The Trail Of The Axe Part 46

"We'll start right away," he said, in his usual voice.

"We?" The monosyllabic question sprang from Truscott's lips in a sudden access of fear.

"Yes. We. Mason, you, and me."

CHAPTER XXVI

TO THE LUMBER CAMP

The gray morning mist rolled slowly up the hillsides from the bosom of the warming valley below. Great billows mounted, swelling in volume till, overweighted, they toppled, surging like the breaking rollers of a wind-swept ocean. Here and there the rosy sunlight brushed the swirling sea with a tenderness of color no painter's brush could ever hope to produce. A precocious sunbeam shot athwart the leaden prospect.

It bored its way through the churning fog searching the depths of some benighted wood-lined hollow, as though to rouse its slumbering world.

Dense spruce and hemlock forests grew out of the mists. The spires of gigantic pines rose, piercing the gray as though gasping for the warming radiance above. A perching eagle, newly roused from its slumbers, shrieked its morning song till the rebounding cries, echoing from a thousand directions, suggested the reveille of the entire feathered world. The mournful whistle of a solitary marmot swelled the song from many new directions, and the raucous chorus had for its accompaniment the thundering chords of hidden waters, seething and boiling in the mighty canons below.

The long-drawn, sibilant hush of night was gone; the leaden mountain dawn had pa.s.sed; day, glorious in its waking splendor, had routed the grim shadows from the mystic depths of canon, from the leaden-hued forest-laden valleys. The sunlight was upon the dazzling mountain-tops, groping, searching the very heart of the Rocky Mountains.

Dave's buckboard, no more conspicuous than some wandering ant in the vast mountain world, crawled from the depths of a wide valley and slowly mounted the shoulders of a forest-clad ridge. It vanished into the twilight of giant woods, only to be seen again, some hours later, at a greater alt.i.tude, climbing, climbing the great slopes, or descending to gaping hollows, but always attaining the higher lands.

But his speed was by no means a crawl in reality, only did it appear so by reason of the vastness of the world about him. His horses were traveling as fresh, mettlesome beasts can travel when urged by such a man as Dave, with his nerves strung to a terrific tension by the emergency of his journey. The willing beasts raced down the hills over the uneven trail with all the sure-footed carelessness of the prairie-bred broncho. They took the inclines with scarcely perceptible slackening of their gait. And only the sharp hills served them for breathing s.p.a.ce.

Dave occupied the driving-seat while Mason sat guard over Jim Truscott in the carryall behind. Those two days on the trail had been unusually silent, even for men such as they were, and even taking into consideration the object of their journey. Truscott and Mason were almost "dead beat" with all that had gone before, and Dave--he was wrapped in his own thoughts.

His thoughts carried him far away from his companions into a world where love and strife were curiously blended. Every thread of such thought sent him blundering into mires of trouble, the possibilities of which set his nerves jangling with apprehension. But their contemplation only stiffened his stern resolve to fight the coming battle with a courage and resource such as never yet had he brought to bear in his bid for success. He knew that before him lay the culminating battle of his long and ardent sieging of Fortune's stronghold. He knew that now, at last, he was face to face with the great test of his fitness. He knew that this battle had always been bound to come before the goal of his success was reached; although, perhaps, its method and its cause may have taken a thousand other forms. It is not in the nature of things that a man may march untested straight to the golden pastures of his ambitions. He must fight every foot of his way, and the final battle must ever be the sternest, the crudest. G.o.d help the man if he has not the fitness, for Fate and Fortune are remorseless foes.

But besides his native courage, Dave was stirred to even greater efforts by man's strongest motive, be his cause for good or evil. Love was the main-spring of his inspiration. He had desired success with a pa.s.sionate longing all his life, and his success was not all selfishness. But now, before all things, he saw the sweetly gentle face of Betty Somers gazing with a heartful appeal, beckoning him, calling him to help her. Every moment of that long journey the vision remained with him; every moment he felt might be the moment of dire tragedy for her. He dared not trust himself to consider the nature of that tragedy, or he must have turned and rended the man who was its cause. Only he blessed each moment that pa.s.sed, bringing him nearer to her side. He loved her as he loved nothing and no one else on earth, and somehow there had crept into his mind the thought of a possibility he had never yet dared to consider. It was a vague ray of hope that the impossibility of his love was not so great as he had always believed.

How it had stolen in upon him he hardly knew. Perhaps it was his mother's persistent references to Betty. Perhaps it was the result of his talk with the man who had brought her to the straits she was now placed in. Perhaps it was one of these things, or both, coupled with the memory of trifling incidents in the past, which had seemed to mean nothing at the time of their happening.

Whatever it was, his love for the girl swept through him now in a way that drove him headlong to her rescue. His own affairs of the mills, the fate of his friends in Malkern, of the village itself; all these things were driven into the background of his thoughts. Betty needed him. The thought set his brain whirling with a wild thrilling happiness, mazed, every alternate moment, with a horrible fear that drove him to the depths of despair.

It was high noon when smoke ahead warned him that the journey was nearly over. The buckboard was on the ridge shouldering a wide valley, and below it was the rushing torrent of the Red Sand River. From his position Dave had a full view of the dull green forest world rolling away, east and west, in vast, undulating waves as far as the eye could reach. Only to the south, beyond the valley, was there a break in the dense, verdant carpet. And here it was he beheld the telltale smoke of the lumber camp.

"That's the camp," he said, looking straight ahead, watching the slowly rising haze with longing eyes. "Guess we haven't to cross the river.

Good."

Mason was looking out over his shoulder.

"No," he said after a moment's pause, while he tried to read the signs he beheld. "We don't cross the river. Keep to the trail. It takes us right past my shack."

"Where Parson Tom and----?"

"Yes, where they're living."

In another quarter of a mile they would be descending the hollow of a small valley diverging from the valley of the Red Sand River. As they drew near the decline, Dave spoke again.

"Can you make anything out, Mason?" he asked. "Seems to me that smoke is thick for--for stovepipes. There's two lots; one of 'em nearer this way."

Mason stared out for some moments, shielding his eyes from the dazzling sun.

"I can't be sure," he said at last. "The nearest smoke should be my shack."

A grave anxiety crept into Dave's eyes.

"It isn't thick there," he said, as though trying to rea.s.sure himself.

"That's your stovepipe?"

"Maybe."

Mason's reply expressed doubt.

Suddenly Dave leant over and his whip fell sharply across the horses'

backs. They sprang at their neck-yoke and raced down into the final dip.

CHAPTER XXVII

AT BAY

In the dugout Tom Chepstow was standing with his ear pressed against the door-jamb. He was listening, straining with every nerve alert to glean the least indication of what was going on outside. His face was pale and drawn, and his eyes shone with anxiety. He was gripped by a fear he had never known before, a fear that might well come to the bravest. Personal, physical danger he understood, it was almost pleasant to him, something that gave life a new interest. But this--this was different, this was horrible.

Betty was standing just behind him. She was leaning forward craning intently. Her hands were clenched at her sides, and a similar dread was looking out of her soft eyes. Her face was pale with a marble coldness, her rich red lips were compressed to a fine line, her whole body was tense with the fear that lay behind her straining eyes. There was desperation in the poise of her body, the desperation of a brave woman who sees the last hope vanishing, swallowed up in a tide of disaster she is powerless to stem.

For nearly a week these two had been penned up in the hut. But for the last thirty-six hours their stronghold had actually been in a state of siege. From the time of her uncle's realization of the conditions obtaining outside Betty had not ventured without the building, while the man himself had been forced to use the utmost caution in moving abroad. It had been absolutely necessary for him to make several expeditions, otherwise he, too, would have remained in their fortress.

They required water and fire-wood, and these things had to be procured.

Then, too, there were the sick.

But on the third day the climax was reached. Returning from one of his expeditions Chepstow encountered a drunken gang of lumber-jacks. Under the influence of their recent orgy their spirit-soaked brains had conceived the pretty idea of "ilin' the pa.s.son's works"; in other words, forcing drink upon him, and making him as drunk as themselves.

In their present condition the joke appealed to them, and it was not without a violent struggle that their intended victim escaped.

He was carrying fire-wood at the time, and it served him well as a weapon of defense. In a few brief moments he had left one man stunned upon the ground and another with a horribly broken face, and was himself racing for the dugout. He easily outstripped his drunken pursuers, but he was quickly to learn how high a price he must pay for the temporary victory. He had brought a veritable hornets' nest about his ears.

The mischief began. The attack upon himself had only been a drunken practical joke. The subsequent happenings were in deadly earnest. The mob came in a blaze of savage fury. Their first thought was for vengeance upon him. In all probability, up to that time, Betty's presence in the hut had been forgotten, but now, as they came to the dugout, they remembered. In their present condition it was but a short step from a desire to revenge themselves upon him, to the suggestion of how it could be accomplished through the girl. They remembered her pretty face, her delicious woman's figure, and instantly they became ravening brutes, fired with a mad desire to possess themselves of her.

They were no longer strikers, they were not even men. The spirit taken from the burning store had done its work. A howling pack of demons had been turned loose upon the camp, ready for any fiendish prank, ready for slaughter, ready for anything. These untutored creatures knew no better, they were powerless to help themselves, their pa.s.sions alone guided them at all times, and now all that was most evil in them was frothing to the surface. Sober, they were as tame as caged wolves kept under by the bludgeon of a stern discipline. Drunk, they were madmen, driven by the untamed pa.s.sions of the brute creation. They were animals without the restraining instincts of the animal, they l.u.s.ted for the exercise of their great muscles, and the vital forces which swept through their veins in a pa.s.sionate torrent.

Their first effort was a demand for the surrender of those in the hut, and they were coldly refused. They attempted a parley, and received no encouragement. Now they were determined upon capture, with loudly shouted threats of dire consequences for the defenders' obstinacy.

It was close upon noon of the second day of the siege. The hut was barricaded at every point. Door and windows were blocked up with every available piece of furniture that could be spared, and the repeating-rifles were loaded ready, and both uncle and niece were armed with revolvers. They were defending more than life and liberty, and they knew it. They were defending all that is most sacred in a woman's life. It was a ghastly thought, a desperate thought, but a thought that roused in them both a conviction that any defense brain could conceive was justified. If necessary not even life itself should stand in the way of their defense.

The yellow lamplight threw gloomy shadows about the barricaded room.

Its depressing light added to the sinister aspect of their extremity.