The Strength of the Pines Part 8

"None."

"But we fight the same fight now."

"Yes. Until we both win--or both die."

Before he could speak again, a strange answer came out of the darkness.

"Not two of you," a croaking old voice told them. It rose, shrill and cracked, from the shadows beyond the fire. They turned, and the moonlight showed a bent old figure hobbling toward them.

It was old Elmira, her cane tapping along in front of her; and something that caught the moonlight lay in the hollow of her left arm. Her eyes still glowed under the grizzled brows.

"Not two, but three," she corrected, in the hollow voice of uncounted years. In the magic of the moonlight it seemed quite fitting to both of them that she should have come. She was one of the triumvirate; they wondered why they had not missed her before. It was farther than she had walked in years, but her spirit had kept her up.

She put the glittering object that she carried into Bruce's hands. It was a rifle--a repeating breechloader of a famous make and a model of thirty years before. It was such a rifle as lives in legend, with sights as fine as a razor edge and an accuracy as great as light itself. Loving hands had polished it and kept it in perfect condition.

"Matthew Folger's rifle," the old woman explained, "for Matthew Folger's son."

And that is how Bruce Folger returned to the land of his birth--as most men do, unless death cheats them first--and how he made a pact to pay old debts of death.

BOOK TWO

THE BLOOD ATONEMENT

XI

"Men own the day, but the night is ours," is an old saying among the wild folk that inhabit the forests of Trail's End. And the saying has really deep significances that can't be discerned at one hearing.

Perhaps human beings--their thoughts busy with other things--can never really get them at all. But the mountain lion--purring a sort of queer, singsong lullaby to her wicked-eyed little cubs in the lair--and the gray wolf, running along the ridges in the mystery of the moon--and those lesser hunters, starting with Tuft-ear the lynx and going all the way down to that terrible, white-toothed cutthroat, Little Death the mink--_they_ know exactly what the saying means, and they know that it is true. The only one of the larger forest creatures that doesn't know is old Ashur, the black bear (_Ashur_ means black in an ancient tongue, just as _Brunn_ means brown, and the common Oregon bear is usually decidedly black) and the fact that he doesn't is curious in itself. In most ways Ashur has more intelligence than all the others put together; but he is also the most indifferent. He is not a hunter; and he doesn't care who owns anything as long as there are plenty of bee trees to mop out with his clumsy paw, and plenty of grubs under the rotten logs.

The saying originated long and long ago when the world was quite young.

Before that time, likely enough, the beasts owned both the day and the night, and you can imagine them denying man's superiority just as long as possible. But they came to it in the end, and perhaps now they are beginning to be doubtful whether they still hold dominion over the night hours. You can fancy the forest people whispering the saying back and forth, using it as a pa.s.sword when they meet on the trails, and trying their best to believe it. "Man owns the day but the night is ours," the coyotes whisper between sobs. In a world where men have slowly, steadily conquered all the wild creatures, killed them and driven them away, their one consolation lies in the fact that when the dark comes down their old preminence returns to them.

Of course the saying is ridiculous if applied to cities or perhaps even to the level, cleared lands of the Middle West. The reason is simply that the wild life is practically gone from these places. Perhaps a lowly skunk steals along a hedge on the way to a chicken pen, but he quivers and skulks with fear, and all the arrogance of hunting is as dead in him as his last year's perfume. And perhaps even the little bobwhites, nestling tail to tail, know that it is wholly possible that the farmer's son has marked their roost and will come and pot them while they sleep. But a few places remain in America where the reign of the wild creatures, during the night hours at least, is still supreme. And Trail's End is one of them.

It doesn't lie in the Middle West. It is just about as far west as one can conveniently go, unless he cares to trace the rivers down to their mouths. Neither was it cleared land, nor had its soil ever been turned by a plow. The few clearings that there were--such as the great five sections of the Rosses--were so far apart that a wolf could run all night (and the night-running of a wolf is something not to speak of lightly) without pa.s.sing one. There is nothing but forest,--forest that stretches without boundaries, forest to which a great mountain is but a single flower in a meadow, forest to make the brain of a timber cruiser reel and stagger from sheer higher mathematics. Perhaps man owns these timber stretches in the daytime. He can go out and cut down the trees, and when they don't choose to fall over on top of him, return safely to his cabin at night. He can venture forth with his rifle and kill Ashur the black bear and Blacktail the deer, and even old Brother Bill, the grand and exalted ruler of the elk lodge. The sound of his feet disturbs the cathedral silence of the tree aisles, and his oaths--when the treacherous trail gives way beneath his feet--carry far through the coverts. But he behaves somewhat differently at night. He doesn't feel nearly so sure of himself. The sound of a puma screaming a few dozen feet away in the shadows is likely enough to cause an unpleasant twitching of the skin of his back. And he feels considerably better if there are four stout walls about him. At nighttime, the wild creatures come into their own.

Bruce sensed these things as he waited for the day to break. For all the hard exertion of the previous day, he wakened early on the first morning of his return to his father's home. Through the open window he watched the dawn come out. And he fancied how a puma, still hungry, turned to snarl at the spreading light as he crept to his lair.

All over the forest the hunting creatures left their trails and crept into the coverts. Their reign was done until darkness fell again. The night life of the forest was slowly stilled. The daylight creatures--such as the birds--began to waken. Probably they welcomed the sight of day as much as Bruce himself. The man dressed slowly. He wouldn't waken the two women that slept in the next room, he thought. He crept slowly out into the gray dawn.

He made straight for the great pine that stood a short distance from the house. For reasons unknown to him, the pine had come often into his dreams. He had thought that its limbs rubbed together and made words,--but of the words themselves he had hardly caught the meaning.

There was some high message in them, however; and the dream had left him with a vague curiosity, an unexplainable desire to see the forest monarch in the daylight.

As he waited, the mist blew off of the land; the gray of twilight was whisked away to a twilightland that is hidden in the heart of the forest. He found to his delight that the tree was even more impressive in the vivid morning light than it had been at night. It was not that the light actually got into it. Its branches were too thick and heavy for that. It still retained its air of eternal secrecy, an impression that it knew great mysteries that a thousand philosophers would give their lives to learn. He was constantly awed by the size of it. He guessed its circ.u.mference as about twenty-five feet. The great lower limbs were themselves like ma.s.sive tree trunks. Its top surpa.s.sed by fifty feet any pine in the vicinity.

As he watched, the sun came up, gleaming first on its tall spire. It slowly overtook it. The dusk of its green lightened. Bruce was not a particularly imaginative man; but the impression grew that this towering tree had an answer for some great question in his own heart,--a question that he had never been able to shape into words. He felt that it knew the wholly profound secret of life.

After all, it could not but have such knowledge. It was so incredibly old; it had seen so much. His mind flew back to some of the dramas of human life that had been enacted in its shade, and his imagination could picture many more. His own father had lain here dead, shot down by a murderer concealed in the distant thicket. It had beheld his own wonder when he had found the still form lying in the moonlight; it had seen his mother's grief and terror. Wilderness dramas uncounted had been enacted beneath it. Many times the mountain lion had crept into its dark branches. Many times the bear had grunted beneath it and reached up to write a challenge with his claws in its bark. The eyes of Tuft-ear the lynx had gleamed from its very top, and the old bull-elk had filed off his velvet on the sharp edges of the bark. It had seen savage battles between the denizens of the wood; the deer racing by with the wolf pack in pursuit. For uncounted years it had stood aloft, above all the madness and bloodshed and pa.s.sion that are the eternal qualities of the wilderness, somber, stately, unutterably aloof.

It had known the snows. When the leaves fell and the wind came out of the north, it would know them again. For the snow falls for a depth of ten feet or more over most of Trail's End. For innumerable winters its limbs had been heaped with the white load, the great branches bending beneath it. The wind made faint sounds through its branches now, but would be wholly silent when the winter snows weighted the limbs. He could picture the great, white giant, silent as death, still keeping its vigil over the snow-swept wilderness.

Bruce felt a growing awe. The great tree seemed so wise, it gave him such a sense of power. The winds had buffeted it in vain. It had endured the terrible cold of winter. Generation after generation of the creatures who moved on the face of the earth had lived their lives beneath it; they had struggled and mated and fought their battles and felt their pa.s.sions, and finally they had died; and still it endured,--silent, pa.s.sionless, full of thoughts. Here was real greatness. Not stirring, not struggling, not striving; only standing firm and straight and impa.s.sive; not taking part, but only watching, knowing no pa.s.sion but only strength,--ineffably patient and calm.

But it was sad too. Such knowledge always brings sadness. It had seen too much to be otherwise. The pines are never cheerful trees, like the apple that blossoms in spring, or the elm whose leaves s.h.i.+mmer in the sunlight; and this great monarch of all the pines was sad as great music. In this quality, as well as in its strength, it was the symbol of the wilderness itself. But it was more than that. It was the Great Sentinel, and in its unutterable impa.s.siveness it was the emblem and symbol of even mightier powers. Bruce's full wisdom had not yet come to him, so he couldn't name these powers. He only knew that they lived far and far above the world and, like the tree itself, held aloof from all the pa.s.sion of Eve and the blood-l.u.s.t of Cain. Like the pine itself, they were patient, impa.s.sive, and infinitely wise.

He felt stilled and calmed himself. Such was its influence. And he turned with a start when he saw Linda in the doorway.

Her face was calm too in the morning light. Her dark eyes were lighted.

He felt a curious little glow of delight at the sight of her.

"I've been talking to the pine--all the morning," he told her.

"But it won't talk to you," she answered. "It talks only to the stars."

XII

Bruce and Linda had a long talk while the sun climbed up over the great ridges to the east and old Elmira cooked their breakfast. There was no pa.s.sion in their words this morning. They had got down to a basis of cold planning.

"Let me refresh my memory about a few of those little things you told me," Bruce requested. "First--on what date does the twenty-year period--of Turners' possession of the land--expire?"

"On the thirtieth of October, of this year."

"Not very long, is it? Now you understand that on that date they will have had twenty years of undisputed possession of the land; they will have paid taxes on it that long; and unless their t.i.tle is proven false between now and that date, we can't ever drive them out."

"That's just right."

"And the fall term of court doesn't begin until the fifth of the following month."

"Yes, we're beaten. That's all there is to it. Simon told me so the last time he talked to me."

"It would be to his interest to have you think so. But Linda--we mustn't give up yet. We must try as long as one day remains. The law is full of twists; we might find a way to checkmate them, especially if that secret agreement should show up. It isn't just enough--to have vengeance. That wouldn't put the estate back in your hands; they would have won, after all. It seems to me that the first thing to do is to find the trapper, Hudson--the one witness that is still alive. You say he witnessed that secret agreement between your father and mine."

"Yes."

"His testimony would be invaluable to us. He might be able to prove to the court that as my father never owned the land in reality, he couldn't possibly have deeded it to the Turners. Do you know where this Hudson is?"

"I asked old Elmira last night. She thinks she knows. A man told her he had his trap line on the upper Umpqua, and his main headquarters--you know that trappers have a string of camps--was at the mouth of Little River, that flows into the Umpqua. But it is a long way from here."

Bruce was still a moment. "How far?" he asked.