The Joyous Trouble Maker/Chapter 6
CHAPTER VI
STEELE'S CACHE
"HAVIN' et your grub, Mr. Steele," observed Turk Wilson when at last his back was again to the big tree and his great bladed knife had returned to his pocket from its latest assault upon his slab of tobacco, "it would sure go against the grain if me an' Bill had to throw you off the ranch forcible. Let's talk."
"Mr. Wilson," responded Steele gravely and in the coin of Turk's own courtesy, "you are a man of parts. We'll talk."
He stretched himself out full length on the ground by the freshly replenished fire which cast its red, companionable glow upon three contented faces. With an elbow sunk in the short grass, his head propped up upon his palm, his pipe puffing slowly, he was in a softened mood and, like Turk, with no stomach for violent cross purposes. Bill Rice, squatting upon the heels of his heavy boots, treating himself to the dregs of the black coffee, nodded his pleasure in the amicable hour.
"To begin with then," continued Steele genially, "I have come to stay and I am going to stay for some little time. Furthermore, I have a perfect right to do so, without offering any explanations. But, because Bill Rice here is a mighty good friend of mine and because I want Turk Wilson for a friend, too, I am going to tell you boys something that isn't very well known yet. I am at this minute on my own land."
No change came into Turk Wilson's red, immobile face. Bill Rice, however, showed his surprise frankly at the information.
"How's that come about, Steele?" he demanded.
"Very naturally, Bill," answered Steele. "But we're not here for the discussion of unnecessary details, are we? All we need to go into at present is that the ground you're squatting on, with eighty acres including the Goblet yonder and a nice little stretch of timber land, belongs to me."
"If you was most any other man I know," said Bill Rice after his own blunt fashion, "I'd say liar to you, Steele."
"But since I am not any other man you know I am giving it to you straight, eh, Bill? Thanks, old man."
Rice discarded his cup, scratched his head and finally shrugged his ample shoulders.
"Well, Turk," he said thoughtfully, "I guess we're through? Ed Hurley musta got his signals mixed."
"My orders," muttered Turk, "was to run him out. Especial if he was Bill Steele. Orders straight from Ed an' he got 'em straight from the Queen. When I take a man's pay … yes, or a woman's … I always obey orders. Always did."
He stopped. Both Steele and Bill Rice watched him interestedly, awaiting the next words. But Turk Wilson, having set himself his proposition, took his own time in working it out. For full five minutes there was only the cheerful sound of the crackling fire to speak through the thunder of falling waters, voicing the presence of men.
"You said it, Bill," announced Turk at last. "You said if he was any other man than Bill Steele you'd name him a liar. Seein' as it's funny Ed Hurley an' Miss Corliss don't know her own land yet. Not meanin' anything to stir up bad blood, but jus' thinkin' as a man does, how do I know Steele ain't lyin'?"
He had set the matter fairly enough, offering no occasion for resentment. Steele felt none. Rather was he humorously disposed to watch for the solution of Turk's self-imposed problem. Bill Rice, rocking back and forward on his heels, gave the matter its due consideration.
"What if I told you, Turk," he said after a little, "that we made a mistake? That you an' me, right now, is trespassin' on Bill Steele's place?"
"But do you tell me that?" asked the cautious Turk. "Honest an' true, cross your heart?"
Bill Rice, still a trifle uncertain, looked across the fire to his old friend, the man who had asked no questions but accepted the half of Bill Rice's quarrel down in Mexico. Steele, meeting his look frankly, nodded. Bill Rice turned again to Turk.
"Yes," he then answered Turk's direct question. "Bill Steele's word is good enough for me to tie my word to. This here is his land, Turk, but I'm teetotally damned if I sabe the play."
Turk waved his hand widely.
"That makes no never mind," he announced calmly. "I guess that's Steele's business an' it ain't ours. The rest is up to Ed an' the Queen."
He sighed, stretched his thick arms above his towselled head, yawned widely and rose to his feet. He had ended this first conference at Hell's Goblet and the darkness was thickening.
"It's a half mile to our camp, Bill," he reminded his companion. "An' I've a notion to travel before it gets any darker so's not to break my neck on a rock pile. G' night, Steele."
"Good night, Wilson," said Steele.
Rising with Bill Rice he put out his hand.
"I'm much obliged, Bill," he said quietly.
Rice, as their hands met, stood looking Steele squarely in the eye for a long moment.
"It looks funny, damn' funny, to me," he said slowly, "I always thought this was her land. Hurley always thought so, an' it's open an shut she ain't sold to you! Dead sure you ain't made a mistake, Steele?"
"Dead sure, Bill."
"Then," said Rice, "good night."
And he followed Turk Wilson's disappearing form into the deeper darkness where what they were pleased to term a trail led down to their camp. When both men were gone from sight Steele was chuckling in anticipation of complications ahead. But, with his own camp preparations still before him he turned back to his fire, threw on an armful of dead branches and set about making his bed.
Tomorrow he would cut fir boughs for his mattress; tonight he was content to spread his blankets out upon the mat of dry needles the winds had shaken from the waving limbs above him. Selecting a spot which suited his fancy he went whistling about his task, the bit of canvas which had served as outside wrapper for his bedding placed down first for warmth, his saddle dragged into place for pillow, his rifle in its case just under the outer edge of his blankets less through a desire to have it handy than through long habit. He drew off his boots, completed his simple preparations for the night, slipped in between his blankets with a big sigh of content.
"When a man can have this sort of thing for nothing," he mused quite as he had done many a time before, quite as many another man had done before Bill Steele came down into the world, "why does he sweat for money to buy himself electric lights that are not in it with the stars, music that tries to copy and can't touch the sound of falling water, a bed that isn't in the same class with a pile of fresh fir boughs or a heap of pine needles?"
The thoughts of a contented man on the verge of drowsing are not usually logically connected.
"That Turk Wilson is a man, a real man," he pondered. "I don't know that either Napoleon or Richard of the Lion Heart had much on him. … I wonder how little Trixie is going to accept the news?"
And as he went to sleep, conscious of something tranquilly maternal in the brooding solitudes about him, his last thought was of the vanished mother who, when Billy Steele was a very little boy, had held him in her arms before she tucked him in for the good night kiss. The faint breeze which found its gentle way here through the forest and world of rocks touched his hair like her fingers. …
In the keen dawn he was joyously awake. His clothes caught up under one arm, he ran down to a pool whose waters were lambs to the roaring lions of the Goblet, poised a moment in white nakedness upon a favourite flat rock, then leaped out and down, gone from the sight of a curious and chattering chipmunk in the spray his own big body flung upward. He beat his way across the ten-foot-wide pool, threshing the water mightily, feeling it laid like ice against him, turned, swam back with vigorous strokes, emerged and climbed upward along the rocks, dripping, warm, laughing, his chest swelling deeply, his blood running gloriously.
"… and for bath tubs," he completed last night's contented musings, "when neither king nor queen can buy better than this!"
Breakfast, both in the preparation and in the eating, was a sheer joy. The smell of frying bacon set him sniffing with a keenness of natural desire, the aroma of coffee in a black and battered pot whose spout and handle had long ago joined the army of the unnecessary luxuries, mingled in perfect harmony with the other incenses of the camp fire. The flapjacks, mixed with water and fried in sizzling hot bacon grease, were in Steele's mind quite the brownest, most fascinating flapjacks it had ever been his pleasure to encounter. Fascinating, no less; brown, tempting beauties.
The morning meal done with, his pipe going, Steele set his camp in order, made experienced provision against a destructive inroad of forest rodents and prepared to take stock of a five-years'-old cache. Last night he had had but the brief time to fumble in the gloom for his coffee pot; today all time was his.
First with a long, searching look directed down stream, then through the woods on either hand to make sure that neither Bill Rice nor Turk Wilson was on the way to pay him an early call, he turned westward, crossed his little plateau and passed down through the boulders, drawing closer to Hell's Goblet. Here the ravine in which were cradled the beginnings of Thunder River was steep sided, granite walled and narrow. Beyond and above the Goblet Steele came to a flat topped rock, overhanging the rugged waterway, whence a man, did he care to take the chance of death below, might have leaped across. But the chance was not one to be accepted lightly, not to be considered without a little shiver along the spine. Looking down, straight down, one saw an inferno of mad waters and jagged rocks.
He passed on, watchful of each step now, clinging to the rocks with hands and feet, continuing to work his way upstream even while he sought to draw constantly nearer the stream below. The sun was up, brightening the tree tops, but no direct rays came to him now as he found the old way down to the stream's riotous edge. In a little strip of wet sand were the tracks made by his boots last night. Here he stopped again to look about him, to make certain that no one watched as he went to his secret place.
Just here the cañon widened, here the water spread out and ran something more placidly, here, to mark each marge, was a pigmy beach of sand and polished stones. Both above and below the rock walls drew in towards each other so that they were little more than a score of feet apart; here was a circular space three times a score of feet in diameter.
Steele followed the tracks he had made last night; later on he would obliterate them as he had no mind to leave them pointing out his cache to the first chance comer. After this he would come down a longer way, leaving no sign of his passing upon the granite blocks and slabs. In after times the spot to which he now was going would be known rather widely as Steele's Cache; he had found it, he had used it, he had kept it his secret and now he counted it in every sense his own.
A half dozen paces further and he left the sandy margin of the stream, beginning to climb again; his body pressed tight against the rock wall. Here, underfoot, was the natural semblance of a path, never wider than twelve inches, often barely allowing foothold. Upon the cañon's sides were occasional bushes, infrequently patches of brush driving hardy roots into soil filled fissures. By gripping a ledge above his head and drawing himself up, Steele came into one of these clumps of mountain brush, to his cache and its hidden door. Hidden because in the rocks there was but the small uneven opening masked by the bushes and further sealed years ago by a slab of stone he himself had dragged into place.
With a final sweeping glance which took in the widened, circular bed of the river and the opposite bank, he set his eager hands to the rock which he had replaced last night, drew it aside, went down on his hands and knees and squirmed in through the narrow passage-way. On all fours he passed through a downward slanting natural tunnel, darkness thick about him, chuckling as he went at the memory of his first coming here when he had wondered what sort of lair he was sticking his fool head into.
Presently he stood up, though still must he crouch, still was the darkness opaque about him. From his pocket he took the little electric flash light which he had bought in San Francisco in a moment alive with anticipation. As its circle of light now leaped out before him he stood regarding the walls of the cavern into which he had entered with a quick eyed satisfaction. Since the child has been father to the man there has never yet lived the man who could not draw lively interest from a spot such as this.
About him the broken floor was strewn with fallen bits of stone, and with the small and shattered bones of such unfortunate woodland beings as had come hither in the strong jaws of wild cat or moimtain lion. The rock floor itself plunged downward steeply, the walls showed ancient water action, the roof was sculptured by time's patient tools into odd, grotesque shapes which as Steele's light found them seemed to take life into their cold shapes, to swell their iron lungs with slow breathing.
He went on and down. At last he could stand erect; in a moment he could not reach the stone ceiling with his finger tips. The cave widened until it was a rude, irregular room; narrowed so that as he walked he could brush the rock at both sides with his elbows; widened again after a long, winding, still descending passage-way. And now at length, when he was again at a level with the tumbling waters in the river bed, did the cavern open up to its greatest size and did he come into fresher air, a subdued light and view of his "plunder" secreted five years ago.
In this lofty cavern a man might have built himself a house of half a dozen rooms. Ages ago … how many, Steele wondered … the water had found its way in here, and never resting had toiled through the little seconds which were drawn out into long centuries, breaking down, bearing away, wearing smooth with its fine chisels of sand and particles.
At the side of the cave furthest from the river was a pile of familiar objects. Steele went to it, picking out details in the circle of his light. An axe with blade rusted a bit, pick and shovel, a half dozen cooking utensils, black from many fires, a coil of rope, some loops of wire, a jumble of odds and ends from his last camp at Hell's Goblet.
"Just as I left them," was his thought. "Just as a man could count upon their remaining not five years but five hundred after he put them there. … And telling me that no one had come here since I came."
The thought brought its contentment.