King Spruce Part 44

And pulling their caps about their ears, and tugging their moose-sled, they set away, up the tote road to the north, leaving Barnum Withee not wholly easy in his mind regarding their motives.

It was from the snow-swirl on d.i.c.kery Pond that "Ladder" Lane had emerged, even then death-struck. It was straight to d.i.c.kery that Christopher led the way, and two hours' steady trudging brought them there.

"So it was from off there he came," muttered the woodsman, blinking into the glare of the snow crystals on its broad surface. "But where, in G.o.d's name, he came from it ain't in me to say!"

It was one of those still winter days when even the wind seems to be bound by the hard frost. The sliding snow-shoes shrieked as shrilly with the sun high as they had in the early morning. There was no hint of melting.

"There are five old operations around this pond, and a set of empty camps on each one," said Straight. "I've been to each one of them in times past, and I know where the main roads come out to the landings.

But it's slow business, takin' 'em one after the other. Perhaps we ought to go back and beat the truth of this thing into Barnum Withee's thick head, and start the hue and cry--but--but--I'd hoped to do it some better way."

"Straight," panted the young man, "it's getting to be perfectly d.a.m.nable, this suspense! Let's do something, if it's only to run up the middle of that pond and shout!"

"Well," snorted the old guide, irrelevantly, "I've been lookin' for old Red Fins to come along for two days now, and I ain't disappointed.

If there's trouble anywhere in this section, old Eli has got a smeller that leads him to it." Wade whirled from his despairing survey of the pond and saw Prophet Eli. He was coming down the tote road on his "ding-swingle," urging on his little white stallion with loose, clapping reins. Huge mittens of vivid red encased his hands, and his conical, knitted cap was red, and was pulled down over his ears like a candle-snuffer.

Wade felt a queer little thrill of superst.i.tion as he looked at him, and then sneered at himself as one who was allowing good wit to be infected by the idle follies of the woods. And yet there was something eerie in the way this bizarre old wanderer turned up now, as he had appeared twice before at times that meant so much, at moments so crucial, in Wade's woods life.

Prophet Eli swung up to them, halted, and peered at them curiously out of his little eyes.

"Green, blue, and yellow," he blurted, patting his much-variegated wool jacket. "And red! Red mittens good for the arterial blood. Why don't you wear them?"

"Say, look here, prophet--" began Christopher, blandly respectful.

"Green is nature's color. Calms the nerves. Blue, electricity for the system--got a stripe of it all up and down my backbone. Good for you.

Ought to wear it. Yellow, kidneys and cathartic. You'd rather be sick, eh? Be sick. Clek-clek!" He clucked his tongue and clapped his reins.

But Christopher grabbed at the stallion's headstall and checked him.

"I believe the idea is all c'rect, prophet, and I'll use it, and I'll try to make it right with you. But just now I'm wantin' a little information, and I'll make it right with you for that, too. You're sky-hootin' round these woods all the time. Now, where's Lane been makin' his headquarters?--you ought to know!"

"What do you want him for? State-prison or insane asylum?" snapped the prophet.

"I don't want him," said the woodsman, solemnly. "He's spoken for, Eli.

He's down there, dead, in Barn Withee's camps."

The little gray eyes blinked quickly. What that emotion was, one could not guess. For the voice of the prophet did not waver in its brisk staccato. "Dead, eh? Hate-bug crawled into him and did it. I told him to stay in the woods and the hate-bugs couldn't get him. Told him twenty years ago. But he wasn't careful. Let the hate-bug get him at last.

Dead, eh? I'll go and get him."

"Get him?" echoed Christopher.

"Promised to bury him," explained the prophet, promptly. "Wanted to be buried off alone, just as he lived. Rocks for a pillow. Expects to rest easy. I helped him dig his grave and lay out the rocks a long time ago.

And I'll tell no one the place--no, sir."

"Well, that lets Withee out of trouble and expense," said the woodsman, "and you'll get a good reception down that way. Now, prophet, where's he been hiding? You know, probably. It's important, I tell you." The old man had struck his stallion, and the animal was trying to get away. But Christopher held on grimly.

"You call yourself a good woodsman?" squealed the indignant Eli.

"I reckon I'll average well."

"If any one wants anything of 'Ladder' Lane now," cried the prophet, "it must be for something that he's left behind him! Left behind him!" he repeated. He stood up on the "ding-swingle," and ran his keen gaze about the ridges that circled the lake.

"Was it something that could build a fire?" he demanded, sharply.

Christopher, in no mood for confidences, stared at the peppery old man.

"You call yourself a good woodsman, and don't know what it means to see that!" He pointed his whip at a thin trail of white smoke that mounted, as tenuous almost as a thread, above the distant sh.o.r.e of d.i.c.kery Pond.

"No lumbermen operating there for three years, and you see that, and are lookin' for something, and don't go and find out! And you call yourself a woodsman!" Without further word or look he lashed the stallion; the animal broke away with a squeal, and Prophet Eli's "ding-swingle"

disappeared down the tote road in a swirl of snow.

"No, I ain't a woodsman!" snorted Christopher. He started away across the pond at a pace that left Wade breath only for effort and not for questions. "I ain't a woodsman. Standin' here and not seein' that smoke!

Not seein' it, and guessin' what it must mean! I ain't a woodsman!" Over and over he muttered his bitter complaints at himself in disjointed sentences. "I'm gettin' old. I must be blind. A lunatic can tell me my business." His anger rowelled him on, and when he reached the opposite sh.o.r.e of the lake he was obliged to wait for the younger man to come floundering and panting up to him.

"I don't feel just like talkin' now, Mr. Wade," he said, gruffly. "I don't feel as though I knew enough to talk to any one over ten years old." He strode on, tugging the sled.

An abandoned main logging-road, well grown to leafless moose-wood and witch-hobble, led them up from the lake. Christopher did not have to search the skies for the smoke. His first sight of it had betrayed the camp's location. He knew the roads that led to it. And in the end they came upon it, though it seemed to Wade that the road had set itself to twist eternally through copses and up and down the hemlock benches.

The camps were cheerless, the doors of main camp, cook camp, and hovel were open, and the snow had drifted in. But from the battered funnel of the office camp came that trail of smoke, reaching straight up. Crowding close to the funnel for warmth, and nestled in the s.p.a.ce that the heat had made in the snow, crouched a creature that Wade recognized as "Ladder" Lane's tame bobcat. This, then, was "Ladder" Lane's retreat.

Inside there--the young man's knees trembled, and there was a gripping at his throat, dry and aching from his frantic pursuit of his grim guide.

"Mr. Wade," said Christopher, halting, "I reckon she's there, and that she's all right. I'll let you go ahead. She knows you. I don't need to advise you to go careful."

And Wade went, tottering across the unmarked expanse of snow, the pure carpet nature had laid between him and the altar of his love--an altar within log walls, an altar whose fires were tended by--He pushed open the door! Foolish Abe was kneeling by the hearth of the rusty Franklin stove. And even as he had been toiling on Enchanted, so here he was whittling, whittling unceasingly, piling the heaps of shavings upon the fire--unconscious signaller of the hiding-place of Elva Barrett.

For a moment Wade stood holding by the sides of the door, staring into the gloom of the camp, for his eyes were as yet blinded by the glare of out-doors.

And then he saw her. Her white face was peering out of the dimness of a bunk. Plainly she had withdrawn herself there like some cowering creature, awaiting a fate she could not understand or antic.i.p.ate. One could see that those eyes, wide-set and full of horror, had been strained on that uncouth, hairy creature at the hearth during long and dreadful suspense.

Through all that desperate search, in hunger, weariness, and despair, he had forgotten John Barrett, contemptuous millionaire; he remembered that John Barrett's daughter Elva had confessed once that she returned his love, and he had thought that when they met again, this time outside the trammels of town and in the saner atmosphere of the big woods, she might understand him better--understand him well enough to know that John Barrett lied when he made honest love contemptible by his sneers about "fortune-seekers." They were all very chaotic, his thoughts, to be sure, but he had believed that the ground on which they would meet would be that common level of honest, human hearts, where they could stand, eye to eye, hands clasping hands, and love frankly answering love.

But love that casts all to the winds, love that forgets tact, prudence, delicacy, love without premeditation or after-thought, is not the love that is ingrained in New England character. She gazed at him at first, not comprehending--her fears still blinding her--and he paused to murmur words of pity and rea.s.surance.

And then Yankee prudence, given its opportunity to whisper, told him that to act the precipitate lover now would be to take advantage of her weakness, her helplessness, her grat.i.tude. If he took this first chance to woo her, demanding, as it were, that she disobey her father's commands, and putting a price on the service that he was rendering her, might her good sense not suggest that, after all, he was a sneak rather than a man?

They call the New England character of the old bed-rock sort hard and selfish. It is rather acute sensitiveness, timorous even to concealment.

And in the end Dwight Wade, faltering ba.n.a.l words of pity for her plight, went to her outwardly calm. And she, her soul still too full of the horror of her experience to let her heart speak what it felt, took his hands and came out upon the rough floor.

The s.h.a.ggy giant squatting by the hearth bent meek and humid eyes on the young man. "Me do it--me do it as you told!" he protested. He patted his hand on the shavings. He was referring to the task to which Wade had set him on Enchanted. To the girl it sounded like the confession of an understanding between this unspeakable creature and her rescuer. Wade, eager only to soothe, protested guilelessly, when she shrank back, that the man was not the ogre he seemed, but a harmless, simple fellow whom he had been sheltering and feeding at his own camp. And then, by the way she stared at him, he realized the chance for a horrible suspicion.

"I don't understand," she moaned. "It's like a dreadful dream. There was an old man who sat here and muttered and raved about my father! And this--this"--she faltered, shrinking farther from Abe--"who brought me here in his arms! And you say he came from your camp! Oh, these woods--these terrible woods! Take me away from them! I am afraid!"

She dropped the shrouding blanket from her shoulders, and he saw her now in the garb of the waif of the Skeets. And under his scrutiny he saw color in her cheeks for the first time, replacing the pallor of distress.

"I had thought there was excuse for this folly--reason for it. I thought it was my duty to--" She faltered, then set her teeth upon her lower lip, and turned away from him. "Oh, take me away from these woods!

Something--I do not know--something has bewitched me--made me forget myself--sent me on a fool's errand! The woods--I'm afraid of them, Mr.

Wade!"

It came to him with a pang that the woods were not offering to his love the common ground of sincerity that he had dreamed of. Elva Barrett, ashamed of her weakness, would not remember generously an attempt to take advantage of her distress when every bulwark of reserve lay in ruins about her, and he felt afraid of his burning desire to take her in his arms and comfort her. Thus self-convinced, he failed to realise that the girl with her bitter words was merely striving, blindly and innocently, to be convinced--and convinced from his own mouth--that she had been wise in her folly, devoted in her mission, and honest in the love that had found such heroic expression in her adventuring.

She looked at him, and saw in his face only the struggle of doubt and hopelessness and fear, and misinterpreted. "You know what the woods have done to make shame and wretchedness, Mr. Wade!" she cried, a flash of her old spirit coming into her eyes. "Men who have been honest with the world outside and honest with themselves have forgotten all honesty behind the screen of these savage woods."

Her cheeks were burning now. She drew the blanket over herself, hugging its edges close in front, covering the attire she wore as though it were nakedness. And in that bitter moment it was nakedness--for the garb she had borrowed from Kate Arden symbolized for her and for him a father's guilty secret laid bare.