The Hunted Woman Part 39

"What we have is worth thirty or forty thousand dollars," he said rea.s.suringly, as he filled his pail with water and they began to return.

"We can do a great deal of good with that. Endowments, for instance," he laughed.

As he spoke, they both stopped, and listened. Plainly they heard the approaching thud of hoofs. MacDonald had been gone nearer two hours than one, and believing that it was him, Aldous gave the owl signal. The signal floated back to them softly. Five minutes later MacDonald rode up and dismounted. Until he had taken the saddle off, and had hobbled his horse, he did not speak. Neither Joanne nor Aldous asked the question that was in their hearts. But even in the darkness they felt something. It was as if not only the torrent rushing through the chasm, but MacDonald's heart as well, was charging the air with a strange and subdued excitement. And when MacDonald spoke, that which they had felt was in his voice.

"You ain't seen or heard anything, Johnny?"

"Nothing. And you--Donald?"

In the darkness, Joanne went to the old man, and her hand found one of his, and clasped it tightly; and she found that Donald MacDonald's big hand was trembling in a strange and curious way, and she could feel him quivering.

"You found Jane?" she whispered.

"Yes, I found her, little Joanne."

She did not let go of his hand until they entered the open s.p.a.ce which Aldous had made in the spruce. Then she remembered what Aldous had said to her earlier in the day, and cheerfully she lighted the two candles they had set out, and forced Aldous down first upon the ground, and then MacDonald, and began to help them to beans and meat and bannock, while all the time her heart was crying out to know about the cavern--and Jane. The candleglow told her a great deal, for in it Donald MacDonald's face was very calm, and filled with a great peace, despite the trembling she had felt. Her woman's sympathy told her that his heart was too full on this night for speech, and when he ate but little she did not urge him to eat more; and when he rose and went silently and alone out into the darkness she held Aldous back; and when, still a little later, she went into her nest for the night, she whispered softly to him:

"I know that he found Jane as he wanted to find her, and he is happy. I think he has gone out there alone--to cry." And for a time after that, as he sat in the gloom, John Aldous knew that Joanne was sobbing like a little child in the spruce and cedar shelter he had built for her.

CHAPTER XXVIII

If MacDonald slept at all that night Aldous did not know it. The old mountaineer watched until a little after twelve in the deep shadow of a rock between the two camps.

"I can't sleep," he protested, when Aldous urged him to take his rest. "I might take a little stroll up the plain, Johnny--but I can't sleep."

The plain lay in a brilliant starlight at this hour; they could see the gleam of the snow-peaks--the light was almost like the glow of the moon.

"There'll be plenty of sleep after to-morrow," added MacDonald, and there was a finality in his voice and words which set the other's blood stirring.

"You think they will show up to-morrow?"

"Yes. This is the same valley the cabins are in, Johnny. That big mountain runs out an' splits it, an' it curves like a horseshoe. From that mount'in we can see them, no matter which way they come. They'll go straight to the cabins. There's a deep little run under the slope. You didn't see it when we came out, but it'll take us within a hunderd yards of 'em. An' at a hunderd yards----"

He shrugged his shoulders suggestively in the starlight, and there was a smile on his face.

"It seems almost like murder," shuddered Aldous.

"But it ain't,'" replied MacDonald quickly. "It's self-defence! If we don't do it, Johnny--if we don't draw on them first, what happened there forty years ago is goin' to happen again--with Joanne!"

"A hundred yards," breathed Aldous, his jaws setting hard. "And there are five!"

"They'll go into the cabins," said MacDonald. "At some time there will be two or three outside, an' we'll take them first. At the sound of the shots the others will run out, and it will be easy. Yo' can't very well miss a man at a hunderd yards, Johnny?"

"No, I won't miss."

MacDonald rose.

"I'm goin' to take a little stroll, Johnny."

For two hours after that Aldous was alone. He knew why old Donald could not sleep, and where he had gone, and he pictured him sitting before the little old cabin in the starlit valley communing with the spirit of Jane. And during those two hours he steeled himself for the last time to the thing that was going to happen when the day came.

It was nearly three o'clock when MacDonald returned. It was four o'clock before he roused Joanne; and it was five o'clock when they had eaten their breakfast, and MacDonald prepared to leave for the mountain with his telescope. Aldous had observed Joanne talking to him for several minutes alone, and he had also observed that her eyes were very bright, and that there was an unusual eagerness in her manner of listening to what the old man was saying. The significance of this did not occur to him when she urged him to accompany MacDonald.

"Two pairs of eyes are better than one, John," she said, "and I cannot possibly be in danger here. I can see you all the time, and you can see me--if I don't run away, or hide." And she laughed a little breathlessly.

"There is no danger, is there, Donald?"

The old hunter shook his head.

"There's no danger, but--you might be lonesome," he said.

Joanne put her pretty mouth close to Aldous' ear.

"I want to be alone for a little while, dear," she whispered, and there was that mystery in her voice which kept him from questioning her, and made him go with MacDonald.

In three quarters of an hour they had reached the spur of the mountain from which MacDonald had said they could see up the valley, and also the break through which they had come the preceding afternoon. The morning mists still hung low, but as these melted away under the sun mile after mile of a marvellous panorama spread out swiftly under them, and as the distance of their vision grew, the deeper became the disappointment in MacDonald's face. For half an hour after the mists had gone he neither spoke nor lowered the telescope from his eyes. A mile away Aldous saw three caribou crossing the valley. A little later, on a green slope, he discerned a moving hulk that he knew was a bear. He did not speak until old Donald lowered the gla.s.s.

"I can see for eight miles up the valley, an' there ain't a soul in sight,"

said MacDonald in answer to his question. "I figgered they'd be along about now, Johnny."

A dozen times Aldous had looked back at the camp. Twice he had seen Joanne.

He looked now through the telescope. She was nowhere in sight. A bit nervously he returned the telescope to MacDonald.

"And I can't see Joanne," he said.

MacDonald looked. For five minutes he levelled the gla.s.s steadily at the camp. Then he shifted it slowly westward, and a low exclamation broke from his lips as he lowered the gla.s.s, and looked at Aldous.

"Johnny, she's just goin' into the gorge! She was just disappearin' when I caught her!"

"Going into--the gorge!" gasped Aldous, jumping to his feet. "Mac----"

MacDonald rose and stood at his side. There was something rea.s.suring in the rumbling laugh that came from deep in his chest.

"She's beat us!" he chuckled. "Bless her, she's beat us! I didn't guess why she was askin' me all them questions. An' I told her, Johnny--told her just where the cavern was up there in the gorge, an' how you wouldn't hardly miss it if you tried. An' she asked me how long it would take to _walk_ there, an' I told her half an hour. An' she's going to the cavern, Johnny!"

He was telescoping his long gla.s.s as he spoke, and while Aldous was still staring toward the gorge in wonderment and a little fear, he added:

"We'd better follow. Quade an' Rann can't get here inside o' two or three hours, an' we'll be back before then." Again he rumbled with that curious chuckling laugh. "She beat us, Johnny, she beat us fair! An' she's got spirrit, a wunnerful spirrit, to go up there alone!"

Aldous wanted to run, but he held himself down to MacDonald's stride. His heart trembled apprehensively as they hurriedly descended the mountain and cut across the plain. He could not quite bring himself to MacDonald's point of a.s.surance regarding Quade and Mortimer FitzHugh. The old mountaineer was positive that the other party was behind them. Aldous asked himself if it were not possible that Quade and FitzHugh were _ahead_ of them, and already waiting and watching for their opportunity. He had suggested that they might have swung farther to the west, with the plan of descending upon the valley from the north, and MacDonald had pointed out how unlikely this was.

In spite of this, Aldous was not in a comfortable frame of mind as they hurried after Joanne. She had half an hour's start of them when they reached the mouth of the gorge, and not until they had travelled another half-hour up the rough bed of the break between the two mountains, and MacDonald pointed ahead, and said: "There's the cavern!" did he breathe easier.

They could see the mouth of the cavern when they were yet a couple of hundred yards from it. It was a wide, low cleft in the north face of the chasm wall, and in front of it, spreading out like the flow of a stream, was a great spatter of white sand, like a huge rug that had been spread out in a s.p.a.ce cleared of its chaotic litter of rock and broken slate. At first glance Aldous guessed that the cavern had once been the exit of a subterranean stream. The sand deadened the sound of their footsteps as they approached. At the mouth of the cave they paused. It was perhaps forty or fifty feet deep, and as high as a nine-foot room. Inside it was quite light. Halfway to the back of it, upon her knees, and with her face turned from them, was Joanne.

They were very close to her before she heard them. With a startled cry she sprang to her feet, and Aldous and MacDonald saw what she had been doing.

Over a long mound in the white sand still rose the sapling stake which Donald had planted there forty years before; and about this, and scattered over the grave, were dozens of wild asters and purple hyacinths which Joanne had brought from the plain. Aldous did not speak, but he took her hand, and looked down with her on the grave. And then something caught his eyes among the flowers, and Joanne drew him a step nearer, her eyes shining like velvet stars, while his heart beat faster when he saw what the object was. It was a book, open in the middle, and it lay face downward on the grave. It was old, and looked as though it might have fallen into dust at the touch of his finger. Joanne's voice was low and filled with a whispering awe.