Read Ebook: The Freebooters of the Wilderness by Laut Agnes C

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Ebook has 1752 lines and 108549 words, and 36 pages

I THE MAN WITH THE MOLES 1

II AUNT REBECCA 25

V BLIND CLUES 83

VI THE VOICE IN THE TELEPHONE 100

X THE SMOLDERING EMBERS 171

THE LION'S SHARE

THE MAN WITH THE MOLES

The first time that Colonel Rupert Winter saw Cary Mercer was under circumstances calculated to fix the incident firmly in his memory. In the year 1903, home from the Philippines on furlough, and preparing to return to a task big enough to attract him in spite of its exile and hardships, he had visited the son of a friend at Harvard. They were walking through the corridors of one of the private dormitories where the boy roomed. Rather grimly the soldier's eyes were noting marble wainscoting and tiled floors, and contrasting this academic environment with his own at West Point. A caustic comment rose to his lips, but it was not uttered, for he heard the sharp bark of a pistol, followed by a thud, and a crackle as of breaking glass.

"Do you fellows amuse yourselves shooting up the dormitory?" said he. The boy halted; he had gone white.

"It came from Mercer's room!" he cried, and ran across the corridor to a door with the usual labeling of two visiting cards. The door was not locked. Entering, they passed into a vestibule, thence through another door which stood open. For many a day after the colonel could see just how the slender young figure looked, the shoulders in a huddle on the study table, one arm swinging nerveless; beside him, on the floor, a revolver and a broken glass bottle. The latter must have made the crackling sound. Some dark red liquid, soaking the open sheets of a newspaper, filled the room with the pungent odor of alcohol. Only the top of the lad's head showed--a curly, silky, dark brown head; but even before the colonel lifted it he had seen a few thick drops matting the brown curls. He laid the head back gently and his hand slipped to the boy's wrist.

"No use, Ralph," he said in the subdued tones that the voice takes unconsciously in the presence of death.

"Another victim of the Wall Street pirates," was the colonel's silent judgment on the tragedy. "Lucky for her his mother's dead."

The next morning he had returned and had gone to his young friend's rooms.

The boy was still full of the horror of the day before. Mercer's brother was in Cambridge, he said--arrived that morning from New York. "Endy is going to fetch him round to get him out of the reporters' way sometime this evening; maybe there's something I can do"--this in explanation of his declining to dine with the colonel. As the two entered the rooms, Winter was a little in advance, and caught the first glimpse of a man sitting in a big mission arm-chair, his head sunk on his breast. So absorbed was this man in his own distempered musings that the new-comers' approach did not arouse him. He sat with knitted brows and clenched hands, staring into vacancy; his rigid and pallid features set in a ghastly intensity of thought. There was suffering in the look; but there was more: the colonel, who had been living among the serpent passions of the Orient, knew deadly anger when he saw it; it was branded on the face before him. Involuntarily he fell back; he felt as if he had blundered in on a naked soul. Noiselessly he slipped out of the range of vision. He spoke loudly, halting to ask some question about the rooms; this made a moment's pause.

It was sufficient; in the study they found a quiet, calm, although rather haggard-looking man, who greeted Winter's companion courteously, with a Southern accent, and a very good manner. He was presented to the colonel as Mr. Mercer. He would have excused himself, professing that he was just going, but the colonel took the words out of his mouth: "Ralph, here, has a cigar for me--that is all I came for; see you at the Touraine, Ralph, to-morrow for luncheon, then." He did not see the man again; neither did he see Ralph, although he made good, so far as in him lay, his fiction of an engagement at the Touraine. But Ralph could not come; and Winter had lunched, instead, with an old friend at his club, and had watched, through a stately Georgian window, the shifting greenery of the Common in an east wind.

All through the luncheon the soldier's mind kept swerving from the talk in hand to Cary Mercer's face. Yet he never expected to see it again. Three years later he did see it; and this second encounter, of which, by the way, Mercer was unconscious, was the beginning of an absorbing chapter in his life. A short space of time that chapter occupied; yet into it crowded mystery, peril, a wonderful and awful spectacle, the keenest happiness and the cruelest anxiety. Let his days be ever so many, the series of events which followed Mercer's reappearance will not be blurred by succeeding experiences; their vivid and haunting pictures will burn through commoner and later happenings as an electric torch flares through layers of mist.

Nothing, however, could promise adventure less than the dull and chilly late March evening when the chapter began. Nor could any one be less on the lookout for adventure, or even interest, than was Rupert Winter. In truth, he was listless and depressed.

When he alighted from his cab in the great court of the Rock Island Station he found Haley, his old orderly, with a hand on the door-hasp. Haley's military stoicism of demeanor could not quite conceal a certain agitation--at least not from the colonel's shrewd eye, used to catch the moods of his soldiers. He strangled a kind of sigh. "Doesn't like it much more than I," thought Rupert Winter. "This is mighty kind of you, Haley," he said.

"Yes, sor," answered Haley, saluting. The colonel grinned feebly. Haley, busy repelling a youthful porter, did not notice the grin; he strode ahead with the colonel's world-scarred hand-luggage, found an empty settee beside one of the square-tiled columns of the waiting-room and disposed his burden on the iron-railed seat next the corner one, which he reserved for the colonel.

"The train ain't in yet, Colonel," said he. "I'll be telling you--"

"No, Haley," interrupted the colonel, whose lip twitched a little; and he looked aside; "best say good-by now; don't wait. The fact is, I'm thinking of too many things you and I have gone through together." He held out his hand; Haley, with a stony expression, gazed past it and saluted, while he repeated: "Yes, sor; I'll be back to take the bags whin the train's made up." Whereupon he wheeled and made off with speed.

"Just the same damned obstinate way he's always had," chuckled the colonel to himself. Nevertheless, something ached in his throat as he frowned and winked.

"Oh, get a brace on you, you played-out old sport!" he muttered. "The game's on the last four cards and you haven't established your suit; you'll have to sit back and watch the other fellows play!" But his dreary thoughts persisted. Rupert was a colonel in the regular army of the United States. He had been brevetted a brigadier-general after the Spanish War, and had commanded, not only a brigade, but a division at one critical time in the Philippines; but for reasons probably known to the little knot of politicians who "hung it up," although incomprehensible to most Americans, Congress had failed to pass the bill giving the wearers of brevet titles the right to keep their hard-won and empty honors; wherefore General Winter had declined to Colonel Winter.

He had more substantial troubles, including a wound which would probably make him limp through life and possibly retire him from service at fifty. It had given him a six months' sick leave , and after spending a month on the Atlantic coast, he was going for the spring to the Pacific. Haley, whose own term of service had expired, had not re?nlisted, but had followed him, Mrs. Haley and the baby uncomplainingly bringing up the rear. It was not fair to Haley nor to Mrs. Haley, the colonel felt. He had told Haley so; he had found a good situation for the man, and he had added the deed for a little house in the suburbs of Chicago.

If Haley wouldn't re?nlist--there never was a better soldier since he had downed a foolish young hankering for wild times and whisky--if he wouldn't go back to the army, where he belonged, let him settle down, take up the honest carpenter's trade that he had abandoned, be a good citizen and marry little Nora to some classmate in the high school, who might make a fortune and build her a Colonial mansion, should the Colonial still obtain in the twentieth century.

The colonel had spread a grand prospect before Haley, who listened unresponsively, a dumb pain in his wide blue Irish eyes. The colonel hated it; but, somehow, he hated worse the limp look of Haley's back as he watched it dwindle down Michigan Avenue.

"And the Senator has all the appointments to the Service out here?"

"No--disappointments," corrected Wayland.

They were both watching the grotesque antics of a squirrel negotiating the fresh tips of a young spruce. The squirrel sat up on his hind legs and chittered, whether at the Senator's brands or their heresy it would be hard to tell; but they both laughed.

"Have you room on the Grazing Range for so many cattle?"

"Not without crowding--"

"You mean crowding the sheepmen, off," she said.

"What is the use of talking?" demanded Wayland petulantly. "Neither you nor I dare open our mouths about it! Tell the sheriff; your ranch houses will be burnt over your ears some night! Everybody knows what has happened when a sheep herder has been killed in an accident, or hustled back to foreign parts; but speak of it--you had better have cut your tongue out! Fight it: you know what happened to my predecessors! One had a sudden transfer. Another got what is known as the bounce--you English people would call it the sack. The third got a job at three times bigger salary--down in the Smelter.

"You know whose drovers are rustling cattle up North from Arizona? You know who pays the gang? So do I! You don't know whose cattle those are: so don't I! To-morrow when they are branded fresh, they'll be the Senator's; and what are you sheep people going to do with this crowd coming in from the outside? The law says--equal rights to all; and you say--fight; but who is going to see that the law is carried out, unless the people awaken and become a Vigilant Committee for the Nation? Tell Sheriff Flood to go out and round up those rustlers: he'll hide under the bed for a week, or 'allow he don't like the job.' Senator Moyese got him that berth. He's going to hang on like a leech to blood.

"Now, look down this side! Do you know a quarter section of that big timber is worth from ,000 to ,000 to its owners, the people of the United States? Do you know you can build a cottage of six rooms out of one tree, the very size a workman needs? The workmen who vote own those trees! Do you know the Smelter Lumber Company takes all for nothing, half a million of it a year? Do you know that Smelter, itself, is built on two-thousand acres of coal lands--stolen--stolen from the Government as clearly as if the Smelter teams had hauled it from a Government coal pit? Do you know there isn't a man in the Land Office who hasn't urged and urged and urged the Government to sue for restitution of that steal, and headquarters pretend to be doubtful so that the Statute of Limitations will intervene?"

On the inner side, the Ridge dropped to an Alpine meadow that billowed up another slope through mossed forests to the snow line of the Holy Cross Mountains. What the girl saw was a sylvan world of spruce, then the dark green pointed larches where the jubilant rivers rioted down from the snow. What the man saw was--a Challenge.

She laughed. "I like your rage! Look! What's that mountain behind the cabin doing?"

"Shine on pale moon, don't mind me," laughed Wayland; but suddenly he stopped storming.

The slant sunlight struck the Holy Cross Mountain turning the snow gullies pure gold against the luminous peak. Just for a moment the white cornice of snow forming the bar of the apparent cross flushed to the Alpine glow, flushed blood-red and quivering like a cross poised in mid-air. An invisible hand of silence touched them both. The sunset became a topaz gate curtained by clouds of fire and lilac mist; while overhead across the indigo blue of the high rare mountain zenith slowly spread and faded a light--ashes of roses on the sun altar of the dead day.

AN INTERLUDE THAT CAME UNANNOUNCED

Wayland stopped storming. His cynical laugh came back an echo hard to his own hearing. Was It speaking the same mute language to her It had spoken to him since first he came to the Holy Cross? The violet shadows of twilight slowly filled with a primrose mist, with a rapt hush as of the day's vespers. The great quiet of the mountain world wrapped them round as in an invisible robe of worship.

Always, as the red flush ran the spectrum gamut of the yellows and oranges and greens and blues and purples to the solitary star above the opaline peak, he had wanted to wait and see--what? He did not know. It had always seemed, if he watched, the primrose veil would lift and release some phantom with noiseless tread on a ripple of night wind. In his lonely vigils he used to listen for all the little bells of the nodding purple heather to begin ringing some sort of pixie music, or for the flaming tongues of the painter's flower to take voice in some chorus that would beat time to the rhythm of woodland life fluting the age-old melodies of Pan.

You would look and look at the winged flames of light swimming and shimmering and melting outlines in the opal clouds there, till almost it became a sort of Mount of Transfiguration, of free uncabined roofless night-dreams camped beneath the sheen of a million stars.

You would listen and listen to the mountain silence--rare, hushed, silver silence--till almost you could hear; but until to-night it had always been like the fall of the snow flake. You could never be quite sure you heard, though there was no mistaking a mass of several million years of snow flakes when they thundered down in avalanche or broke a ledge with the boom of artillery.

Now, at last--was it the end of a million years of pre-existence waiting for this thing? Now, at last, Wayland realized that the quiet fellowship, the common interests, the satisfaction of her presence, the aptitude their minds had of always rushing to meet halfway on the same subject, had somehow massed to a something within himself that set his blood coursing with jubilant swiftness.

He looked at the rancher's daughter. What had happened? She was the same, yet not the same. Her eyes were awaiting his. They did not flinch. They were wells of light; a strange new light; depth of light. Had the veil lifted at last? The welter of sullen anger subsided within him. The wrapped mystery of the mountain twilight hushed speech. What folly it all was--that far off clamor of greed in the Outer World, that wolfish war of self-interest down in the Valley, that clack of the wordsters darkening wisdom without knowledge! As if one man, as if one generation of men, could stay the workings of the laws of eternal righteousness by refusing to heed, any more than one man's will could stop an avalanche by refusing to heed the law of the snowflake!

Calamity, the little withered half-breed woman, slipped in and out of the Forester's cabin tidying up bachelor confusion. The wind suffed through the evergreens in dream voices, pansy-soft to the touch. The slow-swaying evergreens rocked to a rhythm old as Eternity, Druid priests standing guard over the sacrament of love and night. From the purpling Valley came the sibilant hush of the River. Somewhere, from the branches below the Ridge, a water thrush gurgled a last joyous note that rippled liquid gold through the twilight.

Life might have become the tent of a night in an Eternity--a tent of sky hung with stars; the after-glow a topaz gate ajar into some infinite life. Then Love and Silence and Eternity had wrapped them round as in a robe of prayer. He was standing above the dead camp-fire. She was leaning forward from the slab seat, her face between her hands. With a catch of breath, she withdrew her eyes from his and watched the long shadows creep like ghosts across the Valley.

What he said aloud in the nonchalant voice of twentieth century youth keeping hold of himself was--

"Not bad, is it?" nodding at the opal flame-winged peak. "Pretty good show turned on free every night?"

A meadow lark went lifting above the Ridge dropping silver arrows of song; and a little flutter of phantom wind came rustling through the pine needles.

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