Hidden Creek Part 32

Miss Blake gave her a stealthy and cunning look. "Take my gun, then"--her voice rose to a key that was both crafty and triumphant--"and much good it will do you! There's shot enough to kill one if you are a first-rate shot. I lost what was left of my ammunition the day I hurt my ankle. The new stuff is down at the post-office by now, I guess."

The long silence was filled by the shifting of the dog-watch outside the door.

"We must chain them up at any cost," said Sheila. Her lips were dry and felt cold to her tongue.

"Go out and do it, then." The mistress of the house leaned back and crossed her ankles.

"Miss Blake, be reasonable. You have a great deal of control over the dogs and I have none. I _am_ afraid of them and they will know it.

Animals always know when you're afraid..." Again she managed a smile.

"I shall begin to think you are a coward," she said.

At that Miss Blake stood up from her chair. Her face was red with a violent rush of blood and the sparks in her eyes seemed to have broken into flame.

"Very good, Miss," she said brutally. "I'll go out and chain 'em up and then I'll come back and thrash you to a frazzle. Then you'll know how to obey my orders next time."

She caught up her whip, swung it in her hand, and strode to the door.

"And mind you, Sheila, you won't be able to hide yourself from me. Nor make a getaway. I'll lock this door outside and winter's locked the other. You wait. You'll see what you'll get for calling me a coward. Your friend Berg's gone off on a long hunt ... he's left his friends outside there and he's left you.... Understand?"

She shouted roughly to the dogs, snapped her whip, threw open the door, and stepped out boldly. She shut the door behind her and shot a bolt. It creaked as though it had grown rusty with disuse.

In the stillness--for, except for a quick shuffling of paws, there was no sound at first--Sheila chose her weapon of defense. She took down from its place the Eskimo ivory spear, and, holding it short in her hand, she put herself behind the great elk-horn chair. Her Celtic blood was pounding gloriously now. She was not afraid; though if there had been time to notice it, she would have confessed to an abysmal sense of horror and despair. And again she wondered at her own loneliness and youth and the astounding danger that she faced. Yes, it was more astonishment than any other emotion that possessed her consciousness. The horror was below the threshold practicing its part.

Then anger, astonishment, horror itself were suddenly thrown out of her.

She was left like an empty vessel waiting to be filled with fear. Miss Blake had cried aloud, "Help, Sheila! Help!" This was followed by a dreadful screaming. Sheila dropped her spear and leapt to the door. On it, outside, Miss Blake beat and screamed, "Open, for G.o.d's sake!"

Sheila shouted in as dreadful a key. "On your side--the bolt! Miss Blake--the bolt!"

Fingers clawed at the bolt, but it would not slip. Through all the horrible sounds the woman made, Sheila could hear the snarling and leaping and snapping of the dogs. She dashed to the small, tight window, broke a pane with her fist, and thrust out her arm. She meant to reach the bolt, but what she saw took the warm life out of her. Miss Blake had gone down under the whirling, s...o...b..ring pack. The screaming had stopped.

In that one awful look the poor child saw that no human help could save.

She dropped down on the floor and lay there moaning, her hands pressed over her ears....

So she lay, shuddering and gasping, the great part of the night. At last the intense cold drove her to the fire. She heaped up the logs high and hung close above them. Her very heart was cold. Liquid ice moved sluggishly along her veins. The morning brought no comfort or courage to her, only a freshening of horror and of fear. The dogs had gone, and all the winter world lay still about the house.

She was shaken by a regular pulse of nervous sobbing. But, driven by a sort of restlessness, she made herself coffee and forced some food down her contracted throat. Then she put on her coat, took down Miss Blake's six-shooter and cartridge belt, and saw, with a slight relaxing of the cramp about her heart, that there were four shots in the chamber. Four shots and eight dogs, but--at least--she could save herself from _that_ death! She strapped the gun round her slim hips, filled her pockets with supplies--a box of dried raisins, some hard bread, a cake of chocolate, some matches--pulled her cap down over her ears, and took her snowshoes from the wall. With closed eyes she put her arm out through the broken pane, and, after a short struggle, slipped the rusty bolt. Then she went over to the door and, leaning against it, prayed. Even with the mysterious strength she drew from that sense of kinship with a superhuman Power, it was a long time before she could force herself to open. At last, with a big gasp, she flung the door wide, skirted the house, her hands against the logs, her eyes shut, ran across the open s.p.a.ce, scrambled up the drift, tied on her snowshoes, and fled away under the snow-laden pines. There moved in all the wilderness that day no more hunted and fearful a thing.

The fresh snow sunk a little under her webs, but she was a featherweight of girlhood, and made quicker and easier progress than would have been possible to any one else but a child. And her fear gave her both strength and speed. Sometimes she looked back over her shoulder; always she strained her ears for the pad of following feet. It was a day of rainbows and of diamond spray, where the sun struck the shaken snow sifted from overweighted branches. Sheila remembered well enough the route to the post-office. It meant miles of weary plodding, but she thought that she could do it before night. If not, she would travel by starlight and the wan reflection of the snow. There was no darkness in these clear, keen nights. She would not tell herself what gave her strength such impetus.

She thought resolutely of the post-office, of the old, friendly man, of his stove, of his chairs and his picture of the President, of his gun laid across two nails against his kitchen wall--all this, not more than eighteen miles away! And she thought of Hilliard, too; of his young strength and the bold young glitter of his eyes.

She stopped for a minute at noon to drink some water from Hidden Creek and to eat a bite or so of bread. She was pulling on her gloves again when a distant baying first reached her ears. She turned faint, seemed to stand in a mist; then, with her teeth set defiantly, she started again, faster and steadier, her body bent forward, her head turned back. Before her now lay a great stretch of undulating, unbroken white. At its farther edge the line of blue-black pines began again. She strained her steps to reach this shelter. The baying had been very faint and far away--it might have been sounded for some other hunting. She would make the woods, take off her webs, climb up into a tree and, perhaps, attracted by those four shots--no, three, she must save one--some trapper, some unimaginable wanderer in the winter forest, would come to her and rescue her before the end. So her mind twisted itself with hope. But, an hour later, with the pines not very far away, the baying rose so close behind that it stopped her heart. Twenty minutes had pa.s.sed when above a rise of ground she saw the s.h.a.ggy, trotting black-gray body of Brenda, the leader of the pack. She was running slowly, her nose close to the snow, casting a little right and left over the tracks. Sheila counted eight--Berg, then, had joined them. She thought that she could distinguish him in the rear.

It was now late afternoon, and the sun slanted driving back the shadows of the nearing trees, of Sheila, of the dogs. It all seemed fantastic--the weird beauty of the scene, the weird horror of it. Sheila reckoned the distance before her, reckoned the speed of the dogs. She knew now that there was no hope. Ahead of her rose a sharp, sudden slope--she could never make it. There came to her quite suddenly, like a gift, a complete release from fear. She stopped and wheeled. It seemed that the brutes had not yet seen her. They were nose down at the scent.

One by one they vanished in a little dip of ground, one by one they reappeared, two yards away. Sheila pulled out her gun, deliberately aimed and fired.

A spurt of snow showed that she had aimed short. But the loud, sudden report made Brenda swerve. All the dogs stopped and slunk together circling, their haunches lowered. Wreck squatted, threw up his head, and howled. Sheila spoke to them, clear and loud, her young voice ringing out into that loneliness.

"You Berg! Good dog! Come here."

One of the s.h.a.ggy animals moved toward her timidly, looking back, pausing. Brenda snarled.

"Berg, come here, boy!"

Sheila patted her knee. At this the big dog whined, cringed, and began to swarm up the slope toward her on his belly. His eyes shifted, the struggle of his mind was pitifully visible--pack-law, pack-power, the wolf-heart and the wolf-belly, and against them that queer hunger for the love and the touch of man. Sheila could not tell if it were hunger or loyalty that was creeping up to her in the body of the beast. She kept her gun leveled on him. When he had come to within two feet of her, he paused. Then, from behind him rose the starved baying of his brothers.

Sheila looked up. They were bounding toward her, all wolf these--but more dangerous after their taste of human blood than wolves--to the bristling hair along their backs and the bared fangs. Again she fired. This time she struck Wreck's paw. He lifted it and howled. She fired again. Brenda snapped sideways at her shoulder, but was not checked. There was one shot left. Sheila knew how it must be used. Quickly she turned the muzzle up toward her own head.

Then behind her came a sharp, loud explosion. Brenda leapt high into the air and fell at Sheila's feet. At that first rifle-shot, Berg fled with shadow swiftness through the trees. For the rest, it was as though a magic wall had stopped them, as though, at a certain point, they fell upon death. Crack, crack, crack--one after another, they came up, leapt, and dropped, choking and bleeding on the snow. At the end Sheila turned blindly. A yard behind her and slightly above her there under the pines stood Hilliard, very pale, his gun tucked under his arm, the smoking muzzle lowered. Weakly she felt her way up toward him, groping with her hands.

He slid down noiselessly on his long skis and she stood clinging to his arm, looking up dumbly into his strained face.

"I heard your shots," he said breathlessly. "You're within a hundred yards of my house.... For months I've been trying to make up my mind to come to you. G.o.d forgive me, Sheila, for not coming before!"

Swinging his gun on its strap across his shoulder, he lifted her in his arms, and, like a child, she was carried through the silence of the woods, all barred with blood-red glimmers from a setting sun.

CHAPTER XII

THE GOOD OLD WORLD AGAIN

Hilliard carried Sheila into the house that he had built for her and laid her down in that big bedroom that "got the morning sun." For a while it seemed to him that she would never open her eyes again, and when she did regain consciousness she was so prostrate with her long fear and the shock of Miss Blake's death that she lay there too weak to smile or speak, too weak almost to breathe. Hilliard turned nurse, a puzzled, anxious nurse. He would sit up in his living-room half the night, and when sleep overpowered his anxiety he would fall p.r.o.ne on the elk-hide rug before his fire.

At last Sheila pulled herself up and crept about the house. She spent a day in the big log chair before Hilliard's hearth, looking very wan, shrinking from speech, her soft mouth gray and drawn.

"Aren't you ever going to smile for me again?" he asked her, after a long half-hour during which he had stood as still as stone, his arm along the pine mantelshelf, looking at her from the shelter of a propping hand.

She lifted her face to him and made a pitiful effort enough. But it brought tears. They ran down her cheeks, and she leaned back and closed her lids, but the crystal drops forced themselves out, clung to her lashes, and fell down on her clenched hands. Hilliard went over to her and took the small, cold hands in both of his.

"Tell me about what happened, Sheila," he begged her. "It will help."

Word by difficult word, he still holding fast to her hands, she sobbed and gasped out her story, to which he listened with a whitening face. He gripped her hands tighter, then, toward the end, he rose with a sharp oath, lit his cigarette, paced to and fro.

"G.o.d!" he said at the last. "And she told you I had gone from the country! The devil! I can't help saying it, Sheila--she tortured you. She deserved what G.o.d sent her."

"Oh, no!"--Sheila rocked to and fro--"no one could deserve such dreadful terror and pain. She--she wasn't sane. I was--foolish to trust her ... I am so foolish--I think I must be too young or too stupid for--for all this. I thought the world would be a much safer place." She looked up again, and speech had given her tormented nerves relief, for her eyes were much more like her own, clear and young again. "Mr. Hilliard--what shall I do with my life, I wonder? I've lost my faith and trustingness.

I'm horribly afraid."

He stood before her and spoke in a gentle and reasonable tone. "I'll tell you the answer to that, ma'am," he said. "I've thought that all out while I've been taking care of you."

She waited anxiously with parted lips.

"Well, ma'am, you see--it's like this. I'm plumb ashamed of myself through and through for the way I have acted toward you. I was a fool to listen to that dern lunatic. She told me--lies about you."

"Miss Blake did?"

"Yes, ma'am." His face crimsoned under her look.

Sheila closed her eyes and frowned. A faint pink stole up into her face.

She lifted her lids again and he saw the brightness of anger. "And, of course, you took her lies for the truth?"