The Strength of the Pines Part 4

They walked side by side until a turn of the road took them out of eye-range of the store. "This is the road," Simon said. "All you have to do is follow it. Cabins are not so many that you could mistake it. But the main thing is--whether or not you want to go."

Bruce had no misunderstanding about the man's meaning. It was simply a threat, nothing more nor less.

"I've come a long way to go to that cabin," he replied. "I'm not likely to turn off now."

"There's nothing worth seeing when you get there. Just an old hag--a wrinkled old dame that looks like a witch."

Bruce felt a deep and little understood resentment at the words. Yet since he had as yet established no relations with the woman, he had no grounds for silencing the man. "I'll have to decide that," he replied.

"I'm going to see some one else, too."

"Some one named--Linda?"

"Yes. You seem quite interested."

They were standing face to face in the trail. For once Bruce was glad of his unusual height. He did not have to raise his eyes greatly to look squarely into Simon's. Both faces were flushed, both set; and the eyes of the older man brightened slowly.

"I am interested," Simon replied. "You're a tenderfoot. You're fresh from cities. You're going up there to learn things that won't be any pleasure to you. You're going into the real mountains--a man's land such as never was a place for tenderfeet. A good many things can happen up there. A good many things have happened up there. I warn you--go back!"

Bruce smiled, just the faint flicker of a smile, but Simon's eyes narrowed when he saw it. The dark face lost a little of its insolence.

He knew men, this huge son of the wilderness, and he knew that no coward could smile in such a moment as this. He was accustomed to implicit obedience and was not used to seeing men smile when he uttered a threat.

"I've come too far to go back," Bruce told him. "Nothing can turn me."

"Men have been turned before, on trails like this," Simon told him.

"Don't misunderstand me. I advised you to go back before, and I usually don't take time or trouble to advise any one. Now I _tell_ you to go back. This is a man's land, and we don't want any tenderfeet here."

"The trail is open," Bruce returned. It was not his usual manner to speak in quite this way. He seemed at once to have fallen into the vernacular of the wilderness of which symbolic reference has such a part. Strange as the scene was to him, it was in some way familiar too.

It was as if this meeting had been ordained long ago; that it was part of an inexorable destiny that the two should be talking together, face to face, on this winding mountain road. Memories--all vague, all unrecognized--thronged through him.

Many times, during the past years, he had wakened from curious dreams that in the light of day he had tried in vain to interpret. He was never able to connect them with any remembered experience. Now it was as if one of these dreams were coming true. There was the same silence about him, the dark forests beyond, the ridges stretching ever. There was some great foe that might any instant overwhelm him.

"I guess you heard me," Simon said; "I told you to go back."

"And I hope you heard me too. I'm going on. I haven't any more time to give you."

"And I'm not going to take any more, either. But let me make one thing plain. No man, told to go back by me, ever has a chance to be told again. This ain't your cities--up here. There ain't any policeman on every corner. The woods are big, and all kinds of things can happen in them--and be swallowed up--as I swallow these leaves in my hand."

His great arm reached out with incredible power and seized a handful of leaves off a near-by shrub. It seemed to Bruce that they crushed like fruit and stained the dark skin.

"What is done up here isn't put in the newspapers down below. We're mountain men; we've lived up here as long as men have lived in the West.

We have our own way of doing things, and our own law. Think once more about going back."

"I've already decided. I'm going on."

Once more they stood, eyes meeting eyes on the trail, and Simon's face was darkening with pa.s.sion. Bruce knew that his hands were clenching, and his own muscles bunched and made ready to resist any kind of attack.

But Simon didn't strike. He laughed instead,--a single deep note of utter and depthless scorn. Then he drew back and let Bruce pa.s.s on up the road.

VII

Bruce couldn't mistake the cabin. At the end of the trail he found it,--a little shack of unpainted boards with a single door and a single window.

He stood a moment in the sunlight. His shadow was already long behind him, and the mountains had that curious deep blue of late afternoon. The pine needles were soft under his feet; the later-afternoon silence was over the land. He could not guess what was his destiny behind that rude door. It was a moment long waited; for one of the few times in his life he was trembling with excitement. He felt as if a key, long lost, was turning in the doorway of understanding.

He walked nearer and tapped with his knuckles on the door.

If the forests have one all-pervading quality it is silence. Of course the most silent time is at night, but just before sunset, when most of the forest creatures are in their mid-afternoon sleep, any noise is a rare thing. What sound there is carries far and seems rather out of place. Bruce could picture the whole of the little drama that followed his knock by just the faint sounds--inaudible in a less silent land--that reached him from behind the door. At first it was just a start; then a short exclamation in the hollow, half-whispering voice of old, old age. A moment more of silence--as if a slow-moving, aged brain were trying to conjecture who stood outside--then the creaking of a chair as some one rose. The last sounds were of a strange hobbling toward him,--a rustle of shoes half dragged on the floor and the intermittent tapping of a cane.

The face that showed so dimly in the shadowed room looked just as Bruce had expected,--wrinkled past belief, lean and hawk-nosed from age. The hand that rested on the cane was like a bird's claw, the skin blue and hard and dry. There were a few strands of hair drawn back over her lean head, but all its color had faded out long ago. She stood bowed over her cane.

Yet in that first instant Bruce had an inexplicable impression of being in the presence of a power. He did not have the wave of pity with which one usually greets the decrepit. And at first he didn't know why. But soon he grew accustomed to the shadows and he could see the woman's eyes. Then he understood.

They were set deep behind grizzled brows, but they glowed like coals.

There was no other word. They were not the eyes of one whom time is about to conquer. Her bodily strength was gone; any personal beauty that she might have had was ashes long and long ago, but some great fire burned in her yet. As far as bodily appearance went the grave should have claimed her long since; but a dauntless spirit had sustained her.

For, as all men know, the power of the spirit has never yet been measured.

She blinked in the light. "Who is it?" she croaked.

Bruce did not answer. He had not prepared a reply for this question. But it was not needed. The woman leaned forward, and a vivid light began to dawn in her dark, furrowed face.

Even to Bruce, already succ.u.mbed to this atmosphere of mystery into which his adventure had led him, that dawning light was the single most startling phenomenon he had ever beheld. It is very easy to imagine a radiance upon the face. But in reality, most all facial expression is simply a change in the contour of lines. But this was not a case of imagination now. The witchlike face seemed to gleam with a white flame.

And Bruce knew that his coming was the answer to the prayer of a whole lifetime. It was a thought to sober him. No small pa.s.sion, no weak desire, no prayer that time or despair could silence could effect such a light as this.

"Bruce," he said simply. It did not even occur to him to use the surname of Duncan. It was a name of a time and sphere already forgotten. "I don't know what my real last name is."

"Bruce--Bruce," the woman whispered. She stretched a palsied hand to him as if it would feel his flesh to rea.s.sure her of its reality. The wild light in her eyes pierced him, burning like chemical rays, and a great flood of feeling yet unknown and unrecognized swept over him. He saw her snags of teeth as her dry lips half-opened. He saw the exultation in her wrinkled, lifted face. "Oh, praises to His Everlasting Name!" she cried. "Oh, Glory--Glory to on High!"

And this was not blasphemy. The words came from the heart. No matter how terrible the pa.s.sion from which they sprang, whether it was such evil as would cast her to h.e.l.l, such a cry as this could not go unheard. The strength seemed to go out of her as water flows. She rocked on her cane, and Bruce, thinking she was about to fall, seized her shoulders. "At last--at last," she cried. "You've come at last."

She gripped herself, as if trying to find renewed strength. "Go at once," she said, "to the end of the Pine-needle Trail. It leads from behind the cabin."

He tried to emerge from the dreamlike mists that had enveloped him. "How far is it?" he asked her steadily.

"To the end of Pine-needle Trail," she rocked again, clutched for one of his brown hands, and pressed it between hers.

Then she raised it to her dry lips. Bruce could not keep her from it.

And after an instant more he did not attempt to draw it from her embrace. In the darkness of that mountain cabin, in the shadow of the eternal pines, he knew that some great drama of human life and love and hatred was behind the action; and he knew with a knowledge unimpeachable that it would be only insolence for him to try further to resist it. Its meaning went too deep for him to see; but it filled him with a great and wondering awe.

Then he turned away, up the Pine-needle Trail. Clear until the deeper forest closed around him her voice still followed him,--a strange croaking in the afternoon silence. "At last," he heard her crying. "At last, at last."

VIII