by B. M. Bower
“They’ll be shutting up this joint for the winter,” he told himself many times that night, half hopefully, half regretfully. “They won’t pay a man to watch forests that are soaking wet. I guess my job’s done here.”
The next morning a thin white blanket of snow fresh sifted from the clouds lay all over the summit and far down the sides. Beyond its edges the rain beat steadily upon the matted leaves and branches. Surely his job was ended with that storm, Jack kept telling himself, while he stared out at his drenched world capped with white. It was the nearest he had ever been to snow, except once or twice when he had gone frolicking up Mount Wilson with snowballing parties. He scooped up handfuls of it with a dreary kind of gleefulness—dreary because he must be gleeful alone—he made tracks all around just for the novelty of it; he snowballed the rocks. He would soon go into a different kind of exile, without rules and regulations to hamper his movements; without seventy-five dollars a month salary, too, by the way! But he would have the freedom of the mountains. He would be snug and safe in his cave over there, and Marion would climb up to meet him every day or so and bring him magazines and news of the outside world. And he would fill in the time hunting, and maybe do a little prospecting, as he had vaguely hinted to the man who brought his supplies. It would not be so bad.
But his job did not end with that storm. The storm passed after a few days of dreary drizzle in the lower country and howling winds over the crest and a few hours of daytime snowfall that interested Jack hugely because he had never in his life before seen snow actually falling out of the sky. Then the sun came out and dried the forests, and Supervisor Ross said nothing whatever about closing the lookout station for the winter.
A week of beautiful weather brought other beautiful weeks. He had another four days’ relief and, warned by the storm, he spent the time in laboriously carrying dead pine wood and spruce bark up to his cave. It wouldn’t do any harm to have a lot of wood stored away. It might get pretty cold, some stormy days. Already the nights were pretty nippy, even to a warm blooded young fellow who had never in his life really suffered from cold. Some instinct of self-preservation impelled him to phone in for a canvas bed sheet—a “tarp,” he had heard Hank Brown call it—and two pairs of the heaviest blankets to be had in Quincy. You bet a fellow ought to be prepared for the worst when he is planning to winter in a cave! Especially when he must do his preparing now, or tough it out till spring.
With his mirror he heliographed a signal to Marion, and when she came he said he must have more cigarettes, because he might smoke harder when he was really settled down to roughing it. What he should have ordered was more bacon and flour, but he did not know that, his mind dwelling upon the luxuries of life rather than the necessities—he who had never met real necessity face to face.
“I’ll send the order right away,” Marion obligingly promised him. “But Kate will be simply furious if she sees the package. The last lot I made her believe was candy that was sent me, and because I didn’t offer her any of it—I couldn’t, of course—she would hardly talk for a whole day, and she hinted about selfishness. She thinks I carry my pockets full of candy when I start off hiking through the woods, and eat it all by myself.” She laughed because it seemed a good joke on Kate.
The next time she climbed up to the station she found him boarding up the windows and hanging certain things from the ceiling to keep them away from rats, under the telephone directions of the supervisor. He expected Hank’s successor up that afternoon to move down what must be taken to town for the winter. He did not seem so cheerful over the near prospect of hiding out on King Solomon, and Marion herself seemed depressed a bit and more silent than usual. The wind whistled keenly over the peak, whipping her khaki skirt around her ankles and searching out the open places in her sweater. Claremont and the piled ridges beyond were hooded in clouds that seemed heavy with moisture, quite unlike the woolly fleeces of fair weather.
“Well, she’s all nailed down for the winter,” Jack said apathetically when the last board was in place. “She’s been a queer old summer, but I kind of hate to leave the old peak, at that.”
They turned their heads involuntarily and stared across the fire-scarred mountainside to where Taylor Rock thrust bleakly up into the sky. A summer unmarked by incidents worthy the name of events, spent on one mountain top; a winter that promised as little diversion upon another mountain top—
“Say, a ride on a real live street car would look as big to me right now as a three-ring circus,” Jack summed up his world-hunger with a shrug. “By the time I’ve wintered over there I’ll be running round in circles trying to catch my shadow. Plumb bugs, that’s what I’ll be; and don’t I know it!”
“You’ll love it,” Marion predicted with elaborate cheerfulness. “I only wish I could change places with you. Think of me, shut up in a dark little three-room cabin with one elocutionist, one chronic grouch and one human bluebottle fly that does nothing but buzz! You’re a lucky kid to have a whole mountain all to yourself. Think of me!”
“Oh, I’ll think of you, all right!” Jack returned glumly and turned back to the denuded little station. “I’ll think of you,” he repeated under his breath, feeling savagely for the top button of his thick gray sweater. “Don’t I know it!”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
MIKE GOES SPYING ON THE SPIES
Mike sat hunched forward on a box in front of the stove in the rough little cabin where he and Murphy were facing together the winter in Toll-Gate flat. For an hour he had stared at the broken cook stove where a crack disclosed the blaze within. He chewed steadily and abstractedly upon a lump of tar-weed, and now and then he unclasped his hands and gave his left forefinger a jerk that made the knuckle crack. Tar-weed and knuckle-cracking were two queer little habits much affected by Mike. The weed he chewed in the belief that it not only kept his physical body in perfect health, but purified his soul as well; cracking the knuckles on his left forefinger cleared the muddle of his mind when he wanted to go deep into a subject that baffled him.
Hunched forward on another box sat Murphy nursing his elbow with one grimy palm and his pipe with the other. He would glance at Mike now and then and with a sour grin lifting the scraggly ends of his grizzled mustache. Murphy was resentfully contemptuous of Mike’s long silences, but he was even more contemptuous of Mike’s gobbling indistinct speech, so he let Mike alone and comforted himself with grinning superciliously when Mike was silent, and sneering at him openly when he spoke, and cursing his cooking when Mike cooked.
“That gurrl,” Mike blurted abruptly while he cracked his knuckles, “she’d better look out!”
“A-ah,” retorted Murphy scornfully, “belike ye’d better tell her so thin. Or belike ye better set yerself t’ look out fer the gurrl—I dunno.”
“Oh, I’ll look out fer her,” Mike gobbled, nodding his head mysteriously. “I bin lookin’ out fer her all the time—but she ain’t as cute as what she thinks she is. Oh, maybe she’s cute, but there’s them that’s cuter, an’ they don’t live over in Europe, neither. Don’t you worry—”
“Which I’m not doin’ at all, me fine duck,” vouchsafed Murphy boredly, crowding down the tobacco in his pipe. “An’ it’s you that’s doin’ the worryin’, and fer why I dunno.”
“Oh, I ain’t worryin’—but that gurrl, she better look out, an’ the old un she better look out too.”
“An’ fer what, then, Mike, should the gurrl be lookin’ out? Fer a husband, maybe yer thinkin’.”
Mike nodded his head in a way that did not mean assent, but merely that he was not telling all his thoughts. He fell silent, staring again at the glowing crack in the stove. Twice he snapped his knuckles before he spoke again.
“She thinks,” he began again abruptly, “that everybody’s blind. But that’s where she makes a big mistake. They’s nothin’ the matter with my eyes. An’ that old un, she better look out too. Why, the gurrl, she goes spyin’ around t’ meet the other spy, an’ the old un she goes spyin’ around
after the gurrl, an’ me I’m spyin’ on—all of ’em!” He waved a dirt grimed, calloused hand awkwardly. “The whole bunch,” he chortled. “They can’t fool me with their spyin’ around! An’ the gov’ment can’t fool me nayther. I know who’s the spies up here, an’ I kin fool ’em all. Why, it’s like back in Minnesota one time—”
Murphy, having listened attentively thus far, settled back against the wall, swung a rough-shod foot and began nursing his pipe and elbow again. “A-ah, an’ it’s the trail to Minnesota, then,” he commented disgustedly, nodding his head derisively. “Umm-hmm—it’s back in Minnesota ye’re wanderin’ befuddled with yer sphies. So l’ave Minnesota wance more, Mike, an’ put some beans a-soakin’ like I explained t’ ye forty-wan times a’re’dy. My gorry, they’re like bullets the way ye bile them fer an hour and ask that I eat thim. An’ since yer eyes is so foine and keen, Mike, that ye can see sphies thick as rabbits in the woods, wud ye just pick out a few of the rocks, Mike, that will not come soft with all the b’ilin’ ye can give thim? For if I come down wance more with me teeth on a rock, it’s likely I might lose me temper, I dunno.”
Mike grumbled and got out the beans, and Murphy went back to his smoking and his meditations. He made so little of Mike’s outburst about the spies that he did not trouble to connect it with any one in the basin. Mike was always talking what Murphy called fool gibberish, that no man of sense would listen to it if he could help it. So Murphy fell to calculating how much of the money he had earned might justly be spent upon a few days’ spree without endangering the grubstake he planned to take into the farther mountains in the spring. Murphy had been sober now for a couple of months, and he was beginning to thirst for the liquid joys of Quincy. Presently he nodded his head slowly, having come to a definite conclusion in his argument with himself.
“I think I’ll be goin’ t’ town in the marnin’, Mike, av I kin git a little money from the boss,” he said, lookin’ up. “It’s comin’ cold, an’ more shnow, I’m thinkin’, an’ I must have shoepacs, I dunno. So we’ll be up early in the marnin’, an’ it’s a hefty two-hours walk t’ town fer anny man—more now with the shnow. An’ I be thinkin’—”
What he was thinking he did not say, and Mike did not ask. He seemed not to hear Murphy’s declaration at all. Now that he had the beans soaking, Mike was absorbed in his own thoughts again. He did not care what Murphy did. Murphy, in Mike’s estimation, was merely a conceited old fellow-countryman with bad eyes and a sharp tongue. Let Murphy go to town if he liked. Mike had plans of his own.
The old un, for instance, stirred Mike’s curiosity a good deal. Why should she be following the girl, when the girl went tramping around in the woods? They lived in the same cabin, and it seemed to Mike that she must know all about what the girl was doing and why she was doing it. And why didn’t the men go tramping around like that, since they were all in together? Mike decided that the two women must be spies, and the men didn’t know anything about it. Probably they were spying on the men, to get them in trouble with the government—which to Mike was a vast, formless power only a little less than the Almighty. It might be that the women were spies for some other government, and meant to have the men hanged when the time was ripe for it; in other words, when these queer mines with no gold in them were all done.
But a spy spying on a spy smacked of complications too deep for Mike, with all his knuckle-cracking. He was lost in a maze of conflicting conjectures whenever he tried to figure the thing out. And who was the other spy that stayed up on Taylor Rock? There was smoke up there where should be no smoke. Mike had seen it. There were little flashes of light up there on sunny days—Mike had seen them also. And there was nothing in the nature of Taylor Rock itself to produce either smoke or flashes of light. No one but a spy would stay in so bleak a place. That was clear enough to Mike by this time; what he must find out was why one spy followed another spy.
The very next day Marion left the cabin and set forth with a square package under her arm. Mike, watching from where he was at work getting out timbers for next year’s assessment work on the claims, waited until she had passed him at a short distance, going down the trail toward Quincy. When she had reached the line of timber that stood thick upon the slope opposite the basin, he saw Kate, bulky in sweater and coat, come from the cabin and take the trail after Marion. When she also had disappeared in the first wooded curve of the trail, up the hill, Mike struck his axe bit-deep into the green log he was clearing of branches, and shambled after her, going by a short cut that brought him into the trail within calling distance of Kate.
For half a mile the road climbed through deep forest. Marion walked steadily along, taking no pains to hide her tracks in the snow that lay there white as the day on which it had fallen. Bluejays screamed at her as she passed, but there was no other sound. Even the uneasy wind was quiet that day, and the faint scrunching of Marion’s feet in the frozen snow when she doubled back on a curve in the trail, came to Kate’s ears quite plainly.
At the top of the hill where the wind had lifted the snow into drifts that left bare ground between, Marion stopped and listened, her head turned so that she could watch the winding trail behind her. She thought she heard the scrunch of Kate’s feet down there, but she was not sure. She looked at the scrubby manzanita bushes at her right, chose her route and stepped widely to one side, where a bare spot showed between two bushes. Her left foot scraped the snow in making the awkward step, but she counted on Kate being unobserving enough to pass it over. She ducked behind a chunky young cedar, waited there for a breath or two and then ran down the steep hillside, keeping always on the bare ground as much as possible. Lower down, where the sun was shut away and the wind was sent whistling overhead to the next hilltop, the snow lay knee deep and even. But Kate would never come this far off the trail, Marion was sure. She believed that Kate suspected her of walking down to the valley, perhaps even to town, though the distance was too great for a casual hike of three hours or so. But there was the depot, not quite at the foot of the mountain; and at the station was the agent’s wife, who was a friendly little person. Marion had made it a point to mention the agent’s wife in an intimate, personal way, as though she were in the habit of visiting there. Mrs. Morton had an awful time getting her clothes dry without having them all smudged up with engine smoke, she had said after her last trip. Then she had stopped abruptly as though the remark had slipped out unaware. It was easy enough to fool poor Kate.
But there was a chance that poor Kate would walk clear down to the station, and find no Marion. In that case, Marion decided to invent a visit to one of the nearest ranches. That would be easy enough, for if Marion did not know any of the ranchers, neither did Kate, and she would scarcely go so far as to inquire at all the ranches. That would be too ridiculous; besides, Kate was not likely to punish herself by making the trip just for the sake of satisfying her curiosity.
Marion plunged on down the hill, hurrying because she was later than she had intended to be, and it was cold for a person standing around in the snow. She crossed the deep gulch and climbed laboriously up the other side, over hidden shale rock and through clumps of bushes that snatched at her clothing like a witch’s bony fingers. She had no more than reached the top when Jack stepped out from behind a pine tree as wide of girth as a hogshead. Marion gave a little scream, and then laughed. After that she frowned at him.
“Say, you mustn’t come down so far!” she expostulated. “You know it isn’t a bit safe—I’ve told you so a dozen times, and every time I come out, here I find you a mile or so nearer to camp. Why, yesterday there were two men up here hunting. I saw them, and so did Doug. They gave Doug the liver of the deer they killed and the heart—so he wouldn’t tell on them, I suppose. What if they had seen you?”
“One of them was Hank Brown,” Jack informed her unemotionally. “I met him close as I am to you, and he swung off and went the other way. Last time we met I licked the daylights out of him, and I guess he hasn’t forgotten the feel of m
y knuckles. Anyway, he stampeded.”
“Well, forevermore!” Marion was indignant. “What’s the use of your hiding out in a cave, for goodness’ sake, if you’re going to let people see you whenever they come up this way? Just for that I’ve a good mind not to give you these cigarettes. I could almost smoke them myself, anyway. Kate thinks that I do. She found out that it wasn’t candy, the last time, so I had to pretend I have a secret craving for cigarettes, and I smoked one right before her to prove it. We had quite a fuss over it, and I told her I’d smoke them in the woods to save her feelings, but that I just simply must have them. She thinks now that the Martha Washington is an awful place; that’s where she thinks I learned. She cried about it, and that made me feel like a criminal, only I was so sick I didn’t care at the time. Take them—and please don’t smoke so much, Jack! It’s simply awful, the amount you use.”
“All right. I’ll cut out the smoking and go plumb crazy.” To prove his absolute sincerity, he tore open the package, extracted a cigarette and began to smoke it with a gloomy relish. “Didn’t bring anything to read, I suppose?” he queried after a minute which Marion spent in getting her breath and in gazing drearily out over the wintry mountainside.
“No, Kate was watching me, and I couldn’t. I pretended at first that I was lending magazines and papers to Murphy and Mike, but she has found out that Murphy’s eyes are too bad, and Mike, the ignorant old lunatic, can’t read or write. I haven’t squared that with her yet. I’ve been thinking that I’d invent a ranch or something to visit. Murphy says there’s one on Taylor Creek, but the people have gone down below for the winter; and it’s close enough so Kate could walk over and find out for herself.”
She began to pull bits of bark off the tree trunk and throw them aimlessly at a snow-mounded rock. “It’s fierce, living in a little pen of a place like that, where you can’t make a move without somebody wanting to know why,” she burst out savagely. “I can’t write a letter or read a book or put an extra pin in my hat, but Kate knows all about it. She thinks I’m an awful liar. And I’m beginning to actually hate her. And she was the very best friend I had in the world when we came up here. Five thousand dollars’ worth of timber can’t pay for what we’re going through, down there!”
