Howling Jim's Pal

Howling Jim's Pal

BY HAPSBURG LIEBE
Author of "Big Balsam Joe," "Peep-eye," etc.

FOR three hours the snow had been falling steadily. The white blanket that covered Little Brother Mountain and Big Brother Mountain—and the broad and thickly wooded valley that lay between them—was five inches deep. In the center of the valley Big Brother Creek, flowed merrily, passing the Morgan-Haley Lumber Company's logging outfit and pouring its crystal waters into Laurel River some four miles below.

Night had come. Supper was over at the Morgan-Haley camp, and the majority of the timberjacks had deserted the big and rough boarding-house for the commissary's glowing cast-iron stove. These were stalwart and sunburned fellows, all mountaineers and all dressed alike in laced boots and broad hats, blue flannel shirts and clay-colored corduroys.

Gideon Ashford, a big logger whose beard was so black that his freshly-shaven face had a bluish look, had just begun a harangue, setting forth in his uncouth way the extraordinary beauty of one Miss Nancy Kirkland, when an interrupting voice came from the other side of the red-hot stove.

"Shet up!" with an icy snap. "When ye ain't got nothin^o say, say it!"

"Humph!" grunted the impudent Ashford. He was the bully and smart Aleck of the camp. "Is that you, 'Lonesome'? Why, I thought ye was asleep. It's got to be that ye're real sassy when 'Howlin' Jim' ain't around to keep ye quiet. Fust thing ye know, ye'll have some trouble, Lonesome, a-tellin' grown folks to shet up thataway!"

His words carried a bite. The man called "Lonesome" sat on a soap box with his legs crossed and with his forearms resting on his upper knee. He was a tall and rangey young man, as hard as hickory and as lithe as a panther and remarkably taciturn at times—which, of course, had bred for him his nickname. For six months he had been with the Morgan-Haley crew, and still nobody seemed to know anything about him save Howling Jim Baskin—unless it was old Nathan Kirkland's daughter, Nancy.

Howling Jim—he had a voice that would have made a fog-horn blush, and he used it at every decent opportunity—had come to the camp on Big Brother Creek with Lonesome Bentley. He was at least thirty-five, and ten years older than Bentley. But theirs had been a wonderfully tight friendship for all of that.

Lonesome did not favor Ashford with a reply. A few of the onlooking timberjacks snickered, because they didn't know what else to do. Ashford laughed outright at that which he was pleased to think of as the other's discomfiture. Just then there came to the ears of those in the commissary a snatch of a foolish old song in the ringing voice of Howling Jim, who was leaving the boarding-house for the big stove.

"I'm a-goin' to live, anyhow, till I die—
⁠Anyhow, anyhow, till I die!"

"Howlin's a-comm'," grinned Ashford. "I reckon ye'll behave yerself now, Lonesome."

Bentley stuck fast to his motto, "When ye ain't got nothin' to say, say it," and was silent. As Baskin stepped into the commissary doorway, he shook the snow from his hat, his broad shoulders and his boots.

"Hi, men! Good evenin' to ye! Anybody seed anything o' Lonesome?" he shot all in one breath at the crowd by the stove.

"Here," the bully answered in tones colored with ridicule, pointing.

Baskin closed the door behind him, walked smilingly over and halted beside his pal. Something was wrong, he saw at once. Then he caught sight of the still leering face of the bully, and he understood. He stepped toward Ashford, folded his arms across his chest and looked Ashford straight in the eye.

"All right, Gid," he said narrowly; "keep it up. You'll git yores, all right, ef ye'll jest keep it up. It won't be me that hands it to ye, neither; it'll be Lonesome hisself. He shore carries a su'prize package in each paw, and he'll lay a wallopin' on ye that four hosses cain't pull off!"

Gideon Ashford laughed to save his face, so to speak. As yet he had not fought either Howling Jim or Bentley; they were to him unknown quantities. He found an empty box close to Lonesome and sat down. Another minute and the commissary door opened again. This time a slender and nicely-figured girl of not much more than twenty came in. Snow particles glistened like diamond chips on her pale-blue home-knit and tasseled headgear and on her cheap but warm imitation Paisley shawl. Her cheeks were as rosy as red apples from the cold air and good health, and her long brown eyes were full of laughter twinkles.

Smiling for no reason whatever, she walked across to the counter. She paid not the slightest notice to the score of loggers, who had fallen as still as death at the sight of her and who now watched her as if she were the very last woman in the world. Those big, rugged men adored Nancy Kirkland.

"My dad ain't got any tobaccy," she drawled softly to Billy Allison, the clerk, a pale youth who hailed from the lowland.

Allison gave her a tin of smoking tobacco. She put a little silver coin on the counter and turned for the door.

Lonesome Bentley's gaze had been fastened sternly and defiantly upon Gideon Ashford's dark countenance from the moment of the girl's coming. Ashford now put his hands on his knees and was about to go to his feet. Bentley tapped him sharply on the arm.

"Set still," said Lonesome.

"But——"

"Set still!" Lonesome snapped.

Ashford stared in amazement at having his hand thus called. Then his face clouded.

"I got as good a right to go home with her as you have."

"No, you ain't!" Bentley's low, steely voice cut him off. "You ain't fit!"

The girl was gone. Ashford rose, and his huge and hairy hands curled up into fists. Bentley slipped to his feet without any apparent effort.

"You ain't fit," he reiterated. "Any man what lies and steals and drinks and gambles ain't fit to go with any decent woman anywhere. I've shore said it. Ef you want to fight me about it, go to it. I've took all o' yore fun-makin' and mouthin' I'll ever take. Ef you want to start somethin' wi' me, start it right now; I'm ready and a-waitin'."

Lonesome's face was pale save for a tiny pink spot under the sunburn of either cheek. His eyes fairly sparkled. He held himself as tense as a coiled steel spring. The bully turned red and glanced with a sickly grin toward the men who watched and waited at Bentley's elbows. Ashford knew that he had to fight or else let the outfit take it for granted that he was afraid. And that steel spring of a man who stood before him dared him to so much as lift a finger!

For a moment there was charged silence. It was broken by a silly little guffaw from the lowland youth who held forth as commissary clerk, and with that all the loggers except the two belligerents themselves joined in a roar of derisive laughter. Gid Ashford, the fallen false god, became still redder. He slumped back to his box, took paper and tobacco from his pocket and nervously began to roll for himself a cigaret.

Now that the thing was over, Howling Jim Baskin turned and placed a hand proudly on his pal's shoulder. To the surprize of everybody, Lonesome Bentley threw Howling Jim's hand off angrily.

"Never mind," said Lonesome.

Baskin stared, looked hurt, stepped slowly to the counter and leaned against it rather heavily. Bentley gave the crestfallen erstwhile bully a look of contempt and went alone toward the boarding-house.

Not long afterward the commissary crowd began to thin out. At closing time only Ashford and Billy Allison, the clerk, were there. And Ashford watched young Allison keenly as he took the days gleanings from the money-drawer and placed them in the small iron safe.

The Morgan-Haley Company's commissary banked but once each month, and these deposits ran anywhere from four to eight hundred dollars.

WHEN Lonesome Bentley went toward the boarding-house, Howling Jim followed him. Bentley did not even look around until he had reached the up-stairs sleeping-quarters of the crew, in which a big hanging oil lamp burned dimly. He gave Baskin a glance that was part scowl, undressed without a word to his former great crony and crept silently under his blankets. Baskin followed suit, and for five minutes the two big man lay so still there in their narrow beds, within six feet of each oilier, that they seemed to be hardly breathing.

Then Howling Jim put the soft pedal on his log- horn voice and spoke.

"Lonesome!"

No answer.

"Lonesome," Baskin pursued, "what is it that's come between you and me?"

"Never mind," Bentley said sharply.

And not another word could Howling Jim get out of him that night.

Howling Jim found slumber forsaking him. As for Lonesome, neither did he go to sleep readily. His thoughts wouldn't let him sleep. Those thoughts would have been highly enlightening to Baskin if only he could have read them!

A week before Lonesome Bentley and old Nathan Kirkland's daughter, who lived with her parents in a big hewn-log cabin a mile down Big Brother Creek, had quarreled bitterly—so bitterly, in fact, that Nancy had snapped off her engagement to Bentley as if it had been of no more importance than a pie-crust! Lonesome didn't know what they had quarreled about and Nancy didn't remember. That is how it goes when young human beings set other young human beings up on pedestals as models of perfection to worship them. The fault was humanity's, rather than either Nancy Kirkland's or Lonesome Bentley's individually, no doubt. And then——

Four days after the misunderstanding, on a bright Sunday afternoon, Bentley had decided that he would try to bridge the abyss that yawned between him and his sweetheart by going to her and confessing that he had been a fool. He had started for her home, and by the merest chance he had come upon a scene that distressed him sorely. Nancy and Howling Jim were sitting together under a big poplar; Baskin was holding her hand in his, and she was smiling at him in her very best way! Then Lonesome Bentley had stolen back to the camp with red-hot iron in his soul.

It seemed doubly hard to bear, following, as it did, on the heels of news to the effect that the Morgan-Haley Company looked upon him—Lonesome Bentley, as the very best logger in the outfit. Bentley, for all of his taciturnity, was an ambitious young man.

THOUGH they had lost some sleep, Bentley and Baskin sprang from their beds at the first ringing blow on the railroad iron triangle-gong which hung just outside the kitchen door. Neither had any thing to say. Lonesome was the first to get his clothing on. He snatched up his hat and hastened down to the dimly-lighted back porch to bathe his face and his hands.

He had no more than finished his washing when Howling Jim addressed him from the open doorway behind him:

"The super wants to see ye, Lonesome. In his office. Said for me to tell ye. By grab! That's good luck, Lonesome!"

It was a fine bid for talk; however, Lonesome failed to nibble. Without a single word Bentley threw the icy-cold towel to its peg on the wall and went toward Superintendent Bradshaw's little office on the first floor. He wondered just what the good luck was. A raise in wages, maybe.

The high light of the Morgan-Haley camp was a big and bronzed elderly man, and he now sat before a small sheet-iron stove, which was glowing hot.

"Sit down, Bentley," he said, pointing toward a cheap straight-back. Lonesome dropped into the chair, and Bradshaw went on: "Nobody knows loggin' better than you know it, Bentley, and I've recommended you for the super's job here. I'm leavin' in just fifteen more days. What do you think of it? Can you hold it?"

"I can read and write and figger enough to keep the time-sheets," Lonesome said softly, more to himself than to Bradshaw, perhaps. "Shore, I can hold it. I'm much obliged to ye, Brad!"

Honest appreciation beamed from his eyes. To be the superintendent of a logging outfit, that was his fondest dream but one—and that one concerned Nancy Kirkland, himself and a preacher! He had worked hard and for years in the attempt to fit himself for a superintendent's place.

Bradshaw was about to speak again when the door banged open to admit a miniature hurricane of cold air and the youthful figure of Billy Allison, the commissary clerk. Allison snapped the door shut behind him and turned nervously to the two men.

"The commissary's front door was broken open last night, Brad," he announced in a low and somewhat shaky voice. "Whoever it was used a peavy spike which was left lying in the snow by the step. But the safe is all right, and I didn't notice that anything was gone."

Bradshaw rose, and so did Bentley. Then the superintendent beckoned to the logger, and the three of them went toward the company's general store. Dawn was just spreading its great, rose-colored fan upward from the crest of Little Brother Mountain; the new day promised to be clear and bright.

Allison had already lighted the great oil lamp that hung in the center of the big, long room, and he and the other two quickly looked over the stock. So far as they were able to see, nothing had been stolen. Bradshaw walked back to the safe, which stood under the rear end of the counter; it was tightly locked.

"Sure this is all right, Billy?" he asked.

"I haven't looked inside," frowned young Allison.

He hastened to the safe, knelt before it and within another minute swung open the iron door. Then he shot to his feet.

"It's all gone—six hundred dollars!" he exclaimed.

He had spoken correctly. The six hundred dollars in cash was not there. Bentley pressed forward and leaned over the counter.

"Funny how that happened," was his drawling, puzzled comment. "It must ha' been somebody that knowed the combination!"

Billy Allison flashed a quick look toward the hillman, as at an accuser. Another second and he was staring anxiously into the superintendent's bronzed face.

"Brad, do you think—" he began.

Bradshaw interrupted.

"The lad didn't do it, Lonesome," he said a trifle sharply. "And I didn't do it, and only us two and Stapleton Haley knows the combination. There's been a smooth job pulled off here, Lonesome. We'd better send to Jonesville for the sheriff as soon as possible. But first maybe we'd better see whether there's any footprints leadin' off from the commissary. Eh?"

Bentley nodded, and Allison said eagerly:

"Yes; the snow had stopped falling when I closed last night, and the robber couldn't have gone anywhere except to the boarding-house without his footprints giving him away."

It was now light enough for them to see even the track of a rabbit in the snow outside. They walked a wide circle in the clearing, encompassing both the commissary and the boarding-house without coming upon a single footprint that couldn't be easily accounted for. Which was conclusive proof that both the thief and the money were still in camp.

When they had come to the commissary's front doorway again, Bradshaw turned to Bentley with this:

"One of the loggin'-engines ought to have some fire in it from yesterday, Lonesome. Sneak over to the tracks and take one down to Jonesville and bring the sheriff. It's down-grade nearly all the way, and you can raise steam as you go. Hurry!"

Bentley ran to the tracks, leaped aboard one of the geared locomotives and loosed the brakes. The wheels began to turn.

The passing of an hour found him in the foot-hills with a fair head of steam coming on. Two hours after sunrise he was speaking hastily with Garrett Henry, the lanky and serious, blue-clad and broad-hatted Jonesville sheriff.

IT WAS not far from noontime when the thundering staccato of the small, geared engine's laboring exhaust reached the ears of those who waited at the Morgan-Haley camp on Big Brother Creek. The crew had not gone to work in the woods that day. When at last the little locomotive came to a halt in the camp clearing, Garrett Henry and Bentley leaped to the snowy ground and went to meet Superintendent Bradshaw.

"Find out anything more?" growled the officer.

Bradshaw shook his head.

"But the thief is still here, and the money, too. You've got a chance to show us how smart you are, all right!"

Henry merely grunted. The trio walked on and entered the commissary, which was half filled with expectant timberjacks. An accommodating logger passed to the sheriff the peavy that had been used in breaking open the door. Henry looked it over, saw that it was only an ordinary implement of its kind and put it down. Then he and the superintendent and Bentley went back to the safe, where the officer asked questions soberly, nodded a great deal and made a superficial examination. Howling Jim Baskin had followed them; he idly dropped a friendly hand to Lonesome Bentley's arm, and Bentley threw it off as if it were a thing of unspeakable contamination!

"Somebody who knowed the combination," decided Henry.

"It was not," firmly replied Bradshaw.

He himself had vouched for the honesty of Billy Allison.

The sheriff began to strike matches that he might better see into dark corners about the safe. Suddenly he bent lower and picked up a small, square object that was mostly white. As he straightened to bring it into better light—Henry's eyes had never been so good as his courage—a muscular arm in corduroy shot over his shoulder and seized it, and, before the passing of another second, the man to whom that arm belonged was running like a race-horse for the doorway!

It was Howling Jim, who had, by chance, been standing directly behind the officer. Henry snatched his revolver from its holster and called upon Baskin to halt. Half a dozen loggers stepped out of the path of a possible bullet. But Howling Jim didn't stop; he drove through the doorway, turned sharply to his left and out of the sheriff's range of vision and made for the near-by woods.

Henry followed rapidly to the door-sill, and Lonesome Bentley was within a yard of him when he reached it. Then Garrett Henry leveled his revolver at the fleeing figure. Baskin was running unwisely in a straight line, his brown-clad body making a plain and almost stationary target against the dead white of the snow. But before Henry could fire, Bentley caught his right shoulder and pulled him backward.

"Not that!" growled Lonesome, ashen-faced and defiant. "You don't kill Jim Baskin as easy as that!"

When Henry recovered himself, Baskin was in the laurels and his escape assured. The officer now turned his attention to Bentley, and there was a queer smile about his lips.

"Pals, eh?"

"Mighty good pals—" began Lonesome, remembering Nancy Kirkland and breaking off short.

For the fractional part of a minute he looked away at nothing, and, when he again turned his eyes toward the Jonesville sheriff, he found himself staring straight into the muzzle of a Colt .45.

"It's my duty to arrest you," quietly said Garrett Henry, "as a pardner in this robbery."

Lonesome Bentley lived a long time in the moment that followed this announcement. In his mind's eye he saw himself and Nancy—when he had asked her—when she had agreed to marry him. He saw himself and Nancy when they had quarreled over—he didn't remember what. And he saw Howling Jim, his pal, holding the girl's hand while she smiled her best smile into his rugged face. All of it—his bright hopes of a superintendency, the robbery, the accusation and all the rest of it—somehow tangled him, muddled him, dazed him. It seemed unreal, like a bad dream ....

The sheriff was speaking again—

"I'll have to search you, Bentley."

Lonesome gave no sign that he had heard. As Henry began to go through the pockets of his prisoner, Nancy Kirkland walked smilingly into the commissary and turned toward Billy Allison, who now stood in his place behind the counter.

"I want some sug——"

That was as far as she ever got with it, for at that instant she caught sight of the sheriff and Lonesome Bentley. She went immediately toward them.

"What—what's that for?" she demanded in a small, thin voice.

Nobody answered. The officer went on with his slow and exceedingly careful search of Bentley's clothing. Lonesome looked toward her, smiled a tiny smile that seemed desperate rather than merry and turned his gaze aside. Gideon Ashford, who had been watching the entire proceedings with triumph written largely over his dark, countenance, touched Nancy Kirkland's arm and whispered—

"I'll tell ye ef nobody else won't."

With several backward glances toward Bentley the girl went with Ashford to the snow-covered ground outside. There Ashford blew sparks from his home-made cigaret and bent forward with this:

"Lonesome was cunninger'n I thought he was," in low tones. "He was cunning enough to open the commissary safe and take out the six hundred dollars the' was in it and leave it locked up jest like it was afore! It's shore a joke on him—he went and brung the sheriff out and 'en got arrested hisself!"

"He never done the robbin'!" flared Nancy, her brown eyes wide and sparkling with resentment. "He wouldn't never do it!"

Ashford shrugged his ox-like shoulders.

"Forchunitly or onforchunitly, ye don't haf to take my word for it. Look here!"

Through the open door he had seen Garrett Henry unhook a safety-pin from the upper edge of one of Bentley's inside coat pockets and take out a sizeable roll of bank-notes! Ashford stepped hastily back across the door-sill, and Nancy Kirkland followed with a lump in her throat. With one eye still on his prisoner Henry counted the money through, after which he said to Bentley:

"Six hundred, I believe you told me. Here's two hundred and ten. You didn't quite get your share, did you, Lonesome?"

Bentley was still ashen-faced, still defiant. He straightened even a little more.

"You mean that me and Howlin' Jim——"

"I mean that you and Howlin' Jim went pardners in the deal," hazarded the sheriff. "Better confess, Lonesome. It'll go easier with you, you know. Now just how did you and Howlin' manage to get the money without workin' the combination?"

"Charmed it out," drawled Bentley in the keenest sarcasm. He brought his hands up to the lapels of his corduroy coat and with a forefinger rubbed his chin as if reflectively. "One of us stood on each side o' the safe. Howlin' would say, 'Keeno, Presto,' and I'd say, 'Presto, Keeno.' And purty soon the money jest tumbled right out."

Lonesome interrupted himself with a master play. He brought his two hands downward and in one lightning-like movement drove Garrett Henry's revolver fifteen feet out of his grip and seized the roll of two hundred and ten dollars in bank-notes. That money represented Bentley's savings for a year. Henry sprang to recover his weapon, and Lonesome sprang for the outside. As the sheriff ran toward the door with his revolver in his hand, a peavy came hurtling before his legs, tripping him, causing him to fall heavily. When he rose, Bentley was in the laurels.

Seeing that Lonesome, too, had escaped him, the fuming sheriff turned back and stopped squarely before Nancy Kirkland.

"You, too!" he exclaimed. "You throwed the peavy, eh?"

"I shore did," Nancy admitted. "It ain't any secret. What're ye a-goin' to do about it?"

Henry's countenance was threatening—and, considering that morning's run of luck for him, one may hardly blame him.

"I'll arrest you as a—a accomplice; that's what I'm a-goin' to do about it!" he said.

It was then that the camp rose and spoke as a single man.

"I'll be danged ef ye do!"

Henry faced the loggers—loggers who adored Nathan Kirkland's daughter.

"What's that?" he demanded.

"I'll be danged ef ye do!" the camp spoke yet again, and it came a little more determinedly than before.

FOR the first hundred yards after he had gained the snowy underbrush, Bentley's thoughts were occupied wholly with making good his escape. No man of his people had ever been to jail, and he wasn't going so long as he could avoid it. Then, seeing that he was in no immediate danger of capture—the average down-South sheriff knows the hopelessness of chasing a mountaineer in the laurels—Bentley began to wonder what the small white object was that Garrett Henry had found lying under the safe. Soon he decided that he would strike Baskin's trail in the snow, overtake him and find out. Also, he would bring the little matter of Howling Jim's love-making to Nancy to a show-down.

Fifteen minutes more and he had come upon the footprints for which he had been searching. They led him up a bank of the creek for a mile and then turned to the left and were lost on bare ground under a great patch of hemlocks that stood so thickly that their interlaced branches had caught nearly all the snow that had fallen on them. Howling Jim had brought into effect a woodsman's trick here in order to halt possible pursuit, and Lonesome suspected it at once. Lonesome began to look for the answer, and soon his gaze rested upon a spot at which the bare ground ran within half a dozen yards of Big Brother Creek.

Bentley nodded understanding. Just as Baskin had done, he backed off, ran hard and leaped over the few yards of snowy ground, landing somewhere near the middle of the shallow stream.

He walked a mile up the stony little creek before he found Howling Jim's footprints leading out of it. The trail now took him high on the side of Little Brother Mountain and then across an outstanding spur and into a deep cove, and he was not more than half-way down the side of this cove when darkness closed in upon him. It was impossible, of course, for him to follow the string of footprints farther before daylight came again. Lonesome Bentley halted. He was chagrined but by no means beaten. He was cold now. His wet feet seemed frozen, and he stamped them on the ground to help the circulation in them.

It was still, very still, and Lonesome stood and listened. A few minutes later he heard faintly, coming from somewhere in the bottom of the dark cove below him, a snatch of the foolish old song that Howling Jim was so fond of singing in a sort of abandon—

'I'm a-goin' to live, anyhow, till I die!"

Bentley stole softly onward, downward, heading for a tiny point of flame that had suddenly come to life in the woods below.

Howling Jim Baskin sat before a brushwood fire that he had just made at the base of an overhanging cliff. The fire made dancing and grotesque shadows there in the wild forest. Baskin held his wet feet in his wet boots near the flames. The muffled sound of a twig being broken in the snow caused him to look around quickly.

Lonesome Bentley, seeming doubly stalwart and doubly serious in the flickering firelight, walked slowly up and stood looking straight into the upturned and smiling face of his pal. He had suffered an almost overpowering wave of sudden, insensate anger. It was his intention to denounce Howling Jim as a black traitor to all friendship. But in a second's time there flashed on the palimpsest of his brain scenes from the good old days that he and Baskin had spent together, scenes that pictured little kindnesses, confidences, almost tendernesses.

So, when Lonesome finally spoke, he said only this—

"My feet's about froze, Howlin'."

"Shore," grinned Baskin. "Mine was too, by grab! Set down and warm 'ere. Have any trouble a-trackin" me, Lonesome?" His voice was full of gladness.

"Not much," Bentiey answered. He went on, "Do ye reckon Garrett Henry can foller us, Howlin?"

"Him? Humph! No, by grab! He ain't smart enough for that, nor enough used to the woods. But—but they didn't have nothin' agin you, Lonesome!"

Bentley shrugged his shoulders.

"No, nothin'—only-they arrested me as a pardner in the rob'ry; that's all. And they s'arched me and took my money; that's all. But I got it back. Jail? Not for me, Howlin', ef anybody happens to name it to ye!"

He dragged up a flat stone, turned the dry side up, sat down on it and put his feet over the fire. He was at the point of asking Howling Jim what it was that he had snatched from Sheriff Henry's hand, when Baskin said slowly:

"Leather burns quick when it's wet, Lonesome; don't stick 'em too clost. By the way, Lonesome, I got somethin' here what belongs to you."

From an inside coat pocket he drew an opened and unstamped and somewhat crumpled letter that had Bentley's name in a thin, feminine scrawl on the envelope, and this he passed into the hands of his pal.

"I never read it, o' course," he said.

Bentley took the missive and pocketed it almost without looking at it. He had been careful of the few letters Nancy had written him. and it amazed him to think that he had lost one.

"Much obliged, Howlin'," he muttered. "Where'd ye find it?"

"It was that," said Baskin, "that the sheriff picked up from under the commissary safe, which I took from him and run with. I seed the ad-dress afore he did, and I—I knowed you never had no business back there—and I thought—I thought you——"

"I see," cut in Lonesome. "You thought it'd put me in bad about the safe-robbin', and you done it to clear me. Well, it was a fool thing to do, for I never lost the letter there, I'm shore! But—but you——"

He broke off, flushed slightly and began to stir the fire with a boot-heel. Baskin took up the thread that he had dropped:

"Brad had told me jest afore he sent me to ye this mornin', Lonesome, that you was might' nigh shore to be the camp's high-boy purty soon, and I was a-thinkin' about that when I took the letter and cut the mustard for the timber. It'd ha' sp'iled the job for ye, Lonesome, at least. I knowed, y'see, how much ye wanted to be a super. And, as for me," smiling, his eyes twinkling, "I—well, it don't matter about me. 'Cause I'm a-goin' to live, anyhow, till I die! Now ain't I?"

He looked back to the fire. Lonesome turned his gaze hard upon the rugged profile of his pal. So this was the fellow whom he had been about to denounce as a black traitor to their friendship. Lonesome Bentley wished vaguely that he were another man in order that he might kick himself clean across Little Brother Mountain.

"You been mad at me, Lonesome," suddenly said Howling Jim, without taking his eyes from the glowing coals. "It was partly that, too, what made me take the letter and run with it. I wisht I knowed what you been mad at me about, Lonesome."

Bentley told him straightforwardly:

"I seed you a-holdin' Nancy's hand. There on the creek, at the big poplar. It flew all over me like powder a-burnin'; I've died a thousand times sence that one minute, Howlin'. I reckon I ain't got any sense. I reckon ye must ha' had some good reason for a-doin' that, but I shore couldn't see it thataway till now."

Howling Jim sat up straight, smiling.

"I did have a good reason, Lonesome," he said. "That is, I think I did, by grab! I'll leave it to you. Y'see, I could easy tell that somethin' had come between you and her, and I was a-beggin' her to take ye back—and a-tellin' her what a fine, good young man ye was and how much ye liked her and how happy she'd allus be with you!"

"Was—that—it?" gasped Bentley.

"God knows it was," said Baskin.

He went into his corduroy coat and came back with something wrapped neatly in a blue bandanna. Ever so carefully he took the bandanna from it with his big and bungling but wonderfully gentle hands and passed it over to his pal. Lonesome took it and held it up to the dancing firelight. It was an old-fashioned tintype picture of a bareheaded and barefooted mountain lass, a smiling and pretty little mountain lass in calico.

"My sweetheart," Howling Jim said. "This is the only real secret I've ever kept from you, Lonesome. I never talk about it."

"Where is she now?"

"Under the snow."

After a minute of silence Baskin went on: "I ain't never seed nobody else what could take her place, and I know I never will. That's why I go along a-singin' and a-whoopin' through life, jest to forgit, a-doin' the best I can with the little that the Almighty put into my wo'thless cyarcass, for I'm mostly jest plain meat, I reckon. It wasn't much o' my business, I know, Lonesome, for me to go to Nancy and ax her to take ye back. But—well, I thought mebbe——"

"It's all right," said Lonesome. "I thank ye for that, Howlin'. A man never had a better pal 'an you, Howlin'. I shore beg yer pardon for a bein' so low-down mean to ye! Here's the little picture."

He gave Baskin the tintype and rose. He would go straight back to Garrett Henry and tell him everything, though it surely meant jail for him. Baskin put the picture into his pocket, and he, too, went to his feet. Just then there came a most surprizing addition to the little drama there in the snowy wilderness.

THOSE two were not the only men in that wild country who knew woodcraft. An eavesdropper who had stationed himself on the cliff just above had lost his perilous footing, and he now came hurtling down with a resounding thump between Lonesome Bentley and Howling Jim Baskin. The newcomer carried a revolver in a holster, and he wore a deputy's shield on his coat. It was Gideon Ashford.

Lonesome drew back a little as the Big Brother Creek camp's erstwhile bully turned a drawn and ashen face upward.

"You was shore in a devil of a hurry to get here, Gid!" he exclaimed mockingly. "Why couldn't ye jest ha' walked in like a decent white man?"

Baskin forgot himself and raised his foghorn voice:

"Drapped right down out o' the blue sky, by grab! Do ye bring us any glad message from the moon, Gid?"

Ashford struggled there on the ground between them, trying in vain to rise.

"My laig—" he mumbled. "Oh—my laig——"

"By grab!" suddenly cried Howling Jim. "Ef his laig ain't broke plumb in two, might' nigh! Look there, Lonesome—it's all doubled up, and a bone is a-stickin' through below his knee!"

Bentley stooped over and saw, and he shuddered in spite of himself.

"It's a-bleedin'," Ashford said nervelessly; "it's a-bleedin'—Lonesome. You and Howlin' git me to a doctor ef ye can."

"We can, all right," Bentley replied narrowly. "We could simply take ye to the camp, and Super Brad'd shoot ye down to Jonesville on a loggin'-ingine. But you know what's a-waitin' for us at the camp!"

"What—Garrett Henry?"

"Yeuh, Garrett Henry," Baskin nodded. "And maybe a jail sentence or two. Ye cain't ax us to face it, Gid, a-hatin' jail like we does. But we're sorry for ye, 'count o' seein' ye so bad hurt. Though it might ha' sarved ye jest about right for a-snoopin' up there on the clift, a-listenin' to us open our hearts to the bottom. Still, we're sorry for ye, Gid."

"I'm much obliged, shore," tremulously growled Ashford. "But you a-bein' sorry for me don't do me a dang bit o' good!"

"Ef I might ax," drawled Lonesome, pointing to the deputy's shield that Ashford wore, "how comes it that ye're a sportin' that little bright thing on ye coat? 'Cause it's purty?"

At this thrust Gideon Ashford stared silently. His broken limb was beginning to give him excruciating pain now. Baskin winked slyly at his sober-faced pal.

"And he's a-carryin' that .45, I reckon, Lonesome, to keep anybody from a-takin' the badge offen him! Say, Gid, that shore looks to me like Sheriff Henry's gun. How much did he offer ye to bring us in? Tell the truth, or I wisht I may drap dead in my tracks ef I turn a hand to he'p ye. And goodness knows ye're in a bad fix, out here miles from nowhere and not able to walk a step and ready to bleed to death."

Ashford didn't answer. He glanced toward the widening red circle in the snow under his leg, and fear gripped his heart-strings. Lonesome Bentley looked meaningly at Howling Jim.

"We'd better light a rag away from here, Howlin'," said he. "The sheriff might come enny minute. Come on; le's go. Good night to ye, Gid!"

The two turned from the fire, leaving Ashford staring after them with eyes that were afraid and full of pain, and started up the cove in the silent darkness. When they had gone well out of the circle of firelight, Baskin nudged his companion and whispered:

"Do ye really mean to leave him thataway, Lonesome? Wasn't we a little rough to him?"

"We won't go far," Bentley whispered back. "Maybe we was a little rough to him, but it was in self-defense. Don't y'see, Howlin? Ef Gid knows anything about the rob'ry, mebbe he'll tell it as the price of us a-carryin' him to the camp. He knows he'll die here, and jail is allus better'n death to a skunk. I got a notion Gid is the robber hisself, Howlin', 'cause he's the only man in the outfit what's low-down enough to pull off a job like that."

"I've wondered ef it could possibly ha' been Billy Allison. He's sort o' light-headed. Lonesome, a-bein' not much more'n a boy. How could Gid ha' got the safe open?"

"Ax somebody else. I don't know. But——"

A jerking, agonized yell from Gideon Ashford cut Bentley's speech short:

"Lonesome, come back! I'll make it safe for ye at the camp!"

The two pals turned and walked slowly to the now low-burned fire. Ashford stopped his groaning long enough to suggest that they carry him to the edge of the camp clearing and leave him there. They wouldn't listen, and Ashford began to groan again. Finally he broke down completely.

"Take me to Garrett Henry," he begged, "and I'll clear ye both. It was me that robbed the safe. It was me that drapped the letter there at the safe, but I didn't do it a-purpose. I never knowed I'd lost it till Henry found it. I hid the six hundred dollars in the up-stairs o' the boardin'-house. Nancy, she handed me that letter to give to you, Lonesome, and I—I——"

"Opened it and read it," clipped Bentley, "like skunks allus does. Go on wi' the cat-killin'. How did ye git in the safe, Gid?"

"I watched Billy Allison when he put the money in it the night afore," confessed the pain-wracked Ashford, "and he—I seed that the fool boy'd forgot to lock it! Hurry, Lonesome, for I'm a-hurtin' awful, and I'd ruther go to jail 'an to die out here in the cold."

"Well, by grab!" almost shouted Howling Jim Baskin as he knelt to fashion a blue bandanna tourniquet for Ashford's torn and bleeding limb.

While Baskin worked with the injured man, Lonesome took Nancy's letter from his pocket, the letter that he had thought an old one, and read it by the firelight. In it Nancy declared that she had hardly slept since she had broken her engagement with him and asked him to forgive her, if he could, for having been such a fool. Bentley's heart leaped almost to his throat, and his smile was broad as he remembered that he had once started to her to beg her forgiveness for that same white little sin.

FIFTEEN days later, more or less, there came a bright and sunny Sunday afternoon when the snow was all gone. Bentley and Nancy walked up the woods path that led from old Nathan Kirkland's hewn-log cabin, entered the grassy clearing that held the logging-camp on Big Brother Creek and went to the boarding-house porch. There they turned to face smilingly some thirty stalwart timberjacks who had just broken off their usual Sunday afternoon horse-play to watch them.

"Boys," began the strong young man on the porch, removing his broad-brimmed hat with a rather grandiose sweep of his right hand, "I beg permission to interduce Missis Superintendent Lonesome Bentley. Wish us well, boys!"

At first there was a mere murmur of sound among the loggers; then a ripple—then a wild and hearty yell rose from their throats and shattered itself against the two mountainsides. Bentley began to look the loggers over a trifle anxiously. Where was Howling Jim? He had invited Baskin to be present at his wedding, but Baskin hadn't promised. A hundred times before he had located his pal by merely listening for him; so now he raised a hand for silence, and silence came.

From somewhere high on the laurel-covered breast of the everlasting Big Brother there came to the ears of those in the valley a half-sad voice lifted up in a sort of abandon:

"Ye may break-a my bones with-a sticks and stones—
I'm a-goin' to live, anyhow, till I die!"