by Max Brand
He pushed himself away from John Parks and with a cry made the first step down the slope. His legs buckled. Their strength around the knees had turned to water, and he pitched down on his face. His heart swelled with grief. Now, indeed, he had shamed himself. All the praise for strength and for stolid endurance which had been showered on him during the journey was thrown away through this hideous weakness. He strove to raise himself, but his elbows were like his knees, unstrung and helpless.
John Parks scooped the small body up and stood with it crushed to him. Poor Tommy looked up into a face which was wild with terror.
“I’m only winded!” he cried faintly. “And I slipped. I can go on now, Dad.”
But, while one arm drew him closer to a bony breast, the other was thrown to the sky.
“Heaven forgive me! Heaven help me!” murmured John Parks.
He lowered Tommy gently to the snow, and there he lay limp. Even the hot shame could not nerve him as he watched his father strip off his coat. Tommy was raised and wrapped in the garment closely while John Parks cried: “Oh, Tommy, hold on - fight hard. I’ll be down to the trees in no time. Fight, Tommy!”
The burro was left to follow aimlessly in the rear, shaking his head at the wind, while John Parks stumbled and slipped and ran down the slope. Tommy tried to protest. He knew well enough that it was dangerous for a man to run unprotected into the face of that icy wind, but, when he tried to speak, his voice became an unintelligible gibbering. Presently, his mind became as numb as his body. Thoughts formed dim as dream figures. It seemed to him sometimes that the wind had lifted them and was sweeping them back to the terrible summit. Then the gasping voice of John Parks would come to him like a hand pushing away clouds of sleep: “Fight, Tommy. Oh, Tommy, keep fighting!” Yet the drowsiness increased. He began to wonder why they did not stop, now that they had found such a pleasant time for sleeping.
At length his father was no longer slipping as he ran. The strong, sweet breath of evergreens was filling his nostrils, and suddenly he was dropped to the ground. The shock recalled him enough to clear his eyes, but it was not until John Parks had torn dead branches from the trees, had piled them, had kindled them to a flame, that he understood. The first yellow leap of the fire told him how near he had been to death, and now he was placed on the very verge of the fire while his father, blue faced from the cold, gasping and coughing, pummeled his body and rubbed the blood into circulation. In half an hour he was tingling painfully in hands and feet. His face was swollen with heat. But the danger was gone, and, as if to prove that all was well again, the burro stumbled into the clearing and stood with one long ear tilted forward to the fire.
CHAPTER II
THERE FOLLOWED A drowsy time for Tommy. Now and again he was roused with a sudden shuddering to a memory of the labor up the mountainside. But those daylight touches of realization were only momentary. On the whole, he was lost in warm content by the fire. He roused himself for five minutes to drink coffee and eat bacon and flapjacks. But after that he sank back into a semi-trance. Afterward, he could remember seeing and wondering at the livid face of his father and the great, feverish, bright eyes of John Parks leaning over him watching as he fell asleep.
And in that sleep he was followed by dreams of disaster. He found himself again struggling up an endless slope of ice-glazed snow, with the wind shrieking into his face and tugging at his body, while his father strode before him with long steps, tossing up his arms to the driving clouds and laughing like a maniac.
Once he came dimly half awake and actually heard the voice of John Parks, laughing and crying out near him. It seemed odd to him that his father should be talking like this in the middle of the night, but sleep had half numbed his brain, and he was unconscious again in a moment.
He only wakened with the sun full in his face and shoved himself up on his arms and blinked about him. The nightmare gradually lifted from his brain. He was able to see that the little clearing in which the fire had been made the night before, the embers of which were still sending up a tiny drift of smoke, was fringed with young aspens, now newly leafed with sprays of young yellow- green - almost more yellow than green as the sun shone through the fresh- sprouting foliage. And yonder was the burro, absurdly nibbling at the sprouts on a bush and paying no heed to the rich grass.
“Oh, Dad!” called Tommy, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
There was no answer. The silence swept suddenly around him and became an awful thing. And, at a little distance, a confused roaring and dashing, which had troubled his sleep, he now made out to be the voice of a river. They must be close, then, to the bank of the river; it was that famous Turnbull River of which they had heard so much. As for the absence of his father, that could be explained by the fact that he had gone fishing to take their breakfast out of the water.
So Tommy stood up and stretched himself carefully. To his surprise, there was nothing wrong with him, more than a drowsiness and lethargy of the muscles, if it might be called that. And, before he had taken half a dozen steps about the clearing, that lethargy was departing. The very first glance told him that his surmise had been correct. A trail well defined in the rain-softened ground led away from the camp in the direction of the river.
He followed the trail easily, but as he went his wonder grew, for the signs wandered back and forth drunkenly. And sometimes the steps were short, sometimes they were long. Here he had stumbled and lurched sidewise against a young sapling, as the damaged branches showed, and a deep footprint at its base as well. Tommy paused and drew a breath of dismay. Something was decidedly wrong. His father was no expert mountaineer, he knew. When the doctor’s orders, three years before, had sent poor John Parks in search of health in the open country, he had been a great deal of a tenderfoot. And at his age it was impossible to learn all that he needed to know about mountain life and mountain ways. But to have made this trail required that a man should have walked in the darkness, stumbling here and there. And if John Parks had walked away from the camp in the darkness -
Here the mind of Tommy trembled and drew back from the conclusion which had jumped upon him full grown. Before his mother’s death, he had heard her once in a raving delirium. And now, as he thought back to the husky, harsh voice of his father which he had heard laughing and talking near by him in the darkness, he felt certain that John Parks, also, must have been delirious. Yes, that was it, for otherwise men did not waken and laugh so wildly in the heart of the night. Why had he not wakened the instant he heard that laughter and taken care of the older man?
Tommy hurried on along the trail. It was more and more sadly evident that something was wrong as the trail reeled onward. It reached a grove of close- standing, lodgepole pines. Apparently, John Parks had been unable to find his way among them. Here and again he had attempted to go through and had recoiled after running into a trunk. Finally, he had given up the effort, and the trail wound fifty feet to the left.
By this time Tommy was half blind with fear and bewilderment, and he ran on, panting, his feet slipping on the wet grass. Momently, the noise of the Turnbull grew louder, and at length he came through a scattered screen of trees with the dash of a waterfall making the ground beneath his feet tremble. A hundred feet above him, the smooth, green water slid over the edge of a cliff, surrounded itself with a lace of white spray as it fell, and then the solid column was powdered on the rocks, spread out again in a black, swirling pool, and finally emptied into a long, flumelike channel down which the current raced like galloping horses.
And where the bank rose sheer, twenty feet above the edge of that whirling pool, the tracks of his father ceased. Tommy, strangled with fear, looked up to the pale blue sky above him. By an effort into which all his will was thrown he managed to look down again - then fell on his knees moaning.
To his eyes the whole matter was as clear as though he had read it in the pages of a book. Here the ground on the lip of the bank had been gouged away by the feet of John Parks as the poor man slipped and
fell. Whirling in that fall, he had reached out with both hands. There one had slipped on the wet grass. There the other of them had caught at a small shrub and torn it out by the roots. And finally, there was the place where both hands had taken their last hold on the edge of the bank - a hold beneath which the dirt had melted away and had let him drop straight to the water below.
Tommy cleared his dizzy eyes and crept closer. There was no hope that John Parks could have lived for a moment in that run of waters. A twig was dislodged by Tommy’s hand and fell into the stream. It was whirled wildly around, danced away from the teeth of jag-toothed rocks, and then darted off down the foaming length of the flume. A tree trunk might be ground to powder in that shoot of water.
Tommy drew back from the water. The moment the hank cut away the view of the stream, he turned and fled as though the waterfall were a living enemy ready to plunge in pursuit with mighty leaps.
Breathless, he reached the clearing. He ran to the burro, he threw his arms around the neck of that scrawny little beast.
“Oh, Billy,” he cried, “Dad is gone - Dad is gone! Dad can never come back to me!”
And “Billy” canted one ear back and one ear forward, as was his way in all emergencies calling for thought, and, swinging his head around, he looked mildly upon his young master. The next instant he was calmly reaching for more buds on the shrub off which he had been feeding.
Tommy stepped back and watched the burro calmly making a meal, stamping now and then to show his content, or flicking his long ears back in gloomy anger when he caught sight of the packsaddle near by. And it seemed to Tommy Parks that the patient munching of the burro was a symbol of the bland indifference of all the world. His father was dead, but here was the wind bustling merrily among the twinkling leaves of the aspens, and yonder were the white heights over which they had just come, and in the distance was the voice of the Turnbull, an ominous, small thunder. His father was dead, but all went on as it had gone on before. The very fire which he had lighted still sent up a straggling wisp of smoke. And at sight of this, Tommy, who had remained dry- eyed, suddenly burst into tears and wept in an agony of grief and loneliness and fear.
The burro wandered over and curiously nudged his shoulder with his nose.
CHAPTER III
WHEN A MAN is lost in the woods, the first thing to do is to sit down and have a long think and not wander away in the first direction that comes into his head.
That was what John Parks had cautioned Tommy more than once. He remembered it now as he sat cross-legged under a pine, with his back against the trunk. He had spent the morning making up the pack - a weird bundle it was when he finished - and moving down lower in the valley, farther from the Turnbull, so that the sound of its roaring would not haunt him. He had descended simply because he dared not undertake, alone, that perilous journey over the mountain snows. No, wherever he went, it must be down the valley.
And he made the first stop at this open place where the lower slope of the mountain put out a fist through the shrouding forest - or, rather, it might be called a sharp, square shoulder. From the top of it Tommy looked up and down the valley across a wilderness of evergreens. The great mountains over which they had come were at his back. Beneath him, the Turnbull wound into view again, making him shudder as the sun flashed on its windings. And in the dim distance were other mountains, a cloudy rolling of blue which separated to give place to the Turnbull.
Through that pass he must go with Billy. It might take weeks to reach the gap, and during that time he might find no man to help him on the way. Yes, and what lay in blue distance and under the horizon, he could not dream. Perhaps there was a desert, burning hot, impassable except to those who knew the water holes, deadly even to those, sometimes. He had heard much of such places.
As for the trail over which he had come, if he turned back he would have first the terrible heights of the mountains to climb, and then, beyond those, there would be the long stretches which he had crossed with his father - and it had taken them three days from the nearest town. He might miss the way altogether, besides. And it would not be strange if one perished of hunger. No, the best way, he decided, was to follow the Turnbull River, even though it wandered down through an eternity of distance. For there was a great chance that it would lead him to some town.
Bravely, but not quickly, he made up his mind. That uncertain distance was terrible to poor Tommy. For hours he sat there pondering the question back and forth, and, when he eventually made up his mind and rose to start on with Billy, he suddenly noted that his feet were in shadow. The afternoon had worn late, all unawares.
He wanted to start on at once, for he was in a fever of eagerness to have the first stage of the great adventure accomplished and put behind him; but he knew that, when one finds a good camping place in the middle of the afternoon, it is better to camp at once and make an early start in the morning. And nothing could be more ideal than this level hill-shoulder.
In the dense ranks of the trees which marched up around him, there were quantities of dead branches. His keen young eye had noted them automatically while he sat there during the afternoon. There were shrubs, too, which he could easily cut with his father’s sharp ax. Wood, then, which is one of the two main essentials for a camp, was there in plenty. As for water, it was furnished in equal abundance. A rivulet flowed from the mouth of a cave which had doubtless been worn by the working of the water, and the little stream wound across the level, then darted with sudden speed to the foot of the hill where it joined a large creek, and both went murmuring off to join the more distant Turnbull. Perhaps John Parks, if he had seen this place, would have decided to start his home on the very spot. With the thought, great tears welled into the eyes of Tommy.
But, according to John Parks, there is a great and universal antidote for sorrow - work. Tommy sprang up and set to making camp with a fury. He took the pack from the back of Bill - his unpracticed hands had built it so poorly that it had twisted awry on the burro’s patient back - and then, with Billy at work on the grass, the boy hurried to the trees and swung the ax with a will.
It was far too large for him, but practice had taught him to shorten his grip on the handle and in that fashion he made fair play with it. Its keen edge gave him in five minutes an abundance of wood which kept him busy for half an hour longer, dragging it to the center of the opening. But he wanted an oversupply of fuel; there could not be too much to furnish him with company during the cold, solemn hours of the night.
The fire itself he made in approved fashion, grouping some big stones around it, and here he mixed the cornmeal with soda and water and salt and fried his hot cakes and set his bacon sizzling. He made coffee, too, and for a while he was so busy that he had no time to give to other worries.
It was not until he began to eat his supper that grief took him by the throat. It seemed to Tommy that John Parks was somewhere down the mountain, was coming home with great, impatient strides, and that his well-known whistle would surely soon be sounding on the farther side of the clearing. Once he found himself breathlessly listening, his eyes strained and wide. He rallied from that with a great effort, but, when his glance lowered, it struck on the side of the coffee pot, with the graniteware dented where he, on a morning, had dropped pot and coffee and all and sent the boiling stuff sizzling across his father’s shoes. He chuckled softly as he remembered how John Parks had danced around on one foot and then on the other. But there had been no reproving, no sharp words.
Tommy buried his face in his hands and sat quivering, full of a grief which could not spend itself in tears. Afterward, he could eat no more. He could not even look at the tinware and the pots, but, turning his back on the camp, he fled uphill and down, fairly running from sorrow. And, in a measure, he succeeded, for he came to a panting halt at last with the thick forest around him, rapidly darkening with evening, and realized that he must work back carefully if he expected to find the camp.
So that problem filled his mind, and when he
reached the camp it was to find the fire almost dead. He freshened it, and as he did so he heard, blown on the wind from lower down, the valley, a shrill quavering, sobbing voice, melancholy as the weeping of a lost child. Tommy listened with a chill running up his spine, for well he knew it was a mountain lion hunting up the valley, hunting, for the time being, carelessly and well-nigh blindly, since he chose to come down the wind instead of against it. And hungered pumas have been known to stalk men, if not actually to attack them.
Tommy, at least, could collect half a hundred memories of stories such as men tell around a camp fire when supper is finished and the day’s work is done and pipes and imaginations are drawing freely. He picked up the rifle, saw that it was loaded, and practiced aiming it here and there wherever the firelight flashed on a leaf. It was a heavy gun for a child to handle, but familiarity with one’s tools is half the battle, and for two years now John Parks had taken an almost foolish pleasure in teaching his son to shoot with that very weapon.
When Tommy started to work cleaning up the supper dishes, he kept the rifle close at hand. Then he built a rousing fire, not of loose brush which would toss flames into the sky for a few wild minutes and then burn out, but of solid branches which would keep a blaze alive for hours. He even ventured into the forest for more wood, but it was only a single expedition, for while he worked he felt eyes watching him in the darkness.
But when he went back to the fire and lay down beside it, twisted in his blanket only one side was sheltered by the heat of the fire and the red light which all wild beasts are said to dread. The other side lay open to the terrible dark and all the powers that prey by night.
There had been no such fear, no dream of such fear the other nights when John Parks was near. The very sound of his voice, so it seemed to the boy, would be sufficient to frighten hungered prowlers away. Night had been simple and even beautiful before. But now, as he looked up to the huge arch of the sky, filled with impersonal eyes, the mountains appearing like piled shadows on the one side, it seemed to Tommy that all the vast space in between was packed close with enmity and hatred focusing on his single head.