by Zane Grey
“Kev, you dod-blasted steelhead ketcher, I’m glad to see you,” he greeted Keven heartily, and he wrung his hand until it was numb.
Keven was the one with the piercing, searching eyes.
“Hello, Aard. I reckon I—I’m glad if you are.”
“Wal, I’m ’most as glad as Beryl. What ails you, Kev?”
“Collapse, I guess. Walked too far and slept on the cold wet ground.”
“You look sort of hollow-eyed,” rejoined Aard, “but not so sick as Beryl made out.”
He sat down on the bed, holding Beryl’s hand, as she stood beside him, excited and quivering, her black eyes devouring Keven.
“I’m not sick. Just sunk, Aard.”
“That’s how they got you slated in Gold Beach. Sunk! I’m right glad, Kev, to see it’s exaggerated.”
“What?” asked Kev, huskily.
“Your drownin.”
“My—what!”
“You’re reported drowned, Kev, along with Garry, Mulligan, an’ a couple of fishermen whose names I don’t remember. They found your skiff yesterday. It had washed up on the beach. Nothin’ would do but I had to identify it. But Stemm had done that before me. Blackwood wanted to be sure…. So the old river didn’t get you after all?”
“Aard, it seems not. My mind’s a little hazy on what did happen.”
“My daughter’s not hazy about it, that’s sure,” laughed Aard. “Because it fetched you to Solitude.”
“Dad, tell him—tell us all you heard,” implored Beryl.
“Nothin’ much, though I am surprised at Garry Lord lettin’ the Rogue ketch him. A ten-foot rise of water went rollin’ down the river. I remember the same kind of flood years ago. It ketched some of the market fishermen at the mouth, when the tide was goin’ out. That made it bad. Mulligan sure was drowned. They found his boat out at sea, an’ it had his coat an’ hat, also some salmon. Two other fishermen were swept out with their nets. Andy Huell had a tough fight with the flood. Told me he was bein’ swept over the sand bar. He jumped an’ waded out of danger. Lost his boat. For that matter a dozen boats are missin’. Most of these, though, had been pulled up on the riverbank…. What’s your story, Kev?”
“Mine? I—I have—no story,” faltered Keven. But there was a story in Beryl’s pale rapt face, in the deep relief in her eyes.
“But you sure was in that flood!” expostulated Aard mildly. “Was Garry with you in the skiff?”
“Yes. Poor faithful Garry!”
“Wal, then, enough said. I know how you feel. I’m doggone sorry. Garry was a man…. Kev, you’re goin’ to stay with us now? It’s about time, an’ I reckon, the way things have broke for you, Solitude’s about the best place on earth for you to land.”
“Perhaps it is. Beryl says I’m to stay. I—I have no home. But I won’t be a burden. I want to work.”
“Sure, after you get well,” replied Aard kindly, as he rose. “Beryl has her way, as you’ll find out. You can help me with my traps this winter. An’, wal, somethin’ might turn up.”
“Come, Dad, I’ll help you unpack,” said Beryl. “If you didn’t fetch all the things I wanted there’ll be war.” At the door she turned to Keven. Then he saw her eyes were full of tears. “Kev, you rest and sleep. Don’t feel so—so badly about Garry. Forget it—all. Solitude will make up to you—for everything you’ve lost.”
They went out, and once again the hounds bayed to sight of their master. Kev lay still, his hands nerveless upon the blanket. What was it that had happened? He was free from the shadow of the hangman’s noose. Yet, magical as that was, there seemed to be still more. Spent by emotion, he gradually relaxed, though he strove still to think, when the effort was torture. In this hour he must fix, forever on his consciousness, the stupendous truth that life was worth living. For him! It could never have been any other way. He had been only little, miserable, base, overcome by misfortunes. He had lost belief in man and faith, in God. How terribly he had been rebuked! The faithlessness of a shallow woman rendered as nothing by the fidelity of a noble one!
There was significance in all that had happened. He matched the sacrifice of Garry Lord against the treachery of Gus Atwell. There was always the balance—good to outweigh bad. Humble, penitent, Keven stood upon the threshold of a new life, he did not know that. It might be that he could never again know the vigor of a strong, unimpaired body. His strength, his youth had been sacrificed on the altar of patriotism for something that seemed futile and false. But at least he would no longer be afflicted with a morbid centering in self.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
LATE in the afternoon Keven awoke for the second time that day. He had no idea when he had dropped off to sleep. But it was not the glorious gold-red rays of sunset that had awakened him, nor the deep lilac haze which filled the ravine outside his window. Fangs in his vitals—the gnaw of alcohol! In the past he had known it, only to feed the brute. A man who imagined drink brought permanent ease to pain and mental distress only misled himself. The day of retribution had to come.
He got up laboriously and, pulling on his trousers and shoes, he went out. Solitude seemed to leap at him. The great V-shaped cleft, where the river turned into the long stretch, was veiled in deep dark blue, above which stood the sunset-flushed peaks. The Rogue flowed pink and white. And below him the sun touched the rapids at the sharp bend, turning the turbulent waters to topaz.
That evanescent moment had waited for him. A change came as the sun sank, and the river ran a glancing red. He saw wild ducks winging rapid flight round the curve, black against the fading light of the sky. From the ravine at his left pealed up the wild plaintive notes of a water ouzel.
Keven directed his heavy steps down over the mossy rocks to the brook. Here under the arch of firs and pines it was dark, cool, moist, melodious. The water was so clear that pebbles and sand appeared to be uncovered. He sat down to form a cup of his hands, and scooping them up full, he drank. The water was cold and tasteless. Time had been, not so many years back, when Keven had loved the pure fountains that poured down from the dark, stony, fir-shaded dells. Water did not satisfy now, but he drank and drank. “To hell with whisky,” he muttered softly. It was as if some former self that he had known long ago had come to stand there and speak. “To hell with war!” he went on. And then he thought he would make a clean sweep of things. “To hell with the painted, shallow, giggling, man-imitating salamanders with the plucked eyebrows! To hell with their joy riders! To hell with the grafters and the flashy, gross, material world they preyed upon!”
Cold and clear as the water fell his voice. And that seemed final. Late in the day, he thought sadly—too late! But it came to him, nevertheless. The usual things that men worked for could not be his. Success, money, position, all these which in common with his kind he had dreamed of and meant to achieve; were merely chimeras. And when he climbed up out of that singing ravine he left something distorted behind. It seemed, too, that when he gained the bench, to view the towering peaks once more, fading from rose to gray, and Aard’s cabin where on the porch Beryl stood with the hounds—it seemed that the problem which fronted him was unsolvable and inscrutable. It staggered him. He must dismiss it from mind and try to live objectively and to do what little he might be able to do for these simple good mountain folk.
That decision went scattering with the glad look in Beryl Aard’s eyes. He had forgotten that she loved him. But dense as he was he could not but see it, once again in her presence. Even the hounds saw it, for they gazed with solemn, jealous eyes from Beryl to him.
“Kev, you are a bad boy,” she said reprovingly as he approached. “Come up and sit down…. Curry, behave!” One of the long-eared hounds rumbled in his throat. “This is Keven Bell. He’s a great hunter, as you will learn.”
“Hunter?” queried Keven ruefully, as he sat down in one of the comfortable rustic rockers. “I feel as if I could never walk far again, let alone pack a gun.”
“Kev, Dad told me you looked as if you hadn�
�t had enough to eat,” replied Beryl hesitatingly.
“Reckon he guessed right the very first time.”
“What have you been eating?” she went on, in anxious solicitude.
“Not much of late but fish, bread, and coffee. We started out pretty well. We had supplies and we bought some vegetables. Garry was a good cook. But when we got poor—well, we went to loose ends. Many a day with only one meal!”
“No wonder. Listen. We have peaches, apples, blackberries,” she returned, with a half-teasing smile. “Crocks of milk in the springhouse. Thick cream! We have chickens, turkeys, pigs. We bake our own bread. Brown bread we like best. I can bake, I’m telling you, Mister. We churn our butter. We put up jars and jars of preserves. It’s getting almost time now to make peach butter. We have steelhead, whenever I catch them. I hope you remember that is every time I go fishing. We smoke all the steelhead we don’t use. And smoked fish, the way these Indians fix it, is sure good. Then the frost has already come up on the high slopes. Wild grapes! And venison. And sometimes bear meat or wild pig, when Dad shoots one. And we have——”
“Beryl, I am overcome,” he interrupted, laughing. “I’ll eat myself to death…. But I must question one of the many items. You said steelhead whenever you went fishing, didn’t you?”
“I certainly did.”
“Beryl!”
“There, the jealous fisherman comes out!” she retorted, clapping her hands. “But, Kev, I can. I know when to go.”
“I don’t think I could ever forgive any fisherman who never failed. Steelhead! Those queer, changeable, finicky, aristocratic trout!”
“Kev, I tie my own flies and I know where to drop them on the river.”
Nothing she had yet said compared in thrill to this simple statement. She nodded her dark head sagely. Then Aard came out on the porch, in bare head and shirt sleeves. What a splendid type of mountaineer!
“Wal, son,” he said, “Beryl can make good her brag. She’s the darnedest best or luckiest fisherman on this river.”
“Dad, it’s not luck. Don’t I know the birds and the wild animals just as well? If I told you where all the mink and otter and raccoon lived we’d soon have none.”
“Aard, do you trap a lot?” asked Keven.
“Wal, I try a lot. This spring I took five hundred-odd hides to Portland. Mostly mink. Otter gettin’ scarce. But still there are some left.”
“Five hundred!” ejaculated Keven. “Trapping sure is good around Solitude.”
“Pretty fair,” returned Aard complacently. “It’s out of the way. But few hunters ever get in here. An’ no trappers. So I have it all to myself. Hope you will pitch in with me. I can guarantee better wages than market fishin’.”
“Thanks, Aard. I’ll pitch in, you bet,” returned Keven enthusiastically. These people struck him just right. With that promise he burned his bridges behind him. Up to then he had felt a vacillation about staying here at Solitude. He had oscillated like a compass needle between the absolute salvation in the prospect and perturbed unwillingness to do Beryl further wrong. He was only half a man. But he shied from that strange personal thought.
“Kev, I hate trapping,” spoke up Beryl. “I’ve come across traps of Dad’s sprung, with a foot or leg of some poor wild creature that had chewed itself free.”
Keven looked blank at that. Assuredly he had never heard of such a thing. It might prove a bar to happy work in that line.
“Wal, we have to live, Beryl,” said Aard dryly. “An’ we have to wear warm skins and furs. I notice you’re not so all-fired pitiful about cracking a steelhead over the nose.”
“But, Dad, that’s merciful!” she expostulated, flushing. “Besides a fish has no feeling. There’s no comparison.”
Keven decided this girl had a mind of her own and a temper to match it. He hastened to change the subject to that of fruitgrowing.
“Sure, that’ll beat trappin’ someday,” Aard agreed. “You see I’ve ten acres in apples already. Oregon apples sell high. They’re just a little slow down here. But this bench catches the sun. It’s ’most as good as the land upriver. I only wish we had more of it. There’s a fine plot up on the mountain. Good water. You might homestead that land, Kev. Then we’ll develop it.”
“Can you still homestead national forest land?”
“They say you can’t, but the breeds do it, right along. I homesteaded this place twenty years ago, before the Cascades were included in a government reserve. They’ve tried to scare me off. They can’t. I’ve never received a patent for this land, but I own it an’ I can prove that…. Also, you can locate a minin’ claim for about twenty acres, an’ so long as you do your assessment work you can’t be put off. You can get hold of a piece of land that way.”
“By Jove, I’ll do it,” declared Keven.
“Say, Keven Bell, that wonderful bench just above the shelving ledges where the steelhead lie—that’s mine,” declared Beryl.
So they talked on, while Keven’s eyes roved everywhere. He discovered that the Aards appeared remarkably comfortable for folk isolated in the mountains, fifty miles from railroad and motor road. The house, though made of logs, was really not a cabin. He could see into the living room, which was large, light, colorful, plainly but comfortably furnished, and most homelike. The big open fireplace took Keven’s eye.
Then there were many more evidences of considerable prosperity. The gardens were trim and neat, well cared for and enclosed in high picket fences. There were a barn and outsheds, chicken coops and pigpens, and two thriving orchards, which ran up a gradual slope to the timber. He heard running water that had been piped down to the cabins. The springhouse Beryl had mentioned very likely was down in the ravine. Aard’s horses grazed along the trail, where probably the cows did likewise.
Keven tried to recall what this property had looked like four years ago. And he was sure Aard’s prosperity had come since he had last visited Solitude. He conceived an idea that the trapper had other means.
“Aard, I haven’t anything to wear except these fishy rags on my back,” Keven remarked presently.
“Wal, hop a hoss an’ ride down to Illahe. There’s a store where you can buy plain stuff.”
“I haven’t a red cent,” confessed Keven, in shame, yet earnest to acquaint them with his actual condition.
“Wal, that’s nothin’,” replied Aard practically. “Beryl can let you have what you want. She’s banker, treasurer, bookkeeper, an’ general all-around boss of this camp.”
“Kev, I’ll ride down to Illahe with you tomorrow,” said Beryl, pleased at the prospect. Then her face fell. “But I forgot—you’re really not able.”
“I might ride a very gentle, easy-gaited horse, if you have one.”
“Put Kev on the bay mare,” suggested Aard.
“She’s gentle, but sometimes she takes a notion to buck,” returned Beryl dubiously. “We’ll try Sam. He’s only a mule, but——”
Then the conversation was interrupted by a call to supper. They went in, and on the way Beryl gave Keven’s arm a little happy squeeze. She radiated something that convinced Keven she was overflowing with an unspeakable, all-satisfying happiness. If he were responsible for that—what a responsibility! It gave him a melancholy pleasure, that faded quickly before the thought of only added pain to her in the future. What could he do?
Keven sat down to a bountiful meal that despite his hunger proved tasteless and unsatisfying, because of the craving of his stomach for alcohol. It was an unpleasant and disgusting realization. But he did not despair. That craving must and would begin to grow less and less until it left him entirely. He knew because he meant to starve it to death.
Dusk had fallen when they went out upon the porch, and the valley was full of purple shadows. Bats were wheeling over the cabins. There was an intense, all-pervading silence, which seemed unbroken until Keven caught the low murmur of the river. The miner who had named Solitude must have taken this beautiful hour of the evening to express the utter signi
ficance of the place. The feeling fell so strongly upon Keven that for the moment it obliterated the almost always present sense of his sorry state.
“Do you smoke, Kev?” asked Aard, lighting his pipe.
“I used to. Coffin nails.”
“What are they?” Aard continued, amused.
“Cigarettes.”
“Dad, there’s nothing funny about it,” spoke up Beryl. “Most of the women who stopped at Aunt Lucy’s in Roseburg smoked cigarettes. They inhaled the smoke and blew it out through their noses. Struck me as a dirty kind of habit. How could you smell the pines, the firs, the myrtle, the lilac, if you cluttered up your nose with vile smoke? Really that thought was what made me realize how great a pleasure I get out of smelling the woods….” And then she asked quickly, “Kev, could you like a girl who smoked?”
“Well, I reckon I could, if she had an overwhelming number of fine qualities to offset that one bad habit,” replied Keven. “But most girls who smoke also drink, and when they drink——”
He did not complete his statement.
“That Brandeth girl drank,” said Beryl, without any particular expression.
“Wal, liquor is bad enough fer a man,” interposed Aard.
“Beryl, since we’re speaking of a very modern thing, tell me, do you like cars?” queried Keven curiously.
“You mean the railroad cars?”
“No. Motorcars.”
“I didn’t mind riding in the stages. They were so big and felt safe. But small cars scared me stiff.”
“You wouldn’t like to drive one? A spiffy little roadster?”
“Me drive a car? Good gracious, no! I’d rather chop wood.”
That made Aard chuckle. “I tell you, Kev, she’s no mean hand with an ax. Grew up with one.”
“It’s a rather unusual thing for a girl, I’d say. Beryl, how’d you ever come to learn it?”
“We were poor when I was a kid,” replied Beryl, with that simplicity which grew so upon Keven. “Dad was always away in the woods. Mother was not well. So I had to chop wood.”