by Dean Owen
Across his mind jigged a memory of the Indian, Skunk-Bear, whetting a knife on his palm; and he had a hunch that if and when Hugh Ludlow tried to rub him out, the job would be given to that leather-faced Siwash. The furtive slinker probably lacked nerve for an open rifle fight; but the man, bush-wise as a weasel, undoubtedly had a quiverful of deadly tricks.
After watching for twenty minutes and seeing nothing of any shadowers, he hurried on for the top of old Sentinel.
The sun, half-hidden by a scum of cloud overhead, looked like a pale-yellow pancake in the sky; and the wind was sharp and chill to his summer-time clothes.
As he traversed that last steep mile, he noticed that the season was no longer the same as in the valley below. In two hours he had walked backward across the months from July to April. Down yonder, summer was at its lush height; but here was early spring, an odd springtime of late July. From the high slopes around him the winter snows had just gone, so recently that patches of white still lingered in the rock couloirs. The earliest flowers—wakerobins, violets, saxifrage—were blooming; the stunted berry bushes were just beginning to blossom.
Glancing back occasionally at his trail, he side-gouged up a stretch of loose scree; crossed a terrace of soggy rock bed where the icy waters seeped into his cracked shoes, and the ubiquitous mosquitoes made him break into a run; and zigzagged up through a field of huge granite blocks, flaked and seamed by the frosts of innumerable winters.
At the foot of the summit rock, he scouted out a good way up, scrambled a last hundred yards up the treacherous steep shingle, and came out on the naked towering pinnacle of old Sentinel.
At one glance, as he turned and gazed down, he saw that the toil and danger of this trip were justified, and more. Below him Little Saghelia lay spread in miniature. With one sweep of the eyes he could encompass and study its general layout, its side-canyons and rock formations, and its relationship to the old Paradise Trail in the main valley.
Across the high summit where he stood, a cold strong wind, blowing with steady moan out of the northwest, was sweeping the peaks and lofty passes of the ranges but leaving the basins of air in the valleys undisturbed, like a swift current of water over deep pools. The wind was so cold and piercing that he crouched in lee of a table-block to escape its invisible needles.
A shower of sleet spatted across the pinnacle rock. A small bank of woolpack came whirling by, enveloped him in its cold wet whiteness and sailed on out across the void, leaving him thoroughly damp and shivery.
Five miles to the northwest a big heavy cloud was brushing against a cluster of three peaks and laying down a white blanket halfway to timberline. The cloud was heading straight in his direction. With a suspicion that very shortly old Sentinel was going to get hit by a bang-up snowstorm, he got busy, studying Little Saghelia.
Roughly oval-shaped, the valley was ten miles long and five broad at its widest. With its waters and abundant game, its numberless caves, its nearness to Paradise Trail, it had been a “natural” as a hangout for those wilderness bandits.
But where, in the forty-thousand-acre tangle of rocks and canyons and timber, had that pack of killers lived? One part of it looked quite as good as any other. Could a person figure out, by sheer reason, the general location of a camp which had never been seen and which had been a complete mystery for three generations?
Studying the valley, he tried to imagine that this was seventy years ago, that he was Chilcote Rusk, that posses of vengeful sourdoughs were cursing his name and swooping into Little Saghelia repeatedly to find him and wipe out his pack.
“I’d have to shoot game,” he reasoned, “and I wouldn’t want travelers on Paradise Trail to hear my shots, so I’d live back a ways from the mouth. I’d also have to have fire, regularly, every day, and smoke can be seen a considerable distance. On that score, the farther back in the valley, the better.”
The more he studied Little Saghelia and reconstructed those primitive conditions, the more he was convinced that his reasoning so far was correct. The Rusk pack had lived somewhere in the upper part of the valley.
The rim-rock, with its fine dry caves like the one he and Leda had searched yesterday, was another sure bet. The other rock formations had no caves at all.
Trying to narrow down the problem still more, he studied the north end of Little Saghelia, especially the main overfalls at the extreme head of it. That little section looked good to him. If a forest fire should come raging up the cliff-walled valley, the big caldron pool below the overfalls would mean the difference between life and death to any human in the path of the fire.
And then that creek yonder, with its clean rock bed and long stretches where a person could walk a mile without stepping ashore, offered a superlative means—and almost the only conceivable means—of shaking off Indian trackers. A dozen times the Vigilant posses had put keen-eyed Siwash scouts on the trail of the pack, but those scouts had been utterly baffled. The creek looked like the answer to that.
Convinced that his reasoning was roughly correct, he gazed long and thoughtfully at the valley head. Though he tried hard not to build any castles, an exultation was running strong in him. All the facts pointed to that upper end of the valley. Somewhere up yonder, he believed, lay half a million dollars in dust and nuggets.
He and Leda would go up there, look the place over at close range, plan their hunt carefully, and comb that overfalls region as it had never been combed before. They’d find the Rusk cache, if human eyes could find it at all, and leave Hugh Ludlow high and dry…
* * * *
He wanted to stay longer on his lofty lookout, with its blue-hazy vistas and majestic panorama; but the storm was upon him and he had to go. Besides, his back trail was worrying him, a gantlet he must run; and he wanted to get it over with.
Before he reached the boulder field below, the storm burst upon him with the fury of a small woolly-whipper. In the space of forty seconds the sky, mountains and valleys were blotted out; the wind rose to club-like blasts; the season changed once more—to blustery winter. Small particles of sleet, riding level on the gale, stung his face and hands like birdshot; and the snow was swirling so thickly that he could not see ten feet ahead.
Turning up his jacket collar against the sleet and snow, he groped down through the boulders, hurried across the rock bed, and reached the heather slopes.
Though it was still snowing and he squashed along through four inches of feathery fluff, the wind was broken and he could see better. With marveling eyes he looked around at the queer mix-up of seasons—flowers sticking out of a four-inch snow! As though used to the vagaries of mountain weather, the bees and hummingbirds were going about their business with entire unconcern. It was strange and laughable to watch the bumblebees pawing snow out of buttercups before going after the nectar, and stranger still to see hummingbirds darting around like flashing jewels in the wintry scene.
A thousand yards from the rim-rock he passed out of the snow altogether and had dry footing again. A few minutes later the clouds kicked over and the sun broke out, so bright and warm that he glanced back at the white slopes above to make sure that the snowstorm had been real.
As he approached the aspen drogue, his uneasiness sharpened. The drogue and the slope just below the cliff were danger spots. If he had been shadowed, his enemy or enemies would strike at him from one of those two places.
A hundred yards above the aspens, he stopped, eased in behind some rocks and scrutinized the drogue, watching the birds there for any sign of alarm, and studying the deer-bush patches for a glimpse of an enemy.
He saw nothing whatsoever.
“Just jittery, I guess,” he thought. “Gosh, I can be down through that place in a coupla minutes.”
But he stuck to the rocks a little longer, to make doubly sure.
In comparison with the green beautiful valleys which he had seen from the Knob, Big Saghelia Valley, fire-gut
ted and ruined, looked unwordably ugly. An anger smoldered in him as he gazed at the erosion gashes and the black acres, thousands of acres, where the soil had been burned away and even the fireweed could not find root. Those mines were necessary, in the modern scheme of things, and timbering was necessary too; but that black desolation was not. It was sheer wanton destruction, blind to beauty, blind even to the solid dollars-and-cents value of conservation.
As he mused on that ruin of a once-lovely valley, it seemed to him that the dreariness of the surrounding country had crept into the town and left its marks upon the people themselves of Saghelia. Inured to smoke, slag heaps, and rivers polluted by cyanide, they seemed to have forgotten their birthright of trees, limpid waters and the elemental things of nature. With that ugliness all around them, nobody down there seemed to know that beauty existed or to realize how powerful and ennobling a force it could be in the heart of man…
With his rifle at ready, he walked on down to the rim-rock. At the edge of the aspens he stopped, glanced out along the trail, saw nothing.
Moving out to the lip of the two-hundred-foot cliff, he looked down at the slope below. Thirty feet down a wide ledge, clothed with aspen seedlings and brackens, cut off his view of the rim-rock foot, but the rest of the slope lay wide-open beneath him.
He saw nothing—not a glimpse or a stir of an enemy.
With eyes and ears alert, he started out along the cliff top.
He did not get far. Within a dozen steps disaster lashed out and struck him like a blast of lightning, so sudden and crashing that he did not even realize what was happening.
At a place where the trail curved along the very lip of the rock, through knee-high brackens, a pliant three-inch sapling was bent over, close beside the path. Gary saw it, thought it was the freakish work of a strong wind. A wiser bush-loper than he would have known that the tree had been bent down by human hands and pegged to a figure-4 trap, with the trigger string stretched across the path and concealed by the brackens. It was such a trap as the mountain Siwash frequently built to hurl goats, bighorns and even grizzlies from high cliff trails to the rocks below.
With no inkling of his danger, Gary walked squarely into the deadly catapult.
As he brushed through the ferns, his shin struck against something—something that yielded and snapped. In the next split-second the pliant sapling, taut as a bow and powerful as ten ram-horn bows, suddenly swished upward, knocking Leda’s rifle from his hands, striking him a terrific blow and sweeping him bodily off his feet.
As he rolled over the edge of the two-hundred-foot cliff, he grabbed for a small juniper and clutched it, to save himself; but the shrub broke and plunged him downward. With bare hands he clawed at the face of the rock as he fell—tearing his fingers and arms and gashing his forehead. He could not stop himself or even slow his fall; but the juniper had kept him from being hurled forcibly over the cliff, and his desperate clawing at the rock did save him from toppling backwards.
In a shower of dirt and loose stone he struck with a sickening jolt on the fern ledge thirty feet down, and sprawled half over it, his legs dangling, his whole body slipping—with a hundred and seventy feet of sheer drop between him and the jagged rocks below.
He grasped one of the seedling aspens and stopped that fearful slipping. Seizing the aspen between his teeth, he grabbed another. His right hand found a hold in the honeycomb. He wedged his foot in a frost crack… Slowly, in the blind groping way of a person fighting doggedly against unconsciousness, he managed to drag himself back upon the ledge, and lay there, face downward, with a paralyzing weakness all over his body.
CHAPTER SEVEN
For a little time, breathing in jerky gasps and groggy from pain, Gary lay quiet in the ferns, with a roar in his ears and a red mist in front of his eyes.
Stunned by the blow and his fall, he felt himself sinking into an engulfing darkness, as of dark waters pulling him down. But he fought against the oblivion with all his will, dimly aware that he was lying on a precarious ledge and that he must hold on to his senses or drop to death on those rocks beneath.
To his dazed mind it still did not occur that he had walked into a man-trap. In so far as he could think at all, he believed that he must have met some trail accident. But then, perhaps three minutes after he had pulled himself back to temporary safety, a dribble of dirt spattered down, a small stone fell and struck his shoulder; and he realized that he was not alone. His first thought was of Leda. With no realization of time or distance, he believed that she had seen him fall and had come to help him.
Swiping the trickle of blood from his eyes, he turned his head and looked upward, up at the top of the cliff.
In the clump of brackens he saw the swart face of Hugh Ludlow’s Indian, Skunk-Bear.
With one hand clasping an aspen to anchor himself, the Indian was leaning out from the rock and looking down at him. The man’s dark face was as expressionless as some cold granite gargoyle. No exulting, no pity, no emotion whatever save perhaps a surprise that the white man was not lying crushed and dead on the slope far below.
Only then, as he met that glittering stare, did Gary finally realize that he had been shadowed, waylaid and trapped by this man, and had been swept over the cliff by some deadfall of this Indian’s building.
He wondered why the Indian was staring at him so long and silently, and what was in the man’s brutal mind. Gradually that too dawned on him. The Indian was regarding him with the cold-blooded calm of one who was studying a bullet-stricken animal and considering the easiest way of finishing it off.
And he was at the Indian’s mercy—weaponless, badly wounded, hopelessly trapped on the narrow ledge, and half paralyzed by the blow from that sapling. Presently the bracken fronds stirred a little, and the swart face was gone.
Gary believed that the Indian was getting a rifle, either Leda’s or his own, and would lean over the cliff again in a moment and put a bullet into him. Fighting the numbness and that blinding pain, he began crawling toward a little overhang a few feet out along the ledge, in a dogged attempt to stave off death.
By a tremendous effort of body and will, he managed to reach the overhang. Shallow, a miserable few inches deep, it was a sorry excuse as a shelter; but he wedged himself tight against the rock and prayed that the Indian could not lean out far enough to get a shot at him.
As he waited, he tried to take stock of his injuries. Except for an ankle sprain when he struck the ledge, his legs felt all right. But his arms had gone numb, so numb he could hardly raise a hand; the blood from that forehead gash was running into his eyes; and his chest seemed full of hot stabbing pains from several badly cracked ribs.
He could not be sure how serious his other wounds were. The anguish in his chest blanked out everything else.
His guess about the rifle proved wrong. A short time after he had flattened himself against the rock, another dribble of dirt trickled down; he heard the Indian grunt; and then a heavy thirty-pound chunk of granite came crashing down into the ferns, missing his head so narrowly that it drove rock splinters against his face.
Not daring to look up or stir an inch, he hugged the stone wall and waited, helplessly—for whatever would happen next. Why wasn’t the Indian using a gun on him? At half a dozen places out along the cliff top the man could lean out far enough to get in a fatal shot. Was he afraid to shoot; afraid that a rifle bark might draw attention from the cabin down slope? Was that the reason he was trying to finish this business by dropping a heavy stone on his enemy?
Snarling with disappointment—a low throaty snarl like an animal’s—the Siwash went after more rocks, came back, leaned farther than before, and sent another granite chunk whizzing down at Gary. It struck against the face of the cliff and caromed harmlessly off into space. The next smacked into the ferns. A third, just grazing the overhang, struck Gary a glancing blow on the left shoulder—a smash that jarred him all over and jer
ked a gasp of pain from him.
With a guttural “Ugh!” of disgust, Skunk-Bear kicked his last stone over the cliff, and swung back out of sight.
The Indian’s failure with those rocks brought Gary little comfort. The silence, taut and ominous, was worse to him than the whiz and crack of the granite dornicks. For he knew that the man was cooking up some other scheme, some dead-certain scheme of finishing him off. What it would be he had no idea or even a guess. He merely knew Skunk-Bear had plenty of tricks in his evil quiver.
The lengthening silence, the anguishing uncertainty of what to expect next or what moment death would hit him and end the cruelly one-sided struggle—it was torture to Gary. He listened, heard nothing; took a glance along the cliff edge, and saw nothing. The Indian seemed to have gone away and left the place entirely.
But he knew better. Though he was utterly in the dark as to what Skunk-Bear was doing, he did know that the Indian had planned some new scheme and was going about it deliberately, carefully, taking his time. With his enemy trapped and helpless, the man could afford to take his time.
Brushing the red mist from his eyes, Gary raised his head and looked down the long mountain slope to the cabin. A spiral of fresh blue smoke was standing up above the balsams there. The sight of it sent a quiver of hope through him. Leda and old Nat had returned from their morning trip. The cabin was nearly a mile away, but he could muster strength to call to them, in this thin mountain air. If he could attract their attention, Skunk-Bear might get frightened and slink off.
He drew a deep breath, in spite of an explosion of pain in his chest, and raised his head a little higher.
But he checked himself. With his eyes on the cabin and Leda’s name on his lips, he deliberately stifled the call and abandoned any thought of help. A call from him would bring Leda flying up that slope. She had no weapon save the old horse-pistol, effective only at point-blank range. Skunk-Bear was rifle-armed. Instead of slinking off, he would shoot Leda. He had attempted murder, had been recognized, and now he would have to finish this business. He was cunning enough to realize that if he failed to complete this job, he would spend the rest of his life in a pen. From the safety of the aspen drogue he would kill Leda as she came up the open slope.
