"So, Donald, so—you too. Well, I don't blame you, old fellow; I don't blame you." But this disappointment, following so closely on the other, told on Stratton. He sank down again on the steps.
After awhile he took out his pocketbook, and, finding a piece of paper and a pencil, wrote without superscription or signature,
"I came back to see you—I had to. Not to excuse myself, but to ask of you that mercy you once promised me—there below the Paradise—and then to take—what I deserve. I have fallen pretty far since that day on Mt. Rainier, and you are going to wish, all your life, you had left me in that crevasse. Great God, you don't know how I have wished it, too, out there in the terrible stillness of the Palouse; how miserably I wish it now. I would pay any price to see the old friendliness in your face again. But, this morning, up at the tower, I lost the chance. That is all. It cannot help you now, to know I would give anything to have Forrest safe—and be in his place—buried deep in that slide."
All the sheet was a wavering scrawl, but the last lines ran together word over word. He folded the paper, but after a thoughtful moment opened it and added at the bottom of the page, "I want Thornton to have my horse." Then he refolded it and slipped it under the door.
He stood for an interval looking towards the Des Chutes. "She will not find it until Monday," he said, "and by that time if I have not seen her, it will be too late." And he went down the steps and took the trail to Laramie's.
He heard the increasing roar of the freshet as he walked, and presently, when he reached the curve where the trail turned down-stream, he found the flood over banks; currents eddied through the underbrush, undermining the trunks of hemlocks and firs; carrying out detached boughs and logs. At the crossing to the Phiander claim the rustic footbridge was gone.
But Stratton remembered the banks were higher at Laramie's homestead; the old fallen fir, which bridged the channel there, had withstood the shock of many floods. He moved on, quickening his steps where he could, but, now that he had left the gravelly soil of the ridges for the loam of the bottom-land, walking became more difficult. The mud clung to his boots; in places footing oozed under him, and repeatedly, in lower levels, he was forced to make wide détours, leaving the path to push through tangles of alder and hazel or cottonwood. Often water washed above his ankles; at intervals it splashed to his knees.
At last he struggled up a little rise and came out on a low bluff. The great uprooted trunk of the fir footbridge was at his elbow, and he stopped, taking breath, and sank into a half sitting position on the knuckle of one gnarled root. His rain-soaked clothes shaded into the color of the dead, earth-stained tree, so that he might have been a part of it.
The fir had fallen with a downward slant to the farther bank, its top driving wedgelike between two cedars. These trees were standing with their trunks submerged, and, mid-channel, the log swung to the current and formed a dam, holding back an increasing collection of drift, through which the water rushed with the roar of rapids. The whole jam rose and fell with a concerted upheaval.
The roots of the fir, ballasted by forest litter, formed a short stairway up to the crossing, and presently Stratton mounted, slowly, with difficulty and began to feel his steps over the bridge. At the same time a great fallen hemlock swung down-stream, its upreared trunk coming foremost, a tremendous battering ram.