I saw a small room, dust-covered and cob-web frescoed. The floor was littered with refuse, the fireplace held a bank of gray ashes, the home-made furniture had fallen a prey to the savage onslaughts of wood-rats. A damp and disagreeable odor permeated the air. “Surely she has not been here,” I said to myself.
I stepped to a door at the further end of the room, turned the wobbly knob, peered within, and shrank back, confounded at what I saw.
The light was streaming in through a window that had been recently washed and polished until it shown, over a floor freshly scoured. A small white-draped dressing table with all a woman’s dainty toilet paraphernalia met my prying eyes; a small cot gleamed fresh and spotless in a corner; and on every chair, and ranged on the floor around the room, were canvases of various sizes with tantalizing impressionistic bits of the outdoor world painted upon them, while streaming from an open trunk and overflowing in sumptuous, foamy sensuousness to the crude pine floor was the lingerie of a fastidious woman.
I took myself out of the house post-haste, threw myself into my saddle, and plunged away into the enveloping shadows of the cedar thicket. That night I climbed up Nigger Head almost to old Lundquist’s very door. I cast my eyes down in the direction of Hidden Lake. I saw a small red light gleaming there. I lay down on a ledge of rock and watched the light, watched it until toward midnight it disappeared, the wind came up with a soughing sound, the tall pines creaked and swayed above my head, and I walked down the mountain—the rain in my face.
CHAPTER III
I FELL SOME TREES
ALL night the rain pelted furiously against my window, and the wind blew a hurricane, roaring in the pine trees, maundering in my chimney, and rattling the loose casements. In the morning the rain had ceased. The sky was massed with black clouds, but streaks of blue glimmered here and there, and there was a glorious rainbow.
“Oh, Mr. David,” Joey shouted, hanging on my arm as I opened the front door, “the sky looks like a Bible picture!” But I was thinking of Haidee and wondering how she had borne the storm, alone on the shore of that black melancholy lake, through all the devastating night. A huge pine tree lay uprooted across the path, the serviceberry bushes were stripped bare of bloom, and a cottonwood growing on the river bank sprawled, a shattered giant, bathing its silver head in the water.
I evaded Joey, slipped around to the tool-shed, and taking my ax and crosscut saw, mounted my cayuse and rode stealthily away. When I got within sight of the cabin on Hidden Lake, I looked around me fearfully. Smoke was coming from the chimney, and the cabin seemed unscathed. And then I saw that one of the towering pine trees in the draw adjacent had fallen, and in falling had barely grazed the lean-to. The cabin had miraculously escaped.
I rode around to the rear of the cabin and knocked with my whip on the closed door. A figure rose up suddenly out of the bracken by the spring and came to my horse’s head. A figure in a crumpled red cape, with big startled tired eyes, and pale cheeks.
“I have come to cut down every tree that endangers the cabin,” I announced grimly.