With a nod and a smile Douglas followed Marion, who, still wordless, now was half out of sight in the lower entrance. Down they went, passing through a series of smaller caverns, twisting and crouching and dropping, until they came out into sunlight. Before them, hardly a rod away, rose the face of the cliff. Around were bowlders half as big as houses. Among these the girl led an irregular way—and they were under an overhanging crag, looking out across the Traps.
Looking back, he decided that any one would have an extremely difficult time in finding Steve’s covert unless guided to it. Once away from here, he doubted whether he himself could retrace his course. Marion’s dream-cave was as complete a hiding-place as could well be imagined: double entrances and exits, both almost impossible of discovery, the upper one forming a natural flue for a night fire; well-watered, with wood at hand for the taking, plenty of air and sufficient light; yes, it was almost ideal—until the snows should come.
“Go careful down here,” the girl’s voice broke in on his reflections. “It’s pretty rough. Here’s where I took a fall the night the catamount ’most got me.”
Down again they went, over a steep talus; among more bowlders, and out at last on grassy, bushy soil; through undergrowth to a faint foot-track running north. Along this they trod for some time in silence.
“If it’s a fair question, what did Steve mean by saying he was born like a wolf-pup?” he asked at length.
“It’s so,” she said, half reluctantly. “His—his folks wasn’t married, and his pop went off and left his mom ’fore Steve was borned, and he never come back. His mom, she went kind of queer into the head about it. She was into the woods all the time, a-travelin’ and a-whisperin’, folks say. Steve was borned outdoors, like he says. She died pretty soon, and so he hasn’t got any folks.”
Another long silence. Now he knew what Uncle Eb meant by saying the boy had been born unlucky and never had had a chance. Poor, pitiful little tragedy of the hills! The girl deserted by her man just when she most needed his companionship and protection; the staring, whispering young mother-to-be wandering in the leafy solitudes; the new little life coming into the world as primitively as that of the first-born son of mankind; the kindly old Mother Earth taking back into her great bosom one more of her daughters who had loved and lost—a tragedy ever new, yet old as the trust of women and the callousness of men. Poor little mother! Poor Steve!
He might have asked more about the boy—how he had lived and grown—but a glance at the girl told him she would say no more. In all his wanderings among the people of the Traps, this was the first time any one had told him anything about the past of another; and even now it probably was told only because Steve himself had virtually given permission. He asked nothing further. It was she who now asked a question or two of her own.
“When you asked him to come down to your house had you forgot the ha’nt might git him?”
“By George, I did! Clean forgot that ha’nt of mine. Is that why he wouldn’t come?”