The Forester's Daughter Part 17

Standing close beside him in the darkness, knowing that he was weary, wet, and ill, she permitted herself the expression of her love and pity.

Putting her arm about him, she drew his cheek against her own, saying: "Poor boy, your hands are cold as ice." She took them in her own warm clasp. "Oh, I wish we had never left the camp! What does it matter what people say?" Then she broke down and wailed. "I shall never forgive myself if you--" Her voice failed her.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SHE FOUND HERSELF CONFRONTED BY AN ENDLESS MAZE OF BLACKENED TREE-TRUNKS]

He bravely rea.s.sured her: "I'm not defeated, I'm just tired. That's all.

I can go on."

"But you are shaking."

"That is merely a nervous chill. I'm good for another hour. It's better to keep moving, anyhow."

She thrust her hand under his coat and laid it over his heart. "You are tired out," she said, and there was anguish in her voice. "Your heart is pounding terribly. You mustn't do any more climbing. And, hark, there's a wolf!"

He listened. "I hear him; but we are both armed. There's no danger from wild animals."

"Come!" she said, instantly recovering her natural resolution. "We can't stand here. The station can't be far away. We must go on."

VIII

THE OTHER GIRL

The girl's voice stirred the benumbed youth into action again, and he followed her mechanically. His slender stock of physical strength was almost gone, but his will remained unbroken. At every rough place she came back to him to support him, to hearten him, and so he crept on through the darkness, falling often, stumbling against the trees, slipping and sliding, till at last his guide, pitching down a sharp slope, came directly upon a wire fence.

"Glory be!" she called. "Here is a fence, and the cabin should be near, although I see no light. h.e.l.lo! Tony!"

No voice replied, and, keeping Wayland's hand, she felt her way along the fence till it revealed a gate; then she turned toward the roaring of the stream, which grew louder as they advanced. "The cabin is near the falls, that much I know," she a.s.sured him. Then a moment later she joyfully cried out: "Here it is!"

Out of the darkness a blacker, sharper shadow rose. Again she called, but no one answered. "The ranger is away," she exclaimed, in a voice of indignant alarm. "I do hope he left the door unlocked."

Too numb with fatigue, and too dazed by the darkness to offer any aid, Wayland waited--swaying unsteadily on his feet--while she tried the door.

It was bolted, and with but a moment's hesitation, she said: "It looks like a case of breaking and entering. I'll try a window." The windows, too, were securely fastened. After trying them all, she came back to where Wayland stood. "Tony didn't intend to have anybody pushing in," she decided. "But if the windows will not raise they will smash."

A crash of gla.s.s followed, and with a feeling that it was all part of a dream, Wayland waited while the girl made way through the broken sash into the dark interior. Her next utterance was a cry of joy: "Oh, but it's nice and warm in here! I can't open the door. You'll have to come in the same way I did."

He was too weak and too irresolute to respond immediately, and, reaching out, she took him by the arms and dragged him across the sill. Her strength seemed prodigious. A delicious warmth, a grateful dryness, a sense of shelter enfolded him like a garment. The place smelled deliciously of food, of fire, of tobacco.

Leading him toward the middle of the room, Berrie said: "Stand here till I strike a light."

As her match flamed up Norcross found himself in a rough-walled cabin, in which stood a square cook-stove, a rude table littered with dishes, and three stools made of slabs. It was all very rude; but it had all the value of a palace at the moment.

The girl's quick eye saw much else. She located an oil-lamp, some pine-wood, and a corner cupboard. In a few moments the lamp was lit, the stove refilled with fuel, and she was stripping Wayland's wet coat from his back, cheerily discoursing as she did so. "Here's one of Tony's old jackets, put that on while I see if I can't find some dry stockings for you. Sit right down here by the stove; put your feet in the oven. I'll have a fire in a jiffy. There, that's right. Now I'll start the coffee-pot." She soon found the coffee, but it was unground. "Wonder, where he keeps his coffee-mill." She rummaged about for a few minutes, then gave up the search. "Well, no matter, here's the coffee, and here's a hammer. One of the laws of the trail is this: If you can't do a thing one way, do it another."

She poured the coffee beans into an empty tomato-can and began to pound them with the end of the hammer handle, laughing at Wayland's look of wonder and admiration. "Necessity sure is the mother of invention out here. How do you feel by now? Isn't it nice to own a roof and four walls?

I'm going to close up that window as soon as I get the coffee started.

Are you warming up?"

"Oh yes, I'm all right now," he replied; but he didn't look it, and her own cheer was rather forced. He was in the grasp of a nervous chill, and she was deeply apprehensive of what the result of his exposure might be.

It seemed as if the coffee would never come to a boil.

"I depend on that to brace you up," she said.

After hanging a blanket over the broken window, she set out some cold meat and a half dozen baking-powder biscuits, which she found in the cupboard, and as soon as the coffee was ready she poured it for him; but she would not let him leave the fire. She brought his supper to him and sat beside him while he ate and drank.

"You must go right to bed," she urged, as she studied his weary eyes.

"You ought to sleep for twenty-four hours."

The hot, strong coffee revived him physically and brought back a little of his courage, and he said: "I'm ashamed to be such a weakling."

"Now hush," she commanded. "It's not your fault that you are weak. Now, while I am eating my supper you slip off your wet clothes and creep into Tony's bunk, and I'll fill one of these syrup-cans with hot water to put at your feet."

It was of no use for him to protest against her further care. She insisted, and while she ate he meekly carried out her instructions, and from the delicious warmth and security of his bed watched her moving about the stove till the shadows of the room became one with the dusky figures of his sleep.

A moment later something falling on the floor woke him with a start, and, looking up, he found the sun shining, and Berrie confronting him with anxious face. "Did I waken you?" she asked. "I'm awfully sorry. I'm trying to be extra quiet. I dropped a pan. How do you feel this _morning_?"

He pondered this question a moment. "Is it to-morrow or the next week?"

She laughed happily. "It's only the next day. Just keep where you are till the sun gets a little higher." She drew near and put a hand on his brow. "You don't feel feverish. Oh, I hope this trip hasn't set you back."

He laid his hands together, and then felt of his pulse. "I don't seem to have a temperature. I just feel lazy, limp and lazy; but I'm going to get up, if you'll just leave the room for a moment--"

"Don't try it now. Wait till you have had your breakfast. You'll feel stronger then."

He yielded again to the force of her will, and fell back into a luxurious drowse hearing the stove roar and the bacon sizzle in the pan. There was something primitive and broadly poetic in the girl's actions. Through the haze of the kitchen smoke she enlarged till she became the typical frontier wife, the G.o.ddess of the skillet and the coffee-pot, the consort of the pioneer, equally skilled with the rifle and the rolling-pin. How many millions of times had this scene been enacted on the long march of the borderman from the Susquehanna to the Bear Tooth Range?

Into his epic vision the pitiful absurdity of his own part in the play broke like a sad discord. "Of course, it is not my fault that I am a weakling," he argued. "Only it was foolish for me to thrust myself into this stern world. If I come safely out of this adventure I will go back to the sheltered places where I belong."

At this point came again the disturbing realization that this night of struggle, and the ministrations of his brave companion had involved him deeper in a mesh from which honorable escape was almost impossible. The ranger's cabin, so far from being an end of their compromising intimacy, had added and was still adding to the weight of evidence against them both. The presence of the ranger or the Supervisor himself could not now save Berea from the gossips.

She brought his breakfast to him, and sat beside him while he ate, chatting the while of their good fortune. "It is glorious outside, and I am sure daddy will get across to-day, and Tony is certain to turn up before noon. He probably went down to Coal City to get his mail."

"I must get up at once," he said, in a panic of fear and shame. "The Supervisor must not find me laid out on my back. Please leave me alone for a moment."

She went out, closing the door behind her, and as he crawled from his bed every muscle in his body seemed to cry out against being moved.

Nevertheless, he persisted, and at last succeeded in putting on his clothes, even his shoes--though he found tying the laces the hardest task of all--and he was at the wash-basin bathing his face and hands when Berrie hurriedly re-entered. "Some tourists are coming," she announced, in an excited tone. "A party of five or six people, a woman among them, is just coming down the slope. Now, who do you suppose it can be? It would be just our luck if it should turn out to be some one from the Mill."

He divined at once the reason for her dismay. The visit of a woman at this moment would not merely embarra.s.s them both, it would torture Berrie. "What is to be done?" he asked, roused to alertness.

"Nothing; all we can do is to stand pat and act as if we belonged here."

"Very well," he replied, moving stiffly toward the door. "Here's where I can be of some service. I am an excellent white liar."

As our hero crawled out into the brilliant sunshine some part of his courage came back to him. Though lame in every muscle, he was not ill.

That was the surprising thing. His head was clear, and his breath full and deep. "My lungs are all right," he said to himself. "I'm not going to collapse." And he looked round him with a new-born admiration of the wooded hills which rose in somber majesty on either side the roaring stream. "How different it all looks this morning," he said, remembering the deep blackness of the night.