The Cross Pull/Chapter 10
CHAPTER X
In the spring a bear’s pelt is in its prime when the fur of all others slips. His hair has grown thick and silky during the long winter sleep of hibernation. In this high country the bear does not leave his den until some time early in May but even this is too early for men to bring horses across the lofty passes that lead into it.
The girl knew that this fact was intimately related to Dad Kinney’s plans. The previous fall he had left supplies at the cabin, planning to come in on foot, and collect many prime spring pelts to be packed out later when the passes were free of snow.
The days passed and Kinney failed to come.
The girl often talked of this to Flash.
“He should have been here long ago.” Each day she repeated this to the dog. “Even if he had changed his plans he would come the instant my letter reached him, Flash. He’s a little late, that’s all. He’ll be here to-morrow sure.” And as each succeeding night fell without a sign of him she bravely promised the dog that the next day he would surely come.
Many doubts had arisen in her mind; the possible failure of her letter to reach him or the chance that some mishap had befallen the old man on his long trip across the treacherous snow combs of the peaks.
She still dreaded the cry that sounded every few nights in the canyon but restlessness at last forced her away from the cabin in the daytime. She took long tramps with Flash, climbing to some commanding point from which she could scan the surrounding country. She explored their own immediate vicinity but not until a week after her arrival at the cabin did she venture into new territory.
Then one afternoon she turned downstream. The canyon gradually widened until it shaded into another at right angles a mile below the cabin. Here the two streams forked into one. The girl climbed the high ridge on the opposite side and looked down upon a still wider valley.
A sudden storm swept down across the divide, and she sought shelter under an overhanging ledge.
The rain fell in torrents and the lightning flashed and cracked until it seemed to play along the rocks around her. Even Flash shrank from the terrific reports that hurt his sensitive ear drums and he burrowed his head into the folds of her walking skirt to protect them. She read this move as one of fear and it added to her own misgivings.
She felt no active fear of the lightning itself, but it shattered the control of overwrought nerves, and she buried her face in the dog’s fur and sobbed wildly.
Flash was strangely affected by her grief. His own plastic nature, subject to all outside impressions, responded to her emotion and his soul was wrung with misery.
For a time he whimpered in sympathy, but this mood was soon superseded by a desire to comfort her. He drew away and regarded her anxiously, then pawed at the arms which shielded her face. He confronted this, his first experience with a woman in tears, as helplessly as most men face a similar situation.
He wanted to help her—to fight for her, but he could not fight this intangible enemy. He snarled savagely at imaginary foes, clashing his teeth in vicious snaps. If the girl had not soon quieted he would have dashed away in a frenzy to kill the first living thing he met.
She regained her self-control and felt better for having relieved the nervous tension of the last few days. Flash’s mood changed with hers. He too felt better.
The steady downpour slackened to a drizzle. Heavy gray clouds scudded past, obscuring the hills beyond and the valley below. This in turn changed swiftly to a dense fog—one of the milk-white mountain fogs in which even seasoned hill men hesitate to travel when in a strange country.
As the girl started for home the tree trunks loomed vaguely a few feet away. For all she could see of it it might have been a forest of stumps, the trunks being invisible at a height of twenty feet.
Flash kept a pace before her, heading unerringly for home, and she followed him unconsciously, thinking that she chose the route herself.
The fog seemed to deepen and turn to purple instead of white. With a thrill of apprehension she realized that night was settling down over the hills. Before she reached the foot of the slope night had completed the swift transformation of the fog from milky white to oozy black which shut her in until she was unable to see two feet ahead.
She groped forward, feeling her way. Her mind recoiled from the thought of the mile-long trip before her; every foot of it seemed fraught with perils. She remembered the one horrible night she had spent alone before Flash, like an answer to a prayer, had come to her on the second night. But then she had had a fire.
The wind was at their backs and not until they turned into the canyon, and started up the trail did Flash scent the menace ahead. His hair bristled and he turned back. But the girl was now sure of her ground and went on. Flash ran around in front of her, pushing to turn her aside. Not until he growled did she understand that there was danger lurking near.
The scent came plain and it was that of men. He could hear voices which the girl could not. A sudden thought assailed her. Flash must have detected the presence of the beast whose chilling cry she had often heard at night, but she hurried on. It was all she knew—to reach the refuge of the cabin at all costs.
Flash knew these scents and voices were those of some of the men who lived near Two Ocean Pass. To him they meant danger, even death, and as he followed her he bristled uneasily. That they meant danger to her he was not so sure. The ways of men with men had always baffled him. Men whom he trusted associated with those he knew to be dangerous in the extreme. Of the way of men with women he knew nothing at all. Perhaps these men that meant death to him would not harm his lovely mistress in the least.
The sounds which he heard so clearly did not reach the girl until she rounded a sudden bend in the canyon. She heard a man’s laugh at the same instant that she saw the dim, wavering light of a fire gleaming through the fog. It appeared far off but was in reality only fifty feet. It meant but one thing to her. Kinney had come at last and some one else was with him.
In her relief at escaping the imaginary dangers of the night she hurried toward the very real one at the fire. The voices which covered the sound of her approach ceased suddenly as she appeared like a wraith out of the night. The group of half a dozen men around the fire stared incredulously. She too, was startled by the unexpected number and the absence of any familiar face. Kinney was not there.
“I’m lost,” she said unsteadily. And she saw the hungry gleam leap into the eyes of one after another of the group. The firelight revealed faces that were hard and desperate.
These men had long denied the society of women. This appearance among them of a beautiful girl was like the smell of meat to starving beasts of prey. Not a man there but would have murdered his friend in order to own her for an hour.
From beyond the circle of light thrown by the fire a pair of yellow eyes watched this tableau. Flash sensed the menace to his Goddess, satisfied at last that she was unsafe among these men.
There was one man whose cold brain never failed him in an emergency.
“Where are your friends camped?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, some inner voice prompting her to lie. “But somewhere close. I stayed under a rock—and out of the rain—not far from camp.”
As her voice trailed away the man arose.
“I’ll take you to them,” he offered. “Just come with me.”
“Leave it to Harte to think first,’ said another. He rose also. “I need exercise. I’ll just go along with you.”
Every last man leaped to his feet and leered at her. These men stood in awe of Harte but the beauty of the girl had inflamed them beyond caution. One man crowded closer to her.
As he moved, a silent shadow out in the fog moved with him, crouching low to the ground.
Harte’s own blood pounded hotly from her nearness, and he knew that he could not control the lawless impulses of the others yet his brain functioned as coolly as before.
“Think it over,” he advised them calmly. “You know what it will mean to have a fight with a party of hunters in here. In a week we’d have posses scouring this whole country.”
“What of it? The Hole is twenty miles from here,” said one, his eyes resting hungrily on the girl, “I’ll have my taste of her before she goes.”
He threw his arms around her and as he touched her a demon apparition with flashing eyes and fangs split the curtain of fog and drove straight for his throat. The teeth sank deep in his upraised shoulder and the force of the drive bore him to the ground.
The blank wall of fog had swallowed both the dog and the fleeing girl before a man of them fully realized what had occurred. Before she had run twenty feet up the game trail they were after her. The pupils of their eyes, accustomed to the firelight, were not readily readjusted to the velvety black under the trees and they stumbled blindly.
When the foremost man stretched forth his hand to seize her something struck his extended arm with such force as to almost shear it off. He tripped and fell.
“The dog!” he screamed. “She’s got a dog! Look out for him.”
The next man fell over him and pulled his gun as he scrambled to his feet. He bounded ahead—and teeth with the grip of death clamped his leg from behind and a backward wrench slammed him down across a log. As he fell the red spurt of flame from his gun streaked the night and the man close behind cursed him for a fool for shooting almost point blank in his face.
Love transcended fear in Flash and, in his rage against these men who would harm the girl, he conquered his dread of guns. Always it was the man ahead, the one nearest to her, that felt his teeth. Human flesh could not endure against this silent, unseen fiend that slashed them and was gone. By common consent they had all turned back before the boldest had made fifty yards from the fire.
Retreat turned to rout for Flash followed them back, striking swiftly and leaping away from the shot he feared would follow. They shot blindly after him, endangering their own lives more than his. The last man he heeled as he would a cow and threw him.
When they burst into the circle of firelight they found Harte seated on a rock calmly smoking a cigarette.
“You’re a bloody looking crew,” he observed. “I’d like to own that dog.”
One man extended his left hand, exhibiting a ragged flesh wound between thumb and forefinger.
“Some fool shot me,” he growled. “It was either Seely or Cole.”’ Both men profanely denied this charge. Harte laughed scornfully as he looked them over.
“Mistaken identity,” he jeered. “Clay Siggens, shot by a pal who mistook him for a dog in the Battle of Hide and Seek.” They scowled down at him.
“I was out with Jarrat and Hanlin this spring,” he went on. “Jarrat belongs in a coop for the homicidal insane and Hanlin’s a thick skulled brute—but even so, when it comes to brains they have this layout cheated seven ways from the deuce.”
“You wanted the girl yourself,” said Cole. “You aimed to take her off somewhere alone.”
“What of it?” Harte shrugged. “I wouldn’t have made a mess of it. Tie up those rents in your hide and let’s go.”
“Go!” Cole exclaimed. “Go where?”
“Anywhere,” said Harte. ‘Do you poor brainless apes expect to bed down here and sleep? There’s a hunting party of the girl’s friends camped around here close. They’ll have guides. When they hear the girl’s story they’ll be looking for us and pick us off like rats as we lay asleep around the fire.”
As always, his logic was convincing. They started to apply what rough first aid they could to the deepest cuts. As they moved, a beast with dripping jaws circled round and round the fire, waiting for one to venture out into the night.
When they left they started downstream in the opposite direction from the girl. Flash let them go and went back to her. He followed her warm trail for almost a mile before he found her stealing cautiously along the game trail.
She believed Flash was dead. She knew he had fought desperately to give her time. He had not come back to her after the shots. It was a stunning shock when, without a sound to warn her, a cold nose was thrust suddenly against her hand. The eager whine which followed told her it was Flash, alive and safe. She dropped to her knees and threw her arms about him, whispering her gratitude in broken sobs.
She started ahead once more, urged on by the thought that they still followed her. Flash turned from the trail, and whined for her to come and she felt her way through the down timber of the slope and entered the cabin.
As she closed the door behind her the rain began to fall, blotting out whatever trail she might have left. She jay on the bunk, straining to hear any sound of pursuit. She heard nothing but the rain and near morning she slept from sheer exhaustion.
When she opened her eyes it was light. Flash seemed calm and peaceful and she knew from this that the men could not be near. He scratched at the door and she let him out.
Flash started at once for the scene of the fight. He circled cautiously, testing the wind. The rank odor of the drowned camp fire was all that reached him. The rain had washed out all but the faintest trace of human scent.
As he drew near he snarled and bristled his back roach at the smell of blood that haunted the wet spruce needles where he had slashed at them the night before.
He followed their cold trail for a mile, then left it, satisfied that they were far away, and started on a hunt for meat. An hour later he turned up at the cabin carrying a grouse.
The girl would not leave the cabin again, not even descending to the game trail along the stream. The scant store of provisions was running low.
She could not help but associate these men with Dad Kinney’s failure to arrive. Her worry over him inspired a like uneasiness about a man she had never seen—Moran, the owner of Flash.
On that other trip when Flash had crept up to her in the moonlit park Kinney had told her that the dog would never leave Moran yet Flash now stayed with her. Her chief fear had been that Flash would leave her any moment and go back to him. But he had stayed. It now occurred to her that he would not so easily desert the man who had raised him from a pup. Something had happened to Moran.
The thought persisted and she often referred to it in her conversations with the dog.
The frequent repetition of Moran’s name struck some chord of memory in Flash. He had by no means forgotten Moran, but his recollection of him was more of a vague longing than a definite picture.
Man’s most dependable sense is his sense of sight and he carries the memory of absent loved ones by a mental visualization of their faces. Dogs, instead of a mental likeness, retain a mixture of sight, scent and sound, the latter two being the predominating elements of animal memory. It is this which sometimes causes a dog to bark at the approach of his master who he can plainly see but cannot recognize until some familiar scent or sound identifies him.
It was sound—the name of Moran—that stirred Flash. Each recurring time it came from the girl’s lips it quickened the half dormant longing that was in him. And it was sound that one day caused him to drop all else and investigate a distant note with a familiar ring.
He had rambled far up the slope of the main divide where he often hunted. Something beat faintly against his ear drums, and he knew it was a far off sound of man. His ears pricked forward and he moved excitedly from spot to spot. It was a man who whistled and the air was one of the few little tunes that Moran had whistled endlessly as he wandered alone. Flash started swiftly along the hill in the direction of the sound.