Probably its wild surroundings had a great deal to do with this effect. There were no roads leading to Trail's End. Material could not be carried over its winding trails except on pack animals. He had a realization of tremendous difficulties that had been conquered by tireless effort, of long months of unending toil, of exhaustless patience, and at the end,—a dream come true. All of its lumber had to be hewed from the forests about. Its stone had been quarried from the rock cliffs and hauled with infinite labor over the steep trails.
He understood now why the Turners had coveted it. It seemed the acme of luxury to them. And more clearly than ever he understood why the Rosses had died, sooner than relinquish it, and why its usurpation by the Turners had left such a debt of hatred to Linda. It was such a house as men dream about, a place to bequeath to their children and to perpetuate their names. Built like a rock, it would stand through the decades, to pass from one generation to another,—an enduring monument to the strong thews of the men who had builded it. All men know that the love of home is one of the few great impulses that has made toward civilization, but by the same token it has been the cause of many wars. It was never an instinct of a nomadic people, and possibly in these latter days—days of apartments and flats and hotels—its hold is less. Perhaps the day is coming when this love will die in the land, but with it will die the strength to repel the heathen from our walls, and the land will not be worth living in, anyway. But it was not dead to the mountain people. No really primitive emotion ever is.
Perhaps, after all, it is a question of the age-old longing for immortality, and therefore it must have its seat in a place higher than this world of death. Men know that when they walk no longer under the sun and the moon it is good to have certain monuments to keep their name alive, whether it be blocks of granite at the grave-head, or sons living in an ancestral home. The Rosses had known this instinct very well. As all men who are strong-thewed and of real natural virtue, they had known pride of race and name, and it had been a task worth while to build this stately house on their far-lying acres. They had given their fiber to it freely; no man who beheld the structure could doubt that fact. They had simply consecrated their lives to it; their one Work by which they could show to all who came after that by their own hands they had earned their right to live.
They had been workers, these men; and there is no higher degree. But their achievements had been stolen from their hands. Bruce felt the real significance of his undertaking as never before.
He saw the broad lands lying under the moon. There were hundreds of acres in alfalfa and clover to furnish hay for the winter feeding. There were wide, green pastures, ensilvered by the moon; and fields of corn laid out in even rows. The old appeal of the soil, an instinct that no person of Anglo-Saxon descent can ever completely escape, swept through him. They were worth fighting for, these fertile acres. The wind brought up the sweet breath of ripening hay.
Not for nothing have a hundred generations of Anglo-Saxon people been tillers of the soil. They had left a love of it to Bruce. In a single flash of thought, even as he hastened toward the house where he supposed Linda was held prisoner, the ancient joy returned to him. He knew what it would be like to feel the earth's pulse through the handles of a plow, to behold the first start of green things in the spring and the golden ripening in fall; to watch the flocks through the breathless nights and the herds feeding on the distant hills.
Bruce looked over the ground. He knew enough not to continue the trail farther. The space in front was bathed in moonlight, and he would make the best kind of target to any rifle-man watching from the windows of the house. He turned through the coverts, seeking the shadow of the forests at one side.
By going in a quartering direction he was able to approach within two hundred yards of the house without emerging into the moonlight. At that point the real difficulty of the stalk began. He hovered in the shadows, then slipped one hundred feet farther to the trunk of a great oak tree.
He could see the house much more plainly now. True, it had suffered neglect in the past twenty years; it needed painting and many of its windows were broken, but it was a magnificent old mansion even yet. It stood lost in its dreams in the moonlight; and if, as old stories say, houses have memories, this old structure was remembering certain tragic dramas that had waged within and about it in a long-ago day. Bruce rejoiced to see that there were no lights in the east wing of the house; the window that Linda had indicated in the note was just a black square on the moonlit wall.
There was a neglected garden close to this wing of the house. Bruce could make out rose bushes, grown to brambles, tall, rank weeds, and heavy clumps of vines. If he could reach this spot in safety he could approach within a few feet of the house and still remain in cover. He went flat; then slowly crawled toward it.