The Man of the Forest

by Grey, Zane

  "People often get called names—they don't like," she said, with deep intent.

  The cowboy blushed scarlet. Helen as well as he got Bo's inference to that last audacious epithet he had boldly called out as the train was leaving Las Vegas. She also sensed something of the disaster in store for Mr. Carmichael. Just then the embarrassed young man was saved by Dale's call to the girls to come to breakfast.

  That meal, the last for Helen in Paradise Park, gave rise to a strange and inexplicable restraint. She had little to say. Bo was in the highest spirits, teasing the pets, joking with her uncle and Roy, and even poking fun at Dale. The hunter seemed somewhat somber. Roy was his usual dry, genial self. And Auchincloss, who sat near by, was an interested spectator. When Tom put in an appearance, lounging with his feline grace into the camp, as if he knew he was a privileged pet, the rancher could scarcely contain himself.

  "Dale, it's thet damn cougar!" he ejaculated.

  "Sure, that's Tom."

  "He ought to be corralled or chained. I've no use for cougars," protested Al.

  "Tom is as tame an' safe as a kitten."

  "A-huh! Wal, you tell thet to the girls if you like. But not me! I'm an old hoss, I am."

  "Uncle Al, Tom sleeps curled up at the foot of my bed," said Bo.

  "Aw—what?"

  "Honest Injun," she responded. "Well, isn't it so?"

  Helen smilingly nodded her corroboration. Then Bo called Tom to her and made him lie with his head on his stretched paws, right beside her, and beg for bits to eat.

  "Wal! I'd never have believed thet!" exclaimed Al, shaking his big head. "Dale, it's one on me. I've had them big cats foller me on the trails, through the woods, moonlight an' dark. An' I've heard 'em let out thet awful cry. They ain't any wild sound on earth thet can beat a cougar's. Does this Tom ever let out one of them wails?"

  "Sometimes at night," replied Dale.

  "Wal, excuse me. Hope you don't fetch the yaller rascal down to Pine."

  "I won't."

  "What'll you do with this menagerie?"

  Dale regarded the rancher attentively. "Reckon, Al, I'll take care of them."

  "But you're goin' down to my ranch."

  "What for?"

  Al scratched his head and gazed perplexedly at the hunter. "Wal, ain't it customary to visit friends?"

  "Thanks, Al. Next time I ride down Pine way—in the spring, perhaps—I'll run over an' see how you are."

  "Spring!" ejaculated Auchincloss. Then he shook his head sadly and a far-away look filmed his eyes. "Reckon you'd call some late."

  "Al, you'll get well now. These, girls—now—they'll cure you. Reckon I never saw you look so good."

  Auchincloss did not press his point farther at that time, but after the meal, when the other men came to see Dale's camp and pets, Helen's quick ears caught the renewal of the subject.

  "I'm askin' you—will you come?" Auchincloss said, low and eagerly.

  "No. I wouldn't fit in down there," replied Dale.

  "Milt, talk sense. You can't go on forever huntin' bear an' tamin' cats," protested the old rancher.

  "Why not?" asked the hunter, thoughtfully.

  Auchincloss stood up and, shaking himself as if to ward off his testy temper, he put a hand on Dale's arm.

  "One reason is you're needed in Pine."

  "How? Who needs me?"

  "I do. I'm playin' out fast. An' Beasley's my enemy. The ranch an' all I got will go to Nell. Thet ranch will have to be run by a man an' HELD by a man. Do you savvy? It's a big job. An' I'm offerin' to make you my foreman right now."

  "Al, you sort of take my breath," replied Dale. "An' I'm sure grateful. But the fact is, even if I could handle the job, I—I don't believe I'd want to."

  "Make yourself want to, then. Thet 'd soon come. You'd get interested. This country will develop. I seen thet years ago. The government is goin' to chase the Apaches out of here. Soon homesteaders will be flockin' in. Big future, Dale. You want to get in now. An'—"

  Here Auchincloss hesitated, then spoke lower:

  "An' take your chance with the girl!... I'll be on your side."

  A slight vibrating start ran over Dale's stalwart form.

  "Al—you're plumb dotty!" he exclaimed.

  "Dotty! Me? Dotty!" ejaculated Auchincloss. Then he swore. "In a minit I'll tell you what you are."

  "But, Al, that talk's so—so—like an old fool's."

  "Huh! An' why so?"

  "Because that—wonderful girl would never look at me," Dale replied, simply.

  "I seen her lookin' already," declared Al, bluntly.

  Dale shook his head as if arguing with the old rancher was hopeless.

  "Never mind thet," went on Al. "Mebbe I am a dotty old fool—'specially for takin' a shine to you. But I say again—will you come down to Pine and be my foreman?"

  "No," replied Dale.

  "Milt, I've no son—an' I'm—afraid of Beasley." This was uttered in an agitated whisper.

  "Al, you make me ashamed," said Dale, hoarsely. "I can't come. I've no nerve."

  "You've no what?"

  "Al, I don't know what's wrong with me. But I'm afraid I'd find out if I came down there."

  "A-huh! It's the girl!"

  "I don't know, but I'm afraid so. An' I won't come."

  "Aw yes, you will—"

  Helen rose with beating heart and tingling ears, and moved away out of hearing. She had listened too long to what had not been intended for her ears, yet she could not be sorry. She walked a few rods along the brook, out from under the pines, and, standing in the open edge of the park, she felt the beautiful scene still her agitation. The following moments, then, were the happiest she had spent in Paradise Park, and the profoundest of her whole life.

  Presently her uncle called her.

  "Nell, this here hunter wants to give you thet black hoss. An' I say you take him."

  "Ranger deserves better care than I can give him," said Dale. "He runs free in the woods most of the time. I'd be obliged if she'd have him. An' the hound, Pedro, too."

  Bo swept a saucy glance from Dale to her sister.

  "Sure she'll have Ranger. Just offer him to ME!"

  Dale stood there expectantly, holding a blanket in his hand, ready to saddle the horse. Carmichael walked around Ranger with that appraising eye so keen in cowboys.

  "Las Vegas, do you know anything about horses?" asked Bo.

  "Me! Wal, if you ever buy or trade a hoss you shore have me there," replied Carmichael.

  "What do you think of Ranger?" went on Bo.

  "Shore I'd buy him sudden, if I could."

  "Mr. Las Vegas, you're too late," asserted Helen, as she advanced to lay a hand on the horse.

  "Ranger is mine."

  Dale smoothed out the blanket and, folding it, he threw it over the horse; and then with one powerful swing he set the saddle in place.

  "Thank you very much for him," said Helen, softly.

  "You're welcome, an' I'm sure glad," responded Dale, and then, after a few deft, strong pulls at the straps, he continued. "There, he's ready for you."

  With that he laid an arm over the saddle, and faced Helen as she stood patting and smoothing Ranger. Helen, strong and calm now, in feminine possession of her secret and his, as well as her composure, looked frankly and steadily at Dale. He seemed composed, too, yet the bronze of his fine face was a trifle pale.

  "But I can't thank you—I'll never be able to repay you—for your service to me and my sister," said Helen.

  "I reckon you needn't try," Dale returned. "An' my service, as you call it, has been good for me."

  "Are you going down to Pine with us?"

  "No."

  "But you will come soon?"

  "Not very soon, I reckon," he replied, and averted his gaze.

  "When?"

  "Hardly before spring."

  "Spring?... That is a long time. Won't you come to see me sooner than that?"

  "If I can get down to Pine."

&n
bsp; "You're the first friend I've made in the West," said Helen, earnestly.

  "You'll make many more—an' I reckon soon forget him you called the man of the forest."

  "I never forget any of my friends. And you've been the—the biggest friend I ever had."

  "I'll be proud to remember."

  "But will you remember—will you promise to come to Pine?"

  "I reckon."

  "Thank you. All's well, then.... My friend, goodby."

  "Good-by," he said, clasping her hand. His glance was clear, warm, beautiful, yet it was sad.

  Auchincloss's hearty voice broke the spell. Then Helen saw that the others were mounted. Bo had ridden up close; her face was earnest and happy and grieved all at once, as she bade good-by to Dale. The pack-burros were hobbling along toward the green slope. Helen was the last to mount, but Roy was the last to leave the hunter. Pedro came reluctantly.

  It was a merry, singing train which climbed that brown odorous trail, under the dark spruces. Helen assuredly was happy, yet a pang abided in her breast.

  She remembered that half-way up the slope there was a turn in the trail where it came out upon an open bluff. The time seemed long, but at last she got there. And she checked Ranger so as to have a moment's gaze down into the park.

  It yawned there, a dark-green and bright-gold gulf, asleep under a westering sun, exquisite, wild, lonesome. Then she saw Dale standing in the open space between the pines and the spruces. He waved to her. And she returned the salute.

  Roy caught up with her then and halted his horse. He waved his sombrero to Dale and let out a piercing yell that awoke the sleeping echoes, splitting strangely from cliff to cliff.

  "Shore Milt never knowed what it was to be lonesome," said Roy, as if thinking aloud. "But he'll know now."

  Ranger stepped out of his own accord and, turning off the ledge, entered the spruce forest. Helen lost sight of Paradise Park. For hours then she rode along a shady, fragrant trail, seeing the beauty of color and wildness, hearing the murmur and rush and roar of water, but all the while her mind revolved the sweet and momentous realization which had thrilled her—that the hunter, this strange man of the forest, so deeply versed in nature and so unfamiliar with emotion, aloof and simple and strong like the elements which had developed him, had fallen in love with her and did not know it.

  CHAPTER XV

  Dale stood with face and arm upraised, and he watched Helen ride off the ledge to disappear in the forest. That vast spruce slope seemed to have swallowed her. She was gone! Slowly Dale lowered his arm with gesture expressive of a strange finality, an eloquent despair, of which he was unconscious.

  He turned to the park, to his camp, and the many duties of a hunter. The park did not seem the same, nor his home, nor his work.

  "I reckon this feelin's natural," he soliloquized, resignedly, "but it's sure queer for me. That's what comes of makin' friends. Nell an' Bo, now, they made a difference, an' a difference I never knew before."

  He calculated that this difference had been simply one of responsibility, and then the charm and liveliness of the companionship of girls, and finally friendship. These would pass now that the causes were removed.

  Before he had worked an hour around camp he realized a change had come, but it was not the one anticipated. Always before he had put his mind on his tasks, whatever they might be; now he worked while his thoughts were strangely involved.

  The little bear cub whined at his heels; the tame deer seemed to regard him with deep, questioning eyes, the big cougar padded softly here and there as if searching for something.

  "You all miss them—now—I reckon," said Dale. "Well, they're gone an' you'll have to get along with me."

  Some vague approach to irritation with his pets surprised him. Presently he grew both irritated and surprised with himself—a state of mind totally unfamiliar. Several times, as old habit brought momentary abstraction, he found himself suddenly looking around for Helen and Bo. And each time the shock grew stronger. They were gone, but their presence lingered. After his camp chores were completed he went over to pull down the lean-to which the girls had utilized as a tent. The spruce boughs had dried out brown and sear; the wind had blown the roof awry; the sides were leaning in. As there was now no further use for this little habitation, he might better pull it down. Dale did not acknowledge that his gaze had involuntarily wandered toward it many times. Therefore he strode over with the intention of destroying it.

  For the first time since Roy and he had built the lean-to he stepped inside. Nothing was more certain than the fact that he experienced a strange sensation, perfectly incomprehensible to him. The blankets lay there on the spruce boughs, disarranged and thrown back by hurried hands, yet still holding something of round folds where the slender forms had nestled. A black scarf often worn by Bo lay covering the pillow of pine-needles; a red ribbon that Helen had worn on her hair hung from a twig. These articles were all that had been forgotten. Dale gazed at them attentively, then at the blankets, and all around the fragrant little shelter; and he stepped outside with an uncomfortable knowledge that he could not destroy the place where Helen and Bo had spent so many hours.

  Whereupon, in studious mood, Dale took up his rifle and strode out to hunt. His winter supply of venison had not yet been laid in. Action suited his mood; he climbed far and passed by many a watching buck to slay which seemed murder; at last he jumped one that was wild and bounded away. This he shot, and set himself a Herculean task in packing the whole carcass back to camp. Burdened thus, he staggered under the trees, sweating freely, many times laboring for breath, aching with toil, until at last he had reached camp. There he slid the deer carcass off his shoulders, and, standing over it, he gazed down while his breast labored. It was one of the finest young bucks he had ever seen. But neither in stalking it, nor making a wonderful shot, nor in packing home a weight that would have burdened two men, nor in gazing down at his beautiful quarry, did Dale experience any of the old joy of the hunter.

  "I'm a little off my feed," he mused, as he wiped sweat from his heated face. "Maybe a little dotty, as I called Al. But that'll pass."

  Whatever his state, it did not pass. As of old, after a long day's hunt, he reclined beside the camp-fire and watched the golden sunset glows change on the ramparts; as of old he laid a hand on the soft, furry head of the pet cougar; as of old he watched the gold change to red and then to dark, and twilight fall like a blanket; as of old he listened to the dreamy, lulling murmur of the water fall. The old familiar beauty, wildness, silence, and loneliness were there, but the old content seemed strangely gone.

  Soberly he confessed then that he missed the happy company of the girls. He did not distinguish Helen from Bo in his slow introspection. When he sought his bed he did not at once fall to sleep. Always, after a few moments of wakefulness, while the silence settled down or the wind moaned through the pines, he had fallen asleep. This night he found different. Though he was tired, sleep would not soon come. The wilderness, the mountains, the park, the camp—all seemed to have lost something. Even the darkness seemed empty. And when at length Dale fell asleep it was to be troubled by restless dreams.

  Up with the keen-edged, steely-bright dawn, he went at the his tasks with the springy stride of the deer-stalker.

  At the end of that strenuous day, which was singularly full of the old excitement and action and danger, and of new observations, he was bound to confess that no longer did the chase suffice for him.

  Many times on the heights that day, with the wind keen in his face, and the vast green billows of spruce below him, he had found that he was gazing without seeing, halting without object, dreaming as he had never dreamed before.

  Once, when a magnificent elk came out upon a rocky ridge and, whistling a challenge to invisible rivals, stood there a target to stir any hunter's pulse, Dale did not even raise his rifle. Into his ear just then rang Helen's voice: "Milt Dale, you are no Indian. Giving yourself to a hunter's wildlife is selfish. It is wrong
. You love this lonely life, but it is not work. Work that does not help others is not a real man's work."

  From that moment conscience tormented him. It was not what he loved, but what he ought to do, that counted in the sum of good achieved in the world. Old Al Auchincloss had been right. Dale was wasting strength and intelligence that should go to do his share in the development of the West. Now that he had reached maturity, if through his knowledge of nature's law he had come to see the meaning of the strife of men for existence, for place, for possession, and to hold them in contempt, that was no reason why he should keep himself aloof from them, from some work that was needed in an incomprehensible world.

  Dale did not hate work, but he loved freedom. To be alone, to live with nature, to feel the elements, to labor and dream and idle and climb and sleep unhampered by duty, by worry, by restriction, by the petty interests of men—this had always been his ideal of living. Cowboys, riders, sheep-herders, farmers—these toiled on from one place and one job to another for the little money doled out to them. Nothing beautiful, nothing significant had ever existed in that for him. He had worked as a boy at every kind of range-work, and of all that humdrum waste of effort he had liked sawing wood best. Once he had quit a job of branding cattle because the smell of burning hide, the bawl of the terrified calf, had sickened him. If men were honest there would be no need to scar cattle. He had never in the least desired to own land and droves of stock, and make deals with ranchmen, deals advantageous to himself. Why should a man want to make a deal or trade a horse or do a piece of work to another man's disadvantage? Self-preservation was the first law of life. But as the plants and trees and birds and beasts interpreted that law, merciless and inevitable as they were, they had neither greed nor dishonesty. They lived by the grand rule of what was best for the greatest number.

  But Dale's philosophy, cold and clear and inevitable, like nature itself, began to be pierced by the human appeal in Helen Rayner's words. What did she mean? Not that he should lose his love of the wilderness, but that he realize himself! Many chance words of that girl had depth. He was young, strong, intelligent, free from taint of disease or the fever of drink. He could do something for others. Who? If that mattered, there, for instance, was poor old Mrs. Cass, aged and lame now; there was Al Auchincloss, dying in his boots, afraid of enemies, and wistful for his blood and his property to receive the fruit of his labors; there were the two girls, Helen and Bo, new and strange to the West, about to be confronted by a big problem of ranch life and rival interests. Dale thought of still more people in the little village of Pine—of others who had failed, whose lives were hard, who could have been made happier by kindness and assistance.