The 8th Western Novel

by Dean Owen

  For a moment Gary wavered. He hated to give those folk any grounds for evil gossip; and Leda’s unwelcome of a few minutes ago had hurt his pride. But pride, in his situation, was a luxury that he dared not indulge in. He simply had to stay here or get nailed. At the mere thought of the death cell awaiting him in Winnipeg, the cold icy fingers of fear gripped his heart.

  “All right,” he agreed reluctantly. “I’d be awfully glad if I may stay. If any trouble crops up, I can go then.”

  Trying hard to be hospitable, Leda brought him a towel and wash cloth from a shelf. “You go out to the torrent now, and I’ll be taking supper up.”

  As Gary left the cabin and went down the moonlit path, he thought: “Well! My guess about running into a tangle here at old Nat’s was a bull’s-eye hunch, all right.” The sheer fact of his associating with Leda Barton would draw dangerous attention to him. But that seemed only a minor danger compared to the other unknown angles of this situation. He vaguely sensed that there was a vast deal more to this set-up than he had any inkling of as yet. More than slander lay back of that prophetic smile from Sergeant Rhodes.

  * * * *

  At supper, as he listened to the whisper of wind in the balsams outside and watched the shy silent girl across the table, Gary found it hard to realize where he was and what chain of accidents and hapchance had brought him here.

  For weeks that seemed endless he had been riding freights and blind baggages through chill lonely nights, eluding officers and the invisible nets flung out to take him, fighting off demoralization, starving and shivering and leading the shadowy existence of a hunted outlaw; and now, with a dazing suddenness, here he was in a quiet mountain cabin, miles from nowhere, sitting at supper with two people whom he had never heard of a few hours ago.

  “Where did you hunt this afternoon, Leedy?” old Nat inquired, dipping a scone in his tea.

  “I covered a little stretch along the west rim-rock, a couple of miles north.”

  “Did you run onto anything suspicious-lookin’?”

  “No, nothing, Dads.”

  “See anything of Hugh’s party?”

  “No.”

  Gary looked at Leda, all surprised. “Are you hunting for this cache of gold too?”

  “You seem to think it’s a silly business,” Leda remarked, catching the skepticism in his voice. “Well, I don’t! I’ll admit it’s a thousand-to-one chance, but it’s not silly. If you knew the facts, you wouldn’t be so—so amused.”

  “I’m not amused, really,” Gary denied. This cache-of-gold myth must have a pretty deadly bite, he thought. It was understandable for old Higgens to be spending his sun-set years poking around after a will-o’-the-wisp; but when a young and keenly intelligent person like Leda, or like Hugh Ludlow, went hunting for the plunder-hoard of those long-dead bandits—that made a person stop and think. Maybe there was something to this cache story.

  “I seen Hugh Ludlow in town this afternoon, with Mona Casper, Leedy,” old Nat remarked.

  Leda glanced up quickly. “Yes?”

  Gary fidgeted uneasily and wished that old Nat would shut up. With pardonable shame, he did not care for Leda to know anything about that fight.

  In his naive way old Nat let the cat out of the bag. “That’s how I come to meet Gary. Hugh made Jinny run off, and Gary sorta got mad, and one thing led to another. Bein’ a newcomer, Gary didn’t know that young Hugh’s the best fist-fighter anywheres around here.”

  Leda glanced at Gary, at his swollen eye. “Oh,” she said, knowing then how he had come by it.

  “Yes, he licked me,” Gary admitted. “But I must say, I’d like to meet him sometime when I’m not dog-tired and hungry and all washed up. I believe I could even that score.”

  “You’d better not have trouble with Hugh,” Leda advised. “He’s an ugly person to have for an enemy.”

  “You know him, then?”

  “As much as I care to,” Leda answered.

  Her words astonished Gary. Plainly she did know Hugh Ludlow, and disliked him intensely. “Hmmph!” he thought, eyeing Leda. “There’s something up, between those two. Here’s still a new twist to this set-up that Rhodes was smiling about! I’ll be damned! With all these wars and counter-wars going on, what a nice peaceful refuge this valley promises to be for me!”

  Tired and sleepy-eyed, Leda excused herself shortly afterward and went into her small room to bed.

  Refusing any help from old Nat, Gary washed the dishes, carried in wood for the breakfast fire and brought water from the torrent.

  In spite of his own tiredness he was wide-awake, his mind full of the events of that extraordinary day. Things had been happening to him so fast that he could hardly keep up with them. When he had finished the work he strolled outside to join old Nat, who was sitting on the cord-wood.

  Though he was burning to know about this “talk” concerning Leda, the night was so strange and beautiful that for minutes he sat silent, looking into the dim moonlit vistas and listening to the sounds of the wilderness.

  A midnight hush lay over the ranges. A gibbous moon, inching up toward zenith, shone down through the lacy balsams and fell in dark-silvery splashes on the needle-carpeted ground. In that clear thin air the stars were bright as lanterns; the winds flowing down from glacier and snow-field had a decided nip to them; and under the wan moon the surrounding mountains rose like gray ghostly masses against the night sky.

  Most of the sounds that came to him were strange and mysterious to his city ears, but now and then he heard one which he could recognize or guess: the weird sepulchral hoot of a great owl, a far-away crescendo wail, the plaintive bleating of a bighorn lamb on some high battlement across the valley. The air was tremulous with a low hollow murmur that rose and fell with the slight breeze—the low murmuring chorus of a hundred over-falls up and down Little Saghelia. “Shouldn’t you be going to bed, Dad?” he suggested, after a time. “It’s not long till morning.”

  “Oh, I ain’t much on sleepin’ in summer. A person gits that away in the North. I’ll spread a poke out here dreckly and ketch an hour er two.”

  “You’ll do no such thing. You’ll sleep in your own bunk in the cabin, and I’ll spread that poke. I’d rather sleep outside anyhow.” Plucking at a lichen curl, he glanced at the dark cabin. “Say, Dad, about Leda in there—d’you mind telling me what this trouble is between her and Saghelia?”

  Old Nat seemed reluctant to discuss the matter, and Gary realized that this was why he had not mentioned Leda on the up trip that evening.

  “Well,” Nat said finally, “tain’t a very nice thing to talk about, mebbe, but you’d hear it somewheres, I guess. Leedy’s mother down there in town wasn’t mebbe as, uh, respectable as she ought to’ve been. In fack, after Leedy’s father died, she wasn’t a decent woman at all. Ever’body in town knowed it. It was thataway fer years—all the time Leedy was a-growin’ up.”

  “Good Lord!” Gary thought, a little appalled. What a home for a sensitive girl to be reared in!

  “Anybody that says anything bad about Leedy herself is a polecat,” old Nat asserted, as near to anger as he ever got. “I’ve knowed her since she usta bake mud pies along the crick; I’ve watched her grow up; and I knowed her daddy afore she was born. She takes after her daddy lots.”

  “But how did this talk about Leda get started?”

  “It jest started, I guess. On account of her mother. It wasn’t so bad at first-but it kept a-gittin’ worse’n worse. I expect Leedy could have stopped it if she’d kowtowed and went to church and the like of that. But she ain’t that way. She fought back and sassed people and made enemies; and this ‘like mother like daughter’ talk got to spreadin’ till a whole raft of lies and slander was a-goin’.”

  He went on to say that her father, a timber ranger for the Marl Casper interests, had been killed accidentally when Leda was only five. Completely neglected
by her mother, Leda had led a tomboyish existence, fishing, loping the bush like a little auburn-haired waif but managing to go through the grades and high school. Two years ago she had gone down to Victoria and got a job; but last winter she had come back to nurse her mother through a long illness.

  Her mother had died; the old hue and cry had started up again; and with her Victoria job gone, Leda had pitched off from the town and come up here.

  As Gary pondered the story, he could well understand Leda’s hostility at his coming, and the instinctive shyness about her—the shyness of one who had been on the defensive all her life. A great pity came over him for that neglected little girl, growing up, innocent of what her home really was, but having her eyes gradually opened by the taunts and jeers of other children; and then enduring, all through her teens, the evil whisperings of that small town. Leda too, like himself, was reaping a harvest, a bitter harvest, that was not of her own sowing.

  Sometime after old Nat had gone to bed, he took the canvas sleeping poke and started around the cabin for the balsam drogue. As he passed the window of the small room, he glanced inside and saw Leda there, asleep, her arm under her head, with a shaft of moonlight slanting in upon the bunk. Unconsciously he paused a moment, looking at her, noticing the poverty of the room—the cracked mirror, the old dresser, the vase of flowers on the window sill.

  For all her honesty and courage, he knew that the gossip and slander down yonder had left their marks on Leda Barton. One lone girl, fighting a whole town, she had battered herself against its cruel unyielding opinion; and now, wounded and bitter, she was beginning to retreat within herself. He hated to think that Saghelia might ever break her; that in the years ahead she might lose heart and hope and her desperately defended ideals. Something very splendid would perish when her courageous spirit died.

  As he paused there, gazing at her, he was shaken with the wish that he might shelter and shield this lonely defenseless girl, as one might shield anything rare and precious.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Gary was awakened by the raucous chatter of a whisky-jack in a balsam overhead. Opening his eyes, he swore sleepily at the camp pest, yawned, stretched himself luxuriously in the warm poke, and wondered what time it was.

  At the cabin no one seemed stirring, no smoke was coming from the roof pipe; but the sun looked suspiciously high in the sky. He reached for his trousers, glanced at his Ingersoll and whistled in sheer astonishment. Twenty-five after ten!

  “Whew—what a Rip van Winkle draw that was!” he thought. For nine solid hours he had lain there dead to the world, without a flicker of the dreams and nightmares which had haunted his sleep during the two past weeks. The mountain air, his weariness, and especially the terrific let-down from the strain of his two-thousand-mile flight, had kept him sleeping through the night and long northern dawn and nearly halfway into the day.

  Ashamed of being such a laggard, he dressed quickly, hung the canvas poke in a balsam for convenient reference that evening, and hurried to the cabin.

  Leda and old Nat had eaten breakfast and left for a morning’s hunt. Evidently they had been gone for hours. They had put his breakfast—trout and bacon, pea-meal cakes and coffee—on the back of the stove to keep warm; but the food was cold now, and the wood fire had died out.

  Still logy from his long sleep, he went down to the torrent, washed in the icy blue water and laved the soreness out of his bad eye. Back at the cabin, he took his breakfast outside, sat on the chopping block and ate there, loath to miss anything of the bright mountain morning.

  Along the pathways around the cabin a number of striped ground squirrels, comical with their little black tails stuck straight up, were frisking in the sun and calling their lively tcheepmunk-tcheepmunk. A host of alpine butterflies, small and dingy-colored, were dancing over the flowers of the meadow. Higher up slope, in an area of rocky open, a colony of “whistling pigs,” perched prominently on their den boulders, were whistling sociably at one another but keeping an eye cocked at the sky; and Gary, looking up, saw a golden eagle wheeling in and out of a wispy cloud.

  At the south edge of the meadow the runaway Jinny, full of vetches and contentment, had climbed up on a house-size boulder and was carrying on a vocal long-distance battle with a billy goat—a small white speck on top of the eastern rim-rock five miles across the valley.

  Their challenges at each other made Gary smile, and the whole scene around him—the sun and woods and mountain vistas, the tinkle of water and the brooding peace—filled him with gratitude for the destiny which had guided him to this haven in his time of need. But then his gaze traveled down across the treetop leagues to distant Saghelia, to the smoke and tiny sun-glitters of the town; and the smile faded from his lips. Down yonder was that enigmatic Rhodes, symbol of the law, who might seize him and toss him into the law’s pitiless machinery. If Rhodes had recognized him, then this happy life would come to a quick end—today, tomorrow, next week…

  From the cabin a well-worn trail wound down slope toward the alley bottom; and Gary reasoned that it led to the diggings where old Nat tom-rocked dust. As soon as he finished breakfast, he set out down the trail, intending to get in some tom-rocking. Besides wanting to relieve Leda and old Nat of that job, he was keen to tie into some good hard work and toughen up.

  As he swung down through the cedars and deer-bush, he wished that Leda might let him go along with her occasionally on her hunts for the cache. Beneath her aloofness she was a desperately lonesome person, hungry for laughter, hungry for human company and friendship. But to work up any companionship with that shy silent girl would call for very tactful and careful strategy. With good cause she shunned men and was suspicious of almost everybody. The best way of gaining her trust was to treat her in a frank partnerly fashion, ignoring the fact that she was a girl.

  “A cussed hard job, that!” he mused, thinking of her hazel eyes and the light spangles in her hair. “But if I don’t do it, if I let her suspect that she’s a mighty disturbing element, she’ll put me down as just another one of these bozos to steer clear of.”

  In the valley bottom, half a mile below the cabin, the trail brought him to the diggings.

  The place was an old oxbow or dried-up channel, three hundred yards long and forty feet wide. The deposit, of sand, pea-gravel and glacial muck, was about five feet deep, and rested on a water-polished bed-rock. In his twenty-five years on Little Saghelia old Nat had worked only about half of it. Plenty remained, meagerly as he lived, to see him through the rest of his life. His equipment was of the simplest—a shovel, two buckets and a tom-rocker, which sat over at the creek edge, convenient to water.

  The place was not staked or posted. Gary fancied that the deposit must be “Chink stuff,” of low concentration; otherwise, folk from Saghelia would have crowded in and shouldered old Nat aside.

  Thoroughly green at the business of hawking float, he walked over to the tom-rocker, a shallow cradle-like contraption with galvanized lining and two handles, and studied it.

  “Let’s see now,” he reasoned. “You dump in a bucket or two of stuff; then you throw in water and stir until you’ve got a thin goo; then you rock like the dickens, tilting it just enough to slosh out the gravel and sand and muck. After four or five fillings you’ve got a fairly good concentrate, and you work that down carefully—and thar’s yer gold, pardner! Okay, let’s get a wiggle on,” Plunging into work, he carried sand and gravel across to the tom-rocker, clumped it in, threw in water, rocked and sloshed till only a few tablespoonfuls of “goo” remained.

  It took him a full hour of hard toil to work down five fillings. His arms ached, the mosquitoes and brûlés tormented him, and he sweat till his shirt stuck to his back. Several times he soused himself bodily in a deep creek hole to cool off.

  When he finally got his rough concentrate, he poured in a quart of water and then worked that out very carefully, along with the lingering sand grains and tiny
pebbles, till only about a tablespoonful of water was left. With the point of his knife he poked around in this and looked at the fruits of his toil. He expected to see a little puddle of yellow in the blob of water. To his intense disappointment he saw only a few gleams and yellow flecks and one tiny nugget.

  “Hell’s bells!” he swore. “That wouldn’t fill a gnat’s eye-tooth. A couple or three cents’ worth—for all that sweating! Damn it, there’s some trick to this that old Nat’ll have to put me onto.”

  In disgust, not realizing how precious those yellow gleams really were or knowing that he had hawked nearly sixty cents’ worth of gold, he dumped out the blob of water, gave the tom-rocker a good kick, and picked up his hat and jacket.

  As he turned around to go home, he stopped short… Scarcely a dozen feet away. Hugh Ludlow was standing in a shaft of sun, regarding him with a cold stare.

  At a respectful distance behind young Ludlow a huge half-breed, with shaggy black hair, buckskin clothes, and shoulders like a grizzly bear’s, was grinning at the kick which Gary had given the tom-rocker. There was a third man, a dark-faced Indian, standing half-concealed behind a clump of devil’s club. Furtive, hatchet-featured, with the beady glittering eyes of a snake, the Siwash was as evil-looking an individual as Gary ever had met.

  The three of them—Hugh Ludlow, the ’breed Eutrope, and Skunk-Bear the Indian—had walked up unseen and unheard, and had been watching him for several minutes. Their silent stares sent a quiver of uneasiness through Gary. This encounter was no accident but a deliberate visit. And the visit was anything but friendly.

  “What d’you think you’re doing here?” Hugh finally demanded, in cold hard tones.