The Cassowary Part 4

The miner, who was diffident, and who, furthermore, spoke in mountain phrase and with a queer stutter, tried to say that he really did know of one such case, and the Colonel forced him to tell the story. Translated into English--for it was with difficulty that the miner was understood, and the Colonel, who was familiar with the account, gave most of it--this is the story of what happened to a man and wife, not altogether tenderfeet, in the hills, and what was accomplished by

THE LIFE LINE

Robert Felton was in luck when he met an Eastern girl in Salt Lake City.

He was from Chicago and she from Boston. An inveterate sportsman was Felton and each autumn when he came out to visit a mine in which he was interested the trip terminated with a hunting expedition which extended sometimes to the very edge of the time of storms and snow. Once or twice he and his companions had been nearly caught s...o...b..und in the mountains and he had acquired experience, not perhaps sufficient.

He met a tall bronze-haired, gray-eyed Catherine Murdoch who was on a visit from the East--and that settled it. He fell in love a thousand feet and wooed with all the vigor and persistency he might have exhibited after elk or bear. It didn't take long. The splendid advance of the tempestuous hunter-miner, business man, as cultivated as she too, somehow fascinated the frigid beauty and she yielded in almost no time.

They met in June, were married in September and spent the winter and spring and summer in Chicago. Then, with approaching autumn, came again upon Felton the mountain fever, and he proposed the usual Western trip.

He was in love as deeply as ever and he was a considerate man.

"We'll go to Salt Lake City," he said, "and I'll attend to my business--it's all in town there--and then, dear, you'll let me make a hunting trip, won't you, while you stay in the city and have a good time with Mary." Mary was Mrs. Felton's cousin.

"Where do you hunt, Bob?" inquired Mrs. Felton.

"Oh, generally away up a canyon which forks from one where a couple of my friends have a mine. I've had a sort of shack built away up on the side of this branch canyon, which is about five miles across country from the mine, and, every fall, they send over a stock of provisions--canned goods and flour, and sugar and tea and coffee--and come over themselves when they can and hunt and fish with me. It will be a little late this year."

"What sort of a place is this shack of yours?"

"It's fine. There are a cook stove and table and three chairs and a bed.

There's a window, too, and there's a lithograph of Li Hung Chang tacked up on the wall. It's just voluptuous--makes you think of the Taj Mahal on the outside and the boudoir of a Sultan's favorite in the inside.

It's a dream."

"Bob, I'm not going to stay in Salt Lake City. I'm going hunting with you."

"What?"

The tone of the lady became just a shade pleading:

"Why not, Bob?"

"Madam, you're an honor to my home but in a shack in the mountains you would be like La Cigale. Out of your fitting clime and place and your own sweet season, you would perish as do the summer insects. So go the ephemera. Why, dear, up in the shack there, it's only hunting, and fis.h.i.+ng, and climbing or falling and was.h.i.+ng tin dishes and eating and sleeping as sleep the dead and then doing the same things over again.

You're no jewel for such a setting."

The charming lady hesitated for a moment and then spoke very thoughtfully and earnestly though, it must be admitted, with a certain degree of cooingness.

"Bob, I'm afraid I've been negligent, perhaps criminally secretive--but I have failed to make clear to you one side of my character. I wish you to understand, sir, that I have been in the Adirondacks, season after season, that I can swim like a duck, that I can cast a fly and that I can shoot tolerably well. Furthermore I can cook almost anything in a tin dish. Am I not going with you, Bob?"

There was some astonishment and a whoop, certain excusable demonstrations and, two weeks later, his business concluded in Salt Lake City, Felton and his wife were up in the cabin in the mountain and the nickel had been fairly dropped in the Western slot.

It is wonderful when a man is afield with a man companion who understands both him and the woods. It is more wonderful still when the companion is a woman and the creature closest to him and understands all things, as well. His old friends of the mining camp--came over and hunted with him as usual and that fair veneered barbarian cooked famously for them, like a laughing, chaffing squaw and added two more to her list of her fervent admirers. Never were such happy days for Felton as when he fished or hunted with his wife. Woman who well knew the mountains, wise as well as beautiful woman, she had provided herself with a suit for the time's exigency. Thick woolen was it, ending in knickerbockers and stout shoes. There was a skirt which, by unclasping its belt, could be taken on or off in an instant. She proved st.u.r.dy and there is no occasion for the telling of the fis.h.i.+ng and hunting records of the two. They were most content and they lingered in the mountains.

One day--it was late for autumn--in the foothills--Jim Trumbull, one of Felton's two mining friends over on a visit said abruptly:

"Felton, it's time to leave. We're all ready to skip."

"I think so too," said Felton. "Those first little snows seem ominous. I think we'll get it early in the season. I intend to leave to-morrow night. The burros are all ready."

But the next day Felton and his wife found tracks and hunting and a good day of it, and so night found them still in the cabin. At eight o'clock in the evening Felton went out and looked about. There was a great ring around the moon, and the stars had a dim look, not like their usual story. "It looks like the sky over Chicago," Felton muttered. He slept uneasily and was awake at daylight looking anxiously from the cabin door. The earth had changed. The universe was white. The earth was white and the air was white. He leaped back into the cabin. Breakfast over, the man who had forced himself to eat, said:

"Get a day's food, Kate, and get on your hunting dress, with thick garments under it, as quickly as you can."

She did as he told her and he made swiftly a back load of the provisions and her skirt and two great blankets. Well knew he that they must reach Parson's Camp or be lost.

They plunged into the whiteness. They must cross the billowy tongue of high land up and down lying between the two forks of the great canyon.

Across this mesa ran a rude trail which none knew better than did Felton, but to feel and keep it with this white shroud of snow upon the ground and in the air was a feat almost impossible. They plunged ahead into the white depths, for the wind had made the snow deep in the opening, and this depth, while it r.e.t.a.r.ded their progress, was after all a G.o.dsend. It aided Felton in keeping the trail. What need to tell of the details of that awful day? Darkness was falling when Felton carried an exhausted and senseless woman into Parson's Camp. There was no one there. Felton struck a match and found a half-burned candle. He gave his wife whiskey and water and, later, food, and she was soon herself, for the trouble was but exhaustion. Then Felton sat down upon a chair and figured the thing out aloud.

[Ill.u.s.tration: "THEY PLUNGED INTO THE WHITENESS"]

"They thought we'd gone and so did not pay any attention to us. They had sense enough to skip in time."

His wife was up and beside him now.

"What of it?" she said, "we have shelter and warmth, and when it stops snowing perhaps we can dig out"--seeing his face, she added--"anyway we'll be rescued, somehow." Her husband laughed, agreeingly.

"Of course," he said, "we're all right." Then he began looking around for food.

He found in one corner a bushel of potatoes and hanging beside a bunk of shelves where the cook had kept his dishes, there was a good part of a dried deer's ham. Standing on a chair he peered over the top of the shelves. There was nothing there.

"We shall have to live on dried venison and potatoes," he said. "They seem to have left most of their stuff on top here," and the lady was content.

"We'll have venison in all sorts of ways," she commented. "Here's some salt," and she held up a little bag she had found on the floor.

They supped on what they had brought and slept in the bunk which with its belongings, had been abandoned by one of Felton's friends. There pa.s.sed a couple of blithesome days--to the woman--while Felton, brave liar, smiled and made fires, and puns and love, and was sick at heart and full of an inflammatory vocabulary in his inmost being. The miners had probably not yet half way floundered through the snow lying between them and a more or less green old valley. Without aid from the outside Felton knew that he and his wife must die.

The snow fell quietly, steadily, remorselessly. When the two should be missed on the arrival of the miners at the settlement, it was more than likely that the mountains would be inaccessible until spring.

Felton found an axe and kept himself from desperation by digging out certain trees in a wind blown clear s.p.a.ce one side of the cabin. The small trees he converted into firewood, pa.s.sing the sticks through the window to Kate, who delightedly piled the fuel up in great stacks by the chimney. It was not very cold, and they congratulated themselves upon their store of wood, which was carefully husbanded, for future contingencies.

On the fourth day it ceased snowing and they could see the world. It was all white. The snow was about five feet on a level around the house. The canyon down which the home trail ran was evenly filled with feathery powdered snow. It grew colder. Felton at last told the truth to Catherine.

"Dear, I have been lying to you frightfully. There has been no food on the top of the big shelf. We have enough to live on for four or five days, at the utmost. Then we must starve. We are supposed by our friends to be safe, and we cannot reach the outside world. It would take weeks for the most determined men to reach us--from Sharon even, the nearest settlement."

Any man should be satisfied with what this woman did then. She said: "Dear, the only reproach I have is that you did not tell me the true situation at first. Then we could have suffered together, and that would have been better. As it is I think I realize all the situation now. We are together and we have been very happy anyhow."

This altogether illogical conclusion of her words somehow strengthened Felton wonderfully. He began fumbling round the room. Courage filled his heart, without reason, he felt, but with courage regained he was not inclined to quibble as to its source.

"I don't know," he said, "somehow, my girl, you've given me hope. I'll bet the good G.o.d will help us."

"Course He will," responded this dignified, blessed young matron born and bred in Boston.

"Come," said Catherine, rousing herself from the thoughtful mood which had gripped her, after the first excitement of Felton's revelation was over. "We haven't half explored this place. Who knows but there's a barrel of flour stowed away in some dark corner."

"Behind this door--for example," said Felton, entering into his wife's mood, and glad for any little diversion to check thought and imagination.

There had been standing against the wall in one dark corner of the room an old door, evidently brought in from some outhouse for the repairing of its hinges. It had not been disturbed since the new occupancy of the place. Felton grasped the pineplanks in both hands and set them to one side. There semi-gleaming in the candlelight hung revealed one of the two business ends of the common place and eminently valuable telephone of North America.

Felton gasped and then sat down backwards on the floor. "Holy smoke,"

was all he said.