Complete weird tales of.., p.1327
Complete Weird Tales of Robert W Chambers, page 1327
And now Kent began to consult his watch more frequently as the first sunbeams penetrated the trail, striping tree and moss and fallen leaves with palest fire.
For the youthful schoolmistress should have passed at sunrise, and now the sun was high.
Thick vapours drifted up from swamp and gully and rushing stream; the forest dimness pulsated with amber lights. A great barred owl dropped softly upon a limb overhead, folded his spotted wings, looked down at Kent out of dark, liquid eyes, snapped his beak, and settled himself into a feathery mass. The hour for slumber had come to the little folk of the forest.
Why did the young schoolma’am tarry? She should have passed an hour since. And here was the trail’s level end before it twisted to the right in its snaky course up Lynx Peak.
So he was not to meet her after all — not even to see her again before he left!
Up that twisting trail and over the ample shoulder of Lynx Peak lay the course he must now follow. There was one valley to traverse on the other side, a train to flag, and then Albany and Burling. And he must be on his way.
Watch open in his hand, he stood where the trail divided, giving himself his last chance to the limit of the last second.
And one minute’s grace.
Then he snapped the hunting case and turned sharply to the right. And saw her seated on a fallen tree, watching him.
In the rush of surprise and happiness he sprang forward. There seemed to be no trace of self-consciousness in her or in him as she rose when he came up.
“I thought you would come,” she said.
“I was waiting for you,” he replied.
“And I for you.”
She bent her pretty head a trifle as he took her hands. “They’ve sent for me,” he said. “I am on my way back to Albany.”
She said nothing.
“Where are you going?” he asked. “The schoolhouse lies in the other direction.”
“I shall not teach there any more.”
“Then — where are you going on the Lynx Peak trail?”
“I am going — somewhere — I don’t know where.”
“You don’t know where you are going?”
She lifted her grey eyes to his, then lowered them, shaking her head.
“Will you tell me what has happened?” he asked. “Hal Glade turned me out.”
“Your husband!”
“We were never married.”
At that his sun-tanned face surged with heavy colour; and, looking up at him, and comprehending, her own cheeks burnt crimson signals answering his own. And she withdrew her hands from his.
“It is not so — bad — as you think,” she said... “Do you — understand?”
“No.”
She sighed, twisting her slender fingers, and looking down. There was nothing further she could explain — nothing more she could say.
“I must go now,” she said under her breath.
But both lingered in silence for a moment longer.
Then she turned away, and he moved forward beside her, slowly. The trail was steep.
When they entered the first abandoned orchard, knee-deep in bleached wild grass, far on the shoulder of the mountain a rifle cracked, and the pack on Kent’s shoulders quivered with the bullet’s impact.
Down he went flat into the high dead grass, pulling his little comrade with him, holding her rigid, motionless through the throbbing seconds.
And far away down the wooded slope went crashing the would-be murderers in headlong flight — Glade with the coward’s reaction after vengeance fulfilled; the walleyed one no less fearful now that his first blow had been struck at Burling, although the 30-30 bullet which he supposed was embedded in Kent did not fit the magazine of his rusty 45-70.
Kent lay very still, listening, and clutching his comrade close to the earth, closer and more rigidly as he felt her struggle — to rise, as he thought.
But she was merely striving to crawl closer to him, deeming him hard hit and done for: and at last, when the heavy galloping of the assassins had died out in the valley below, and when Kent’s grip on her relaxed, she came creeping up beside him, trembling, and laid her whitened cheek against his.
“Dear,” she whispered, “are you badly shot? Are you suffering?”
Sheer astonishment struck him dumb. Her face touched his, her lips quivered.
“I am with you,” she said tremulously. “I shall not leave you.... I have wanted you — so long — and now they have killed you—”
“Kathleen!” he faltered.
“Yes,” she whispered, “Kathleen — just as — as God made her — or she had not dared to touch you—”
“Kathleen!”
He had swung himself upright, carrying her with him. Bewildered, beginning to understand, she stammered out painfully: “Are you not hit? I — I heard the bullet strike—”
“My pack! — Kathleen — Oh, little Kathleen—”
“You fell! — I thought—” Her face surged in shamed colour; she turned her tear-wet eyes away.
“There were more bullets in their magazines.... So I threw you flat in the grass.... Kathleen, married or unmarried, free or bound — whatever you are or were, I want you — I want you, Kathleen — beloved — tenderest heart in the world!... Speak to me, dear!”
But her lips were no longer under control when he drew her burning face to his shoulder. Unstirring, silent, she lay there, her tears falling like an April rain that lingers in fragrance amid the sighing of newborn leaves.
But at last the tardy gleam of sunshine came: and Kathleen lifted her head and looked up into her lover’s eyes, palely smiling.
And life began from the very beginning for them, at that instant, and in that place.
WILDRICK’S DUMP
AFTER THE DEATH of her parents the solitary house became known to lumbermen and forest loafers as Wildrick’s Tavern, or Wildrick’s Dump. It had no tavern license.
Her stepfather, Jim Wildrick, had no guide’s license either — not even a gun license — much less any general or special dispensation to sell malt or spirituous liquors. Which bothered him not at all. Also he cherished what he called a collie — the same bearing an astonishing resemblance to a deerhound. But nobody mentioned the resemblance to Wildrick.
As for his stepdaughter, Helen Grey, when he acquired her he took her for granted, along with the house and acreage; and he lounged about his lawless business with no responsibility concerning her on his mind.
Had it not been for the memory of better things the child must have succumbed to circumstances — her mind decadent, her morals a matter of chance.
But she was thirteen when her father gave up his job as teacher in a New York school, and, with his meagre savings, built the unpainted frame house on the edge of the State Forest — where in a few months his lungs finished him.
She was fourteen when her pretty, shallow mother married Jim Wildrick — and died of the experiment within the year, leaving Helen alone with this forest loafer on the shaggy edges of desolation. And it was not long before Wildrick’s Dump became notorious as a rendezvous for everything lawless and sordid in the region.
When the new Commissioner of Conservation came into office Wildrick was warned to behave himself or get out. And Wildrick merely leered and spat and winked at his cronies.
A few months later rumours floated through the wilderness that John Burling, the new Commissioner, meant to get Wildrick.
But nothing seemed to happen.
Poor food, poverty, and solitude do not hasten maturity. Adolescence came late to Helen Grey.
For companions she had her father’s books, her memories of better things, and her own immature thoughts; for acquaintances she had her big, shambling stepfather, his forest loafing cronies, and the doubtful sort of men who sometimes came from cities, requiring a guide — being otherwise incompetent to catch trout or murder deer.
There was in her life nothing else to emphasize existence except the waste of bushy land to the south, slashed, disfigured, and marred by those twin scourges loosed by a half-baked civilization — lumbermen and fire.
Two miles to the north the State Forest bordered their own woods, where low, ugly mountains humped up against the sky. A shallow river, talkative, ever full of futile noises, gabbled incessantly behind the house.
Southward, out through the sad and devastated country, a sandy road ran twenty miles before it passed the first house. Beyond that, here and there among the lower hills aggressive towns, dreary and hideous, affronted the remnants of a noble forest, already doomed to clothespins, chair splints, and firewood.
Yet, ever to the child, Helen, southward somewhere beyond the skyline’s abominable desolation lay Paradise — rather a primitive and simple paradise to be sure, for, as she imagined, it contained as furniture merely books unlimited, baths with hot water, unsoiled clothing, and crowds of people who understood the grammatical construction of their native language. And for four years, now, she had been dreaming of such a heaven until it had become as far away and as unreal to her as the other Heaven.
With the opening of the deer season that year a few motley hunting parties drifted into the tavern — one or two local “forest burns,” a dingy village clerk or two, a fat bartender from a distant town, and the local deputy game warden, fox-faced, gimlet-eyed, full of mean silences and plausible loquacity.
To break the law was Wildrick’s specialty. Holes were as quickly dug for antlered heads in the velvet as for unantlered heads, in season and out. Also, from holes back of the house Wildrick extracted bottles when his guests required them.
And around the sheet-iron stove in the Dump dirty transactions were ratified, illegally shot birds started toward their destination by parcel post, illegally taken pelts bartered, plans made to cut State timber, plans hatched to start forest fires when the burns and loafers of the region needed pin money — the Fire Wardens paying two dollars a day.
So there was always more or less “business” to be transacted in the wilderness — and perhaps some of the business was more sinister than the mere breaking of game and forest and excise laws. As, for instance, when big Aristide Caron was found very dead below the logjam with a bloody peavy beside him — and when, in another instance, nobody was ever able to find a flashy travelling man who went hunting accompanied only by a new rifle, a gold watch — and a hundred and fifty dollars. Also something — if not somebody — had kicked to death one William Finn, a forest squatter — the coroner’s inquest disclosing as much. But nothing was ever done about it. Wildrick said that a vicious cow was the guilty one. And Sagamore County let it go at that.
In the first hunting party that came to Wildrick’s Dump that year were a shoe drummer, and a timber-looker out for pulp. And the drummer had gone into the kitchen and had wound both arms around Jim Wildrick’s stepdaughter when the timber-looker came in for the same purpose.
The girl watched them sullenly while they fought it out, then went to her room to mend her tom dress while Wildrick, hearing the fracas, shambled in and cursed both combatants because they had broken the kitchen table.
And on one of several similar occasions Wildrick intervened more pointedly:
“Say, what the hell!” he shouted. “Ain’t any of you spry enough to git her without knockin’ down the hull house!”
The girl’s arms and face were bruised, and a bright drop fell from her swollen lip.
“An’ don’t you worry none, neither,” he added, turning and leering at her. “The man that gits the better o’ you has got to marry you sooner or later — or I’ll break his damn face for him.”
Which threat impressed everybody; as legalizing such matters was often the tardy result of an afterthought in the imminency of emergency.
The hunting season advanced; Helen’s gingham dress was mended and her swelled lip resumed its normally sensitive curve; the black and blue bruises faded from her arms and body. So she went about her life’s business as she found it, dreaming sometimes of her own species of paradise, sometimes of a relief still more wonderful, more desirable, except that she always had been terrified at the thought of being buried in these woods.
All day long the routine of her life scarcely varied. First came the awakening in the bitter dusk of morning, then the reek of fire and kerosene lamp, crackle of frying food, men trampling to and fro with the thud of gunstocks on carpetless floors — the restless, incessant, ghost-like patter of the hound long since taught to conceal all emotional demonstrations.
Then the cautious departure, her stepfather slouching ahead and the furtive file sneaking after him, away into the white obscurity of the morning mist.
After that — dishes washed and wiped — there were a few gaunt mountain cows to milk and turn out among the ferns again, a few eggs to be gathered, a few potatoes to be peeled, pies and cake to be constructed, a little washing of ragged clothing, an hour’s ironing.
Then the rest of the day was hers; and she could go to her own little room, which was plastered and papered, and turn over the leaves of her father’s books, or she could sit in her mother’s rocking-chair and gaze at the family photographs tacked up over the fireplace — or she could lay her cheek against the soft, creamy folds of her grandmother’s Paisley shawl — her only heirloom.
Also, she might, if she wished, go out into the sunshine and seat herself on the chopping block, and listen to the garrulous little river, or to the blue jays in the chilly woods, or to a hawk mewing, sweeping the hillside in widening circles over acres of berry bramble and slashings.
And it happened one sunny morning, when frost still whitened the shadows of house and tree, and the few remaining yellow forest leaves fell more thickly with every breath of wind, that the creak of wheels aroused her from her reverie.
A man got out of a muddy wagon, came toward her, and lifted his shooting cap. Which in itself was extraordinary, because nobody had ever before saluted her in that fashion.
“Is this Jim Wildrick’s tavern?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said.
“Is there anybody here to take my horse?”
“I can do that,” she replied.
He said, smiling:
“I’ll bed and feed him myself.... Is that the barn?” — doubtfully.
“Yes.”
“Very well, I’ll manage, thank you.”
And taking his horse by the head he led him away, the muddy wagon rattling over the stones.
The girl sat on the chopping block, her purple-grey eyes following the stranger.
In due course of time he reappeared, all in leather, rifle balanced across his padded shoulder, a suit-case swinging in his left hand.
“Is Mr. Wildrick about?” he asked cheerfully.
“No,” she said.
“Where is he?”
“Hunting.”
“Oh! Then he won’t return until tonight?”
“He won’t be back till tomorrow or next day.”
“What?”
“He has a party out beyond Lynx Peak. He’ll lie out.”
The young man’s keen eyes rested on her for a second, and their alert intelligence softened.
“Then I shall have to wait for my buck, I suppose,” he remarked, looking around. “May I have a room?”
“This way, if you please,” and rising, she led the way into the house.
Up the rickety stairs he followed her; unplastered boards and bunks built in, straw ticks and ragged, musty coverings, did not appear to disturb him.
“This is fine!” he exclaimed. “Thank you very much, Miss — Miss Wildrick — I suppose—”
“I am Helen Grey.”
“Thank you — I thought — understood—”
“He is only my stepfather.”
“Certainly. I ought to have known.”
A slight flush came into her face, and she picked up his tin water pitcher.
“I’ll fill that,” he said pleasantly, taking it from her hand with a decision that discounted instinctive resistance. She did not seem to know exactly how to confront such a situation — nobody before ever having relieved her of any burden.
“Will you have dinner?” she asked mechanically.
“Please. Any time suits me.”
She went away down the stairs.
For a while the young man was busy with his rifle and the contents of his suit-case, but about noon he also went downstairs. Dinner, including roast venison, potatoes, and flapjacks, was on the table.
As he ate he could see the girl busy in the kitchen, moving quickly and gracefully here and there. The fire had tinted her bare arms and face a delicate pink; her hair, with the ruddy glimmer in it, sagged heavily over both close-set ears. He decided that the snowy purity of her skin made the grey eyes seem purple and her lips almost scarlet, so vivid was the contrast.
She came presently to the kitchen doorway and looked in at him.
“Will you have anything more?” she asked seriously.
“Nothing, thank you.... Is there anything to read in the house?”
“What?”
“Any newspapers?”
“No.”
“No books, I suppose—”
She was silent; but as he rose to leave the room she said in a low voice that sounded unwilling and sullen:
“I have some books.... Would you care to read one?”
“Why — thank you — if you don’t mind—”
“If you will wait until the dishes are done.”
“Of course I’ll wait—” Then, with a laugh, he added: “I’m accustomed to camping. May I help you with your dishes?”
She looked around at him in slow surprise, while his pleasant laugh was still sounding in her ears. Then the painful colour crept to the roots of her hair.
“I didn’t mean to be impertinent,” he added, watching the grave, young face turn from him.
She made no response.
So he went outdoors to light his pipe and saunter about; and after a little while, chancing to turn, he saw her standing at the house door as though awaiting him.
“The books are in my room,” she said. “Would you mind reading them there?”
