The Heart of Thunder Mountain Part 38

It was a real peril, and one that might have had a tragic termination as easily as a happy one,--more easily, indeed, if she had lost her head. But something strong within her kept her senses keen; and suddenly she broke out in a cry of joy and triumph that went echoing down the forest aisles. There, on a patriarchal pine, though almost obliterated by time and weather, was the blaze in the bark that told her the trail ran at the base of that solid trunk. She halted Tuesday there--and faced a new difficulty: in her many circlings she had lost the general direction in which she had been riding. The trail was under her horse's hoofs; but which way should she go? There appeared to be no ascent the one way or the other, and no slope on either side.

She solved the problem by following the trail regardless of direction until she was able to discover in the black mold the fresh print of a horse's hoof--an unshod hoof this was, and the print certainly no older than yesterday. Without serious misgivings now, she rode on, and in a few minutes the trail mounted again with a sharpness sufficient to remove the last of her doubts.

Well, she was a woodsman now, and would fear no more. But she took the precaution to banish all thoughts excepting those necessary to the task in hand. The woods themselves offered countless temptations to distraction. They were alive. Grouse moved among the branches of the trees; small birds of a very silent habit fluttered across the trail; and once a deer slipped away through a dim and leafy avenue. In moist places flowers of tender hues still bloomed as if to shame the autumn browns of the underbrush. And then she emerged from the soft shades of the green woods into one of the most melancholy of mountain places, a great patch of burnt timber. For surely half an hour she rode through a veritable cemetery of pines, among mult.i.tudes of tall straight shafts from which the flames had licked the foliage and stripped the limbs, and from which the rains and snows and winds of winter had washed the charred bark until the boles stood white and ghastly, infinitely sad and still. No life was here, no flutter or call or hum of living creatures; and the silence was like a menace. She began to cast apprehensive glances around her, and was glad to the very core of her when the forest gradually greened again, and she was in the cool and friendly shade.

Yet another terrifying experience awaited her,--not terrifying in the sense of any peril to herself so much as in its vivid suggestion of peril to Philip Haig. Without warning there came a prodigious crash of thunder; very near, it seemed. The whole earth rocked and shook, she fancied, under that smashing blow, and thereupon a savage bellowing filled the vault of heaven, and the forest quivered with the reverberations. Hard on the first blow fell another; and then the strokes descended in a swift and terrible succession, until there was one continuous and deafening roar like nothing she had ever heard or imagined. By this she knew that she was now close up under the frowning battlement of Thunder Mountain; and that a storm had burst upon that shelterless and unpitied head, with a malevolent timeliness befitting its ill repute. And somewhere in the midst of that destroying fury was Philip Haig!

The blue tracery of sky was blotted out; the forest became dark as night; the tree tops heaved and thrashed about in the wind that rushed down the mountain side. On the heels of the wind came a drenching rain, and Marion took what refuge was offered close to the trunk of a huge pine, which shook and shivered as if it too had nerves that were unstrung by all this tumult.

It pa.s.sed, and the sky cleared with what to her seemed extraordinary swiftness. And when she rode out again to pick up the trail, the air was indescribably fresh and exhilarating, and the sun was soon filtering through the foliage upon her pathway.

The trail grew more precipitous, its surroundings more rugged and wild. Rocks took the place of the soft, mossy soil, and the forest thinned and shrank. Where there had been monarchs in their majesty she rode now among stunted pines and dwarf oaks no higher than her head.

And soon she was at timber line, where the beaten and disheartened trees grew downward, or curled along the earth like serpents, or spread out in fantastic, unnatural, and monstrous shapes.

And there at last towered the bald head of Thunder Mountain. She could not see, of course, the flat top itself. Before her rose a precipitous slope, covered with loose stones and debris, and ending in a jagged line of rock against the sky, dull gray against the blue. Thin gra.s.s grew yet some distance up the slope; and then it was bare of vegetation, bare of soil, with a wavering faint line marking where life ended and death began.

She halted near the last gnome-tree, and stared at the desolate slope and the forbidding sky line. This was the end of her journey; and she knew no more than she could have known back there in the Park. The mountain was still the sphinx, telling her nothing, though she had come to it at last after months of questioning, with one question on her lips. Where was Philip? Perhaps just yonder, just beyond that sharp-raised barrier. From that crest, no doubt, the whole expanse of the summit would be visible. And how could she go back alone, without being able to a.s.sure herself forever that she had done her best?

She studied the slope. From where she stood to the gray sky line the distance was perhaps seven hundred feet. But the trail, which she could discern faintly marked among the loose and sliding stones, traveled five or six times that distance in its zigzag course.

Fascinated, her eyes followed it in and out until its dim line vanished high up in the gray-brown uniformity of the steep ascent.

From this she looked up eagerly at the sky. It was a clear steel-blue; the sun shone bright on the expanse of stone; a vigorous but not violent breeze came from around the distant curve of the slope. It seemed incredible, considering all that she had heard, and all that she had imagined. The mountain, she knew, had its brief and infrequent hours of quiet, but she had pictured it as terrifying even in its calm. Now it was formidable and mysterious, and she could not forget its menace; but it was not terrible. On top, perhaps----

She urged Tuesday forward. The trail went far out to the right at an easy gradient, turned sharply, and came back to reach out as far to the left. It was more difficult than Marion had imagined, for the reason that the loose stones afforded an ill footing for the pony, which slipped and slid and stumbled, often going to his knees, and more than once barely avoiding a fall that would have sent horse and rider rolling down to be caught by the network of stunted trees. But Tuesday was sure of foot; and so, with muscles quivering under the strain, and his eyes bulging with anxiety and fear, he climbed up and up without disaster, while Marion leaned far forward in the saddle, her nerves on edge, her eyes alert, and her heart pounding wildly, as much from excitement as from its struggle with that high alt.i.tude.

How long that climb endured she never knew; the actual minutes seemed to her as hours, their total an eternity. But at last, trembling and sweating, Tuesday stood on a narrow shelf of granite, with the long slope behind, and a wall of rock ahead. While the pony rested, Marion looked to left and right for the continuation of the trail. She could not see it, but knew there should be an opening somewhere in the wall that rose sheer some twenty-five or thirty feet above her head. Slowly riding along the platform, searching for a sign, the wall at her left, and the declivity at her right, she came to a place where the barrier curved inward, and was also hollowed out at its base, so that a shallow cave (speaking loosely) was formed, where some sort of shelter might have been found from a storm. This possibility flashed into Marion's mind, for she could not forget the mountain and its ways. She dismounted to look into the cave, and at two steps started forward with a cry.

On the rocky floor was a small heap of ashes and charred ends of sticks. Kneeling quickly, she tore off a glove, and thrust her fingers into the ashes. They were warm! And near the ashes she discovered the rind of a thin slice of bacon, and a few crumbs of bread. Philip had pa.s.sed Murray's soon after midday; he would have reached the cave, then, before night; and so he had slept there, and risen at dawn, and eaten his meagre breakfast, and ridden on.

She leaped to her feet, ran out and mounted her pony, and rode forward along the platform, searching for the trail.

CHAPTER XXI

IN THE HOLLOW OF THE STORM

Haig arrived at timber line about an hour before nightfall. On the long trail he had considered thoroughly all the chances of his case, and was prepared to undergo delays and disappointments. He knew Thunder Mountain. Even without reckoning on storms (and the vapors were at that moment settling down on the frowning battlement), it were foolhardiness, or worse, to attempt the pa.s.sage of the mountain in the night. Then he remembered the shallow cave that he had noticed on his previous visit to the summit; and his plans were made.

He gathered an armful of dry sticks and shreds of bark, climbed the treacherous slope as Marion did some hours later, and settled himself in the half-shelter of the cave to await the morning. A rasher of bacon, a slice of bread, and a pipe of tobacco refreshed him; and he rolled himself in his blankets, and went to sleep. Like Marion in the "spare bedroom" far below, he was awakened in the night by the savage hammerings of the storm. The very rocks beneath him seemed to be jarred by that cannonade; the wind, howling around the cliff, threatened to drag him out of his cave; and the rain fell in torrents on the platform, almost flooding his stone bed. But he turned over in his blankets, and hoped the mountain would "keep it up" all night.

Even Sunnysides would be halted by a storm like that.

He arose at the first sign of dawn, hurried through his scant and salty breakfast, quenched his thirst with rain water scooped out of depressions in the rock, and started on. Knowing the trail at this point, he rode straight out along the platform, and came in half a minute to the spot where the wall of rock was broken down into a clutter of debris, in width some forty feet. Up through this litter of disintegrated granite the trail lurched with many twists and turns, and emerged at last upon one of the lower levels of the summit.

Trixy was winded, and for a moment Haig rested her, while he surveyed the scene. And in the thrill of that moment, facing the undertaking in which he had once failed, he all but forgot Sunnysides. The wind was low, and scarcely more difficult to meet than a stiff blow in the Park; but aside from that he saw little encouraging in the prospect.

Behind him, it was true, the forests and all the hills and valleys lay clear in the morning light, with just a thin mist clinging in the gulches; and around him on all sides but one the sharp peaks stood up shining white in the first rays of the sun. But in front of him gray vapors, not yet dense enough to be described as clouds, came swirling and tumbling toward him across the stone-littered surface of the flat.

Unless the sun should dissipate those vapors--He shrugged his shoulders, and rode on.

Almost fourteen thousand feet above the level of the sea, the bald head of Thunder Mountain, stripped as it has been of its enn.o.bling peak, needs only three or four hundred feet to be as high as the snow-clad summits on each side. Seen from afar, that bare head appears to be as flat and smooth as a table, but in reality its entire area, roughly circular in outline, and something more than three miles in its largest diameter, is broken up into terraces, into slopes and hillocks, into hollows and mounds, all strewn with, bowlders and loose stones, with here and there uprearing rocks of fantastic and suggestive shapes. There is no life there,--no birds, no conies or chipmunks that inhabit most high places of these mountains; no flowers, no gra.s.s, no sign of vegetation; nothing but granite. The trail runs sometimes plainly across level reaches of loose stones, sometimes over long smooth surfaces of rock, sometimes in and out among wildernesses of shattered and tumbled fragments of the mountain's blasted head. At varying intervals, particularly in its more difficult stages, it is marked by small pyramids of stones, and by crosses cut crudely in the rock. Care must be taken not to miss one of these marks; for the trail, in avoiding inaccessible heaps of granite, goes in places perilously near the edge of the summit, which falls away in more than one known precipice a thousand feet to the unknown gulch below.

The wind was cold, and Haig felt that its strength was steadily increasing, though it yet blew fitfully. He made the second level without mishap, but was brought to a momentary standstill there by the fiercer rush of wind on the higher terrace. It seemed strange, at first thought, that the wind had not blown away the vapors that now enveloped him; but he saw presently that it was not blowing across the mountain, but rather in a circular, whirlwind motion that gradually became more violent. The terrace he now crossed was as smooth as a floor, and he found his way only by means of the crosses carved in the rocks beneath his feet. Then the trail dropped suddenly into a shallow trough; mounted to another field of crumbled stones; and rose unevenly to a barrier that he remembered with a pang of chagrin. This was what at the first glance would have appeared to be a solid and insurmountable wall of rock, perhaps fifteen feet in height, and stretching away to the very edge of the plateau at his right, and to a wilderness of granite on the left.

But directly ahead of him the wall was cleft, and there was a narrow pathway climbing up between two huge rocks that had been carved by the elements into shapes bearing a fanciful resemblance to human figures. These were the Twin Sisters.

Here Haig had been caught by a storm that hurled him back defeated; and he had, moreover, narrowly escaped a worse thing than mere defeat; for the wind had carried him off the trail, and almost to the brink of the chasm that yawned some hundred yards away. Now, remembering that experience, he spurred Trixy forward to take the aperture in the wall before the wind should suddenly become insupportable; and this time he was more fortunate. The pony leaped and clambered up the slippery path, and at the exit was caught by a blast that hurled and pinned her, as if she had been no heavier than a b.u.t.terfly, against the base of the righthand towering figure. For some seconds neither horse nor man was able to move from that fixed position, where the wind flattened them against the rock. Then it swerved sharply, flung them against the other Sister with such force that Haig's leg was stunned and bruised, and finally released them with a shriek that sounded like a cry of disappointed rage. Trixy plunged forward with a snort, and Haig saw that the trail was again plain across another field of scattered stones.

Now, thrilled by this victory, he urged the pony onward at all possible speed toward the worst of all the perils of the mountain. The stone field was succeeded by a series of mounds and hollows, and this by a second slippery floor; and then he mounted the ridge that terminated in the Devil's Chair. Here was the highest point attained by the trail: a flat rock measuring perhaps twenty yards one way, and a little less the other, lifted high above the surrounding slopes, and having (hence its name) a huge back formed by the abrupt termination of the ridge. From the chair the rock dipped in a kind of hollow like a chute, worn smooth by the winds and rains; and everything that ever fell into that chute was swallowed by the chasm of unplumbed and unestimated depth. Sometimes the wind blew up through the chute across the Devil's Chair; sometimes it blew down through it into the chasm.

It was blowing out when Parker reached the chair, and he was hurled back down, the slope three times before he acknowledged his defeat; it was blowing in when the three members of the English party were sucked down into the chasm.

Haig could have cried aloud the joy that ran through him, when, having spurred Trixy up the steep ascent to a footing on the Devil's Chair, he found that almost a perfect calm reigned there, due to some sudden shift in the currents of the air.

"Quick, Trixy! On!" he cried.

The horse bounded across the platform, slid and stumbled down the other side, and was up again, leaping forward, and a little to the left, where there was firmer going over another field of stones. And now at length, to Haig's relief, the trail bent sharply in toward the middle of the plateau, and thus away from the peril of the chasms.

But his elation was short-lived. If Thunder Mountain had admitted him between the Twin Sisters, and spared him at the Devil's Chair, it was only to hurl upon him its acc.u.mulated fury farther on. Engrossed in the endless difficulties of the trail, he had not observed the stealthy and insidious change that was taking place in the atmosphere until it had advanced far toward its climax. The un-looked for calm, so opportune, was but a pause before an outburst of elemental rage.

The vapors lifted, and hung in still ma.s.ses a few feet above the earth. Haig picked his way along in a strange, weird, yellowish light, in a stillness that was all the more impressive by contrast with the recent howling and hammering of the wind. There was not a faintest puff of air on his cheek, and not a sound except the click of Trixy's feet among the stones, and his own hurried breathing. All else seemed to have paused, expectant, waiting.

It did not come as storms come in the valley, or on the plain, or among the hills; not even as they come in the mountains. It did not come from north, or east, or west, or south, or from any known horizon; it had no sensible direction; it was there. Out of the portentous hush (not into it) there came first a whisper, something low and malevolent; then a singular moaning sound, incomparably dismal and hollow and pervasive. Haig moved his head from side to side, endeavoring to trace it--before, behind, above--he knew not where. The moaning murmur grew, and still there was no perceptible movement in the air; it rose whining up, up, up the scale until at last it was a shrill, demoniacal shriek. And then, out of the darkening mists, it leaped upon him.

In this whirling, wicked, wondrous thing there was no orderly and recognizable succession of phenomena, such as wind and lightning and rain. These came all in one swoop, all in one frightful blend. It was black, and it was bright. The lightning came not from the sky, discharging its bolts to earth; it was on the very surface of the plateau. It flamed and crackled on uplifted rocks; it ran hissing like fiery serpents among the scattered stones; it buzzed and exploded in the very face of Haig, and under the pony's belly. If he had been caught in a burning storehouse of fireworks--rockets, Roman candles, pinwheels, and all the ingenious products of the pyrotechnician--the experience might have been like this, only a thousand times less terrifying. He dodged and ducked, and threw up his hands to shield his face, expecting instantly that one of those exploding things would make an end of him.

Then there were other horrors to be endured. The din became incessant. Simultaneous with the hiss and crackle and crack of the lightning there was a continuous deafening detonation in the air above him, crash on crash and roar on roar. The terrors of the first few seconds had been chiefly those felt and heard. But the wind had steadily increased in violence. It did not blow against him, bowling him over, but whirled around him with a speed that was every instant accelerated. He felt that he had no weight. He seemed about to be lifted into the vortex of the storm, to be flung far out into s.p.a.ce.

"Down, girl! Down!" he tried to shout.

But there was no sound from his lips. He felt the pony stiffening under him, bracing herself stiff-legged on the stones; and he knew that she shared his fear. And all this time the rain beat down upon him, in lead-like sheets, with intermittent bombardments of hailstones. It occurred to him to wonder dully which would win--the wind that sought to whirl him up into the sky, or the rain that was for beating him to earth, or the lightning that would burn him to cinders. Then thought left him, and his last impression was of being torn limb from limb, and atom from atom, in excruciating pain.

He was roused at length to the consciousness of having been lifted and hurled; and found himself prostrate on the ground, face downward, with the rain flooding him. Trixy lay at his side, flat like himself, her head stretched out among the stones. They seemed to lie in a vacuum, in the very hollow of the storm. Around them the clatter, the clang and the uproar were even more terrifying than before because they were now separated from these noises, no longer a part of them. All was blackness, shot through with fire. Haig was no more tortured in his body, except for the sense of being suffocated. He seemed to inhale raw ozone; the air fairly stank with the odors of decomposition; the saliva in his mouth had a peculiar pungent and disagreeable taste. He gasped and fought for breath.

Such reason as was left to him told him that this was the end of all.

At any instant something would flash out of that wall of blackness, and destroy him with a blow. His spirit rose exultantly to meet and welcome it; he rejoiced in such a death, slain by the elements, on the roof of the world, alone, unseen; it was a glorious exit, the finish he had sought for years on years, his heart's desire. Triumphant and defiant, he tried to roar back at the thunder, to outscream the wind, to face the lightning with undimmed eyes.

There came a blinding flash, exceeding in brightness anything he had yet experienced. But with it, to his amazement, there emerged from the blackness a vision that brought life back to him with a shocking thrill. For there, not ten paces distant, was Sunnysides. Only for an instant; and then all was again obscure. He must have been mistaken.

It was only a figment of fancy, a creation of his tortured brain, a phenomenon a.s.sociated with his pa.s.sing from life to death. And yet he waited, staring into the smothering void.

Another flash of fire across the black--and Sunnysides! But now the lightning, as if directed by some intelligence, became again continuous, its flashes joined in one spouting flame. And in the very midst of it stood the outlaw in his familiar att.i.tude, with one forefoot slightly raised, his head high, his nostrils distended, his dark eyes filled with fire. There had never been anything so bright and beautiful. His golden hide gleamed with planetary splendor, like the mythical horses of the sun. This was The Horse, the golden epiphany of the brute, the answer to all of Haig's fears and resolutions. And in the very hour of his exit--

Rage rose again within him. Instinctively, for he was scarce capable of thought, he tried to reach his revolver. But his arms were leaden.

His fingers touched the b.u.t.t of the weapon, and stopped as if paralyzed. The horse wavered and danced before his eyes; there was a culminating detonation; he felt a terrific blow on his head. And he knew no more.

CHAPTER XXII

THE NARROW Pa.s.sAGE