The Freebooters of the Wilderness Part 8

"We can't take the wagon up yon Ridge trail--"

"No, but I can climb straight up and not mind the switch back, if you'll wait."

He muttered some commonplace about "true Westerner;" and, springing out, she had gone scrambling up the slope avoiding delay of the zig-zag by climbing almost straight.

Quizzically, the old man gazed after her; the first hundred feet were easy, a mossed slope with padded foot-hold. Then came steep ground slippery with pine needles; but the mountain laurel and ground juniper gave hand grip; and she swung herself up past the third tier of the switch back where the Ridge arose a rock face and trees with two notches and one blaze marked the lower bounds of the National Forests.

Here he saw her run along the bridle trail marked by one notch and one blaze: then, she was swinging over moraine slopes to the fifth bench of the trail. There she disappeared round a jut of rock--he remembered a mountain spring trickled out at this place bridged by spruce poles.

Then he noticed that the c.u.mulous clouds which had been flashing sheet lightning all afternoon, were ma.s.sing and darkening and lowering closer over the Valley, with zig-zag jags of live fire down to the ground and sounds more like the crack of a whip or splinter of wood than thunder.

The cliff swallows dipped almost to the gra.s.s; and the flowers were hanging their heads in miniature umbrellas. All the trembling poplars and cotton-woods seemed to be furled waiting. Then, the lower side of the slate clouds frayed in the edge of a sweepy garment to sheets and fringes of rain. A little tremor ran through the leaves. The horses laid back their ears.

"We'll get it," said the old man tightening the reins.

She had paused for breath round the b.u.t.tress of a gray crag when she noticed the churn of yeasty blackness blotting out the Valley and felt the hushed heat of the air. A jack rabbit went whipping past at long bounds. The last rasp of a jay's scold jangled out from the trees.

Then, she heard from the hushed Valley, the low flute trill of a blue bird's love song. Ever afterwards, either of those bird notes, the scurl of the jay or the golden melody of the blue warbler, brought her joyous, terrible thoughts, too keen to the very quick of being for either words or tears; for a horseman had turned the crag leading his broncho. It was the Ranger in his sage green Service suit wearing a sprig of everlasting in his Alpine hat.

"Why, I've been trying to get you by telephone all day," he said, "but the wires are cut--"

In the light of the sudden strength on his face, she forgot the brooding storm, the impending horror.

"Has Fordie brought the sheep down?"

"Yes, ages ago; he pa.s.sed at noon with the whole bunch, fifteen thousand of 'em, strung along the trail from the top of the Ridge to the bottom. Don't you see how they skinned every branch? That's why the cattlemen hate 'em! Ford will be on the Rim Mesas now. Why; anything wrong?"

She did not remember till afterwards how it was she had met both his hands with her own as she repeated the old frontiersman's report. She knew, if time stopped and storm split the welkin, it would be all the same. She felt the heat hush come up from the Valley, felt the quivering pause of the waiting air, the noiseless flutter of the foliage, the awed quiet, then the exquisite tingling pain of her own being,--

"Eleanor, look at me! Look in my eyes! Look up at me--"

She felt the rush of her being to meet and blend and fuse in the flame of his love. Then, she looked up. His eyes drank hers in one poised moment of delirious recognition, of tempestuous tenderness. The world swam out of ken. All but the fluted melody of the blue bird; and she knew they must always sound together, the trill and the rasp, the blue bird and the jay, the true and the false, love and its counterfeit.

"We go into this fight together," he said very quietly, "And forever!"

He placed the sprig of everlasting in her hand. "You can count me on the firing line."

Then he had thrown the reins over his broncho's neck, headed the horse back up the Ridge and was slithering down the steep slope giving her hand-hold as of steel-springs. So short was the interval, it could not be measured in time. Yet it had rivetted eternity. She saw the rolling clouds of ink writhing up the Valley turning everything to blackness: yet she did not know it. The little flutter of air changed to whiplashes and puffs of wind that curled the black hair forward over her unhatted face in a frame. Wayland looked at her and felt his masterdom going to those same winds; for the pace had painted her ivory cheeks, not rose color, but the deep flame of the wild flower. Some day, perhaps,--no matter; he set his teeth and screwed the whipcord muscles taut; for the moraine stones had begun to roll, and there was a zig-zag flash of lightning that sent fire b.a.l.l.s sizzling over the rock.

He braced her to the leap down the steep sliding moraine, and felt the frenzy of joy from her touch.

"There! We took the jump together! You didn't push me over the edge of things," he said, as their feet touched the pine needle slope.

This time, the lightning came with a ripping splintering rocking echo.

"It's like Love and Life racing in the picture," she laughed back and they bounded into the buckboard, Wayland standing braced behind the seat, "to stop her kiting down the hill if we break loose," he said; she, forward with the driver, feet braced to the iron foot-rest, hands holding the seat-guard. Then, the brim of his felt hat flapping, the bronchos' ears laid back, necks craned out, the old man whirling the whip, they were off for the Rim Rocks. The breaking storm, the whipping winds, the wild pace, the rush of the fringed rain, seemed a part of the furious exaltation breaking the bounds of her own consciousness.

"Cross the ford, Sir," shouted the Ranger bending forward, "it's shorter than the bridge;" and her hair tossed in his face as the buckboard splashed into the River and bounced up the far side with hind wheels swaying.

"Are y' all right, there?" called the old driver over his shoulder.

"Stay with it," yelled Wayland, "straight ahead where the road cuts the Rim Rocks."

"We're splitting the air all right," shouted the old man. "Ye mind y'

talked of sawing air. Split it, man, an' y'll get somewhere."

Up a hummock, down a ravine, over a fallen log with a hurdle jump that threatened to break the buckboard's back.

"Are ye there yet?" called the old man.

"Split the wind, Sir," shouted Wayland; and the rig went rattling up the red earth road of the Rim Rocks not a wheel's width from the edge.

"We're leaving the storm behind; look back," she said.

Up the Valley swept the rains in a wall of whipped spray jagged by the zig-zag streaks of lightning.

"Hold on till we turn the next switch back," warned the Ranger. The buckboard wheeled a point as he spoke and the bronchos floundered to a f.a.gged trot. They saw it coming: the rain wall, frayed at the edge to a fringe, the wind lashing their faces, the red rocks of the battlements jutting through the cloud wrack spectral and ominous. A toothed edge of rock above, then a belt of cloud cut by the darting wings of the countless swallows.

The trees of the Ridge across the Valley seemed to bend and snap.

There was a funnelling roar, sucking up earth and air, trees and brushwood; whips and lashes and splintering crashes of rain and wind and jagged light-lines; the bronchos cowering against the inner wall of the trail. Then the funnelling wind tore the pinnacled rock tops clear of the billowing mist.

"There goes your hat, Sir," cried Wayland as the black felt went sailing down the precipice.

"What's that!" demanded the old man, springing from the seat and pointing upward with his whip.

Over the edge of the sky line, on the rimmed red battlements, jumping, jumping, jumping; as sheep jump at shearing time from the hot center to the cool outside, or over the backs of one another in winter cold, when the outer line jumps to the huddled center; came the herd in a gray woolly shapeless whirling ma.s.s! Shouts, cries, shrill bleatings, storm m.u.f.fled bang, bang and thud of guns! Just for an instant, emerged from the mist on the skyline of the battlements the figure of a man in sheep-skin chaps, a riderless white horse, shadows of other men, the sheep in a living torrent pouring over into the nothingness of mist; then a boy, a little boy, riding hatless, craning far forward over the neck of his pinto pony, shouting, waving, screaming, trying to head the sheep back from the precipice edge!

"The dastard coward, blackguard h.e.l.l-hatched hounds!" roared the old man, shaking his impotent fist. Then he funnelled his hands and shouted the lad's name.

It happened in the twinkling of an eye. The man in the sheep-skin-chaps clubbed his rifle at the galloping pony. The pinto reared, flung back, pitched over the edge of the Rim Rocks. Then the cloud blot, earth and air sponged into the wet blur of a washed slate, shrieking furies of peltering rain, a roar of the hurricane wind, a blinding flash, the air torn to tatters! The cloud burst hurled down in sheets, the red clay road runnelling flood torrents. Wayland had caught her under shelter of the rock wall. The old man hurtled to the heads of the shivering bronchos, gripping both bridles. A splintering crash that rocketted from crag to crag and rumbled below their feet; and the thing was over quick as it had come. The funnelling whirl of clouds eddied over the Pa.s.s behind the Holy Cross Mountain; the opal peak radiant and dazzling above the Valley; the air a burst of yellow sunlight quivering in the smoking rain mist; the red battlement rocks above dripping and bare; and somewhere a song sparrow trilling to the tinkle of the subsiding waters. A roil of cloud rolled from below.

The sound came first, smothered and pain-piercing; then the old frontiersman had uttered something between a curse and a groan. She sprang from shelter and looked over the edge. Jumbled at the foot of the pinnacled red rocks heaved a writhing ma.s.s, a weltering maimed horror. On the outer edge, arms under head, face to sky, tossed backwards, lay the body of the boy beside the pinto pony, the neck of the horse broken under in the fall, the child pitched beyond the ma.s.s by the double turn of his falling horse.

For a moment none of the three uttered a word. She was trembling so that she could not speak. There were tears in the old man's eyes. To Wayland's face had come a look. It was like the blue flash of a pistol shot. The pupils of his eyes had focussed to pin points of fire. He moistened his lips.

"May h.e.l.l be both deep and hot!" he said.

It was the cry of the primal man beneath all the culture of the schools that disprove h.e.l.l; the cry of human red-blooded manhood against all the white-corpuscled sickly sentimentality that ever sacrifices innocence on the altar of guilt.

While the Law marked time, the swift feet of crime had not paused nor slackened pace. While the Law argued, learnedly, disputatiously, with the handing up and the handing down of inane decisions, Crime scored; and Who or What tallied? The men round the fire the night before in the cow-camp, the men of "the bunco game" had stacked cards and played trump; but unfortunately, they had jumbled the white-vested fighter's orders about the boy. The cattlemen had taken care of themselves after a code not honored by the law of nations.

Also, they had gone into the fight together: the one who saw the right but did not understand the fight; the one who understood the fight but sometimes lost his vision of the right; and the one who saw in the fight for right, not the quarrel of a Valley, or a Faction, or a Ring, but the saving of the Nation, the repudiation of a world lie, the welding of right and might into an eternal harmony.

CHAPTER VIII

A VICTIM OF LAW'S DELAY

For years, Eleanor could not let herself remember the details of that night. We like to persuade ourselves that by some miraculous chance, some trickery of fate, good may come in a vague somehow out of evil; contrary to the proofs from the beginning of time that good fruit never yet grew from evil seed. The girl was too honest for such fetish faith. She could not turn up the whites of her eyes in a pious resignation that it had been the will of G.o.d evil should triumph. So she shut out the details of the horror from mind's memory and set her teeth, knowing well that when lewd horrors triumph it is not because the G.o.d of the Universe is a fool but because the powers for right have not fought valiant as the powers for evil.