The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  The girl went off and cried, and called Mrs. Singleton Corey a stuck-up old hen who would freeze—and serve her right. She even hoped that Mrs. Singleton Corey would get stuck in a snowdrift and have to walk every step of the way to Toll-Gate. Leaving her breakfast when it was all on the table, just as if it would hurt her to eat in the same room with people, and then acting like that to a person! She wished she had let the old catamaran spoil her skirt; and so on.

  Mrs. Singleton Corey never troubled herself over the impression she made upon the servant class. She regretted the publicity that seemed to have been given her arrival and her further journey into the hills. It annoyed her to have the girl calling her Mrs. Corey so easily; it seemed to imply an intimate acquaintance with her errand which was disquieting in the extreme. Was it possible that the Humphrey woman had been talking to outsiders? Or had the police really gotten upon the trail of Jack?

  She hurried into her warmest things, drank the coffee because it would stimulate her for the terrible journey ahead of her, and went down to find the four-horse team waiting outside, tails whipping between shivering hind legs, hips drawn down as for a lunge forward, heads tossing impatiently. The red-faced driver was bundled to his eyes and did not say a word while he tucked the robes snugly down around her feet.

  The snow was driving up the street in a steady wind, but Mrs. Singleton Corey faced it undauntedly. She saw the white-veiled plaza upon one side, the row of little stores huddled behind bare trees upon the other side. It seemed a neat little town, a curiously placid little town to be so buffeted by the storm. Behind it the mountain loomed, a dark blur in the gray-white world. Beautiful, yes; but Mrs. Singleton Corey was not looking for beauty that day. She was a mother, and she was looking for her boy.

  Two men, with two long-handled shovels, ran out from a little store halfway down the street and, still running, threw themselves into the back of the sleigh.

  “Better go back and get another shovel,” the driver advised them, pulling up. “I forgot mine. Anything they want me to haul up? Where’s them blankets? And say, Hank, you better go into the drugstore and get a bottle of the best liquor they’ve got. Brandy.”

  “I’ve got a bottle of rye,” the man standing behind Mrs. Singleton Corey volunteered. “Stop at the Forest Service, will you? They’ve got the blankets there. We can get another shovel from them.”

  The driver spoke to his leaders, and they went on, trotting briskly into the wind. Blurred outlines of cottages showed upon either hand. Before one of these they stopped, and a young man came out with a roll of canvas-covered bedding balanced upon his bent shoulders. Hank climbed down, went in and got a shovel.

  “Ain’t heard anything more?” questioned the driver, in the tone one involuntarily gives to tragedy.

  The young man dumped his burden into the back of the sleigh and shook his head. “Our men are going to stay up there till they find her,” he said. “There’s a sack of grub I wish you’d take along.”

  He glanced at Mrs. Singleton Corey, whose dark eyes were staring at him through her veil, and ran back into the house. Running so, with his back turned, his body had a swing like Jack’s, and her throat ached with a sudden impulse toward weeping.

  He was back in a minute with a knobby sack of something very heavy, that rattled dully when he threw it in. “All right,” he called. “Hope yuh make it, all right.”

  “Sure, we’ll make it! May have to shovel some—”

  Again they started, and there were no more stops. They swung down a straight bit of road where the wind swept bitterly and the hills had drawn back farther into the blur. They drew near to one that slowly disclosed snow-matted pine trees upon a hillside; skirted this and ploughed along its foot for half a mile or so and then turned out again into a broad, level valley. Now the mountains were more than ever blurred and indistinct, receding into the distance.

  “Do we not go into the mountains?” Mrs. Singleton Corey laid aside her aloofness to ask, when the valley seemed to stretch endlessly before them.

  “Sure. We’ll strike ’em pretty soon now. Looks a long ways, on account of the storm. You any relation to the girl that’s lost?”

  “I do not know her at all.” But trouble was slowly thawing the humanity in Mrs. Singleton Corey, and she softened the rebuff a little. “It must be a terrible thing to be lost in these mountains.”

  “Far as I’m concerned,” spoke up Hank from behind them, ‘they’re either two of ’em lost, or there ain’t anybody lost. I’ve got it figured that either she’s at the camp of that feller that’s stayin’ up there somewheres around Taylor Rock, or else the feller’s lost too. I’ll bet they’re together, wherever they be.”

  “What feller’s that, Hank?” the driver twisted his head in his muffled collar.

  “Feller that had the lookout on Mount Hough las’ summer. He’s hidin’ out up there somewheres. Him an’ the girl used to meet—I know that fer sure. Uh course I ain’t sayin’ anything—but they’s two lost er none, you take it from me.”

  The driver grunted and seemed to meditate upon the matter. “What did that perfessor wade clear down to Marston through the storm for, and report her lost, if she ain’t lost?”

  “He come down to see if she’d took the train las’ night. That’s what he come for. She’d went off somewheres before noon, and didn’t show up no more. He didn’t think she was lost, till Morton told him she hadn’t showed up to take no train. That’s when the perfessor got scared and phoned in.”

  The driver grunted again, and called upon his leaders to shake a leg—they’d have walking enough and plenty when they hit the hill, he said. Again they neared the valley’s rim, so that pine trees with every branch sagging under its load of snow, fringed the background. Like a pastel of a storm among hills that she had at home, thought Mrs. Singleton Corey irrelevantly. But was it Jack whom the man called Hank referred to? The thought chilled her.

  “What’s he hidin’ out for, Hank? Funny I never heard anything about it.” The driver spoke after another season of cogitation, and Mrs. Singleton Corey was grateful to him for seeking the information she needed.

  “Well, I dunno what fur, but it stands to reason he’s on the dodge. All summer long he never showed up in Quincy when he was relieved. Stayed out in the hills—and that ain’t natural for a young city feller, is it? ’N’ then he was ornery as sin. Got so’t I wouldn’t pack grub up to him no more. I couldn’t go ’im, the way he acted when a feller come around. ’N’ then when they closed up the station, he made camp up there somewheres around Taylor Rock, and he ain’t never showed his nose in town. If I knowed what fur, I might ’a’ did something about it. They’s a nigger in the woodpile somewheres, you take it from me.”

  “Well, but that ain’t got anything to do with the girl,” the driver contested stubbornly. “I know her—she’s a mighty fine girl, too; and good-looking as they make ’em. I hauled their stuff up last summer—and them, too. They seem like nice enough folks, all of ’em. And I saw her pretty near every time I hauled tourists up to the lake.”

  Hank chuckled to himself. “Well, I guess I know ’er, too, mebby a little better’n what you do. I ain’t saying anything ag’inst the girl. I say she was in the habit of meeting this feller—Johnny Carew’s the name he went by—meetin’ him out around different places. They knowed each other, that’s what I’m sayin’. And the way I figure, she’d went out to meet him, and either the two of ’em’s lost, er else they’re both storm-stayed up at his camp. She’s mebby home by this time. I look for ’er to be, myself.”

  “You do, hey?” The driver twisted his head again to look back at Hank. “What yuh going up to help hunt her for, then?”

  “Me, I’m just goin’ fur the ride,” Hank grinned.

  They overtook Murphy, plodding along in the horse-trampled, deep snow, with a big, black hat pulled down to his ears, an empty gunny sack over his shoulders like a cape, a quart bottle sticking out of each coat pocket. They took him into the sleigh and
went on, through another half mile of lane.

  After that they began abruptly to climb through pine forest. In a little they crossed the railroad at the end of a cut through the mountain’s great toe. Dismal enough it looked under its heavy blanket of snow that lay smoothly over ties and rails, the telegraph wires sagging, white ropes of snow. Mrs. Singleton Corey glanced down the desolate length of it and shivered.

  After that the four horses straightened their backs to steady, laborious climbing up a narrow road arched over with naked oak trees set amongst pines. Here, too, the deep snow was trampled with the passing of horses—the searching party, she knew without being told. The driver spoke to the two behind him, after a ten-minute silence against the heavy background of roaring overhead.

  “Know that first turn, up ahead here? If we don’t have to shovel through, we’ll be lucky.”

  From the back of the sleigh where he was sitting flat, Murphy spoke suddenly. “A-ah, an’ av ye don’t have to saw yer trail through a down tree, ye’ll be luckier sthill, I dunno. An’ it’s likely there ain’t a saw in the hull outfit!” He spat into the storm and added grimly, “An’ how ye’re to git the shled around a three-fut tree, I dunno.”

  “Sure takes you to think up bad luck, Murph,” Hank retorted. “We ain’t struck any down timber so fur.”

  “An’ ye ain’t there yet, neither—not be four mile ye ain’t.”

  Mrs. Singleton Corey, wrapped in her furs, with snow packing full every fold and wrinkle of her clothing left uncovered by the robe, did not hear the aimless argument that followed between Hank and Murphy. The sonorous shwoo-oosh of the wind-tormented pine tops surged through the very soul of her, the diapason accompaniment to the miserere of motherhood. Somewhere on this wild mountainside was Jack, huddled from the wind in a cave, or wandering miserably through the storm. Wrapped in soft luxury all her life, Mrs. Singleton Corey shuddered as she looked forth through her silken veil, and saw what Jack was enduring because she had never taught her son to love her; because she had not taught him the lessons of love and trust and obedience.

  Of the girl who was lost she scarcely thought. Jack was out here in the cold and the snow and the roaring wind; homeless because she had driven him forth with her coldness; friendless because she had not given him the precious friendship of a mother. Her own son, fearing his mother so much that he was hiding away from her among these terrible, mourning, roaring forests! Behind her veil, her delicately powdered cheeks showed moist lines where the tears of hungry motherhood slid swiftly down from eyes as brown as Jack’s and as direct in their gaze, but blurred now and filled with a terrible yearning.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  GRIEF, AND HOPE THAT DIED HARD

  During the months when she had hidden her shame in a sanitarium, Mrs. Singleton Corey first learned how it felt to be unsatisfied with herself. Had learned, too, what it meant to have her life emptied of Jack’s roisterous personality. She had learned to doubt the infallibility of her own judgments, the justice of her own viewpoints. She had attained a clarity of vision that enabled her to see herself a failure where she had taken it for granted that she was a success. She had failed as a mother. She had not taught her son to trust her, to love her—and she had discovered how much she craved his love and his trust.

  Now she was learning other things. For the first time in her sheltered life Mrs. Singleton Corey knew what it meant to be cold; bitterly cold—cold to the middle of her bones. As Murphy had predicted, a tree had fallen across the trail, so close to their passing that they had heard the crash of it and had come up to see the branches still quivering from the impact. Before then Mrs. Singleton Corey had learned the feel of biting cold, when she waited on a bald nose of the hill while three shovels lifted the snow out of the road so that they could go on. Her unaccustomed ears had learned the sound of able-bodied swearing because the horseman had taken a short-cut over the hill and so had not broken the trail here for the team.

  Then, because the driver had not prepared for the emergency of fallen trees—rather, because the labor of removing a section would have been too long even if they had brought axes and a cross-cut saw—she learned how it felt to be plodding through snow to her aristocratic knees. She had to walk a mile and a half to reach Toll-Gate cabin, which was the only shelter on the mountainside, save the cabin of Murphy and Mike, which was out of the question. She had to walk, since she declined to ride one of the horses bareback; so she was tired, for the first time in her pampered life, and she knew that always before then she had merely played at being tired.

  The driver, being unable to go farther with the sleigh, and having a merciful regard for his four horses, turned back when the men had lifted the sleigh around so that it faced townward. So Mrs. Singleton Corey had the novel experience of walking with the assistance of Murphy, whose hands were eager to help the lady, whose tongue was eager to while away the wearisome journey with friendly converse, whose breath was odorous of bad whisky. The other two men went ahead with the blankets and the gunny-sack of supplies, and broke trail for Murphy and the lady whose mission remained altogether a mystery, whose manner was altogether discouraging to curiosity.

  Those of us who have never experienced hardships, never plumbed the black depths of trouble, never suffered desperate anguish, are too prone to belittle the suffering of others. Mrs. Singleton Corey had always secretly believed that suffering meant merely a certain bearable degree of discomfort. In exalted moments she had contemplated simple living as a desirable thing, good to purge one’s soul of trivialities. Life in the raw was picturesque.

  She changed her mind with a suddenness that was painful when she tottered thankfully into Toll-Gate cabin and found the main room unswept and with the breakfast dishes cold and cluttered upon the rough, homemade table. And Kate crying on a couch in the other room, close enough to the heating stove so that she could keep the fire up without putting her injured foot to the floor. She did not know this disheveled woman with swollen eyes and a soiled breakfast cap and an ugly bathrobe and one foot bandaged like a caricature of a gouty member of plutocracy. The Kate Humphrey she hazily remembered had been a careful product of refinement, attired in a black lace evening gown and wearing very good imitation pearls.

  But Mrs. Singleton Corey gave no more than one glance at Kate, who hurriedly pulled her bathrobe together and made a half-hearted attempt to rise and greet her properly. The stove looked like a glimpse of paradise, and Mrs. Singleton Corey pulled up a straight-backed chair and sat down with a groan of thankfulness, pulling her snow-sodden skirts up above her shoetops to let a little warmth reach her patrician limbs. She fumbled at the buttons of her coat and threw it open, laid a palm eloquently upon her aching side and groaned again.

  But the dauntless Mrs. Singleton Corey could not for long permit her spirit to be subdued, especially since she had not yet found Jack.

  “Well, can you get word to my son that I am here and should like to see him?” she asked, as soon as the chill had left her a little. “This is a terrible storm,” she added politely.

  Even when Kate had explained how impossible it was to get word to any one just then, Mrs. Singleton Corey refused to yield one bit of her composure to the anxiety that filled her. She simply sat and looked at poor Kate like the chairman of a ways-and-means committee who is waiting to hear all the reports.

  “You think, then, that the young woman went to meet Jack?”

  “I know she did. She was furious because I had not concealed the fact of his being here, but I felt that I owed it—”

  “Yes, to be sure. And where would she be most likely to meet him? Do you know?”

  “I know where she did meet him,” Kate retorted with an edge to her voice. “She couldn’t have gotten lost, though, if she had gone there. It is close to the road you traveled. Doug—Professor Harrison has led a party up where Marion said Jack had his cave. If they are there, we shall know it as soon as they come back.”

  “Yes, certainly. And if they are not
there?” Mrs. Singleton Corey held her voice firm though the heart within her trembled at the terrible possibility.

  “Well—she didn’t take the train, we know that positively. She must be up there with Jack!”

  Mrs. Singleton Corey knew very well that Kate was merely propping her hope with the statement, but she was glad enough to accept the prop for her own hopes. So they talked desultorily and with that arms-length amiability which is the small currency of polite conversation between two strange women, and Mrs. Singleton Corey laid aside her dignity with her fur-lined coat, and made tea for them—since Kate could not walk.

  Late in the afternoon men began to straggle into the cabin, fagged and with no news of Marion. The professor was brought back so exhausted that he could not walk without assistance, and talked incoherently of being shot at, up near the peak, and of being unable to reach Taylor Rock on account of the furious wind and the deep drifts.

  Hank Brown declared that he could make it in the morning, and one or two others volunteered to go with him. It began to seem more and more likely that Marion was up there and compelled by the storm to stay, in whatever poor refuge Jack might have. It seemed useless to make any further attempt at hiding Jack’s identity and whereabouts, although Mrs. Singleton Corey, with a warning glance at Kate and a few carefully constructed sentences, managed to convey the impression that Jack had been hiding away from her, after a quarrel between them which had proved merely a misunderstanding. She was vastly relieved to see that her explanation was accepted, and to know that if Quincy had ever heard of the auto-bandit affair, it had forgotten all about it long ago.