The Short Cut Part 4

Garth Conway had already gone, riding the half dozen miles to the Bar L-M to carry word of the death of its owner, and to a.s.sume entire charge there until Wayne should return. Sledge Hume was loitering down by the stable.

The day pa.s.sed, strangely silent. No reference was made in the Leland household to the tragedy which had stirred each member of it so deeply, so differently. Throughout the long afternoon Martin Leland remained among his cattle and horses, often flaring into anger at trifles. Mrs.

Leland was in her room, alone, suffering as she might have suffered had Arthur and Wayne been the sons nature had denied to her. Wanda wandered restlessly back and forth, from the house to the stable, about the yard, where the pigeons whirled and circled and cooed.

The days which followed were like this one, silent, tense, expectant.

It was as though each one of these people was waiting for something, all but breathless. MacKelvey, a heavy set, quick eyed man, the county sheriff, came one day and talked long with Martin Leland. The two sat for an hour on the corral fence below the stable. After that MacKelvey went away and the waiting, the tense expectancy was more marked than before.

The tenth day came and went its laughing, blue way. Wayne Shandon did not come with it, but Garth Conway rode over that evening. He had had no word from Wayne, although he was expecting him hourly. Two weeks pa.s.sed, and still no word from Wayne. One by one, slowly, heavily the days went by.

Then at last Garth Conway rode again to the Leland ranch house and brought tidings of Wayne. He had tired of New York, but he was not yet coming West. Instead he was sailing for Europe, and would probably go down into Africa for some hunting.

"Where does he get the money?" demanded Martin Leland sharply.

Garth's short laugh was rather full answer. But he elaborated it into words:

"I am to rush a forced sale of cattle," he said, lifting his shoulders.

"He wants two thousand dollars in a hurry. G.o.d knows what for. He is going to fritter his property away just as he fritters away everything!"

Leland sprang up from his chair, his two fists clenched and lifted high above his head, his eyes blazing.

"Martin! Martin!" cried Mrs. Leland.

He dropped his hands to his sides and turned away, the words on his tongue checked.

"Dear G.o.d," Wanda prayed within her soul. "Let him be a man. Let him come back soon. Before every one believes he did that thing, before . . . they send for him!"

CHAPTER IV

THE WHITE HUNTRESS

Two months, filled with the clean breath of outdoors, had softened the memory of that stark tragedy upon which Wanda had come at the edge of Echo Creek. Not forgotten, never to be wiped clean from the memory, still the keen horror was dulled, the harsh details blurred, the whole dreadful picture softened under the web which the spider of time weaves over an old canvas.

Again life was glad and good and golden. Again youth was eager and hopeful and merry. The death which had come and changed the world had gone, leaving the world as it has always been.

Wanda and Gypsy and Shep saw much of one another. They were all very happy, perhaps because they were very busy. Full of enthusiasm that was at once gay and serious Wanda had thrown herself into her "Work"

immediately upon returning home in the early springtime. Before the tragic event which for the time had driven her life out of its groove she had already won for herself the t.i.tle, bestowed merrily by Wayne Shandon, of the "White Huntress." Her "work," to which she gave up so many hours of each day, was purposeful, steadily pursued, and brought her a vast pleasure. The game she hunted was the squirrel tossing his grey body through the branches of pine and cedar, the quail calling from the hillsides, the cottontail scampering through the underbrush, the yellowhammer, the woodp.e.c.k.e.r, the wide winged b.u.t.terflies sailing through the orchard and across the meadow lands. The weapon with which she hunted was a camera which she carried in its black case slung over her shoulder or hanging from the horn of Gypsy's saddle.

Reared since babyhood in a land where men and women were few and where the wild things of the forests were many and unafraid, she had long ago come to look upon the little, bright eyed woodland folk as her playmates. Many of her childhood sorrows and joys were linked with their fates. Her first great grief had occurred when she was ten years old and Jule, her brown bear cub,--named after the cook to whom he bore in the child's eyes a marked resemblance, a slight and necessary variation in the termination of the name taking care of the matter of a difference in s.e.x,--came to an untimely end through the instinctive and merciless conduct of Shep's grandparents. The house was filled with chipmunks who frightened Julia, to whom they were "jest rats, drat 'em," and who raided the kitchen systematically. A trained grey squirrel barked from the trees above the house, and pet rabbits were numerous and unprofitable about the vegetable garden. At the age when little girls in the cities were dressing and undressing their dolls, Wanda was taming a palpitating heart in some little fury [Transcriber's note: furry?] breast or leaning breathlessly, like a small mother bird herself, over a nest in the gra.s.s watching eagerly for the tender bills to peck and chip their way out into the wonderful world.

It was but natural therefore that after her childhood had gone and she had outgrown her pa.s.sion for numberless pets overrunning the house just as her sisters in the cities had outgrown their pleasure in dressing and undressing dolls, she should become the "White Huntress." She loved more than ever the wildness of the forest lands, and the ways of the woodland things were wonderful and mysterious to her. And now, from a new angle, they were her study.

There were days when she rode far out from the ranch house, her lunch at her saddle strings, to be gone until dusk or after the stars came out. She would leave Gypsy tethered where the gra.s.s was deep and rich, command Shep to lie down and see that n.o.body ran away with her outfit, and then tramp off alone, carrying her camera. She knew how to climb up into the tree and to screen herself behind the foliage, so that she might watch the mother bird and her ways, and find out when she should expect the joyous miracle of new life.

When the eggs were hatched Wanda was ready. Days before she had chosen the exact spot on the particular limb where she would place her camera.

She had clothed herself as the springtime clothed the forests. A soft blouse of green, short skirt and stockings of green, little cap of green and green moccasins. She crouched upon the broad limb of a cedar or clung more hazardously to the branch of a pine, the tone colour of her costume making no discord with the dusky sheen of the waving branches, and watched and waited. So, when "hunting" was good she had a picture of the mother bird perched upon the edge of the nest in which the eggs lay, a picture of the nest with the little, new birds obeying the first command of nature, a picture of the parents feeding them the first worm or berry or rebellious bug, a picture of the trial flight when soft young bodies essayed independence on unskilful wings.

At first the girl had been merely an amateur in the early, sweet sense of the word. Then one day she saw a couple of pages in an ill.u.s.trated magazine devoted to such photographs as these she was playing with.

They were better than hers, since the man who had taken them was a trained artist as well as a lover of the wild; and they had been at once a disappointment and an inspiration to her. Then, upon another day, her father who made little comment upon her pastime, handed her a box from the express office in which she found a camera with a lens that would do its part if she learned to do hers. And that was when she threw herself so enthusiastically into her "work."

"I am going to have a page of pictures in that same magazine," was her way of thanking him. "And mine are going to be better!"

She flushed a little at his smile, but when she had gone away and was alone with her new possession and a world of possibilities, her chin was very firm.

She had her own studio in the attice above the dining room, developed plates and films there, and descended the ladder into the hallway flushed with triumph or vexed with disappointment as her efforts proved to be good or bad. The mistakes had been many at first; they were few now.

She became a student of the "Home Life of the Wild Things." They all interested her, they all posed for her, squirrel and bird and b.u.t.terfly. Inevitably she began to specialise, but her specialisation was not in one species but rather in one process, in the dawning and budding life of the young in the real "home life" before the new fledgling or tiny furred body left the nest for an independent life and a future nest of its own. The wild mates at work upon the house which instinct prompted was to be of use soon, the construction of a swinging pocket hung high up by an oriole, this was a part of the home life, just as essential a part of it as the covering of the eggs, the feeding of the young.

Before the year had swelled and blossomed into full mid-summer she had a pupil. It was her mother. Mother and daughter had always been more to each other than the terms commonly imply, very nearly all that they should connote. They had been friends. Here where the solitudes were mighty and vast, where long miles and hard trails lay between homes and where women were few, they had had but themselves to turn to when need or desire came for the company of their own s.e.x. Mrs. Leland had remained young, in part because hers was a happy, sunny nature, in part because she had had the fires of youth replenished from the superabundant glow of girlhood in her daughter.

But now that the summer came with monotony and silence, now that Arthur Shandon came no more, that Wayne seemed to have forgotten the range country, that Garth Conway was busy every day with the entire management of a heavily stocked cattle outfit, there were long, quiet days at the Echo Creek.

"Wanda," Mrs. Leland said one day, a little wistfully. "Can't I come with you and take a peep first hand into the homes of your wild friends? I'll be very still, I'll stay with Shep and Gypsy if you want me to."

Wanda, at once contrite and happy, was filled with apologies and explanations. She had had no thought that her mother would find an interest in her "play." But if she would come, if she would like to come, oh, she would show her the most wonderful discovery. . . .

So mother and daughter rode out together that day with lunch and camera, and that night worked together in Wanda's attic studio over a highly satisfactory film. The older woman's interest became as steady, as enthusiastic in a deeply thoughtful way, as Wanda's. She learned to love each day's adventure as warmly as did her daughter, she came to have the same tender joy in the unexpected discovery of some new phase of the home life of the wild.

"In all of your hunting you are missing something, my White Huntress,"

she said one day. "Something which I have discovered!"

Wanda smiled brightly at her over the top of a new picture, pleased with her mother's interest no less than with the print in her hands.

"What is it, mamma?"

"I am not going to tell you yet. But to-morrow when we go out for the oriole's nest, I am going to take your old kodak!"

As they rode the five or six miles to the spot where they were to do the morning's "hunting" Wanda wondered what it was she had missed that her mother had noticed. But she promptly forgot about it when she climbed the great pine which, for her mother's purpose, was so happily situated close to a cliff. She noted with a bright nod of approval as she edged far out upon a horizontal limb that her mother had made her own way up to the cliff top. Long she waited that morning, patient and happy and still, her camera set in front of her, before she got the exposure she wanted. And she did not hear the other click of the other machine, did not know that her mother had been as patient and as contented waiting to get the picture she wanted of Wanda as Wanda had been in snapping the bird and the nest and the young, hungry mouths at the threshold.

That afternoon they developed and printed, each her own pictures. And when Mrs. Leland had finished she showed Wanda what she had done.

There was the picture of Wanda, far out upon the great limb, eager and watchful, her camera ready, the oriole's nest swinging before her, the mother bird just dropping down to it. And below and beyond were the ground, looking immeasurably distant, the fir and pine branches, the forest of trees.

"You see, Wanda, what you have overlooked?" Mrs. Leland's eyes were unusually bright. "You have dozens of pictures that are wonderful, pictures that you strove for for weeks, months at a time! One looks at your picture and sees that it is wonderful, but does not understand how wonderful. You cling to a branch or a tree trunk or the side of a cliff, fifty or a hundred and fifty feet of s.p.a.ce below you, and take your picture. People look at the picture and do not see that the wonderful thing, the interesting thing, is how you got it!"

"But . . ." began Wanda.

"But," Mrs. Leland laughed happily, "just listen to me a moment, miss.

You are going on with your pictures and I am going to follow you very humbly and take other pictures to show how you get them. We'll send both sets to your magazines and you'll see if mine aren't snapped up just as quick as yours!"

So the relationship of mother and daughter which had grown into that of a warm, intimate friendship now developed into closer, more intimate companionship. Together they found bright, br.i.m.m.i.n.g days that otherwise might have been dull and empty.

Wanda came to realise that a woman who is forty may be, in all essentials, as young as a girl of twenty, and that the added score of years while it brings truer insight and perhaps a steadier heart does not quench ardour or deaden the emotions.

"Mamma," she said one day, looking up brightly from the development of a film from her mother's kodak, "you are just a girl yourself!"

And Mrs. Leland was just girl enough to flush, and youthful enough to laugh as musically as her daughter.