The Strength of the Pines Part 14

"Yes," Simon echoed in a strange half-whisper. "Let the buzzards talk to him."

Dave took fresh heart at the sound of that voice. "No one would have ever knowed it," he went on. "No one would ever know it now. They'd find his bones, some time maybe, but there'd be no one to point to. They'd never get any thing against us. Everybody except the mountain people have forgotten about this affair. Those in the mountains are too scattered and few to take any part in it. I tell you--it's all the way, or no way at all. Tell me to wait for him on the trail."

"Wait. Wait a minute. How long before he will come?"

"Any time now. And don't postpone this matter any more. We're men, not babies. He's not a fool or not a coward, either. He's got his old man's blood in him--not his mother's to run away. As long as he ain't croaked, all we've done so far is apt to come to nothing. And there's one thing more. He's going to take the blood-feud up again."

"Lots of good it would do him. One against a dozen."

"But he's a shot--I saw that plain enough--and how'd you like to have him shoot through _your_ windows some time? Old Elmira and Linda have set him on, and he's hot for it."

"I wish you'd got that old heifer when you got her son," Simon said. He still spoke calmly; but it was plain enough that Dave's words were having the desired effect. Dave could discern this fact by certain lights and expressions about the pupils of his brother's eyes, signs learned and remembered long ago. "So he's taken up the blood-feud, has he? I thought I gave his father some lessons in that a long time since.

Well, I suppose we must let him have his way!"

"And remember too," Dave urged, "what you told him when you met him in the store. You said you wouldn't warn him twice."

"I remember." The two men were silent, but Dave stood no longer motionless. The motions that he made, however, were not discernible in the growing gloom of the barn. He was shivering all over with malice and fury.

"Then you've given the word?" he asked.

"I've given the word, but I'll do it my own way. Listen, Dave." Simon stood, head bent, deep in thought. "Could you arrange to have Linda and the old hag out of the house when Bruce gets back?"

"Yes--"

"We've got to work this thing right. We can't operate in the open like we used to. This man has taken up the blood-feud--but the thing to do--is to let him come to us."

"But he won't do it. He'll go to the courts first."

Simon's face grew stern. "I don't want any more interruptions, Dave. I mean we will want to give the impression that he attacked us first--on his own free will. What if he comes into our house-a man unknown in these parts--and something happens to him there--in the dead of night?

It wouldn't look so bad then, would it? Besides--if we got him here--before the clan, we might be able to find out where that doc.u.ment is. At least we'll have him here where everything will be in our favor.

First, how can you tell when he's going to come?"

"He ought to be here very soon. The moon's bright and I can get up on the ridge and see his shadow through your field gla.s.ses when he crosses the big south pasture. That will give me a full half-hour before he comes."

"It's enough. I'm ready to give you your orders now. They are--just to use your head, and on some pretext get those two women out of the house so that Bruce can't find them when he returns. Don't let them come back for an hour, if you can help it. If it works--all right. If it doesn't, we'll use more direct measures. I'll tend to the rest."

He strode to the wall and took down a saddle from the hook. Quickly he threw it over the back of one of the cow ponies, the animal that he had punished. He put the bridle in Dave's hand. "Stop at the house for the gla.s.ses, then ride to the ridge at once," he ordered. "Then keep watch."

Without words Dave led the horse through the door and swung on to its back. In an instant the wild folk, in the fringe of forest beyond, paused in their night occupations to listen to the sound of hoof beats on the turf. Then Simon slowly saddled his own horse.

XIX

The day was quite dead when Dave Turner reached his post on top of the ridge. The gray of twilight had pa.s.sed, the forest was lost in darkness, the stars were all out. The only vestige of daylight that remained was a pale, red glow over the Western mountains,--and this was more like red flowers that had been placed on its grave in remembrance.

Fortunately, the moon rose early. Otherwise Dave's watch would have been in vain. The soft light wrought strange miracles in the forest: bathing the tree tops in silver, laying wonderful cobweb tapestries between the trunks, upsetting the whole perspective as to distance and contour. Dave didn't have long to wait. At the end of a half-hour he saw, through the field gla.s.ses, the wavering of a strange black shadow on the distant meadow. Only the vivid quality of the full moon enabled him to see it at all.

He tried to get a better focus. It might be just the shadow of deer, come to browse on the parched gra.s.s. Dave felt a little tremor of excitement at the thought that if it were not Bruce, it was more likely the last of the grizzlies, the Killer. The previous night the gray forest king had made an excursion into Simon's pastures and had killed a yearling calf; in all probability he would return to-night to finish his feast. In fact, this night would in all probability see the end of the Killer. Some one of the Turners would wait for him, with a loaded rifle, in a safe ambush.

But it wasn't the Killer, after all. It was before his time; besides, the shadow was too slender to be that of the huge bear. Dave Turner watched a moment longer, so that there could be no possibility of a mistake. Bruce was returning; he was little more than a half-hour's walk from Linda's home.

Turner swung on his horse, then lashed the animal into a gallop. Less than five minutes later he drew up to a halt beneath the Sentinel Pine, almost a mile distant. For the first time, Dave began to move cautiously.

It would complicate matters if the two women had already gone to bed.

The hour was early--not yet nine--but the fall of darkness is often the going-to-bed time of the mountain people. It is warmer there and safer; and the expense of candles is lessened. Incidentally, it is the natural course for the human breed,--to bed at nightfall and up at dawn; and only distortion of nature can change the habit. It is doubtful if even the earliest men--those curious, long-armed, stiff-thumbed, heavy-jowled forefathers far remote--were ever night hunters. Like the hawks and most of the other birds of prey they were content to leave the game trails to the beasts at night. As life in the mountains gets down to a primitive basis, most of the hill people soon fall into this natural course. But to-night Linda and old Elmira were sitting up, waiting for Bruce's return.

A candle flame flickered at the window. Dave went up to the door and knocked.

"Who's there?" Elmira called. It was a habit learned in the dreadful days of twenty years ago, not to open a door without at least some knowledge of who stood without. A lighted doorway sets off a target almost as well as a field of white sets off a black bull's-eye.

Dave knew that truth was the proper course. "Dave Turner," he replied.

A long second of heavy, strange silence ensued. Then the woman spoke again. There was a new note in her voice, a curious hoa.r.s.eness, but at the same time a sense of exultation and excitement. But Dave didn't notice it. Perhaps the oaken door that the voice came through stripped away all the overtones; possibly his own perceptions were too blunt to receive it. He might, however, have been interested in the singular look of wonder that flashed over Linda's face as she stared at her aged aunt.

Linda was not thinking of Dave. She had forgotten that he stood outside.

His visit was the last thing that either of them expected--except, perhaps, on some such deadly business as the clan had come years before--yet she found no s.p.a.ce in her thought for him. Her whole attention was seized and held by the unfamiliar note in her aunt's voice, and a strange drawing of the woman's features that the closed door prevented Dave from seeing. It was a look almost of rapture, hardly to be expected in the presence of an enemy. The dim eyes seemed to glow in the shadows. It was the look of one who had wandered steep and unknown trails for uncounted years and sees the distant lights of his home at last.

She got up from her chair and moved over to the little pack she had carried on her back when she had walked up from her cabin. Linda still gazed at her in growing wonder. The long years seemed to have fallen away from her; she slipped across the uncarpeted floor with the agility and silence of a tiger. She always had given the impression of latent power, but never so much as now. She took some little object from the bag and slipped it next to her withered and scrawny breast.

"What do you want?" she called out into the gloom.

Dave had been getting a little restless in the silence; but the voice rea.s.sured him. "I'll tell you when you open the door. It's something about Bruce."

Linda remembered him then. She leaped to the door and flung it wide. She saw the stars without, the dark fringe of pines against the sky line behind. She felt the wind and the cool breath of the darkness. But most of all she saw the cunning, sharp-featured face of Dave Turner, with the candlelight upon him. The yellow beams were in his eyes too. They seemed full of guttering lights.

The few times that Linda had talked to Dave she had always felt uneasy beneath his speculative gaze. The same sensation swept over her now. She knew perfectly what she would have had to expect, long since, from this man, were it not that he had lived in fear of his brother Simon. The mighty leader of the clan had set a barrier around her as far as personal attentions went,--and his reasons were obvious. The mountain girls do not usually attain her perfection of form and face; his desire for her was as jealous as it was intense and real. This dark-hearted man of great and terrible emotions did not only know how to hate. In his own savage way he could love too. Linda hated and feared him, but the emotion was wholly different from the dread and abhorrence with which she regarded Dave. "What about Bruce?" she demanded.

Dave leered. "Do you want to see him? He's lying--up here on the hill."

The tone was knowing, edged with cruelty; and it had the desired effect.

The color swept from the girl's face. In a single fraction of an instant it showed stark white in the candlelight.

There was an instant's sensation of terrible cold. But her voice was hard and lifeless when she spoke.

"You mean you've killed him?" she asked simply.

"We ain't killed him. We've just been teaching him a lesson," Dave explained. "Simon warned him not to come up--and we've had to talk to him a little--with fists and heels."

Linda cried out then, one agonized syllable. She knew what fists and heels could do in the fights between the mountain men. They are as much weapons of torture as the claws and fangs of the Killer. She had an instant's dread picture of this strong man of hers lying maimed and broken, a battered, whimpering, ineffective thing in the moonlight of some distant hillside. The vision brought knowledge to her. Even more clearly than in the second of their kiss, before he had gone to see Hudson, she realized what an immutable part of her he was. She gazed with growing horror at Dave's leering face. "Where is he?" she asked.

She remembered, with singular steadfastness, the pistol she had concealed in her own room.

"I'll show you. If you want to get him in you'd better bring the old hag with you. It'll take two of you to carry him."

"I'll come," the old woman said from across the shadowed room. She spoke with a curious breathlessness. "I'll go at once."

The door closed behind the three of them, and they went out into the moonlit forest. Dave walked first. There was an unlooked-for eagerness in his motions, but Linda thought that she understood it. It was wholly characteristic of him that he should find a degenerate rapture in showing these two women the terrible handiwork of the Turners. He rejoiced in just this sort of cruelty. She had no suspicion that this excursion was only a pretext to get the two women away from the house, and that his eagerness arose from deeper causes. It was true that Dave exulted in the work, and strangely the fact that it was part of the plot against Bruce had been almost forgotten in the face of a greater emotion. He was alone in the darkness with Linda--except of course for a helpless old woman--and the command of Simon in regard to his att.i.tude toward her seemed suddenly dim and far away. He led them over a hill, into the deeper forest.