The Sky Line of Spruce. Edison Marshall
I rite this with what I think is my dying hand. It's my will too. I'm at the hotel at Snowy Gulch—and not much more time. You know I've been hunting a claim. Well, I found it—rich a pocket as any body want, worth a quarter million any how and in a district where the Snowy Gulch folks believe there ain't a grain of gold.
It's yours. Come up and get it quick before some thieves up hear jump it. Lookout for Jeffery Neilson and his gang they seen some of my dust. I'm too sick to go to recorder in Bradleyburg and record claim. Get copy of this letter to carry, put this in some safe place. The only condition is you take good care of Fenris, the pet I raised from a pup. You'll find him and my gun at Steve Morris's.
I felt myself going and just did get hear. You get supplies horses at Snowy Gulch go up Poor Man Creek through Spruce Pass over to Yuga River. Go down Yuga River past first rapids along still place to first creek you'll know it cause there's an old cabin just below and my canoe landing. Half mile up, in creek bed, is the pocket and new cabin. And don't tell no one in Snowy Gulch who you are and where you going. Go quick brother Ez and put up a stone for me at Snowy Gulch.
Your brother
HIRAM MELVILLE.
There was a long pause after Ezram's voice had died away. Ben's eyes glowed in the moonlight.
"And you haven't heard—whether your brother is still alive?"
"I got a wire the hotel man sent me. It reached me weeks before the letter came, and I guess he must have died soon after he wrote it. I suppose you see what he means when he says to carry a copy of this letter, instead of the original."
"Of course—because it constitutes his will, your legal claim. Just the fact that you are his brother would be claim enough, I should think, but since the claim isn't recorded, this simplifies matters for you. You'd better make a copy of it and you can leave it in some safe place. And of course this claim is what you offered to let me in on."
"That's it. Not much, but all what I got. What I want to know is—if it's a go."
"Wait just a minute. You've asked me to go in with you on a scheme that looks like a clear quarter of a million, even though I can't give anything except my time and my work. You found me in a penitentiary, busted and all in—a thief and a gangster. Before we go any further, tell me what service I've done you, what obligation you're under to me, that gives me a right to accept so much from you?"
It might have been in the moonlight that Ezram's eyes glittered perceptibly. "You're in my charge," he grinned. "I guess you ain't got any say comin'."
"Wait—wait." Ben sprang to his feet, and caught by his earnestness, Ezram got up too. "I sure—I sure appreciate the trust you put in me," Ben went on slowly. "For my own part I'd give everything I've got and all I'd hope to ever get to go with you. It's a chance such as I never dared believe would come to me again—a chance for big success—a chance to go away and get a new start in a country where I feel, instinctively, that I'd make good. But that's only the beginning of it."
The dark vivid eyes seemed to glow in the soft light. "Forgive me if I talk frank; and if it sounds silly I can't help it," Ben continued. "You've never been in prison—with a five-year sentence hanging over you—and nobody giving a damn. For some reason I can't guess you've already done more for me than I can ever hope to repay. You got me out of prison, you wakened hope and self-respect in me when I thought they were dead, and you've proved a friend when I'd given up any thought of ever knowing human friendship again. I was down and out, Ezram. Anything you want me to do I'll do to the last ditch. You know I can fight—you know how a man can fight if it's his last chance. I've got some bonus money coming to me from the Canadian Government—and I'll put that in too, because we'll be needing horses and supplies and things that cost money. But I can't take all that from a stranger. You must know how it is. A man can't, while he's young and strong, accept charity—"
"Good Lord, it ain't charity!" the old man shouted, drowning him out. "I'm gettin' as much pleasure out of it as you." His voice sank again; and there was no line of mirth in his face.
"It was long ago, in Montreal," Ezram went on, after a pause. "I knew your mother, as a girl. She married a better man, but I told her that every wish of hers was law to me. You're her son."
IV
Night is always a time of mystery in Snowy Gulch—that little cluster of frame shacks lost and far in the northern reaches of the Caribou Range. Shadows lie deep, pale lights spring up here and there in windows, with gaping, cavernous darkness between; a wet mist is clammy on the face. At such times one forgets that here is a town, an enduring outpost of civilization, and can remember only the forests that stretch so heavy and dark on every side. Indeed the town seems simply swallowed up in these forests, immersed in their silence, overspread by their gloom, and the red gods themselves walk like sentries in the main street.
The breath that is so fragrant and strange between the fronting rows of shacks is simply that of the forest: inept the woodsman who would not recognize it at once. The silence is a forest silence, and if the air is tense and electric, it is because certain wilderness forces that no white man can name but which surely dwell in the darker thickets have risen and are in possession.
It is not a time when human beings are at their best and strongest. There is an instinctive, haunting feeling which, though not fear, wakens a feeling of inadequacy and meekness. Only a few—those who have given their love and their lives to the wild places—have any idea of sympathetic understanding with it. Among these was Beatrice Neilson, and she herself did not fully understand the dreams and longings that swept her ever at the fall of the mysterious wilderness night.
The forest had never grown old to her. Its mystery was undying. Born in its shadow, her love had gone out to it in her earliest years, and it held her just as fast to-day. All her dreams—the natural longings of an imaginative girl born to live in an uninhabited portion of the earth—were inextricably bound up in it; whatever plans she had for the future always included it. Not that she was blind to its more terrible qualities: its might and its utter remorselessness that all foresters, sooner or later, come to recognize. Her thews were strong, and she loved it all the more for the tests that it put to its children.
She was a daughter of the forests, and its mark was on her. To-night the same moon that, a thousand miles to the south, was lighting the way for Ben and Ezram on their northern journey, shone on her as she hastened down the long, shadowed street toward her father's shack, revealing her forest parentage for all to see. The quality could be discerned in her very carriage—swift and graceful and silent—vaguely suggesting that of the wild creatures themselves. But there was no coarseness or ruggedness about her face and form such as superficial observation might have expected. Physically she was like a deer, strong, straight-limbed, graceful, slender rather than buxom, dainty of hands and feet. A perfect constitution and healthful surroundings had done all this. And good fairies had worked further magic: as she passed beneath the light at the door of the rude hotel there was revealed an unquestioned and rather startling facial beauty.
It seemed hardly fitting in this stern, rough land—the soft contour and delicacy of the girl's features. It had come straight from her mother, a woman who, in gold-rush days, had been the acknowledged beauty of the province. Nor was it merely the attractive, animal beauty that is so often seen in healthy, rural girls. Rather its loveliness was of a mysterious, haunting kind that one associates with old legends and far distant lands.
Perhaps its particular appeal lay in her eyes. They seemed to be quite marvelously deep and clear, so darkly gray that they looked black in certain lights, and they were so shadowed and pensive that sometimes they gave the image of actual sadness. For all the isolation of her home she was no stranger to romance; but the romance that was to be seen, like a gentleness, in her face was that of the great, shadowed forest in which she dwelt.
Pensive, wistful, enthralled in a dreamy sadness—what could