The Joyous Trouble Maker/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
INTO THE WILDERNESS
BEATRICE CORLISS, when Steele had gone down the mountain roadway to the stable for his horse, turned back to her office table. The man's word of what he meant to do was of course, like the man himself, absurd. A big block of land was not to be stolen as though it were a pocket handkerchief. Still her eyes were frowning. His air of cheerful certainty was disquieting despite her conviction that he could do nothing. His voice had rung with a seemingly outspoken sincerity which troubled and puzzled her.
For perhaps fifteen minutes she sat before her table motionless, seeking to explain to herself the purpose of Steele's empty vaunt. If his own account of himself were truthful and he was a mining engineer and before now had prospected through the Hell's Goblet country, then it was more than merely probable that he had found gold there. The Little Giant mine, now running full blast and profitably, was only a half dozen miles from the Goblet across the ridge. It would not be surprising if Steele had stumbled upon a strike. This would explain his desire for the land.
But it fell short of the explanation she sought. Steele's positive statement that he meant to have the land in question willy-nilly, with her good will if that were forthcoming, without it if need be, was quite another matter. It might be just his misshapen idea of a further "joke." Was he seeking, as he would have expressed it, "to throw a scare into her, also for the good of her soul"? Or did he mean what he said and did he know what he was talking about?
When, still puzzling over the matter, she went again to her outer door she saw Steele down in the valley riding a bay, white stockinged horse toward the upper end of the valley. That way lay the Little Giant and the new mining town of Camp Corliss beyond … that way, also, lay the Goblet country.
With sudden inspiration the girl turned back into her office, took from its case in her table drawer a pair of field glasses, and with them in her hand hastened through the house, coming out at the back into a little flower garden just under a line of low granite cliffs. She hurried through the flowers, came to a steep path cut long ago into the rocky wall and mounting swiftly mounted after a breathless moment to the old lookout. Here, at the top of the slight precipice, was a level space some twenty paces across where were benches and a rustic table under an open pavilion like that in front of which Steele had sat earlier in the day. From here one might have a fuller, wider sweep of valley land and broken mountain. What was more to the present purpose, from here the girl could pick up with her glasses the spote where the Goblet trail branched off to the right from the Little Giant road.
Steele had disappeared, but in a moment rode again into view passing beyond a grove of river poplars. She focussed her glasses upon him. Before she marked anything else she noted how he rode. It was as her own outdoors men rode, with a seat which, while it seemed loosely careless, was both sure and confident. His horse was in high spirit, dancing out of the way of a wind blown leaf, snorting its distrust of a bobbing rabbit, ready in a flash to whirl and plunge to this side or that. And yet, ever across the lengthening distance intervening, it was patent that a firm hand on the reins was amply competent to cope with the caprice of a half broken four-year-old, while the big body in the saddle moved in unison with the animal as though the two were co-ordinating parts of one organism.
He had not yet reached the parting of the ways. Now she took stock of what things he carried with him. Under his knee, in its case, was a gun, rifle probably. She fancied that strapped to it was a second case containing the sections of a fishing rod. Behind his saddle, done up in a compact bundle, was a roll of blankets; from the moment she saw them she was certain that he would turn off at the trail.
He was lost to her as he rode down closer to the river, hidden by the fringe of trees. She would not be able to see him again until he had traversed another five hundred yards. Her brows contracted with her impatience; his careless leisureliness irritated her quite as though he had known she was watching him and in order to anger her had refused to hasten.
She turned from him, looking toward the lower valley. She did not require her glasses to see an automobile approaching from the direction of White Rock. Her guests were coming already.
With increased impatience she turned again toward Steele. She must be at the house to meet her friends and the man was so annoyingly slow.
But at length he appeared again, galloping now.
"That's the first decent thing you've done today, Bill Steele," she murmured. "Hurry, will you?"
Steele hurried on. At a swinging gallop he passed along the winding road, hidden to her now and then by a tree or a shoulder of the ridge, riding into view again in a moment, the bulk of him growing smaller with the distance. At last he had come to the foot of the trail which passed to the right and into the southern half of the ranch. The girl watched breathlessly. Steele swerved his horse into the trail.
"He is going straight to Hell's Goblet!" she said sharply. "Whatever his game is, that man means business!"
And so did the young queen of Thunder River ranch. She waited no longer to watch him, gave but a speeding glance to the two automobiles now in full view in the valley. Running down the steep rocky pathway, she hastened to her office and her table telephone.
She rang three bells, a call for Ed Hurley at the Little Giant and, while waiting for his voice, set her finger to the bell set in her table. To Bradford, who came immediately, she said briefly:
"I want Booth Stanton. Just as quick as he can get here."
Hurley was in his little office, having barely returned from his talk with her. She gave him his orders without wasting words or time:
"Send a couple of your best men immediately into the Goblet country," she said coolly. "Your best men, understand? They are to remain there until further orders. Their chief duty is to see that no trespassers come onto the land; in particular if they find a man there who calls himself William Steele, they are to see that he gets off of my property and stays off. Further, they are to prospect every inch of that section for gold; there's gold there."
Leaving Hurley without any further information, she clicked up the transmitter, waited a second, then rang White Rock and asked for the telegraph office.
"This is Miss Corliss of the Queen's Ranch," she said in answer to the operator's "Hello." "Take a message, please. To Attorney Stuart Rollins, Merchants' Exchange, San Francisco. Look immediately into ranch title. Especially extreme southeast section. Is anything wrong? Signed, Beatrice Corliss."
The first of the two touring cars was already upon the lower grade. She glanced swiftly at the clock upon the opposite wall. Then Stanton, walking quickly, came in at her door.
"What do you know of William Steele?" she demanded.
"The reporter?" asked Stanton.
"He is not a reporter," she retorted. "Who said that he was? Did he tell you so?"
"No. Bradford—"
"It seems," she interrupted icily, "that all the men I have about me are fools! That man Steele is a mining engineer, and he is here because he is after gold. Do you know anything about a miner named Steele?"
"Yes," said Stanton stiffly. "A good deal by hearsay. I have never seen him, though."
"You saw him today. I haven't time now for a lot of hearsay. What sort of man is he, do you know that?"
"Not first hand. His reputation is that of a square sort of chap."
Beatrice sniffed.
"I'm scarcely interested in his morals. Does he amount to anything out among men? Is he just a loud talker or does he mean what he says? Has he ever done anything?"
"He's done some rather big things, I believe. He hasn't the name of being a wind bag, if that is what you mean. Ed Hurley knows him; Hurley has mentioned him to me. Ed thinks he is a big man in his way."
"In the way of a boor!" cut in Beatrice. "That is all, Stanton. I'll get further information from Hurley when I have time for it. I have just instructed him to see that William Steele refrains from trespassing on my property. You will co-operate with him in the matter."
Then, as the first car rolled into the open court Beatrice drove the puzzled look from her eyes, summoned an expression of welcoming gaiety which was not entirely spontaneous, and hurried out.
Three young women in motor veils and two men in goggles greeted her, the women effusively and with skilfully hidden envy, the men warmly and with admiration in their eyes. While the car rolled away these stood in the courtyard awaiting the coming of the second automobile. One of the men, a keen eyed, massive jawed man of forty with a touch of grey at the temples and an air of quiet, confident mastery, whose manner bespoke his habitual experience of getting what he wanted, grasped a moment of much chattering to say quietly to Beatrice:
"I heard in White Rock that a man named Steele, William Steele, had ridden out this way. Not a friend of yours, is he?"
Quickly she lifted interested eyes to his.
"No. I have just met him today. Do you know him then, Mr. Embry?"
"I know something of him," said Embry as quietly as before. "Rather a good deal. Is he still here?"
"No. Tell me, what sort of a man is he?"
"Not just the kind I'd like to see hanging around you," was Embry's rejoinder. "He's a crook, Miss Corliss; look out for him."
Then the others came and Joe Embry turned with his hostess toward them.
So William Steele was just plain crook, then? Joe Embry had said so, and Joe Embry was a man in whose opinions Beatrice Corliss placed more faith than in most men's. A boor first, a crook next. And she had let him lunch with her, he had had the assurance to behave toward her as he might have acted with a shop girl!
Could Steele have read her thoughts he must have been surprised that, while greeting her guests, she could give him so great a place in them. But William Steele, having pondered upon her more than he realized since leaving the ranch house, had now other matters to occupy him. In the first place this trail turning off into the mouth of the cañon was one little travelled and none too well remembered by him. Not for full five years had he ridden it, it was crossed and recrossed by numerous stock trails, the simplest matter in the world being for a man to lose it and after an hour's mistaken travel find himself at the end of a blind path in some tangle of brush. Unless he meant to be the entire afternoon in coming to the spot where he had planned to camp he must keep his wits about him.
"Five years," he mused, even while his eyes, running far ahead, picked up the monument of a flat stone upon a trailside rock marking the way for him, "and it's as safe as if it were tucked away in the United States treasury! I guess, old man, you wouldn't have plunged quite so recklessly if you hadn't had this to come back to. Lord, won't little Trixie throw a fit!"
The thought seemed to tickle his own sort of a sense of humour, for he chuckled his amused satisfaction with the probable approaching condition of affairs. But when he had reached the rock sign-post his eyes were merely keen and watchful again. A herd of young steers just ahead of him had trampled out all sign of path in a little grassy meadow and he was uncertain. Somewhere hereabouts the trail left the bed of the cañon, climbing steeply to mount and cross the ridge, making the short cut to the Goblet. To be sure it was no great matter if he for a little lost his way; inevitably he must come to the particular spot he had set his mind upon since he had his general directions. But to a man like Steele, who knew more of the mountains than of city streets, it was a deeply pleasant sensation to find that, even after five years, he could follow on old, once travelled trail.
He reined in his horse, eased himself sideways in the saddle and sat for a little, sending his questing regard this way and that along the rugged, timbered slopes. The trees were big here about him, pine and fir and an occasional cedar, rising upon splendid, tapering boles a hundred, a hundred and fifty feet against the blue sky, filling the cañon with a pleasant duskiness. In the open spaces between the thick trunks the lush grass was dotted with the spring's blue and yellow flowers, threaded with thin streams, trampled by browsing cattle. Stamped cleanly and freshly at the edge of a sand-bedded rivulet where no cattle tracks had obliterated it was the hoof print of a big buck. Steele's eyes brightened. From far off on the mountainside he heard the liquid call of a quail.
"And we build ourselves thick walled houses to shut all of this out!" he muttered. "God, it's good to be back! Bill Steele, listen to me: this time you're going to stay put."
He had quite forgotten to seek his trail. But now, the memory of the bigger, vaster, more solitary woods of the Goblet country upon him, their murmurous voices calling to him across the five years of absence, he again sought the way that led to them. He swerved to the right, crossed the floor of the cañon, reined in again at the foot of the slope where were fewer big trees, wider spaces between where mountain brush and boulders allowed the vision wider range. Again the light of satisfaction came into his eyes. Yonder, a short distance ahead and higher up, was a landmark to be remembered, two giant cedars standing straight and close together, a long splinter of granite wedged in between them and gripped securely for many long years to come, lifted twenty feet above the ground.
"Hello, old boys," laughed Steele. "I remember you, all right. No, I'm not going to stop to answer your riddle today, but I'm just as much obliged to you."
For the Goblet trail ran close to their trunks and from this point on there need be no hesitation. Steele swung down from the saddle. Leading his horse over the uneven ground, climbing in as straight a line as slope and brush would permit, he came in ten minutes to the cedars and their imprisoned rock. A moment he laid a big hand against a massive bole, looking up into the gnarled branches quite as one might turn glad eyes upon the weathered visage of an old friend. Then again he mounted, riding toward the south, keeping well up on the mountainside.
Half an hour later he passed over the ridge and dropped down into a country which had grown abruptly wilder, more rugged, infinitely eloquent of solitude. Beyond and below stretched away the big timber which man had left in its own dark browed dignity because its stronghold stood behind bulwarks of mountains which had defied the making of roads. As he rode down to the rim of the thickening forest the whispering of its countless million singing tongues set the strings vibrating in his own heart. Only the crooning of the tree tops, the music of distant water splashing on glistening rocks, the breaking of dead sticks under the shod hoofs of the horse of him who entered the peaceful kingdom, and Steele filled his lungs and felt his blood stir pleasantly.
At last the boom of Thunder River was again in his ears and he was near his journey's end. This ridge, down which he rode slowly, was a long spur about which the river whirled in a six-mile-long horseshoe; he, in crossing it, was taking that short cut which lay between its source and the valley lands below the Corliss home. And yet, with at last the flash of turbulent water in his eyes, there lay the final three miles of broken lands before he came to his camp site at the Goblet. But already he counted the matter accomplished. The way, though uneven, was not to be mistaken. He had but to ride down to the river and turn upward along its course, keeping to the right bank when once he had forded it. In an hour or an hour and a quarter he would be unsaddling, then screwing the sections of his rod together as the first step toward supper.
Supper alone in the big timber! The prospect set him whistling like any boy off for a holiday. Potatoes from his scanty larder, jostling with onions and dried fruit deep within his roll of blankets, to be covered with coals and hot ashes at the rim of his fire, trout to sizzle and sputter and grow brown before exacting eyes, coffee to bubble and send forth its tempting aroma from a treasured, spoutless and very black coffee pot. And the coffee pot itself? It awaited him at Hell's Goblet!
"For I'll bet a man the shirt off my back," was Steele's contented thought, "that the stuff I cached there five years ago hasn't so much as come under the prying eyes of a chipmunk. By the Lord, I'm getting home!"
Bigger and bigger, ever taller and more darkly august grew the trees as he rode on down into the narrow valley, duskier the woodland gloom, sweeter the spring air sprinkled with woodsy incense. When an unseen deer went crashing through the brush and struck out, splashing mightily, through the river just beyond a thick clump of red willows, Steele nodded his head in acceptance of a sound he could have expected and looked forward to with an agreeable sense of the fitness of things. Only some eight or nine miles from the Corliss ranch house, little more than half that distance from the Little Giant where men sweated and thundered the silences with blasts of dynamite and black powder, here was the wilderness in untroubled supremacy. It seemed to him that here the forestland possessed a conscious entity, a sentient personality that it breathed as he himself breathed, taking its bright joy from the sense of living, that its mighty breath touched his hair and enfolded him in an ineffable caress.
"It's because I'm ripe for it," thought Steele.
He rode swiftly along the grass-grown trail where speed was possible, slowly when must be, eager now to come to his camp site before the true dusk of day's end merged with that which broods always over the forest. At a well remembered ford he pushed his horse across the stream, knowing that further up there could be no crossing because of steep, water gouged rocky banks. In a little meadow where a tributary stream and thick rich grass promised the best of pasturage he unsaddled, tethering his horse with a twenty-foot rope. The saddle with its pack thrown over his shoulder, he hastened on upstream on foot.
Now he clambered over piled and strewn boulders, always climbing steeply. The din of the water swelled into a thunderous roar as it flashed out and down in a series of white waterfalls. But impatiently he pushed on, breathing deeply, spurred by the knowledge that in ten minutes he could throw down his saddle and call the day's work done.
In that ten minutes he penetrated the very citadel of solitude. Between great boulders ten, fifteen feet high, over fallen slabs of granite, under occasional monster pines, at last along a little-used deer trail leading back from the river and to a small, grassy, timbered table-land. Upon a sun-dried mat of fallen pine needles he dropped his saddle, and with a deep sigh of utter content turned toward the west. Yonder, still an hour high above the wooded ridge, was the sun. There, catching only infrequently the sun's slant rays, lay the source of Thunder River. And here, to be seen at its best from where he stood, only a hundred yards from him, was Hell's Goblet.
Those who come first into such spots are not men who carry subtle fancies in their brains or golden similes or the tenderer poetical growths. Rude men, roughed by the frontiers, they father a rude nomenclature. Devil's Slide, Fool's Peak, Shirt Tail Cañon, Yankee Jim's, Hang Town, such are the names which sprinkle the western mountain country, names given out of hand which cling on as a memory of an earlier day. Hell's Goblet might have been christened otherwise and more gently, perhaps more befittingly, but it never was.
It was a great granite bowl measuring some twenty-five or thirty feet across filled with eddy-churned, white, angry water, fed from a full stream which plunged down into it from the rocks above, which whipped at the troubled surface night and day, which had lashed the restless waters into white froth and flying spray throughout the ages. And as the stream hurled itself into the monster cup in a frenzied orgy of liquid flashing and thunderous sound, so did it pour itself out over the worn rim, to fall echoing into the pools below. If in the wide woods through which Steele had ridden there held the calm and peace of the solitude, then here was that other expression of the wilderness, the passionate heart of the wild itself.
"And here," mused Steele, his hat off, the cañon air stirring his hair, in his eyes the sombre tints of the forest, the glint of tumbling water, the cloudless blue of the sky, "do I begin my holiday. Thank God I went broke as soon as I did! Old goblet, fuss and fume and sputter and boil over all you please; you are mine now! Tonight you'll sing me to sleep, tonight we'll light up the stars for our candles while we use the world for a pillow! A royal welcome for your liege lord, old fellow, Bill Steele, King of the Universe! What have we to do with petty Queens?"
As though in answer to him there came, faint in his ears through the din of the water, a man's voice shouting to him. Steele's eyes darkened as they had not darkened that day, clouded to an anger such as the man seldom experienced. For the moment he was, in sober earnest, as a king into the privacy of whose meditations some offending mortal had intruded.
"I don't believe in being inhospitable," he grumbled deep in his throat, "but they'll just have to clean out and leave us alone, old goblet."
There were two of them and he turned to watch as they came on toward him across the tableland.