by Max Brand
“I learned from her how to trail and how to hide my trail. Because, of course, she used to know that I was following her, and she would leave me trail problems enough to have baffled an eagle. They always fooled me. It was really ridiculous. That half a ton of ambling bones and meat could fade away out of the landscape and leave me with three days of devilish worry and work to find her again!”
He paused to laugh, silently. She wondered over him more profoundly than ever. But he seemed to have forgotten her, so intent was he on his tale of bruin.
“When she went to sleep that first winter of my stay in the mountains,” he said, “there was a very great deal which she had failed to teach me. But still I had copied out of her book enough to keep me busy all winter rehearsing and digesting. Over an area of a thousand square miles she had taught me every stream, and where the best shallows were for fishing; she had taught me the little pools and the lakes in the same way. She had charted for me the districts where the bees were the busiest; and she showed me a thousand places where one could make one’s trail vanish into thin air and where one could take cover. She taught me all the wise ways of the chipmunks so that I could never really be hungry if I had the patience to do a little digging; and if I wanted to be absolutely sure of a good meal every day, I’d carry a pick and shovel with me, not a rifle. Roasted in a certain way, you know, there’s nothing more delicious!”
He drew in his breath as though he were famished at that instant.
“You know,” he continued, “a grizzly is really a very studious creature. I thought during the first season that I was doing nothing but copy bruin. But in the second season that I trailed her, I found that she was constantly hunting me! Upon my honor, the old rascal was actually playing on my trail just as I had been playing on hers.”
“Good heavens!” cried the girl. “Do you mean to say that the terrible creature was hunting you down?”
“Just as I was hunting her, of course. I had no right to hound her as I was doing, and she knew it. Very naturally she looked into the matter after a time, and I suppose that the clever old girl was delighted beyond telling when she found out that there was actually in the wilderness something from which she could learn a few lessons which would make life easier for her, now that her bones were growing brittle and her muscles stiff. I give you my word that a hundred times she has laid in the brush and watched me make a fire. And a hundred times she has walked around and sniffed at me while I slept.”
“And you didn’t die of fright in the morning?”
“We were fast friends long before that. We were silent allies, you know. I never saw her for long at a time; and we never talked to one another. But still we kept in touch. Oh, if I could tell you how I have watched her dig out a nest of chipmunks and gobble them as they came to light — and if I could tell you how she watches me fish! She has pointed out the best pools and streams for the work, but she doesn’t bother to fish a great deal now. When she’s hungry for fish, she gets on my trail. She knows that when I fish at a pool I’ll be sure to leave three fourths of my catch on the banks, and when I’m gone she comes out and gobbles up what’s left.
“She has an appetite to amaze you, you may be sure! Last year she was cornered by hunters and badly smashed up with bullets. I found the place where she had cached away herself and her cubs, and she and they were starving because she was too crippled to hunt for a whole month. So I did the hunting for the whole party — it kept me busy day and night, and even with my rifle and my traps, I could not take enough to give her more than a lean diet.”
“You actually fed her?”
“I left the stuff where she could get it.”
The girl was silent, full of thought.
“That gives you an idea how I have lived,” said he. “I came out here ignorant and helpless, and the beasts taught me how to get food. They kept me from loneliness. They showed me the mountains. Above all, they showed me that night is the time to live. I learned to sleep from prime to mid-afternoon, just the way Madame Bruin does. That left me the morning and the evening, which are the richest times of the day, and then the whole night, for hunting or for trapping. Of course I need a little money now and then for odds and ends and for guns and ammunition. So, in the heart of the winter, I trek north and trap for foxes. In two weeks I catch enough to do me. I take the pelts down to a Canadian fur trader, here or there, and they cheat me to their hearts’ content, but even so I get all the money I need, and more.
“Besides, they don’t ask questions. I’m not so very different from some of the half-breeds who come into the posts looking wild. They ask no questions, take the furs, give me a third of their value in cash and half their value in trade, and then I’m off again for the southland. And that, I think, tells you what I am, and how I live. But you can ask me whatever you wish. I’ll answer you frankly.”
He had finished the cigarette, put it out carefully, and waited, folding his arms. But she was too bewildered to speak at once. What he referred to as a simple narrative seemed to her the wildest romance to which she had ever listened or ever read.
“If there is nothing more,” he said, “au revoir, mademoiselle.”
“Wait! Wait!” she called to him as he turned away. “Are you to go like this? Am I never to see you again?”
“We have made an agreement,” said he.
“That you will answer my questions. There are a thousand I have for asking, but they are all swirling in my brain. I haven’t them in order. But tomorrow”
“Tomorrow I must be far away.”
“Why must you leave?”
“It is foolish to make a long hunt in one place. I have been here for two days. Besides, I have grown hungry for honey, and I know a place a little distance away where there was a great swarm last year. It should be a mine of good eating this summer.”
“But if it is close”
“Fifty miles, I think. A good days’ march to the southwest.”
Fifty miles in one day — fifty miles of such mountains as these for a single day’s march! She looked at him in amazement. And yet it was not impossible. The frailty which she had first thought she noted in him was deceptive, after all. It was mere lightness of a body strung with sinewy muscles, tireless as a wolf on the trail.
“It can’t be this way,” she said. “I have to see you once more. Then I’ll release you. You can go where you please after that! But — I’m going to make a list of things to ask you when I see you again.”
It seemed to her that he sighed in the little pause that followed.
“If it must be,” said he, “I am unable to disagree, you see.”
“Where can I find you, then?”
“Where you please. I shall come.”
“So long as it is not near other men, I suppose.”
“That is no difference.”
“But if they found your trail”
He shrugged his shoulders and laughed again, as silently as before.
“They will not follow it long,” he said. “If a thousand-pound grizzly can make her trail vanish, why cannot such a little thing as a man do it? I promise you, if Madame Grizzly used to make trail problems which I could not solve, I now make ones which she cannot decipher. I am very proud of that!”
She wondered at him in silence, and then: “Good night!” he said, and was gone, gliding away without a sound, though he stepped upon the noisy pine needles which, when she herself walked, crackled continually under her feet. She felt like a great and clumsy creature as she turned back toward the ranch; she was a mundane being indeed compared with that form of shadowy lightness.
Instead of holding straight for the ranch house, however, she followed an impulse which led her to the right, through the forest, and up to the crest of the ridge which walled in the canyon to the westward, and as she stood on the eminence, she saw a shadow slide out from the trees not a hundred yards away and pass down into the valley. It was a man, running with a swift and yet an easy stride. It reminded her of that fr
ictionless lope of the wolf which goes on and all through the whole of a day and never wearies from the dawn to the dark. This was the man of the forest.
Then she remembered, suddenly, that she had forgotten to make a definite appointment and state a meeting place. Her heart stopped, and she grew sick with sudden grief. He would never come back to her out of the mountains, and that one interview would be both the first and the last of him. She beat her fists together in a childish tantrum. She felt as a child, indeed, would have felt, had a fairy appeared before it, ready to answer any wish, and she had been too tongue-tied to question.
Her first impulse was to tell her father at once and let his men hunt down the fugitive, and yet she could not do that — partly because her word was pledged, and partly, also, because she felt assured that a hot pursuit might make the wanderer uncomfortable, indeed, but that it never could run him to the ground. The trail puzzles, as he had said, which could trouble a keen-scented grizzly would certainly be weird enough to baffle the strongest hunters who rode the range.
Now, as she stared before her, the shadow slid up onto the brow of a western hill. So soon had the runner passed across the valley that he must have run up the farther slope as easily and swiftly as he had run down that at her feet. His silhouette showed distinctly against the moonlit sky, and she made out the lump behind his shoulders which must be his pack; and the moonshine winked along the barrel of the rifle which he slung lightly in his hand as he ran. Then he was down out of sight in the winking of an eye. How empty and aching was the heart of the girl, seeing him go!
IX.— “THE FERRET” TALKS
STEFFAN’S PLACE HAD at one time been famous for the number of glasses which had rattled upon its bar, and though the country had gone dry, it was still strange to note the numbers of old and new patrons who still flocked to Steffan’s as though drawn by the magic of its name. Along that bar they ranged, and with solemn faces sipped the ridiculous sodas and “pops” which now took the place of the good old throat-tearing, stomach destroying red-eye. Of course there was an explanation of the mystery, and a very crude one.
Worthy Mr. Steffan had simply brought in sundry barrels of moonshine which he kept in a shed behind his saloon. The barrels were on the edge of the floor of the shed, supported with wedges, and once these wedges were knocked away, the barrels would crash through the back of the shed and then pitch into vacancy down the long fall of the precipice, until they thundered into the little river far below.
An armed guard stood over those precious barrels night and day to shoot up any thirsty spirits who attempted to steal the good stuff, and to evade any sheriff’s man by sending the loot shooting into the depths below. Twice the wily sheriff had tried to put his hands on the stock, and twice he had failed, and the whole quantity had gone to waste in the gorge beneath, to the misery of a thousand dry throats in the vicinity.
But Steffan himself controlled his grief. He merely doubled his prices and brought in fresh moonshine, raw and terrible with naked alcohol. Thus equipped, he furnished each glass of “soft stuff” that crossed his bar with a copious “stick” strong enough for the strongest old toper to lean upon. Business became more prospering with Steffan than ever before. He built a new wing to his house, increased his bar in size, put in a game room to the back of it, and established himself as a rising member of the community where he was more freely received than ever. He enjoyed a kind of popularity.
Such was Steffan’s, where on this day a worthy cow-puncher by the name of “Mug” Doran resorted. His appearance was hardly more beautiful than his name. He was not thirty, but a premature baldness exposed the cramped and brutal slope of his forehead behind his brows, which were great projecting rings of bone. He was possessed, beneath this disappearing forehead, of a pair of little pale-green eyes, placed as close together as possible on either side of a still tinier nose, which had at one time tilted heavenward at the point, but which had been long since beaten flat by heavy fists in many and many a fight. His cheek bones, his mouth, and his chin, were the important features of his face. The cheek bones were like jutting rocks; his mouth was a wide and leathery slit; his chin had been battered many a time before, and would be battered many a time again, but it was still thrust dauntlessly forth in a defiance of the world.
Mug walked with a waddling lack of grace upon two very short legs, and around his narrow hips a gun was belted, but it was plain that the Colt was a concession to convention rather than an assistance to the gentleman. His real comfort and joy consisted in a pair of arms as huge in girth and in length as the legs were short and small. All of his movements were clumsy, but none so stiff as the turning of his head, which was placed upon a neck only two or three inches in length, apparently, and gorilla-like in circumference.
Mug Doran walked to the bar and stood beside it, staring at the floor with his melancholy eyes, while the barkeeper rallied him in vain upon his downcast air and strove to win him to talk. But The Mug would have none of it. Once or twice he lifted those pale-green eyes, but it was to stare vacantly out the window and not into the face of the bartender. When he drank, it was still without turning around, but with furtive sips — half a glassful at a sip.
Having in this fashion finished two tall glasses of “soda,” he turned reluctantly from the bar and seated himself upon the front veranda. All of this time he had not spoken a word, and now he sat with his legs and his lower body thrust out into the white-hot sun. He enjoyed that heat so much, indeed, that when his cigarette was half rolled he paused and let it stay in his hand uncompleted while he soaked in that burning sunshine. Presently a rider heaved into view down the canyon road and pushed his jogging horse into a tired canter at the sight of the parlor of peace and moisture. He pulled up his mount in a mist of reddish-brown dust through which he now strode, with a breath of that stained fog hanging about behind his shoulders.
The Mug gave him a cool and unfriendly scrutiny, but the newcomer paid not the slightest heed to Doran. One might have suspected that so fine an appearing man would be ashamed to be found in converse with such an ape as Doran. For Jerry Monson was as fine a picture of manly beauty as one could wish to see, bland and blond and smiling, as strong as he was tall, and as tall as he was handsome. He gave not the slightest heed to The Mug, but just before he passed through the swinging door into the saloon, the three forefingers of his right hand flattened against the side of his overalls, and he thrust out his thumb at a sharp right angle.
Then he was gone, but The Mug remained staring for another moment as though he still saw the picture of that hand displayed. At length he rose, yawned, and stretched out his long arms, and made off for his horse. He untethered the animal and lifted himself into the saddle with his long arms, instead of jumping, as others would do. Once in the saddle he rode off at a good round pace until he reached a point where the trail veered sharply to the right: The Mug rode straight ahead over a litter of rocks, and so down a short gulley between two mountainsides.
It was a lofty pass. On either side the rugged trees were climbing in smaller and in thinner ranks toward the timber line which was not far above their heads, and above that point the mossy sides of the mountains rolled into the sky, sometimes quite naked, sometimes covered with the dim flowers of the high bee pastures in delicate and pastel shades. The Mug gave these visions of delight a cursory glance, then touched his weary horse so deeply with the spurs that he brought out a dot of crimson upon either flank and sent him snorting and racing around the side of the pass until he drew up with braced feet, sliding to a halt over the gravel.
Mug Doran now dismounted with sudden nonchalance and waved a greeting to some three or four men who were assembled around or in a little shack near by. Foremost of these, and now seated behind a little table in the shack, was no less a personage than Lew Borgen. He greeted Mug with a grunt; received a grunt in ample payment for that courtesy, and dropped his head to continue his meditations. Those thoughts were not altogether pleasant, as could be seen in his clou
ded and moody eye, fixed upon the floor. Plainly Lew Borgen was worried, and indeed there were many new lines of thought in his face since he had last been seen. One might have said that he had paid amply for the prosperity which had come to him, and that rapidly growing bank account in a certain Eastern town.
He waited here behind the old table until the party had grown to its full size. When complete, there were besides himself, Jerry Monson, and Mug Doran, six others, who were, by name, Joe Montague, Sam Champion, Nick Oliver, “Silver” Lambert, “Lefty” Anson, and finally Pete Nooney. Pete arrived last of all on a sweating roan with his whistle, as usual, running gayly before him to announce that he was coming.
Even the gloomiest among that nest of rascals could not help at least a semblance of a smile when that whistle of Pete’s was heard dimly in the distance.
Finally they were assembled in a closed knot around the table, or sprawling upon the floor. The evening had commenced, and a roaring fire had been built in the fireplace, so that the room, as the daylight faded, was filled with a broken and dancing illumination. Sometimes it washed a wave of shadow over a man; sometimes it painted all his face in red; sometimes teeth glistened where someone yawned in a corner; sometimes sharp, wicked eyes burned out of a shadow.
Such was the assemblage. When they were all met and in order, Lew Borgen finally rose and said: “Gents, I guess, take it by and large, I ain’t exactly welcome in here. But I heard tell that there was going to be a meeting of everybody else but me, and I sort of didn’t like it. So I come along. But if I still ain’t wanted, I hope that somebody will stand up and tell me why. I’m sure right here, open to reason, and just plumb waiting to be talked to.”
It was a speech which could almost have been called humble, at least by those who were familiar with the violence which was natural to the big man. But there followed this demand, or rather appeal, an interval of silence in which no man looked at his fellows lest something should be seen in his eyes which might incline to point out the ringleader. There was no need of such a betrayal, however. From the farthest corner there stood up that man among them all who was the least in stature and the most terrible in fight.