Treasure and Trouble Therewith Part 23

He could see them cutting bread and chunks of meat, flurried and he knew frightened. Leaning against a chair was a rifle, placed where he could see it. He could have smiled at it had he not been so bound and cramped with fear. As they cut they interchanged low-toned remarks, and once the elder looked at him frowningly over her shoulder.

"Why ain't you workin'? A big, husky man like you?" she asked.

"I'm calcalatin' to find work at Sonora, but I have to have the strength to git there. I've had a bad spell of ague."

The girl raised her eyes to him and compa.s.sion softened them. As she went back to her bread-cutting he heard her murmur,

"I guess that's straight. He sure has an awful peaked look."

It was she who gave him the food, rolled in a piece of newspaper.

Standing in the doorway, she held it out to him and said, smiling,

"There, it's a good lunch. I hope it'll brace you up so you can get to Sonora all right. I believe you're tellin' the truth and I wish you luck."

He grunted his thanks and made off, shambling across the yard and out into the sun-flooded fields. He had to cross them to get out of range behind a hill spur before he turned into the woods. As he walked, feeling their eyes boring into his back, conscious of himself as hugely conspicuous in the untenanted landscape, he opened the paper and ate ravenously, tearing at the bread and meat.

He was far afield before he dared to rest and look at the paper. It was part of the Sunday edition of the _Stockton Expositor_, and in it he read of the approaching trial of Knapp. Both Danny Leonard and Jim Bailey had identified him by his hands and his size as the man who had wounded the messenger, and Knapp had admitted it. The paper predicted a life sentence for him. Then it went on to Garland, who was still at large. Various people were sure they had seen him. A saloon keeper on the outskirts of Placerville was ready to swear that a mounted man, who had stopped at his place one night for a drink, was the fugitive outlaw. If this evidence was reliable Garland was moving toward his old stamping ground, the camps along the Feather, where it was said he had friends.

His relief was intense, for it was evident Knapp had had little to say of him, and his hunters were on the wrong trail. Food cravings appeased, his anxieties temporarily at rest, he was easier than he had been since the night at Sheeps Bar. Curled under a thicket of madrone he slept like a log and woke in the morning, his energies primed, his brain alert, thinking of Pancha.

There were two things that had to be done--get a letter to her and replenish his store of cartridges. If too long a time pa.s.sed without news of him, she would grow anxious, might talk, might betray suspicious facts or draw inferences herself. A word from him, dispatched from a camp along the lode, would quiet her. So he must gird his loins for the perilous venture of a break into the open under the eyes of men.

Up beyond Angels, slumbering amid its rotting placers and abandoned ditches, lies the old camp of Farleys. In times past it was a stop on the way to the Calaveras Big Trees, but after the railroad diverted the traffic to the Mariposa Group, Farleys was left to pursue its tranquil way undisturbed by stage or tourist. Still it remains, if stagnant, self-respecting, has a hotel, a post office and a street of stores, along which the human flotsam and jetsam of the mineral belt may drift without exciting comment. A derelict could pa.s.s along its wooden sidewalk, drop a letter in the post box, even buy a box of cartridges without attracting notice. And even if he should be noticed, Farleys was sleepy and a good way from anywhere. Warnings sent from there would not be acted upon too quickly. A man could catch the eye of Farleys, wake its suspicions and get away while it was talking things over and starting the machinery for his arrest.

This was the place he decided on and forthwith moved toward. He had four cartridges and if game was plentiful and his aim good he might make Farleys and still have one or maybe two left.

But it took longer than he calculated, swollen rivers blocking his path, luck going against him. Three of his cartridges were expended on a deer before he brought it down and the rains came back, blinding and torrential. Forced to make detours because of the unfordable streams he lost his way and spent precious hours groping about in pine forests, dark as twilight, their boughs bent to the onslaught of the storm. Crossing a watercourse he fell and his matches were soaked, and that night, crouched against a tree trunk, a creature less protected than the beasts who had their shelters, he sucked the raw meat.

The next day his misfortunes reached a climax when he used his last bullet on a rabbit and missed it. He went on for twelve hours, and in the darkness under a ma.s.s of dripping bracken began to think of Farleys less as a place of peril than as a refuge, even though known for what he was.

But he pushed that thought away as other men push temptation and tried to sleep under his saturated tent. In the morning he was on the trail with the first light, staggering a little, squinting down the columned aisles for open ground whence he could look out and get his bearings.

It was late in the afternoon, dusk at hand, when he saw the light of a clearing. He hastened, staring ahead, stood for a stunned second, then leaped behind a tree, muscles tight, the dull confusion of his brain gone. Looming high through the gray of the twilight, balconied, many-windowed, was a large white building. Outhouses sprawled at one side, a weed-grown drive curved to its front steps, down the slant of its roof the rain ran, spouting from broken gutters and las.h.i.+ng the shutters that blinded its tiers of windows.

The first shock over, he stole cat-soft from trunk to trunk, studying it.

There were no lights, no smoke from the chimneys, no sign of habitation.

A loosened shutter on the ground floor banged furiously, calling out echoes from the solitude. He circled the back of it, round by the outbuildings, a lot of them, one like a stable--all silent. Then made his way to the side with its deep, first-floor veranda and was creeping toward the front when he ran into something--a circular construction covered with a rough bark and topped by a bal.u.s.trade.

One look at it and he gave a smothered exclamation and ran back among the trees. The light was almost gone, but there was enough to show a line of enormous shafts towering into a remote blackness. Like reddish monoliths they reared themselves in a receding file, silence about their feet, their crests far aloft moaning under the wind. In the encroaching darkness they showed like the pillars of a temple reared by some primordial race of giants, their foliage a roof that seemed to touch the low sky. He knew where he was now--the Calaveras Big Trees.

The house was the old hotel, once a point of pilgrimage, long since fallen from popularity and left to gradual decay. In summer a few travelers found their way there, but at this season the spot was in as complete a solitude as it had been when the first gringoes came and stood in silent awe.

He broke his way in by the window with the loosened shutter and pa.s.sed through the dimness of long rooms, bare and chilly, his steps loud on the uncarpeted floors. The place was damp and had the musty smell of a house long unaired and unoccupied. The double doors into the dining room were jammed and he had to wrench them open; in the pantry a windowpane was broken and the rain had seeped in. Here, on a three-legged table, he found a calendar and remembered hearing that the hotel had been opened during the previous summer, but that, business being bad, the proprietor had closed it after a few weeks.

In the kitchen he found signs of this period of habitation. On a shelf in a cupboard, hidden by a debris of paper and empty boxes, he came upon two cans evidently overlooked. He took them to the window, threw back the shutter, and saw they contained tomatoes and cherries. This heartened him to new efforts and he began a search through the dirty desolation of the room. He was rewarded by finding a half-filled match box, a few sticks of split wood and in the bottom of a coal bunker in the pa.s.sage enough coal to make at least one good fire.

Before he started it he closed the shutter tight, then, groping in the dusk, filled the big range with paper and wood and set a match to it. It flickered, caught, snapped cheerily, light flickering along the walls, s.h.i.+ning between the bars. He poured on the coal, opened all the draughts, saw the iron grow slowly red and felt the grateful warmth. With his knife he cut open the tomato can, heated its contents in a leaky saucepan, and, taking it to the sink, spooned it up with a piece of wood. The cherries were his dessert.

After that he peeled off his outer clothes and lay on the floor in front of the range. It threw out a violent heat, but not too much for him; he luxuriated, basked in it, delighting in the rosy patches that grew on the stove's rusty surface, the bright droppings from its grate. Holding his stiff feet out to it, he cooked himself, stretching and turning like a cat. Finally, he lay quiet, his hands clasped behind his head, his eyes touching points that the red light played upon, and listened to the rain.

The building shook to its buffets; it swept like feeling fingers across the windows, drummed on the low roofs of the outhouses, ran in a spattering rush along the balcony. The sound of it soothed him like a lullaby, and with the banging of the unfastened shutter loud in his ears he slept the sleep of the just.

The next morning, with the daylight to help him, he extended his search and found a few spoonfuls of tea in a gla.s.s preserve jar, a handful of moldy potatoes in a gunny-sack and in a shed back of the kitchen a pile of cut wood. He breakfasted royally, finis.h.i.+ng the remains of the cherries, built the fire up high and hot, and started to explore the house.

It was as empty as a sh.e.l.l, room opening out of room, half lighted, bare and dismal. There was nothing to be got out of it and he was back on his way to the warmth of the kitchen when he thought of the broken-legged table in the pantry. Propping this up against the window ledge, a drawer fell from it, scattering sheets of paper and envelopes on the floor. He stood staring at them, lying round his feet, fallen there as if from heaven to supply his last and now greatest need. With an upturned box for a seat, the stub of pencil he always carried sharpened to a pin point by his knife, he steadied the table on the windowsill, and sat down to write to Pancha. He wrote the word "Farleys" at the top of the sheet, as he knew she would see the Farleys postmark, but the date he omitted:

"MY DEARY PANCHITA:

"_Farleys_

"Here's the old man writing to you from Farleys. Sort of small dead place, but there's business moving round it, so I got washed up here for a few days. I ain't had anything that's good yet, but there's a feller that looks like he might nibble, and take it from me my hooks are out.

Anyways if he does I'll let you know. Plenty lot of rain, but I've been comfortable right along. Got a good room here and swell grub. And don't you worry about my roomatiz. All you want to know is I ain't got it. I can't give you no address, as I'm moving on soon, Wednesday maybe. But I'll drop you a line from somewheres as soon as I got anything to say.

You want to remember I'm all right and as happy as I ever am when I ain't with my best girl. This leaves me in good health, which I hope it finds you.

"YOUR BEST BEAU."

The rain lasted that day, but on the next the sun rose on a world washed clean, woodland-scented, fresh and beautiful. The time had come for him to dare. At nightfall he started, a young moon to guide him, followed a road ankle high in ruts and mud, and at dawn crept into an alder thicket for rest and sleep. It was nine, the day well started, when he walked into Farleys.

The little town was up and about its business, windows open, housewives sweeping front steps. The air was redolent of pine balsam, the sun licking up the water in hollows on the sidewalks, the distances colored a transparent blue. Outside the saloon the barkeeper was patting his dog, women in sunbonnets with string bags on their arms were on their way to the general store, men were bringing out chairs and placing them with pondering calculation the right distance from the hitching bar.

He bought his stamp and posted his letter, the man inside the window offering comments on the weather. Then he had to face the length of the street; he had been there before and knew the hardware store was at its other end. As he traversed it the heads of the men--already settled in their chairs for the day--turned hopefully at the sound of his masculine tread. It might be someone who would stand a drink, and even if it wasn't, staring at a pa.s.serby was something to do. To run such a gauntlet required all his fort.i.tude, and as he walked under the battery of eyes the sweat gathered on his face and his heart thumped in his throat.

The clerk at the hardware store was reading a paper. When he went for the cartridges he left it on the counter and the fugitive saw the heading of a column, "Garland still eludes justice." As he waited he read it, turning from it to take his package and then back to it as the clerk made change. They were hunting in the Feather country. A blacksmith beyond Auburn swore he knew the outlaw and had seen him, mounted on a bay horse, ride past his shop a week before at sunset. The clerk held out the change, and Garland, reading, nodded toward the counter. He was afraid to extend his hand, knowing that it shook, and presently, dropping the paper, scooped up the money with a curved palm.

"Looks like Garland was goin' to give 'em the slip after all," said the clerk.

"Um--looks that way, but I wouldn't bank on it. If he's lyin' low in one of them camps up the Feather he's liable to be seen. There's folks there that knows him it says here and you can't always trust your friends. Fine weather we're havin' after the rain. So long."

When he came out into the street he was nerved for a last, desperate venture. He went to the general store and bought a stock of provisions: bread, sugar, bacon, coffee and tobacco. The salesman was inclined to be friendly and asked him questions, and he explained himself as a prospector in the hills, cut off by the recent rains. He got away from there as quickly as he could, dropped down a side path and made for the woods and "home."

That evening he went out and lay under the giant trees, and smoked his first pipe for weeks. The sunset gleamed through the foliage in fiery spots, here and there piercing it with a long ray of light which slanted across the red trunks. From the forest recesses twilight spread in stealthy advance, and looking up he could see bits of the sky, scatterings of pink through the darkening green. It was intensely quiet, not a stir of wind, not a bird note, or leaf rustle. The place was held in that mysterious silence which broods over the Californian country and suggests a hushed and ominous attention. It is as if nature were aware of some impending event, imminent and portentous, and waited in tranced expectancy. The outlaw felt it, and moved, disquieted, setting his oppression down to loneliness.

One afternoon a week later, while standing at the kitchen window, he saw a figure dart across an opening between the trees. It went so swiftly that he was aware of it only as a dash of darkness, the pa.s.sage of a shadow, but It left a moving wake in the ferns and gra.s.ses. With his heart high and smothering, he felt for his revolver and crept through the rooms to the broken window on the veranda. If he was caught he would die game, fight from this citadel till his last cartridge was gone. His eyes to a crack in the shutter he looked out--no one was there. The vista of the forest stretched back as free of human presence as in the days before man had roamed its solemn corridors.

Then he saw it again; the tightness of his muscles relaxed, and the hand holding the revolver dropped to his side. It was a child, a boy; there were two of them. He watched them move, foot balanced before foot, wary eyes on the house, emerge from behind a trunk and flee to the shelter of the next one. They were little fellows, eight or perhaps ten, in overalls and ragged hats, scared and yet adventurous, creeping cautiously nearer.

It was easy to guess what they were and what had brought them: ranch children who had seen the smoke of his fire, and, knowing the hotel to be empty, had come to discover who was there. The game was up--they might have been round the place for hours, for days. He suddenly threw open the shutters and roared at them, an unexpected and fearful challenge. A moment of paralyzed terror was followed by a wild rush, the bracken breaking under their flying feet. After they had pa.s.sed from his sight he could hear the swish and cras.h.i.+ng of their frantic flight. Two boys, so frightened, would not take long to reach home and gasp out their story.

He left on their heels, window and door flapping behind him, the fire red in the range.

Two days later he found cover in a deserted tunnel back in the hills. Its timbers sagged with the weight of the years, the yellow mound of its dump was hidden under a mantle of green. Even its mouth, once a black hole in the hillside verdure, was curtained by a veil of creepers. There was game and there was water and there he stayed. At first he rested, then idle and inert lay among the ferns on the top of the dump, staring at the distance, squinting up at the sky, deadened with the weight of the interminable, empty days.

CHAPTER XIX

HALF TRUTHS AND INFERENCES

Chrystie had developed a liking for long walks. As she was a person of a lazy habit Lorry inquired about it and received the answer that walking was the easiest way to keep down your weight. This was a satisfactory explanation, for Chrystie was of the ebullient, early-spreading Californian type, and an extending acquaintance among girls of her age might readily awake a dormant vanity. So the walks pa.s.sed unchallenged.