“Been to town?”
“Ya—I been to town.” He took his old black pipe from his mouth and crept closer. “Last night,” he stuttered, in his rasping broken accent, “last night I saw a light, Mr. Dale—a light—down thar.”
He pointed with his pipe-stem over his shoulder.
“A light? Do you mean you saw a light from your cabin?”
“Ya—in the old shack on Hidden Lake.” He chuckled. “Thar been no light thar fer three year. The wood-rats they eat up the furniture ole Russell leave. Place sold—maybe?”
I saw Joey watching me miserably during dinner. I ate like an automaton, and never once did I speak. Afterward it was no better. I took my book and sat on a bench outside the cabin. Joey’s voice soaring high above the rattle of the dishes in the sink; a red-shafted flicker hammering noisily on a pine tree before the door, saluting me with his “kee-yer, kee-yer”; the whistle of the Georgie Oaks at the draw-bridge, were all heard as in a dream. I was back in the workshop with Haidee, I heard her eager question: “There is a place I may buy, then?” I tried to picture to myself Russell’s old cabin metamorphosed by that radiant presence. It required a daring stretch of the imagination to vision anything so improbable.
The valley which lies like an emerald-green jewel in the very lap of the mountains in this section of Idaho, is watered by innumerable streams which it seems presumptuous to call rivers, and honeycombed with tiny blue lakes, their entrance from the rivers so concealed by tangles of birches and high green thickets and clumps of underbrush that their existence is practically unknown, save to the settlers along the adjacent rivers and to a few zealous sportsmen who make portages from lake to lake, dragging their canoes across the intervening marshes and of the Georgie Oaks likens the shadowy St. Joe and the equally shadowy but more obscure Cœur meadow-land. The tourist sitting on the deck d’Alene river to the Rhine, and bemoans the absence of storied castles, never dreaming of the chain of jeweled lakes that lies just beyond.
It was on the most cleverly hidden of these lakes that Russell’s cabin stood. Years before I had paddled down the river and contrived to find the lead. But the thickets were still deeper now, and I doubted my ability to find the narrow aperture. Toward the middle of the afternoon, therefore, I threw the saddle on Buttons, and rode away beneath the fragrant yews, seeking the trail that skirted the mountain.
The day was fair, the sky a soft azure, and the wheat fields rippled in a sultry breeze; but as I left the trail and descended through a boscage of cedars and scrub pines, following the damp clay path to Hidden Lake, I shivered in spite of the warmth of the day. And when I rode through the rushes that grew as high as a man’s head, and emerged on the cozy grey beach, and gazed across the deep blue, unnatural quiet of the water, I was weighted down by a weird depression. I felt suddenly like a puny thing, shaken with the knowledge of my own mutability. A bittern rose up from the tules, flapped its wings and gave its honking note of desolation; a flock of terns on a piece of driftwood emitted raucous cries. Russell’s cabin stood before me, weather-beaten, warped, and unsightly; moss on the roof, bricks falling from the chimney, the door steps rotted, the small porch sagging.
I slid off my cayuse and stood contemplating the ravages about me. Not a sound came from the cabin. Presently, I gathered my courage sufficiently to mount the steps and knock with the butt of my whip on the slatternly door that stood ajar. I received no response. I waited. The bittern in the tules gave its pumping call, “pumper-lunk, pumper-lunk,” and the hollow rushes droned suddenly in the wind like ghoulish piccolos. I pushed open the door without further ado and looked within.