The Rim of the Desert by Ada Woodruff Anderson (page 3)

you would admit?”

“Oh, no, but the friction of the reins can make even a scratch uncomfortable after a while, and my glove is getting tight. A little peroxide, when we reach a pharmacy, will fix it all right.”

But Miss Armitage watched him doubtfully. She assured him she was not tired and that she loved to drive. Had she not told him so at the start? Then, as they left the promontory, her glance followed the road ahead. The bridge was no longer fine as a spider web; it was a railroad crossing of steel, and the long eaves of the Great Northern depot lifted near, flanked by the business blocks of a town. “Wenatchee!” she exclaimed; and wavering, asked: “_Isn’t_ this Wenatchee?”

“Yes, Miss Armitage, I am afraid that it is. You are back to civilization. A few minutes more and, if you will give me their address, you will be safe with your friends.”

“I did not say I had any friends in Wenatchee, Mr. Tisdale. I am going on to Hesperides Vale. But please leave me at any quiet hotel. I can’t thank you enough for all your kindness and patience,” she went on hurriedly. “For making this trip possible. All I can hope to do is share the expense.” And she found the inside pocket of her coat and drew out a small silver purse.

Tisdale, driving slowly, divided his attention between his team and the buildings on either side. “There is a public garage,” he said, “and a rival establishment opposite. You will have no trouble to finish your trip by automobile, as you planned. It will be pleasant making the run up the valley this evening, when it is cool.”

Miss Armitage opened her purse. “The rates must be considerably higher on a rough mountain road than on the Seattle boulevard, and, of course, one couldn’t expect to hire Nip and Tuck at ordinary rates.”

Tisdale drew in, hesitating, before a hotel, then relaxed the reins. “The building seems modern, but we may find a quiet little inn up some side street with more shade.”

“I presume you will drive on up the valley,” she said, after a moment, “and start back to Kittitas to-morrow. Or will it be necessary to rest the team a day?”

“I shall drive on to that tract of Weatherbee’s this afternoon; but I expect to take the westbound train to-night, somewhere up the valley.”

“I see,” she said quickly and tried to cover her dismay, “you intend to ship the team back to Kittitas by way of Seattle. I’m afraid”–her voice broke a little, the color flushed pinkly to her forehead, her ears, and her glance fell to the purse in her lap–“but please tell me the charges.”

“Madam,” and the ready humor crinkled the corners of his mouth, “when I ship these horses back to Lighter, he is going to pay the freight.”

She drew a quick breath of relief, but her purse remained open, and she waited, regarding Tisdale with an expectant, disconcerting side-glance of her half-veiled eyes. “And the day rates for the use of the team?” she asked.

For a moment he was busy turning the horses. They had reached a second hotel, but it proved less inviting than the first, and the side streets they had crossed afforded no quiet inn, or indeed any dwelling in the shade. “After all,” he said, “a room and bath on the north side, with windows looking up the Columbia, should make you fairly comfortable through the heat of the day.” But the girl waited, and when his eyes fell to that open purse, his own color burned through the tan. There was no help for it; she must know the truth. He squared his shoulders, turning a little toward her. “There are no expenses to share, Miss Armitage. I– happened to own this team, and since we were traveling the same way, I was glad to offer you this vacant seat.”

“Do you mean you bought these horses–outright–at Kittitas?”

“Yes, the opportunity was too good to miss.” He tried to brave the astonishment in her eyes, but his glance moved directly to the colts. “And, you see, if I should buy that tract of Weatherbee’s, I am going to need a team.”

“Doubtless,” answered Miss Armitage slowly. “Still, for breaking wild land or even cultivating, one would choose a steadier, heavier team. But they are beauties, Mr. Tisdale, and I know a man in Seattle who is going to be disappointed. I congratulate you on being able to secure them.” She closed the purse at last and reluctantly put it away, and she added, with the merriment dimpling her lips: “Fate certainly was with me yesterday.”

They had reached the hotel, and as he drew up to the curb, a man came from the lobby to hold the bays. Several traveling salesmen stood smoking and talking outside the entrance, while a little apart a land promoter and his possible capitalist consulted a blue print; but there was a general pause as Tisdale sprang out, and the curious scrutiny of wayfarers in a small town was focussed on the arrivals.

“It looks all right,” he said quietly, helping her down, “but if you find anything wrong, or should happen to want me, I shall be at that other hotel until two o’clock. Good-by!”

He saw the surprise in her face change to swift appreciation. Then “Good-by,” she answered and walked towards the door. But there she stopped. Tisdale, looking back as he gave her suitcase to a boy, saw her lips part, though she did not speak. Then her eyelids drooped, the color played softly in her face, and she turned to go in. There had been no invitation in her attitude, yet he had felt a certain appeal. It flashed over him she did not want to motor up the valley; she wished to drive on with him. Too proud, too fine to say so, she was letting her opportunity go. He hurried across the pavement.

“Miss Armitage,” he said, and instantly she turned; the sparkles leaped in her eyes; she came towards him a few steps and stopped expectantly. “If I start up the valley at two”–and he looked at his watch–“that will be a rest of nearly three hours. It means the heat of the day, but if it seems better than motoring over a country road with a public chauffeur, I would be glad to have you drive for me.”

CHAPTER X

A WOMAN’S HEART-STRINGS

“Now I know the meaning of Wenatchee. It’s something racy, Mr. Tisdale, and a little wicked, yet with unexpected depths, and just the coolest, limpid hazel-green.”

Tisdale’s pulses quickened; his blood responded to her exhilaration. “Yes, only”–and he waited to catch the glance she lifted from the stream–“your green is blue, and you forgot to count the sparkles in.”

As he spoke, the bays paced off the bridge. They sprang, gathering themselves lightly for a sharp ascent and for an interval held the driver’s close attention. The town and the Columbia were behind, and the road, which followed the contour of the slopes rising abruptly from the Wenatchee, began a series of sudden turns; it cut shelf-wise high across the face of a ridge; spurs constantly closed after them; there seemed no way back or through, then, like an opening gate, a bluff detached from the wall ahead, and they entered another breadth of valley. In the wide levels that bordered the river, young orchards began to supplant the sage. Looking down from the thoroughfare, the even rows and squares seemed wrought on the tawny background like the designs of a great carpet. Sometimes, paralleling the road, the new High Line canal followed an upper cut; it trestled a ravine or, stopped by a rocky cliff, bored through. Where a finished spillway irrigated a mountainside, all the steep incline between the runnels showed lines on lines of diminutive trees, pluckily taking root-hold.

A little after that, near an old mission, they dropped to a lower bench and passed an apple orchard in full bearing. Everywhere boughs laden with a gold or crimson harvest were supported by a network of scaffolding. It was marvelous that fruit could so crowd and cling to a slender stem and yet round and color to such perfection. Miss Armitage slowed the horses down and looked up the shady avenues. Presently a driveway divided the tract, leading to a dwelling so small it had the appearance of a toy house; but on the gatepost above the rural delivery box the name of the owner shone ostentatiously. It was “Henderson Bailey, Hesperides Vale.”

“Do you see?” she asked. “This is that station master’s orchard, where the Rome Beauty grew.”

But the team was troublesome again. The road made a turn, rounding the orchard, and began the descent to a bridge. On the right a great water-wheel, supplied with huge, scoop-shaped buckets, was lifting water from the river to distribute it over a reclaimed section. The bays pranced toward it suspiciously. “Now, now, Tuck,” she admonished, “be a soldier.” The colt sidled gingerly. “Whoa, Nip, whoa!” and, rearing lightly, they took the approach with a rush.

As they quieted and trotted evenly off the bridge, a large and brilliant signboard set in an area of sage-brush challenged the eye. Miss Armitage fluted a laugh.

“Buy one of these Choice Lots,”

she read, with charming, slightly mocking exaggeration.

“Buy to-day.

“To-morrow will see this Property the Heart of a City.

“Buy before the Prices Soar.

“Talk with Henderson Bailey.

“This surely is Hesperides Vale,” she added.

The amusement went out of Tisdale’s face. “Yes, madam, and your journey’s end. Probably the next post-box will announce the name of your friends.”

She did not answer directly. She looked beyond the heads of the team to the top of the valley, where two brown slopes parted like drawn curtains and opened a blue vista of canyon closed by a lofty snow-peak. The sun had more than fulfilled its morning promise of heat, but a soft breeze began to pull from that white summit down the watercourse.

“I did not tell you I had friends in Hesperides Vale,” she said at last. Her eyes continued to search the far blue canyon, but her color heightened at his quick glance of surprise, and she went on with a kind of breathlessness.

“I–I have a confession to make. I–But hasn’t it occurred to you, Mr. Tisdale, that I might be interested in this land you are on your way to see?”

His glance changed. It settled into his clear, calculating look of appraisal. Under it her color flamed; she, turned her face farther away. “No,” he answered slowly, “No, that had not occurred to me.”

“I should have told you at the beginning, but I thought, at first, you knew. Afterward–but I am going to explain now,” and she turned resolutely, smiling a little to brave that look. “Mr. Morganstein had promised, when he planned the trip to Portland, that he would run over from Ellensburg to look the property up. He believed it might be feasible to plat it into five-acre tracts to put on the market. Of course we knew nothing of the difficulties of the road; we had heard it was an old stage route, and we expected to motor through and return the same day. So, when the accident happened to the car in Snoqualmie Pass, and the others were taking the Milwaukee train home, I decided, on the impulse of the moment, to finish this side trip to Wenatchee and return to Seattle by the Great Northern. I admit seeing you on the eastbound influenced me. We–Mrs. Feversham–guessed you were on your way to see this land, and when the porter was uncertain of the stage from Ellensburg, but that you were leaving the trail below Kittitas, I thought you had found a newer, quicker way. So–I followed you.”

Tisdale’s brows relaxed. He laughed a little softly, trying to ease her evident distress. “I am glad you did, Miss Armitage. I am mighty glad you did. But I see,” he went on slowly, his face clouding again, “I see Mrs. Weatherbee had been talking to you about that tract. It’s strange I hadn’t thought of that possibility. I’ll wager she even tried to sell the land off a map, in Seattle. I wonder, though, when this Weatherbee trip was arranged to look the property over, that she didn’t come, too. But no doubt that seemed too eager.”

The blue lights flashed in her eyes; her lip trembled. “Be fair,” she said. “You can afford to be–generous.”

“I am going to be generous, Miss Armitage, to you.” The ready humor touched his mouth again, the corners of his eyes. “I am going to take you over the ground with me; show you Weatherbee’s project, his drawn plans. But afterwards, if you outbid me–“

“You need not be afraid of that,” she interrupted quickly. “I–you must know”–she paused, her lashes drooped–“I–am not very rich,” she finessed.

Tisdale laughed outright. “Neither am I. Neither am I.” Then, his glance studying the road, he said: “I think we take that branch. But wait!” He drew his map from his pocket and pored over it a moment. “Yes, we turn there. After that there is just one track.”

For an instant Miss Armitage seemed to waver. She sent a backward look to the river, and the glance, returning, swept Tisdale; then she straightened in her seat and swung the bays into the branch. It cut the valley diagonally, away from the Wenatchee, past a last orchard, into wild lands that stretched in level benches under the mountain wall. One tawny, sage-mottled slope began to detach from the rest; it took the shape of a reclining brazen beast, partly leopard, partly wolf, and a line of pine trees that had taken root in a moist strata along the backbone had the effect of a bristling mane.

“That is Weatherbee’s landmark,” said Tisdale. “He called it Cerberus. It is all sketched in true as life on his plans. The gap there under the brute’s paw is the entrance to his vale.”

As they approached, the mountain seemed to move; it took the appearance of an animal, ready to spring. Miss Armitage, watching, shivered. The dreadful expectation she had shown the previous night when the cry of the cougar came down the wind, rose in her face. It was as though she had come upon that beast, more terrifying than she had feared, lying in wait for her. Then the moment passed. She raised her head, her hands tightened on the reins, and she drove resolutely into the shadows of the awful front. “Now,” she said, not quite steadily, “now I know how monstrously alive a mountain can seem.”

Tisdale looked at her. “You never could live in Alaska,” he said. “You feel too much this personality of inanimate things. That was David Weatherbee’s trouble. You know how in the end he thought those Alaska peaks were moving. They got to ‘crowding’ him.”

The girl turned a little and met his look. Her eyes, wide with dread, entreated him. “Yes, I know,” she said, and her voice was almost a whisper. “I was thinking of him. But please don’t say any more. I can’t– bear it–here.”

So she was thinking of Weatherbee. Her emotion sprang from her sympathy for him. A gentleness that was almost tenderness crept over Tisdale’s face. How fine she was, how sensitively made, and how measureless her capacity for loving, if she could feel like this for a man of whom she had only heard.

Miss Armitage, squaring her shoulders and sitting very erect once more, her lips closed in a straight red line drove firmly on. A stream ran musically along the road side,–a stream so small it was marvelous it had a voice. As they rounded the mountain, the gap widened into the mouth of the vale, which lifted back to an upper bench, over-topped by a lofty plateau. Then she swung the team around and stopped. The way was cut off by a barbed wire fence.

The enclosure was apparently a corral for a flock of Angora goats. There was no gate for the passage of teams; the road ended there, and a rough sign nailed to a hingeless wicket warned the wayfarer to “Keep Out.” On a rocky knob near this entrance a gaunt, hard-featured woman sat knitting. She measured the trespassers with a furtive, smouldering glance and clicked her needles with unnecessary force.

Tisdale’s eyes made a swift inventory of the poor shelter, half cabin, partly shed, that evidently housed both the woman and her flock, then searched the barren field for some sort of hitching post. But the few bushes along the stream were small, kept low, doubtless, by the browsing goats, and his glance rested on a fringe of poplars beyond the upper fence.

“There’s no way around,” he said at last, and the amusement broke softly in his face. “We will have to go through.”

“The wicket will take the team singly,” she answered, “but we must unhitch and leave the buggy here.”

“And first, if you think you can hold the colts that long, I must tackle this thistle.”

“I can manage,” she said, and the sparkles danced in her eyes, “unless you are vanquished.”

The woman rose and stood glowering while he sprang down and drew the wooden pin to open the wicket. Then, “You keep off my land,” she ordered sharply. “I will, madam,” he answered quietly, “as soon as I am satisfied it is yours.”

“I’ve lived on this claim ‘most five years,” she screamed. “I’m homesteading, and when I’ve used the water seven years, I get the rights.” She sprang backward with a cattish movement and caught up a gun that had been concealed in some bushes. “Now you go,” she said.

But Tisdale stayed. He stood weighing her with his steady, appraising eyes, while he drew the township plat from his pocket.

“This is the quarter section I have come to look up. It starts here, you see,”–and having unfolded the map, he turned to hold it under her glance–“at the mouth of this gap, and lifts back through the pocket, taking in the slopes to this bench and on up over this ridge to include these springs.”

The woman, curbing herself to look at the plat, allowed the rifle to settle in the curve of her arm. “I piped the water down,” she said. “This stream was a dry gully. I fenced and put up a house.”

“The tract was commuted and bought outright from the Government over seven years ago.” Tisdale’s voice quickened; he set his lips dominantly and folded the map. “I have copies of the field notes with me and the owner’s landscape plans. And I am a surveyor, madam. It won’t take me long to find out whether there is a mistake. But, before I go over the ground, I must get my horses through to a hitching-place. I will have to lower that upper fence, but if you will keep your goats together, I promise to put it back as soon as the team is through.”

“You let that fence alone.” Tisdale had started to cross the field, and she followed, railing, though the gun still rested in the hollow of her arm. “If one of those goats breaks away, the whole herd’ll go wild. I can’t round ’em in without my dog. He’s off trailing one of the ewes. She strayed yesterday, and he’ll chase the mountain through if he has to. It’s no use to whistle; he won’t come back without her. You let that fence be. You wouldn’t dare to touch it,” she finished impotently, “if I had a man.”

“Haven’t you?” Tisdale swung around, and his voice dropped to its soft undernote. “That’s mighty hard. Who laid all that water-pipe? Who built your house?”

“I did,” she answered grimly. “The man who hauled my load of lumber stopped long enough to help set the posts, but I did the rest.”

“You did?” Tisdale shook his head incredulously. “My! My! Made all the necessary improvements, single-handed, to hold your homestead and at the same time managed these goats.”

The woman’s glance moved to the shack and out over the barren fields, and a shade of uncertainty crept into her passionate eyes. “The improvements don’t make much of a show yet; I’ve had to be off so much in the mountains, foraging with the herd. But I was able to hire a boy half a day with the shearing this spring, and from now on they’re going to pay. There are twenty-eight in the bunch, counting the kids, and I started with one old billy and two ewes.”

“My! My! what a record!” Tisdale paused to look back at Miss Armitage, who had turned the bays, allowing them to pace down a length of road and back.

“But,” he added, walking on, “what led you to choose goats instead of sheep?”

“I didn’t do the choosing”; she moved abreast of Hollis, “it was a fool man.”

“So,” he answered softly, with a glimmer of amusement in his eyes, “there is a man, after all.”

“There was,” she corrected grimly. “The easiest fellow to be talked over under the sun; the kind always chasing off after a new scheme. First it was a mineral claim; then he banked the future on timber, and when he got tired waiting for stumpage to soar, he put up a dinky sawmill to cut his own trees. He was doing well, for him, getting out ties for a new railroad–it was down in Oregon–when he saw the chance to trade for a proved-up homestead. But it was the limit when he started out to buy a bunch of sheep and came back with that old Angora billy and two ewes.”

“I see.” They were near the fence, and Tisdale swerved a little to reach a stout poplar that formed the corner post. He saw that the wire ends met there and felt in his pocket for his knife. “I see. And then he left the responsibility to his wife.”

“The wedding hadn’t come off,” she said sharply. “It was fixed for the seventeenth of June, and that was only May. And I told him I couldn’t risk it–not in the face of those goats.”

“And he?” pressed Hollis gently. This thistle, isolated, denied human intercourse, was more easily handled than he had hoped.

“He said it suited him all right. He had been wanting to go to Alaska. Nothing but that wedding had kept him back.”

Tisdale stopped and opened his knife. “And he went?” he asked.

“Yes.” The woman’s face worked a little, and she stood looking at him with hard, tragic eyes. “He sold the homestead for what he could get to raise the money to take him to Dawson. He was gone in less than twenty-four hours and before daylight, that night he left, I heard those goats _ma-a-ing_ under my window. He had staked them there in the front yard and tucked a note, with his compliments, in the door. He wrote he didn’t know of anything else he could leave that would make me remember him better.”

Tisdale shook his head. “I wish I had been there.” He slipped the knife in between the ends of the wires and the bole, clawing, prying, twisting. “And you kept them?” he added.

“Yes, I don’t know why, unless it was because I knew it was the last thing he expected. But I hated them worse than snakes. I couldn’t stand it having them around, and I hired a boy to herd them out on his father’s farm. Then I went on helping Dad, selling general merchandise and sorting mail. But the post-office was moved that year five miles to the new railroad station, and they put in a new man. Of course that meant a line of goods, too, and competition. Trade fell off, then sickness came. It lasted two years, and when Dad was gone, there wasn’t much left of the store but debt.” She paused a moment, looking up to the serene sky above the high plateau. A sudden moisture softened her burning eyes, and her free hand crept to her throat. “Dad was a mighty fine man,” she said. “He had a great business head. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t leave me well fixed.”

Tisdale laid the loosened wire down on the ground and started to work on another. “But there was the man in Alaska,” he said. “Of course you let him know.”

“No, sir.” Her eyes flashed back to Tisdale’s face. “You wouldn’t have caught me writing to Johnny Banks, then. I’m not that kind. The most I could do was to see what I could make of the goats. I commenced herding them myself, but I hadn’t the face to do it down there in Oregon, where everybody knew me, and I gradually worked north with them until I ended here.”

Tisdale had dropped his knife. He stooped to pick it up. “That’s where you made your mistake,” he said.

The woman drew a step nearer, watching his face; tense, breathless. Clearly he had turned her thoughts from the fence, and he slipped the knife in farther and continued to pry and twist the wire loose. “How do you know it was a mistake?” she asked at last.

Tisdale laid the second wire down. “Well, wasn’t it? To punish yourself like this, to cheat yourself out of the best years of your life, when you knew how much Banks thought of you. But you seem to have overlooked his side. Do you think, when he knows how you crucified yourself, it’s going to make him any happier? He carried a great spirit bottled in that small, wiry frame, but he got to seeing himself through your eyes. He was ashamed of his failures–he had always been a little sensitive about his size–and it wasn’t the usual enthusiasm that started him to Alaska; he was stung into going. It was like him to play his poor joke gamily, at the last, and pretend he didn’t care. A word from you would have held him–you must have known that–and a letter from you afterwards, when you needed him, would have brought him back. Or you might have joined him up there and made a home for him all these years, but you chose to bury yourself here in the desert of the Columbia, starving your soul, wasting your best on these goats.” He paused with the last loosened wire in his hands and stood looking at her with condemning eyes. “What made you?” he added, and his voice vibrated softly. “What made you?”

The woman’s features worked; tears filled her eyes.

They must have been the first in many months, for they came with the gush that follows a probe. “You know him,” she said brokenly. “You’ve seen him lately, up there in Alaska.”

“I think so, yes. The Johnny Banks I knew in the north told me something about a girl he left down in Oregon. But she was a remarkably pretty girl, with merry black eyes and a nice color in her cheeks. Seems to me she used to wear a pink gown sometimes, and a pink rose in her black hair, and made a picture that the fellows busy along the new railroad came miles on Sundays to see.”

A bleak smile touched the woman’s mouth. “Dad always liked to see me wear nice clothes. He said it advertised the store.” Then her glance fell to her coarse, wretched skirt, and the contrast struck poignantly.

Tisdale moved the wires back, clearing a space for the bays to pass. “There was one young engineer,” he went on, as though she had not spoken; “a big, handsome fellow, who came oftener than the rest. Banks thought it was natural she should favor him. The little man believes yet that when he was out of the way she married that engineer.”

The woman was beyond speech. Tisdale had penetrated the last barrier of her fortitude. The bitterness, pent so long, fostered in solitude, filled the vent and surged through. Her shoulders shook, she stumbled a few steps to the poplar and, throwing up her arm against the bole, buried her face, sobbing, in her sleeve.

Tisdale looked back across the field. Miss Armitage was holding the team in readiness at the wicket. “I am going now,” he said. “You will have to watch your goats until I get the horses through. But if you will write that letter, madam, while I’m at work, I’ll be glad to mail it for you.”

The woman looked up. A sudden hope transfigured her face. “I wish I dared to. But he wouldn’t know me now; I’ve changed so. Besides, I don’t know his address.”

“That’s so.” Tisdale met her glance thoughtfully. “But leave it to me. I think I can get into touch with him when I am back in Seattle.”

Miss Armitage watched him as he came swiftly across the field. “Oh,” she cried, when he reached the waiting team, “how did you accomplish it? Are you a magician?”

Hollis shook his head. “I only tried to play a little on her heart-strings, to gain time, and struck an unexpected chord. But it’s all right. It’s going to do her good.”

CHAPTER XI

THE LOOPHOLE

The afternoon sun shone hot in that pocket; the arid slopes reflected the glare; heat waves lifted; the snow-peak was shut out, and when a puff of wind found the gap it was a breath from the desert. Miss Armitage, who had trailed pluckily after Tisdale through the sage-brush and up the steep face of the bench, rested on the level, while he hurried on to find the easiest route to the high plateau and the spring. He had left her seated on a flat rock in the shade of a sentinel pine tree, looking over the vale to Cerberus and the distant bit of the Wenatchee showing beyond the mouth, but as he came back along the ridge, he saw she had turned her shoulder on the crouching mountain. At his far “Hello!” she waved her hand to him and rose to start across the bench to meet him. He was descending a broken stairway below two granite pillars that topped a semi-circular bluff and, springing from a knob to avoid a dry runnel, he shaped his way diagonally to abridge the distance. He moved with incredible swiftness, swinging by his hands to drop from a ledge, sliding where he must, and the ease and expediency with which he accomplished it all brought the admiration sparkling to her eyes.

“I am sorry,” he said, as he drew near, “but there isn’t any easy way. It’s too bad to have traveled so far and miss the spring, for the whole project hinges on it; but the climb is impossible for you in this heat.”

“Then you found the spring?” she asked quickly. “It was all the plans promised?”

“Yes.” He began to walk on across the bench, suiting his steps to hers. “And Weatherbee had put in a small dam there to create his first reservoir. I found his old camp, too; a foundation of logs, open now to the sky, with a few tatters left of the canvas that had roofed it over.” There was a silent moment, then he added, with the emotion still playing gently in his voice: “I wish I could show you that place; the pool is crystal clear and cool, rimmed in pines, like a basin of opals.”

When they reached the flat rock in the shade of the pine tree, he took the reclamation plan from his inner pocket and seated himself beside her. “This is Weatherbee’s drawing,” he said. “See how carefully he worked in the detail. This is the spring and that upper reservoir, and this lower one is a natural dry basin up there under that bluff, a little to the left of those granite chimneys; you can see its rocky rim. All it needs is this short flume sketched in here to bring the water down, and a sluice-gate to feed the main canal that follows this bench we are on. Spillways would irrigate a peach orchard along this slope below us and seep out through this level around us to supply home gardens and lawn. Just imagine it!” He paused, while her glance followed his brief comparisons, moving from the plan to the surface of the bench and down over the slope to the vale. “Imagine this tract at the end of four years; a billowing sea of green; with peach trees in bearing on this mountainside; apples, the finest Jonathans, Rome Beauties if you will, beginning to make a showing down there. Water running, seeping everywhere; strawberries carpeting the ground between the boles; alfalfa, cool and moist, filling in; and even Cerberus off there losing his sinister shape in vineyards.”

“Then it is feasible,” she exclaimed softly, and the sparkles broke subdued in her eyes. “And the price, Mr. Tisdale; what would you consider a fair price for the property as it stands now, unimproved?” Tisdale rose. He paused to fold the drawing and put it away, while his glance moved slowly down over the vale to the goat-keeper’s cabin and her browsing flock. “You must see, Miss Armitage,” he said then, “that idea of Mr. Morganstein’s to plat this land into five-acre tracts for the market couldn’t materialize. It is out of range of the Wenatchee valley projects; it is inaccessible to the railroad for the small farmer. Only the man with capital to work it on a large scale could make it pay. And the property is Mrs. Weatherbee’s last asset; she is in urgent need of ready money. You should be able to make easy terms with her, but I warn you, if it comes to bidding, I am prepared to offer seven thousand dollars.”

He turned, frowning a little, to look down at her and, catching those covert sparkles of her side-glance, smiled.

“You may have it,” she said.

“Wait. Think it over,” he answered. “I am going down to the gap now to find the surveyor’s monument and trace the section line back to the top of the plateau. Rest here, where it’s cooler, and I will come down this way for you when I am through. Think the project over and take my word for the spring; it’s well worth the investment.”

Doubtless Miss Armitage followed his suggestion, for she sat thoughtfully, almost absently, watching him down the slope. At the foot of the vale, the goat-woman joined him, and it was clear he again used his magic art, for presently he had her chaining for him and holding an improvised flag, while he estimated the section line. But finally, when they left the bed of the pocket and began to cross-cut up the opposite mountainside, the girl rose and looked in the direction of the spring. It was cooler; a breeze was drawing down from the upper ridge; a few thin clouds like torn gauze veiled the sky overhead; the blue lost intensity. She began to walk across the bench towards the granite chimneys. In a little while she found the dry reservoir, walled, where the plateau lifted, in the semi-circular bluff; then she stopped at the foot of an arid gully that rose between this basin and a small shoulder which supported the first needle. This was the stairway she had seen Tisdale descend, and presently she commenced to climb it slowly, grasping bunches of the tenacious sage or jutting points of rock to ease her weight.

The stairs ended in a sharp incline covered with debris from the decomposing pillars; splinters of granite shifted under her tread; she felt the edges cutting through her shoes. Fragments began to rattle down; one larger rock crashed over the bluff into the dry basin. Then, at last, she was on the level, fighting for breath. She turned, trembling, and braced herself against the broken chimney to look back. She shrank closer to the needle and shook her head. It was as though she said: “I never could go back alone.”

But when her glance moved to the opposite mountainside, Tisdale was no longer in sight. And that shoulder was very narrow; it presented a sheer front to the vale, like the base of a monument, so that between the chimney and the drop to the gully there was little room in which to stand. She began to choose a course, picking her foothold cautiously, zigzagging as she had seen Hollis do on the slope above. Midway another knob jutted, supporting a second pillar and a single pine tree, but as she came under the chimney she was forced to hurry. Loose chippings of granite started at every step. They formed little torrents, undermining, rushing, threatening to sweep her down; and she reached the ledge in a panic. Then she felt the stable security of the pine against her body and for a moment let herself go, sinking to the foot of the tree and covering her eyes with her hands.

Up there a stiff wind was blowing, and presently she saw the snow-peak she had missed in the vale. The ridge lifted less abruptly from this second spur, and in a little while she rose and pushed on, lagging sometimes, stumbling, to the level of the plateau. The Wenatchee range, of which it was a part, stretched bleak and forbidding, enclosing all those minor arid gulfs down to the final, long, scarred headland set against the Columbia desert. She was like a woman stranded, the last survivor, on an inhospitable coast. Turning to look across the valley of the Wenatchee, she saw the blue and glaciered crests of the Chelan mountains, and behind her, over the neck of a loftier height, loomed other white domes. And there yesterday’s thunder-caps, bigger and blacker, with fringed edges, drove along the sky line. One purplish mass was streaming like a sieve. For an interval the sun was obscured, and her glance came back to the vale below where Cerberus reclined, watchful, his tawny head lifted slightly between two advanced paws. Suddenly the lower clouds grew brilliant, and shafts of light breaking through changed the mountain before her to a beast of brass.

She turned and began to pick her way through grease brush and insistent sage towards a grove of pines. In a little while she saw water shining through the trees. She hesitated–it was as though she had come to the threshold of a sanctuary–then went on under the boughs to the opal pool.

She remained in the grove a long time. When she reappeared, the desert eastward was curtained in a gray film. Torn breadths of it, driven by some local current of air, formed tented clouds along the promontory. It was as though yesterday’s army was marshalled against other hosts that held the Chelan heights. A twilight indistinctness settled over the valley between. Rain, a downpour, was near. She hurried on to the brow of the plateau, but she dared not attempt to go down around those crumbling chimneys alone. And Tisdale had said he would come back this side of the vale. Any moment he might appear. She turned to go back to the shelter of the pines. It was then a first electrical flash, like a drawn sword, challenged the opposite ridge. Instantly a searchlight from the encamped legions played over the lower plain. She turned again, wavering, and began to run on over the first dip of the slope and along to the first pillar. There she stopped, leaning on the rock, trembling, yet trying to force down her fear. It was useless; she could not venture over that stream of shifting granite. She started back, then stopped, wavering again. After a moment she lifted her voice in a clear, long call: “Mr. Tis–da–le!”

“I’m coming!” The answer rang surprisingly close, from the gully above the basin. Soon she discovered him and, looking up, he saw her standing clear-cut against a cavernous, dun-colored cloud, which, gathering all lesser drift into its gulf, drove low towards the plateau. She turned her face, watching it, and it seemed to belch wind like a bellows, for her skirt stiffened, and the loosened chiffon veil, lifting from her shoulders, streamed like the drapery of some aerial figure, poised there briefly on its flight through space. Then began cannonading. Army replied to army. The advancing film from the desert, grown black, became an illuminated scroll; thin ribbons of gold were traced on it, bowknots of tinsel. The pattern changed continually. The legions repeated their fire; javelins, shafts, flew. Lightning passed in vertical bolts, in sheets from ridge to ridge. Then the cloud approaching the plateau spoke, and the curtain moving from the Columbia became a wall of doom, in which great cracks yawned, letting the light of eternity through.

The girl was flying down the slope to meet Tisdale. She came with bent head, hands to her ears, skimming the pitfalls. Under her light tread the loose debris hardly stirred. Then, as he rounded the pillar, her pace slackened. “I am afraid,” she said and stumbled. “I am afraid.” And her trembling body sank against his arm; she buried her face in his coat. “Take me away from this terrible place.”

Her impact had started the splintered granite moving, but Hollis swung instantly and set his back to the crumbling chimney, clinging there, staying her with his arm, until the slide stopped.

“See here,” he said, and his voice vibrated its soft undernote, “you mustn’t lose your grip. It’s all right. Old Mother Nature is just having one of her scolding fits. She has to show the woman in her once in a while. But it’s going to end, any minute, in tears.”

She lifted her face, and he paused, knitting his brows, yet smiling a little, mastering the terror in her eyes with his quiet, compelling gaze. “Come, Miss Armitage,” he said, “we must hurry. You will be wet through.”

He took her hand and began to lead her quickly down the rugged staircase. “Be careful,” he admonished, “this granite is treacherous.” But she gave little heed to her steps; she looked back continually over her shoulder, watching the dun cloud. Presently she tripped. Hollis turned to steady her, and, himself looking up beyond her, caught her in his arms and ran, springing, out of the gully.

The ledge he reached formed the rim of the natural reservoir and, measuring the distance with a swift glance, he let himself over, easing the drop with one hand on the rocky brink, while the other arm supported her. Midway, on a jutting knob, he gathered momentary foothold, then swung to the bottom of the basin.

It was all done surely but with incredible haste, while the cavernous cloud drew directly overhead. The next instant, from its brazen depths, it spoke again. The whole mountain seemed to heave. Then something mighty crashed down. The basin suddenly darkened as though a trap door had closed, and Tisdale, still shielding his companion, stood looking up, listening, while the reverberations rang from slope to slope and filled the vale. Then silence came.

Miss Armitage drew erect, though her hand rested unconsciously on Tisdale’s sleeve. The thing that roofed the basin was black, impenetrably thick; in it she saw no possible loophole of escape. “This time,” she faltered, “Fate is against you.”

Her breast rose and fell in deep, hurried breaths; in the twilight of the basin her eyes, meeting his, shone like twin stars. Tisdale’s blood began to race; it rose full tide in his veins, “Fate is with me,” he answered, and bent and kissed her mouth.

She shrank back, trembling, against the rocky wall; she glanced about her with the swift, futile manner of a creature helplessly trapped, then she pressed her fingers an instant to her eyes and straightened. “You never will forgive yourself,” she said; not in anger, not in judgment, but in a tone so low, so sad, it seemed to express not only regret but finality.

Tisdale was silent. After a moment he turned to the lower side of the basin, which afforded better foothold than the wall he had descended, and began to work up from niche to ledge, grasping a chance bunch of sage, a stunted bush of chaparral that grew in a cranny, to steady himself. And the girl stood aloof, watching him. Finally he reached a shelf that brought him, in touch with the obstruction overhead and stopped to take out his pocketknife, with which he commenced to create a loophole. Little twigs rained down; a larger branch fell, letting the daylight through. The roof was a mesh of pine boughs.

At last he closed his knife and, taking firm hold on a fixed limb, leaned to reach his other palm down to her. “Come,” he said, “set your foot in that first niche–no, the left one. Now, give me your hand.”

She obeyed as she must, and Hollis pushed backward through the aperture he had made, getting the bough under one armpit. “Now, step to that jagged little spur; it’s solid. The right one, too; there’s room.” She gained the upper ledge and waited, hugging the wall pluckily while he worked out on the rim of the basin and, stretching full length, with the stem of the tree under his waist, reached his arms down to her. “You will have to spring a little,” he directed, “and grip my shoulders hard. Now, come!”

At last she was safe beside him. In another moment he was up and helped her to her feet. They stood looking towards the mountain top. The dun cloud stalking now with trailing skirts in the direction of the snow-peaks, hurled back a parting threat. “It was the pine tree,” she exclaimed. “It was struck. And, see! It has carried down most of that chimney. Our staircase is completely wrecked.”

Tisdale was silent. Her glance came back to him. A sudden emotion stirred her face. Then all the conservatism dropped from her like a discarded cloak, and he felt her intrepid spirit respond to his own. Now she understood that moment in the basin; she knew it had been supreme; she was great enough to see there was nothing to forgive. “You were right,” she said, and her voice broke in those steadying pauses that carried more expression than any words. “Fate was with us again. But I owe–my life–to you.”

“Sometime,” he answered slowly, smiling a little, “not now, not here, I am going to hold you to the debt. And when I do, you are going to pay me–in full.”

The beautiful color, that was like the pink of coral, flamed and went in her face. “We must hurry back to the team,” she said and turned to finish the descent to the bench. “Horses are always so nervous in an electrical storm.” Then suddenly, as Tisdale pushed by to help her in a difficult place, she stopped. “How strange!” she exclaimed. “That terrible curtain has lifted from the desert. It threatened a deluge any minute, and now it is moving off without a drop of rain.”

“That’s so,” he replied. “A cross current of wind has turned it up the Columbia. But the rain is there; it is streaming along those Chelan summits in a downpour.”

“And look!” she cried, after a moment. “A double rainbow! See how it spans the Wenatchee! It’s a promise.” And the turquoise lights shone once more in her eyes. “Here in this desert, at last, I may come to my ‘pot of gold.'”

“You mean,” responded Tisdale, “now you have seen the spring, Weatherbee’s project seems possible to you. Well, I have reconsidered, too. I shall not outbid you. That would favor Mrs. Weatherbee too much. And my interests are going to keep me in Alaska indefinitely. I should be obliged to leave the plans in the hands of a manager, and I had rather trust them to you.”

Miss Armitage did not answer directly. She was watching the arch, painted higher now, less brilliantly, on the lifting film. The light had gone out of her face. All the bench was in shadow; in the valley below a twilight indistinctness had fallen. Then suddenly once more Cerberus stood forth like a beast of brass. She shivered.

“It isn’t possible,” she said. “It isn’t possible. Even if I dared–for David’s sake–to assume the responsibility, I haven’t the money to carry the project through.”

Tisdale stopped and swung around. They had reached the flat rock under the sentinel pine tree. “Did you know David Weatherbee?” he asked.

She was silent. He put his hands in his pockets and stood regarding her with his upward look from under slightly frowning brows. “So you knew David,” he went on. “In California, I presume, before he went to Alaska. But why didn’t you tell me so?”

She waited another moment. In the great stillness Hollis heard her labored breathing. She put out her hand, steadying herself on the bole of the pine, then: “I’ve wanted to tell you,” she began. “I’ve tried to–but–it was impossible to make you understand. I–I hadn’t the courage.”

Her voice fluted and broke. The last word was almost a whisper. She stood before Tisdale with veiled eyes, breath still coming hard and quick, the lovely color deepening and paling in her face, like a woman awaiting judgment. And it came over him in a flash, with the strength of conviction, that this beautiful, inscrutable girl wished him to know she had loved Weatherbee. Incredible as it seemed, she had been set aside for the Spanish woman. And she had learned about David’s project; he himself perhaps had told her years ago in California. And though his wife had talked with Morganstein about platting the land into five-acre tracts to dispose of quickly, this woman had desired to see the property with a view to carrying out his plans. That was why she had continued the journey from Snoqualmie Pass alone. That was why she had braved the mountain drive with him. She had loved Weatherbee. This truth, sinking slowly, stirred his inner consciousness and, wrenched in a rising commotion, something far down in the depths of him lost hold. He had presumed to think, in the infinite scheme of things, this one woman had been reserved for him. He had dared to let her know he believed so; he had taken advantage of her helpless situation, on an acquaintance of two days. His own color began to burn through the tan. “You were right,” he said at last, very gently, “I never can forgive myself. I can’t understand it!” he broke out then, “if you had been his wife, David Weatherbee would have been safe with us here, to-day.”

Miss Armitage started. She gave him a quick, searching glance, then sank down upon the rock. She seemed suddenly exhausted, like a woman who, hard-pressed in the midst of peril, finds unexpectedly a friendly threshold.

Tisdale looked off to the brazen slopes of Cerberus. It was the first time he had censured Weatherbee for anything, and suddenly, while he brooded, protesting over that one paramount mistake, he felt himself unaccountably responsible. He was seized with a compelling desire to, in some way, make it up to her. “Come,” he said, “you mustn’t lose heart; to-morrow, when you are rested, it will look easier. And the question of ready money need not trouble you. Mrs. Weatherbee has reached the point where she has got to hedge on the future. Make her an offer of five thousand dollars in yearly payments, say, of fifteen hundred. She’ll take it. Then, if you agree, I will arrange a loan with a Seattle bank. I should allow enough margin to cover the first reclamation expenses. Your fillers of alfalfa and strawberries would bring swift returns, and before your orchards came into bearing, your vineyards would pay the purchase price on the whole tract.”

He turned to her, smiling, and surprised a despair in her face that went to his heart.

“I thought, I hoped you meant to buy this land,” she said.

“So I did, so I do, unless you decide to. And if you undertake this project, I pledge myself to see you through.” His voice caught a pleading undernote. “It rests with you. Above every one it rests with you to even things for Weatherbee. Isn’t that clear to you? Look ahead five years; see this vale green and shady with orchards; the trees laden with harvest; imagine his wife standing here on this bench, surveying it all. See her waking to the knowledge she has let a fortune slip through her hands; see her, the purchase price spent, facing the fact that another woman built her faith on David Weatherbee; had the courage to carry out his scheme and found it a bonanza. That is what is going to make her punishment strike home.”

Miss Armitage rose. She stood a moment watching his face, then, “How you hate her!” she said.

“Hate?” Tisdale’s laugh rang short and hard. “Well, I grant it; hate is the word. I hate her so much I’ve known better than go where she was; I’ve avoided her as an electrician avoids charged wire. Still, if I had found myself in Weatherbee’s place; if I had made his mistake and married her, she should have felt my streak of iron. I might have stayed in Alaska as he did, but she would have stayed too and made a home for me, helped to fight things through.” He paused and, meeting the appeal in her eyes, his face softened. “I’ve distressed you again,” he added. “I’m sorry; but it isn’t safe for me to speak of that woman; the thought of her starts my temperature rising in bounds. I want you to help me forget her. Yet, down in the depths of your heart you know you blame her.”

“Yes, I blame her.” Miss Armitage began to walk on towards the edge of the bench. “I blame her, but not as you do. I know she tried to do right; she would have gone to Alaska–if David had wished it–at the start. And she’s been courageous, too. She’s smiled–laughed in the face of defeat. Her closest friends never knew.”

“You defend her. I wonder at that.” Tisdale passed her and turned to offer his help down the first abrupt pitch. “How you, who are the one to censure her the most, can speak for her always, as you do. But there you are like Weatherbee. It was his way to take the losing side; champion the absent.”

“And there is where your resemblance stops,” she answered quickly. “He lacked your streak of iron. Of course you know about your strange likeness to him, Mr. Tisdale. It is so very marked; almost a dual personality. It isn’t height and breadth of shoulder alone; it’s in the carriage, the turn of the head; and it creeps into your eyes sometimes; it gets into your voice. The first time I saw you, it was startling.”

Tisdale moved on, picking up the trail they had made in ascending; the humor began to play reminiscently at the corners of his mouth. “Yes, I know about that resemblance. When we were on the Tanana, it was ‘Tisdale’s Twin’ and ‘Dave’s Double.’ A man has to take a name that fits up there, and we seemed to grow more alike every day. But that often happens when two friends who are accustomed to think in the same channels are brought into continual touch, and the first year we spent in the north together we were alone for weeks at a stretch, with no other human intercourse, not a prospector’s camp within a hundred miles. The most incompatible partners, under those circumstances, will pick up subconsciously tricks of speech and gesture. Still, looking back, I see it was I who changed. I had to live up to Weatherbee; justify his faith in me.”

Miss Armitage shook her head slowly. “That is hard to believe. Whoever tried to mould you would feel through the surface that streak of iron.” They had come to another precipitous place, and Tisdale turned again to give her the support of his hand. The position brought his face on a level with hers, and involuntarily she stopped. “But whatever you may say, Mr. Tisdale,” she went on, and as her palm rested in his the words gathered the weight of a pact, “whatever may–happen–I shall never forget your greatness to-day.” She sprang down beside him, and drew away her hand and looked back to the summit they had left. “Still, tell me this,” she said with a swift breathlessness. “If it had been David Weatherbee’s wife up there with you when the thunderbolt struck, would it have made a difference? I mean, would you have left her to escape–or not–as she could?”

Tisdale waited a thoughtful moment. The ripple of amusement was gone; the iron, so near the surface, cropped through. “I can’t answer that,” he said. “I do not know. A man is not always able to control a first impulse, and before that pine tree fell there wasn’t time to hesitate.”

At this she was silent. All her buoyancy, the charming camaraderie that stopped just short of intimacy, had dropped from her. It was as though the atmosphere of that pocket rose and clung to her, enveloped her like a nimbus, as she went down. In the pent heat her face seemed cold. She had the appearance of being older. The fine vertical line at the corner of her mouth, which Tisdale had not noticed before, brought a tightness to his throat when he ventured to look at her. How could Weatherbee have been so blind? How could he have missed the finer, spiritual loveliness of this woman? Weatherbee, who himself had been so sensitive; whose intuition was almost feminine.

They had reached the final step from the bench to the floor of the vale when Hollis spoke again. “If you do decide to buy this land and open the project, I could recommend a man who would make a trusty manager.”

“Oh, you don’t understand,” she replied in desperation “You don’t understand. I should have to stay, to live in this terrible place for weeks, months at a time. I couldn’t endure it. That dreadful mountain there at the gap would forever be watching me, holding me in.”

Tisdale looked at her, knitting his brows, “I told you it was dangerous to allow yourself to feel the personality of inanimate things too much.”

“I know. I know. And this terrible beast”–she paused, trying to steady her voice; her whole body trembled–“would remind me constantly of those awful Alaska peaks–the ones that crowded–threatened him.”

Tisdale’s face cleared. So that was the trouble. Now he understood. “Then it’s all right”–the minor notes in his voice, vibrating softly, had the quality of a caress–“don’t worry any more. I am going to buy this land of David’s. Trust me to see the project through.”

CHAPTER XII

“WHOM THE GODS WOULD DESTROY”

Hope is an insistent thing. It may be strangled, lie cold and buried deep in the heart of a man, yet suddenly, without premonition, he may feel it rise and stretch small hands, groping towards a ray of light. So in that reminiscent hour while the train labored up through the Cascades to the great tunnel, Tisdale told himself this woman–the one woman for whom he must have been waiting all these years, at whose coming old and cherished memories had faded to shadows–was very near to loving him. Already she knew that those mysterious forces she called Fate had impelled them out of their separate orbits through unusual ways, to meet. Sometime–he would not press her, he could be patient–but sometime she would surely pay him that debt.

He dwelt with new interest on his resemblance to Weatherbee, and he told himself it was her constancy to David that had kept her safe. Then it came over him that if Weatherbee had married her instead of the Spanish woman, that must have been an insurmountable barrier between them to-day. As long as they lived, she must have remained sacred on her pedestal, out of reach. But how nobly partisan she was; how ready to cross swords for Weatherbee’s wife. That was the incredible test; her capacity for loving was great.

The porter was turning on the lights. Tisdale moved a little and looked across the aisle. For that one moment he was glad Weatherbee had made his mistake. She was so incomparable, so adorable. Any other woman must have lost attractiveness, shown at least the wear and tear of that mountain journey, but her weariness appealed to him as her buoyancy had not. She had taken off her hat to rest her head on the high, cushioned back of the seat, and the drooping curves of her short upper lip, the blue shadows under those outward curling black lashes, roused a new emotion, the paternal, in the depths of his great heart. He wished to smooth her ruffled hair; it was so soft, so vital; under the electric light it seemed to flash little answering blue sparks. Then his glance fell to her relaxed palms, open in her lap, and he felt a quick solicitude over a scratch the barbed fence must have made on one small, determined thumb.

They had had trouble with the horses in the vale. Nip, who had broken away during the storm, had been rounded in by the goat-woman and her returning collie. The travelers found her trying to extricate his halter which had caught, holding him dangerously close, in the wire fencing. It had taken caution and long patience to free him, and more to hitch the excited team. The delay had caused them to miss the westbound evening train; they were forced to drive back and spend the night at Wenatchee. And the morning Oriental Limited was crowded with delegates from some mystic order on an annual pilgrimage. There was no room in the observation car; Tisdale was able to secure only single seats on opposite sides of the sleeper.

The train rumbled through the great tunnel and came to a brief stop outside the west portal. It was snowing. Some railroad laborers, repairing the track, worked in overcoats and sweaters, hat brims drawn down, collars turned up against the bitter wind. The porter opened the transoms, and a piercing draught pulled through the smoky, heat-laden car. Miss Armitage sat erect and inhaled a full breath. She looked across at Tisdale, and the sparkles broke softly in her eyes. “It’s Wellington!” she exclaimed. “In a moment we shall be racing down to Scenic Hot Springs and on along the Skykomish–home.” Then she stopped the porter. “Bring me a telegraph blank, please. I want to send a message from the Springs.”

The limited, under way again, dropped below the cloud. Great peaks and shoulders lifted everywhere; they began to make the loop around an incredibly deep and fissure-like gorge. It was a wonderful feat of railroad engineering; people on the other side of the car got to their feet and came over to see. The girl, with the yellow blank in her hand, drew close to Tisdale’s elbow. “Oh, no,” she demurred, when he rose to offer his seat, “I only want standing room just a moment. There’s going to be a delightful view of Scenic.”

The passenger beside Hollis picked up his bag. “Take my place,” he said. “I am getting off at the Springs.”

Then presently, when she had moved into the vacated seat next the window, the peaks stood apart, and far, far below the untouched forest at the summer resort stood out darkly, with the gay eaves and gables of the hotel etched on it like a toy Swiss chalet on a green plateau.

“Oh,” she cried softly, “it never seemed as charming before; but, of course, it is coming, as we have, straight from the hot desert. There’s the coolest, fragrant wood road down there, Mr. Tisdale, from the hotel to Surprise Falls. It follows the stream past deep green pools and cascades breaking among the rocks. Listen. We should hear the river now.”

Tisdale smiled. There was nothing to be heard but the echo of the running trucks and the scream of the whistle repeated from cliff and spur. They were switchbacking down the fire-scarred front of a mountain. He bent a little to look beyond her. It was as though they were coasting down a tilted shelf in an oblique wall, and over the blackened skeletons of firs he followed the course of the river out through crowding blue buttes. Returning, his glance traced the track, cross-cutting up from the gorge.

“I know Surprise Falls,” he said; “and the old Skykomish from start to finish. There’s a point below the Springs where the current boils through great flumes of granite into a rocky basin. Long before the hotel was thought of, I fished that pool.”

“I know! I know!” she responded, glowing. “We–Miss Morganstein and her brother and I–found it this summer. We had to work down-stream across those fissures to reach it, but it was worth the trouble. There never was another such pool. It was like a mighty bowl full of dissolving emeralds; and the trout loved it. We caught twenty, and we built a fire on the rocks and cooked them. It was delightfully cool and shady. It was one of those golden days one never forgets; I was sorry when it was gone.” She paused, the high wave of her excitement passed. “I never could live in that treeless country,” she went on. “Water, running as God made it, plenty of it, is a necessity to me. But please take your seat, Mr. Tisdale.” She settled back in her place and began to date her telegram. “I am just sending the briefest message to let Mrs. Feversham know where I am.”

“The porter is coming back for it now,” he answered “And thank you, but I am going in the smoking-car.”

As he approached the vestibule, he caught her reflection in the mirror at the end of the sleeper. She was looking after him, and she leaned forward a little with parted lips, as though she had started to call him back, but her eyes clouded in uncertainty; then suddenly, the sparkle rose. It suffused her whole face. She had met his glance in the glass. And the porter was waiting. She settled herself once more and devoted herself to the telegram.

The lines in Tisdale’s face deepened mellowly. He believed that, now they were so near their journey’s end, she wanted to be sure of an opportunity to thank him some more. “I am coming back,” he said inwardly, addressing the woman in the mirror, “but I must have a smoke to keep my pulse normal.”

But he did not return to the sleeper, for the reason that at Scenic Hot Springs the Seattle papers were brought aboard. The copy of the _Press_ he bought contained the account of the accident in Snoqualmie Pass. The illustrations were unusually clear, and Daniels’ cuts were supplemented by another labelled: “The Morganstein party leaving Vivian Court,” which also designated the group.

(Mrs. Feversham, wife of the special delegate from Alaska, in the tonneau.

Her sister, Miss Morganstein, on her right.

Mrs. Weatherbee seated in front.

Frederic Morganstein driving the car.)

And under the central picture Hollis read: “Mrs. Weatherbee (Miss Armitage?), as she drove the machine into the embankment.”

The paper rattled a little in his hands. His face flamed, then settled gray and very still. Except that his eyes moved, flashing from the photographs to the headlines, he might have been a man hewn of granite. “One more reason why the Snoqualmie highway should be improved,” he read. “Narrow escape of the Morganstein party. Mrs. Weatherbee’s presence of mind.” And, half-way down the page, “Mrs. Weatherbee modestly assumes an incognito when interviewed by a representative of the _Press_.”

But Tisdale did not look at the story. He crushed the newspaper into the corner of his seat and turned his face to the window. His cigar had gone out. He laid it mechanically on the sill. So, this was the woman who had wrecked David Weatherbee; who had cast her spell over level-headed Foster; and already, in the less than three days he had known her, had made a complete idiot of him. Suppose Foster should hear about that drive through the mountains that had cost him over seven hundred dollars; suppose Foster should know about that episode in the basin on Weatherbee’s own ground. A great revulsion came over him.

Presently he began to take up detail after detail of that journey. Now he saw the real impulse that had led her to board the eastbound train in Snoqualmie Pass. She had recognized him, conjectured he was on his way to find that tract of Weatherbee’s; and she had determined to go over the land with him, cajole him into putting the highest estimate possible on the property. Even now, there in the sleeper, she was congratulating herself no doubt on the success of her scheme.

At the thought of the ease with which he had allowed himself to be ensnared, his muscles tightened. It was as though the iron in the man took shape, shook off the veneer, encased him like a coat of mail. Hitherto, in those remote Alaska solitudes, this would have meant the calling to account of some transgressor in his camp. He began to sift for the prime element in this woman’s wonderful personality. It was not physical beauty alone; neither was it that mysterious magnetism, almost electrical, yet delicately responsive as a stringed instrument. One of these might have kept that tremendous hold on Weatherbee near, but on Weatherbee absent through those long, breaking years, hardly. It was something deeper; something elusive yet insistent that had made it easier for him to brave out his defeat alone in the Alaska wilderness than come back to face. Clearly she was not just the handsome animal he had believed her to be. Had she not called herself proud? Had he not seen her courage? She had a spirit to break. A soul!

CHAPTER XIII

“A LITTLE STREAK OF LUCK”

It was not the first time Jimmie Daniels had entertained the Society Editor at the Rathskeller, and that Monday, though he had invited her to lunch with him in the Venetian room, she asked him, as was her habit, to “order for both.”

“Isn’t there something special you’d like?” he asked generously; “something you haven’t had for a long time?”

“No. You are so much of an epicure–for a literary person–I know it’s sure to be something nice. Besides,” and the shadow of a smile drifted across her face, “it saves me guessing the state of your finances.”

A critic would have called Geraldine Atkins too slender for her height, and her face, notwithstanding its girlish freshness, hardly pretty. The chin, in spite of its dimple, was too strong; the lips, scarlet as a holly berry, lacked fullness and had a trick of closing firmly over her white teeth. Even her gray-blue eyes, which should have been a dreamer’s, had acquired a direct intensity of expression as though they were forever seeking the inner, real you. Still, from the rolling brim of her soft felt hat to the hem of her brown tailor-made, that cleared the ankles of trim brown shoes, she was undeniably chic and in the eyes of Jimmie Daniels “mighty nice.”

He was longer than usual filling out the card, and the waiter hesitated thoughtfully when he had read it, then be glanced from the young man to his companion with a comprehensive smile and hurried away. There was chilled grapefruit in goblets with cracked ice, followed by bouillon, oysters, and a delectable young duck with toast. But it was only when the man brought a small green bottle and held it for Jimmie to approve the label that his guest began to arch her brows.

Daniels smiled his ingenuous smile. “It’s just to celebrate a little streak of luck,” he said. “And I owe it to you. If you hadn’t been at Vivian Court to write up the decorations for that bridge-luncheon and happened to make that snap-shot of the Morganstein party, my leading lady would have gone to the paper as Miss Armitage straight, and I guess that would have queered me with the chief. But that headline you introduced about Mrs. Weatherbee’s incognito struck him right. ‘Well, Jimmie,’ he said, ‘you’ve saved your scalp this time.'”

The Society Editor smiled. “You were a gullible kiddie,” she replied. “But it’s a mystery to me how you could have lived in Seattle three years without knowing the prettiest woman on the boulevard by sight.”

Jimmie shook his head. “I haven’t the shadow of an excuse, unless it was because another girl was running such a close second she always cut off my view.”

“Think,” said Miss Atkins quickly, disregarding the excuse, “if that name, Miss Armitage, had been tagged to a picture that half the town would have recognized. Mrs. Weatherbee is the most popular lady, socially, in Seattle. When there’s a reception for a new Council, she’s always in the receiving line; she pours tea at the tennis tournament, and it was she who led the cotillion at the Charity ball. You would find her name in all the important affairs, if you read the society column.”

Daniels nodded meekly. “It was a hairbreadth escape, and I’m mighty grateful.”

There was a little silence then, but after the waiter had filled the long-stemmed glasses and hurried away, she said slowly, her gray-blue eyes sifting Jimmie through and through: “It looks like you’ve been playing cards for money, but I never should have suspected it–of you.”

Daniels shook his head gravely. “No get-rich-quick games for me. My luck doesn’t come that way. But it cost me nearly two thousand dollars to find it out. I’ve always meant to tell you about that, sometime. That two thousand dollars was all my capital when I came to Seattle to take my course in journalism. I expected it to see me through. But, well, it was my first week at the University–fortunately I had paid the expenses of the first semester in advance–when one night a couple of fellows I knew brought me down to see the town. I didn’t know much about a city then; I had grown up over in the sage-brush country, and I never had heard of a highball. To start with I had two, then I got interested in a game of roulette, and the last I remember I was learning to play poker. But I must have had more high-balls; the boys said afterwards they left me early in the evening with a new acquaintance; they couldn’t get me to go home. I never knew how I got back to the dorm, and the next day, when I woke, the stubs of my checkbook showed I had signed practically all of my two thousand away.”

There was a brief silence. Out in the main room the orchestra began to play. Miss Atkins was looking at Jimmie, and her scarlet lips were closed like a straight cord.

He drew his hand over his smooth, close-cut, dark hair and took a long draught from his glass of ice-water. “I can’t make you understand how I felt about it,” he went on, “but that two thousand was the price of my father’s ranch over near the Columbia. It stood for years of privation, heart-breaking toil, and disappointment–the worst kind. Two seasons of drouth we saw the whole wheat crop blister and go to ruin. I carried water in buckets from the river up to that plateau day after day, just to keep our home garden and a little patch of grass alive. And mother carried too up that breaking slope in the desert sun. It was thinking of that made me– all in. She worked the same way with the stock. Something lacking in the soil affected the feed, and some of the calves were born without hair; their bones were soft. It baffled my father and every man along that rim of the desert, but not mother. She said doctors prescribed lime for rickety human babies, and she made limewater and mixed it with the feed. It was just the thing. She was a small woman, but plucky from start to finish. And we, Dad and I, didn’t know what it was costing her–till she was gone.”

There was another silence. In the orchestra, out beyond the palms and screens of the Venetian room, the first violin was playing the _Humoresque_. The girl leaned forward slightly, watching Jimmie’s face. Her lips were parted, and an unexpected sympathy softened her eyes.

“She had been a school teacher back in Iowa,” he resumed, “and long winter evenings and Sundays when she could, she always had her books out. Up to the year I was twenty, she taught me all I knew. She tried her best to make a man of me, and I can see now how she turned my mind to journalism. She said some day there was going to be an opening for a newspaper right there in the Columbia desert. Where a great river received the waters of another big stream, there was bound to be a city. She saw farther than we did. The High Line canal was only a pipe dream then, but she believed it would come true. When she died, we hadn’t the heart to stay on with the ranch, so Dad gave it to me, to sell for what I could get, and went back to Iowa. He said he had promised her he would give me a chance at the State University, and that was the best he could do. And, well, you see I had to come to the U. of W. to stay, and I was used to work. I did all sorts of stunts out of hours and managed to pull through the second semester. Then I hiked over the mountains to the Wenatchee valley and earned enough that summer vacation to tide me over the next year. I had a friend there in the sage-brush country, a station agent named Bailey, who had blown a thousand dollars into a tract of desert land he hadn’t seen off the map. He was the kind of fellow to call himself all kinds of a fool, then go ahead and make that ground pay his money back. He saw a way to bring it under irrigation and had it cleared and set to apples. But, while he was waiting for the trees to grow, he put in fillers of alfalfa and strawberries. He was operating for the new Milwaukee railroad then, and hired me to harvest his crops. They paid my wages and the two Japs I had to help, with a snug profit. And his trees were doing fine; thrifty, every one in the twenty acres. Last year they began to bear, only a few apples to a tree, but for flavor and size fit for Eden. This year he is giving up his position with the Milwaukee; his orchards are going to make him rich. And he wrote me the other day that the old ranch I threw away is coming under the new High Line ditch. The company that bought it has platted it into fruit tracts. Think-of that! Trees growing all over that piece of desert. Water running to waste, where mother and I carried it in buckets through the sand, in the sweltering heat, up that miserable slope.”

The Society Editor drew a full breath and settled back in her chair. Her glance fell to her glass, and she laid her fingers on the thin stem. Jimmie refreshed himself again with the ice-water. “I didn’t mean to go into the story so deep,” he said, “but you are a good listener.”

“It was worth listening to,” she answered earnestly. “I’ve always wondered about your mother; I knew she must have been nice. But you must simply hate the sight of cards now. I am sorry I said what I did. And I don’t care how it happened, here is to that ‘Little Streak of Luck.’ May it lead to the great pay-streak.”

She reached her glass out for Jimmie to touch with his, then raised it to her lips. Daniels drank and held his glass off to examine the remaining liquor, like a connoisseur. “I play cards a little sometimes,” he confessed; “on boats and places where I have to kill time. But,” and he brightened, “it was this way about that streak of luck. I was detailed to write up the new Yacht Club quarters at West Seattle, with illustrations to show the finer boats at the anchorage and, while I was on the landing making an exposure of the Morganstein yacht, a tender put off with a message for me to come aboard. Mr. Morganstein had seen me from the deck, where he was nursing his injured leg. He was lonesome, I suppose. There was no one else in sight, though as I stepped over the side, I heard a victrola playing down below. ‘How are you?’ he said. ‘Have a seat.’ Then he scowled down the companionway and called: ‘Elizabeth, stop that infernal machine, will you?’

“The music was turned off, and pretty soon Miss Morganstein came up the stairs. She was stunning, in a white sailor suit with red fixings, eyes black as midnight; piles of raven hair. But as soon as he had introduced us, and she had settled his pillows to suit him–he was lying in one of those invalid chairs–he sent her off to mix a julep or something. Then he said he presumed we were going to have a fine cut of the _Aquila_ in the Sunday paper, if I was the reporter who made that exposure at the time of the accident to his car. I told him yes, I was Daniels, representing the _Press_, and had the good fortune to be in Snoqualmie Pass that day. ‘I was sure of it,’ he said. ‘Watched you over there with these binoculars.’ He put the glasses down on a table and opened a drawer and took out his fountain-pen and checkbook. ‘That write-up was so good,’ he said, handing me the blank he had filled, ‘I want to make you a little present. But you are the first _Press_ reporter I ever gave anything to, and I want this kept quiet.’

“I thanked him, but when I looked at that check I woke up. It was for a cool hundred dollars. I tried to make him take it back; I told him my paper was paying me; besides, I couldn’t accept all the credit; that you had fixed up the story and put the names right, and the first cut was yours. ‘Never mind,’ he said, ‘I have something else for your society miss to do. I am going to have her describe my new country place, when it’s all in shape. Takes a woman to get hold of the scenery and color schemes.’ Then he insisted I had earned the extra money. Not one man in a hundred would have been quick enough to make that exposure, and the picture was certainly fine of the whole group. In fact, he wanted that film of the car swinging into the embankment. He wanted to have an enlargement made.”

“I see,” said Miss Atkins slowly, “I see.” She paused, scooping the crest from her pineapple ice, then added: “Now we are getting to the core.”

“I told him it belonged to the paper, but I thought I would be able to get it for him,” Jimmie resumed. “And he asked me to bring it down to Pier Number Three just before four this afternoon. The _Aquila_ was starting for a little cruise around Bainbridge Island to his country place, and if I wanted to work in something about her equipment and speed, I might sail as far as the Navy Yard, where they would make a short stop. Then he mentioned that Hollis Tisdale might be aboard, and possibly I would be able to pick up a little information on the coal question. These Government people were ‘non-committal,’ he said, but there was a snug corner behind the awnings aft, where in any case I could work up my Yacht Club copy.”

“So,” remarked the Society Editor slowly, “it’s a double core.”

CHAPTER XIV

ON BOARD THE AQUILA

Tisdale’s rooms were very warm that afternoon. It was another of those rare, breezeless days, an aftermath of August rather than the advent of Indian summer, and the sun streamed in at the western windows. His injured hand, his whole feverish body, protested against the heat. The peroxide which he had applied to the hurt at Wenatchee had brought little relief, and that morning the increased pain and swelling had forced him to consult a surgeon, who had probed the wound, cut a little, bandaged it, and announced curtly that it looked like infection.

“But I can’t afford to nurse this hand”–Hollis rose from the couch where he had thrown himself when he came in from the doctor’s office–“I ought to be using it now.” He went over and drew the blinds, but the atmosphere seemed more stifling. He needed air, plenty of it, clean and fresh in God’s out-of-doors; it was being penned in these close rooms that raised his temperature. He pulled the shades up again and took a turn across the floor. Then he noticed the crumpled note which, aimed left-handedly, had missed the waste basket earlier, when he opened his mail, and he went over and picked it up. He stood smoothing it on his desk. A perfume, spicy yet suggestive of roses, pervaded the sheet, which was written in a round, firm, masculine hand, under the gilt monogram, M.F. His glance ran through the lines:

“I am writing for my brother, Frederic Morganstein, who is recuperating aboard his yacht, to ask you to join us on a little cruise around Bainbridge Island this afternoon at four o’clock. Ever since his interests have been identified with Alaska, he has hoped to know you personally, and he wishes particularly to meet you now, to thank you for your services in Snoqualmie Pass. In the general confusion after the accident I am afraid none of us remembered to.

“We expect to touch at the Navy Yard and again at Frederic’s new villa to see how the work is coming on, but the trip should not take longer than four hours, and we are dining informally on board.

“Do not trouble to answer. If the salt air is a strong enough lure this warm day, you will find the _Aquila_ at Pier Three.

“Very truly yours,

“MARCIA FEVERSHAM.

“Tuesday, September seventh.”

“That floating palace ought to stir up some breeze.” Tisdale crumpled the invitation again and dropped it deliberately in the waste basket. “And to-morrow I shall be shut up on my eastbound train.” He looked at his watch; there was still half an hour to spare before the time of sailing. “After all, why not?”

A little later, when he had hurried into white flannels as expeditiously as possible with his disabled hand, the suggestion crept to his inner consciousness that he might find Mrs. Weatherbee aboard the _Aquila_. “Well, why not?” he asked himself again. “Why not?” and picked up his hat.

So he came to Pier Number Three and, looking down the gangway as he crossed, saw her standing in the little group awaiting him on the after deck. Morganstein spoke to him and introduced him to the ladies. He did not avoid her look and, under his appraising eyes, he saw the color begin to play in her face. Then her glance fell to his bandaged hand, and an inquiry rushed to her lips. But she checked the words in time and drew slowly aloof to a seat near the rail.

Tisdale took a place near the reclining chair of his host. When she ventured to give him a swift side-glance, his mouth set austerely. But the space between them became electrical. It was as though wireless messages passed continually between them.

“Look back. See how often I tried to tell you! My courage failed. Believe in me. I am not the monster you thought.”

And always the one response: “The facts are all against you.”

Duwamish Head had dropped from sight; Magnolia Bluff fell far astern, and the _Aquila_ steamed out into the long, broad reach of Puget Sound; but though the tide had turned, there was still no wind. The late sun touched the glassy swells with the changing effect of a prism. The prow of the craft shattered this mirror, and her wake stretched in a ragged and widening crack. But under the awnings Frederic Morganstein’s guests found it delightfully cool. Only Jimmie Daniels, huddled on a stool in the glare, outside the lowered curtain that cut him off from the breeze created by the motion of the yacht, felt uncomfortably warm.

The representative of the _Press_ had arrived on board in time to see Tisdale come down the pier and had discreetly availed himself of the secluded place that the financier had previously put to his disposal. He had heard it told at the newspaper office that Tisdale, whose golden statements were to furnish his little scoop, Hollis Tisdale of Alaska and the Geographical Survey, who knew more about the coal situation than any other man, was also the most silent, baffling sphinx on record when it came to an interview.

At the moment the _Aquila_ came into the open, the Japanese boy placed a bowl of punch, with, pleasant clinking of ice, on the wicker table before Mrs. Feversham, who began to serve it. Like Elizabeth’s, the emblems on her nautical white costume were embroidered in scarlet, and a red silk handkerchief was knotted loosely on her full, boyish chest. She was not less striking, and indeed she believed this meeting on the deck of the yacht, where formalities were quickly abridged, would appeal to the out-of-doors man and pave the way to a closer acquaintance in Washington. But Tisdale’s glance involuntarily moved beyond to the woman seated by the rail. Her head was turned so that he caught the finely chiseled profile, the outward sweep of black lashes, the adorable curve of the oval chin to meet the throat. She too wore the conventional sailor suit, but without color, and this effect of purity, the inscrutable delicacy of her, seemed to set her apart from these dark, materialistic sisters as though she had strayed like a lost vestal into the wrong atmosphere. His brows relaxed. For a moment the censor that had come to hold dominion in his heart was off guard. He felt the magnetism of her personality drawing him once more; he desired to cross the deck to her, drop a word into those deep places he had discovered, and see her emotions stir and overflow. Then suddenly the enthusiasm, for which during that drive through the mountains he had learned to watch, broke in her face. “Look!” she exclaimed softly. “See Rainier!”

Every one responded, but Tisdale started from his chair, and went over and stood beside her. There, southward, through golden haze, with the dark and wooded bluffs of Vashon Island flanking the deep foreground of opal sea, the dome lifted like a phantom peak. “It doesn’t seem to belong to our world,” she said, and her voice held its soft minor note, “but a vision of some higher, better country.”

She turned to give him her rare, grave look, and instantly his eyes telegraphed appreciation. Then he remembered. The swift revulsion came over him. He swung on his heel to go back to his chair, and the unexpected movement brought him in conjunction with the punch tray. The boy righted it dexterously, and she took the offered glass and settled again in her seat. But from his place across the deck, Tisdale noticed a drop had fallen, spreading, above the hem of her white skirt. The red stain held his austere gaze. It became a symbol of blood; on the garment of the vestal the defilement of sacrifice.

She was responsible for Weatherbee’s death. He must not forget that. And he saw through her. Now he saw. Had she not known at the beginning he was an out-of-doors man? That he lived his best in the high spaces close to Nature’s heart? And so determined to win him in this way? She had meant to win him. Even yet, she could not trust alone to his desire to see David’s project through, but threw in the charm of her own personality to swing the balance. Oh, she understood him. At the start she had read him, measured him, sounded him through. That supreme moment, at the crisis of the storm, had she not lent herself to the situation, counting the price? At this thought, the heat surged to his face. He wished in that instant to punish her, break her, but deeper than his anger with her burned a fury against himself. That he should have allowed her to use him, make a fool of him. He who had blamed Weatherbee, censured Foster, for less.

Then Marcia Feversham took advantage of the silence and, at her first statement, Jimmie Daniels sat erect; he forgot his thirst, the discomfort of his position, and opened his notebook on his knee. “I understand your work this season was in the Matanuska coal region, Mr. Tisdale; you must be able to guess a little nearer than the rest of us as to the outcome of the Naval tests. Is it the Copper River Northwestern or the Prince William Development Company that is to have the open door?”

Tisdale’s glance moved from the opal sea to the lady’s face; the genial lines crinkled faintly at the corners of his eyes. “I believe the Bering and Matanuska coal will prove equally good for steaming purposes,” he replied.

Frederic Morganstein grasped the arms of his chair and moved a little, risking a twinge of pain, to look squarely at Tisdale. “You mean the Government may conserve both?” His voice was habitually thick and deliberate, as though the words had difficulty to escape his heavy lips. “That, sir, would lock the shackles on every resource in Alaska. Guess you’ve seen how construction and development are forced to a standstill, pending the coal decision. Guess you know our few finished miles of railroad, built at immense expense and burdened with an outrageous tax, are operating under imported coal. Placed an order with Japan in the spring for three thousand tons.”

“Think of it!” exclaimed Marcia. “Coal from the Orient, the lowest grade, when we should be exporting the best. Think of the handicap, the injustice put upon those pioneer Alaskans who fought tremendous obstacles to open the interior; who paved the way for civilization.”

Tisdale’s face clouded. “I am thinking of those pioneers, madam, and I believe the Government is going to. Present laws can be easily amended and enforced to fit nearly every situation until better ones are framed. The settler and prospector should have privileges, but at the same time the Government must put some restriction on speculation and monopoly.”

Behind the awning Jimmie’s pencil was racing down the page, and Morganstein dropped his head back on the pillow; a purplish flush rose in his face.

“The trouble is,” Hollis went on evenly, “each senator has been so over-burdened with the bills of his own State that Alaska has been side-tracked. But I know the President’s interest is waking; he wants to see the situation intelligently; in fact, he favors a Government-built railroad from the coast to the upper Yukon. And I believe as soon as a selection is made for naval use, some of those old disputed coal claims– some, not all–will be allowed. Or else–Congress must pass a bill to lease Alaska coal lands.”

“Lease Alaska coal lands?” Frederic started up again so recklessly he was forced to sink back with a groan. “Do you mean we won’t be allowed to mine any coal in Alaska, in that case, except by lease?” And he added, turning his cheek to the pillow, “Oh, damn!”

Tisdale seemed not to have heard the question. His glance moved slowly again over the opal sea and rested on the shining ramparts of the Olympics, off the port bow. “Constance!” he exclaimed mellowly. “The Brothers! Eleanor!” Then he said whimsically: “Thank God they can’t set steam-shovels to work there and level those peaks and fill the canyons. Do you know?”–his look returned briefly and the genial lines deepened– “those mountains were my playground when I was a boy. My last hunting trip, the year I finished college, came to an untimely end up there in the gorge of the Dosewallups. You see it? That shaded contour cross-cutting the front of Constance.”

Elizabeth, who had opened her workbag, looked up with sudden interest. “Was there an accident?” she asked. “Something desperate and thrilling?”

“It seemed so to me,” he said.

Then Mrs. Weatherbee rose and came over to the port rail. “I see,” she said, and shaded her eyes with her hand. “You mean where that gold mist rises between that snow slope and the blue rim of that lower, nearer mountain. And you had camped in that gorge”–her hand dropped; she turned to him expectantly–“with friends, on a hunting trip?”

He paused a moment then answered slowly: “Yes, madam, with one of them. Sandy, our old camp cook, made a third in the party.”

CHAPTER XV

THE STORY OF THE TENAS PAPOOSE

Tisdale paused another moment, while his far-seeing gaze sifted the shadows of Constance, then began: “We had made camp that afternoon, at the point where Rocky Brook tumbles over the last boulders to join the swift current of the Dosewallups. I am something of an angler, and Sandy knew how to treat a Dolly Varden to divide honors with a rainbow; so while the others were pitching the tents, it fell to me to push up stream with my rod and flies. The banks rose in sharp pitches under low boughs of fir, hemlock, or cedar, but I managed to keep well to the bed of the stream, working from boulder to boulder and stopping to make a cast wherever a riffle looked promising. Finally, to avoid an unusually deep pool, I detoured around through the trees. It was very still in there; not even the cry of a jay or the drum of a woodpecker to break the silence, until suddenly I heard voices. Then, in a tangle of young alder, I picked up a trail and came soon on a group of squaws picking wild blackberries. They made a great picture with their beautifully woven, gently flaring, water-tight baskets, stained like pottery; their bright shawls wrapped scarfwise around their waists out of the way; heads bound in gay handkerchiefs. It was a long distance from any settlement, and they stood watching me curiously while I wedged myself between twin cedars, on over a big fallen fir, out of sight.

“A little later I found myself in a small pocket hemmed by cliffs of nearly two hundred feet, over which the brook plunged in a fine cataract. Above, where it cut the precipice, a hanging spur of rock took the shape of a tiger’s profile, and a depression colored by mineral deposit formed a big red eye; midway the stream struck shelving rock, breaking into a score of cascades that spread out fan-shape and poured into a deep, green, stone-lined pool; stirring, splashing, rippling ceaselessly, but so limpid I could see the trout. It was a place that held me. When at last I put away my flies and started down the bank, I knew dinner must be waiting for me, but I had a string of beauties to pacify Sandy. As I hurried down to the fallen tree, I heard the squaws calling to each other at a different point out of sight up the ridge; then I found a step in the rough bole and, setting my hands on the top, vaulted over. The next instant I would have given anything, the best years of my life, to undo that leap. There, where my foot had struck, left with some filled baskets in the lee of the log, lay a small papoose.”

Tisdale’s voice vibrated softly and stopped, while his glance moved from face to face. He held the rapt attention of every one, and in the pause the water along the keel played a minor interlude. Behind the awning a different sound broke faintly. It was like the rustle of paper; a turned page.

“The baby was bound to the usual-shaped board,” Hollis went on, “with a woven pocket for the feet and a broad carrying-strap to fit the head of the mother. I sat down and lifted the little fellow to my knees. I wore heavy shoes, studded with nails for mountain climbing, and the mark of my heel was stamped, cruelly, on the small brown cheek; the rim had crushed the temple.”

Tisdale halted again, and in the silence Elizabeth sighed. Then, “I’ll bet you didn’t waste any time in that place,” exclaimed Morganstein.

“The eyes were closed,” resumed Tisdale gently. “I saw the blow had taken him in his sleep, but the wantonness, the misery of it, turned me cold. Then, you are right, I was seized with a panic to get away. I laid the papoose back in the place where I had found him and left my string of fish, a poor tribute, with what money I had about me, and hurried down into the bed of the brook.

“The squaws were several days’ travel from the reservation, but I remembered we had passed a small encampment a few miles down the river and another near the mouth of the Dosewallups, where a couple of Indians were fishing from canoes. I knew they would patrol the stream as soon as the alarm was given, and my only chance was to make a wide detour, avoiding my camp where they would first look for me, swim the river, and push through the forest, around that steep, pyramid peak to the next canyon. You see it?–The Duckabush cuts through there to tide water. I left no trail in crossing the stony bed of the brook, and took advantage of a low basalt bluff in climbing the farther bank. It was while I was working my way over the rock into cover of the trees that the pleasant calling on the ridge behind me changed to the first terrible cry. The mother had found her dead baby.

“Twilight was on me when I stopped at last on the river bank to take off my shoes. I rolled them with my coat in a snug pack, which I secured with a length of fish-line to my shoulders before I plunged in. The current was swift; I lost headway, and a whirlpool caught me; I was swept under, came up grazing a ragged rock, dipped again through a riffle, and when I finally gathered myself and won out to the opposite shore, there was my camp in full view below me. I was winded, bruised, shivering, and while I lay resting I watched Sandy. He stirred the fire under his kettle, put a fresh lag on, then walked to the mouth of the brook and stood looking up stream, wondering, no doubt, what was keeping me. Then a long cry came up the gorge. It was lost in the rush of the rapids and rose again in a wailing dirge. The young squaw was mourning for her papoose. It struck me colder than the waters of the Dosewallups. Sandy turned to listen. I knew I had only to call, show myself, and the boys would be ready to fight for me every step of the trail down to the settlement; but there was no need to drag them in; I hoped they would waste no time in going out, and I found my pocket compass, set a course, and pushed into the undergrowth.

“That night journey was long-drawn torture. The moon rose, but its light barely penetrated the fir boughs. My coat and shoes were gone, torn from me in the rapids, and I walked blindly into snares of broken and pronged branches, trod tangles of blackberry, and more than once my foot was pierced by the barbs of a devil’s-club. Dawn found me stumbling into a small clearing. I was dull with weariness, but I saw a cabin with smoke rising from the chimney, and the possibility of a breakfast heartened me. As I hurried to the door, it opened, and a woman with a milking pail came out. At sight of me she stopped, her face went white, and, dropping the bucket, she moved backward into the room. The next moment she brought a rifle from behind the door. ‘If you come one step nearer,’ she cried, ‘I’ll shoot.'”

Tisdale paused, and the humor broke gently in his face. “I saw she was quite capable of it,” he went on, “and I stopped. It was the first time I had seemed formidable to a woman, and I raised my hand to my head–my hat was gone–to smooth my ruffled hair; then my glance fell from my shirt sleeves, soiled and in tatters, down over my torn trousers to my shoeless feet; my socks were in rags. ‘I am sorry,’ I began, but she refused to listen. ‘Don’t you say a word,’ she warned and had the rifle to her shoulder, looking along the sight. ‘If you do, I’ll shoot, and I’m a pretty good shot.’

“‘I haven’t a doubt of that,’ I answered, taking the word, ‘and even if you were not, you could hardly miss at that range.’

“Her color came back, and she stopped sighting to look me over. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘you take that road down the Duckabush, and don’t you stop short of a mile. Ain’t you ashamed,’ she shrilled, as I moved ignominiously into the trail, ‘going ’round scaring ladies to death?’

“But I did not go that mile. Out of sight of the cabin I found myself in one of those old burned sections, overgrown with maple. The trees were very big, and the gnarled, fantastic limbs and boles were wrapped in thick bronze moss. It covered the huge, dead trunks and logs of the destroyed timber, carpeted the earth, and out of it grew a natural fernery.” He turned his face a little, involuntarily seeking Mrs. Weatherbee. “I wish you could have seen that place,” he said. “Imagine a great billowing sea of infinite shades of green, fronds waving everywhere, light, beautifully stencilled elk-fern, starting with a breadth of two feet and tapering to lengths of four or five; sword-fern shooting stiffly erect, and whole knolls mantled in maidenhair.”

“I know, I know!” she responded breathlessly. “It must have been beautiful, but it was terrible if you were pursued. I have seen such a place. Wherever one stepped, fronds bent or broke and made a plain trail. But of course you kept to the beaten road.”

Tisdale shook his head. “That road outside the clearing was simply a narrow, little used path; and I was so dead tired I began to look for a place where I might take an hour’s rest. I chose a big cedar snag a few rods from the trail, the spreading kind that is always hollow, and found the opening screened in fern and just wide enough to let me in. Almost instantly I was asleep and–do you know?”–the humor broke again gently– “it was late in the afternoon when I wakened. And I was only roused then by a light blow on my face. I started up. The thing that had struck me was a moccasin, and its mate had dropped at my elbow. Then I saw a can of milk with a loaf of bread placed inside my door. But there was no one in sight, though I hurried to look, and I concluded that for some unaccountable reason that inhospitable woman had changed her opinion of me and wanted to make amends. I took a long draught of the milk–it was the best I ever tasted–then picked up one of the moccasins. It was new and elaborately beaded, the kind a woman fancies for wall decorations, and she had probably bartered with some passing squaw for the pair. But the size looked encouraging, and with a little ripping and cutting, I managed to work it on. Pinned to the toe of the other, I found a note. It ran like this: ‘Two Indians are trailing you. I sent them down-stream, but they will come back. They told me about that poor little papoose.’

“I saw she must have followed me that morning, while searching for her cow, or perhaps to satisfy herself I had left the clearing, and so discovered my hiding-place. The broader track of her skirts must have covered mine through the fern.”

Tisdale paused. The _Aquila_ had come under the lee of Bainbridge Island. The Olympics were out of sight, as the yacht, heeling to the first tide rip, began to turn into the Narrows, and the batteries of Fort Ward commanded her bows; a beautiful wooded point broke the line of the opposite shore. It rimmed a small cove. But Mrs. Weatherbee was not interested; her attention remained fixed on Tisdale. Indeed he held the eyes of every one. Then Marcia Feversham relieved the tension. “And the Indians came back?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, that was inevitable; they had to come back to pick up my trail. But you don’t know what a different man that rest and the moccasins made of me. In five minutes I was on the road and making my best time up the gorge, in the opposite direction. The woman was standing in her door as I passed the cabin; she put a warning finger to her lips and waved me on. In a little while the ground began to fall in short pitches; sometimes it broke in steps over granite spurs where the exposed roots of fir and hemlock twined; then I came to a place where an immense boulder, big as a house, moving down the mountain, had left a swath through the timber, and I heard the thunder of the Duckabush. I turned into this cut, intending to cross the river and work down the canyon on the farther side, and as I went I saw the torrent storming below me, a winding sheet of spray. The boulder had stopped on a level bluff, but two sections, splitting from it, had dropped to the bank underneath and, tilting together in an apex, formed a small cavern through which washed a rill. It made a considerable pool and, dividing, poured on either side of the uprooted trunk of a fir that bridged the stream. The log was very old; it sagged mid-channel, as though a break had started, and snagged limbs stretched a line of pitfalls. But a few yards below the river plunged in cataract, and above I found sheer cliffs curving in a double horseshoe. It was impossible to swim the racing current, and I came back to the log. By that time another twilight was on me. The forest had been very still; I hadn’t noticed a bird all day, but while I stood weighing the chances of that crossing, I heard the harsh call of a kingfisher or jay. It seemed to come from the slope beyond the bluff, and instantly an answer rose faintly in the direction of the trail. I was leaning on one of the tilted slabs, and I wormed myself around the base, to avoid leaving an impression in the wet sand, and dipped under the trailing bough of a cedar, through the pool, and crawled up into the cavern. There wasn’t room to stand erect, and I waited crouching, over moccasins in water. The cedar began to sway–I had used the upper boughs to ease myself in sliding down the slab from the bluff–a fragment of granite dropped, then an Indian came between me and the light.

“While he stopped to examine the sand at the edge of the pool, another followed. He ventured a short distance out on the log and came back, while the first set his rifle against the trunk and sank on his hands and knees to drink. The water, roiled probably by my steps, was not to his taste, and he rejected it with a disgusted ‘Hwah!’ When he rose, he stood looking across the pool into my cavern. I held my breath, hugging the bluff behind me like a lizard. It was so dark I doubted if even his lynx eyes could discover me, but he lifted the gun and for an instant I believed he meant to send a shot into the hole. Then he seemed to think better of wasting his ammunition and led the way down-stream. They stopped on a level bank over the cataract, and in a little while I caught the odor of smoke and later of cooking trout. My cramped position grew intolerable, and finally I crept out into the pool to reconnoitre. The light of their fire showed both figures stretched on the ground. They had camped for the night.

“It was useless to try to go down-stream; before dawn Indians would patrol the whole canyon; neither could I double back to the Dosewallups where they had as surely left a watch; my only course was to risk the log crossing at once, before the moon rose, and strike southward to the Lilliwaup, where, at the mouth of the gorge, I knew the mail steamer made infrequent stops. I began to work up between the gnarled roots to the top of the trunk and pushed laboriously with infinite caution out over the channel. I felt every inch of that log, but once a dead branch snapped short in my hand, and the noise rang sharp as a pistol shot. I waited, flattening myself to the bole, but the thunder of the river must have drowned the sound; the Indians did not stir. So at last I came to the danger point. Groping for the break, I found it started underneath, reaching well around. Caused probably by some battering bulk in the spring floods, and widening slowly ever since, it needed only a slight shock to bring it to a finish. I grasped a stout snag and tried to swing myself over the place, but there came a splitting report; and there was just time to drop astride above that stub of limb, when the log parted below it, and I was in the river. I managed to keep my hold and my head out of water, though the current did its best to suck me under. Then I saw that while the main portion of the tree had been swept away, the top to which I clung remained fixed to the bank, wedged no doubt between trunks or boulders. As I began to draw myself up out of the wash, a resinous bough thrown on the fire warned me the Indians were roused, and I flattened again like a chameleon on the slippery incline. They came as far as the rill and stood looking across, then went down-stream, no doubt to see whether the trunk had stranded on the riffles below the cataract. But they were back before I could finish the log, and the rising moon illuminated the gorge. I was forced to swing to the shady side of the snag. The time dragged endlessly; a wind piping down the watercourse cut like a hundred whips through my wet clothes; and I think in the end I only kept my hold because my fingers were too stiff to let go. But at last the Indians stretched themselves once more on the ground; their fire burned low, and I wormed myself up within reach of a friendly young hemlock, grasped a bough, and gained shelving rock. The next moment I relaxed, all but done for, on a dry bed of needles.”

Tisdale paused, looking again from face to face, while the humor gleamed in his own. “I am making a long story of it,” he said modestly. “You must be tired!”

“Tired!” exclaimed Elizabeth, “It’s the very best story I ever heard. Please go on.”

“Of course you escaped,” supplemented Marcia Feversham, “but we want to know how. And what was your chum doing all the time? And wasn’t there another woman?”

Frederic Morganstein rumbled a short laugh. “Maybe you made the Lilliwaup, but I’ll bet ten to one you missed your steamer.”

Tisdale’s eyes rested involuntarily again on Mrs. Weatherbee. She did not say anything, but she met the look with her direct gaze; her short upper lip parted, and the color burned softly in her cheek. “I made the Lilliwaup,” he went on, “about two miles from the mouth, between the upper and lower falls. The river breaks in cascades there, hundreds of them as far as one can see, divided by tremendous boulders.”

“We know the place,” said Elizabeth quickly. “Our first cruise on the _Aquila_ was to the Lilliwaup. We climbed to the upper falls and spent hours along the cascades. Those boulders, hundreds of them, rose through the spray, all covered with little trees and ferns. There never was anything like it, but we called it The Fairy Isles.”

Tisdale nodded. “It was near the end of that reach I found myself. The channels gather below, you remember, and pour down a steep declivity under a natural causeway. But the charm and grandeur were lost on me that day. I wanted to reach the old trail from the falls on the opposite shore, and I knew that stone bridge fell short a span, so I began to work my way from boulder to boulder out to the main stream. It was a wide chasm to leap, with an upward spring to a tilted table of basalt, and I overbalanced, slipped down, and, coasting across the surface, recovered enough on the edge to ease myself off to a nearly submerged ledge. There I stopped.” He paused an instant, and his eyes sought Marcia Feversham’s; the amusement played lightly on his flexible lips. “I had stumbled on another woman. She was seated on a lower boulder, sketching the stone bridge. I was behind her, but I saw a pretty hand and forearm, some nice brown hair tucked under a big straw hat, and a trim and young figure in a well-made gown of blue linen. Then she said pleasantly, without turning her head: ‘Well, John, what luck?’

“I drew back into a shallow niche of the rock. I had not forgotten the first impression I made on the woman up the Duckabush and had no desire to ‘scare ladies.’ But my steamer was almost due, and I hoped John would come soon. Getting no reply from him, she rose and glanced around. Then she looked at her watch, put her hand to her mouth, and sent a long call up the gorge. ‘Joh-n. Joh-n, hello!’ She had a carrying, singer’s voice, but it brought no answer, so after a moment she gathered up her things and started towards the bank. I watched her disappear among the trees; then, my fear of missing the steamer growing stronger than the dread of terrifying her, I followed. The trail drops precipitously around the lower falls, you remember, and I struck the level where the river bends at the foot of the cataract, with considerable noise. I found myself in a sort of open-air parlor flanked by two tents; rustic seats under a canopy of maple boughs, hammocks, a percolator bubbling on a sheet-iron contrivance over the camp-fire coals, and, looking at me across a table, the girl. ‘I beg your pardon,’ I hurried to say. ‘Don’t be afraid of me.’

“‘Afraid?’ she repeated. ‘Afraid–of you?’ And the way she said it, with a half scornful, half humorous surprise, the sight of her standing there so self-reliant, buoyant, the type of that civilization I had tried so hard to reach, started a reaction of my overstrained nerves. Still, I think I might have held myself together had I not at that moment caught the voice of that unhappy squaw. It struck a chill to my bones, and I sank down on the nearest seat and dropped my face in my hands, completely unmanned.

“I knew she came around the table and stood looking me over, but when I finally managed to lift my head, she had gone back to the percolator to