by B. M. Bower
Jack went so far as to pack everything he owned into his suitcase and carry it to the niche in the ledge. He would not stay and give her the satisfaction of sending the sheriff up there. He was a headlong youth, much given to hasty judgments. All that night he hated Marion Rose worse than he had ever hated any one in his life. He did not leave, however. He could not quite bring himself to the point of leaving while his beloved mountain was being scarred with fire. He knew that it was for the sake of having him there in just such an emergency as this fire that the government paid him a salary. Headlong as was his nature, there was in him the quality of being loyal to a trust. He could make all preparations for leaving—but until the fire was out and the forest safe for the time being, he could not go.
Then, quite early the next day, Marion herself came up the trail with three movie magazines and a loaf of bread that she had purloined from Kate’s makeshift pantry. On this day she was not so frivolous, but helpful and full of sympathy. Jack could not believe that she had told his secret to Kate; and because he could not believe it he asked her point blank whether Kate had come spying up there deliberately, and was vastly reassured by Marion’s vehement denial.
They worked out a heliograph code that day, and they planned an exploring trip to Taylor Rock the next time Jack was relieved. It seemed very important that Jack should have a picturesque hide-out there; a secret cave, perhaps, with a tilting rock to cover the doorway.
“It would be great,” declared Marion, clasping her hands together with her favorite ecstatic gesture. “If we could just find a cave with a spring away back in it, don’t you know, and a ledge outside where you could watch for enemies—wouldn’t that be keen? It makes me wish I had done something, so I had to hide out in the hills. And every day at a certain time, I can come up here where that hydrometer thing was before it burned, and signal to you. And we’ll find a place where I can leave magazines and things like that, and you can come and get them. Honestly, I’ve always wished I could be an outlaw—if I could be one without doing anything really bad, you know. I’d love having to live in a cave somewhere. You’re lucky, Jack—Johnny Carew—if you only knew it.”
“I do know it. I never found it out till today, though,” Jack told her with what he fancied was an enigmatic smile.
“Now listen. If you want me to help you enjoy being an outlaw, Jack Corey, you simply must cut out the sentimental stuff. Let me tell you how I feel about it. It’s nothing new to have men make love—any kind of a man will sit up and say ‘bow-wow’ if you snap your fingers at him. That’s deadly common. But here you are, a bandit and an outlaw without being bad or tough—I don’t think you are, anyway. You didn’t do such awful things to get in bad with the law, you see. But you’re hiding out just the same, with the police sleuthing around after you, and disowned by your mother and all, just like the real thing. Why, it’s a story in real life! And I want to live in that story, too, and help you just like a book heroine. I think we can make it awfully interesting, being real enough so it isn’t just make-believe. It’s keen, I tell you. But for once I want to see if a boy and a girl can’t cut out the love interest and be just good pals, like two boys together.” Marion got up and stood before him, plainly as ready to go as to stay. “If you’ll agree to that I’ll go and help you find your cave. Otherwise, I’ll go back to camp and stay there, and you can look after yourself.”
“Be calm! Be calm!” Jack pushed back his mop of hair and grinned derisively. “You should worry about any lovemaking from me. Take the bunch out at the beach, or at a dance, and I can rattle off the sentimental patter to beat the band. But it doesn’t seem to fit in up here—unless a fellow meant it honest-to-goodness. And I ain’t going to mean it, my dear girl. Not with you. I like you as a friend, but I fear I can never be more than a step-brother to you.” He pulled off a dead twig from the bush beside him, snapped it in two and flipped the pieces down the slope. “I’d look nice, making love to a girl, the fix I’m in!” he added with a savage bitterness that gave the lie to his smiling indifference. “A fellow ought to make sure his canoe is going to stay right side up before he asks a girl to step into it.”
“That’s all right then. It’s best to understand each other. Now, if I were you, I’d have things brought up here, a little at a time, that you’ll need for your secret camp. Groceries, you know, and things. You can make a place to keep them in till you get your vacation—and listen! When I go to town I can buy you things that would look queer if you sent for them. Towels and napkins and—”
Jack gave a whoop at that, though his ignorance of primitive living did not fall far short of hers. But in the main, he took her advice with praiseworthy gratitude. He had never expected to enjoy being an outlaw. But under the influence of her enthusiasm and his own youthfulness, he began to take a certain interest in the details of her scheme—to plan with her as though it was going to be merely a camping out for pleasure. That, of course, was the boy in him rising to the bait of a secret cave in the mountains, and exchanging heliograph signals with the heroine of the adventure, and lying upon a ledge before his cave watching for enemies. There would be the bears, too, that Hank Brown had said would be ambling up there to their winter quarters. And there would be the scream of the mountain lions—Jack had more than once heard them at night down in the forest below him, and had thrilled to the sound. He would stalk the shy deer and carry meat to his cave and broil the flesh over his tiny campfire—don’t tell me that the boy in any normal young man would not rise enthusiastically to that bait!
But there were other times, when Marion was not there; when Jack was alone with the stars and the dark bulk of the wooded slopes beneath him; times when the adventure paled and grew bleak before his soul, so that he shrank from it appalled. Times when he could not shut out the picture of the proud, stately Mrs. Singleton Corey, hiding humiliated and broken of spirit in a sanatorium, shamed before the world because he was her son. Not all the secret caves the mountains held could dull the pain of that thought when it assailed him in the dark stillness of the peak.
For Jack was her true offspring in pride, if no more. He had been a sensitive youngster who had resented passionately his mother’s slights upon his vague memory of the dad who had given him his adventurous spirit and his rebellion against the restraints of mere convention, which was his mother’s dearest god. Unknown to Mrs. Singleton Corey, he had ardently espoused the cause of his wandering dad, and had withdrawn his love from the arrogant lady-mother, who never once spoke affectionately of the man Jack loved. He had taken what money she gave him. It was his dad’s money, for his dad had suffered hardship to wrest it from the earth, in the mines that kept Mrs. Singleton Corey in soft, perfumed luxury. His dad would have wanted Jack to have it, so Jack took all she would give him and did not feel particularly grateful to her because she was fairly generous in giving.
But now the very pride that he had inherited from her turned upon him the savage weapons of memory. He had swift visions of his mother mounting the steps of some mansion, going graciously to make a fashionable ten-minute call upon some friend, while Jack played chauffeur for the occasion. She couldn’t go calling now on the Westlake millionaires’ wives, taunted memory. Neither could she preside at the club teas; nor invite forty or fifty twittery women into her big double parlors and queen it over them as Jack had so often seen her do. She could not do any of the things that had made up her life, and Jack was the reason why she could not do them.
He tried to shut out the picture of his mother, and there were times when for a few hours he succeeded. Those were the hours he spent with Marion or in watching for her to come, or in perfecting the details of the plan she had helped him to form. By the time he had his next four days of freedom, he had also a good-sized cache of food ready to carry to Grizzly Peak where his makeshift camping outfit was hidden. Marion had told him that when the fire-season was over and the lookout station closed for the winter, which would be when the first snow had come to stay, he ought to be ready
to disappear altogether from the ken of the Forest Service and all of the rest of Quincy.
“You can say you’re going prospecting,” she planned, “and then beat it to your cave and make it snug for the winter. Anything you must buy after that, you can tell me about it, and I’ll manage to get it and leave it for you at our secret meeting place. I don’t know how I’ll manage about Kate, but I’ll manage somehow—and that’ll be fun, too. Kate will be perfectly wild if she sees me doing mysterious things—but she won’t find out what it’s all about, and I’ll have more fun! I do love to badger her, poor thing. She’s a dear, really, you know. But she wants to know everything a person does and says and thinks; and she hasn’t any more imagination than a white rabbit, and so she wouldn’t understand if you told her every little thing.
“So I’ll have the time of my life doing it, but I’ll get things just the same, and leave them for you. And I’ll bring you reading—oh, have you put down candles, Jack? You’ll need a lot of them, so you can read evenings.”
“What’s the matter with pine knots?” Jack inquired. “Daniel Boone was great on pine-knot torches, if I remember right. One thing I wish you would do, Marion. I’ll give you the money to send for about a million Araby cigarettes. I’ll write down the address—where I always bought them. Think you could get by with it?
“You just watch me. Say, I do think this is going to be the best kind of a winter! I wouldn’t miss being up here for anything.”
Jack looked at her doubtfully, but he finally nodded his head in assent. “It could be worse,” he qualified optimistically.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
MURPHY HAS A HUMOROUS MOOD
Though Fred and the professor shouldered pick and shovel at sunrise every morning and laid them down thankfully at dusk every night, they could not hope to work out the assessment upon eight mining claims in a year. The professor was not a success as a pick-and-shovel man, though he did his best. He acquired a row of callouses on each hand and a chronic ache in his back, but beyond that he did not accomplish very much. Fred was really the brawn of the undertaking, and in a practical way he was the brains also. Fred saw at once that the task required more muscle than he and the professor could furnish, so he hired a couple of men and set them to work on the claims of the speculators.
Two little old Irishmen, these were; men who had dried down to pure muscle and bone as to their bodies, and to pure mining craft and tenacious memory for the details of their narrow lives as to brains. The mountains produce such men. In the barren plains country they would be called desert rats, but in the mountains they are called prospectors.
They set up their own camp half a mile down the creek, so that Kate and Marion seldom saw them. They did their own cooking and divided their work to suit themselves, and they did not charge as much for their labor as Fred charged the claim-owners for the work, so Fred considered that he had done very well in hiring them. He could turn his attention to his own claim and the claims of Marion and Kate, and let the professor peck away at a hole in the hillside where he vaguely hoped to find gold. Why not? People did, in these mountains. Why, nuggets of gold had been picked up in the main street of Quincy, so they told him. One man in town had solemnly assured him that all these hills were “lousy with gold”; and while the professor did not like the phrase, he did like the heartening assurance it bore to his wistful heart, and he began examining his twenty-acre claim with a new interest. Surely the early-day miners had not gleaned all the gold! Why, nearly every time he talked with any of the natives he heard of fresh strikes. Old prospectors like Murphy and Mike were always coming in town for supplies and then hurrying back to far canyons where they fully expected to become rich.
The professor got a book on mineralogy and read it faithfully. Certain points which he was not sure that he understood he memorized and meant to ask Murphy, who had a memory like a trap and had mined from Mexico to Alaska and from Montana to the sea.
Murphy poised his shovel, since he happened to be working, twinkled his eyes at the professor through thick, silver-rimmed glasses, and demanded: “For why do ye be readin’ a buke about it? For why don’t ye get down wit yer pick, man, and see what’s in the ground? My gorry, I been minin’ now for forty-wan year, ever sence I come from the auld country, an’ I never read no buke t’ see what I had in me claim. I got down inty the ground, an’ I seen for meself what I got there—an’ whin I found out, my gorry, I didn’t need no buke t’ tell me was she wort’ the powder I’d put inty ’er. An’ them that made their millions outy their mines, they didn’t go walkin’ around wit’ a buke in their hands! My gorry, they hired jackasses like me an’ Mike here t’ dig fer all they wanted t’ know about.
“And if ye want to find out what’s there in yer claim, I’d advise ye t’ throw away yer buke, young feller, an’ git busy wit’ yer two hands, an’ ye’ll be like t’ know a dom sight more than wit’ all yer readin’. An’ if ye like to bring me a sample of what ye git, I’ll be the wan t’ tell ye by sight what ye have, and I don’t need no buke t’ tell it by nayther.”
Whereat Mike, who was silly from being struck on the head with a railroad tie somewhere down the long trail of years behind him, gulped his lean Adam’s apple into a laugh, and began to gobble a long, rambling tale about a feller he knew once in Minnesota who could locate mines with a crooked stick, and wherever he pinted the stick you could dig.…
Murphy sat down upon him then—figuratively speaking—and reminded Mike that they were not talking about crooked sticks ner no kind of sticks, ner they didn’t give a dom what happened in Minnesota fifty year ago—if it ever had happened, which Murphy doubted. So Mike left his story in the middle and went off to the water jug under a stubby cedar, walking bowlegged and swinging his arms limply, palms turned backward, and muttering to himself as he went.
“A-ah, there goes a liar if ever there was one—him and his crooked sthick!” Murphy brought out a plug of tobacco the length of his hand and pried off a corner with his teeth. “Mebby it was a railroad tie, I dunno, that give him the dint in his head where he should have brains—but I misdoubt me if iver there was more than the prospect of a hole there, and niver a color to pay fer the diggin’.” He looked at the professor and winked prodigiously, though Mike was out of earshot. “Him an’ his crooked sthick!” he snorted, nudging the professor with his elbow. “’S fer me, I’d a dom sight ruther go be yer buke, young feller—and more I cannot say than thot.”
The professor went back to his ledge on the hillside and began to peck away with his pick, getting a sample for Murphy to look at. He rather liked Murphy, who had addressed him as young feller—a term sweet to the ears of any man when he had passed forty-five and was still going. By George! an old miner like Murphy ought to know a fair prospect when he saw it! The professor hoped that he might really find gold on his claim. Gold would not lessen the timber value, and it would magnify the profits. They expected to make somewhere near six thousand dollars off each twenty acres; perhaps more, since they were noble trees and good, honest pine that brought the best price from the mills. Six thousand dollars was worth while, certainly; but think of the fortune if they could really find gold. He would have a more honest right to the claim, then. He wondered what Murphy thought of the shaft he was sinking over there, where Fred had perfunctorily broken through the leaf mold with a “prospect” hole, and had ordered Murphy and Mike to dig to bed-rock, and stop when they had the assessment work finished.
What Murphy thought of it Murphy was succinctly expressing just then to Mike, with an upward twinkle of his thick, convex glasses, and a contemptuous fling of his shovelful of dirt up over the rim of the hole.
“My gorry, I think this mine we’re workin’ on was located by the bake,” he chuckled. “Fer if not that, will ye tell me why else they want ’er opened up? There’s as much gold here as I’ve got in me pocket, an’ not a dom bit more.”
“Well, that man I knowed in Minnesota, he tuk a crooked sthick,” gobbled Mike, whose spe
ech, as well as his mind had been driven askew by the railroad tie; but Murphy impatiently shut him up again.
“A-ah, an’ that’s about as much as ye iver did know, I’m thinkin’, le’s have no more av yer crooked sthick. Hand me down that other pick, fer this wan is no sharper than me foot.”
He worked steadily after that, flinging up the moist soil with an asperated “a-ah” that punctuated regularly each heave of his shoulder muscles. In a little he climbed out and helped Mike rig a windlass over the hole. Mike pottered a good deal, and stood often staring vacantly, studying the next detail of their work. When he was not using them, his hands drooped helplessly at his sides, a sign of mental slackness never to be mistaken. He was willing, and what Murphy told him to do he did. But it was Murphy who did the hard work, who planned for them both.
Presently Mike went bowlegging to camp to start their dinner, and Murphy finished spiking the windlass to the platform on which it rested. He still whispered a sibilant “a-ah!” with every blow of the hammer, and the perspiration trickled down his seamed temples in little rivulets to his chin that looked smaller and weaker than it should because he had lost so many of his teeth and had a habit of pinching his lower jaw up against his upper.
The professor came back with his sample of rock—with a pocketful of samples—just as Murphy had finished and was wiping his thick glasses on a soiled, blue calico handkerchief with large white polka-dots on the border and little white polka-dots in the middle. He turned toward the professor inquiringly, warned by the scrunching footsteps that some one approached. But he was blind as a bat—so he declared—without his glasses, so he finished polishing them and placed them again before his bleared, powder-burned eyes before he knew who was coming.