The B. M. Bower Megapack

by B. M. Bower

  “But the point I’m getting at is that he suspects something. He said you hadn’t been near Quincy, and there must be some reason. He said you didn’t have any mine located, because you hadn’t filed any claim, or anything. But that isn’t the worst—”

  “I don’t care what Hank thinks.” Jack pulled the collar of his coat closer to his ears, because of the seeking wind and snow. “Get under the cedar, while I tell you. I was going without seeing you, because I saw you and Hank together and I didn’t like the looks of it. I was sore as a goat, Marion, and that’s the truth. But it’s like this: I’m going back home. I can’t stand it any longer—I don’t mean the way I’ve been living, though that ain’t any soft graft either. But it’s mother, I’m thinking of. I never gave her a square deal, Marion.

  “I—you know how I have felt about her, but that’s all wrong. She’s been all right—she’s a brick. I’m the one that’s given the raw deal. I’ve been a selfish, overbearing, good-for-nothing ass ever since I could walk, and if she wasn’t a saint she’d have kicked me out long ago. Why, I sneaked off and left a lie on her dresser, and never gave her a chance to get the thing straight, or anything. I tell you, Marion, if I was in her place, and had a measly cub of a son like I’ve been, I’d drown him in a tub, or something. Honest to John, I wouldn’t have a brat like that on the place! How she’s managed to put up with me all these years is more than I can figure; it gets my goat to look back at the kinda mark I’ve been—strutting around, spending money I never earned, and never thanking her—feeling abused, by thunder, because she didn’t—oh, it’s hell! I can’t talk about it. I’m going back and see her, and tell her where I stand. She’ll kick me out if she’s got any sense, but that’ll be all right. I’ll see her, and then I’m going to the chief of police and straighten out that bandit stuff. I’m going to tell just how the play came up—just a josh, it was. I’ll tell ’em—it’ll be bad enough, at that, but maybe it’ll do some good—make other kids think twice before they get to acting smart-alecky.

  “So you run along home, Marion, and maybe some day—if they don’t send me up for life, or anything like that—maybe I’ll have the nerve to tell yuh—” A dark flush showed on his cheek-bones, that were gaunt from worry and hard living. He moved uneasily, tugging at the collar of his sweater.

  “You’ve got your nerve now, Jack Corey, if you want to know what I think,” Marion retorted indignantly. “Why, you’re going up against an awfully critical time! And do you think for a minute, you big silly kid, that I’ll let you go alone? I—I never did—ah—respect you as much as I do right now. I—well, I’m going right along with you. I’m going to see that chief of police myself, and I’m going to see your mother. And if they don’t give you a square deal, I’m going to tell them a few things! I—”

  “You can’t go. Don’t be a fool, sweetheart. You mustn’t let on that you’ve thrown in with me at all, and helped me, and all that. I appreciate it—but my friendship ain’t going to be any help to—”

  “Jack Corey, I could shake you! The very idea of you talking that way makes me wild! I am going. You can’t stop me from riding on the train, can you? And you can’t stop me from seeing the chief—”

  “I’d look nice, letting your name get mixed up with mine! Sweetheart, have some sense!” Jack may not have known what name he had twice called her, but Marion’s eyes lighted with blue flames.

  “Some things are better than sense—sweetheart,” she said, with a shy boldness that startled her. The last word was spoken into the snow-matted fur of her muff, but Jack heard it.

  “You—oh, God! Marion, do you—care?” He reached out and caught her by the shoulders. “You mustn’t. I’m not fit for a girl like you. Maybe some day—”

  “Some day doesn’t mean anything at all. This part of today is what counts. I’m going with you. I—I feel as if I’d die if I didn’t. If they send you to jail, I’ll make them send me too—if I have to rob a Chinaman!” She laughed confusedly, hiding her face. “It’s awful, but I simply couldn’t live without—without—”

  “Me? Say, that’s the way I’ve been feeling about you, ever since Lord knows how long. But I didn’t suppose you’d ever—”

  “Say, my feet are simply freezing!” Marion interrupted him. “We’ll have to start on. It would be terrible if we missed the train, Jack.”

  “You oughtn’t to go. Honestly, I mean it. Unless we get married, it would—”

  “Why, of course we’ll get married! Have I got to simply propose to you? We’ll have to change at Sacramento anyway—or we can change there just as well as not—and we’ll get married while we’re waiting for the train south. I hope you didn’t think for a minute that I’d—”

  “It isn’t fair to you.” Jack moved out from under the sheltering cedar and led the way up the gully’s rim, looking mechanically for an easy crossing. “I’m a selfish enough brute without letting you—”

  Marion plucked at his sleeve and stopped him.

  “Jack Corey, you tell me one thing. Don’t you—want me to—marry you? Don’t you care—?”

  “Listen here, honey, I’ll get sore in a minute if you go talking that way!” He took her in his arms, all snow as she was, and kissed her with boyish energy. “You know well enough that I’m crazy about you. Of course I want you! But look at the fix I’m in: with just about a hundred dollars to my name—”

  “I’ve got money in my muff to buy a license, if you’ll pay the preacher, Jack. We’ll go fifty-fifty on the cost—”

  “And a darned good chance of being sent up for that deal the boys pulled off—”

  “Oh, well, I can wait till you get out again. Say, I just love you with that little lump between your eyebrows when you scowl! Go on, Jack; I’m cold. My gracious, what a storm! It’s getting worse, don’t you think? When does that train go down, Jack? We’ll have to be at the station before dark, or we might get lost and miss the train, and then we would be in a fix! I wish to goodness I’d thought to put on my blue velvet suit—but then, how was I going to know that I’d need it to get married in?”

  Jack stopped on the very edge of the bank, and held back the snow-laden branches for her to pass. “You’re the limit for having your own way,” he grinned. “I can see who’s going to be boss of the camp, all right. Come on—the sooner we get down into lower country, the less chance we’ll have of freezing. We’ll cross here, and get down in that thick timber below. The wind won’t catch us quite so hard, and if a tree don’t fall on us we’ll work our way down to the trail. Give me a kiss. This is a toll gate, and you’ve got to pay—”

  Standing so, with one arm flung straight out against the thick boughs of a young spruce, he made a fair target for Mike back there among the trees. Mike was clean over the edge now of sanity. The two spies had come together—two against one, and searching for him to kill him, as he firmly believed. When they had stood under the cedar he thought that they were hiding there, waiting for him to walk into the trap they had set. He would have shot them, but the branches were too thick. When they moved out along the gulch, Mike ran crouching after, his rifle cocked and ready for aim. You would have thought that the man was stalking a deer. When Jack stopped and turned, with his arm flung back against the spruce, he seemed to be looking straight at Mike.

  Mike aimed carefully, for he was shaking with terror and the cold of those heights. The sharp pow-w of his rifle crashed through the whispery roar of the pines, and the hills flung back muffled echoes. Marion screamed, saw Jack sag down beside the spruce, clutched at him wildly, hampered by her muff. Saw him go sliding down over the bank, into the gulch, screamed again and went sliding after him.

  Afterwards she remembered a vague impression she had had, of hearing some one go crashing away down the gully, breaking the bushes that impeded his flight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE MISERERE OF MOTHERHOOD

  The up-train came shrieking out of the last tunnel in Feather River Canyon, churned around a curve, struck
a hollow roar from the trestle that bridges the mouth of Toll-Gate creek, shrieked again when it saw, down the white trail of its headlight, the whirling snow that swept down the canyon, and churned up the stiff grade that would carry it around through the Pocket at the head of the canyon and to the little yellow station just beyond. A fight it would have to top the summit of the Sierras and slip down into the desert beyond, but it climbed the grade with a vicious kind of energy, twisted around the point of the hill where the Crystal Lake trail crossed and climbed higher, and with a last scream at the station lights it slewed past the curve, clicked over a switch or two and stood panting there in the storm, waiting to see whether it might go on and get the ordeal over with at once, or whether it must wait until the down train passed.

  A thin, yellow slip ordered it to wait, since it was ten minutes behind time. The down train was just then screaming into Spring Garden and would come straight on. So the up train stood there puffing like the giant thing it was, while the funny little train from Quincy fussed back upon a different siding and tried its best to puff as loud as its big, important neighbor while it waited, too, for the down train.

  Two men and a woman plowed through the wind and the snow and mounted wearily the steps of the little coach which comprised the branch line’s passenger service. The two men took it all as a matter of course—the bare little coach with plush seats and an air of transient discomfort. They were used to it, and they did not mind.

  The woman, however, halted inside the door and glanced around her with incredulous disdain. She seemed upon the point of refusing to ride in so crude a conveyance; seemed about to complain to the conductor and to demand something better. She went forward under protest and drew her gloved fingers across the plush back of a seat, looked at her fingers and said, “Hmh!” as though her worst fears were confirmed. She looked at one of the men and spoke as she would speak to a servant.

  “Is there no other coach on this train?”

  “No, ma’am!” the man said, accenting the first word as though he wished to prevent argument. “It’s this or walk.”

  “Hmh!” said the lady, and spread a discarded newspaper upon the seat, and sat down. “Thank you,” she added perfunctorily, and looked out of the window at what she could see of the storm.

  The down train thundered in, just then, and with a squealing of brakes stopped so that its chair car blotted her dismal view of the close hillside. Between the two trains the snow sifted continuously, coming out of the gray wall above, falling into the black shadows beneath. Two or three bundled passengers with snow packed in the wrinkles of their clothing went down the aisle of the chair-car, looking for seats.

  It was all very depressing, wearisome in the extreme. The lady settled herself deeper into her furs and sighed.

  She continued to sigh at intervals during the remainder of the trip. The last and the heaviest sigh of all she heaved when she settled down to sleep in a hotel bedroom and thought miserably of a certain lovable, if somewhat headstrong, young man who was out somewhere in these terrible mountains in the storm, hiding away from the world and perhaps suffering cold and hunger.

  Thoughts of that kind are not the best medicine for sleeplessness, and it was long after midnight before Mrs. Singleton Corey drifted insensibly from heartsick reflections into the inconsequent imaginings of dreams. She did not dream about Jack, which was some comfort; instead, she dreamed that she was presiding over a meeting of her favorite club.

  She awoke to the chill of an unheated room during a winter storm. The quiet lulled her at first into the belief that it was yet very early, but sounds of clashing dishes in a pan somewhere in a room beneath her seemed to indicate breakfast. She would have telephoned down for her breakfast to be served in her room, but there was no telephone or call bell in sight. She therefore dressed shiveringly and groped through narrow hallways until she found the stairs. The mournful whoo-ooing of the wind outside gripped at her heartstrings. Jack was out somewhere in this, hiding in a cave. She shivered again.

  In the dining room, where two belated breakfasters hurried through their meal, Mrs. Singleton Corey tried to pull herself together; tried to shut out sentiment from her mind, that she might the better meet and handle practical emergencies. It would not do, of course, to announce her motive in coming here. She would have to find this Miss Humphrey first of all. She unfolded her napkin, laid it across her lap and waited.

  “They can’t do much till this storm lets up,” a man at the next table observed to his companion. “Uh course, I s’pose they’ll make some kinda bluff at trying—but believe me, these hills is no snap in a snowstorm, and don’t I know it! I got caught out, once,—and I like to of stayed out. No, sir—”

  “How’s the trains, Barney?” the other called to a man who had just come in from the office.

  “Trains! Ain’t any trains, and there won’t be. There’s four slides between here and Keddie—Lord knows how many there is from there on down. Wires are all down, so they can’t get any word. Nothing moving the other, way, either. It’s the rain coming first, that softened things up, and then the weight of the snow pulled things loose. Take your time about your breakfast,” he grinned. “You’ll have quite a board bill before you get away from here.”

  “Anybody starting out to hunt that girl?” the first speaker asked him. “Can’t do much till the storm lets up, can they?”

  “Well, if they wait till the storm lets up,” Barney retorted drily, “they might just as well wait till spring. What kinda folks do you think we are, around here? Forest Service started a bunch out already. Bill Dunevant, he’s getting another party made up.”

  “It’s a fright,” the second man declared, “I don’t know a darn thing about these mountains, but if somebody’ll stake me to a horse, I’ll go and do what I can.”

  “When was it they brought word?”

  “Fellow got down to the station about an hour ago and phoned in, is the way I heard it,” Barney said. “He had to wait till the office opened up.”

  Mrs. Singleton Corey laid her unused napkin on the table beside her unused knife and fork, and rose from her chair. She had a feeling that this matter concerned her, and that she did not want to hear those crude men pulling her trouble into their talk. With composed obliviousness to her surroundings she walked out into the office, quite ignoring the astonishment of the waitress who held Mrs. Singleton Corey’s butter and two biscuits in her hands by the table. She waited, just within the office, until the man Barney sensed her impatience and returned from the dining room.

  “I should like to go to a place called Toll-Gate cabin,” she told him calmly. “Can you arrange for a conveyance of some kind? I see that an automobile is out of the question, probably, with so much snow on the ground. I should like to start as soon as possible.”

  The man looked at her with a startled expression. “Why, I don’t know. No, ma’am, I’m afraid a rig couldn’t make it in this storm. It’s halfway up the mountain—do you happen to know the young lady that was lost up there, yesterday?”

  “Has a young lady been lost up there?” The eyes of Mrs. Singleton Corey dwelt upon him compellingly.

  “Yes, ma’am, since yesterday forenoon. We just got word of it a while ago. They’re sending out searching parties now. She was staying at Toll-Gate—”

  “Is Toll-Gate a town?”

  “No, ma’am. Toll-Gate is just the name of a creek. There’s a cabin there, and they call it Toll-Gate cabin. The girl stayed there.”

  “Ah. Can you have some sort of conveyance—”

  “Only conveyance I could promise is a saddle horse, and that won’t be very pleasant, either. Besides, it’s dangerous to go into the woods, a day like this. I don’t believe you better try it till the weather clears. It ain’t anything a lady had ought to tackle—unless maybe it was a matter of life and death.” He looked at her dubiously.

  Mrs. Singleton Corey pressed her lips together. Any recalcitrant club member, or her son, could have told him then that
surrender was the only recourse left to him.

  “Please tell your searching party that I shall go with them. Have a saddle horse brought for me, if you can find nothing better. I shall be ready in half an hour. Tell one of the maids to bring me coffee, a soft-boiled egg and buttered toast to my room.” She turned and went up the stairs unhurriedly, as goes one who knows that commands will be obeyed. She did not look back, or betray the slightest uneasiness, and Barney, watching her slack-jawed until she had reached the top, pulled on a cap and went off to do her bidding.

  Mrs. Singleton Corey was not the woman to let small things impede her calm progress toward a certain goal. She proved that beyond all doubt when she ordered a saddle horse, for she had last ridden upon the back of a horse when she was about fourteen years old. She had a vague notion that all horses nowadays were trained from their colthood to buck—whatever that was. Rodeo posters and such printed matter upon the subject as her eye could not escape had taught her that much, but she refused to be dismayed. Moreover, she was aware that it would probably be necessary for her to ride astride, as all women seemed to ride nowadays: yet she did not falter.

  From her beautifully fitted traveling bag she produced a pair of ivory-handled manicure scissors, lifted her three-hundred-dollar fur-lined coat from a hook behind the door and proceeded deliberately to ruin both scissors and coat by slitting the back of the coat up nearly to the waist-line, so that she could wear it comfortably on horseback. Her black broadcloth skirt was in imminent danger of the same surgical revision when a shocked young waitress with the breakfast tray in her hands uttered shrill protest.

  “Oh, don’t go and ruin your skirt that way! They’ve got you a four-horse team and sleigh, Mrs. Corey. Mercy, ain’t it awful about that poor girl being lost? Excuse me—are you her mother, Mrs. Corey?”

  Mrs. Singleton Corey, sitting now upon the bed, lifted her aloof glance from the mutilated coat. “Set the things on the chair, there, since there is no table. I do not know the girl at all.” And she added, since it seemed necessary to make oneself very plain to these people: “I think that will be all, thank you.” She even went a step farther and gave the girl a tip, which settled all further overtures toward conversation.