The Sky Line of Spruce Part 29

But she must get herself in hand again! Perhaps life had not yet completely flickered out; and she could nurse it back. She dropped her ear to his breast, listening.

Yes, she felt the faint stirring of his heart. It was so feeble, the throbs were so far apart, yet they meant life,--life that might flush his cheeks again, and might yet bring him back to her, into her arms. He was breathing, too; breaths so faint that she hardly dared to believe in their reality. And presently she realized that his one hope of life lay in getting back to the fire.

For long hours he had been lying in the cold rain; a few more minutes would likely extinguish the spark of life that remained in his breast.

Her hand stole over his powerful frame, in an effort to get some idea of the nature of his wounds.

One of his arms was broken; its position indicated that. Some of his ribs were crushed too--what internal injuries he had that might end him before the morning she did not know. But she could not take time to build a sledge and cut away the brush. She worked her shoulder under his body.

Wrenching with all her fine, young strength she lifted him upon her shoulder; then, kneeling in the vines, she struggled for breath. Then thrusting with her arm she got on her feet.

His weight was over fifty pounds greater than her own; but her woods training, the hard work she had always done, had fitted her for just such a test as this. She started with her burden toward the cave.

She had long known how to carry an injured man, suspending him over her shoulder, head pointed behind her, her arms clasping his thigh. With her free arm she seized the tree branches to sustain her. She had no light now; she was guided only by the faint glow of the fire at the cavern mouth.

After a hundred feet the load seemed unbearable. Except for the fact that she soon got on the well-worn moose trail that followed the creek, she could scarcely have progressed a hundred feet farther. As it was, she was taxed to the utmost: every ounce of her reserve strength would be needed before the end.

At the end of a hundred yards she stopped to rest, leaning against a tree and still holding the beloved weight upon her shoulder. If she laid it down she knew she could not lift it again. But soon she plunged on, down toward the beacon light.

Except for her love for him, and that miraculous strength that love has always given to women, she could not have gone on that last, cruel hundred yards. But slowly, steadily, the circle of light grew brighter, larger, nearer; ever less dense were the thickets of evergreen between.

Now she was almost to the glade; now she felt the wet gra.s.s at her ankles. She lunged on and laid her burden on her bed.

Then she relaxed at his feet, breathing in sobbing gasps. Except for the crackle of the fire and the beat of the rain, there was no sound in the cave but this,--those anguished sobs from her wracked lungs.

But far distant though Ben was and deep as he slept--just outside the dark portals of death itself--those sounds went down to him. He heard them dimly at first, like a far-distant voice in a dream, but as the moments pa.s.sed he began to recognize their nature and their source. Sobs of exhaustion and distress--from the girl that was in his charge. He lay a long time, trying to understand.

On her knees beside him Beatrice saw the first flutter of his eyelids.

In awe, rather than rapture, her arms crept around him, and she kissed his rain-wet brow. His eyes opened, looking wonderingly into hers.

She saw the first light of recognition, then a half-smile, gentle as a girl's, as he realized his own injuries. Of course Ben Darby would smile in such a moment as this; his instincts, true and manly, were always to try to cheer her. Presently he spoke in the silence.

"The tree got me, didn't it?" he asked.

"Don't try to talk," she cautioned. "Yes--the tree fell on you. But you're not going to die. You're going to live, live--"

He shook his head, the half-smile flickering at his lips. "Let me talk, Beatrice," he said, with just a whisper of his old determination. "It's important--and I don't think--I have much time."

Her eyes widened in horror. "You don't mean--"

"I'm going back in a minute--I can't hardly keep awake," he said. His voice, though feeble, was preternaturally clear. She heard every kind accent, every gentle tone even above the crackle of the fire without and the beat of the rain. "I think it's the limit," he went on. "I believe the tree got me--clear inside--but you must listen to everything I say."

She nodded. In that eerie moment of suspense she knew she must hear what he had to tell her.

"Don't wait to see what happens to me," he went on. "I'll either go out or I'll live--you really can't help me any. Where's the rifle?"

"The rifle was broken--when the tree fell."

"I knew it would be. I saw it coming." He rested, waiting for further breath. "Beatrice--please, please don't stay here, trying to save me."

"Do you think I would go?" she cried.

"You must. The food--is about gone. Just enough to last one person through to the Yuga cabins--with berries, roots. Take the pistol.

There's six shots or so--in the box. Make every one tell. Take the dead grouse too. The rifle's broken and we can't get meat. It's just--death--if you wait. You can just make it through now."

"And leave you here to die, as long as there's a chance to save you?"

the girl answered. "You couldn't get up to get water--or build a fire--"

He listened patiently, but shook his head at the end. "No, Bee--please don't make me talk any more. It's just death for both of us if you stay.

The food is gone--the rifle broken. Your father's gang'll be here sooner or later--and they'd smash me, anyway. I could hardly fight 'em off with those few pistol sh.e.l.ls--but by G.o.d I'd like to try--"

He struggled for breath, and she thought he had slipped back into unconsciousness. But in a moment the faltering current of his speech began again.

"Take the pistol--and go," he told her. "You showed me to-day how to give up--and I don't want to kill--your father--any more. I renounce it all! Ezram--forgive me--old Ez that lay dead in the leaves." He smiled at the girl again. "So don't mind leaving me. Life work's all spent--given over. Please, Beatrice--you'd just kill yourself without aiding me. Wait till the sun comes up--then follow up the river--"

Unconsciousness welled high above him, and the lids dropped over his eyes. The gloom still pressed about the cavern, yet a sun no less effulgent than that of which he had spoken had risen for Ben. It was his moment of renunciation, glorious past any moment of his life. He had renounced his last, little fighting chance that the girl might live. And Ezram, watching high and afar, and with infinite serenity knowing at last the true balance of all things one with another, gave him his full forgiveness.

The girl began to strip the wet clothes from his injured body.

x.x.xVI

The trail was long and steep into Back There for Jeffery Neilson and his men. Day after day they traveled with their train of pack horses, pus.h.i.+ng deeper into the wilds, fording mighty rivers, traversing silent and majestic mountain ranges, climbing slopes so steep that the packs had to be lightened to half before the gasping animals could reach the crest. They could go only at a snail's pace,--even in the best day's travel only ten miles, and often a single mile was a hard, exhausting day's work.

Of course there was no kind of a trail for them to follow. As far as possible they followed the winding pathways of big game--as long as these led them in their general direction--but often they were obliged to cut their way through the underbrush. Time after time they encountered impa.s.sable cliffs or rivers from which they were obliged to turn back and seek new routes; they found marshes that they could not penetrate; ranges they could not climb; wastes of slide rock where they could make headway only at a creeping pace and with hourly risk of their lives.

They had counted on slow travel, but the weeks grew into the months before they even neared the obscure heart of Back There where they thought Ben and Beatrice might be hidden. The way was hard as they had never dreamed. Every day, it seemed to them, brought its fresh tragedy: a long back-trailing to avoid some impa.s.sable place, a fatiguing digression, perhaps several hours of grinding work with the axe in order to cut a trail. Sometimes the harness broke, requiring long stops on the trail to repair it, the packs slipped continually from the hard going; and they found it increasingly difficult to secure horse feed for the animals.

Even Indian ponies cannot keep fat on such gra.s.s as grows in the deep shade of the spruce. They need the rich growths of the open park lands to stiffen them for the grinding toil; and even with good feeding, foresters know that pack animals must not be kept on the trail for too many days in succession. Jeffery Neilson and his men disregarded both these facts, with the result that the animals lost flesh and strength, cutting down the speed of their advance. Oaths and shouts were unavailing now: only cruel blows could drive them forward at all.

They seemed to sense a great hopelessness in their undertaking. Usually well-trained pack horses will follow their leader without question, walk almost in his tracks, and the rider in front only has to show the way.

After the first few days of grinding toil, the morale of the entire outfit began to break. The horses broke away into thickets on each side; and time after time, one hour upon another, the hors.e.m.e.n had to round them up again. When they came to the great rivers--wild tributaries of the Yuga--they had to follow up the streams for days in search of a place to ford. Then they were obliged to carry the packs across in small loads, making trip after trip with the utmost patience and toil. The horses, broken in spirit, took the wild waters just as they climbed the steep slopes, with little care whether they lived or died.

The days pa.s.sed, June and July. Ever they moved at a slower pace. One of the horses, giving up on a steep pitch and frenzied by Ray's cruel, las.h.i.+ng blows, fell off the edge of the trail and shot down like a plummet two hundred feet into the canyon below--and thereupon it became necessary not only to spend the rest of the day in retrieving and repairing the supplies that had fallen with him, but also to heap bigger loads on the backs of the remaining horses. And always they were faced by the cruel possibility that this whole, mighty labor was in vain,--that Ben and Beatrice might have gone to their deaths in the rapids, weeks before.

The food stores brought for the journey were rapidly depleted. The result was that they had to depend more and more upon a diet of meat.

Men can hold up fairly well on meat alone, particularly if it has a fair amount of fat, but the effort of hunting and drying the flesh into jerky served to cut down their speed.

The constant delays, the grinding, blasting toil of the day's march, and particularly the ever-recurring crises of ford and steep, made serious inroads on the morale of the three men. Just the work of urging on the exhausted horses drained their nervous energy in a frightful stream: the uncertainty of their quest, the danger, the scarcity of any food but meat, and most of all the burning hatred in their hearts for the man who had forced the expedition upon them combined to torment them; even now, Ben Darby had received no little measure of vengeance.

No experience of their individual lives had ever presented such a daily ordeal of physical distress; none had ever been so devastating to hope and spirit. There was not one moment of pleasure, one instant of relief from the day's beginning to its end. At night they went to sleep on hastily made beds, cursing at all things in heaven and earth; they blasphemed with growing savagery all that men hold holy and true; and degeneracy grew upon them very swiftly. They quarreled over their tasks, and they hated each other with a hatred only second to that they bore Darby himself. All three had always been reckless, wicked, brutal men; but now, particularly in the case of Ray and Chan, the ordeal brought out and augmented the latent abnormalities that made them criminals in the beginning, developing those odd quirks in human minds that make toward perversion and the most fiendish crime.

Jeffery Neilson had almost forgotten the issue of the claim by now. He had told the truth, those weary weeks before, when he had wished he had never seen it. His only thought was of his daughter, the captive of a relentless, merciless man in these far wilds. Never the moon rose or the sun declined but that he was sick with haunting fear for her. Had she gone down to her death in the rapids? This was Neilson's fondest wish: the enfolding oblivion of wild waters would be infinitely better than the fate Ben had hinted at in his letter. Yet he dared not turn back.

She might yet live, held prisoner in some far-off cave.

At first all three agreed on this point: that they must not turn back until either Ben was crushed under their heels or they had made sure of his death. Ray had not forgotten that Ben alone stood between him and the wealth and power he had always craved. He dreamed, at first, that the deadly hards.h.i.+ps of the journey could be atoned for by years of luxury and ease. His mind was also haunted with dark conjectures as to the fate of Beatrice, but jealousy, rather than concern for her, was the moving impulse.

Neilson knew his young partner now. He saw clearly at last that Ray was not and had never been a faithful confederate, but indeed a malicious and bitter enemy, only waiting his chance to overthrow his leader. They were still partners in their effort to rescue the girl and slay her abductor; otherwise they were at swords' points. And there would be something more than plain, swift slaying, now. If Neilson could read aright, the actual, physical change that had been wrought in Ray's face foretold no ordinary end for Ben. His features were curiously drawn; and his eyes had a fixed, magnetic, evil light. Occasionally in his darker hours Neilson foresaw even more sinister possibilities in this change in Ray: the abnormal intensity manifest in every look and word, the weird, evil preoccupation that seemed ever upon him. There was not only the fate of Ben to consider, but that of Beatrice too, out in these desolate forests. But surely Ray's degenerate impulses could be mastered. Neilson need not fear this, at least.