The Homesteaders Part 24

"You were foolish to come into the hills with so much money alone,"

he said. "I would have been at your service for the asking, and this would not have happened. But now that it has happened, the first thing is to provide for the wounded man, and the next is to place this suspect in custody. And you will need some toning up yourself after your night's experience. Then we will have a full investigation. I know a rancher's house a few miles down the valley where you and your son will have the best attention."

The mounted policeman made a brief examination of Allan, as best he could in the grey dawn, for the lantern now had no oil. "He has not bled very much," he said, "He has a strong frame and ought to have a fighting chance. I will just have a look at the scene of the crime, and then we will move him."

He made a hurried survey of the cabin, merely satisfying himself that the man in the doorway was quite dead, and then, with Harris's a.s.sistance, quickly found the horses and harnessed them to the buggy.

He also found another horse near the roadway, saddled and bridled.

"We will make the prisoner ride his own horse," he said, "while you take your son in the buggy."

They placed the wounded and still unconscious Allan in the buggy as gently as they could, and then Grey gave his attention to the prisoner. Having searched his clothing for weapons, he cut away the bonds that securely held his arms and feet, and released the sack from his half-choked throat. The man writhed and gasped for fresh air, and the policeman drew the sack away and revealed the face of Jim Travers.

CHAPTER XVIII

CONVERGING TRAILS

Beulah Harris raised her arms above her head and drank in the fresh mountain air that flooded through the open window. A smoky red, with brighter shafts of yellow behind, streamed up from the eastern sky and sent a glow of burnt-orange colour through her bedroom. The girl stretched her spread fingers to the limit of their reach, and with extended toes sought the iron bars at the foot of the bed, filling her lungs with the fresh foothill ozone. Then she dropped her hands, palm upward, with the backs of her finger-tips resting on her eyes, and felt that it was good to be alive.

They had been great times--wonderful times--these weeks spent in the freedom and harmony of the Arthurses' household. Mr. and Mrs.

Arthurs--Uncle Fred and Aunt Lilian, as she now called them--had opened their hearts and their home to Beulah from the first. Indeed, the girl was often conscious of their gaze upon her, and at times she would look up quickly and surprise a strange, wistful look of yearning in their eyes--a look that they tried very hard to hide from her. They wanted to leave her free to live her own life--to shape her career, for a time at least, wholly in accordance with her impulses.

And such a life as she had lived! Arthurs had at once placed a horse at her disposal, and with a fierce delight at the leap she was taking through conventions she swung her right leg over the saddle and sat to place like any man. Although born and raised on a farm, horseback riding was to her something of a novelty, and the a.s.sumption of the masculine position was a positive epoch in her career. How the people of Plainville would have been scandalized if they could have witnessed her shocking familiarity with a horse! She thought of an English girl who had been cut by the good society of Plainville because she dared to ride like a biped instead of a mermaid. And she laughed in a wild exultant freedom, while the wind whipped her hair about her shoulders, and she felt her mount firm beneath her as they cantered across the brown foothills.

Such hills they were! In her native plains they would have been mountains of themselves, wonders of Nature to point out to strangers and to hold in a kind of awe across the country-side, but here they were foothills, mere fragments dropped from the trowel of the Builder as He reared the majestic Rockies behind. And though she often in the early morning, or at sunset, or when the moon was full and white, feasted her eyes and her soul on the cold splendour of the mighty range, it was to the warm brown foothills, with their stubbling of little trees and their solemn warts of grey-green rock, that her heart turned with something of human affection. At first Uncle Fred, or Aunt Lilian, or, a little later, one of the two cowboys rode with her on her expeditions, but her prairie sense of direction quickly adapted itself to her new surroundings, and she soon learned to keep a keen eye for the precipitous cut-banks that drop sheer from a level plain and lie as unsuspected in the saffron sunlight as a coyote among the ripened willows. There were quicksands, too--spots where the water sprang from the hillside in a crystal stream and in a few yards soaked into the kneady earth as in a sponge--but all these places were fenced; even in Alberta, where cattle grow like rabbits on the range, the paving of sink-holes with beef steers is an expensive expedient. So Beulah quickly got her foothill sense, and in a week was riding, care-free and exultant, across the ranges as her heart listed or her horse preferred.

One morning, just as the first grey of dawn mottled the darkness of her chamber, Beulah heard her door open, and through the uncertain light she discerned Arthurs gently entering with a rifle in his hand.

She sat up, alert, but not afraid; the tingling health in her veins left no place for fear and suffered no foolishness on the part of her nervous system.

"What is it, Uncle Fred?" she whispered.

"H-s-h," he cautioned. "You know we have been losing calves with the timber wolves? Well, there are two of the murderers just across from the corral. I thought you might want to see them."

In an instant her feet were on the floor, and, hand in hand, she and Arthurs stole to the window. At first her eyes could distinguish nothing in the darkness, but by following Arthurs' index finger she at last located two gaunt, s.h.a.ggy creatures a little way up the hillside beyond the corral, and a couple of hundred yards from the house.

"However did you know they were there?" she whispered. "You must have cat's eyes. I could hardly see them when you pointed them out."

"Not cat's eyes, Beulah," he answered. "Just rancher's eyes. I heard the horses snorting, and I fancied there were visitors. Now, will you take first shot?"

"Oh, that would be a shame. They would get away, and besides, I might kill a horse."

"Well, won't press it this time," said Arthurs, "because I have a little personal score to settle with these fellows. I guess I have about five hundred dollars invested in each of them."

The wolves were moving leisurely about on the hillside, showing no disposition to run away, but apparently afraid to approach closer to the ranch buildings. Arthurs leaned his rifle across the window sill and took steady aim, while the girl held her breath with excitement.

Then there was a quick flash, that shut the scene momentarily from their eyes; the next moment they saw one of the wolves leap into the air and fall, a sprawling ma.s.s, upon the ground, while the other darted with the speed of a greyhound toward the neighbouring bushes.

Arthurs followed him with a bullet, but even so fine a marksman could have found him only by chance in that uncertain light.

"Well, I guess there's a widow in Wolfville this morning," said Arthurs, as he leisurely threw the discharged cartridge from the barrel. "My apologies, Miss Beulah, for this somewhat unconventional call and the interruption of your beauty sleep."

But Beulah was standing, wrapped in admiration. "Oh, Uncle Fred," she exclaimed. "You're just wonderful. If I could only shoot like that!"

"It's all a matter of training," he told her. "Of course, you must have good eyes and steady nerves, but you have those already. The rifle is yours whenever you want it, and all the ammunition you can carry. There's just one stipulation--for the first week shoot only at foothills, and, remember, aim low."

So Beulah became a rifle enthusiast, and it astonished her how rapidly she improved in marksmanship. With a little instruction from Arthurs and the cowboys in the matter of sighting and holding her weapon, she developed quickly from a stage of dangerous uncertainty in her gunnery to one of almost expert accuracy. Then she made of the rifle a companion on her horseback excursions, to the destruction of gophers, rabbits, and even a badger and a coyote. It was a brave day when she rode into the corral with a coyote strung across her saddle.

The river near by teemed with trout, and the girl soon caught the fascination of the angler. Mrs. Arthurs had a pair of high rubber boots, which she used when she herself went whipping the blue water, and, anch.o.r.ed in these as far out as she dared go into the gravel-bottomed stream, the girl laced the cold current back and forth. And the wild exultation of her first bite! The fish darted up and down stream, pulling out line faster than she could reel it in, and Beulah, in her excitement, waded deeper into the stream as she followed the quivering line. But mountain streams are treacherous; one step too far plunged her into twenty feet of water, and the next moment she was spinning round and round in the current. She had learned to swim a few strokes in the creek on her father's farm, and her meagre skill now stood her in good stead, for she was able to keep afloat until the current threw her against a gravel bar that jutted into the river. She dragged herself ash.o.r.e, very wet, and of a sudden, very frightened, and sat down on the warm stones. It was here that she recorded another resolution; she would learn to swim--not a feeble stroke or two, but to be master of this river which had so nearly mastered her. "I will do it," she said. "I will swim it across and back, if it takes till December, and--bur-r-r-rh--it's cold enough now." Then it occurred to her that there was no better time to start than the present. She looked out a place where the current was not too strong, and where there were no treacherous rock-splits in the bottom, spread her wet clothing to dry in the sun, and for an hour fought the cold current at its own game.

It is not recorded how it came about, but Arthurs pa.s.sed the word among the ranch hands that a certain stretch of river bank was sacred from all intrusion.

But it was in the life of the home, even more than in the joyous freedom of the out-of-doors, that Beulah found her great delight. The Arthurs, she knew, were wealthy--many times richer than her father, who pa.s.sed as a wealthy man among the farmers of Plainville. But with the Arthurs wealth was merely an incident--a pleasant but by no means essential by-product of their lives. They lived simply, but well; they worked honestly, but did not slave; and in all their living and working they shed a kindliness and courtesy that communicated itself to all with whom they came in contact. The cowboys, Beulah soon discovered, were as unlike the cowboys of fiction and of her imagination as a Manitoba steer is unlike his Alberta brother; they did not carry revolvers, nor swagger in high boots, nor rip the air with their profanity; and their table manners reminded her of George and Harry Grant, and the Grants were outstanding examples of right living in the Plainville district. And Mrs. Arthurs, gentle and kind in all her doings, and yet firm and strong and calm, she was--such a woman, Beulah told herself, as her own mother might have been, had her soul not been crushed under a load of unceasing labour. But, most of all, it was to Fred Arthurs that the heart of the young girl turned. Whether he sat over his desk at his letters, or dispensed hospitality at his table (for all who pa.s.sed up or down the valley, as a matter of course, stopped for a meal at the Arthurses), or cantered across the foothills, or shouted behind his lagging herds (such shouting as it was, fit to split the canyons!}, or played ball with the boys in the evening, or discussed theology with the travelling missionary, or philosophy with his book-worm neighbour from across the river, or read poetry with his wife on the Sunday afternoons, or sang with his great voice in the mellow, yellow eventide, or--most of all--when he looked at Beulah with his fine eyes, and she caught the mirrored reflection of the hunger in his soul, she felt that here was a man who had lived his life to the uttermost and would go on living it through all eternity. She only half guessed what his thoughts toward her were--she did not know that Fred and Lilian Arthurs had at last agreed that they could do better than leave their wealth to charity, and that a new will was soon to be drawn--but to her he seemed pure gold, and a gentleman to his last gesture. And she vowed one night that if ever she met a single man like Fred Arthurs she would marry him although all the canons and conventions of Christendom stood between them.

And then, quite unexpected, it came upon her, and thrilled her frame from toe to temple. Jim Travers! It had been in the background of her mind for months, the centre of the subconscious processes which culminated in this revelation. Yes, Fred Arthurs at twenty-five must have been such a man as Jim Travers. Jim Travers at fifty would be such a man as Fred Arthurs. She was absolutely sure of it. Jim was living his own life, seeking out that which was worth while, culling the incidental from the essential, just as Fred Arthurs must have done. She remembered with sudden joy how Jim had held a little kindness to her of greater moment than the impatient engine in the plough-field; the scores of little labours he had undertaken, not as a sacrifice, but as a privilege--as his contribution to human happiness. She would marry Jim Travers. The strange part of it was her sudden certainty that she should marry him. She found herself enveloped in a flame of possession, a feeling that he was hers--hers now, this minute, and hers for ever. Beulah was a fatalist, although she had never a.n.a.lyzed her own beliefs enough to know it, but she knew that Destiny had linked her life with his and that Destiny would not be balked. Her mind had been feeling its way, through the darkness of months, to this sudden ecstasy, but now that she had reached it she felt that it could never, never fail her. Her sense of possession, of mergement, was complete; she felt that already their souls had mingled irrevocably and indistinguishably.

The arrival of her mother at the Arthurses' ranch had brought fresh joy to Beulah's life. She saw the colour coming back to the old face, the frame straightening up a little, the light rekindling in the eye, the spring returning to the instep. She had not thought that her mother, after twenty-five years of unprotesting submission, had still the nerve to place a limit on that submission, and the discovery had surprised and delighted her. True, Mary Harris let it be known that she was only on a visit, and in due course would return to her home; but Beulah knew the die had been cast, and things could never again be quite as they were. And Beulah told her secret, and her mother just kissed her and let a tear or two fall in her hair.

So this morning, as the girl stretched her young limbs, rounding with life and energy, and the burnt-orange glow of sunrise suffused the room and lit the pink tissues of her slender fingers, she rested in the deep peace which, ever since her revelation, had enveloped her about. For a minute she let her mind dwell on the picture she carried in her brain, until the a.s.sociation became too keen and threatened to overwhelm her from very tenderness; then she sprang from her bed, and, flipping the window-blind to the top, drank in the beauty of the valley through the open window. Her bedroom had windows both to the east and the west; and it was her custom to awaken early and feast on the glory as it surged up the valley, and then, turning, watch the long waves of light sink slowly down the white mountains. And this morning, when she thought the first beams must be gilding the highest peaks, she turned to the westward window and saw the light playing under a Chinook arch across a segment of sky so soft and near she could almost feel it with extended fingers. And then a sound caught her ear, and up the trail she saw two men on horseback, a mounted policeman and another, and behind them other men driving in a buggy.

By intuition Beulah knew that a mishap had occurred. The Arthurses'

ranch was the first abode of real civilization on the way out from the mountains, and it was nothing unusual for a lumberman with a chopped foot, or a prospector caught in sliding rock, or a river-driver crushed between logs, or a hunter the victim of his own marksmanship, to come limping or riding down the trail to this haven of first aid. Quickly she drew on her simple clothing and hurried downstairs, but Arthurs was already at the door. The little party came into the yard, and the policeman rode up to the door. The other horseman sat with his back to the house; his hands were chained together in front of him.

"Good-morning, Sergeant Grey," said Arthurs. "You're early out."

The sergeant saluted. The salutation was intended for Arthurs, but at the moment the policeman's eye fell on Beulah, and even the discipline of the Force could not prevent a momentary turning of the head.

"I've a badly hurt man here," he said, "a man who will need your hospitality and care for some days. There was a shooting up the valley last night. His father is here, too, unhurt physically, but on the verge of collapse, if I am not mistaken."

"We will bring both of them in at once," said Arthurs. "Beulah, will you call Lilian, and your mother, too? They may be needed. But who is the third?" he continued, turning to Grey.

"A prisoner. It seems the older man overpowered him. Now let us get this poor fellow in."

The policeman beckoned and Harris drove the buggy up to the door.

Arthurs glanced at him with a casual "Good-morning," but the next instant his eyes were riveted on the visitor. "John Harris!" he exclaimed, taking a great stride forward and extending his strong arm. "Man, John, I'm glad to see you, but not in these troubles."

Harris took his hand in a silent clasp, and there was a warmth in it that set his heart beating as it had not for years. "It's hard, Fred," he managed to say in a dry voice, "but it's good to have you by."

Arthurs bent over Allan, who was half sitting, half lying, in the buggy. His face was sapped and grey in the growing light. Tenderly the three men lifted him out. "Take him straight upstairs," said Arthurs. "It will save moving him again." Both spare-rooms in the house were occupied, but Arthurs led the way into Beulah's, and they laid the wounded boy on the white bed.

Arthurs heard Beulah in the hall. "Take off his clothes, Grey," he said, and turned to the doorway. "Where's your mother, Beulah?" he asked in a low voice, closing the bedroom door behind him.

"Dressing." The girl looked in his face, and drew back with a little cry. "What's the matter, Uncle Fred? What's wrong?"

"A friend of mine has been hurt, and an old friend of your mother's.

She must not see him just now. You will arrange that?"

"Yes. But I must see him--I must help."