The Sky Line of Spruce Part 24

June pa.s.sed away in the wilds of Back There, leaving warmer, longer days, a more potent sun, and a greener, fresher loveliness to the land.

The spring calves no longer tottered on wabbly legs, but could follow their swift mothers over the most steep and difficult trails. Fledglings learned to fly, the wolf cubs had their first lessons in hunting on the ridges. The wild Yuga had fallen to such an extent that navigation--down to the Indian villages on the lower waters--was wholly impossible.

The days pa.s.sed quickly for Ben and Beatrice. They found plenty of work and even of play to pa.s.s the time. Partly to fill her lonely moments, but more because it was an instinct with her, Beatrice took an ever-increasing interest in her cave home. She kept it clean and cooked the meals, performing her tasks with goodwill, even at times a gaiety that was as incomprehensible to herself as to Ben.

Their diet was not so simple now. Of course their flour and sugar and rice, and the meat that they took in the chase furnished the body of their meals, and without these things they could not live; but Beatrice was a woods child, and she knew how to find manna in the wilderness.

Almost every morning she ventured out into the still, dew-wet forest, and nearly always she came in with some dainty for their table. She gathered watercress in the still pools and she knew a dozen ways to serve it. Sometimes she made a dressing out of animal oil, beaten to a cream; and it was better than lettuce salad. Other tender plant tops were used as a garnish and as greens, and many and varied were the edible roots that supplied their increasing desire for fresh vegetables.

Sometimes she found wocus in the marsh--the plant formerly in such demand by the Indians--and by patient experiment she learned how to prepare it for the table. Washing the plant carefully she would pound it into paste that could be used as the base for a nutty and delicious bread. Other roots were baked in ashes or served fried in animal fat, and once or twice she found patches of wild strawberries, ripening on the slopes.

This was living! They plucked the sweet, juicy berries from the vines; they served as dessert and were also used in the fashioning of delicious puddings with rice and sugar. Several times she found certain treasures laid by for winter use by the squirrels or the digging people--and perfectly preserved nuts and acorns, The latter, parched over coals, became one of the staples of their diet.

She gathered leaves of the red weed and dried them for tea. She searched out the nests of the grouse and robbed them of their eggs; and always high celebration in the cave followed such a find as this. Fried eggs, boiled eggs, poached eggs tickled their palates for mornings to come.

And she traced down, one memorable day when their sugar was all but gone, a tree that the wild bees had stored with honey.

In the way of meat they had not only caribou, but the tender veal of moose and all manner of northern small game. Ben did not, however, spend rifle cartridges in reckless shooting. When at last his enemies came filing down through the beaver meadow he had no desire to be left with a half-empty gun. He had never fired this more powerful weapon since he had felled their first caribou. The moose calves and all the small game were taken with Beatrice's pistol.

Sometimes he took ptarmigan--those whistling, sprightly grouse of the high steeps--and Beatrice served uncounted numbers of them, like the famous blackbirds, baked in a pie. Fried ptarmigan was a dish never to forget; roast ptarmigan had a distinctive flavor all its own, and the memory of ptarmigan frica.s.see often called Ben home to the cavern an hour before the established mealtime. Indeed, they partook of all the northern species of that full-bosomed clan, the upland game birds; little, brown quail, willow grouse, fool hens, and the incomparable blue grouse, half of the breast of which was a meal. It was true that their little store of pistol cartridges was all but gone, but worlds of big game remained to fall back upon.

Ben never ceased regretting that he had not brought a single fishhook and a piece of line. He had long since carried the canoe from the river bank and hid it in the tall reeds of the lake sh.o.r.e, not only for pleasure's sake, but to preserve it for the autumn floods when they might want to float on down to the Indian villages; and surely it would have afforded the finest sport in the way of trolling for lake trout.

But with utter callousness he made his pistol serve as a hook and line.

Often he would crawl down, cautiously as a stalking wolf, to the edge of a trout pool, then fire mercilessly at a great, spotted beauty below.

The bullet itself did not penetrate the water, but the shock carried through and the fish usually turned a white belly to the surface. A fat brook or lake trout, dipped in flour and fried to a chestnut brown, was a delight that never grew old.

At every fresh find Beatrice would come triumphant into Ben's presence; and at such times they scarcely conducted themselves like enemies. An unguessed boyishness and charm had come to Ben in these ripe, full summer days: the hard lines softened in his face and mostly the hard shine left his eyes. Beatrice found herself curiously eager to please him, taking the utmost care and pains with every dish she prepared for the table; and it was true that he made the most joyful, exultant response to her efforts. The searing heat back of his eyes was quite gone, now. Even the scarlet fluid of his veins seemed to flow more quietly, with less fire, with less madness. A gentling influence had come to bear upon him; a great kindness, a new forbearance had brightened his outlook toward all the world. A great redemption was even now hovering close to him,--some unspeakable and ultimate blessing that he could not name.

Their days were not without pleasure. Often they ventured far into the heavy forest, and always fresh delight and thrilling adventure awaited them. Ever they learned more of the wild things that were their only neighbors,--creatures all the way down the scale from the lordly moose, proud of his growing antlers and monarch of the marshes, to the small pika, squeaking on the slide-rock of the high peaks. They knew and loved them all; they found ever-increasing enjoyment in the study of their shy ways and furtive occupations; they observed with delight the droll awkwardness of the moose calves, the impertinence and saucy speech of the jays, the humor of the black bear and the surly arrogance of the grizzly. They knew that superlative cunning of his wickedness, the wolverine; the stealth of the red fox; the ferociousness of the ermine whose brown skin, soon to be white, suggested only something silken and soft and tender instead of a fiendish cutthroat, terror of the Little People; the skulking cowardice of the coyote; and the incredible savagery and agility of the fisher,--that middle-sized hunter that catches and kills everything he can master except fish. They climbed high hills and descended into still, mysterious valleys; they paddled long, dreamy twilight hours on the lake; they traversed marshes where the moose wallowed; and they walked through ancient forests where the decayed vegetation was a mossy pulp under their feet. Sometimes they forgot the poignancy of their strange lives, romping sometimes, gossiping like jays in the tree-limbs, and sometimes, forgetting enmity, they told each other their secret beliefs and philosophies. They had picnics in the woods; and long, comfortable evenings before their dancing fire. But there was one enduring joy that always surpa.s.sed all the rest, a happiness that seemed to have its origin in the silent places of their hearts. It was just the return, after a fatiguing day in forest and marsh, to the sheltering walls of the cave.

With his axe and hunting knife Ben prepared a complete set of furniture for their little abode. His first Work was a surpa.s.sing-marvelous dining-room suite of a table and two chairs. Then he put up shelves for their rapidly dwindling supplies of provisions and cut chunks of spruce log, with a bit of bark remaining, for fireside seats. And for more than a week, Beatrice was forbidden to enter a certain covert just beyond the glade lest she should prematurely discover an even greater wonder that Ben, in off hours, was preparing for a surprise.

From time to time she heard him busily at work, the ring of his axe and his gay whistling as he whittled bolts of wood; but other than that it concerned the grizzly skin she had not the least idea of his task. But the work was completed at last, and then came two days of rather significant silence,--quite incomprehensible to the girl. She was at a loss why Ben did not reveal his treasure.

But one morning she missed the familiar sounds of his fire-building, usually his first work on wakening. The very fact of their absence startled her wide-awake, while otherwise she would have perhaps slept late into the morning. Ben had seemingly vanished into the heavy timber across the glade.

Presently she heard him muttering and grunting as he moved some heavy object to the door of the cave. Boyishly, he could not wait for the usual late hour when she wakened. He made a wholly unnecessary amount of noise as he built the fire. Then he thrust his lean head into the cavern opening.

"I hope I haven't waked you up?" he said.

The girl smiled secretly. "I wanted to wake up, anyway--to-day."

"I wish you'd get up and come and look at something ugly I've got just outside the door."

She hurried into her outer garments, and in a moment appeared. It was ugly, certainly, the object that he had fashioned with such tireless toil: not fitted at all for a stylish city home; yet the girl, for one short instant, stopped breathing. It was a hammock, suspended on a stout frame, to take the place of her tree-bough bed on the cave floor. He had used the grizzly skin, hanging it with unbreakable sinew, and fashioning it in such a manner that folds of the hide could be turned over her on cold nights. For a moment she gazed, very earnestly, into the rugged, homely, raw-boned face of her companion.

Beatrice was deeply and inexplicably sobered, yet a curious happiness took swift possession of her heart. Reading the grat.i.tude in her eyes, Ben's lips broke into a radiant smile.

"I guess you've forgotten what day it is," he said.

"Of course. I hardly know the month."

"I've notched each day, you know. And maybe you've forgotten--on the ride out from Snowy Gulch--we talked of birthdays. To-day is yours."

She stared at him in genuine astonishment. She had not dreamed that this little confidence, given in a careless moment of long weeks before, had lingered in the man's memory. She had supposed that the fury and savagery of his war with her father and the latter's followers had effaced all such things as this.

And it was true that had this birthday come a few weeks before, on the river journey and previous to their occupation of the cave, Ben would have let it pa.s.s unnoticed. The smoldering fire in his brain would have seared to ashes any such kindly thought as this. But when the wild hunter leaves his leafy lair and goes to dwell, a man rather than a beast, in a permanent abode, he has thought for other subjects than his tribal wars and the blood-l.u.s.t of his hates. The hearth, and the care and friendship of the girl had tamed Ben to this degree, at least.

But wonders were not done. The look in the girl's eyes suddenly melted, as the warm sun melts ice, some of the frozen bitterness of his spirit.

"It's your birthday--and I hope you have many of 'em," he went on. "No more like this--but all of 'em happy,--as you deserve."

He walked toward her, and her eyes could not leave his. He bent soberly, and brushed her lips with his own.

There were always worlds to talk about in the warm gleam of their fire.

When the day's work was done, and the hush of early night gathered the land to its arms, they would sit on their fireside seats and settle all problems, now and hereafter, to the perfect satisfaction of them both.

From Ben, Beatrice gained a certain strength of outlook as well as depth of insight, but she gave him in return more than she received. He felt that her influence, in his early years, would have worked wonders for him. She straightened out his moral problems for him, taught him lessons in simple faith; and her own childish sweetness and absolute purity showed his whole world in a new light.

Sometimes they talked of religion and ethics, sometimes of science and economics, and particularly they talked of what was nearest to them,--the mysteries and works of nature. She had been a close observer of the forest. She had received some glimpse of its secret laws that were, when all was said and done, the basic laws of life. But for all her love of science she was not a mere biologist. She had a full and devout faith in Law and Judgment beyond any earthly sphere.

"No one can live in this boundless wilderness and not believe," she told him earnestly, her dark eyes br.i.m.m.i.n.g with her fervor. "Perhaps I can't tell you why--maybe it's just a feeling of need, of insufficiency of self. Besides, G.o.d is close, like He was to the Israelites when they were in the wilderness; but you will remember that He never came close again.--This forest is so big and so awful, He knows he must stay close to keep you from dying of fear.--G.o.d may not be a reality to the people of the cities, where they see only buildings and streets, but Ben, He is to me. You can't forget Him up here. He stands on every mountain, just as the sons of Aaron saw Him."

He found, to his surprise, that she was not ill-read, particularly in the old-time cla.s.sics. But her environment had also influenced her choice of reading. She loved the old legends in the minor,--far-off and plaintive things that reflected the mood of the dusky forest in which she lived.

One night, when the moon was in the sky, he told her of his war record, of the sh.e.l.l-shock and the strange, criminal mania that followed it; and then of his swift recovery. With an over-powering need of self-justification he told her of his further adventures with Ezram, of the old man's murder and the theft of the claim. She heard him out, listening attentively; but in loyalty to her father she did not let herself believe him entirely. The answer she gave him was the same as she had always given at his every reference to his side of the case.

"If you were in the right, you'd take me back and let the law take its course," she told him. "You'd not be out here laying an ambush for them, to kill them when they try to rescue me."

He could never make her understand how, by the intricacies of law, it would be a rare chance that he would be able to fasten the crime on the murderers: that he had taken the only sure way open to make them pay for Ezram's death. He told her of the old man's, final request; how that his war with her father and his men was a debt that, by secret, inscrutable laws of his being, could never be written off or disavowed. But he could never fully find words to uphold his position. The thing went back to his instincts, traced at last to the remorseless spirit of the wolf that was his heritage.

Yet these hours of talk were immensely good for him. While they never met on common grounds, the girl's true outlook and n.o.bility of character were ever more manifest to him; and were not without a gentling, healing influence upon him. He could not blind himself to them. And sometimes when he sat alone by his dying fire, as the dark menaced him, and the girl that was his charge slept within the portals of stone, he had the unescapable feeling that the very structure of his life was falling and shattering down; but even now he could see, an enchanted vista in the distance, a mightier, more glorious tower, builded and shaped by this woman's hand.

x.x.xI

While Beatrice was at her household tasks--cooking the meals, cleaning the cave, washing and repairing their clothes--Ben never forgot his more serious work. Certain hours every day he spent in exploration, seeking out the pa.s.ses over the hills, examining every possible means of entrance and egress into his valley, getting the lay of the land and picking out the points from which he would make his attack. Already he knew every winding game trail and every detail of the landscape for five miles or more around. His ultimate vengeance seemed just as sure as the night following the day.

Ever he listened for the first sound of the pack train in the forest; and even in his hours of pleasure his eyes ever roamed over the sweep of valley and marsh below. He was prepared for his enemies now. One or five, they couldn't escape him. He had provided for every contingency and had seemingly perfected his plan to the last detail.

He had not the slightest fear that his eagerness would cost him his aim when finally his eye looked along the sights at the forms of his enemies, helpless in the marsh. He was wholly cold about the matter now.

The l.u.s.t and turmoil in his veins, remembered like a ghastly dream from that first night, returned but feebly now, if at all. This change, this restraint had been increasingly manifest since his occupation of the cave, and it had marked, at the same time, a growing barrier between himself and Fenris. But he could not deny but that such a development was wholly to have been expected. Fenris was a child of the open forest aisles, never of the fireside and the hearth. It was not that the wolf had ceased to give him his dint of faithful service, or that he loved him any the less. But each of them had other interests,--one his home and hearth; the other the ever-haunting, enticing call of the wildwood.

Lately Fenris had taken to wandering into the forest at night, going and coming like a ghost; and once his throat and jowls had been stained with dark blood.

"It's getting too tame for you here, old boy, isn't it?" Ben said to him one hushed, breathless night. "But wait just a little while more. It won't be tame then."

It was true: the hunting party, if they had started at once, must be nearing their death valley by now. Except for the absolute worst of traveling conditions they would have already come. Ben felt a growing impatience: a desire to do his work and get it over. His pulse no longer quickened and leaped at the thought of vengeance; and the wolflike pleasure in simple killing could no longer be his. It would merely be the soldier's work--a dreadful obligation to perform speedily and to forget. Even the memory of the huddled form of his savior and friend, so silent and impotent in the dead leaves, did not stir him into madness now.

Yet he never thought of disavowing his vengeance. It was still the main purpose of his life. He had no theme but that: when that work was done he could conceive of nothing further of interest on earth, nothing else worth living for. Not for an instant had he relented: except for that one kiss, on the occasion of her birthday, he had never broken his promise in regard to his relations with Beatrice. His first trait was steadfastness, a trait that, curiously enough, is inherent in all living creatures who are by blood close to the wild wolf, from the German police dog to the savage husky of the North. But he was certainly and deeply changed in these weeks in the cave. He no longer hated these three murderous enemies of his. The power to hate had simply died in his body. He regarded their destruction rather as a duty he owed old Ezram, an obligation that he would die sooner than forego.