The Heart of Thunder Mountain

CHAPTER VI

THE STORY OF THE SCAR

She was awakened by the shrill chatter of the magpies in the tall pine near her window. Often she had resented their quarrelsome dialogue at dawn, but now she slipped eagerly out of bed, and hurried to the window. There had been rain in the night, but when she had pulled apart the chintz curtains and opened the wooden shutters the air was sweet and clean in her face, and the thin light showed the world rising joyously to the day.

She dressed hastily in her oldest clothes, stole on tiptoe to the kitchen for a biscuit and a glass of milk, found fishing tackle on the veranda, and was soon running breathlessly past the corrals toward the banks of the Brightwater. And all this was a deliberate deception. She purposed to fish, of course–a little, to justify the clandestine expedition; but what she really sought was solitude.

It was half in jest that she had said to Smythe, “He shall tell me!” But in the night, by some strange alchemy, that jest had been transmuted into a purpose of which she was still doubtful, if not afraid. And yet to go forward seemed less difficult than to go back. For she had let the days of Seth’s recovery and convalescence slip by without telling Claire of her experience in the Forbidden Pasture and on the road to Paradise. The duel at the post-office, she argued, surely had made it unnecessary to warn Huntington of Haig’s anger. And yet, as their guest, as Claire’s cousin–But had they been quite fair to her? They had not warned her of the hostility across the Ridge; they had let her go blundering into the Forbidden Pasture; not that it mattered so much, though it might have been worse–

Her thoughts were becoming very much confused. She had permitted a man to treat her most offensively, and she had seen him shoot down another without compunction; and that other was her cousin, in whose house she was a guest. And yet she felt no resentment, no detestation, no censure, no rebuke. Instead, here she was running away to think out a plan whereby she might hear the whole story of the feud, and more, from Haig himself.

The morning advanced in rose and pearl nuances. A hundred tantalizing perfumes filled the air; field-spiders’ webs sparkled in the dew like silver gossamer; meadow larks rose at her feet, and wove delicate patterns in the air with threads of melody. Who could think amid such diverting beauty? She lifted her head, and went singing through the meadows, knee-deep in the wet and clinging grass, and laughing when the parted branches of the willows splashed her face and drenched her. And then, at the first cast she made into a still, deep pool, where the night loitered under the very eye of day, an imprudent trout took the gray hackle fly, and made off with it. The splash, and the “zip” of the tightening line through the water; and then the fight, and the capture–Well, if they were going to rise like that–

The sun was high before she became aware that she was very hot and tired and hungry. Her shoes were soaking wet, her skirts and stockings splashed with mud; one shoulder was being sunburned where a twig had caught and ripped her white flannel waist; and Seth’s red silk handkerchief around her neck was scarcely a deeper crimson than her face.

“But I can’t catch them all in one day!” she exclaimed reluctantly, leaning wearily against a tree.

At that instant, under her very eyes, a trout leaped in the nearby pool.

“Impudence!” she cried. “I’ll just get you, and then quit.”

But it was one pool too many; for at the second cast her hook caught in the rough bark of a log that projected far out into the stream.

“Oh! Now I’ve done it!” she groaned.

Several smart tugs at the line, with a whipping of the rod to right and left of the log, convinced her that the hook was too deeply embedded to be released by any such operation. Sinking down on a heap of driftwood on the bank, she gloomily contemplated the consequences of her greed. There were two ways to go about it now,–to break the line and leave the hook to its fate, or to crawl out on the log and rescue it. The first was unsportsmanlike, the second was very likely to be dangerous.

“Um-m-m!” she muttered, with a grimace. “It’s not easy.”

The log ran out, at a slight inclination upward, from the center of the heap of driftwood, and its free end, where the hackle fly reposed at a distance of fully twenty feet from the bank, was suspended barely two feet above the middle of the pool. She leaned forward, and gazed into its dark depths, which appeared to be scarcely stirred by the current, though five yards away the stream was making a merry racket over the shallows.

She stood up, and looked around her. Through the screen of willows and cottonwoods on each sloping bank she saw the meadows lying green and silent in the sun. There was no sound except the prattle of the Brightwater and the murmur of the breeze in the foliage. She assured herself that she was quite alone.

Next she folded and pinned up her skirt so that it hung just to her knees, and after a final glance in all directions, stepped cautiously out to the edge of the driftwood, knelt down on the fallen trunk, and began to creep warily out toward the embedded hook. The log was round, and none too large; her knees, protected only by thin stockings, were bruised by the rough and partly-loosened bark; and she scarcely dared to breathe lest she should lose her balance, and tumble into the yawning pool. Once she incautiously looked down, and saw her image waving dizzily on the slow-moving surface of the water.

“Oh!” she gasped, as she drew back her gaze, and dug her nails into the log.

But for all her fears, and because of them, it was tremendously exciting, and she became deeply absorbed in her task. Now clinging close to the log in sudden panic, now laughing tremulously at her trepidation, she forgot everything except her goal, and the inches by which she was approaching it. She had arrived within two feet of the hook, and was just about to reach a trembling hand to detach it, when she received a shock that was near to ending her expedition in an ignominious splash.

“Wait!” called out a voice, somewhere behind her. “I’ll help you!”

The fright first nearly caused her to lose her grip on the log, and then left her cold and shivering. After that a wave of heat swept over her, and the blood tingled in her flushed and perspiring face.

Who was it? Philip Haig, by all the ill luck in the world? Who else could have had the effrontery? She dared not turn to look, both in fear of falling, and in shame at being caught in that absurd predicament. What a sight! she thought. Her skirt was above her knees, and one stocking, caught by a projection of bark, had slipped down to her ankle. And that was not all!.. With a desperate effort, she lifted one hand from its hold on the log, and tried to adjust her skirt; but the movement only unbalanced her. With a shriek she flattened herself, and lay there panting and miserable.

“Wait!” the voice cried, more sharply than before. “No move–for minute!”

She was arrested by the words. “No move for minute!” It was not the voice of Philip Haig, but in that assurance there was only a doubtful consolation. If not Haig–who? There was something oddly foreign in that heavy, harsh, and yet not displeasing voice. A new fear presently mingled with the others. It was a wild country after all; and she had taken no note of the distance she had come, and little of her surroundings. But she could only obey, and wait.

There came the sound of quick splashing in the water, and a few seconds later a man’s head and shoulders appeared in the stream at her side. At sight of the strange, dark countenance suddenly upturned to her, within a foot of her own, she almost fainted. It was a face she had never seen before, solemn, stolid, with a copper-colored skin, high cheek bones, and deep-set, black eyes in which there was no more expression than there was on the thin, straight lips. She closed her eyes.

But that was only for an instant, since nothing terrible was happening. When she dared to look again the man was quietly releasing the offending fly. He tossed it back in the direction of the bank, then stood for a moment regarding her, still without the trace of an expression on his dark face.

“Don’t be ’fraid!” he said. “Hold still!”

She obeyed him, though his next move was one to have brought a scream to her lips if she had not become incapable of utterance. Standing in the water, which came almost up to his armpits, he had kept his arms high above the surface of the pool. Now he stretched them out toward her, clasped both her ankles with one huge hand, slipped the other under her waist, and with what seemed incredible strength and assurance, lifted her off the log. Then, without so much as wetting the edge of her skirt, he bore her to the bank, and seated her gently on the heap of driftwood from which she had ventured so bravely only a little while before.

Should she weep, or laugh, or rage at him? Through eyes half-blinded by tears, she searched his face; but he met her troubled and fiery gaze with the most perfect calm. Then, after a moment, he deliberately turned, and stood facing squarely away from her,–an act of stoicism that at once removed her fears and completed her discomfiture. She took the hint implied in his movement, and bent down, blushing furiously, to pull up the fallen stocking, and let down her skirt.

When she sat erect again the man had not changed his position; and she seized the opportunity to study him. His figure, though she had just had proof of his strength, was lean almost to thinness, very straight, and borne, she fancied, with a certain dignity and even majesty in its erectness. The straight, black hair under the sombrero was touched with gray. He was not young, past middle age perhaps; but she could hazard no nearer guess at his age. No matter! Looking at him thus, she began to feel her resentment falling away, as if every shaft from her angry eyes had broken harmlessly on that serene and unoffending back. Even her embarrassment began to seem inexcusable. The man had carried her ashore in much the manner he would have used if she had been a sack of oats to be saved from wetting.

“You are very strong!” Marion said at last.

He turned slowly toward her. His face was grave and expressionless, but by no means dull; and his eyes were very black and bright.

“You–are–all–right–now?” he asked, ignoring her praise.

There was a curious slowness and lack of emphasis in his speech, with a pause after each word, that gave a singular impressiveness to all he said.

“But why did you do it?” she demanded.

“’Fraid you fall,” was his simple answer.

“But I don’t mind getting wet.”

“Easy drown in little water,” he said laconically.

She laughed at the idea of her drowning in a pool like that–she who had battled triumphantly with the breakers at Atlantic City, Newport, and Bar Harbor.

“But I can swim!” she assured him.

“I not know that,” he replied, unmoved.

True. And she must have appeared to be greatly in need of assistance.

“Anyhow, I thank you!” she said sincerely. “But who am I thanking, please?”

“Pete.”

“Pete! Pete who?”

“Only Pete.”

“But have you no other name?”

“Yes. Indian name.”

And he rolled out a string of guttural syllables that sounded like names of places in the Maine woods.

Indian name! Marion started; and in a flash she knew. Haig’s man Friday! Here was luck indeed.

“You are Mr. Haig’s–” She hesitated.

“Friend,” he said, completing her sentence.

Marion was again embarrassed. She did not know what to say next, fearing to say the wrong thing, and so to throw away a golden opportunity. In her search for the right lead, her eyes lighted on a fishing basket that lay on the ground not far from her own.

“Oh!” she cried. “But it’s strange I didn’t hear or see you!”

“Indian not make noise.”

“I should say not!” she retorted, laughing.

“Trout very smart,” he added quietly.

“I’ve caught fourteen,” she volunteered eagerly. “And you?”

For answer he fetched his creel, and opened it.

“Oh!” she cried, in envy and admiration, seeing that the creel was almost full, and that not a fish in sight was as small as her largest prize.

“I give you some,” he said, glancing at her own basket.

“No! No!” she protested quickly. “I have plenty.”

She showed him her catch, which was by no means insignificant. Nevertheless Pete took three of his largest trout, and transferred them to her basket, ignoring her protests.

“But they are for–him, aren’t they?” she asked.

“Biggest you no see. At bottom.”

That satisfied her, and she watched him silently while he found her rod, and reeled in the offending fly.

“Brown fly better now,” he said. “You ought see what trout eating before you try catch big ones.”

On this he drew a book of flies from his pocket, and replaced the gray hackle with a brown one. She questioned him eagerly, following this plain lead; and presently they were seated on the pile of driftwood, while he told her about the native trout and the rainbow and the California, of little brooks far up among the mountains where the trout were small but of a delicious flavor, of the time for flies and the time for worms, of famous catches he had made, of the way the Indians fished before the white man showed them patent rods and reels. By slow degrees Pete’s iron features softened, and he smiled at her, not with his lips, but with his eyes, which were the blackest, surely, in the world.

But Marion was not diverted from the questions that were next her heart. With all her woman’s cunning of indirection, she brought the talk around to Philip Haig. Did he fish? Sometimes. Did he hunt? Much, when the deer came down from the heights with the first snows. Then–she could resist no longer.

“It must have been terrible–the accident,” she said, placing a finger on her cheek.

He looked at her strangely, while she held her breath.

“That no accident,” he said at last, after what seemed to her an interminable interval of suspense.

“No accident?” she repeated, trying not to appear too eager.

“He call it accident, maybe. He say it is nothing. Pete say it is much. It is big debt. Some day Pete pay.”

There was deep silence for a moment. The stream gurgled and splashed; the breeze whispered through the cottonwoods; and over all, or under all, was the vague, insistent, seductive sound that the summer makes in the fulness of its power.

Marion hesitated, quivering with eagerness and uncertainty. She was afraid to ask more, lest she should be shortly rebuffed, and lose her opportunity. But Pete was looking at her steadily. She felt a flush coming into her face again. Had he guessed–something–already in her manner, in her impulsive questions? More likely it was the charm that, for once unconsciously, she wielded–the elusive charm of woman that makes men want to tell, without the asking.

“You like to hear?” Pete said; and her heart leaped.

“Oh, please!”

And she was keenly disappointed. She had expected something romantic, something ennobling and fine. And it was only a barroom brawl, though Philip was not in it until the end, to be sure! Five Mexican sheep herders against the lone Indian. Guns and knives in the reeking border saloon; and afterwards in the street; and the Indian almost done for, bleeding from a dozen wounds; and then a voice ringing out above the fracas: “No, I’m damned if you do! Five to one, and greasers at that!” And Philip Haig had jumped from his horse, and plunged into the mêlée, disdaining to draw his gun on greasers. Smash! Bang! went his fists, front and right and left.

Pete had accounted for one Mexican, who would herd sheep no more on the plains of Conejos. The others fled. Then Haig, despite the knife-wound in his face, grabbed the Indian, and somehow lifted him up behind him on his horse.

“Quick, Indian!” he cried. “This town’s full of greasers. You’ve got no chance here.”

And then the long ride to Del Norte, with the Indian drooping on Haig’s back; and a doctor of Haig’s acquaintance, who sheltered and cured the silent savage. And Pete, convalescent, had come straight to Haig’s ranch, and remained there, despite Haig’s protests that he did not need another hand.