The Snowshoe Trail. Edison Marshall
he hasn't—something has happened to him—somewhere between here and there. He couldn't have remained out of sight so long."
"I want you to make every try. I can't bear—to give up."
Even this woodsman, knowing men to the heart but stranger to the world of women, knew that she meant what she said. She wasn't of the mold that gives up quickly. For all her cool exterior, her impersonal voice, the grace and breeding that went clear to her finger tips, he had some measure of understanding of an ardor and an intensity that might have been native to his own wilderness. Not often has girlhood love stood such a test as this—six years of silence. He could not doubt its reality; no small or half-felt emotion could have propelled her forth into these desolate wastes. Her love had gone deep and it lived.
He answered very gravely and humbly, perhaps a even a little sadly: "I'll do everything I can to find him for you, Miss. I'll get your sweetheart for you if it can be done."
To Vosper and Lounsbury the two little sentences were just the assurances of a hired employee, half-felt and forgotten soon. But Virginia heard more clearly. She had a vague feeling that she was a witness to a vow. It seemed to her that there was the fire of a zealot in his dark eyes, and by token of some mystery she did not understand, this strong man had seen fit to give her his oath. She only knew that he spoke true, that by a secret law that only strong men know he would be as faithful to this promise as if he had given bond.
IV
It was one of the decrees of the forest gods that no human being shall ride for five miles through the spruce forests of the Selkirks and fail to glean at least some slight degree of wilderness knowledge. Both Virginia and Lounsbury had been on horseback before. Virginia had ridden in the parks of her native city: long ago and far away a barefoot, ragged boy—much to be preferred to the smug and petulant man who now tried to hard to forget those humble days—had bestrode an old plow horse nightly on the way to a watering trough. But this riding had qualities all its own. There was no open road winding before them. Nor was there any trail—in general or particular.
It was true that the moose had passed that way, leaving their great footprints in the dying grass. They had chosen the easiest pathway over the hills, and Bill was enough of a woodsman to follow where they led. Traversing the Clearwater was simply a matter of knowing the country and going in a general direction. Almost at once the evergreen thickets closed around them.
Virginia found that safety depended upon constant watchfulness. The evergreen branches struck cruel blows at her face, the spruce needles cut like knives. Sometimes the horse in front would bend down a young tree, permitting it to whip back with a deadly blow; she had to watch her knees in the narrow passages between the trunks; and the vines reached and caught at her. Sometimes the long-hanging limbs of the young trees made an impassable barrier, and more than once she was nearly dragged from the saddle. Shortly they came to the first fallen log.
Mulvaney, Bill's horse, took it lightly; and the man turned to watch the girl. Her horse stepped gingerly, making it without trouble. Then the guide saw fit to give her a little good advice.
"Kick Buster in the ribs just before you come to a log," he said. "He'll jump 'em then. It's a whole lot safer—if he tries to step over 'em he's apt to get his foot caught and give you a bad fall."
Virginia looked up coldly. She wasn't accustomed to being spoken to in quite this tone of voice, particularly by an employee. But she saw his sober eyes and immediately forgot her resentment. And she found an actual delight in bounding over the next obstruction.
"And there's one more thing," the guide went on. "I've ridden plenty of horses, and I've found there's only one way to handle 'em. I'm going to try a new way to-day, because there's a lady in the party. But if I'm tried too heavy——"
"Go ahead," the girl replied, smiling. "I suppose you mean—to swear."
"Not just to swear. Call names. These horses won't think we're present if we don't swear at 'em. And the only name they know refers to them is one that casts slurs upon their ancestry, but I'll try to avoid it to-day. I suppose I can make a roaring sound that sounds enough like it to fool the horses."
Virginia was naturally alert and quick-witted, and she needed both of these traits now. The guide helped her all he could, warning her of approaching thickets; yet the first hour was a grim initiation to the woods. Lounsbury was having even a more difficult time. He was afraid of his horse, to start with—and this is never an auspicious beginning. A frightened rider means a nervous, excited animal—and nervousness and excitement are unhealthy qualities in the Selkirks. Neither put trust in the other, and Lounsbury's cruel, lashing blows with the long bridle ends only made matters worse. The horse leaped and plunged, slipped badly on the hills, progressed awkwardly over the fallen logs, and flew into wild panic when he came to the quagmires. The man's temper fell far below the danger point in the first hour, and he was savage and desperate before half of the afternoon's ride was done.
The thickets were merciless. They knew him, those silent evergreens: they gave no welcome to his breed; and it seemed to him they found a hundred ways to plague him. Their needles scratched his face, their branches whipped into his eyes, the limbs dealt cruel blows at his side and the tree trunks wrenched at his knees. Worse still, they soon came to a hill that Bill advised they take on foot.
"Not me," Lounsbury shrilled. "I'll swear I won't walk any hills. You've provided a vicious horse for me, and I'm going to ride him up if it kills him. I didn't come out here to break my wind on mountains—and this horse needs the devil taken out of him, anyway."
It was in Virginia's mind that none of the emphatic but genial oaths that Bill had let slip from time to time grated on her half so much as this frenzied complaint of her companion, but she kept her thoughts to herself. But Bill turned with something dangerously like a smile.
"Suit yourself, of course," he replied. "I'm not asking you to walk up to spare your horse. Only, from time to time a horse makes a misstep on this hill—just one little slip—and spins down in backward somersets a thousand feet. If you want to try it, of course it's all right with me."
He swung off his horse, took the bridle reins of both his own animal and Virginia's, and started the long climb. And it was to be noticed that at the first steep pitch Lounsbury found that he was tired of riding and followed after meekly, but with wretched spirit.
They stopped often to rest; and from the heights Virginia got her first real glimpse of Clearwater. Her first impression was simply vast and unmeasured amazement at the dimensions of the land. As far as she could see lay valley after valley, range upon range, great forests of spruce alternating with open glades, dim unnamed lakes glinting pale blue in the afternoon sun, whole valleys where the foot of white man had never trod. She felt somewhat awed, scarcely knowing why.
Rivers gleamed, marshes lay yellow and somber in the sun, the dark forests stretched until the eyes tired; but nowhere were there any homes, any villages or pastures, not a blaze upon a tree, not the smoke of a camp fire. Bradleyburg was already obliterated and lost in the depths of the woodland. The silence was incredible—as vast and infinite as the wilderness itself. It startled her a little, when they paused in their climb, to hear the pronounced tick of her wrist watch, even the whisper of her own breath. It was as if she had gone to an enchanted land, a place that lay in a great sleep that began in the world's young days, and from which the last reaches of time it could never waken.
Bill, standing just above her, pointed to a dash of golden across the canyon. "That's quivering asp," he told her, "turned by the frost. It seems good to see a bit of color in this world of dark woods. It's just like a flash of sunshine in a storm."
She listened with some surprise. The same detail had held her gaze, the same thought—almost the same simile—had come into her mind; but she had hardly expected to find a love of the beautiful in this bronzed forester. In fact, she found that a number of her preconceived ideas were being turned topsy-turvy.