"What is done up here isn't put in the newspapers down below. We're mountain men; we've lived up here as long as men have lived in the West. We have our own way of doing things, and our own law. Think once more about going back."
"I've already decided. I'm going on."
Once more they stood, eyes meeting eyes on the trail, and Simon's face was darkening with passion. Bruce knew that his hands were clenching, and his own muscles bunched and made ready to resist any kind of attack.
But Simon didn't strike. He laughed instead,—a single deep note of utter and depthless scorn. Then he drew back and let Bruce pass on up the road.
VII
Bruce couldn't mistake the cabin. At the end of the trail he found it,—a little shack of unpainted boards with a single door and a single window.
He stood a moment in the sunlight. His shadow was already long behind him, and the mountains had that curious deep blue of late afternoon. The pine needles were soft under his feet; the later-afternoon silence was over the land. He could not guess what was his destiny behind that rude door. It was a moment long waited; for one of the few times in his life he was trembling with excitement. He felt as if a key, long lost, was turning in the doorway of understanding.
He walked nearer and tapped with his knuckles on the door.
If the forests have one all-pervading quality it is silence. Of course the most silent time is at night, but just before sunset, when most of the forest creatures are in their mid-afternoon sleep, any noise is a rare thing. What sound there is carries far and seems rather out of place. Bruce could picture the whole of the little drama that followed his knock by just the faint sounds—inaudible in a less silent land—that reached him from behind the door. At first it was just a start; then a short exclamation in the hollow, half-whispering voice of old, old age. A moment more of silence—as if a slow-moving, aged brain were trying to conjecture who stood outside—then the creaking of a chair as some one rose. The last sounds were of a strange hobbling toward him,—a rustle of shoes half dragged on the floor and the intermittent tapping of a cane.