather distressing experience, but nothing ever came of it except a good tale around a fireside. But most of these episodes, Snowbird remembered, occurred either in daylight or in the dry season. The reason was obviously that in the damp woods or at night a stalking cougar cannot be perceived by human senses. Her own senses could perceive this animal all too plainly,—and the fact suggested unpleasant possibilities.
The animal on the trail behind her was taking no care at all to go silently. He was simply pat-patting along, wholly at his ease. He acted as if the fear that men have instilled in his breed was somehow missing. And that is why she instinctively tried to hurry on the trail.
The step kept pace. For a long mile, up a barren ridge, she heard every step it made. Then, as the brush closed deeper around her, she couldn't hear it at all.
She hurried on, straining to the silence. No, the sound was stopped. Could it be that the animal, fearful at last, had turned from her trail? And then for the first time a gasp that was not greatly different from a despairing sob caught at her throat. She heard the steps again, and they were in the thickets just beside her.
Two hours before Snowbird had left the house, on her long tramp to the ranger station, Dan had started home. He hadn't shot until sunset, as he had planned. The rear guard of the waterfowl—hardy birds who spent most of the winter in the Lake region and which had come south in the great flight that had been completed some weeks before—had passed in hundreds over his blind, and he had obtained the limit he had set upon himself—ten drake mallards—by four o'clock in the afternoon. If he had stayed to shoot longer, his birds would have been wasted. So he started back along a certain winding trail that led through the thickets and which would, if followed long enough, carry him to the road that led to the valleys.
He rode one of Lennox's cattle ponies, the only piece of horse-flesh that Bill had not taken to the valleys when he had driven down the livestock. She was a pretty bay, a spirited, high-bred mare that could whip about on her hind legs at the touch of the rein on her neck. She made good time along the trail. And an hour before sunset he passed the only human habitation between the marsh and Lennox's house,—the cabin that had been recently occupied by Landy Hildreth.
He glanced at the place as he passed and saw that it was deserted. No smell of wood smoke remained in the air. Evidently Landy had gone down to the settlements with his precious testimony in regard to the arson ring. Yet it was curious that no word had been heard of him. As far as Dan knew, neither the courts nor the Forest Service had taken action.
He hurried on, four miles farther. The trail entered the heavy thickets, and he had to ride slowly. It was as wild a section as could be found on the whole Divide. Once a deer leaped from the trail, and once he heard Woof grunting in the thickets. And just as he came to a little cleared space, three strange, dark birds flung up on wide-spreading wings.
He knew them at once. All mountaineers come to know them before their days are done. They were the buzzards, the followers of the dead. And what they were doing in the thicket just beside the trail, Dan did not dare to think.
Of course they might be feeding on the body of a deer, mortally wounded by some hunter. He resolved to ride by without investigating. He glanced up. The buzzards were hovering in the sky, evidently waiting for him to pass. Then, mostly to relieve a curious sense of discomfort in his own mind, he stopped his horse and dismounted.
The twilight had started to fall, and already its first grayness had begun to soften the harder lines of forest and hill. And after his first glance at the curious white heap beside the trail, he was extremely glad that it had. But there was no chance to mistake the thing. The elements and much more terrible agents had each wrought their change, yet there was grisly evidence in plenty to show what had occurred. Dan didn't doubt for an instant but that it was the skeleton of Landy Hildreth.
He forced himself to go nearer. The buzzards were almost done, and one white bone from the shoulder gave unmistakable evidence of the passage of a bullet. What had happened thereafter, he could only guess.
He got back quickly on his horse. He understood, now, why nothing had been heard of the evidence that Landy Hildreth was to turn over to the courts as to the activities of the arson ring. Some one—probably Bert Cranston himself—had been waiting on the trail. Others had come thereafter. And his lips set in his resolve to let this murder measure in the debt he had to pay Cranston.
The Lennox house seemed very silent when, almost an hour later, he turned his horse into the corral. He had rather hoped that Snowbird would be at the door to meet him. The darkness had just fallen, and all the lamps were lighted. He strode into the living room, warming his hands an instant beside the fireplace. The fire needed fuel. It had evidently been neglected for nearly an hour.
Then he called Snowbird. His voice echoed in the silent room, unanswered. He called again, then went to look for her. At the door of the dining room he found the note that she had left for him.
It told, very simply and plainly, that her father lay injured in his bed, and he was to remain and do what he could for him. She had gone for help to the ranger station.
He leaped through the rooms to Lennox's door, then went in on tiptoe. And the first thing he saw when he opened the door was the grizzled man's gray face on the pillow.
"You're home early, Dan," he said. "How many did you get?"
It was entirely characteristic. Shaggy old Woof is too proud to howl over the wounds that lay him low, and this gray old bear on the bed had partaken of his spirit.
"Good Lord," Dan answered. "How badly are you hurt?"
"Not so bad but that I'm sorry that Snowbird has gone drifting twelve miles over the hills for help. It's dark as pitch."
And it was. Dan could scarcely make out the outline of the somber ridges against the sky.
They talked on, and their subject was whether Dan should remain to take care of Lennox, or whether he should attempt to overtake Snowbird with the horse. Of course the girl had ordered him to stay. Lennox, on the other hand, said that Dan could not help him in the least, and desired him to follow the girl.
"I'm not often anxious about her," he said slowly. "But it is a long walk through the wildest part of the Divide. She's got nothing but a pistol and a lantern that won't shine. Besides—I've had bad dreams."
"You don't mean—" Dan's words came hard—"that she's in any danger from the animals—the cougars—or the wolves?"
"Barring accidents, no. But, Dan—I want you to go. I'm resting fairly easily, and there's whisky on the table in case of a pinch. Someway—I can't bar accidents to-night. I don't like to think of her on those mountains alone."
And remembering what had lain beside the trail, Dan felt the same. He had heard, long ago, that any animal that has once tasted human flesh loses its fear of men and is never to be trusted again. Some wild animal that still hunted the ridges had, in the last month, done just that thing. He left the room and walked softly to the door.
The night lay silent and mysterious over the Divide. He stood listening. The girl had started only an hour before, and it was unlikely that she could have traversed more than two miles of the steep trail in that time. He could fancy her toiling ever upward, somewhere on the dark ridge that lay beyond. Although the horse ordinarily did not climb a hill more swiftly than a human being, he didn't doubt but that he could overtake her before she went three miles farther. But where lay his duty,—with the injured man in the house or with the daughter on her errand of mercy in the darkness?
Then the matter was decided for him. So faint that it only whispered at the dim, outer frontiers of hearing, a sound came pricking through the darkness. Only his months of listening to the faint sounds of the forest, and the incredible silence of the night enabled him to hear it at all. But he knew what it was, the report of a pistol. Snowbird had met an enemy in the darkness.
He called once to Lennox, snatched the shotgun that still stood where he had placed it in the corner of the room, and hastened to the corral. The mare whickered plaintively when he took her from her food.
X
Even in the darkest night, there is one light that never brings hope or cannot lead. It is not a twinkling, joyous light like that mysterious will-o'-the-wisp that now and again has lured travelers into the marshes to their death. Nor can any one ever mistake it, or be soothed and cheered by it. It always appears the same way,—two green circles, close together, in the darkness.
When Snowbird first heard the step in the thickets beside her, she halted bravely and held her lantern high. She understood at last. The very extremity of the beams found a reflection in two very curious circles of greenish fire: a fire that was old upon the world before man ever rubbed two sticks together to strike a flame. Of course the dim rays had simply been reflected on the eyes of some great beast of prey.
She identified it at once. Only the eyes of the felines, with vertical pupils, have this identical greenish glare. The eyes of the wolves glow in the darkness, but the circles are usually just bright points. Of course it was a cougar.
She didn't cry out again. Realizing at last the reality of her peril, her long training in the mountains came to her aid. That did not mean she was not truly and terribly afraid. The sight of the eyes of a hunting animal in the darkness calls up memories from the germ-plasm,—deep-buried horrors of thousands of generations past, when such lights glowed all about the mouth of the cave. Besides, the beast was hunting her. She couldn't doubt this fact. Curiosity might make a lion follow her, but it would never beget such a wild light of madness in his eyes as this she had just seen. Only the frenzied pulse of wild blood through the fine vessels of the corneas could occasion such a glow as this. She simply clamped down all her moral strength on her rising hysteria and looked her situation in the face. Her hand flew instinctively to her side, and the pistol leaped in the lantern light.
But the eyes had already blinked out before she could raise the weapon. She shot twice. The echoes roared back, unbelievably loud in the silence, and then abruptly died; and the only sound was a rustling of leaves as the cougar crouched. She sobbed once, then hurried on.
She was afraid to listen at first. She wanted to believe that her pistol fire would frighten the animal from her trail. She knew, under ordinary conditions, that it would. If he still followed, it could mean but one thing,—that some unheard-of incident had occurred to destroy his fear of men. It would mean that he had knowingly set upon her trail and was hunting her with all the age-old remorselessness that is the code of the mountains.
For a little while all was silence. Then out of the hush the thickets suddenly crashed and shook on the opposite side of the trail. She fired blindly into the thicket. Then she caught herself with a sob. But two shells remained in her pistol, and they must be saved for the test.
Whisperfoot the cougar, remembering the lessons of his youth, turned from the trail when he had first heard Snowbird's step. He had crouched and let her pass. She was walking into the wind; and as she was at the closest point a message had blown back to him.
The hair went straight on his shoulders and along his spine. His blood, running cold an instant before from fear, made a great leap in his veins. A picture came in his dark mind: the chase for a deer when the moon had set, the stir of a living thing that broke twigs in the thickets, and the leap he had made. There had been blood, that night,—the wildness and the madness and the exultation of the kill. Of course there had been terror first, but the terror had soon departed and left something lying warm and still in the thickets. It was the same game that walked his trail in front—game that died easily and yet, in a vague way he did not understand, the noblest game of all. It was living flesh, to tear with talon and fang.
All his training, all the instincts imbued in him by a thousand generations of cougars who knew this greatest fear, were simply obliterated by the sudden violence of his hunting-madness. He had tasted this blood once, and it could never be forgotten. The flame leaped in his eyes. And then he began the stalk.
A cougar, trying to creep silently on its game, does not move quickly. It simply steals, as a serpent steals through the grass. Whisperfoot stalked for a period of five minutes, to learn that the prey was farther away from him at every step.
He trotted forward until he came close, and again he stalked. Again he found, after a few minutes of silent creeping through the thickets, that he had lost distance. Evidently this game did not feed slowly, like the deer. It was to be a chase then. Again he trotted within one hundred feet of the girl.
Three times more he tried to stalk before he finally gave it up altogether. This game was like the porcupine,—simply to be chased down and taken. As in the case of all animals that hunt their game by overtaking it, there was no longer any occasion for going silently. The thing to do was to come close and spring from the trail behind.
Though the fear was mostly gone, the cougar retained enough of that caution that most wild animals exhibit when hunting a new game so that he didn't attempt to strike Snowbird down at once. But as the chase went on, his passion grew upon him. Ever he crept nearer. And at last he sprang full into the thickets beside her.
At that instant she had shot for the first time. Because the light had left his eyes before she could find aim, both shots had been clean misses. And terrible as the reports were, he was too engrossed in the chase to be frightened away by mere sound. This was the cry the man-pack always made,—these sudden, startling sounds in the silence. But he felt no pain. He crouched a moment, shivering. Then he bounded on again.
The third shot was a miss too: in fact, there had been no chance for a hit. A sound in the darkness is as unreliable a target as can possibly be imagined. And it didn't frighten him as much as the others.
Three times he crouched, preparing for a spring, and three times his tawny tail began that little up-and-down motion that is always the warning before his leap. But each time, as he waited to find his courage, the game had hurried on.
Now she had her back to a tree and was holding the lantern high. It glinted on his eyes. And the fourth time she shot, and something hot and strange singed by close to his head. But it wasn't the pain of one quill from a porcupine, and it only increased his anger. He waited, crouching, and the girl started on.
She was making other sounds now—queer, whimpering sounds not greatly different from the bleat that the fawn utters when it dies. It was a fear-sound, and if there is one emotion with which the wild beasts are acquainted, in all its phases, it is fear. She was afraid of him then, and that meant he need no longer be in the least afraid of her. His skin began to twitch all over with that terrible madness and passion of the flesh-hunters.
This game was like the deer, and the thing to do was lie in wait. There was only one trail. He was simply following his instincts, no conscious intelligence, when he made a long circle about her and turned back to the trail two hundred yards in front. He wasn't afraid of losing her in the darkness. She was neither fleet like the deer nor courageous like Woof, the bear. He had only to wait and leap from the darkness when she passed.
And because this was his own way of hunting, because the experiences of a thousand generations of cougars had taught him that it was the safest way, that even an elk may be downed by a surprise leap from ambush, the last of his fear went out of him. The step drew nearer, and he knew he would not again be afraid to give his stroke.
When Dan Failing, riding like mad over the mountain trail, heard the third shot from Snowbird's pistol, he felt that one of the debts he owed had come due at last. He seemed to know, as the darkness pressed around him, that he was to be tried in the fire. And the horse staggered beneath him as he tried to hasten.
He showed no mercy to his mount. Horseflesh isn't made for carrying a heavy man over such a trail as this, and she was red-nostriled and lathered before half a mile had been covered. He made her leap up the rocks, and on the fairly level stretches he loosed the reins and lashed her into a gallop. Only a mountain horse could have stood that test. To Dan's eyes, the darkness was absolute; yet she kept straight to the trail. He made no attempt to guide her. She bounded over logs that he couldn't see, and followed turn after turn in the trail without ever a misstep.
He gave no thought to his own safety. His courage was at the test, and no risk of his own life must interfere with his attempt to save Snowbird from the danger that threatened her. He didn't know when the horse would fall with him and precipitate him down a precipice, and he was perfectly aware that to crash into a low-hanging limb of one of the great trees beside the trail would probably crush his skull. But he took the chance. And before the ride was done he found himself pleading with the horse, even as he lashed her sides with his whip.
The lesser forest creatures sprang from his trail; and once the mare leaped high to miss a dark shadow that crossed in front. As she caught her stride, Dan heard a squeal and a rattle of quills that identified the creature as a porcupine.
By now he had passed the first of the worst grades, coming out upon a long, easy slope of open forest. Again he urged his horse, leaving to her keen senses alone the choosing of the path between the great tree trunks. He rode almost in silence. The deep carpet of pine needles, wet from the recent rains, dulled the sound of the horse's hoofs.
Then he heard Snowbird fire for the fourth time; and he knew that he had almost overtaken her. The report seemed to smash the air. And he lashed his horse into the fastest run she knew,—a wild, sobbing figure in the darkness.
"She's only got one shot more," he said. He knew how many bullets her pistol carried; and the danger—whatever it was—must be just at hand. Underbrush cracked beneath him. And then the horse drew up with a jerk that almost hurled him from the saddle.
He lashed at her in vain. She was not afraid of the darkness and the rocks of the trail, but some Terror in the woods in front had in an instant broken his control over her. She reared, snorting; then danced in an impotent circle. Meanwhile, precious seconds were fleeing.
He understood now. The horse stood still, shivering beneath him, but would not advance a step. The silence deepened. Somewhere in the darkness before him a great cougar was waiting by the trail, and Snowbird, hoping for the moment that it had given up the chase, was hastening through the shadows squarely into its ambush.
Whisperfoot crouched lower: and again his long serpent of a tail began the little vertical motion that always precedes his leap. He had not forgotten the wild rapture of that moment he had inadvertently sprung on Landy Hildreth,—or how, after his terror had died, he had come creeping back. He hunted his own way, waiting on the trail; and his madness was at its height. He was not just Whisperfoot; the coward, that runs at the shadow of a tall form in the thickets. The consummation was complete, and that single experience of a month before had made of him a hunter of men. His muscles set for the leap.
So intent was he that his keen senses didn't detect the fact that there was a curious echo to the girl's footsteps. Dan Failing had slipped down from his terrified horse and was running up the trail behind her, praying that he could be in time.
Snowbird heard the pat, pat of his feet; but at first she did not dare to hope that aid had come to her. She had thought of Dan as on the far-away marshes; and her father, the only other living occupant of this part of the Divide, might even now be lying dead in his house. In her terror, she had lost all power of interpretation of events. The sound might be the cougar's mate, or even the wolf pack, jealous of his game. Sobbing, she hurried on into Whisperfoot's ambush.
Then she heard a voice, and it seemed to be calling to her. "Snowbird—I'm coming, Snowbird," a man's strong voice was shouting. She whirled with a sob of thankfulness.
At that instant the cougar sprang.
Terrified though she was, Snowbird's reflexes had kept sure and true. Even as the great cat leaped, a long, lithe shadow out of the shadow, her finger pressed back against the trigger of her pistol. She had been carrying her gun in front of her, and she fired it, this last time, with no conscious effort. It was just a last instinctive effort to defend herself.
One other element affected the issue. She had whirled to answer Dan's cry just as the cougar left the ground. But she had still been in range. The only effect was to lessen, in some degree, the accuracy of the spring. The bullet caught the beast in mid-air; but even if it had reached its heart, the momentum of the attack was too great to be completely overcome. Snowbird only knew that some vast, resistless power had struck her, and that the darkness seemed to roar and explode about her.
Hurled to her face in the trail, she did not see the cougar sprawl on the earth beside her. The flame in the lantern almost flicked out as it fell from her hand, then flashed up and down, from the deepest gloom to a vivid glare with something of the effect of lightning flickering in the sky. Nor did she hear the first frenzied thrashing of the wounded animal. Kindly unconsciousness had fallen, obscuring this and also the sight of the great cat, in the agony of its wound, creeping with broken shoulder and bared claws across the pine needles toward her defenseless body.
But the terrible fangs were never to know her white flesh. Some one had come between. There was no chance to shoot: Whisperfoot and the girl were too near together for that. But one course remained; and there was not even time to count the cost. In this most terrible moment of Dan Failing's life, there was not even an instant's hesitation. He did not know that Whisperfoot was wounded. He saw the beast creeping forward in the weird dancing light of the fallen lantern, and he only knew that his flesh, not hers, must resist its rending talons. Nothing else mattered. No other considerations could come between.
It was the test; and Dan's instincts prompted coolly and well. He leaped with all his strength. The cougar bounded into his arms, not upon the prone body of the girl. And she opened her eyes to hear a curious thrashing in the pine needles, a strange grim battle that, as the lantern flashed out, was hidden in the darkness.
And that battle, in the far reaches of the Divide, passed into a legend. It was the tale of how Dan Failing, his gun knocked from his hands as he met the cougar's leap, with his own unaided arms kept the life-giving breath from the animal's lungs and killed him in the pine needles. Claw and fang and the frenzy of death could not matter at all.
Thus Failing established before all men his right to the name he bore. And thus he paid one of his debts—life for a life, as the code of the forest has always decreed—and in the fire of danger and pain his metal was tried and proven.