The Strength of the Pines Part 2

It might have been a different world. Only a glimpse of it, illumined by the moon, could be seen through the soiled and besmirched window pane; but that was enough to tell the story. There were no tall buildings, lighted by a thousand electric lights, such as Bruce could see through the windows of his bedroom at night. The lights that could be discerned in this strange, dark sky were largely unfamiliar to Bruce, because of the smoke-clouds that had always hung above the city where he lived.

There were just stars, but there were so many of them that the mind was unable to comprehend their number.

There is a perplexing variation in the appearance of these twinkling spheres. No man who has traveled widely can escape this fact. Likely enough they are the same stars, but they put on different faces. They seem almost insignificant at times,--dull and dim and unreal. It is not this way with the stars that peer down through these high forests. Men cannot walk beneath them and be unaware of them. They are incredibly large and bright and near, and the eyes naturally lift to them. There are nights in plenty, in the wild places, where they seem much more real than the dim, moonlit ridge or even the spark of a trapper's campfire, far away. They grow to be companions, too, in time. Perhaps after many, many years in the wild a man even attains some understanding of them, learning their infinite beneficence, and finding in them rare comrades in loneliness, and beacons on the dim and intertwining trails.

There was also a moon that cast a little square of light, like a fairy tapestry, on the floor. It was not such a moon as leers down red and strange through the smoke of cities. It was vivid and quite white,--the wilderness moon that times the hunting hours of the forest creatures.

But the patch that it cast on the floor was obscured in a moment because the man who had been musing in the big chair beside the empty fireplace had risen and lighted a kerosene lamp.

The light prevented any further scrutiny of the moon and stars. And what remained to look at was not nearly so pleasing to the spirit. It was a great, white-walled room that would have been beautiful had it not been for certain unfortunate attempts to beautify it. The walls, that should have been sweeping and clean, were adorned with gaudily framed pictures which in themselves were dim and drab from many summers' acc.u.mulation of dust. There was a stone fireplace, and certain ma.s.sive, dust-covered chairs grouped about it. But the eyes never would have got to these.

They would have been held and fascinated by the face and the form of the man who had just lighted the lamp.

No one could look twice at that ma.s.sive physique and question its might.

He seemed almost gigantic in the yellow lamplight. In reality he stood six feet and almost three inches, and his frame was perfectly in proportion. He moved slowly, lazily, and the thought flashed to some great monster of the forest that could uproot a tree with a blow. The huge muscles rippled and moved under the flannel shirt. The vast hand looked as if it could seize the gla.s.s bowl of the lamp and crush it like an eggsh.e.l.l.

The face was huge, big and gaunt of bone; and particularly one would notice the mouth. It would be noticed even before the dark, deep-sunken eyes. It was a bloodhound mouth, the mouth of a man of great and terrible pa.s.sions, and there was an unmistakable measure of cruelty and savagely about it. But there was strength, too. No eye could doubt that.

The jaw muscles looked as powerful as those of a beast of prey. But it was not an ugly face, for all the brutality of the features. It was even handsome in the hard, mountain way. One would notice straight, black hair--the man's age was about thirty-nine--long over rather dark ears, and a great, gnarled throat. The words when he spoke seemed to come from deep within it.

"Come in, Dave," he said.

In this little remark lay something of the man's power. The visitor had come unannounced. His visit had been unexpected. His host had not yet seen his face. Yet the man knew, before the door was opened, who it was that had come.

The reason went back to a certain quickening of the senses that is the peculiar right and property of most men who are really residents of the wilderness. And resident, in this case, does not mean merely one who builds his cabin on the slopes and lives there until he dies. It means a true relationship with the wild, an actual understanding. This man was the son of the wild as much as the wolves that ran in the packs. The wilderness is a fecund parent, producing an astounding variety of types.

Some are beautiful, many stronger than iron, but her parentage was never more evident than in the case of this bronze-skinned giant that called out through the open doorway. Among certain other things he had acquired an ability to name and interpret quickly the little sounds of the wilderness night. Soft though it was, he had heard the sound of approaching feet in the pine needles. As surely as he would have recognized the dark face of the man in the doorway, he recognized the sound as Dave's step.

The man came in, and at once an observer would have detected an air of deference in his att.i.tude. Very plainly he had come to see his chief. He was a year or two older than his host, less powerful of physique, and his eyes did not hold quite so straight. There was less savagery but more cunning in his sharp features.

He blurted out his news at once. "Old Elmira has got word down to the settlements at last," he said.

There was no muscular response in the larger man. Dave was plainly disappointed. He wanted his news to cause a stir. It was true, however, that his host slowly raised his eyes. Dave glanced away.

"What do you mean?" the man demanded.

"Mean--I mean just what I said. We should have watched closer.

Bill--Young Bill, I mean--saw a city chap just in the act of going in to see her. He had come on to the plateaus with his guide--Wegan was the man's name--and Bill said he stayed a lot longer than he would have if he hadn't taken a message from her. Then Young Bill made some inquiries--innocent as you please--and he found out for sure that this Wegan was from--just the place we don't want him to be from. And he'll carry word sure."

"How long ago was this?"

"Week ago Tuesday."

"And why have you been so long in telling me?"

When Dave's chief asked questions in this tone, answers always came quickly. They rolled so fast from the mouth that they blurred and ran together. "Why, Simon--you ain't been where I could see you. Anyway, there was nothin' we could have done."

"There wasn't, eh? I don't suppose you ever thought that there's yet two months before we can clinch this thing for good, and young Folger might--I say might--have kicking about somewhere in his belongings the very doc.u.ment we've all of us been worrying about for twenty years."

Simon cursed--a single, fiery oath. "I don't suppose you could have arranged for this Wegan to have had a hunting accident, could you? Who in the devil would have thought that yelping old hen could have ever done it--would have ever kept at it long enough to reach anybody to carry her message! But as usual, we are yelling before we're hurt. It isn't worth a cussword. Like as not, this Wegan will never take the trouble to hunt him up. And if he does--well, it's nothing to worry about, either. There is one back door that has been opened many times to let his people go through, and it may easily be opened again."

Dave's eyes filled with admiration. Then he turned and gazed out through the window. Against the eastern sky, already wan and pale from the encroaching dawn, the long ridge of a mountain stood in vivid and startling silhouette. The edge of it was curiously jagged with many little upright points.

There was only one person who would have been greatly amazed by that outline of the ridge; and the years and distance had obscured her long ago. This was a teacher at an orphanage in a distant city, who once had taken a crude drawing from the hands of a child. Here was the original at last. It was the same ridge, covered with pines, that little Bruce had drawn.

IV

The train came to a sliding halt at Deer Creek, paused an infinitesimal fraction of a second, and roared on in its ceaseless journey. That infinitesimal fraction was long enough for Bruce, poised on the bottom step of a sleeping car, to swing down on to the gravel right-of-way. His bag, hurled by a sleepy porter, followed him.

He turned first to watch the vanishing tail light, speeding so swiftly into the darkness; and curiously all at once it blinked out. But it was not that the switchmen were neglectful of their duties. In this certain portion of the Cascades the railroad track is constructed something after the manner of a giant screw, coiling like a great serpent up the ridges, and the train had simply vanished around a curve.

Duncan's next impression was one of infinite solitude. He hadn't read any guidebooks about Deer Creek, and he had expected some sort of town.

A western mining camp, perhaps, where the windows of a dance hall would gleam through the darkness; or one of those curious little mushroom-growth cities that are to be found all over the West. But at Deer Creek there was one little wooden structure with only three sides,--the opening facing the track. It was evidently the waiting room used by the mountain men as they waited for their local trains.

There were no porters to carry his bag. There were no shouting officials. His only companions were the stars and the moon and, farther up the slope, certain tall trees that tapered to incredible points almost in the region where the stars began. The noise of the train died quickly. It vanished almost as soon as the dot of red that had been its tail light. It was true that he heard a faint pulsing far below him, a sound that was probably the chug of the steam, but it only made an effective background for the silence. It was scarcely more to be heard than the pulse of his own blood; and as he waited even this faded and died away.

The moon cast his shadow on the yellow gra.s.s beside the crude station, and a curious flood of sensations--scarcely more tangible than its silver light--came over him. The moment had a quality of enchantment; and why he did not know. His throat suddenly filled, a curious weight and pain came to his eyelids, a quiver stole over his nerves. He stood silent with lifted face,--a strange figure in that mystery of moonlight.

The whole scene, for causes deeper than any words may ever seek and reveal, moved him past any experience in his life. It was wholly new.

When he had gone to sleep in his berth, earlier that same night, the train had been pa.s.sing through a level, fertile valley that might have been one of the river bottoms beyond the Mississippi. When darkness had come down he had been in a great city in the northern part of the State,--a noisy, busy place that was not greatly different from the city whence he had come. But now he seemed in a different world.

Possibly, in the long journey to the West, he had pa.s.sed through forest before. But some way their appeal had not got to him. He was behind closed windows, his thoughts had been busy with reading and other occupations of travel. There had been no shading off, no gradations; he had come straight from a great seat of civilization to the heart of the wilderness.

He turned about until the wind was in his face. It was full of fragrances,--strange, indescribable smells that seemed to call up a forgotten world. They carried a message to him, but as yet he hadn't made out its meaning. He only knew it was something mysterious and profound: great truths that flickered, like dim lights, in his consciousness, but whose outline he could not quite discern. They went straight home to him, those night smells from the forest. One of them was a balsam: a fragrance that once experienced lingers ever in the memory and calls men back to it in the end. Those who die in its fragrance, just as those who go to sleep, feel sure of having pleasant dreams. There were other smells too--delicate perfumes from mountain flowers that were deep-hidden in the gra.s.s--and many others, the nature of which he could not even guess.

Perhaps there were sounds, but they only seemed part of the silence. The faintest rustle in the world reached him from the forests above of many little winds playing a running game between the trunks, and the stir of the Little People, moving in their midnight occupations. Each of these sounds had its message for Bruce. They all seemed to be trying to tell him something, to make clear some great truth that was dawning in his consciousness.

He was not in the least afraid. He felt at peace as never before. He picked up his bag, and with stealing steps approached the long slope behind. The moon showed him a fallen log, and he found a comfortable seat on the ground beside it, his back against its bark. Then he waited for the dawn to come out.

Not even Bruce knew or understood all the thoughts that came over him in that lonely wait. But he did have a peculiar sense of expectation, a realization that the coming of the dawn would bring him a message clearer than all these messages of fragrance and sound. The moon made wide silver patches between the distant trees; but as yet the forest had not opened its secrets to him. As yet it was but a mystery, a profundity of shadows and enchantment that he did not understand.

The night hours pa.s.sed. The sense of peace seemed to deepen on the man.

He sat relaxed, his brown face grave, his eyes lifted. The stars began to dim and draw back farther into the recesses of the sky. The round outline of the moon seemed less p.r.o.nounced. And a faint ribbon of light began to grow in the east.

It widened. The light grew. The night wind played one more little game between the tree trunks and slipped away to the Home of Winds that lies somewhere above the mountains. The little night sounds were slowly stilled.

Bruce closed his eyes, not knowing why. His blood was leaping in his veins. An unfamiliar excitement, almost an exultation, had come upon him. He lowered his head nearly to his hands that rested in his lap, then waited a full five minutes more.

Then he opened his eyes. The light had grown around him. His hands were quite plain. Slowly, as a man raises his eyes to a miracle, he lifted his face.

The forest was no longer obscured in darkness. The great trees had emerged, and only the dusk as of twilight was left between. He saw them plainly,--their symmetrical forms, their declining limbs, their tall tops piercing the sky. He saw them as they were,--those ancient, eternal symbols and watchmen of the wilderness. And he knew them at last, acquaintances long forgotten but remembered now.

"The pines!" he cried. He leaped to his feet with flashing eyes. "I have come back to the pines!"

V