by Max Brand
“Oh, ingratitude!”
“You see, she’s not a bear in a fairy tale; she’s a grizzly playing up to form. At any rate, I got out of sight before the men came up. Their dogs had scampered across the fallen stump. But they couldn’t follow their dogs on foot and leave their horses behind them. Besides, it looked as though the dogs could never bring the old grizzly to bay. So they called off the dogs and went back. But first they gathered around the stump and examined it. They couldn’t make out what had happened.
“There were the marks of my hatchet clearly enough to be seen, I imagine; and if they had looked very carefully at the ground, they could have made out places where I had stood, though I had taken a little care to step on stones. At any rate, they saw none of these things, and when they went home they carried with them the most wonderful bear story that was ever told — of how a grizzly actually bit and clawed in two the decaying stump of an old tree and so made a bridge for herself across to the other side of a gorge. They’ll all swear to that, I know!”
“I think I’ve heard of some such thing,” she told him. “But of course, even a bear story is nothing in these days of The Whisperer.”
“What is that?”
“Do you mean, really, that you’ve never heard?”
He assured her that he had not, for only now and again rumors and murmurs came to him from the world of daylight and of men. Sometimes he stole up on a camp fire and listened to the talk around it; once he had been shot at for a prowling beast of prey on such an excursion; sometimes parties passed him, or single hunters, while he was hiding and sleeping in the woods by day; and so, out of random words here and there, he made up a few hints of what was happening in the world. It was hard news for her to digest, but he told it so simply that she found herself drawn in spite of herself to believe him.
Here a gate clanged, and a cow-puncher ran up through the garden toward the house, breaking a strict law to the effect that no one saving the family must pass through the garden; but he probably had something of importance to report. The girl looked to her strange visitor in terror lest he should be seen, but he had vanished into the thinnest air.
XV. PAYING THE PENALTY
THE OLD CHILLY feeling of the unearthly which had come so strongly upon her at the first meeting with the man of the night had been dispelled, somewhat, on their second meeting, by his most daylight cheerfulness, and that pleasant tale of the delivery of the old bear from her hunters. Rose Kenworthy thought the story remarkable enough, but certainly there was nothing ghostly about it. Besides, the daylight had made it possible for her to see the unkempt length of his hair and the tattered condition of the deerskin in which he was chiefly dressed, and these calmly noted facts were surely far removed from the realm of mystery.
He became more singular and less terrible with every instant; and though a shock passed through her when she found that he had vanished, she could not help but smile when, a moment later, she discovered that he had simply fallen noiselessly to the ground where, however, he made no effort to flatten himself, but trusting to the height of the shrubs and the thickness of the evening to shield him, he rested his head upon his hand and, lying at ease there, addressed her in a measured and cautious voice.
She did not hear what he said, but watched the cow-puncher out of sight toward the house, and then she sighed as she looked back to the stranger.
“That was a narrow escape,” she told him.
“No,” he answered, “a man like that fellow sees nothing until it has been pointed out to him. A horse has been skinned up a bit in some barbed wire, and now he’s running with his mouth open to tell the news to your father who will light another cigar and tell him that he never thinks about horses or any other part of the ranch after dinner.”
She cried out beneath her breath; for it was exactly what her father would have said under such circumstances.
“How can you know him so?”
“I spent an evening watching him through the window of his library a few days ago. It was easy to read his lips.”
She knew that he meant a “mind” instead of “lips,” and she flushed a little; she wanted to say something in defense of her poor father, but then she controlled herself and wondered still more that this wild man should have made her feel apologetic for any member of her own family. Yet how clear it was that at a glance he had pierced to the fatuous heart of the rich rancher! How had he looked into herself, she wondered? She looked down to him with a new curiosity.
He had rolled upon his back, and, having plucked a small yellow flower from the lawn — in the dim evening she could only make out its color — he was touching it to his nostrils in order to perceive the delicate scent from the blossom; and this he enjoyed with his eyes closed and a smile of satisfaction on his lips. Plainly she was not within a thousand miles of his thoughts! A wretched sense of loneliness came upon Rose Kenworthy and in spite of the wide outlines of her father’s house spreading against the sky, she felt abandoned and friendless in the world. The sight of the ranch-house roof reminded her for what purpose she had come into the garden this evening; and suddenly the thought of marrying young Glenhollen was utterly abhorrent.
“But the questions?” asked the man of the forest, snapping the yellow head from the flower and tossing it away. “This is the time to answer them all; I have promised you that.”
She rested her elbows on her knees and brooded above him.
“Talking would never do. Talking could never teach me what I want to know; for it seems to me that you hardly know yourself — you’re simply wandering along, keeping your eyes wide open to some things and closing them fast to the rest.”
“Ah?” said he, and sat up. “To what do I close them?”
“To facts of all kinds — such as this: that you have to leave your fashion of life before long.”
“Why?”
“Before you grow old, for one thing. When the animals grow stiff and can’t kill, they live on roots for a while, and then they starve to death. Isn’t that true?”
He shivered, and his eyes grew so large with melancholy that it seemed he had never thought of this before.
“You are putting the poison in the cup,” he told her gloomily. “But women don’t like to see men leave the beaten path. It’s an alarming symptom when a man is able to live happily all by himself. Suppose that the fever were to spread!”
She wondered why she was not offended by that frank speech; but now as he sprang to his feet and leaned against the tree, she saw that she had truly stung him to the quick with her suggestion.
“I have kept my word and come back,” he said shortly, “but since you have no questions — adieu!”
“Wait!” she commanded.
He paused, fairly on tiptoe with eagerness to be off. To the girl, it seemed that if he left her now, half the happiness of life would be torn from her. What she expected from him she herself could not say; she knew she was fascinated, but could not say why. It was as though this stranger possessed a key to a mystery worth all treasure to be known.
“Instead of all the questions,” she said at last, “I’ve decided on one thing: Let me see you work on a trail at night; let me inside your life from a midnight to a morning.”
He frowned, and then he shook his head; but when she insisted, he pointed out to her gravely that it was a thing which could not be done far more for her own sake than for his. To let her hunt beside him for one night was nothing to him, but for her to come out from her home and remain away during so many secret hours might start an endless amount of gossip, if her absence were known. It was like trying to persuade the free wind not to blow; she brushed these petty objections away from her. No one would find out her absence, and if they did, she could tell that she had gone out for a walk on account of sleeplessness.
“There is some other reason that makes you want me to stay away,” she told him frankly. “There is something that has to do with you. But if you think that I cannot keep on the trail or that I�
��ll spoil your hunting”
He came back to her, at that, and sat on a mossy boulder, looking far past her to where the twilight was still living on the snows of the peaks, though the hollow was long since dead and dark.
“See what you are doing,” he said gloomily. “I had made a free life for myself, doing harm to no one. If I give nothing to the world, at least I take nothing from it. Every day has begun with the midafternoon and ended with the morning, and if each day brought me a sound sleep, I was contented. I have learned to be happy on one meal a day — on eating once in forty-eight hours, even; and yet the winning of that food has been enough to make a reward for two days of hunting. See how complete I have been, not because I had a great deal, but because I wanted nothing except what a beggar would sneer at.
“Oh, I have known there are other things that other men live for and die for, but I have locked them all away; I have never been lonely because I have never allowed myself to have friends. I have shunned the very faces of men lest I should ever be hungry to see them. And there’s no famine like the want of company, you know. It makes criminals come back to the place of the old home, where they know there is danger for them! And now,” said the man of the wilderness, “you push open the door of my privacy and look in on me; but how can you tell that, having looked in on me once, I shall not suddenly stop in the middle of a trail and wish to see you again; that I may come back from a camp fire yonder” and he pointed to the snowy crags above them, “and run down the slopes to find you, and find you gone?”
He stood up before her.
“If I see you again,” he said, with the faintest of smiles, “I may be cursed with a desire to have you for a friend. That is why I never wish to put eyes on you again.”
She considered him gravely, with just a touch of warmth in her face as she understood the singular nature of this compliment. Then she shook her head.
“You don’t play fair,” she assured him. “When you started to play the wild man, you guaranteed never to let the world in to peek at you; but now that I’ve found you it’s only right that you pay the penalty.”
She stood up in turn. “I’m going down to that hollow in the woods where I first found you. I’m leaving the house at midnight. Will you be waiting for me there?”
He did not return any answer more than a small gesture of surrender; and she turned from him and went back up the path toward the house.
XVI. THE WHISPERER’S TRAIL
THERE IS ONLY one thing which can make two-handed poker exciting, and that is the presence of large stakes; but Jerry Monson and Montague were playing for matches. Not that they were short of money, but Monson, big, bland, and good-natured, had long ago discovered that his companion’s irascible temper always grew white hot when he lost at cards, and therefore he steadfastly refused to play for money with Joe Montague. Perhaps it was owing to this diplomatic procedure more than anything else that they had remained friends for so long a time. For Joe, though his brimming spirits made him friends everywhere, lost them even faster than he made them, owing to his devilish temper.
So they shuffled and dealt and won and lost; but it made little difference how much the store of matches on one side of the board were diminished, since there were other boxes from which the heaps could be replenished. He who remained in possession of the greater number would, when the game was finished, be condemned to cut the wood and cook the breakfast for the following morning.
Even this small penalty was sufficiently heavy to make Montague lose all patience, and he began to show a heightened color as the game proceeded, and hand after hand turned against him. He was beginning to make sarcastic remarks about the success of his friend, so that Monson, who knew the other like a book, suddenly declared that had had enough of the stupid game and preferred to toss a coin for the onerous task of wood-chopping on the next day.
The coin was tossed; and Monson, as he planned, lost. He pocketed that damage with a shrug of his broad shoulders and then, with a yawn, contemplated his blankets. In the long run, he would always win a more substantial stake from his impulsive and more generous friend; and what skill could not accomplish, persuasion would. Moreover, in case of need, the snaky skill of Montague in the wielding of weapons was a resource worth whole treasures.
Monson had hung up his gun belt; he had drawn off one boot and laid his hands on the other, and Montague was in a similar defenseless condition, when the door sagged suddenly wide and there appeared in the opening no other than Stew Morrison, with his great beak of a nose crimsoned from riding through the night wind, and his tiny eyes twinkling like the eyes of a bird. Moreover, in his immense hands, as reddened about the knuckles as his nose, he bore two big Colts, and directed one of each against the inhabitants of the shack.
They pushed their hands reluctantly above their heads, fighting against the temptation to make a sudden reach for their own guns or perhaps by a sudden motion overturn the stool upon which the smoky lantern was now resting. But they decided that to take a chance against such a known man as Morrison would be foolish in the extreme. So their hands went above their heads. Montague, more ready witted than his friend, gave the other the cue as to their line of talk.
“Look here, Morrison,” he said, to the tall man, “ain’t you been playing in luck, lately? Getting low in funds and have to turn in for this trade?”
Morrison bade them keep their hands above their heads and face the wall, standing side by side, and when they had obeyed he went over them carefully, took away their knives, and finding that they carried no other weapons, he allowed them to lower their hands and sit at ease.
“I got low enough,” he told them then, answering the first question. “I turned in for a hard job, boys, but I didn’t know that it would lead me to your way. You been raising a bit of hell, lately, ain’t you?”
They carefully avoided looking into one another’s faces.
“If there’s any hell to be raised mucking in an old hole in the ground such as we got to call a gold mine,” said Montague with a sigh, “you’re welcome to the name, Morrison.”
He looked behind.
Morrison nodded. “Been breaking ground hard, boys?”
“Pretty steady,” they told him.
“I visited around at the drift and lighted a match, a few minutes back, to see how things was getting on. Didn’t seem to me like you’d been walking very deep into the innards of the old mountain, boys.”
“Quartzite ain’t sandstone,” Monson told him.
“And your hands, Joe,” continued Stew Morrison, “don’t look like you’d been raising many blisters with a double jack, lately.”
“What’s up?” asked Montague abruptly. “What are you drifting toward with all this talk, Morrison?”
“I aim to guess that you gents know, well enough.”
“I ain’t a bit of use at puzzles.”
“Well, it looks to me like you boys ain’t been making a living out of the mine for the past year.”
“It’s sure soaked up a lot of labor and gave us mighty little back,” admitted Monson.
“You all had bank accounts to live on, I s’pose,” said Morrison with all soberness.
“Not a penny,” put in Montague eagerly, lest his companion should make a slip. “But we had a run of luck at the cards. Eh?”
He turned to his friend, and the latter nodded, brightening as he saw a way out of the difficulty.
“Luck at cards is a new thing for you,” Morrison said to the spokesman. “Well, boys, I’m mighty glad that I happened onto you here.” He almost smiled upon them as he spoke.
“What d’you mean?” asked Monson, now tormented by anxiety and by the yawning mouth of the revolver which gaped toward him.
“You couldn’t guess,” Morrison told them dryly. “You’d be mighty surprised, for instance, if I was to tell you that I wanted to know what you boys had been doing on Mackerel Mountain, a little while ago.”
When such a blow is dealt, it is more than mortal nerves can
endure perfectly; Monson withstood the shock well enough, but Montague, high-strung as a hair trigger, allowed his eyes to shift for a fraction of a second to his gun upon the wall. Then, realizing that his glance might have betrayed him, he turned pale; and having turned pale he realized that this pallor was eloquent, and grew as flaming red in an instant. He set his jaw as he glared at his tormentor.
“What in the devil is old Mackerel to Monsonor to me, leastwise?” he demanded.
The man hunter juggled the guns softly in his hands, and his little birdlike eyes bored into them.
“They’s a dead man on the mountain,” he told them soberly.
Again the blow told, and he followed it quickly with a third.
“I’ve just jogged down here to ask you boys what you might know about The Whisperer, you see?”
Montague was paralyzed, but the slow-thinking Monson now sprang to his feet.
“In the name of Heaven, Morrison, what d’you mean?”
“In the name of the devil,” remarked the tall man, “I mean just what I say.”
“The Whisperer? How should I know anything about him?”
“Sit down, Jerry. They ain’t any hurry to say it at once. I just want a couple of parcels of news. I think that you boys can tell me” He paused.
“Nothing,” said Montague. “There’s nothing to say, if you want stuff on The Whisperer.”
“Feelings are running pretty high, right now,” went on the man hunter, apparently breaking off at a tangent from his former course of conversation. But he came back to it at once. “If the pair of you was to be stuck in jail and the news was to get around that you belonged to The Whisperer’s gang, I dunno what the boys in town would be apt to do.”