The Snowshoe Trail. Edison Marshall
country in search of my fiance, Mr. Harold Lounsbury, of whom doubtless you have heard, and who disappeared in the Clearwater district six years ago. I will be accompanied by Mr. Lounsbury's uncle, Kenly Lounsbury, and I wish you to secure the outfit and a man to cook at once. You will be paid the usual outfitter's rates for thirty days. We will arrive in Bradleyburg September twentieth by stage. Yours sincerely, Virginia Tremont.
Bill finished the note, pocketed it carefully, and a boyish light was in his eyes as he shook fragrant tobacco into his pipe. "The way out," he told himself. "She won't care if I do my prospecting the same time."
His thought swung back to a scene of many Septembers before, of a camp he had made beside a distant stream and of a wayfarer who had eaten of his bread and journeyed on—never to pass that way again. There had been one curious circumstance connected with the meeting, otherwise it might not have lingered so clearly in Bill's memory. It had seemed to him, at the time, that he had encountered the stranger on some previous occasion. There was a haunting familiarity in his face, a fleeting memory that he could not trace or identify. Yet nothing in the stranger's past life had offered an explanation. He was a newcomer, he said—on his first trip north. Bill, on the other hand, had never gone south. It had been but a trick of the imagination, after all. And Bill did not doubt that he was the man for whom the girl sought.
The little lines seemed to draw and deepen about the man's eyes. "Six years—but six years is too long, for Clearwater," he murmured. "Men either come out by then, or it gets 'em. I'm afraid she'll never find her lover."
He went to make arrangements with Fargo, the merchant, about supplies. At midnight he sat alone in the little lobby of the inn; all the other townsmen had gone. The fire was nearly out; a single lamp threw a doubtful glow on the woodsman's face. His thoughts had been tireless to-night. He couldn't have told why. Evidently some little event of the evening, some word that he had not consciously noticed had been the impulse for a flood of memories. They haunted him and held him, and he couldn't escape from them.
His thought moved in great circles, always returning to the same starting point—the tragedy and mystery of his own boyhood. He knew perfectly that there was neither pleasure nor profit in dwelling upon this subject. In the years that he had had his full manhood he had tried to force the matter from his thoughts, and mostly he had succeeded. Self-mastery was his first law, the code by which he lived; and mostly the blue devils had lifted their curse from him. But they were shrieking from the gloom at him to-night. In the late years some of the great tranquility of the forest had reposed in him and the bitter hours of brooding came ever at longer intervals. But to-night they held him in bondage.
It was twenty-five years past and he had been only a child when the thing had happened. He had been but seven years old—more of a baby than a child. He smiled grimly as the thought went home to him that childhood, in its true sense, was one stage of life that he had missed. He had been cheated of it by a remorseless destiny; he had been a baby, and then he had been a man. There were no joyous gradations between. The sober little boy had sensed at once that the responsibilities of manhood had been thrust upon him, and he must make good. After all, that was the code of his life—to take what destiny gave and stand up under it.
If the event had occurred anywhere but in the North, the outcome might have been wholly different. Life was easy and gentle in the river bottoms of the United States. Women could make a brave fight unaided; even fatherless boys were not entirely cheated of their youth. Besides, in these desolate wastes the code of life is a personal code, primitive emotions have full sway, and men to not change their dreams from day to day. Constancy and steadfastness are the first impulses of their lives; neither Bill nor his mother had been able to forget or to forgive. Here was an undying ignominy and hatred; besides—for the North is a far-famed keeper of secrets—the mystery and the dreadful uncertainty, haunting like a ghost. As a little boy he had tried to comfort his mother with his high plans for revenge; and she had whispered to him, and cried over him, and pressed him hard against her; and he had promised, over and over again, that when manhood came to him he would right her wrongs and his own. He remembered his pathetic efforts to comfort her, and it had never occurred to him that he had been in need of comforting himself. He had been a sober, wistful-eyed little boy, bearing bravely the whole tragic weight upon his own small shoulders.
The story was very simple and short—nothing particularly unusual in the North. His father had come early to the gold fields of Bradleyburg, and he had been one of few that was accompanied by his wife—a tender creature, scarcely molded for life in the northern gold camps. Then there had been Rutheford, his father's partner, a man whom neither Bill nor his mother liked or trusted, but to whom the elder Bronson gave full trust. Somewhere beyond far Grizzly River, in the Clearwater, Bronson had made a wonderful strike—a fabulous mine where the gravel was simply laden with the yellow dust; and because they had prospected together in times past, Bronson gave his partner a share in it.
They had worked for months at their mine, in secret, and then Rutheford had come with pack horses into Bradleyburg, ostensibly for supplies. He had been a guest at the Bronson cabin and had reported that all was well with his generous partner. And the next night he had disappeared.
Weeks were to pass before the truth was known. Rutheford did not return to the mine at all; he was traced clear to the shipping point, three hundred miles below Bradleyburg. And he did not go empty-handed. The pack horses had not carried empty saddlebags. They had been simply laden with gold. And Bronson never returned to his family in Bradleyburg.
There was only one possible explanation. The gold had represented the season's washings—an amount that went into the hundreds of thousands—and Rutheford had murdered his benefactor and absconded with the entire amount. No living human being except Rutheford himself knew where the mine lay; there was no way for Bronson's family either to reclaim the body or to continue to work on the mine. Search parties had sought it in vain, and the lost mine of the Bronsons became a legend, a mystery that had grown constantly more dim in the passing years.
"When I am gone," little Bill would whisper to his mother, as she knelt crying at his feet, "I will go out and find my papa's mine. Also I will chase down Rutheford, and track him all over the world until I find him, and make him suffer for all he has done!"
This was a northern child, and his baby eyes would gleam and his features draw, and then his mother, half-frightened, would try to quiet him in her arms. This was the North, the land of primitive emotions, take and give, receive and pay, simple justice and remorseless vengeance; and when the storm swept over the cabin and the snow deepened at the doorway, those terrible, whispered promises seemed wholly fitting and true.
"I'll follow him till I die, and he and his wife and his son will pay for what he has done to us."
But the years had come and passed, and Rutheford had not been brought to justice nor the mine found. It was true that in a past summer Bill had traced his father's murderer as far as the shipping point, but there all trace of him was irremediably lost. Bill had made many excursions into the Clearwater in search of the lost mine, all without success. He had had but one guide—a hastily scrawled map that Bronson had once drawn for his wife, to show her the approximate position of the claim. There had been no hope of avenging the murder, but with each recurring spring Bill had felt certain of clearing up the mystery, at least of finding the mine and its wealth and the bones of his father. But the last days of his mother, gone at last to her old home in the United States, could be made easier; but his own future would be assured. But now, at thirty-two, the recovery of the mine seemed as far distant as ever. Devoting his life to the pursuit of it, he had not prepared himself for any other occupation; he had only a rather unusual general education, procured from the Bradleyburg schools and his winter reading, and now he was face to face with economic problems, too.
He would try once more. If he did not win, the dream of his youth would have to be given over. He had devoted his days to it; such a force as was about to send Virginia Tremont into the wilderness in search of her lover had never come up in his life. He sat dreaming, the ashes cold in is pipe.
He was called to himself by a distinct feeling of cold. The fire was out, the chill of the early midnight hours had crept into the room. The man rose wearily, then strode to the door for a