The 8th Western Novel

by Dean Owen

  “Better have my fun this afternoon,” he reflected, as excuse for his leisureliness, “for if I’m still on Little Saghelia tomorrow, things aren’t going to be very funny for me!”

  For a time Leda kept scolding him for being so poky, but after a while she fell in with his mood and forgot about the afternoon’s work.

  At a small torrent they saw a school of fingerling trout, golden-colored Skeenas, darting around in the crystal water like animated nuggets of live gold. Across the valley they saw Jinny’s billy-goat friend, frightened by a grizzly, lead his sergalio at a breath-taking dash straight up the face of a thousand-foot rock. On a talus slide they spotted a cony, solitary little denizen of bleak high places, and paused to watch him industriously making hay—cutting the sparse grass, spreading it on flat stones to dry, and carrying yesterday’s harvest back into his bear-proof den against the snows and woolly-whippers of winter.

  Whenever they came to a nest of “balancing boulders,” they selected a big one, toppled it, watched it go bounding and careening down the steep half-mile slope till it vanished in the heavy timber.

  It was half-past three when they reached the stretch of caves which Leda wanted to search. To make up for wasted time they set to work very diligently, intending to finish that stretch and get back home before dusk.

  The first cave they went into was rather small—a bit higher than their heads, wide as an average room and reaching thirty or forty feet back. The rock dust, dry and impalpably fine, was pitted with ant-lion holes; and except for the entrance-way, where a few eddies of autumnal leaves had drifted in, the dust looked as though it had lain undisturbed for decades. The cave had no pockets, no branches, no indications of old camp smoke, no human signs at all.

  In the far dark end of it, a large grizzly track in the dust, and a wallow where the shaggy brute had lain, gave Gary considerable pause.

  “Say, Lee, d’you suppose this fellow is anywhere in our immediate vicinity?”

  “Oh, no. Bears stay altogether in the open till late in the fall. That track might be several years old.”

  “But don’t you find a cave now and then that’s got one in?”

  “Not very often. The way I do, if there are any fresh tracks in the entrance, I take a good sniff or several sniffs before going in. You can smell a bear nine times out of ten. If you’re still not satisfied, you can throw rocks back in, and if he’s in there he’ll start growling.”

  It came home to Gary, as they walked out of the cave, that a girl who tom-rocked gold and threw stones at grizzly bears could well claim something more than pity. And any girl who could maintain her ideals and independent spirit, as Leda had done, through the bewilderment of young girlhood and the shame which Leda Barton had faced—that, in his eyes, was a greater tribute to her character than even her amazing abilities at bush-loping.

  Near an overfalls, where a torrent came tumbling over the two-hundred-foot cliff, they found a cave with a long tunnel entrance and unknown depths beyond the limit of their flash. After tying their cord to a tree and lighting a resinous pine knot in case of accident to the flashlight, they started in, playing out the guide line as they went.

  Fifty feet from the mouth, a sharp bend in the tunnel shut out the light of day. For a hundred feet more the tunnel wound on back, till at last, abruptly, it widened and opened out into a high-vaulted room, large enough to hold a fair-sized house.

  The place was as dark and chill as a tomb and so deathly quiet, so different from the world of sun and trees and living winds outside, that they kept close to each other and spoke in awed whispers.

  Walking out to the center of the hall, they turned the flash all around the walls and over the floor; but they saw no sign of human occupancy or even the prints of animals.

  From the main room half a dozen galleries led on back—dark passageways to a still darker unknown. With both of them holding to the string, they stepped across to the gallery farther to their left, followed it back for a hundred tortuous yards, found that it ended in a small blind room, and then returned to the big hall.

  It took them a full hour to explore the other corridors. The last one was the longest and hardest of all. Through bends and room-widenings, through narrow squeezes and places where they had to go on hands and knees, it led them on and on back, till their thousand-foot guide line was almost all out. But they refused to give up, and at last they came to a good-sized room and saw only blind walls around them, gleaming with the fossil bone and pearly shell of that remote Cretaceous sea.

  The tunnel had led in the general direction of the small overfalls, and by putting their ears against the rock they could hear the faint hollow whisper of the beating waters. But that whisper and the slender cord in their hands were their only links with the world outside. The chill of the place made them shiver; and the sense of being buried far back in dark cold rock oppressed them like a tangible weight. The room was a catacombs, not of human design nor for human dead, but a catacombs which the Ages had made and where the Ages had laid away their children. The flashlight and the smoky pine knot lit up the grayish-white of bones, the fossil-relief of a nautilus, the shell of a yellow scallop, as delicately yellow and lovely as when it had been a “sea butterfly” in the warm Cretaceous waves…

  Shivering from the chill they came out of the cave, blinking their eyes in the bright hot sun.

  A few rods farther on, Leda spotted a wide ledge up against the face of the cliff, forty feet above their heads.

  “Looks suspicious,” she commented. “These ledges are my favorite hunting places. All the regular caves in Little Saghelia have been combed and curry-combed; but if the Chilcote Rusk pack lived in a ledge cave and used a rope ladder, no wonder those old Vigilant posses couldn’t find them.”

  “Smart idea. But how’re we going to get up there?”

  “Climb up.”

  “Climb that?” He took another look at those precipitous forty feet. “Why, that’s straight up, girl. A billy goat with a grizzly after him couldn’t make it.”

  “A person can climb rings around a billy goat any day.” She put down her knapsack. “If you don’t want to, why—”

  “Hold on; I’ll try it. But you stay away from under me. One broken neck will be enough.”

  With Leda instructing him, he started up the face of the rock, wedging his toes into frost cracks, finding precarious finger-holds in the honeycomb, scratching himself on sharp nodules, straining and sweating for every upward foot, and fully expecting to wake up down on the game trail with Leda throwing water in his face.

  He was fifteen minutes climbing those forty feet, but he stuck with it and finally pulled himself up on the ledge As he turned to look down, Leda took a swift experienced glance at the rock for the best way up, tossed back her auburn hair, and came scaling up toward him, hand over hand, so quickly and deftly that before he could catch his breath she was standing beside him on the jut.

  Considerably chagrined, Gary helped her search the ledge. Finding nothing, they sat down on the fern-clad rock, their feet dangling, with the tops of the minaret pines straight out from them.

  At the eastern rim-rock far away across the valley Gary saw five small moving specks, and with a start he realized that this was Hugh Ludlow’s searching party.

  “Lee,” he asked, watching those distant men, “old Nat mentioned that the Caspers and Ludlows are having a big scrap of some kind. What’s it about, d’you know?”

  “Well,” Leda explained, “last year old Hugh Ludlow started a war on Marl Casper. He wasn’t content with owning half of Saghelia; he wanted to own it all. But he overreached. He’s been badly licked, so badly that he’s on the verge of bankruptcy. Another shove will send him over the cliff.”

  “So that’s why young Hugh is hunting this cache—he’s trying to save the day for his dad!”

  “That’s not why! Hugh isn’t trying to save anybody but him
self. If he finds this gold, he won’t give his dad one thin nickel of it.”

  “Isn’t he on good terms with his dad?”

  “I hope not! They never did get along; they’re both too domineering and willful. Right now, Hugh’s dad is putting pressure on him to marry Mona Casper. Hugh could if he wanted to. Mona’s crazy about him. She comes back to Saghelia every summer just to be around Hugh. But he doesn’t like her. The point is, if he’d marry Mona, why, that’d stop this war and save the Ludlow interests. His dad is trying to make him do that, but Hugh is holding off.”

  “What d’you mean—‘holding off’?”

  “He’s stalling. He doesn’t intend to be left without a fortune, whatever happens. If he can find this half-a-million-dollar cache, he’ll throw Mona aside and defy his dad. If he doesn’t find it… Well, my guess is that he’ll give in, all right. In the meanwhile he’s stalling his dad and stalling Mona.”

  “Good Lord!” Gary exclaimed. Here at last he was getting down to the bed-rock of this situation. Down to human thirsts and blind clashing ambitions.

  Certain that Leda, after their comradely hours that afternoon, would answer his question now, he asked: “Lee, aren’t you pretty well acquainted with Hugh? It’s none of my business, of course, but didn’t he and you have some association sometime?”

  Leda hesitated a moment and then slowly nodded. “Yes. Last winter. He was kind to me, and he’s one of the few people who don’t believe those lies and slanders. But our association was short and slight, Gary. I don’t consider him any person to trust. The more I saw of him, the more I came to dislike him.”

  Gary fancied that in the winter past there had been a time when Leda, friendless and lonely, might have come to like Hugh Ludlow or even to love him, if only because of his belief in her. But Hugh had not measured up. He had stalled, had weighed her against other considerations, and now his chance with her was forever gone. With clear insight she read him through and through—his motives, his fears, his shrewd maneuvers.

  The full situation here on Little Saghelia, as Leda’s words laid it bare, was rather staggering to him. It packed dynamite, both for himself and for Leda. In a way, because of Hugh’s passion for her, this girl actually was holding a key position in the battle between the powerful and wealthy owners of Saghelia! In a way he himself, if he stayed and fought, might become the storm center in this whirl of hates and passions and warring forces.

  “I don’t wonder,” he thought, “that Sergeant Rhodes smiled when I invited myself into this! The wonder is that his ears didn’t drop off!”

  “Gary—?”

  “Yes?”

  “What did you mean a little while ago when you said something about leaving Little Saghelia?”

  Gary did not answer. Silent, his eyes upon those distant men across the valley, he weighed all that Leda had just told him, and with slow deliberation made his decision. He could see no way in which his presence here would imperil Leda. On the contrary she needed him. With this Casper-Ludlow battle drawing swiftly to a head, with Hugh Ludlow under such terrific pressure and liable to lash out in some unpredictable fashion, she had to have a friend and a safeguard.

  That ultimatum was still rankling in him, stirring all the fight in his nature; and as he looked down across the pine tops to a blue thread of campfire smoke, the camp of his enemy, he said silently, with grim resolve:

  “I’m going to stay here and see that you keep your hands off of Leda; and if that cache can be found, I’ll find it myself and take it away from you. You and your hired bush-sneaks may put me out of the picture, but before you do, I’ll rub out a few of you, too. You asked for war. You forced it on me. All right! War it’ll be!”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Though he went to bed fully intending to get up at daybreak, Gary had another tremendous sleep; and it was midmorning when he woke.

  He raised his head, glanced at the cabin. Leda and old Nat were gone. So far as he could see, nobody was prowling around the place. Jinny was grazing peacefully; the chipmunks were playing in the pathways; and on a snag at the meadow edge a wary hawk-owl, better than any watchdog at sounding alarms, was calmly preening itself after a lemming breakfast.

  As he crawled out of the poke and dressed, thinking about the feud on his hands now, it gave him a queer sensation to realize that when the sun set that evening he might not be alive. But his decision to stay and fight had been a deliberate choice, and he had no regrets. The worst that could happen to him was death, a quick oblivion; and that, to view it sanely, was infinitely preferable to being dragged back to Winnipeg and lying for weeks in that dreaded cell whose exit was the gallows.

  While he was eating breakfast in the cabin, he decided to make a little reconnoitering trip that morning and plan a methodic search for the old Rusk cache. Leda and Nat and Hugh Ludlow’s party were hunting in a hit-or-miss way, and that was as hopeless as looking for a cuckoo’s nest.

  He believed he could reason out, within certain rough limits, the location of the Rusk camp seventy-odd years ago, and narrow the hunt down to a comparatively small area. If he could, then the chances of finding that half a million would be jumped up immensely.

  Taking Leda’s light .25-35 rifle, he left the cabin and headed up slope. His goal was the high rocky top of Sentinel Knob, an eight-thousand-foot peak from which the torrent in the balsams came stair-stepping down.

  The trip looked safe enough—as safe as anything could be except sticking tight to the cabin. The scanty timber and open meadows cut down the danger of ambush; he could watch his back trail most of the way to the Knob; and he was armed. At least he would find out, definitely, whether Hugh Ludlow’s ultimatum was a bluff or the genuine article.

  The nine o’clock sun, beating full against the slope, was scorching hot; and the rocky peak of Sentinel, cloud-shadowed and swept with high cold winds, looked cool and inviting as he hurried up the mountainside. The steep climb got his wind badly, and he was sore from the rock-work yesterday with Leda; but he kept to a swift pace, glad to be stretching his legs and tying into something energetic.

  After two years of law study and twenty-four years in the city, this vigorous outdoor life appealed to him powerfully. A month here, and Hugh Ludlow wouldn’t slam him around with his fists quite so easily. A month of loping these mountains and wrestling the tom-rocker, and he’d knock that big bully cold.

  When he reached the rim-rock where he and Leda had halted yesterday, he slipped in behind some small boulders and watched down the slope, wondering uneasily whether he was being followed.

  On the little plaque of wolf-foot he could still see the impress where Leda had flung herself down to rest; and if brought back to him those sunlit hours with her, yesterday afternoon. He wished she were along on this trip. Her knowledge of the bush, her zestful enthusiasms, her eager fun at such wholly useless and wholly delightful things as toppling boulders, made her a splendid trail partner, all aside from her charm as a girl.

  The thought of daily intimate association with Leda, of their loping the bush together and hunting for that cache of gold, filled him with uneasy forebodings. A fellow could fall for her and fall hard. She was bewitchingly pretty, was in a tough spot; and between him and her a tacit partnership had sprung up. All that made a bad combination.

  Whether he could fight off Hugh Ludlow or not, whether Sergeant Rhodes had recognized him or not, he was an outlaw, here for a few weeks at most before hitting the trail again. Friendship with Leda Barton was not for him. He would have to go, and go by himself; and no wishful thinking could alter that harsh fact.

  On the mountainside below him he saw no sign of an enemy. After a few minutes he rose and made his way up through a fissure, which he had noticed yesterday, to the top of the rim-rock. Turning north through a drogue of aspen saplings, he followed a game trail along the edge of the high cliff till he picked up the torrent again; then he headed straight up
slope toward the rocky pinnacle two miles away.

  Following along the icy streamlet, he passed rapidly through the storm-twisted balsams, the squat spruces hugging the ground, and lodgepoles gnarled and stunted by the fierce struggle for existence; and came out at last into the clear, with open slope between him and the stark rocks of the Summit.

  Though the slant was steep, the footing was fairly good, and he got his second wind; but his old weakness of curiosity slowed him down. The experience of being above timber-line, for the first time in his life, was so fascinating that he forgot about the feud, about watching his back trail, about everything except the marvels of that strange high region.

  Along the rushing torrent he saw miniature birch trees, grown to maturity, as evidenced by their catkins, but scarcely three inches high and with only one pair of leaves, as big as a dime. Out the slope a huge grizzly was overturning flat stones and gobbling up the unlucky mice and lemmings beneath them. On the moraine flats he walked through acres of red and yellow and snow-white heather, alive with rock-bees and flower-flies and bronze-backed hummingbirds.

  Again and again the torrent led him past tiny rock-girt lakes, swarming with golden trout, bordered with yellow snow lillies, and beautiful as a painter’s dream.

  In the slowly broadening panorama of the mountains he saw a many-branched glacier, thirty miles to the east, riding a range like an octopus. Below the ice mass a dozen avalanche slides, pale green swaths through the mountainside forests, led downward thousands of feet into the heavy valley timber. The hoary old giant to the north was in a bad mood that morning, shaking snow-and sleet-storms out of his whiskers, and spreading his white breath down into the evergreens far below timberline.

  Halfway to the Knob, Gary stopped a last time and watched down the mountain, long and carefully. To his dismay a portion of his back trail was cut off from view by the rim-rock, and another section was partly veiled by the aspen drogue. With growing uneasiness he realized that on his return trip he might walk into an ambush.