by Dean Owen
“I’ll get some salmon eggs, Mona,” the young fellow said, stepping out of the car. “You should have remembered about them yourself when you were getting things ready.”
Gary thought, “If I had a jar of salmon eggs, I wouldn’t fish with ’em—I’d eat ’em myself!”
With observant eyes he watched young Ludlow step across the sidewalk to a hardware store. Neatly dressed in cords, laced boots and leather jacket, the young fellow was strikingly handsome, tall, superbly athletic, with a hard virility about him that Gary keenly envied. He seemed a haughty and arrogant chap; several of the miners ventured a “Good evenin’, Mr. Ludlow” to him, but he did not answer them or even nod.
The girl appeared to be a rather likable person. In spite of her fashion-plate clothes, she was not at all pretty; but she had nothing of young Ludlow’s arrogance. Quite obviously she was head-over-heels in love with her handsome big escort. She had taken his rebuke without a word, and her eyes followed him, clung to him, all the way across the sidewalk and into the hardware shop.
A few doors up, an old prospector came out of Lafe Nottingham’s general store. Behind him, with some purchases on its back and a silver bell jingling at its halter, ambled a fat little burro, scarcely larger than some of the big huskies of the town.
Gary blinked his eyes and stared, as though seeing an incarnation of all the bush-loped old “mountain rats” whom he had ever heard or read about. The old fellow, eighty if a day, was grizzled and wrinkled, his shoulders were stooped from years of foot-slogging under heavy packs, but he was still as hale and tough as weathered oak. His suspenders were simply two pieces of rope; his shirt had been patched till it looked like a crazy quilt; and his baggy canvas trousers, quite as fearfully patched, were stuffed into heavy hobnailed boots.
Gary nudged a bystander, a big half-breed. “Who’s he, for goodness sake?”
“Heem? Oh, dat’s ole Nat Higgens—and Jinny. Dey’re an eyeful, hein?”
“A prospector, isn’t he?”
“Ou’. Dat is, he pokes aroun’ in de rocks op Lettle Saghelia. He’s got some long-hair’ idee ’bout some gold being op dere. ’Tween you and me, I t’ink he’s a lettle bit bushed. He’s been livin’ to heemself so long dat he’s shaking hands wit’ de willows. But he’s a good ole feller, ole Nat is.”
With Jinny at his heels, old Higgens got off the sidewalk and came plodding down the dusty street. Young Ludlow had just rejoined Mona Casper in the car. Like everyone else within eyeshot, the young couple were watching Higgens, the girl with an amused smile, Hugh Ludlow with a queer mixture of smile and scowl.
As the old fellow trudged past the automobile young Ludlow leaned out and pressed the glowing tip of his cigarette against the burro’s rump.
At the hot stab of pain Jinny gave a lunge forward, butted into old Higgens and knocked him to his knees. Snorting and kicking, the animal barged against the car fender and burst two of the sacks on its back.
Somewhat dazed, old Nat scrambled up and whirled around. “You jinny!” he scolded. “You w’uthless scalawag—what’n creation possessed you to do that, nohow? Now lookit what you’ve done! Lookit our beans and flour!”
The little animal, still prancing and kicking, looked around and saw that stream of white apparently pouring out of its own fat ribs, and went suddenly panicky. With a final snort it whanged its heels into the fender, stampeded past old Nat and took off down the street like a frightened jackrabbit heading for its mountain home and scattering beans, sugar and flour as it went.
Several of the onlookers laughed at the unexpected comedy, but a hot anger flared up in Gary; and the big half-breed beside him growled: “Dat was a carcajou treeck out of yo’ng Ludlow. Ole Nat mus’ have spent a week tomrocking de dust to buy dat grub.”
As young Ludlow glanced at the vanishing Jinny and laughed aloud, Gary stepped off the curb and around in front of the car. The trick itself, utterly unprovoked, had been bad enough; but that laugh, at an old man’s misery…
“Say, you,” he rapped at young Ludlow, “you ought to have your teeth bashed in for that. If you get your fun out of hurting other people, why don’t you pick on somebody your size and age?”
The smile faded from Hugh Ludlow’s face. For a moment or two he stared disdainfully at Gary, looking at his battered hat, his disreputable clothes. Then, with studied scorn:
“Did you say something to me, bum?”
The epithet did not faze Gary, but the sight of old Higgens trying to salvage a little pile of beans from the dust, made him see red.
“I said you need a bashing, you slick-haired puppy! Pony up for the grub this old man lost, or I’ll wrap you around a telephone pole.”
Deliberately Hugh Ludlow removed his wrist-watch, handed it to Mona, opened the car door and stepped out. Mona caught his arm.
“Hugh! Don’t get into a fight. Please, dear.”
“It won’t be much of a fight,” Hugh answered evenly. He flicked the ashes from his cigarette, laid it on the fender, turned, confronted Gary. “Anybody that talks to me like you did,” he said, confident and assured, “gets hell knocked out of him!”
Someone on the sidewalk yelled “Fight!” and the onlookers began surging around the car and surrounding the arena.
Ordinarily Gary would have felt himself a match for his stalwart enemy. He was quite as tall—six feet two from his shoes to his sandy cowlick; and like young Hugh he was heavy-fisted and big of build. But two years of study and indoors had pulled him down; the hunger of the last fortnight had sapped his strength; and he had a premonition that he was in for a mauling.
Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Mounted sergeant come to life and start across the street. A quiver of fear darted through him. What if that officer recognized him as the Gary Frazier of the poster? In flashes quicker than thought he had a sickening vision of himself lying in a Police “butter-tub,” and heard those dread words, “To be hanged by the neck until dead.”
“What’s the matter—yellow?” Ludlow taunted. “You asked for it. Put up your fists, bum.”
With a hard smile on his face, he closed in, swung a short right that missed, then landed a straight jarring left that caught Gary on the chin and staggered him.
Unable to back out of the fight, Gary waded in, feinted his enemy’s guard down, and drove in a right to the jaw. It was a clean hard blow, and he packed all his strength into it; but it had little effect on young Ludlow, beyond wiping the smile from his face and infuriating him. With an oath he bore down on Gary, slipped across another jarring left, then a bare-knuckle right to Gary’s cheek, then a smash in the stomach, then a terrific crack to the jaw that sent Gary staggering backwards against the big half-breed.
Gary shook his head, to clear the fog out of it. He was weak with hunger—far weaker than he had realized; and that crack to the jaw had knocked him groggy. Ludlow and the little crowd and the Mounted sergeant elbowing toward the fight—they all seemed to be going around and around.
Swiping the blood from his mouth, he closed in, doggedly, and swung at his enemy.
With that hard confident smile on his face again, Hugh Ludlow backed up a step, measured Gary, and then drove in one more blow—a murderous long-swinging uppercut…
* * * *
Dimly Gary became aware that someone was speaking to him. In spite of a trip-hammer throb in his head he opened his eyes.
The big métis was helping him sit up and brushing the dust from his clothes. “How you feel, partner?” the man asked. “Anyt’ing bad wrong?”
“I’m—all right,” Gary managed. “Just got socked. But golly”—he rubbed his chin where the uppercut had landed—“that fellow can really sock!”
The mists were clearing from his brain, and he looked around. Only then did he realize that he had been knocked out, knocked completely cold, and had been out for several minutes. The car, with the Casper gir
l and Hugh Ludlow, was gone; the little crowd of onlookers had been sent about their business; only the métis and old Nat remained—and the Mounted sergeant.
The sight of the officer, gazing down at him with those sharp unfathomable eyes, brought Gary out of his grogginess like a slap of cold water. As he met that silent gaze, all the fears which had dogged him on his long flight, and all the grisly visions of what awaited him back in Manitoba, came flooding into his mind.
He fought off his panic and steadied himself. Maybe this sergeant hadn’t recognized him, after all. The man showed no sign of it. His cold gray eyes and impassive face showed no emotion whatever.
With the half-breed’s help Gary stood up, walked around a few steps to get his legs back; then forced himself to return and confront the sphinx-like officer.
“I’m sorry I started that scrap, Sergeant,” he said, hoping to talk himself out of being arrested for the street brawl. If he could, then he might squeeze out of this jam altogether. “I don’t usually go hunting for trouble, but—well, that was a raw trick he pulled, and I boiled over, I guess. I’m only human.”
The sergeant did not answer. With features as expressionless as a granite mask, he regarded Gary steadily, saying nothing, betraying nothing of his thoughts. For the life of him Gary could not tell what lay back of that silent gaze—whether the officer believed him merely a foot-loose wanderer, or definitely recognized him as the hunted fugitive of the poster.
Old Nat spoke up. “Young Hugh hadn’t oughta done that,” he said. His tones were mildly reproachful but utterly without rancor. He looked at Gary as though apologizing for being the cause of Gary’s drubbing. “I don’t mind seem’ you ’round town afore, b’y. Are you a newcomer, mebbe?”
“Yes.”
“What parts might you come from?”
“I came in from the Grand Trunk on the bobtail this morning,” Gary answered, hoping that the guileless old fellow would stop asking questions.
Hastily he thought up an assumed name and home city, expecting that query to come next. So far, here in Saghelia, people had been content merely to call him “stranger” or “partner”; and on all his two-thousand-mile flight he had hardly spoken a dozen words to a human being.
Old Nat glanced across Saghelia River to the north range where a lush beautiful valley opened back into the mountains. “Scalawag!” he muttered, at the absent Jinny. “She’s been ’sociatin’ with them wild billy goats so much she’s gittin’ skittish as they are.” He turned around again. “I guess mebbe I’d better git some grub on debt from Lafe and be startin’ fer home.” He held out a gnarled hand to Gary. “I ain’t unmindful how you stuck up fer me, b’y. That was real decent out of you. If you ever git up nigh my place, why I’d be right glad to have you stop in.”
As Gary glanced past him at the distant valley of Little Saghelia, an idea shot into his head. Here in town he had no friends, no work, no place to stay, nothing but the constant danger of being recognized and nailed. But back in those mountains he could breathe a safe breath and would have a superlative refuge till the man-hunt died down. With tom-rocker and shovel he could pay his own way and be no burden on the old bush-loper.
“Dad,” he suggested, loath to invite himself but forced to it, “you couldn’t take me in, up there at your place, could you? There aren’t any jobs around here and—well, I’m stranded and broke. I don’t know much about tom-rocking, but I could learn.”
Old Nat was astounded. “Why, d’you mean that, b’y?” he asked, as though not quite believing that any one should really wish to live with him.
“I sure do, Dad—that is, if I wouldn’t be imposing.”
Old Nat hesitated a moment. “We ain’t exactly fixed fer any one extry, but you wouldn’t be imposin’. Not one particle. And we’d be more’n glad to have you fer comp’ny. You come right along if you want to.”
Gary wondered who that “we” meant. Probably old Nat and Jinny, he thought.
He turned to the officer. “How about it, Sergeant?” he asked. His voice was steady but he was trembling a little, as a man well might when his freedom and life were hanging in the balance. “Instead of pinching me for fighting, won’t you sentence me to hard labor on old dad’s tom-rocker?”
For several moments, interminable moments to Gary, the sergeant said nothing. His gaze traveled from Gary to old Nat and on to that far green valley. He seemed to be thinking deeply. A flicker of a smile came to his lips—a smile as inscrutable and baffling as his cold gray eyes.
At last, with a laconic jerk of his thumb at Little Saghelia, he spoke two words that set Gary’s heart thumping with wild joy: “Go ahead.”
CHAPTER TWO
As he walked along beside old Nat, across Saghelia River, past some abandoned mines and slag heaps, through river-bottom daisy flats and drogues of scrub poplar, the conviction grew on Gary that he was heading into a dark puzzling situation which might have explosive possibilities for an outlaw like himself.
His hunch was mostly guesswork; but it clung to him like a cocklebur, and he could not shake it off.
For one thing, why had Hugh Ludlow scowled at old Nat? It seemed ridiculous that young Ludlow, wealthy and proud and of a different world altogether, should nurse any hostility toward a harmless old bush-loper; but how else was one to interpret that scowl? And what was old Nat prospecting for? What was this “long-hair’ idee” of his, this odd quest for gold up Little Saghelia?
And then, what lay behind that baffling smile from Sergeant Rhodes? As plain as day, Rhodes had been thinking about this unknown situation when he smiled his faint smile. He seemed to be foreseeing fireworks for one Gary Frazier. His laconic “Go ahead” had sounded like, “All right, innocent—it’ll be your funeral, not mine.”
Had Rhodes recognized him? He flatly did not know. In all his days he had never encountered so enigmatic a person. The officer was uncanny—a pair of X-ray eyes that betrayed nothing, said nothing, but saw everything.
Considering that the Police of half a dozen provinces were hunting for Gary Frazier, it looked, at first glance, as though Rhodes surely would have arrested so notorious a criminal on instant recognition or even on suspicion. But a person couldn’t be certain even about that. The officer might shrewdly have held off in hopes that the fugitive’s confederates would show up or that the wanted man would give away the location of that twenty-two-thousand dollars in plunder.
Beside a torrent at the mouth of Little Saghelia Valley, he and old Nat halted a few minutes to rest. After bathing his right eye, which was bruised and swollen, and eating a handful of luscious raspberries, Gary started to stretch out on a flat mossy boulder; but old Nat suggested:
“If we’re goin’ to git home afore dark, lad, mebbe we’d better put our foot in front of our nose and git. It’s only ten miles, but they’re mountain miles.”
“Okay,” Gary agreed. He was tired and achy, but he refused to let an old man of eighty outdo him. “Let’s be traveling.”
Following a game trail that led along a cold blue mountain creek, they left the main valley behind them and plunged into the wild fastness of Little Saghelia.
With wondering eyes, with a feeling of awe and enhancement, Gary kept glancing around at the green lush paradise of the valley, as they wound deeper and deeper into the heavy virginal woods. Its sense of remote isolation, the absence of human trail or human sign save a few blaze marks, made it seem in an altogether different land from the dull town and the fire-ruined main valley which he had just quitted.
The long midsummer sun and the warm “drizzle Chinooks” from the Pacific gave a tropical luxuriance to the trees and flowers and undergrowth. Mosses of a dozen kinds grew everywhere, covering the boulders, mantling the windfall, running up the trees to their first branches, and carpeting the ground with a green living plush. Bracken with fronds like palm leaves clothed the dripping rocks and hung from the cliff faces. T
he cedars and Douglas firs towered so high that Gary felt Lilliputian when he looked upward to their lofty crown-spreads.
The berry thickets made his mouth water, hungry as he was. Raspberries, red and black and lavender; huckleberries, blueberries, loganberries; saskatoons, bake-apples, and others that he could not even name—in riotous profusion they tangled with the buckbrush, overran the piles of windfall and hung out into the game trail as though waving themselves at the passer-by.
“If you don’t quit stoppin’ fer berries,” old Nat kept remonstrating, “we’ll be midnight gittin’ home, lad.”
Two miles up Little Saghelia they came to a fork of the trail. The main path kept on up along the rushing creek, but old Nat turned left on a dim trail that swung up the west slope.
“It’s furder home this way,” he explained, “but a pile better goin’. Up the crick a piece the windfall gits bad.”
For nearly a mile the trail led them up slope at a steep climb—out of the dense woods of the bottom, into the minaret pines and little mountain prairillons. Then, halfway between timberline and the creek, it straightened out, and headed north again, up valley. Near eight-thirty, when the sun was inching down behind the northwestern peaks, they halted again to rest, on a high rocky hogback. Badly winded by the climb, Gary flung down the grub sack, which he had insisted on toting, and stretched out on the shingle, so tired that he merely gazed wistfully at the wild strawberries and sweet white dewberries all around him.
Down across the treetops, Saghelia lay basking in the slant evening sun, its tin roofs glittering, its coal smoke standing straight up in the still air. At that distance the shafts of the Casper and Ludlow mines looked like marmot holes against the mountainside. For miles up and down the main valley the slopes had been gutted by fires, repeatedly, till the soil was destroyed and even second-growth could not find root. Only the brilliant fireweed clothed that desolute brûlé, in patches here and there of glowing reddish color, as though the despoiling flames still were licking at those slopes. Old Nat pointed with his corncob pipe. “Tain’t very nice to look at, lad, is it?”