PARADISE TRAIL, by William Byron Mowery

Originally published in 1936.

CHAPTER ONE

“Well, I’ve achieved popularity, at any rate!” Gary mused, looking at the poster tacked to a telephone pole. “A person would think I’m running for premier, the way my picture is splashed all over half a dozen provinces!”

In the hot sun of a July afternoon he stood on a curb in the little mining city of Saghelia, glancing at the poster and watching a Mounted Policeman across the street. Hungry, penniless, a hunted fugitive with the shadow of death hanging over him, he nevertheless was philosopher enough to fling a jest at his desperate plight.

It daunted him to discover that the man-hunt had penetrated even to this mountain-buried town in northern British Columbia. For two thousand miles he had flitted like a box-car ghost from city to city—Winnipeg, Saskatoon, Edmonton, Jasper—heading blindly westward for oblivion and safety. Yesterday, suspecting that the Pacific Coast towns would be on the lookout for him, he had left the Grand Trunk and dodged north eighty miles on an obscure spur line, praying that no whisper of the hunt had reached this Saghelia country. And now, that poster, and that red-coated peril yonder, looking at him…

As he lifted his eyes to the mountains cradling the smoky town, it seemed ages ago that he had left Chicago and headed north for a summer in the Canadian harvest fields. He hardly could realize that he had fled clear across the continent to the far North-West, without breath of the Pacific Ocean.

A terrific lot could happen to a person in one short month, he reflected. More than had happened to him previously in all his twenty-four years. With a wry smile he imagined the pop-eyed astonishment of his Chicago acquaintances when they had read that Gary Frazier, the quiet law student, had wrecked a mail truck in Winnipeg, killed the driver and a clerk, and had stolen twenty-two thousand dollars!

His picture on the poster was a very poor likeness, and this fact reassured him a little; but even so he wished that the Mounted sergeant yonder would move on. A tingle of uneasiness jigged through him every time the man glanced his way. On his flight across the provinces he had outwitted city cops a-plenty and slipped out of several tight squeezes with the Provincials; but these Mounteds were bad eggs. And this particular specimen, a sharp-eyed man of thirty, silent and watchful, looked like especially bad poison.

Though it was well on toward six o’clock, the sun stood as high in the sky as at mid-afternoon in Chicago. Half an hour ago the whistles had blown at the near-by mines; and the miners were streaming into town, some heading for the two taverns, some trickling into the general stores for tobacco or carbide, some trudging straight homeward.

To Gary’s surprise the men seemed little different, as a group, from the outpouring of a factory or railroad shops in his home city. And Saghelia itself, for all the wild mountains around it, was strangely like any small steel town of the Chicago area. The numerous Indians and swart half-breeds, the occasional picturesque prospector or whiskery trapper in from the ranges, gave a certain frontier tone to the place; but deep down the basic patterns were exactly the same as he had known all his life: housewives making supper purchases, children playing in the dingy streets, grimy sparrows quarreling in the dust, loafers idling at drug store and corner, a certain stagnation everywhere, a certain weary boredom on people’s faces.

A middle-aged miner stopped beside him and asked for a light; and Gary took the occasion to inquire:

“Any chance of a job at one of these mines, partner?” He gestured at the dozen shafts sprawled against the south range.

“Hunh? A job, you say? You must be a stranger around here to ask that. The Caspers are only runnin’ one shift, and the Ludlow’s are layin’ men off.”

“How about these lumber outfits—any chance there? Or d’you know of any opening around here?”

The man shook his head. “Ain’t anything.” He lit his pipe, stared a moment at the poster, said “hmmph!” as he read of the five-thousand-dollar reward, and walked on.

“Damn all!” Gary thought, dismayed. “This is a pretty kettle of fish! I’ve got to stay here. If I keep on the move or even try to dodge back to the Grand Trunk, I’ll get nailed as sure as little green apples. This place is my best bet. If I can only hole in here and lay low for a while, I might have a Chinaman’s chance to get out of Canada.”

But to stay he needed a job, and at once. He had not had a decent meal in days; these mountain nights were too cold for sleeping under a railroad bridge; and if that sergeant saw him idling around town, the man would get suspicious and look into him.

Up the street a shiny car swung around a corner, purred down toward him and stopped beside the telephone pole. An expensive imported roadster, with its silver and glass a dazzling glitter in the sun, it was one of the few cars which Gary had seen in the little steel-end town. Its occupants were a girl of twenty and a man of Gary’s own age.

The two were evidently bound for a bit of trouting that evening—in the rumble seat he noticed tackle boxes, fly-poles in bamboo cases, and other fishing gear.

The awed glances from the miners and loiterers told Gary that this young couple were people of considerable importance in Saghelia. As yet he did not know that they were practically Saghelia itself; that he was looking upon Mona Casper and young Hugh Ludlow, heirs to these mills and timber limits and the precious hard-rock veins in the range yonder.

“I’ll get some salmon eggs, Mona,” the young fellow said, stepping out of the car. “You should have remembered about them yourself when you were getting things ready.”

Gary thought, “If I had a jar of salmon eggs, I wouldn’t fish with ’em—I’d eat ’em myself!”

With observant eyes he watched young Ludlow step across the sidewalk to a hardware store. Neatly dressed in cords, laced boots and leather jacket, the young fellow was strikingly handsome, tall, superbly athletic, with a hard virility about him that Gary keenly envied. He seemed a haughty and arrogant chap; several of the miners ventured a “Good evenin’, Mr. Ludlow” to him, but he did not answer them or even nod.

The girl appeared to be a rather likable person. In spite of her fashion-plate clothes, she was not at all pretty; but she had nothing of young Ludlow’s arrogance. Quite obviously she was head-over-heels in love with her handsome big escort. She had taken his rebuke without a word, and her eyes followed him, clung to him, all the way across the sidewalk and into the hardware shop.

A few doors up, an old prospector came out of Lafe Nottingham’s general store. Behind him, with some purchases on its back and a silver bell jingling at its halter, ambled a fat little burro, scarcely larger than some of the big huskies of the town.

Gary blinked his eyes and stared, as though seeing an incarnation of all the bush-loped old “mountain rats” whom he had ever heard or read about. The old fellow, eighty if a day, was grizzled and wrinkled, his shoulders were stooped from years of foot-slogging under heavy packs, but he was still as hale and tough as weathered oak. His suspenders were simply two pieces of rope; his shirt had been patched till it looked like a crazy quilt; and his baggy canvas trousers, quite as fearfully patched, were stuffed into heavy hobnailed boots.

Gary nudged a bystander, a big half-breed. “Who’s he, for goodness sake?”

“Heem? Oh, dat’s ole Nat Higgens—and Jinny. Dey’re an eyeful, hein?”

“A prospector, isn’t he?”

“Ou’. Dat is, he pokes aroun’ in de rocks op Lettle Saghelia. He’s got some long-hair’ idee ’bout some gold being op dere. ’Tween you and me, I t’ink he’s a lettle bit bushed. He’s been livin’ to heemself so long dat he’s shaking hands wit’ de willows. But he’s a good ole feller, ole Nat is.”

With Jinny at his heels, old Higgens got off the sidewalk and came plodding down the dusty street. Young Ludlow had just rejoined Mona Casper in the car. Like everyone else within eyeshot, the young couple were watching Higgens, the girl with an amused smile, Hugh Ludlow with a queer mixture of smile and scowl.

As the old fellow trudged past the automobile young Ludlow leaned out and pressed the glowing tip of his cigarette against the burro’s rump.

At the hot stab of pain Jinny gave a lunge forward, butted into old Higgens and knocked him to his knees. Snorting and kicking, the animal barged against the car fender and burst two of the sacks on its back.

Somewhat dazed, old Nat scrambled up and whirled around. “You jinny!” he scolded. “You w’uthless scalawag—what’n creation possessed you to do that, nohow? Now lookit what you’ve done! Lookit our beans and flour!”

The little animal, still prancing and kicking, looked around and saw that stream of white apparently pouring out of its own fat ribs, and went suddenly panicky. With a final snort it whanged its heels into the fender, stampeded past old Nat and took off down the street like a frightened jackrabbit heading for its mountain home and scattering beans, sugar and flour as it went.

Several of the onlookers laughed at the unexpected comedy, but a hot anger flared up in Gary; and the big half-breed beside him growled: “Dat was a carcajou treeck out of yo’ng Ludlow. Ole Nat mus’ have spent a week tomrocking de dust to buy dat grub.”

As young Ludlow glanced at the vanishing Jinny and laughed aloud, Gary stepped off the curb and around in front of the car. The trick itself, utterly unprovoked, had been bad enough; but that laugh, at an old man’s misery…

“Say, you,” he rapped at young Ludlow, “you ought to have your teeth bashed in for that. If you get your fun out of hurting other people, why don’t you pick on somebody your size and age?”

The smile faded from Hugh Ludlow’s face. For a moment or two he stared disdainfully at Gary, looking at his battered hat, his disreputable clothes. Then, with studied scorn:

“Did you say something to me, bum?”

The epithet did not faze Gary, but the sight of old Higgens trying to salvage a little pile of beans from the dust, made him see red.

“I said you need a bashing, you slick-haired puppy! Pony up for the grub this old man lost, or I’ll wrap you around a telephone pole.”

Deliberately Hugh Ludlow removed his wrist-watch, handed it to Mona, opened the car door and stepped out. Mona caught his arm.

“Hugh! Don’t get into a fight. Please, dear.”

“It won’t be much of a fight,” Hugh answered evenly. He flicked the ashes from his cigarette, laid it on the fender, turned, confronted Gary. “Anybody that talks to me like you did,” he said, confident and assured, “gets hell knocked out of him!”

Someone on the sidewalk yelled “Fight!” and the onlookers began surging around the car and surrounding the arena.

Ordinarily Gary would have felt himself a match for his stalwart enemy. He was quite as tall—six feet two from his shoes to his sandy cowlick; and like young Hugh he was heavy-fisted and big of build. But two years of study and indoors had pulled him down; the hunger of the last fortnight had sapped his strength; and he had a premonition that he was in for a mauling.

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Mounted sergeant come to life and start across the street. A quiver of fear darted through him. What if that officer recognized him as the Gary Frazier of the poster? In flashes quicker than thought he had a sickening vision of himself lying in a Police “butter-tub,” and heard those dread words, “To be hanged by the neck until dead.”

“What’s the matter—yellow?” Ludlow taunted. “You asked for it. Put up your fists, bum.”

With a hard smile on his face, he closed in, swung a short right that missed, then landed a straight jarring left that caught Gary on the chin and staggered him.

Unable to back out of the fight, Gary waded in, feinted his enemy’s guard down, and drove in a right to the jaw. It was a clean hard blow, and he packed all his strength into it; but it had little effect on young Ludlow, beyond wiping the smile from his face and infuriating him. With an oath he bore down on Gary, slipped across another jarring left, then a bare-knuckle right to Gary’s cheek, then a smash in the stomach, then a terrific crack to the jaw that sent Gary staggering backwards against the big half-breed.

Gary shook his head, to clear the fog out of it. He was weak with hunger—far weaker than he had realized; and that crack to the jaw had knocked him groggy. Ludlow and the little crowd and the Mounted sergeant elbowing toward the fight—they all seemed to be going around and around.

Swiping the blood from his mouth, he closed in, doggedly, and swung at his enemy.

With that hard confident smile on his face again, Hugh Ludlow backed up a step, measured Gary, and then drove in one more blow—a murderous long-swinging uppercut…

* * * *

Dimly Gary became aware that someone was speaking to him. In spite of a trip-hammer throb in his head he opened his eyes.

The big métis was helping him sit up and brushing the dust from his clothes. “How you feel, partner?” the man asked. “Anyt’ing bad wrong?”

“I’m—all right,” Gary managed. “Just got socked. But golly”—he rubbed his chin where the uppercut had landed—“that fellow can really sock!”

The mists were clearing from his brain, and he looked around. Only then did he realize that he had been knocked out, knocked completely cold, and had been out for several minutes. The car, with the Casper girl and Hugh Ludlow, was gone; the little crowd of onlookers had been sent about their business; only the métis and old Nat remained—and the Mounted sergeant.

The sight of the officer, gazing down at him with those sharp unfathomable eyes, brought Gary out of his grogginess like a slap of cold water. As he met that silent gaze, all the fears which had dogged him on his long flight, and all the grisly visions of what awaited him back in Manitoba, came flooding into his mind.

He fought off his panic and steadied himself. Maybe this sergeant hadn’t recognized him, after all. The man showed no sign of it. His cold gray eyes and impassive face showed no emotion whatever.

With the half-breed’s help Gary stood up, walked around a few steps to get his legs back; then forced himself to return and confront the sphinx-like officer.

“I’m sorry I started that scrap, Sergeant,” he said, hoping to talk himself out of being arrested for the street brawl. If he could, then he might squeeze out of this jam altogether. “I don’t usually go hunting for trouble, but—well, that was a raw trick he pulled, and I boiled over, I guess. I’m only human.”

The sergeant did not answer. With features as expressionless as a granite mask, he regarded Gary steadily, saying nothing, betraying nothing of his thoughts. For the life of him Gary could not tell what lay back of that silent gaze—whether the officer believed him merely a foot-loose wanderer, or definitely recognized him as the hunted fugitive of the poster.

Old Nat spoke up. “Young Hugh hadn’t oughta done that,” he said. His tones were mildly reproachful but utterly without rancor. He looked at Gary as though apologizing for being the cause of Gary’s drubbing. “I don’t mind seem’ you ’round town afore, b’y. Are you a newcomer, mebbe?”

“Yes.”

“What parts might you come from?”

“I came in from the Grand Trunk on the bobtail this morning,” Gary answered, hoping that the guileless old fellow would stop asking questions.

Hastily he thought up an assumed name and home city, expecting that query to come next. So far, here in Saghelia, people had been content merely to call him “stranger” or “partner”; and on all his two-thousand-mile flight he had hardly spoken a dozen words to a human being.

Old Nat glanced across Saghelia River to the north range where a lush beautiful valley opened back into the mountains. “Scalawag!” he muttered, at the absent Jinny. “She’s been ’sociatin’ with them wild billy goats so much she’s gittin’ skittish as they are.” He turned around again. “I guess mebbe I’d better git some grub on debt from Lafe and be startin’ fer home.” He held out a gnarled hand to Gary. “I ain’t unmindful how you stuck up fer me, b’y. That was real decent out of you. If you ever git up nigh my place, why I’d be right glad to have you stop in.”

As Gary glanced past him at the distant valley of Little Saghelia, an idea shot into his head. Here in town he had no friends, no work, no place to stay, nothing but the constant danger of being recognized and nailed. But back in those mountains he could breathe a safe breath and would have a superlative refuge till the man-hunt died down. With tom-rocker and shovel he could pay his own way and be no burden on the old bush-loper.

“Dad,” he suggested, loath to invite himself but forced to it, “you couldn’t take me in, up there at your place, could you? There aren’t any jobs around here and—well, I’m stranded and broke. I don’t know much about tom-rocking, but I could learn.”

Old Nat was astounded. “Why, d’you mean that, b’y?” he asked, as though not quite believing that any one should really wish to live with him.

“I sure do, Dad—that is, if I wouldn’t be imposing.”

Old Nat hesitated a moment. “We ain’t exactly fixed fer any one extry, but you wouldn’t be imposin’. Not one particle. And we’d be more’n glad to have you fer comp’ny. You come right along if you want to.”

Gary wondered who that “we” meant. Probably old Nat and Jinny, he thought.

He turned to the officer. “How about it, Sergeant?” he asked. His voice was steady but he was trembling a little, as a man well might when his freedom and life were hanging in the balance. “Instead of pinching me for fighting, won’t you sentence me to hard labor on old dad’s tom-rocker?”

For several moments, interminable moments to Gary, the sergeant said nothing. His gaze traveled from Gary to old Nat and on to that far green valley. He seemed to be thinking deeply. A flicker of a smile came to his lips—a smile as inscrutable and baffling as his cold gray eyes.

At last, with a laconic jerk of his thumb at Little Saghelia, he spoke two words that set Gary’s heart thumping with wild joy: “Go ahead.”

CHAPTER TWO

As he walked along beside old Nat, across Saghelia River, past some abandoned mines and slag heaps, through river-bottom daisy flats and drogues of scrub poplar, the conviction grew on Gary that he was heading into a dark puzzling situation which might have explosive possibilities for an outlaw like himself.

His hunch was mostly guesswork; but it clung to him like a cocklebur, and he could not shake it off.

For one thing, why had Hugh Ludlow scowled at old Nat? It seemed ridiculous that young Ludlow, wealthy and proud and of a different world altogether, should nurse any hostility toward a harmless old bush-loper; but how else was one to interpret that scowl? And what was old Nat prospecting for? What was this “long-hair’ idee” of his, this odd quest for gold up Little Saghelia?

And then, what lay behind that baffling smile from Sergeant Rhodes? As plain as day, Rhodes had been thinking about this unknown situation when he smiled his faint smile. He seemed to be foreseeing fireworks for one Gary Frazier. His laconic “Go ahead” had sounded like, “All right, innocent—it’ll be your funeral, not mine.”

Had Rhodes recognized him? He flatly did not know. In all his days he had never encountered so enigmatic a person. The officer was uncanny—a pair of X-ray eyes that betrayed nothing, said nothing, but saw everything.

Considering that the Police of half a dozen provinces were hunting for Gary Frazier, it looked, at first glance, as though Rhodes surely would have arrested so notorious a criminal on instant recognition or even on suspicion. But a person couldn’t be certain even about that. The officer might shrewdly have held off in hopes that the fugitive’s confederates would show up or that the wanted man would give away the location of that twenty-two-thousand dollars in plunder.

Beside a torrent at the mouth of Little Saghelia Valley, he and old Nat halted a few minutes to rest. After bathing his right eye, which was bruised and swollen, and eating a handful of luscious raspberries, Gary started to stretch out on a flat mossy boulder; but old Nat suggested:

“If we’re goin’ to git home afore dark, lad, mebbe we’d better put our foot in front of our nose and git. It’s only ten miles, but they’re mountain miles.”

“Okay,” Gary agreed. He was tired and achy, but he refused to let an old man of eighty outdo him. “Let’s be traveling.”

Following a game trail that led along a cold blue mountain creek, they left the main valley behind them and plunged into the wild fastness of Little Saghelia.

With wondering eyes, with a feeling of awe and enhancement, Gary kept glancing around at the green lush paradise of the valley, as they wound deeper and deeper into the heavy virginal woods. Its sense of remote isolation, the absence of human trail or human sign save a few blaze marks, made it seem in an altogether different land from the dull town and the fire-ruined main valley which he had just quitted.

The long midsummer sun and the warm “drizzle Chinooks” from the Pacific gave a tropical luxuriance to the trees and flowers and undergrowth. Mosses of a dozen kinds grew everywhere, covering the boulders, mantling the windfall, running up the trees to their first branches, and carpeting the ground with a green living plush. Bracken with fronds like palm leaves clothed the dripping rocks and hung from the cliff faces. The cedars and Douglas firs towered so high that Gary felt Lilliputian when he looked upward to their lofty crown-spreads.

The berry thickets made his mouth water, hungry as he was. Raspberries, red and black and lavender; huckleberries, blueberries, loganberries; saskatoons, bake-apples, and others that he could not even name—in riotous profusion they tangled with the buckbrush, overran the piles of windfall and hung out into the game trail as though waving themselves at the passer-by.

“If you don’t quit stoppin’ fer berries,” old Nat kept remonstrating, “we’ll be midnight gittin’ home, lad.”

Two miles up Little Saghelia they came to a fork of the trail. The main path kept on up along the rushing creek, but old Nat turned left on a dim trail that swung up the west slope.

“It’s furder home this way,” he explained, “but a pile better goin’. Up the crick a piece the windfall gits bad.”

For nearly a mile the trail led them up slope at a steep climb—out of the dense woods of the bottom, into the minaret pines and little mountain prairillons. Then, halfway between timberline and the creek, it straightened out, and headed north again, up valley. Near eight-thirty, when the sun was inching down behind the northwestern peaks, they halted again to rest, on a high rocky hogback. Badly winded by the climb, Gary flung down the grub sack, which he had insisted on toting, and stretched out on the shingle, so tired that he merely gazed wistfully at the wild strawberries and sweet white dewberries all around him.

Down across the treetops, Saghelia lay basking in the slant evening sun, its tin roofs glittering, its coal smoke standing straight up in the still air. At that distance the shafts of the Casper and Ludlow mines looked like marmot holes against the mountainside. For miles up and down the main valley the slopes had been gutted by fires, repeatedly, till the soil was destroyed and even second-growth could not find root. Only the brilliant fireweed clothed that desolute brûlé, in patches here and there of glowing reddish color, as though the despoiling flames still were licking at those slopes. Old Nat pointed with his corncob pipe. “Tain’t very nice to look at, lad, is it?”

“That’s exactly what I was thinking, Dad.”

“It was old Hugh Ludlow, young Hugh’s father, who did most of that ugly destroyin’. Marl Casper ain’t that way, exactly. I mind the time when that whole big valley yon was jest like Little Saghelia now, as purty as a dream. That’s what Saghelia means in Siwash—the purty land, er paradise. The trail up Big Saghelia usta be called Paradise Trail by us old ’uns.”

“Why, were you here in the early days?”

“I was that. I come up Paradise Trail on my daddy’s back, I did. My daddy lit out from Bella Coola when the first news come about this Saghelia strike; and spite of havin’ a woman and little shaver to lug along, he got here miles ahead of the big rush.”

“What brought the rush, this hard-rock?”

Old Nat snorted. “People wouldn’t look at hard-rock in them days. Hard-rock takes machinery and money. It was a placer find, b’y.” He pointed up Big Saghelia to a range of blue headwater mountains. “The field was up there. It’s all worked out now and dead and fergot about; but in its time it was a lively ’un—as excitin’ as anything I seen in the Klondike, and a pile rougher’n tougher’n the Klondike.”

“You went away from this country then, after the Saghelia rush?”

“Fer quite a spell—thirty, forty years.”

Gary nodded. In that “thirty, forty year” he heard overtones of long wandering, up and down the Rocky backbone of the continent, on the prospector’s lonely trail. Old Nat’s speech, as variegated as his patched clothes, seemed to have been picked up haphazardly all the way from Tuba City to White Horse.

“Then you came back,” he asked, “and—how long have you been here on Little Saghelia, Dad?”

“Twenty-five year.”

“Lord, my whole lifetime and a year longer!” Gary exclaimed. “If it’s any of my business, what’re you prospecting for in here? Hard-rock or placer stuff?”

“Well, neither ’un, exactly.” He paused, cleared his throat. “They’s a cave in this valley with a cache of gold in it, and that’s what I’m a-huntin’ fer.”

Gary sat bolt upright. “A cave, with a cache of gold?”

“That’s how it is, lad. A pack of men hid that gold in here seventy-odd year ago; and short of the dead aririn’ and walkin’ and takin’ it away, it’s right here yit.”

Gary forgot his tiredness and the tempting berries. “If it’s not a secret, d’you mind telling me about this cache?”

With his eyes on those blue headwater mountains, as though he was looking back across the misty years to the roaring golden days of Saghelia, old Nat told him the story.

It was a little saga of those distant times when British Columbia, New Caledonia then, was a raw wild region, its whole interior almost an unknown land. On its southeastern plains the buffalo herds still roamed; in its foothills Blackfeet warred with Piegan, and the whisky ranchers preyed on both; and along the Pacific Coast the Cossack promy-shletiiki (fur collectors) still extorted tribute from the hapless Siwash for the Little White Father in far-off Moscow. The country was lawless and full of evil men, for Colonel French and his band of red-coated Shagalasha had not yet come riding across the plains from old Fort Garry, bringing order and justice to the North-West Territories.

During the heyday of the Saghelia rush—old Nat recounted—a band of killers, five of them, began operating in this region. Miners with rich pokes would leave their “diggings,” yonder in the headwater mountains, and start down the valley trail for the Coast; and they never were seen again. From some cave-rendezvous here in Little Saghelia, this bandit pack would lie in ambush along Paradise Trail, pick their victims off, plunder and murder them. The leader of those five was a man called Chilcote Rusk.

“He was a frightful ’un, Chilcote was,” old Nat reminisced, drawing imaginary smoke from his unlighted corncob. “They said he et raw bear and killed grizzlies with a belt ax. He could drink up a half gallon of bush-whisky in two, three zwoops, and ’stead of shavin’ he singed off his whiskers with birch paper. I mind seein’ him with my own eyes when they brung him in dead that mornin’. They had him hog-tied with chains even though he was cold dead—that’s how a-feared people was of Chilcote.”

The repeated slayings, old Nat went on, roused the miners to fury and Vigilant posses scoured Little Saghelia in search of that hidden cave. Failing to find it, they set a shrewd trap for the pack, using a living man as their bait. The bandits fell for the ruse, waylaid the man, and were surrounded and shot down, all five of them.

In dust and nuggets the bandits had taken nearly half a million from their victims; and so, before the sun set on the day of their annihilation, a hundred men were combing up and down Little Saghelia on a feverish hunt for that cache of gold.

Mementos of the pack were found in plenty—their footprints along the creek; places where they had shot and flensed animals for food; abandoned possessions of the miners whom they had murdered; and even the lookout station from which they had watched the valley trail.

But the cave where they had lived and where their gold lay cached remained a blank mystery.

In the decades since then all sorts of individuals and organized parties had tried to crack that secret open; but no trace of the cave had ever been found.

“But that gold is right in this valley,” old Nat concluded. “It’s a-layin’ in here, somewhere, jest like Chilcote and his men left it.”

Gary sat silent when the story was finished. It was a good yarn, this frontier epic of the fearsome Chilcote, and undoubtedly part of it was fact; but he took no stock in that cache of gold. The size of the booty, the various hunts for it, the semi-legendary character of it, made him put the story down as just another of those ubiquitous yarns about pirate gold and hidden treasure.

At first thought he was inclined to pity old Nat for spending twenty-five long years chasing a will-o’-the-wisp as nonexistent as the pot of gold at the rainbow’s end. But then, as he gazed at the beautiful valley, so virginal and wild that Jinny inhabited with billy goats, his pity ebbed.

“Dad,” he said, presently, “I personally think that you’re a hornswoggling old hypocrite and deceiver, I swear I do.”

Old Nat was mildly thunderstruck. “Why, lad, what call have you got to go a-throwin’ all them hard names at me? What’m I any hyppercrite about?”

“That cave of gold! You really don’t believe that, any more than I do.”

“I don’t? Why don’t I? Ain’t I been here twenty-five year a-huntin’ fer it?”

“That’s just the point! You wanted to live here—and it’s the prettiest place I ever saw in my life; you felt you ought to have some excuse for putting in your time, so you took up with that old Chilcote yarn. You know doggone well there’s no cache of gold in this valley.”

“Is that so? Well, mebbe you think I’m the only ’un who b’lieves in that cache.” He motioned up valley; and Gary, looking where he pointed, made out a thin spiral of blue smoke standing above the pines of the valley bottom, two miles north. “That’s young Hugh Ludlow’s outfit, camped there; and you can’t call him no old fool, like mebbe you’re thinkin’ of me.”

Gary started a little. “That camp—Hugh Ludlow’s? D’you mean he’s got an outfit hunting for this cache?”

“That’s how it is, And young Hugh is gamblin’ mighty heavy on findin’ this gold. They’s a big war on atween old Hugh Ludlow and Marl Casper—I don’t know jest what it’s all about, but they’re a-cuttin’ each other’s throats hog-up—and young Hugh is out to git this half a million.”

As Gary looked thoughtfully at that distant thread of smoke, an uneasiness stirred in him. He had little idea what this Casper-Ludlow war was about, and he cared less, feeling that it would never touch himself. But the news that young Hugh Ludlow, his enemy yonder in Saghelia, was here in this valley jarred him considerably. They had clashed at their first encounter, and now back in this wild isolated fastness, they would be living within sight of each other.

“Why, hell,” he thought, “maybe that’s what Sergeant Rhodes was smiling about! I’ll bet he was thinking that young Ludlow and I were sure to tangle. Well, he’ll miss his guess. I’m not tangling with anybody. The ice I’m skating on is too cussed thin. But I wish that Ludlow wasn’t in here. I just didn’t like that fellow’s looks…”

* * * *

In the soft owl-dusk of ten o’clock they trudged out of a pine drogue into a tiny level prairillon; and ahead of them, nestling in a stance of balsam and spruce, Gary saw old Nat’s cabin.

It was no hasty shack, as he had been expecting, but a permanent and carefully built place—a person’s home. A large two-room structure of logs and stone, it was prettily whitewashed, comfortable looking, its windows netted, a spiral of blue smoke curling up from the roof pipe. Neat paths bordered with white rocks led away from it; and the window ledges held boxes of wild flowers, as though all the bewildering riot of flowers in the meadow and surrounding woods was not enough.

Its location, too, was superbly well chosen. It was safe from avalanches, sheltered from winter woolly-whippers, high enough that the air had a vigorous tang, and down across the leagues of forestry a person had a splendid front-door vista. Just back of the cabin a sizable torrent, stair-stepping down the mountain, provided not only water but an endless slumber song for tired evenings.

The whole place resurrected, in Gary’s mind, a dim childhood memory of a similar cabin in the Colorado mountains, where he once had lived through a summer season, in that happy time when his father and mother were still alive and vacations were not an undreamed-of luxury.

In the middle of the prairillon the truant Jinny was calmly pasturing. Her pack, or what had been left of it when she got home, had been taken off. Gary thought this odd. He was also surprised at a candleglow in the cabin.

But he gave little thought to that just then, as he looked around at the meadow and woods and log building. He was thinking how fine a refuge this place would be till the manhunt storm kicked over—if no disaster struck. Whatever happened, this cabin was trail-end for him. From here he might be dragged back to Winnipeg, condemned and hopeless; to the gallows and noose and black hood. Or he might live here safely, till the autumnal snows drifted over the ranges and he could venture on. The trail which he had walked this evening would indeed be paradise trail for him—or the road to death.

CHAPTER THREE

As they trudged across the tiny meadow, Gary heard someone whistling in the cabin ahead. Decidedly it was no man’s whistle but the hit-or-miss efforts of a girl.

“Heavens!” he breathed, thoroughly surprised. Not one word had old Nat told him about any girl at this place. “What the devil am I running into now?”

Without having to be told, he knew that this girl was no transient visitor but was living here. She was the explanation of those flower boxes and the prettiness of old Nat’s home.

But who was she? And why was she living back in this isolated mountain valley?

Through the window netting, as they drew near, he saw her inside the cabin, moving from stove to table as she prepared supper. By the candlelight he had a glimpse of auburn hair, blue corduroy dress, moccasins and a little nosegay of primulas pinned jauntily at her breast. At the footsteps on the gravel path she came hurrying to the door.

“Dads! Where’ve you been so long?” she scolded. “Jinny came home hours ago, and I was beginning to think that something had happened—”

Then she caught sight of the strange man with old Nat, and stared sharply at Gary, questioning who he was.

In her manner, as she stood there in the doorway, Gary detected an unmistakable shyness, and, back of that, a quick-springing hostility toward him.

Old Nat awkwardly introduced them. “Gary, this is Leedy Barton. Her home was in Saghelia, but she’s sorta stayin’ with me’n Jinny this summer.”

“How d’you, uh, do,” Gary stammered. Wondering who on earth she could be, he stared at her, aware that his gaze was rude but unable to take his eyes from her. In a wild-Indian way, what with her moccasins and rainbow belt and the deep tan of her face and hands, she was extraordinarily pretty, with delicately chiseled features and a body as graceful as a dancing girl’s. The glow of health and splendid vitality about her suggested that she must spend most of her time loping the woods and mountains of Little Saghelia. She seemed to have all the proverbial fire of a red-head; and that, on top of her exceptional young beauty, made him put her down as the most unforgettable girl he had met in a long time. Leda acknowledged the introduction with a curt nod, not speaking; and Gary knew then, positively, that in her eyes he was definitely unwelcome here.

“Come in, lad,” Nat invited. Leda’s hostility toward his guest was entirely lost on him. “The way you was a-eatin’ them berries, you must be hungrier’n a young spring silver-tip.” Ill at ease, Gary followed him inside.

The cabin was very crudely furnished. Chairs, tables and the bunk in the far corner were hand-made, of unbarked wood; the floor was carpeted with worn deerskins; and the “hall-tree” was a pair of caribou horns. There was hardly ten dollars’ worth of furniture in the whole place.

But the cabin was spotlessly clean and tidy, and its harshness had been softened by the deft touches of a woman’s hand. The center table was covered with white oilcloth; the battered old stove had been polished till it glistened; the chairs had cushions on them; the entire cabin was sweet-scented from half a dozen birchbark vases of flowers. A doorway, curtained off by two deerskins, led into a second, smaller room.

Gary put his grub sacks on the wall bench and turned around, feeling his unwelcome keenly. By the supper table Leda was glancing from Nat to him, waiting for old Nat to explain. The candlelight, shimmering softly in her auburn hair, shone full on her face, and Gary took another good look at her.

She was hardly out of her teens—he judged her twenty or twenty-one at the most. With a touch of pity he noticed that her dress was patched and worn, her sweater old and badly frayed. There was a wistfulness in her eyes which hinted that this girl had seen her share, and more, of hard lines; and he had the impression that she had led a knockabout life on her own, pretty much like himself.

The silence was so awkward that even old Nat, hanging his hat on the caribou horns, became aware of it at last and tried to break the ice.

“I run onto Gary down in town, Leedy,” he explained. “Gary come in from the outside, but he couldn’t find no work or nothin’ in Saghelia, so I figgered it might mebbe be nice fer him to come up here with me’n you. I thought mebbe he might be comp’ny fer you, bein’ a young person. Me’n Jinny ain’t much, I know.”

Leda’s hazel eyes opened widely. “Do you mean,” she demanded, “that he’s going to stay here?”

For the first time old Nat realized that something was wrong. In his mild way he inquired, “Why, Leedy, what’s the matter?”

“Oh, Dads! You’re always doing impossible things like this. Why didn’t you stop to think? Don’t you know that he and I can’t both live here?”

“Why, uh, why not, honey? We can make out fer room somehow—”

“It isn’t that; it’s what people would say!”

“You b’lieve they’d talk?”

“Talk? They’d—they’d boil! All the idle tongues in Saghelia would start wagging.” In angry vexation she stamped her moccasined foot. “I tell you, it’s impossible!”

Old Nat’s face was a picture of bewilderment and dismay. He pulled at his beard and looked blankly from Gary to Leda, trying to see some way out of this predicament.

“But after invitin’ Gary and bringin’ him up here,” he objected, hesitantly, “why, we can’t hardly turn him out, Leedy. That ’ud be mean as polecats.”

Gary intervened. He felt no resentment toward Leda Barton. Her main point was perfectly clear and dead-right: for two young people to live together in this tucked-away cabin might easily stir talk in Saghelia. And she was a girl. Gossip could damage her severely.

“I had no idea,” he said to Leda, in quiet tones, “that anybody else was staying with Nat or that I’d be barging into any arrangement. I’m sorry.” He picked up his hat. “I’ll be going back. The moon’s bright enough. This was just a mistake, so don’t think anything about it at all.”

His quiet offer to efface himself hurt Leda visibly, and her hostility fled. She checked Gary, her hand on his arm.

“Don’t go. Please. I won’t drive you away from here.” She looked up and met his gaze, and Gary saw that she was very close to tears—of self-reproach, of helplessness in this situation. How candid her hazel eyes were! And how swift-changing her moods, like an April sky. “I haven’t got anything against you. How could I have? It’s just that if we both stay here, it might put me in an awf’ly bad light, down there in Saghelia. It might seem like proof of all the slander and lies they’ve ever said about me.”

Gary wondered what in the name of heaven she meant by this “slander and lies.” Her words implied that she and Saghelia were having a private little war of some sort.

“I don’t see no call fer either ’un of you to go,” old Nat put in. “Leedy, they can’t say anything more about you than what they’ve already said, can they?”

A color flew into Leda’s cheeks, and she hung her head, ashamed. As Gary regarded her, he realized that it was this “talk” which had caused her to leave the town and take refuge with guileless old Higgens. Though he knew nothing about the indictment which Saghelia had brought against this honest-eyed girl, he felt an instinctive sympathy for her, as from one outcast to another.

After a time Leda looked up. “You’re right, Dads,” she said bitterly. “They can’t possibly say anything worse than they’ve said already. I hadn’t thought of that, but it’s true. It doesn’t really make any difference what I do.” She turned again to Gary. “We won’t either of us leave. We won’t put ourselves out just to kowtow to those people.” A defiant light came into her eyes. “I haven’t knuckled under to those tongue-waggers yet, and I’m not going to start now! You stay right here.”

For a moment Gary wavered. He hated to give those folk any grounds for evil gossip; and Leda’s unwelcome of a few minutes ago had hurt his pride. But pride, in his situation, was a luxury that he dared not indulge in. He simply had to stay here or get nailed. At the mere thought of the death cell awaiting him in Winnipeg, the cold icy fingers of fear gripped his heart.

“All right,” he agreed reluctantly. “I’d be awfully glad if I may stay. If any trouble crops up, I can go then.”

Trying hard to be hospitable, Leda brought him a towel and wash cloth from a shelf. “You go out to the torrent now, and I’ll be taking supper up.”

As Gary left the cabin and went down the moonlit path, he thought: “Well! My guess about running into a tangle here at old Nat’s was a bull’s-eye hunch, all right.” The sheer fact of his associating with Leda Barton would draw dangerous attention to him. But that seemed only a minor danger compared to the other unknown angles of this situation. He vaguely sensed that there was a vast deal more to this set-up than he had any inkling of as yet. More than slander lay back of that prophetic smile from Sergeant Rhodes.

* * * *

At supper, as he listened to the whisper of wind in the balsams outside and watched the shy silent girl across the table, Gary found it hard to realize where he was and what chain of accidents and hapchance had brought him here.

For weeks that seemed endless he had been riding freights and blind baggages through chill lonely nights, eluding officers and the invisible nets flung out to take him, fighting off demoralization, starving and shivering and leading the shadowy existence of a hunted outlaw; and now, with a dazing suddenness, here he was in a quiet mountain cabin, miles from nowhere, sitting at supper with two people whom he had never heard of a few hours ago.

“Where did you hunt this afternoon, Leedy?” old Nat inquired, dipping a scone in his tea.

“I covered a little stretch along the west rim-rock, a couple of miles north.”

“Did you run onto anything suspicious-lookin’?”

“No, nothing, Dads.”

“See anything of Hugh’s party?”

“No.”

Gary looked at Leda, all surprised. “Are you hunting for this cache of gold too?”

“You seem to think it’s a silly business,” Leda remarked, catching the skepticism in his voice. “Well, I don’t! I’ll admit it’s a thousand-to-one chance, but it’s not silly. If you knew the facts, you wouldn’t be so—so amused.”

“I’m not amused, really,” Gary denied. This cache-of-gold myth must have a pretty deadly bite, he thought. It was understandable for old Higgens to be spending his sun-set years poking around after a will-o’-the-wisp; but when a young and keenly intelligent person like Leda, or like Hugh Ludlow, went hunting for the plunder-hoard of those long-dead bandits—that made a person stop and think. Maybe there was something to this cache story.

“I seen Hugh Ludlow in town this afternoon, with Mona Casper, Leedy,” old Nat remarked.

Leda glanced up quickly. “Yes?”

Gary fidgeted uneasily and wished that old Nat would shut up. With pardonable shame, he did not care for Leda to know anything about that fight.

In his naive way old Nat let the cat out of the bag. “That’s how I come to meet Gary. Hugh made Jinny run off, and Gary sorta got mad, and one thing led to another. Bein’ a newcomer, Gary didn’t know that young Hugh’s the best fist-fighter anywheres around here.”

Leda glanced at Gary, at his swollen eye. “Oh,” she said, knowing then how he had come by it.

“Yes, he licked me,” Gary admitted. “But I must say, I’d like to meet him sometime when I’m not dog-tired and hungry and all washed up. I believe I could even that score.”

“You’d better not have trouble with Hugh,” Leda advised. “He’s an ugly person to have for an enemy.”

“You know him, then?”

“As much as I care to,” Leda answered.

Her words astonished Gary. Plainly she did know Hugh Ludlow, and disliked him intensely. “Hmmph!” he thought, eyeing Leda. “There’s something up, between those two. Here’s still a new twist to this set-up that Rhodes was smiling about! I’ll be damned! With all these wars and counter-wars going on, what a nice peaceful refuge this valley promises to be for me!”

Tired and sleepy-eyed, Leda excused herself shortly afterward and went into her small room to bed.

Refusing any help from old Nat, Gary washed the dishes, carried in wood for the breakfast fire and brought water from the torrent.

In spite of his own tiredness he was wide-awake, his mind full of the events of that extraordinary day. Things had been happening to him so fast that he could hardly keep up with them. When he had finished the work he strolled outside to join old Nat, who was sitting on the cord-wood.

Though he was burning to know about this “talk” concerning Leda, the night was so strange and beautiful that for minutes he sat silent, looking into the dim moonlit vistas and listening to the sounds of the wilderness.

A midnight hush lay over the ranges. A gibbous moon, inching up toward zenith, shone down through the lacy balsams and fell in dark-silvery splashes on the needle-carpeted ground. In that clear thin air the stars were bright as lanterns; the winds flowing down from glacier and snow-field had a decided nip to them; and under the wan moon the surrounding mountains rose like gray ghostly masses against the night sky.

Most of the sounds that came to him were strange and mysterious to his city ears, but now and then he heard one which he could recognize or guess: the weird sepulchral hoot of a great owl, a far-away crescendo wail, the plaintive bleating of a bighorn lamb on some high battlement across the valley. The air was tremulous with a low hollow murmur that rose and fell with the slight breeze—the low murmuring chorus of a hundred over-falls up and down Little Saghelia. “Shouldn’t you be going to bed, Dad?” he suggested, after a time. “It’s not long till morning.”

“Oh, I ain’t much on sleepin’ in summer. A person gits that away in the North. I’ll spread a poke out here dreckly and ketch an hour er two.”

“You’ll do no such thing. You’ll sleep in your own bunk in the cabin, and I’ll spread that poke. I’d rather sleep outside anyhow.” Plucking at a lichen curl, he glanced at the dark cabin. “Say, Dad, about Leda in there—d’you mind telling me what this trouble is between her and Saghelia?”

Old Nat seemed reluctant to discuss the matter, and Gary realized that this was why he had not mentioned Leda on the up trip that evening.

“Well,” Nat said finally, “tain’t a very nice thing to talk about, mebbe, but you’d hear it somewheres, I guess. Leedy’s mother down there in town wasn’t mebbe as, uh, respectable as she ought to’ve been. In fack, after Leedy’s father died, she wasn’t a decent woman at all. Ever’body in town knowed it. It was thataway fer years—all the time Leedy was a-growin’ up.”

“Good Lord!” Gary thought, a little appalled. What a home for a sensitive girl to be reared in!

“Anybody that says anything bad about Leedy herself is a polecat,” old Nat asserted, as near to anger as he ever got. “I’ve knowed her since she usta bake mud pies along the crick; I’ve watched her grow up; and I knowed her daddy afore she was born. She takes after her daddy lots.”

“But how did this talk about Leda get started?”

“It jest started, I guess. On account of her mother. It wasn’t so bad at first-but it kept a-gittin’ worse’n worse. I expect Leedy could have stopped it if she’d kowtowed and went to church and the like of that. But she ain’t that way. She fought back and sassed people and made enemies; and this ‘like mother like daughter’ talk got to spreadin’ till a whole raft of lies and slander was a-goin’.”

He went on to say that her father, a timber ranger for the Marl Casper interests, had been killed accidentally when Leda was only five. Completely neglected by her mother, Leda had led a tomboyish existence, fishing, loping the bush like a little auburn-haired waif but managing to go through the grades and high school. Two years ago she had gone down to Victoria and got a job; but last winter she had come back to nurse her mother through a long illness.

Her mother had died; the old hue and cry had started up again; and with her Victoria job gone, Leda had pitched off from the town and come up here.

As Gary pondered the story, he could well understand Leda’s hostility at his coming, and the instinctive shyness about her—the shyness of one who had been on the defensive all her life. A great pity came over him for that neglected little girl, growing up, innocent of what her home really was, but having her eyes gradually opened by the taunts and jeers of other children; and then enduring, all through her teens, the evil whisperings of that small town. Leda too, like himself, was reaping a harvest, a bitter harvest, that was not of her own sowing.

Sometime after old Nat had gone to bed, he took the canvas sleeping poke and started around the cabin for the balsam drogue. As he passed the window of the small room, he glanced inside and saw Leda there, asleep, her arm under her head, with a shaft of moonlight slanting in upon the bunk. Unconsciously he paused a moment, looking at her, noticing the poverty of the room—the cracked mirror, the old dresser, the vase of flowers on the window sill.

For all her honesty and courage, he knew that the gossip and slander down yonder had left their marks on Leda Barton. One lone girl, fighting a whole town, she had battered herself against its cruel unyielding opinion; and now, wounded and bitter, she was beginning to retreat within herself. He hated to think that Saghelia might ever break her; that in the years ahead she might lose heart and hope and her desperately defended ideals. Something very splendid would perish when her courageous spirit died.

As he paused there, gazing at her, he was shaken with the wish that he might shelter and shield this lonely defenseless girl, as one might shield anything rare and precious.

CHAPTER FOUR

Gary was awakened by the raucous chatter of a whisky-jack in a balsam overhead. Opening his eyes, he swore sleepily at the camp pest, yawned, stretched himself luxuriously in the warm poke, and wondered what time it was.

At the cabin no one seemed stirring, no smoke was coming from the roof pipe; but the sun looked suspiciously high in the sky. He reached for his trousers, glanced at his Ingersoll and whistled in sheer astonishment. Twenty-five after ten!

“Whew—what a Rip van Winkle draw that was!” he thought. For nine solid hours he had lain there dead to the world, without a flicker of the dreams and nightmares which had haunted his sleep during the two past weeks. The mountain air, his weariness, and especially the terrific let-down from the strain of his two-thousand-mile flight, had kept him sleeping through the night and long northern dawn and nearly halfway into the day.

Ashamed of being such a laggard, he dressed quickly, hung the canvas poke in a balsam for convenient reference that evening, and hurried to the cabin.

Leda and old Nat had eaten breakfast and left for a morning’s hunt. Evidently they had been gone for hours. They had put his breakfast—trout and bacon, pea-meal cakes and coffee—on the back of the stove to keep warm; but the food was cold now, and the wood fire had died out.

Still logy from his long sleep, he went down to the torrent, washed in the icy blue water and laved the soreness out of his bad eye. Back at the cabin, he took his breakfast outside, sat on the chopping block and ate there, loath to miss anything of the bright mountain morning.

Along the pathways around the cabin a number of striped ground squirrels, comical with their little black tails stuck straight up, were frisking in the sun and calling their lively tcheepmunk-tcheepmunk. A host of alpine butterflies, small and dingy-colored, were dancing over the flowers of the meadow. Higher up slope, in an area of rocky open, a colony of “whistling pigs,” perched prominently on their den boulders, were whistling sociably at one another but keeping an eye cocked at the sky; and Gary, looking up, saw a golden eagle wheeling in and out of a wispy cloud.

At the south edge of the meadow the runaway Jinny, full of vetches and contentment, had climbed up on a house-size boulder and was carrying on a vocal long-distance battle with a billy goat—a small white speck on top of the eastern rim-rock five miles across the valley.

Their challenges at each other made Gary smile, and the whole scene around him—the sun and woods and mountain vistas, the tinkle of water and the brooding peace—filled him with gratitude for the destiny which had guided him to this haven in his time of need. But then his gaze traveled down across the treetop leagues to distant Saghelia, to the smoke and tiny sun-glitters of the town; and the smile faded from his lips. Down yonder was that enigmatic Rhodes, symbol of the law, who might seize him and toss him into the law’s pitiless machinery. If Rhodes had recognized him, then this happy life would come to a quick end—today, tomorrow, next week…

From the cabin a well-worn trail wound down slope toward the alley bottom; and Gary reasoned that it led to the diggings where old Nat tom-rocked dust. As soon as he finished breakfast, he set out down the trail, intending to get in some tom-rocking. Besides wanting to relieve Leda and old Nat of that job, he was keen to tie into some good hard work and toughen up.

As he swung down through the cedars and deer-bush, he wished that Leda might let him go along with her occasionally on her hunts for the cache. Beneath her aloofness she was a desperately lonesome person, hungry for laughter, hungry for human company and friendship. But to work up any companionship with that shy silent girl would call for very tactful and careful strategy. With good cause she shunned men and was suspicious of almost everybody. The best way of gaining her trust was to treat her in a frank partnerly fashion, ignoring the fact that she was a girl.

“A cussed hard job, that!” he mused, thinking of her hazel eyes and the light spangles in her hair. “But if I don’t do it, if I let her suspect that she’s a mighty disturbing element, she’ll put me down as just another one of these bozos to steer clear of.”

In the valley bottom, half a mile below the cabin, the trail brought him to the diggings.

The place was an old oxbow or dried-up channel, three hundred yards long and forty feet wide. The deposit, of sand, pea-gravel and glacial muck, was about five feet deep, and rested on a water-polished bed-rock. In his twenty-five years on Little Saghelia old Nat had worked only about half of it. Plenty remained, meagerly as he lived, to see him through the rest of his life. His equipment was of the simplest—a shovel, two buckets and a tom-rocker, which sat over at the creek edge, convenient to water.

The place was not staked or posted. Gary fancied that the deposit must be “Chink stuff,” of low concentration; otherwise, folk from Saghelia would have crowded in and shouldered old Nat aside.

Thoroughly green at the business of hawking float, he walked over to the tom-rocker, a shallow cradle-like contraption with galvanized lining and two handles, and studied it.

“Let’s see now,” he reasoned. “You dump in a bucket or two of stuff; then you throw in water and stir until you’ve got a thin goo; then you rock like the dickens, tilting it just enough to slosh out the gravel and sand and muck. After four or five fillings you’ve got a fairly good concentrate, and you work that down carefully—and thar’s yer gold, pardner! Okay, let’s get a wiggle on,” Plunging into work, he carried sand and gravel across to the tom-rocker, clumped it in, threw in water, rocked and sloshed till only a few tablespoonfuls of “goo” remained.

It took him a full hour of hard toil to work down five fillings. His arms ached, the mosquitoes and brûlés tormented him, and he sweat till his shirt stuck to his back. Several times he soused himself bodily in a deep creek hole to cool off.

When he finally got his rough concentrate, he poured in a quart of water and then worked that out very carefully, along with the lingering sand grains and tiny pebbles, till only about a tablespoonful of water was left. With the point of his knife he poked around in this and looked at the fruits of his toil. He expected to see a little puddle of yellow in the blob of water. To his intense disappointment he saw only a few gleams and yellow flecks and one tiny nugget.

“Hell’s bells!” he swore. “That wouldn’t fill a gnat’s eye-tooth. A couple or three cents’ worth—for all that sweating! Damn it, there’s some trick to this that old Nat’ll have to put me onto.”

In disgust, not realizing how precious those yellow gleams really were or knowing that he had hawked nearly sixty cents’ worth of gold, he dumped out the blob of water, gave the tom-rocker a good kick, and picked up his hat and jacket.

As he turned around to go home, he stopped short… Scarcely a dozen feet away. Hugh Ludlow was standing in a shaft of sun, regarding him with a cold stare.

At a respectful distance behind young Ludlow a huge half-breed, with shaggy black hair, buckskin clothes, and shoulders like a grizzly bear’s, was grinning at the kick which Gary had given the tom-rocker. There was a third man, a dark-faced Indian, standing half-concealed behind a clump of devil’s club. Furtive, hatchet-featured, with the beady glittering eyes of a snake, the Siwash was as evil-looking an individual as Gary ever had met.

The three of them—Hugh Ludlow, the ’breed Eutrope, and Skunk-Bear the Indian—had walked up unseen and unheard, and had been watching him for several minutes. Their silent stares sent a quiver of uneasiness through Gary. This encounter was no accident but a deliberate visit. And the visit was anything but friendly.

“What d’you think you’re doing here?” Hugh finally demanded, in cold hard tones.

With half an eye Gary could see that Hugh Ludlow was dangerously angry at him, for some unknown reason. And the swart Siwash, his slit eyes glinting, was silently whetting a long-bladed skinning knife on his palm—a tacit and sinister threat that daunted Gary.

“Well,” Gary said, trying to ignore Hugh’s hostility, “I don’t seem to be doing much of anything. I thought I was washing out some dust, but I didn’t cut much mustard, I guess.”

“I don’t mean that,” Hugh snapped. “I mean”—he jerked a thumb at the cabin up slope—“what the hell d’you think you’re doing up there?”

His arrogant tones angered Gary. Yesterday, and now at this second encounter, he had the impression that Hugh Ludlow was a spoiled and vicious boy, not yet grown up to know there were other people in the world besides himself.

“I’m staying up there with old Higgens,” he said, playing poker till he found out the cause of Hugh’s ugly temper. Defenseless and weaponless, he took a quick glance at the shovel near the tom-rocker, meaning to jump for it if these three tried to gang him and beat him up.

For a moment or two Hugh stared at him silently, his scowl deepening. Then: “Didn’t it occur to you,” he demanded, “that you’re putting Leda Barton on the spot by living at that cabin? What d’you suppose people will be saying about her? Or don’t you give a damn?”

“We talked about that angle last evening,” Gary answered. “I offered to clear out, but Leda said, and old Nat, too, that those mud-daubers in Saghelia couldn’t say anything worse about her than they’ve said already. So I stayed.”

“What if those two did ask you to stay? You should have been man enough to clear out anyhow. You’re a fine specimen—dynamiting a girl’s reputation just so’s you can hang around that old coot’s cabin and have things easy.”

For a moment Gary believed that Hugh was using Leda merely as an excuse, to veil the real reason of his hostility. Maybe Hugh was feverishly covetous of that cache of gold and afraid that someone else might find it.

Hugh’s next words set him right. Stepping closer, face to face, Hugh delivered his ultimatum: “You do as I say and there’ll be no trouble. I’ll give you a fair-square chance, and you’d better listen. Here’s your ticket. You’re not staying up there at that cabin. You’re getting out of Little Saghelia. I don’t intend to have this whole country talking about Leda Barton on account of you. They’ve talked about her enough now. Too damned much!”

Gary was fairly staggered. Not by the ultimatum, but because the reason of Hugh’s ugly temper toward him suddenly stood revealed, as by a lightning flash. He knew jealousy when he saw it, passion when he saw it; and he knew he was surely seeing both, now. Hugh’s anger at the lies about Leda, his proprietary air toward her, his very tones when he spoke her name—all this betrayed, more forcefully than any words, that the man was fiercely in love with Leda Barton.

“Lord above me!” Gary breathed. Hugh Ludlow, proud, overweening, heir to half this country—in love with Leda Barton, outcast, defamed and slandered! The irony of it nearly bowled him over.

In the light of this crashing discovery a dozen little puzzles of the last twenty hours cleared up instantly: why Hugh Ludlow had treated Mona Casper so brusquely; why Leda had looked up so quickly at mention of Hugh’s name; why she had spoken a warning about Hugh Ludlow.

And that sphinx-like smile from Sergeant Rhodes—he saw still deeper into that, now. Small wonder that Rhodes, knowing young Ludlow’s jealous and domineering nature, had smiled prophetically at the thought of a strange man living at the cabin up Little Saghelia!

“Well, say something!” Hugh commanded. “Don’t stand there tongue-tied. I’m not going to eat you. You understand what you’re to do, don’t you?”

“I ought to; you made it clear enough,” Gary answered evasively. Alone against three men, one of them toting a vicious knife, and Ludlow probably armed with a pocket gun, he was in no position to refuse point-blank. And yet he would not promise to go.

“All right, then,” Hugh said, plainly believing that he had driven the fear of the Lord into his enemy. “I thought you’d take warning. Your cake’s all dough, fellow, and I’m glad you see it.”

He motioned at the ’breed and Indian, and they started back down the trail. He himself stayed for a final word.

“When you get in town, you’ll find a ticket for you at the railroad station. Out to the Grand Trunk. Take it and use it. If you don’t, if you’re still up there tomorrow morning”—he paused, to emphasize his words—“you may not get out of this alley at all.”

With a nod that was half contempt and half satisfaction over the result of his visit, he whirled on his heel, joined the other two; and the three of them disappeared, down valley.

CHAPTER FIVE

“You seem sorta quiet, Gary,” old Nat remarked, over the noon meal in the cabin. “Is something a-troublin’ you?”

“Not a thing, Dad,” Gary denied. He had said nothing to Leda or old Nat about Hugh Ludlow’s ultimatum. It was not their worry but his.

He could not make up his mind whether to stay and fight Hugh Ludlow, or to take up his flight again. The odds against him here were pretty hopeless. Against his lone self stood six or seven men and all the power of Hugh Ludlow’s money. If he stayed he likely would get a rifle bullet from ambush or a knife stab in the back. The best he could possibly hope for was to be waylaid, ganged, beaten half to death, and then “escorted” out of the valley.

And he would not dare to go to the law against those men. Whatever they did to him, however viciously and criminally they hounded him, he would have to take it and keep quiet.

But he winced at the thought of leaving Little Saghelia; and he was thinking not only of himself but of Leda. Hugh Ludlow’s proprietary air toward her made him angry, and a bit uneasy. The man had staked Leda out. His emotion toward her was not an unselfish love but a fierce and dangerous passion. She needed someone, some capable and loyal friend, to watch after and protect her.

When he thought of Hugh’s ultimatum and the man’s domineering nature, a slow deep anger burned in him, and he wanted to stay. Wanted to keep Leda from harm, and smash that overweening young egoist.

“Damned if you’ll push me around that way,” he thought. “You won’t ride rough-shod over me or over Leda either.”

He wished he could have a talk with Leda, in his few hours of grace this afternoon, before definitely deciding what to do. Undoubtedly there were angles to this situation here on Little Saghelia which he still knew nothing about. If Leda would tell him the whole set-up, that might help him make up his mind.

Old Nat pushed back his empty plate and glanced through the door at the bright cloudless sky.

“It’ll be hiyu hot this afternoon along that rim-rock, Leedy. Somehow the heat sorta gits me worse’n it usta.”

“You stay home, Dads. I can hunt that little stretch we were thinking about.”

“I don’t like the idee of you bein’ ’way up valley by yourself, girl. Bears with cubs are nasty, this time of year; and ’sides, on this rock work a person can’t ever tell when he’ll fall an’ break a limb. If you’re plumb set on goin’, mebbe Gary might like to go ’long with you.”

Gary could have hugged old Nat for the suggestion. All through the meal he had been wondering how he could get in a talk with Leda. Besides wanting to see what this cave-hunting business was like, he could imagine nothing finer than a whole afternoon with her, getting closer acquainted and shaking off the blue devils which had hounded him since Hugh Ludlow’s ultimatum.

Old Nat’s suggestion startled Leda a little. She looked up and glanced dubiously at Gary, as though uncertain whether she wanted him to go or not.

Wisely Gary clamped down on himself and appeared totally uninterested. His deliberate policy of casualness toward her as a girl had already drawn her out of her shyness and made her less on guard against him.

Presently, when he said nothing, she asked hesitantly, “Maybe you had other plans for this afternoon?”

With studied indifference Gary answered: “Oh, I hadn’t anything special on. I don’t mind going.” Leda batted her eye at that. Gary could almost see her thinking: “Why, gee, he doesn’t seem to have any interest in me at all! He must have a girlfriend where he came from, or—or something.”

In a moment she invited, “I—I’d like to have you, that is, if you really want to go.”

“Okay,” Gary agreed. “I don’t guarantee to lick any bears, but if one gets after you I’ll try to slow him down till you get up a tree.”

A few minutes later, with a pocket flash, a roll of trout line and Nat’s heavy old horse-pistol, they left the cabin and headed up the mountain. As they side-gouged up a steep slope above the meadow, Leda pointed at the whitish rim-rock which extended, as a bold imposing cliff, all the way around Little Saghelia Valley.

“That’s a soft chalky limestone, and it’s got all sorts and sizes of caves in it. The other rocks in Little Saghelia are mostly granites and gneisses, and they don’t have any caves except overhangs. So Dads and I’ve been concentrating on this rim-rock. There are some ideal caves along it for a band of men to live in.”

“I wish I could share your faith about finding this gold, Lee,” he commented. That “Lee” sounded rather partnerly and somewhat like a man’s name. “Frankly, this cache looks to me like a million-to-one-shot.”

“But it’s here, and think of what you’d have if you found it. Five hundred thousand dollars! Doesn’t that excite you?”

“Oh, some. But half a million, when and if found, is no key to the golden gates, Lee. Where I came from, lots of people with that much jump out of hotel windows.”

“Give me that much and I’d jump higher than a hotel window!”

“What would you do with it if you had it, Lee?”

“I’d give Dads half, and then I’d use the other quarter-million to buy a one-way ticket away from Saghelia!”

Gary doubted this. It seemed to him that secretly she longed for the good opinion of the little city yonder, or she would have gone long since. Saghelia was her home and its esteem was something that she cherished feverishly, valuing it as one always values a prize desperately fought for and never attained.

They reached the foot of the rim-rock and sat down on a plaque of moss to rest. Down the long mountain slope the cabin under the balsams looked small as a wren house, and Jinny was only a lazy gray ant on the tiny flower-bright meadow. From their timberline height they could follow the winding silver thread of Big Saghelia River for half a hundred miles into the northeast, till the master stream split into its headwater creeks and vanished.

To the north, over the Little Saghelia watershed, a towering giant lifted its naked pinnacle rocks nearly three miles into the sky, its white névés flashing cold fires in the sun, its lower reaches hidden by clouds and a swirling snowstorm.

The blue-hazy distances, the bracing air, the majesty of that mountain panorama, brought a strange exhilaration to Gary. Human affairs, including his own troubles, seemed a little dwarfed, a little less important and crushing. As he gazed down at the beautiful valley, he experienced a renewal of his confidence and steadiness, as though the mountains in some intangible way were giving him of their largeness.

The prospect of fighting Hugh Ludlow and those slinkers did not seem so hopeless as it had an hour ago. After all, he had outwitted scores of Police and Provincials and had run a two-thousand-mile gantlet through the fury of a manhunt storm. Hugh Ludlow couldn’t have done that. Hugh Ludlow, for all his money and hired bush-sneaks, wasn’t invincible. The man might be outsmarted and fought to a standstill.

For himself he wanted to stay and fight, but he refused to decide. There were other people besides himself to think about. Plainly this situation here had high explosive in it, and he did not care to draw destruction upon Leda and kindly old Nat.

He wondered just how things stood between Leda and Hugh Ludlow. Considering how lonely and friendless she was, why hadn’t Hugh won any liking from her? The circumstances had been extraordinarily favorable. But plainly she disliked the man. Evidently she saw through him, and knew better than to pin any faith or trust to a person so thoroughly unscrupulous.

Whatever Hugh’s ultimate intentions were, he clearly had hopes of swinging her around. He did not seem even to believe that she disliked him. To his overweening mind it was probably inconceivable that she would turn him down flatly, or that with her, unlike everything else in his life, he was not to have his way.

“I’ll have to find out what happened between her and Hugh,” he told himself, “before I can make any intelligent decision. If I don’t rush things this afternoon, if I can work up a confidential talk and lead around gradually, she’ll tell me, all right. And I’ll find out what the rest of this set-up is. It’ll be an eye opener, I’m betting.”

As he glanced at Leda he saw that she was nervously snapping the flashlight on and off and that her cheeks were tinged with color. He had a premonition of what was coming.

Presently: “Gary, did old Nat tell you anything about—about… Did he say why I’m staying up here with him, and why I hate that town down there?”

“Yes, he did,” Gary stated frankly, believing it wise to be matter-of-fact. “I asked him, and he told me.”

“And what did you think?”

“Well, I thought that you weren’t the first person to be victimized by small-town talk. And last night when I stopped and looked in—I mean, last night I thought that you and I both, Lee, are reaping something that we didn’t sow ourselves. We’re reaping somebody else’s harvest.”

“I don’t get that.”

Gary hesitated a moment before taking the fateful step. But only a moment. His instinctive judgment told him that with Leda Barton a confidence was entirely safe. She was honest, and keen as a whiplash; and she had been through trouble enough herself to know what hard lines meant. Besides, her familiarity with this country and its people might be of vital help to him, if he stayed.

“Well,” he said, “you and I are in pretty much the same boat, Lee. Outcasts, I mean. If you want to make a nice little stack of money in a hurry, go down there to Saghelia and tell Sergeant Rhodes that you know where Gary Frazier is.”

The flashlight dropped from Leda’s hand. “W-h-a-t? No! I don’t believe it!”

“It’s true. I’m wanted. That’s why I grabbed at the chance to get back into these mountains, away from towns and people. So, I say, we’re in the same boat. The only difference is that you get slandered whereas if I’m caught, I’ll get hanged!”

Leda turned pale. “Is it—really—that bad?”

Gary nodded. “There’s a murder charge against me. It’s air-tight. If I’m taken, I’ll swing.”

“Murder?” Leda gasped. She stared at him incredulously. “You—you killed some person?”

“Two people,” Gary stated, in even tones. “A robbery.”

For moments Leda gazed at him searchingly. At last, slowly, she began shaking her head in disbelief.

“No. You didn’t. You didn’t do any such thing. You might kill a person in self-defense or accidentally, but you’d never murder two people in a robbery. You’re not that interested in money. Why, you aren’t much interested even in this half-million dollars. I don’t know what you did—but you didn’t do it! Does Sergeant Rhodes know or suspect who you are?”

Gary shook his head in a baffled way. “I swear he’s got me guessing, Lee. He may not have the faintest idea. Again, he may have spotted me right off. If he does know, I’m done for.”

“What name are you going by?”

“Nobody has asked, and I haven’t said. Everything seems to be ‘partner’ in this country.”

“We ought to get together on a name for you in case somebody does ask.”

“That’s so,” Gary agreed, though he fancied that he might be leaving Saghelia before any one became curious about his name. He smiled. “Suppose you dub me, Lee.”

She thought a moment. “Dawson, Gary Dawson—that sounds pretty, and it’s quite natural.”

“Okay. Dawson it is, if and when. Gosh, Lee, when a person is dodging the noose like this, he has to drop his identity and sink his whole past… It’s demoralizing as the dickens. You’ve no idea how good it is to be talking to you this way. To have a friend again, I mean.”

Leda reached out and touched his hand in sympathy. “I’m awfully glad you told me this, Gary. My own trouble doesn’t seem so important, in comparison.” She added: “It’s a good thing we believe in each other. Nobody else seems to believe in us.”

“That’s about right, too. If I can and do hang on here, we ought to partner up and take these things to a licking.”

Leda’s eyes flashed. “That’s a bargain!” she said, in her impetuous fashion. “I’m tired of being tramped on, and you must be too. We’ll team up and lick everybody and everything!”

* * * *

The game trail along the cliff foot was level easygoing, and they could have made good time; but Gary, meeting something new and fascinating at every step, kept poking into this and that and stopping repeatedly.

He glanced into the mysterious caves they passed, tossed a stone back in, or listened to the ghostly echo of his voice from the dark depths. On that sun-drenched slope the berries, especially the wild strawberries, were vastly sweeter than in the valley woods, and he sampled every patch. The dry rock dust under the overhangs displayed a bewildering assortment of animal tracks, ranging all the way from the dainty prints of grasshopper mice to the huge claw-fringed pads of grizzlies; and he made Leda identify them all for him.

The limestone cliff itself, formerly the bed of an ancient Cretaceous sea but now seven thousand feet in air and a hundred miles inland, was studded like a plum pudding with irresistible fossils of all sorts—shark teeth, fearsome-looking fish jaws, the bones of pelagic dinosaurs, and the actual unaltered shells, tinted as in life, of arks and clams and scallops. He pried out specimens till his knapsack and pockets were bulging.

“Better have my fun this afternoon,” he reflected, as excuse for his leisureliness, “for if I’m still on Little Saghelia tomorrow, things aren’t going to be very funny for me!”

For a time Leda kept scolding him for being so poky, but after a while she fell in with his mood and forgot about the afternoon’s work.

At a small torrent they saw a school of fingerling trout, golden-colored Skeenas, darting around in the crystal water like animated nuggets of live gold. Across the valley they saw Jinny’s billy-goat friend, frightened by a grizzly, lead his sergalio at a breath-taking dash straight up the face of a thousand-foot rock. On a talus slide they spotted a cony, solitary little denizen of bleak high places, and paused to watch him industriously making hay—cutting the sparse grass, spreading it on flat stones to dry, and carrying yesterday’s harvest back into his bear-proof den against the snows and woolly-whippers of winter.

Whenever they came to a nest of “balancing boulders,” they selected a big one, toppled it, watched it go bounding and careening down the steep half-mile slope till it vanished in the heavy timber.

It was half-past three when they reached the stretch of caves which Leda wanted to search. To make up for wasted time they set to work very diligently, intending to finish that stretch and get back home before dusk.

The first cave they went into was rather small—a bit higher than their heads, wide as an average room and reaching thirty or forty feet back. The rock dust, dry and impalpably fine, was pitted with ant-lion holes; and except for the entrance-way, where a few eddies of autumnal leaves had drifted in, the dust looked as though it had lain undisturbed for decades. The cave had no pockets, no branches, no indications of old camp smoke, no human signs at all.

In the far dark end of it, a large grizzly track in the dust, and a wallow where the shaggy brute had lain, gave Gary considerable pause.

“Say, Lee, d’you suppose this fellow is anywhere in our immediate vicinity?”

“Oh, no. Bears stay altogether in the open till late in the fall. That track might be several years old.”

“But don’t you find a cave now and then that’s got one in?”

“Not very often. The way I do, if there are any fresh tracks in the entrance, I take a good sniff or several sniffs before going in. You can smell a bear nine times out of ten. If you’re still not satisfied, you can throw rocks back in, and if he’s in there he’ll start growling.”

It came home to Gary, as they walked out of the cave, that a girl who tom-rocked gold and threw stones at grizzly bears could well claim something more than pity. And any girl who could maintain her ideals and independent spirit, as Leda had done, through the bewilderment of young girlhood and the shame which Leda Barton had faced—that, in his eyes, was a greater tribute to her character than even her amazing abilities at bush-loping.

Near an overfalls, where a torrent came tumbling over the two-hundred-foot cliff, they found a cave with a long tunnel entrance and unknown depths beyond the limit of their flash. After tying their cord to a tree and lighting a resinous pine knot in case of accident to the flashlight, they started in, playing out the guide line as they went.

Fifty feet from the mouth, a sharp bend in the tunnel shut out the light of day. For a hundred feet more the tunnel wound on back, till at last, abruptly, it widened and opened out into a high-vaulted room, large enough to hold a fair-sized house.

The place was as dark and chill as a tomb and so deathly quiet, so different from the world of sun and trees and living winds outside, that they kept close to each other and spoke in awed whispers.

Walking out to the center of the hall, they turned the flash all around the walls and over the floor; but they saw no sign of human occupancy or even the prints of animals.

From the main room half a dozen galleries led on back—dark passageways to a still darker unknown. With both of them holding to the string, they stepped across to the gallery farther to their left, followed it back for a hundred tortuous yards, found that it ended in a small blind room, and then returned to the big hall.

It took them a full hour to explore the other corridors. The last one was the longest and hardest of all. Through bends and room-widenings, through narrow squeezes and places where they had to go on hands and knees, it led them on and on back, till their thousand-foot guide line was almost all out. But they refused to give up, and at last they came to a good-sized room and saw only blind walls around them, gleaming with the fossil bone and pearly shell of that remote Cretaceous sea.

The tunnel had led in the general direction of the small overfalls, and by putting their ears against the rock they could hear the faint hollow whisper of the beating waters. But that whisper and the slender cord in their hands were their only links with the world outside. The chill of the place made them shiver; and the sense of being buried far back in dark cold rock oppressed them like a tangible weight. The room was a catacombs, not of human design nor for human dead, but a catacombs which the Ages had made and where the Ages had laid away their children. The flashlight and the smoky pine knot lit up the grayish-white of bones, the fossil-relief of a nautilus, the shell of a yellow scallop, as delicately yellow and lovely as when it had been a “sea butterfly” in the warm Cretaceous waves…

Shivering from the chill they came out of the cave, blinking their eyes in the bright hot sun.

A few rods farther on, Leda spotted a wide ledge up against the face of the cliff, forty feet above their heads.

“Looks suspicious,” she commented. “These ledges are my favorite hunting places. All the regular caves in Little Saghelia have been combed and curry-combed; but if the Chilcote Rusk pack lived in a ledge cave and used a rope ladder, no wonder those old Vigilant posses couldn’t find them.”

“Smart idea. But how’re we going to get up there?”

“Climb up.”

“Climb that?” He took another look at those precipitous forty feet. “Why, that’s straight up, girl. A billy goat with a grizzly after him couldn’t make it.”

“A person can climb rings around a billy goat any day.” She put down her knapsack. “If you don’t want to, why—”

“Hold on; I’ll try it. But you stay away from under me. One broken neck will be enough.”

With Leda instructing him, he started up the face of the rock, wedging his toes into frost cracks, finding precarious finger-holds in the honeycomb, scratching himself on sharp nodules, straining and sweating for every upward foot, and fully expecting to wake up down on the game trail with Leda throwing water in his face.

He was fifteen minutes climbing those forty feet, but he stuck with it and finally pulled himself up on the ledge As he turned to look down, Leda took a swift experienced glance at the rock for the best way up, tossed back her auburn hair, and came scaling up toward him, hand over hand, so quickly and deftly that before he could catch his breath she was standing beside him on the jut.

Considerably chagrined, Gary helped her search the ledge. Finding nothing, they sat down on the fern-clad rock, their feet dangling, with the tops of the minaret pines straight out from them.

At the eastern rim-rock far away across the valley Gary saw five small moving specks, and with a start he realized that this was Hugh Ludlow’s searching party.

“Lee,” he asked, watching those distant men, “old Nat mentioned that the Caspers and Ludlows are having a big scrap of some kind. What’s it about, d’you know?”

“Well,” Leda explained, “last year old Hugh Ludlow started a war on Marl Casper. He wasn’t content with owning half of Saghelia; he wanted to own it all. But he overreached. He’s been badly licked, so badly that he’s on the verge of bankruptcy. Another shove will send him over the cliff.”

“So that’s why young Hugh is hunting this cache—he’s trying to save the day for his dad!”

“That’s not why! Hugh isn’t trying to save anybody but himself. If he finds this gold, he won’t give his dad one thin nickel of it.”

“Isn’t he on good terms with his dad?”

“I hope not! They never did get along; they’re both too domineering and willful. Right now, Hugh’s dad is putting pressure on him to marry Mona Casper. Hugh could if he wanted to. Mona’s crazy about him. She comes back to Saghelia every summer just to be around Hugh. But he doesn’t like her. The point is, if he’d marry Mona, why, that’d stop this war and save the Ludlow interests. His dad is trying to make him do that, but Hugh is holding off.”

“What d’you mean—‘holding off’?”

“He’s stalling. He doesn’t intend to be left without a fortune, whatever happens. If he can find this half-a-million-dollar cache, he’ll throw Mona aside and defy his dad. If he doesn’t find it… Well, my guess is that he’ll give in, all right. In the meanwhile he’s stalling his dad and stalling Mona.”

“Good Lord!” Gary exclaimed. Here at last he was getting down to the bed-rock of this situation. Down to human thirsts and blind clashing ambitions.

Certain that Leda, after their comradely hours that afternoon, would answer his question now, he asked: “Lee, aren’t you pretty well acquainted with Hugh? It’s none of my business, of course, but didn’t he and you have some association sometime?”

Leda hesitated a moment and then slowly nodded. “Yes. Last winter. He was kind to me, and he’s one of the few people who don’t believe those lies and slanders. But our association was short and slight, Gary. I don’t consider him any person to trust. The more I saw of him, the more I came to dislike him.”

Gary fancied that in the winter past there had been a time when Leda, friendless and lonely, might have come to like Hugh Ludlow or even to love him, if only because of his belief in her. But Hugh had not measured up. He had stalled, had weighed her against other considerations, and now his chance with her was forever gone. With clear insight she read him through and through—his motives, his fears, his shrewd maneuvers.

The full situation here on Little Saghelia, as Leda’s words laid it bare, was rather staggering to him. It packed dynamite, both for himself and for Leda. In a way, because of Hugh’s passion for her, this girl actually was holding a key position in the battle between the powerful and wealthy owners of Saghelia! In a way he himself, if he stayed and fought, might become the storm center in this whirl of hates and passions and warring forces.

“I don’t wonder,” he thought, “that Sergeant Rhodes smiled when I invited myself into this! The wonder is that his ears didn’t drop off!”

“Gary—?”

“Yes?”

“What did you mean a little while ago when you said something about leaving Little Saghelia?”

Gary did not answer. Silent, his eyes upon those distant men across the valley, he weighed all that Leda had just told him, and with slow deliberation made his decision. He could see no way in which his presence here would imperil Leda. On the contrary she needed him. With this Casper-Ludlow battle drawing swiftly to a head, with Hugh Ludlow under such terrific pressure and liable to lash out in some unpredictable fashion, she had to have a friend and a safeguard.

That ultimatum was still rankling in him, stirring all the fight in his nature; and as he looked down across the pine tops to a blue thread of campfire smoke, the camp of his enemy, he said silently, with grim resolve:

“I’m going to stay here and see that you keep your hands off of Leda; and if that cache can be found, I’ll find it myself and take it away from you. You and your hired bush-sneaks may put me out of the picture, but before you do, I’ll rub out a few of you, too. You asked for war. You forced it on me. All right! War it’ll be!”

CHAPTER SIX

Though he went to bed fully intending to get up at daybreak, Gary had another tremendous sleep; and it was midmorning when he woke.

He raised his head, glanced at the cabin. Leda and old Nat were gone. So far as he could see, nobody was prowling around the place. Jinny was grazing peacefully; the chipmunks were playing in the pathways; and on a snag at the meadow edge a wary hawk-owl, better than any watchdog at sounding alarms, was calmly preening itself after a lemming breakfast.

As he crawled out of the poke and dressed, thinking about the feud on his hands now, it gave him a queer sensation to realize that when the sun set that evening he might not be alive. But his decision to stay and fight had been a deliberate choice, and he had no regrets. The worst that could happen to him was death, a quick oblivion; and that, to view it sanely, was infinitely preferable to being dragged back to Winnipeg and lying for weeks in that dreaded cell whose exit was the gallows.

While he was eating breakfast in the cabin, he decided to make a little reconnoitering trip that morning and plan a methodic search for the old Rusk cache. Leda and Nat and Hugh Ludlow’s party were hunting in a hit-or-miss way, and that was as hopeless as looking for a cuckoo’s nest.

He believed he could reason out, within certain rough limits, the location of the Rusk camp seventy-odd years ago, and narrow the hunt down to a comparatively small area. If he could, then the chances of finding that half a million would be jumped up immensely.

Taking Leda’s light .25-35 rifle, he left the cabin and headed up slope. His goal was the high rocky top of Sentinel Knob, an eight-thousand-foot peak from which the torrent in the balsams came stair-stepping down.

The trip looked safe enough—as safe as anything could be except sticking tight to the cabin. The scanty timber and open meadows cut down the danger of ambush; he could watch his back trail most of the way to the Knob; and he was armed. At least he would find out, definitely, whether Hugh Ludlow’s ultimatum was a bluff or the genuine article.

The nine o’clock sun, beating full against the slope, was scorching hot; and the rocky peak of Sentinel, cloud-shadowed and swept with high cold winds, looked cool and inviting as he hurried up the mountainside. The steep climb got his wind badly, and he was sore from the rock-work yesterday with Leda; but he kept to a swift pace, glad to be stretching his legs and tying into something energetic.

After two years of law study and twenty-four years in the city, this vigorous outdoor life appealed to him powerfully. A month here, and Hugh Ludlow wouldn’t slam him around with his fists quite so easily. A month of loping these mountains and wrestling the tom-rocker, and he’d knock that big bully cold.

When he reached the rim-rock where he and Leda had halted yesterday, he slipped in behind some small boulders and watched down the slope, wondering uneasily whether he was being followed.

On the little plaque of wolf-foot he could still see the impress where Leda had flung herself down to rest; and if brought back to him those sunlit hours with her, yesterday afternoon. He wished she were along on this trip. Her knowledge of the bush, her zestful enthusiasms, her eager fun at such wholly useless and wholly delightful things as toppling boulders, made her a splendid trail partner, all aside from her charm as a girl.

The thought of daily intimate association with Leda, of their loping the bush together and hunting for that cache of gold, filled him with uneasy forebodings. A fellow could fall for her and fall hard. She was bewitchingly pretty, was in a tough spot; and between him and her a tacit partnership had sprung up. All that made a bad combination.

Whether he could fight off Hugh Ludlow or not, whether Sergeant Rhodes had recognized him or not, he was an outlaw, here for a few weeks at most before hitting the trail again. Friendship with Leda Barton was not for him. He would have to go, and go by himself; and no wishful thinking could alter that harsh fact.

On the mountainside below him he saw no sign of an enemy. After a few minutes he rose and made his way up through a fissure, which he had noticed yesterday, to the top of the rim-rock. Turning north through a drogue of aspen saplings, he followed a game trail along the edge of the high cliff till he picked up the torrent again; then he headed straight up slope toward the rocky pinnacle two miles away.

Following along the icy streamlet, he passed rapidly through the storm-twisted balsams, the squat spruces hugging the ground, and lodgepoles gnarled and stunted by the fierce struggle for existence; and came out at last into the clear, with open slope between him and the stark rocks of the Summit.

Though the slant was steep, the footing was fairly good, and he got his second wind; but his old weakness of curiosity slowed him down. The experience of being above timber-line, for the first time in his life, was so fascinating that he forgot about the feud, about watching his back trail, about everything except the marvels of that strange high region.

Along the rushing torrent he saw miniature birch trees, grown to maturity, as evidenced by their catkins, but scarcely three inches high and with only one pair of leaves, as big as a dime. Out the slope a huge grizzly was overturning flat stones and gobbling up the unlucky mice and lemmings beneath them. On the moraine flats he walked through acres of red and yellow and snow-white heather, alive with rock-bees and flower-flies and bronze-backed hummingbirds.

Again and again the torrent led him past tiny rock-girt lakes, swarming with golden trout, bordered with yellow snow lillies, and beautiful as a painter’s dream.

In the slowly broadening panorama of the mountains he saw a many-branched glacier, thirty miles to the east, riding a range like an octopus. Below the ice mass a dozen avalanche slides, pale green swaths through the mountainside forests, led downward thousands of feet into the heavy valley timber. The hoary old giant to the north was in a bad mood that morning, shaking snow-and sleet-storms out of his whiskers, and spreading his white breath down into the evergreens far below timberline.

Halfway to the Knob, Gary stopped a last time and watched down the mountain, long and carefully. To his dismay a portion of his back trail was cut off from view by the rim-rock, and another section was partly veiled by the aspen drogue. With growing uneasiness he realized that on his return trip he might walk into an ambush.

Across his mind jigged a memory of the Indian, Skunk-Bear, whetting a knife on his palm; and he had a hunch that if and when Hugh Ludlow tried to rub him out, the job would be given to that leather-faced Siwash. The furtive slinker probably lacked nerve for an open rifle fight; but the man, bush-wise as a weasel, undoubtedly had a quiverful of deadly tricks.

After watching for twenty minutes and seeing nothing of any shadowers, he hurried on for the top of old Sentinel.

The sun, half-hidden by a scum of cloud overhead, looked like a pale-yellow pancake in the sky; and the wind was sharp and chill to his summer-time clothes.

As he traversed that last steep mile, he noticed that the season was no longer the same as in the valley below. In two hours he had walked backward across the months from July to April. Down yonder, summer was at its lush height; but here was early spring, an odd springtime of late July. From the high slopes around him the winter snows had just gone, so recently that patches of white still lingered in the rock couloirs. The earliest flowers—wakerobins, violets, saxifrage—were blooming; the stunted berry bushes were just beginning to blossom.

Glancing back occasionally at his trail, he side-gouged up a stretch of loose scree; crossed a terrace of soggy rock bed where the icy waters seeped into his cracked shoes, and the ubiquitous mosquitoes made him break into a run; and zigzagged up through a field of huge granite blocks, flaked and seamed by the frosts of innumerable winters.

At the foot of the summit rock, he scouted out a good way up, scrambled a last hundred yards up the treacherous steep shingle, and came out on the naked towering pinnacle of old Sentinel.

At one glance, as he turned and gazed down, he saw that the toil and danger of this trip were justified, and more. Below him Little Saghelia lay spread in miniature. With one sweep of the eyes he could encompass and study its general layout, its side-canyons and rock formations, and its relationship to the old Paradise Trail in the main valley.

Across the high summit where he stood, a cold strong wind, blowing with steady moan out of the northwest, was sweeping the peaks and lofty passes of the ranges but leaving the basins of air in the valleys undisturbed, like a swift current of water over deep pools. The wind was so cold and piercing that he crouched in lee of a table-block to escape its invisible needles.

A shower of sleet spatted across the pinnacle rock. A small bank of woolpack came whirling by, enveloped him in its cold wet whiteness and sailed on out across the void, leaving him thoroughly damp and shivery.

Five miles to the northwest a big heavy cloud was brushing against a cluster of three peaks and laying down a white blanket halfway to timberline. The cloud was heading straight in his direction. With a suspicion that very shortly old Sentinel was going to get hit by a bang-up snowstorm, he got busy, studying Little Saghelia.

Roughly oval-shaped, the valley was ten miles long and five broad at its widest. With its waters and abundant game, its numberless caves, its nearness to Paradise Trail, it had been a “natural” as a hangout for those wilderness bandits.

But where, in the forty-thousand-acre tangle of rocks and canyons and timber, had that pack of killers lived? One part of it looked quite as good as any other. Could a person figure out, by sheer reason, the general location of a camp which had never been seen and which had been a complete mystery for three generations?

Studying the valley, he tried to imagine that this was seventy years ago, that he was Chilcote Rusk, that posses of vengeful sourdoughs were cursing his name and swooping into Little Saghelia repeatedly to find him and wipe out his pack.

“I’d have to shoot game,” he reasoned, “and I wouldn’t want travelers on Paradise Trail to hear my shots, so I’d live back a ways from the mouth. I’d also have to have fire, regularly, every day, and smoke can be seen a considerable distance. On that score, the farther back in the valley, the better.”

The more he studied Little Saghelia and reconstructed those primitive conditions, the more he was convinced that his reasoning so far was correct. The Rusk pack had lived somewhere in the upper part of the valley.

The rim-rock, with its fine dry caves like the one he and Leda had searched yesterday, was another sure bet. The other rock formations had no caves at all.

Trying to narrow down the problem still more, he studied the north end of Little Saghelia, especially the main overfalls at the extreme head of it. That little section looked good to him. If a forest fire should come raging up the cliff-walled valley, the big caldron pool below the overfalls would mean the difference between life and death to any human in the path of the fire.

And then that creek yonder, with its clean rock bed and long stretches where a person could walk a mile without stepping ashore, offered a superlative means—and almost the only conceivable means—of shaking off Indian trackers. A dozen times the Vigilant posses had put keen-eyed Siwash scouts on the trail of the pack, but those scouts had been utterly baffled. The creek looked like the answer to that.

Convinced that his reasoning was roughly correct, he gazed long and thoughtfully at the valley head. Though he tried hard not to build any castles, an exultation was running strong in him. All the facts pointed to that upper end of the valley. Somewhere up yonder, he believed, lay half a million dollars in dust and nuggets.

He and Leda would go up there, look the place over at close range, plan their hunt carefully, and comb that overfalls region as it had never been combed before. They’d find the Rusk cache, if human eyes could find it at all, and leave Hugh Ludlow high and dry…

* * * *

He wanted to stay longer on his lofty lookout, with its blue-hazy vistas and majestic panorama; but the storm was upon him and he had to go. Besides, his back trail was worrying him, a gantlet he must run; and he wanted to get it over with.

Before he reached the boulder field below, the storm burst upon him with the fury of a small woolly-whipper. In the space of forty seconds the sky, mountains and valleys were blotted out; the wind rose to club-like blasts; the season changed once more—to blustery winter. Small particles of sleet, riding level on the gale, stung his face and hands like birdshot; and the snow was swirling so thickly that he could not see ten feet ahead.

Turning up his jacket collar against the sleet and snow, he groped down through the boulders, hurried across the rock bed, and reached the heather slopes.

Though it was still snowing and he squashed along through four inches of feathery fluff, the wind was broken and he could see better. With marveling eyes he looked around at the queer mix-up of seasons—flowers sticking out of a four-inch snow! As though used to the vagaries of mountain weather, the bees and hummingbirds were going about their business with entire unconcern. It was strange and laughable to watch the bumblebees pawing snow out of buttercups before going after the nectar, and stranger still to see hummingbirds darting around like flashing jewels in the wintry scene.

A thousand yards from the rim-rock he passed out of the snow altogether and had dry footing again. A few minutes later the clouds kicked over and the sun broke out, so bright and warm that he glanced back at the white slopes above to make sure that the snowstorm had been real.

As he approached the aspen drogue, his uneasiness sharpened. The drogue and the slope just below the cliff were danger spots. If he had been shadowed, his enemy or enemies would strike at him from one of those two places.

A hundred yards above the aspens, he stopped, eased in behind some rocks and scrutinized the drogue, watching the birds there for any sign of alarm, and studying the deer-bush patches for a glimpse of an enemy.

He saw nothing whatsoever.

“Just jittery, I guess,” he thought. “Gosh, I can be down through that place in a coupla minutes.”

But he stuck to the rocks a little longer, to make doubly sure.

In comparison with the green beautiful valleys which he had seen from the Knob, Big Saghelia Valley, fire-gutted and ruined, looked unwordably ugly. An anger smoldered in him as he gazed at the erosion gashes and the black acres, thousands of acres, where the soil had been burned away and even the fireweed could not find root. Those mines were necessary, in the modern scheme of things, and timbering was necessary too; but that black desolation was not. It was sheer wanton destruction, blind to beauty, blind even to the solid dollars-and-cents value of conservation.

As he mused on that ruin of a once-lovely valley, it seemed to him that the dreariness of the surrounding country had crept into the town and left its marks upon the people themselves of Saghelia. Inured to smoke, slag heaps, and rivers polluted by cyanide, they seemed to have forgotten their birthright of trees, limpid waters and the elemental things of nature. With that ugliness all around them, nobody down there seemed to know that beauty existed or to realize how powerful and ennobling a force it could be in the heart of man…

With his rifle at ready, he walked on down to the rim-rock. At the edge of the aspens he stopped, glanced out along the trail, saw nothing.

Moving out to the lip of the two-hundred-foot cliff, he looked down at the slope below. Thirty feet down a wide ledge, clothed with aspen seedlings and brackens, cut off his view of the rim-rock foot, but the rest of the slope lay wide-open beneath him.

He saw nothing—not a glimpse or a stir of an enemy.

With eyes and ears alert, he started out along the cliff top.

He did not get far. Within a dozen steps disaster lashed out and struck him like a blast of lightning, so sudden and crashing that he did not even realize what was happening.

At a place where the trail curved along the very lip of the rock, through knee-high brackens, a pliant three-inch sapling was bent over, close beside the path. Gary saw it, thought it was the freakish work of a strong wind. A wiser bush-loper than he would have known that the tree had been bent down by human hands and pegged to a figure-4 trap, with the trigger string stretched across the path and concealed by the brackens. It was such a trap as the mountain Siwash frequently built to hurl goats, bighorns and even grizzlies from high cliff trails to the rocks below.

With no inkling of his danger, Gary walked squarely into the deadly catapult.

As he brushed through the ferns, his shin struck against something—something that yielded and snapped. In the next split-second the pliant sapling, taut as a bow and powerful as ten ram-horn bows, suddenly swished upward, knocking Leda’s rifle from his hands, striking him a terrific blow and sweeping him bodily off his feet.

As he rolled over the edge of the two-hundred-foot cliff, he grabbed for a small juniper and clutched it, to save himself; but the shrub broke and plunged him downward. With bare hands he clawed at the face of the rock as he fell—tearing his fingers and arms and gashing his forehead. He could not stop himself or even slow his fall; but the juniper had kept him from being hurled forcibly over the cliff, and his desperate clawing at the rock did save him from toppling backwards.

In a shower of dirt and loose stone he struck with a sickening jolt on the fern ledge thirty feet down, and sprawled half over it, his legs dangling, his whole body slipping—with a hundred and seventy feet of sheer drop between him and the jagged rocks below.

He grasped one of the seedling aspens and stopped that fearful slipping. Seizing the aspen between his teeth, he grabbed another. His right hand found a hold in the honeycomb. He wedged his foot in a frost crack… Slowly, in the blind groping way of a person fighting doggedly against unconsciousness, he managed to drag himself back upon the ledge, and lay there, face downward, with a paralyzing weakness all over his body.

CHAPTER SEVEN

For a little time, breathing in jerky gasps and groggy from pain, Gary lay quiet in the ferns, with a roar in his ears and a red mist in front of his eyes.

Stunned by the blow and his fall, he felt himself sinking into an engulfing darkness, as of dark waters pulling him down. But he fought against the oblivion with all his will, dimly aware that he was lying on a precarious ledge and that he must hold on to his senses or drop to death on those rocks beneath.

To his dazed mind it still did not occur that he had walked into a man-trap. In so far as he could think at all, he believed that he must have met some trail accident. But then, perhaps three minutes after he had pulled himself back to temporary safety, a dribble of dirt spattered down, a small stone fell and struck his shoulder; and he realized that he was not alone. His first thought was of Leda. With no realization of time or distance, he believed that she had seen him fall and had come to help him.

Swiping the trickle of blood from his eyes, he turned his head and looked upward, up at the top of the cliff.

In the clump of brackens he saw the swart face of Hugh Ludlow’s Indian, Skunk-Bear.

With one hand clasping an aspen to anchor himself, the Indian was leaning out from the rock and looking down at him. The man’s dark face was as expressionless as some cold granite gargoyle. No exulting, no pity, no emotion whatever save perhaps a surprise that the white man was not lying crushed and dead on the slope far below.

Only then, as he met that glittering stare, did Gary finally realize that he had been shadowed, waylaid and trapped by this man, and had been swept over the cliff by some deadfall of this Indian’s building.

He wondered why the Indian was staring at him so long and silently, and what was in the man’s brutal mind. Gradually that too dawned on him. The Indian was regarding him with the cold-blooded calm of one who was studying a bullet-stricken animal and considering the easiest way of finishing it off.

And he was at the Indian’s mercy—weaponless, badly wounded, hopelessly trapped on the narrow ledge, and half paralyzed by the blow from that sapling. Presently the bracken fronds stirred a little, and the swart face was gone.

Gary believed that the Indian was getting a rifle, either Leda’s or his own, and would lean over the cliff again in a moment and put a bullet into him. Fighting the numbness and that blinding pain, he began crawling toward a little overhang a few feet out along the ledge, in a dogged attempt to stave off death.

By a tremendous effort of body and will, he managed to reach the overhang. Shallow, a miserable few inches deep, it was a sorry excuse as a shelter; but he wedged himself tight against the rock and prayed that the Indian could not lean out far enough to get a shot at him.

As he waited, he tried to take stock of his injuries. Except for an ankle sprain when he struck the ledge, his legs felt all right. But his arms had gone numb, so numb he could hardly raise a hand; the blood from that forehead gash was running into his eyes; and his chest seemed full of hot stabbing pains from several badly cracked ribs.

He could not be sure how serious his other wounds were. The anguish in his chest blanked out everything else.

His guess about the rifle proved wrong. A short time after he had flattened himself against the rock, another dribble of dirt trickled down; he heard the Indian grunt; and then a heavy thirty-pound chunk of granite came crashing down into the ferns, missing his head so narrowly that it drove rock splinters against his face.

Not daring to look up or stir an inch, he hugged the stone wall and waited, helplessly—for whatever would happen next. Why wasn’t the Indian using a gun on him? At half a dozen places out along the cliff top the man could lean out far enough to get in a fatal shot. Was he afraid to shoot; afraid that a rifle bark might draw attention from the cabin down slope? Was that the reason he was trying to finish this business by dropping a heavy stone on his enemy?

Snarling with disappointment—a low throaty snarl like an animal’s—the Siwash went after more rocks, came back, leaned farther than before, and sent another granite chunk whizzing down at Gary. It struck against the face of the cliff and caromed harmlessly off into space. The next smacked into the ferns. A third, just grazing the overhang, struck Gary a glancing blow on the left shoulder—a smash that jarred him all over and jerked a gasp of pain from him.

With a guttural “Ugh!” of disgust, Skunk-Bear kicked his last stone over the cliff, and swung back out of sight.

The Indian’s failure with those rocks brought Gary little comfort. The silence, taut and ominous, was worse to him than the whiz and crack of the granite dornicks. For he knew that the man was cooking up some other scheme, some dead-certain scheme of finishing him off. What it would be he had no idea or even a guess. He merely knew Skunk-Bear had plenty of tricks in his evil quiver.

The lengthening silence, the anguishing uncertainty of what to expect next or what moment death would hit him and end the cruelly one-sided struggle—it was torture to Gary. He listened, heard nothing; took a glance along the cliff edge, and saw nothing. The Indian seemed to have gone away and left the place entirely.

But he knew better. Though he was utterly in the dark as to what Skunk-Bear was doing, he did know that the Indian had planned some new scheme and was going about it deliberately, carefully, taking his time. With his enemy trapped and helpless, the man could afford to take his time.

Brushing the red mist from his eyes, Gary raised his head and looked down the long mountain slope to the cabin. A spiral of fresh blue smoke was standing up above the balsams there. The sight of it sent a quiver of hope through him. Leda and old Nat had returned from their morning trip. The cabin was nearly a mile away, but he could muster strength to call to them, in this thin mountain air. If he could attract their attention, Skunk-Bear might get frightened and slink off.

He drew a deep breath, in spite of an explosion of pain in his chest, and raised his head a little higher.

But he checked himself. With his eyes on the cabin and Leda’s name on his lips, he deliberately stifled the call and abandoned any thought of help. A call from him would bring Leda flying up that slope. She had no weapon save the old horse-pistol, effective only at point-blank range. Skunk-Bear was rifle-armed. Instead of slinking off, he would shoot Leda. He had attempted murder, had been recognized, and now he would have to finish this business. He was cunning enough to realize that if he failed to complete this job, he would spend the rest of his life in a pen. From the safety of the aspen drogue he would kill Leda as she came up the open slope.

“Can’t draw her into a death trap,” Gary thought, and his head slowly sank. “Can’t let her pay for—for my mistake. I bargained for this. I stayed here. If it has to be—for me… But that damned Siwash won’t shoot her down. He’d do it without blinking an eye, the devil!”

As he waited through the slow-dragging minutes, it came home to him that he had indeed found out whether Hugh Ludlow’s ultimatum had been a bluff or not! Hugh had meant that warning; meant it to the hilt. The man must be half crazed about Leda and the cache of gold. In sending a bush-sneak to kill a personal enemy, with no grounds save jealousy, he had taken a fearful risk. Under pressure he was going morally to pieces, was stooping to murder, to have his way. For all his money and education and social eminence, in his trampling on the rights and lives of other people he was not unlike that old killer of Little Saghelia, the brutal Chilcote Rusk…

In the nerve-racking silence he heard, or thought he heard, a faint scratching noise somewhere along the rim-rock and not far away. Pressing his ear against the cold stone, he listened intently, and heard the noise a bit more clearly. What it was, where it was coming from, what it meant, he could not guess.

Though his senses were reeling and he was still groggy from pain, he began flexing his arms and legs, trying feebly to get ready for Skunk-Bear’s next move and stave off whatever brand of death the Indian was about to launch.

He had no hope. He felt himself doomed. His terrible physical helplessness was the worst of it. His arms were limp and useless, his shoulders numbed. If a hundred rifles, loaded and cocked, were lying beside him, he could not lift one and squeeze a trigger at the Siwash.

The faint scratchy noise stopped. In the dead silence he heard the swish and rustle of fern fronds, not above him, but on the ledge itself.

Through a crook in his arm he looked around, looked out along the narrow shelf, and saw the Indian.

With a long-shafted knife in his hand, the man was cautiously stalking nearer, his glinting eyes fixed upon his wounded and helpless enemy. Somewhere along the cliff he had found a place where he could clamber down; and now he was walking up to tumble the stricken white man off the ledge and send him hurtling to the rocks one hundred and seventy feet below.

For all the fright and panic of those moments, Gary understood at last why the Indian had not shot him. Hugh Ludlow had ordered that there should be no shooting. Afraid of the law, young Ludlow had ordered the Indian to disguise the killing in such a way that Rhodes or the devil himself would have no evidence of murder. With superlative cunning from first to last, Skunk-Bear was carrying out those instructions. This death would seem altogether an accident—a stumble and fatal fall from a high dangerous trail. The signs of that figure-4 trap could all be smoothed out; there would be no tag or wisp of court-sure evidence; nothing but a broken and lifeless body lying at the foot of a cliff.

It seemed bitterly ironic to Gary that after coming through that man-hunt storm, after outwitting the Police of several provinces and successfully running a gantlet of two thousand miles, he should meet death at the hands of a degraded bush-slinker like this Skunk-Bear.

Motionless and quiet, except for drawing his legs up a little, he watched through the crook of his arm and let the Indian come on. He knew that Skunk-Bear would have to come close and take hold of him to tumble him over the rock; and he gathered all his feeble strength and tensed every nerve in his aching body for one desperate effort to save himself. The ledge was narrow, the footing precarious. If Skunk-Bear came close enough and bent down…

Step by cautious step, the Indian drew near, crouching a little, his dark face like a mask of stone, and only his beady eyes alive. Almost over Gary, he stopped and looked down at the white man, alert against any trickery or sudden move. But he was reassured by Gary’s hoarse breathing and blood-smeared face and that telltale limpness of arms and shoulders; and at last he stooped down, slowly, to seize Gary’s foot.

With his back braced against the rock, Gary lashed at him with both feet, suddenly, an unexpected smash, with all the power of his body behind it. Through the last minute, the longest minute of his life, he had known that this one smash would be all he would get, his one hope against death; and into the thrust he put everything he had of steadiness and coolness and strength. It was a swifter and harder thrust than he believed he could muster up.

His feet caught the crouching Indian squarely in the stomach. With a yell of surprise, a yell that changed to terror as he lost his balance, Skunk-Bear toppled backwards, grabbing frantically at the bracken fronds. On the lip of the ledge he hung poised for an instant, his right hand clutching a big bracken, his left hand clawing futilely at the bare rock—till the bracken snapped and he shot out of sight, cart-wheeling down that hundred and seventy foot drop to the jagged boulders of the slope.

Minutes after he had heard the heavy th-uu-dd below the cliff, Gary raised himself on an elbow, cursing the pain when he drew breath; and started calling.

It was safe now to call. Safe for Leda to come up the mountainside and help him. Skunk-Bear had laid his last ambush.

Because of the roaring in his ears, he could hardly hear his own voice as he called Leda’s name. Forcing himself to breathe deeply, he shouted twice, and then paused, listening to his shouts drift down the slope, and watching the cabin.

At his third call he saw a tiny far-away figure coming out of the cabin and run over to the meadow edge and stand stock-still, listening, trying to locate him.

He shouted once more. “Lee-da… Here… Bring rope—with you.”…

As he saw Leda fly back to the cabin and then come running up the mountain slope, he sank back, fighting oblivion again, praying that he could hold out till his girl partner got there.

CHAPTER EIGHT

With a great show of unconcern about her, Leda crossed the river bridge and started up the sidewalk into Saghelia, with Jinny ambling along at her heels.

Beneath her air of indifference she was trembling with uncertainty and fears. This visit, she knew, was going to be a critical day in her life. What sort of reception would Saghelia give her? If the talk about her had not died down in the three months since she had fled to old Nat’s cabin, it never would. If her summer of lonely exile back in the mountains had not shamed people and given the lie to those whispered slanders, then nothing she could ever say or do would change the town’s opinion of her.

She had come in to Saghelia only because she had been forced to—for food and other necessities. Gary was not quite well enough yet to come; old Nat had foolishly stayed out all day in a cold drenching rain and given his “rhoo-maticks” a chance at him; and so the trip had fallen to her.

Besides the prosaic food items, Leda intended to do a little personal shopping. She had suddenly grown conscious that her clothes, which she had not bothered her head about all summer, were very old and unbecoming. She had set her heart on a new dress and slippers to wear of evenings at the cabin, and on a dozen smaller purchases, if her money held out.

In the past two weeks all the time which she could spare from nursing Gary had been spent down at the diggings, tom-rocking, with a picture of the Miranda Shoppe, its frocks, wall mirrors and shaded lights, putting strength into her tired arms.

As she went up the sidewalk, her impressions of the town, after a three-month absence, surprised her own self. The place was so dreary and dingy—and dead. For all its noises and stir, it seemed as dead as the gray lifeless waters of Big Saghelia, surging under the bridge.

With a whole wide mountain valley to spread out in, the town had gathered itself tightly around the business section and those ore mills, as unthinkingly as iron filings around a magnet, without parks or playgrounds, with no room for gardens or lawns around the homes.

But it was the dreariness of the town that oppressed her the worst. Scrawny shade trees, few birds or flowers, no vistas of greenery, no tang of pine on the breeze, the streets dusty under the hot August sun, the steady inescapable scrunch and rumble of the mills, and coal soot everywhere. Even the garrulous sparrows were several shades darker than natural from the soot.

At the first business corner a small group of loiterers were watching a steam shovel at an excavation job. To pass them was a real gantlet with Leda. Most of them knew her, at least as “Mamie Barton’s girl”; and several of them had been schoolmates of hers. She affected to pay no attention but surreptitiously she watched them closely.

As she went by, they nudged one another, turned, stared at her and grinned; and two or three of them passed remarks.

The noise of the shovel kept Leda from hearing what was said, and she was not dead-positive but what they might be grinning as much at Jinny as at herself—the usual condescension of townspeople toward prospectors or anybody in from the mountains. But no one gave her a friendly nod or word. No one wanted to appear acquainted with her. Even Buddy Lerrick, who used to get into fights for her with the school crowd, would not give her a nod of recognition.

With her secret hopes badly shaken by this omen, she hurried past.

The spectacle of those men watching a monotonous steam shovel with such a curious mixture of fascination and boredom reminded her, forcefully, of something Gary had said to her last evening, in the moon-shadows of a balsam. “Lee, this silly gossip is largely a result of the fact that those people down there haven’t got much else to do. I mean, they haven’t any wholesome adventure or zest or excitement in their lives. That’s a pretty dreadful lack. It isn’t human nature to be caged up, any more than with a bird or animal.”

She suddenly understood, now, the deep truth which Gary had been driving at. These people were bored. Their lives did lack wholesome activities and outlets. From sheer want of anything better, they watched steam shovels, seized on gossip with a kick to it; and she knew two youngsters of that group who were taking up with petty crime, because it had a thrill for them.

At the next corner she unexpectedly ran into Sergeant Rhodes. He had taken a stray little métis tot, one of Alec Bergelot’s children, in tow, and calmed it with a peppermint stick and was waiting for Alec or Regina Bergelot to show.

With a friendliness that he rarely exhibited toward anybody, the gray-eyed officer touched his hat to her, courteously. “How’d you do, Leda.”

Coming from him, Leda thought, that was a very loquacious speech. Though she wanted to linger a moment and talk, she was trembling afraid of him, because of Gary; and she merely, returned his greeting and started on.

“May I inquire how the cave hunting is coming along?” Rhodes asked, and Leda had to stop, willy-nilly.

“Why, we haven’t found the cache yet,” she answered, trying to meet that gray searching gaze with no betraying uneasiness. “But Gary has reasoned out the general location of that old camp—I mean, where it ought to have been; and I think he’s correct. In a couple of days we’re going to start searching from this new angle.”

Rhodes eyed her, toying with his swagger stick. “Well, I wish you a pleasant hunt,” he remarked.

Despite herself, Leda flushed and looked away. There were overtones in that word “pleasant.” Plainly Rhodes was aware, somehow, that a good deal of water had flowed under the bridge, between her and Gary.

If he knew this, then surely he did not know who Gary was. Surely he could not stand there and regard her so calmly and impassively, if he knew that one of these days he would come up to the cabin and take Gary away.

“I hear,” Rhodes said, “that your friend met with an accident, Leda.”

“Yes, he did. He was pretty seriously hurt, and was out for two whole weeks. But he came through all right, and in a day or two more he’ll be entirely well.”

“How did it happen?”

“Why, uh,” Leda explained, caught unprepared, “he had a bad slip and fall from a rock.”

Rhodes merely looked at her, silent, inscrutable; but Leda knew that he did not believe her faltering explanation. His searching gaze frightened her badly. Not until that moment did she fully realize that Gary had killed a person and that this might have disastrous consequences for him. He had killed Skunk-Bear in dire self-defense, and he could probably clear himself of murder guilt; but any investigation or trial would bare his identity, would be fatal to him.

How did Rhodes know anything about this “accident”? Who had told him? Hugh Ludlow? Did Hugh suspect that Gary was a wanted man?…

As she excused herself and hurried on up the sidewalk, she noticed that three more of the Ludlow shafts against the south range had closed down—mute sign that old Hugh Ludlow was in most desperate financial straits.

At first thought she was glad. All his life old Hugh had been wolfish and cruel to others, and it was about time for him to get a dose of his own medicine. He deserved to lose every mine, mill and stick of timber he owned. He himself had started this ruthless war; and it’d be a good thing if Marl Casper crowded him to the wall—and over it!

But these shafts closing down one after another, like lights going out; and this whole Casper-Ludlow struggle, rushing swiftly toward its inevitable explosion—all this was going to have repercussions for her and Gary. Young Hugh couldn’t stave off his decision much longer. He’d have to act. Maybe he was acting, already! Under pressure from his dad and goaded by this threat that the whole Ludlow fortune would crash in bankruptcy, maybe he had some unpredictable move on foot which she and Gary knew nothing about.

She came to Lafe Nottingham’s general store. With Jinny waiting complacently on the sidewalk, she hurried inside, glad to escape the stares and offensive remarks of a little group across the street.

She had hoped to find the store empty; but three timber cruisers, several children and half a dozen women customers were there, making their Saturday purchases. At her entrance the talk broke off abruptly, the women gave her a long hostile stare, then glanced knowingly at one another; and in a frigid silence they went on with their buying.

Defiant and yet miserable, Leda edged over into an inconspicuous corner and waited, trying hard to keep the women from seeing that their holier-than-thou attitude affected her at all.

She thought it significant and ominous, like a weather vane in a strong wind, that Lafe Nottingham should give her merely a hasty glance and nod, without speaking. In the years past, “Uncle Lafe” had done her many a kindness, had comforted her with candy and encouraging words at times when things were particularly black. Secretly he was her good friend still, but with those women customers present he did not dare appear friendly.

“He knows what’s being said about me,” Leda thought. “It must be pretty dreadful if he won’t even say ‘Good morning’ in public.”

In her misery, as she felt the eyes of those eight or nine people upon her, she wished she were back in the sheltering haven of Gary’s strong understanding comradeship. To run the three-block gantlet on to the Miranda Shoppe, through stares and jeering remarks, and then endure more frozen silence and possibly a worse scene even than this—nothing but her longing for the dress and slippers and all, nerved her to the ordeal.

Hoping that maybe she had just happened to meet the very worst of her critics so far, she waited till the customers were gone, then moved over to the counter and produced her two goose-quills full of dust.

“How much is this worth, Uncle Lafe?”

Nottingham took his gold scales from their glass cage, poured the precious dust into the ivory pan, weighed it, pretended to inspect it carefully through a hand lens.

“Why, I figure it a mite over twenty dollars, Leda. Say, twenty and a quarter. That all right?”

Leda nodded. She knew that “Uncle Lafe” was giving her several dollars too much, just as he used to give her candy and oranges when she was the town’s waif. She hated to take the extra money; it was perilously close to charity; but she pocketed her pride, with a mental vow to repay him at her first chance. After squaring for old Nat’s previous bill and today’s purchase, her funds would be woefully short for all the things she needed at the Miranda.

As he was putting up her grocery list, Nottingham remarked: “I hear rumors that you’ve acquired yourself a real close friend, Leda. No, now, don’t fly off the handle and sass me. You know how I mean it. I wouldn’t blame you for liking him. I saw him that day he had the fight with Hugh Ludlow.”

“But I don’t like him!” Leda denied vehemently. “You don’t understand. We’re just good friends.”

“Hmmm. That’s too bad. After all the first-class hating you’ve had to do, it’d be a good idea if you did like somebody. ’Specially if he’d put you in his coat pocket and take you a thousand miles away from Saghelia. Doesn’t he like you, then?”

“No! I tell you, we’re just friends. Why, he doesn’t even seem to know I’m a girl at all! He treats me exactly like a—a partner.”

“Hmmm! He must be blinder’n a bat,” Nottingham commented. He finished getting up her list, wrapped the packages securely in burlap, leaned his elbows on the counter and asked, confidentially, “Say, Leda, isn’t Hugh Ludlow putting up a terrific kick about this Gary staying up there at the cabin with you?”

Leda merely nodded. The Skunk-Bear incident was so dangerous, so full of dynamite for Gary, that she refused to say a word about it to anyone.

“Well,” Nottingham advised, “Gary had better watch his step close, Leda. Those men in Hugh’s party don’t average very high in some respects. A couple of ’em ’ud plug a man for a mus’rat pelt, and the others aren’t much better. Gary’s a cheechako, while they’re bush-lopers from ’way back.”

“Gary may be a cheechako,” Leda asserted, her eyes akindle with pride at the thought of Gary’s magnificent battle on the ledge, “but when it comes to brains and courage, he’s worth a dozen…” She broke off there, at a sudden gesture of silence from Nottingham.

“What’s the matter, Uncle Lafe?”

“Talking about the devil!” he said, sotto voce. “Look.”

Leda turned, glanced through the screen door at the street. An outfit of four pack horses, the ’breed Eutrope afoot, and Hugh Ludlow on a chestnut mare, had stopped in front of the store.

“Hugh dismounted, strode across the sidewalk and came in. “Hullo,” he greeted, catching sight of Leda. “Saw the burro outside and thought you’d be in here.” He stepped up to her. “Busy?” he asked. He tried to talk brusquely but his eyes clung to her, and her mere presence made him nervous and taut.

“Yes, I’m busy,” Leda said curtly. She shrank back from him, despising him for hiring that Siwash to murder Gary.

“But couldn’t you squeeze out a few minutes? I’d like to have a little talk with you.” He motioned to a confectionery across the street. “We could step over there and discuss this thing over a soda.”

“I believe I told you last week, when you came up to the diggings, that I didn’t care to talk to you,” Leda refused. “If you’ve got anything to say, you can say it right here.”

Hugh colored violently, his face a queer study of anger and passion. With an effort he got hold of himself and managed to speak in casual tones.

“Oh, it wasn’t much,” he remarked, trying to be offhand. “I merely wanted to admit that I made a big mistake about your—about this fellow up at old Higgens’s cabin. He’s got more goods than I ever imagined he had.”

Leda kept silent, wondering suspiciously what Hugh’s game was. His hollow flattery of the man whom he wished dead made her instantly wary and on guard.

“Anybody,” Hugh went on, watching her closely, “who can meet Skunk-Bear in the bush and bump that Siwash off—well, he’s good! I’ll take my hat off to him. But I still believe it must have been part accident.”

In a flash Leda saw through Hugh’s game. He was fishing for some hint or clue to Skunk-Bear’s mysterious disappearance. He believed Gary had killed the Siwash, but he was completely in the dark about the actual circumstances. With no shred of proof, he was trying to trap her into admitting that Gary was involved in the death. If he had the slightest evidence to go on, he would run yapping to the law, and Gary would be dragged into an arrest and trial. Gary might even be railroaded on the perjured testimony of those six or seven men of Hugh’s.

As she met his eyes she knew that he had already gone to Sergeant Rhodes and tried to make the officer act. There was the reason why Rhodes had doubted her explanation of the “accident”! As plain as day Hugh had been prying around and trying to hang something onto Gary.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said coolly, scorning his amateurish trap. “And whatever it is, I don’t care to hear it.” She turned her back on him. “If you came in here to talk to me, please get out!”

For several moments, silent throbbing moments, she could feel Hugh’s eyes upon her and his passionate jealousy beating against her. But she said nothing more, refused to look at him again; and with an oath Hugh finally whirled and strode out, slamming the door as he brushed through it.

A little pale from the encounter, Leda gathered up her purchases. She was frightened all through. Not at the threat of any physical danger; she felt confident that she and Gary could take care of themselves against Hugh’s whole pack. But this effort to get Gary arrested was a deadly move. And this probing around in Gary’s past was worse still. If Hugh ever guessed that Gary was wanted, he could annihilate Gary with one word…

After saying good-bye to Lafe Nottingham, she left the store, so harassed by this sinister shadow over Gary that she forgot her own troubles.

She was speedily reminded of them, as she buckled the mantle on Jinny’s pack. Across the street the group of young idlers who had jeered her half an hour ago, began catcalling at her, as though they had been waiting for her to come out and had stored up their witticisms.

“Hey, sister, which way are you goin’ home?”…“Say, you ain’t got room for another feller up at that cabin, have you?”…“Tell the big boyfriend that we’re goin’ to gang him for takin’ you out of circulation!”

The remarks burned Leda’s ears, and she was torn with the impulse to turn around and get out of Saghelia. The Miranda sign, three blocks up the street, looked three miles away—an endless avenue of staring faces, insulting glances, jeering words.

But she wanted those new clothes desperately, after two weeks of hungering and working for them; and she started on up the sidewalk, trying bravely to see and hear nothing.

She did not get far. Scarcely a dozen steps from the Nottingham store her little expedition to town came to a sudden and explosive end.

At the telephone pole where Gary’s picture was tacked up, she ran into her worst enemy in all the town, a cub reporter on the Saghelia Star. She had known and detested him in school; had incurred his spite by scorning his advances; and a friend of her father’s had once given him a public thrashing for something he had said about her. His venomous little tidbits in his weekly “Through-the-Keyhole” column had done more to poison her reputation than all the back-fence gossip in Saghelia.

“Well, well, well!” he greeted, planting himself squarely in front of her. “If it isn’t our long-lost Red! How’s the gold-digging in the hills, Red—any better than in town?”

Leda tried to ignore him and go on. From a barber shop awning near-by several loiterers, scenting a bit of excitement, were starting to edge closer; and out of the corner of her eye she saw the little group on the opposite curb watching sharply, ready to come surging across. She felt she would die of shame if she got dragged into a street brawl with this malicious enemy; and she stepped off the sidewalk to get around him.

He stopped her, seizing Jinny’s halter. “Not so fast, Red. What’s the personal items? Come on, now—you’ve got lots of ’em—in three months’ time.”

“Let me go,” Leda begged. “Please.”

“Can’t. Got to have the items first. Tell me all about the new boyfriend and—”

Smack—Leda drew back her hand and slapped him, so hard that he staggered backwards and his glasses fell to the sidewalk. Goaded beyond endurance, she forgot self-control, forgot the crowd edging up, forgot everything save the leering face in front of her, symbolic of the whole senseless hue and cry which had hounded her all her girlhood years.

In a blind fury she tore the reporter’s notebook away from him, backed him against the telephone pole and beat at him with her small fists. So scared that he was white and trembling, the reporter tried to get away from her, snarling: “Why, you—you thing, you—striking me like that! I’ll have you arrest—”

“You will, hein?” a booming voice cut him short. Through the jostling crowd big Alec Bergelot, the broad-shouldered half-breed whom Gary had met that first day, elbowed his way and planted himself between Leda and her enemy. “So you’ll give dis girl insults and den have her arrest’, hein? You glass-eye’ carcajou, I t’ink I wipe op dis sidewalk wit’ you, I t’ink I will.”

He reached out with one huge hand, seized the reporter by the scruff of the neck, shook him till his teeth rattled and his eyes bulged, and then flung him contemptuously against the telephone pole.

“Dere! Nex’ tarn you peeck on a girl lak dis, I use you for fresh bait!” He turned to Leda, brushing his hands; and only then did Leda, blinded with tears of shame and fury, recognize him as big Alec. “W’ere you going, Leda? I go ’long and see dat you get dere, by damn; and if any of dese banty roosters lets out wan peep, I’ll put my foot on hees neck and take hold on hees legs and pull! Come on, le’s go!”

Leda shook her head, in a kind of daze. The Miranda no longer beckoned to her. She no longer wanted the dress and slippers and all, for which she had planned and worked. They seemed like a bitter mockery; like her aching hope that Saghelia might prove kindly, after her exile. She wanted only to escape this crowd of faces, escape the town and get back to Gary. Saghelia had given her its answer, with the bang of finality. Her summer of isolation had not changed the town’s opinion one jot. She was still “Mamie Barton’s girl.”

With big Alec Bergelot striding along behind her, she turned away and went back down the sidewalk.

CHAPTER NINE

“I guess we’d better knock off for today, Lee,” Gary suggested. “It’ll be dark by the time we catch some trout for supper and get home.”

“For all we’ll ever find that gold, we might as well knock off for good,” Lee answered. She made a little gesture of despair. “I’m not going to hunt anymore! This is my last trip!”

“Don’t talk like that, Lee. You sold me on this cache business, and now you mustn’t lose faith yourself.” He leached out and patted her arm encouragingly. “That old cache is around here, and we’re going to find it!”

“All the gold we’ll ever find will be down there at the tom-rocker, with our buckets and shovels!”

At the mouth of a cave which they had just searched, at the upper end of Little Saghelia, they sat together on a mossy boulder in the slant afternoon sun, tired from an all-day hunt and completely disheartened by failure.

Down across the treetops in front of them the mountain valley, fresh and glistening from a heavy shower an hour ago, lay shimmering in the golden light. The rain-sweet air was heavy with flower odor and the warm rich smell of woods earth. Two hundred yards to their right the main overfalls, plunging over a seventy-foot cliff into a big caldron pool, gave a faint quivering tremble to the rock they sat on, and filled the whole upper valley with its rumble.

Though he hid his pessimism from Leda, Gary himself was badly discouraged about their hunt. In the past twelve days, searching from early morning till the hush of evening, he and Leda had combed the upper end of the valley thoroughly; but not one trace of the cache, not one faintest sign of the old Rusk camp, had they found.

He had pinned a great deal of faith to his theory that the Rusk rendezvous had been somewhere in this overfalls region. Now his theory seemed to have fallen down, and nothing remained but to go back to the old hit-or-miss hunting. And that was utterly hopeless.

If the cache was in this valley—and from his long talks with old Nat, he believed implicitly that it was—it seemed to be hidden beyond human finding.

In spite of his disappointment, he did not consider this failure the disaster that Leda thought it. Possibly because she had been a penniless little waif all through her teens, she seemed to think that the cache would be a magic key to happiness, an enchanted wand that would touch all their troubles to nothingness. While he did not exactly sniff at half a million dollars, there were many things more precious in his eyes than that overstuffed fortune in dust and nuggets; and several of those things he was actually having now.

One of them was this rugged outdoor life and his buoyant health—a zest of mind and body that went far deeper than the merely physical. After bouncing back from his sickness, he had surged on to a hard-bitten health such as he had once envied in Hugh Ludlow. What with climbing rocks and loping mountains and hawking float in odd hours, he felt as hard as a lean range wolf and as keen as a gust from the snow-fields.

For another thing, it seemed to him that in discovering this elemental world of the outdoors, of mountains, winds and clouds, of waters, forestry and wild creatures, he had come into his own at last, after twenty-four years of deep wordless dissatisfaction. As the sea to some and the city to others, this way of life was his birthright, unknown, unsuspected, till his outlawry had tossed him into it.

Whatever the veiled future held for him, he knew that he would never go back to the city now. It would be prison.

As he and Leda sat there on the sun-warmed rock, he wondered what on earth had plunged his girl partner into so deep a despondency. A person of tremendous ups and downs, she seemed as variable as mountain weather—happy as sunshine one hour and all clouded over the next. For several days her sky had been overcast most of the time; and chasing the glooms away had been one of his chief jobs. But this blue mood, the worst he had ever seen in her, was beyond his fathoming. All day she had been silent, dejected, and for once he could not buoy her up.

Across on the west slope a pair of moosebirds began quarreling at something in a tangle of windfall and thick balsams. Suspicious, Gary watched the tangle uneasily, fancying that one of Hugh Ludlow’s bush-sneaks might be over there.

In their twelve days of searching the valley head, he and Leda had been shadowed and spied on constantly. Several times when they happened to retrace their steps, they had seen fresh tracks, in sphagnum or leaves, where some man had been skulking along behind; and twice on their way home they had caught a flitting glimpse of an enemy following them in the owl-dusk. But so far there had been no attempt to ambush or molest them at all.

What this calm meant he did not know. Whether Skunk-Bear’s disappearance had thrown a scare into Hugh’s outfit; whether Hugh was having them shadowed and deliberately letting them go on searching so that if they did find the cache he could snake it away from them; whether he was trying to dig up court-sure evidence of how the Siwash had met death—to all these questions Gary had no answer. But this calm looked ominous to him, like the ominous quiet when Skunk-Bear had been stalking out along the ledge to push him over.

In a minute or two, as he watched the windfall across the valley, he detected a blurred movement behind some crisscross logs. Presently a man-figure, all but hidden by the bush and trees, backed out of the tangle, crept unto a thicket of deerbush, slipped south along the slope, and vanished into a deep rocky couloir.

“Heading for camp with the day’s report,” Gary thought, saying nothing to Leda. “Why, damn you, fellow! If you’d shoot at me, or something like that, I could understand it; but this dogging us and then sneaking off… A person can’t ever tell what’s around the next corner.”

He stood up, gave Leda his hand to rise, and picked up her rifle.

“Let’s try that overfalls pool for our trout, Lee,” he suggested. “If we get ’em there, we won’t have to look up a fishing hole down the valley, and we can go past our tarn on the way home. Is that all right with you?”

“I don’t care what.”

“Don’t be so discouraged, partner. We’re not licked yet. Why, we’ve just begun to hunt! We’ll come back here and give this place another going over. We may have missed something. Personally I’m still banking on this overfalls section. For all you know, we may stumble onto that stuff right tomorrow.”

“I tell you, I’m not going to hunt anymore!” Leda retorted. “I’m done. And stop calling me ‘partner.’ It makes me feel like some tobacco-chewing prospector or a trapper out of the willows!”

Her anger astonished and bewildered Gary. Plainly she was not only despondent over the hunt but angry at him. What under heaven had he done? He certainly seemed to have done something. All afternoon she had been so touchy that he was almost afraid to talk to her.

As they walked out along the rim-rock, he cut a pliant twelve-foot aspen, trimmed it, dug a fishline out of his knapsack and rigged up a pole. Farther on, in a little open of saw-grass and “mountain lettuce,” he bashed a handful of grasshoppers, using a pine branch, and stuck them into his jacket pocket.

“Our tackle is sort of primitive, Lee,” he remarked, thinking of Hugh Ludlow’s bamboo poles and assorted lures and preserved salmon eggs. “But at that I’ll bet we catch as many trout as Hugh does; and what’s more, we eat ’em!”

Near the overfalls they climbed down a steep bank and crossed a strip of polished boulders to the big caldron pool.

“You flip ’em out,” he bade Leda, offering her the pole. Usually she loved to fish; and catching half a dozen of these high-charged cutthroats might cheer her up. “I’ll stand by to take ’em off and bait hooks.”

Leda shook her head. “I don’t care to. You do it.” She leaned against a boulder and stared at the plunging waters.

Gary stepped across the spray-wet rocks to the pool edge and hooked a grasshopper. He saw no fish jumping, no sinuous dark mottles in the foamy swirls and boils, but the place certainly looked good. The wide thin apron of water pouring over the cliff churned the pool to white froth and swift deep eddies—a natural haunt for big cutthroats.

He flipped the grasshopper out as far as he could and dropped it upon a patch of foam. As it sank into the green water beneath, the line suddenly straightened out, went taut with a violent yank, and then, as suddenly, fell slack. Gary pulled up, stared at the six feet of turned to Leda.

“Say! Did you see that? Hook and lead and ’hopper and everything at one yank. Are we going to let ’em get by with that kind of rough stuff? Come on, partner, and give me a hand here. You’re better at this than I am.”

“Fish closer in, where they aren’t so large,” Leda suggested, above the overfalls rumble. “And stop calling me ‘partner’!”

With a piece of their guide cord, Gary rigged up another line and started fishing again, in the shallower swirls. But Leda’s dejection took all the edge off his enthusiasm. He could not enjoy himself when she was so miserable.

While he fished he kept glancing at her, trying to puzzle out the cause of her despondency. The disastrous Saghelia trip had taken her a hard jolt, but that trip was two weeks past and could scarcely explain this mood. Whatever her trouble, it had been growing on her for nearly a week, till she could stand it no longer.

He swore to himself that on the way home he was going to make her tell him what was the matter. Poor kid, she surely had plenty to be blue about—homeless, penniless, with a bitterly unhappy girlhood behind her and nothing but a lonely empty trail ahead.

As he watched her, there by the boulder, he was swept with the impulse to go over and take her into his arms and let her know that she had at least one friend in the world. But he fought the impulse down. Weeks ago he had sworn that never by word or act would he let her suspect that she meant anything more to him than a friend and partner. Alone with her from morning till dusk, day after day, he found it a desperately hard job, so hard that every night he wondered how he could possibly muddle through the next day without betraying himself. Outlaw and outcast, they were drawn close to each other, closer than he had ever been to anyone else on earth, by a sense of being two against the rest of humanity; and he could no more stop loving her than he could stop breathing.

Whenever he thought of going away from Little Saghelia and not seeing Leda any more, a fierce rebellion welled up in him against his outlawry, and he felt that he could never by his own volition leave her. But always the inevitable was there, inescapable, and he knew that he would have to go; and to save both himself and her from a bad crack-up, he had steadfastly kept silent.

Now, even in the face of her misery, he refused to break down that partnerly front.

In a few minutes he flipped out half a dozen trout, scrappy little pounders, as cold to the hand as icicles. After cleaning them and wrapping them in leaves, he rejoined Leda, picked up her knapsack and the pistol, because she looked so tired; and they started down the valley, following the winding game trail beside the creek.

As he walked along, parting the rain-wet bushes for Leda or holding back the occasional briar, he kept a sharp watch on the trail bends ahead and the buck-brush thickets of the valley bottom. He hardly expected an ambush, but then he did not know what to expect. Considering the critical state of the Casper-Ludlow warfare and the tremendous pressure on Hugh, these days of grace simply could not last.

“If his deadfall has taken all this long to build,” Gary thought, “it ought to be a wham when he does spring it! One thing sure, he isn’t going to be satisfied with a plain ambush for me or a mere bumping off. If he was jealous of me a month ago, he’s in a killing temper now. Whatever he tries, it’ll be calculated not only to put me out of the picture but to put himself back into it, in Leda’s eyes.”

Half a mile below the overfalls they left the main trail and swung up the west slope on a dim old path, to get out of the thick dangerous timber of the valley bottom.

Twenty minutes of steep climb brought them to a small hanging lake, one of a dozen in the upper valley. A tiny rock-girt tarn, perfectly round and only fifty feet across, it was beautifully clear and blue, the bluest water Gary had ever seen; and a stone tossed into it gave the hollow ch-oo-nk of many fathoms.

Several times on their return home he and Leda had halted there. It was so idyllic a spot whether they wanted to rest or not. Ferns hung from its dank rocks; a swath of purple lilies flanked its spillway on the lower side; the ground was carpeted with thick plushy sphagnum; and it lay in a drogue of old patriarchal pines. Deep in its blue depths big trout coursed slowly back and forth—wavy mottles that changed to a flash of black and a splash of silver when may-fly or beetle touched the surface.

At the edge of the tarn Leda flung herself down on the moss and gazed up at the vireos and flame-colored warblers in the high treetops. After tossing the rest of his grasshoppers to the trout and examining some queer black lilies near the spillway, Gary came back and sat down beside her.

The sun had inched down behind the western peakline, and the first shadows of twilight were creeping into the denser drogues of the valley. He knew that he and Leda ought to be hurrying on home; but he did not stir. An hour like this and a place like this came seldom; and besides he wanted to know what Leda’s trouble was and help her out, if he could. “Lee,” he asked gently, “tell me what’s the matter, won’t you? Something’s all wrong, I know.”

Leda shook her head. “There’s nothing the matter. And it’s my own business, anyhow.” This sounded somewhat inconsistent to Gary. She was evidently angry at him—very angry and aloof. For a whole month they had talked about everything under the sun, sharing each other’s thoughts and hopes; and now she was suddenly telling him to mind his own business.

“Maybe I could help, Lee. If it’s something I’ve done—and it seems to be—I’ll sure correct it. Give me a chance, partner.”

That last word struck fire from Leda. She sat up quickly. “Don’t call me that!” she blazed at him. “‘Partner’—I hate it! Don’t you ever call me that again. I’m no old sourdough! Or a muskrat trapper!”

Her fiery outburst dumbfounded Gary so completely that he could only stare at her, speechless, utterly at a loss why that innocent little word should touch off such an explosion.

Like a floodgate loosening, as though this anger had been gathering in her for days and now was going out at one rush, Leda stormed at him:

“Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that I’m a girl? You don’t act like it! It’s ‘partner’ this and ‘partner’ that all day long! I’m not a man and don’t want to be one, and I’m not going to be treated like one, and from now on you can go hunting by yourself, Gary Frazier! Just because I’d rather climb rocks than lie around in a hammock with a book, and just because I’m not a useless butterfly, like Mona Casper, why you think I’m a—just a bush-loping ‘partner’! Even Hugh Ludlow treats me better than you do! He never makes me feel like a backwoodsman!”

“Why—why,” Gary stammered, in groping bewilderment, “d’you mean you don’t want me to treat you as a partner? Has that been the trouble? You mean you don’t like it, Lee?”

“Like it? I hate it! And I hate you!”

As Gary stared at her, at her flushed cheeks and angry eyes, he realized that he had stumbled, all unknowingly, on the cause of Leda’s strange mood. To his thunderstruck surprise he saw, he could not help seeing, that it was his air of casual partnership which had been grating on her unbearably; that when she said “hate” she meant “love”; that she had been wanting love in return from him because she was so alone, so friendless, and he was just about all the world to her.

He could hardly believe his eyes or believe she loved him. It was too momentous a thing to grasp in a few moments. He only knew that his campaign, so desperately maintained, to treat her like a partner, had certainly worked with a vengeance!

“I’m—I’m sorry, Leda,” he groped, scarcely knowing what to say. She probably wouldn’t believe him now, whatever he said. “It did occur to me that you’re a girl! Good heavens, I haven’t been able to think of much else but that! Why, Lee, I thought I was doing the right thing, for you and for myself, in treating you like a partner, but it’s been the hardest job of my life—”

“You’re just saying that. You don’t mean a word of it!” She stood up and turned away. “I’m going home. You’re just saying that to—just because I flared out.”

Gary sprang up and caught her arm. “Leda, please. Don’t go.” He took both her hands in his. “Good God, you must be blind, girl, if you can’t see that all the time I’ve been fighting myself and calling you ‘partner’ and trying to muddle along day after day—that I’ve been loving you and hating this partnerly front… Leda, look at me; don’t turn away like that. I didn’t mean to tell you this. I swore I never would. But it’s done now. Tell me you believe me, honey.”

“No! It isn’t so!” She struggled against him as he took her into his arms. “Gary. Don’t! I won’t let you. You’re just trying to be—be nice to me… You’ve been so kind and good—but now I won’t—won’t believe—”

He smoothed back her disheveled hair and kissed her lips, silencing her whispered protests.

“You do believe. You’ve got to. Leda, look at me. You didn’t mean that ‘hate,’ did you, sweet?”

Leda looked up at him, her eyes full of tears—tears of shame, of lingering anger, of love she could not deny; and as she stood tiptoe for his kiss, she answered him, whispering, “No—Gary—not exactly—I mean, not now.”…

CHAPTER TEN

Twilight was gathering in earnest by the time they started on homeward. The sun still lingered in the high clouds overhead, but the valley was filled with purple shadows nearly to timberline, and in cave and canyon the owls were beginning to hoot their weird eight-noted calls.

A little awed and bewildered by their hour at the tarn, they walked along very silent, side by side where the trail allowed, following the dim old path through the drogues and dark rocky ravines.

Even with Leda beside him, her hand in his, Gary could not fully realize that all this—the hour back yonder, the miracle of Leda’s love—was not a dream but sober actuality. It was all too new and strange and dazing.

In the confusion of his thoughts, he hardly knew how to judge himself for throwing his whole deliberate program to the winds. Had it been wrong of him—wrong and reckless and selfish? Had he failed, when the stark test came, to be a true friend to this girl beside him?

As he looked back across his relationship with Leda, it seemed to him that for an entire month he and Leda had been rushing headlong toward that hour at the tarn. He could no more have halted it than he could hold back a mile-long avalanche with his bare hands.

It dawned on him that the past hour had not only changed the whole outlook between him and Leda but had swept all his own plans into the discard. Until this evening he had had the prospect, however, slender, of whipping on to the Coast sometime before winter and making his get-away. That prospect was dead now. He could not go; he did not want to go. After this open avowal between them he could not possibly put Leda out of his life and leave her here alone, defenseless against Saghelia. She had no one on earth but himself. There was the reason why his casual partnership had plunged her into such despondency.

For a long time he had been suspecting that for good or bad, happiness or disaster, he and Leda were destined to stick together. Now he knew it.

It was unthinkable, too, for him to take her along, on the outlaw’s trail. If she should be arrested with him, she would face a prison term for aiding a murderer. And how could he ask her to share the hunger, the nerve-racking fears of that fly-by-night existence?

All this meant that he had to stay on Little Saghelia. He was bound there by invisible chains.

“But if I stay here,” he told himself, “I’m going to get caught. If Rhodes knows who I am—and that’s just about a sure thing—I’ve been living a month on borrowed time.”

Altogether, with the Police wanting him for murder, and Hugh Ludlow trying to kill him, and the cache hunt apparently hopeless, he felt that his fortunes had struck a new all-time low. Except for Leda. Whenever he thought of how her happiness was bound up with his own, he swore grimly that he had been pushed around enough and now he was going to do a little pushing himself.

With many windings the dim path brought them finally to a better trail that led straight home. A pall of heavy clouds, bringing a warm rain from the Kuro Siwa of the Pacific, had cut off the lingering afterglow of the sun; and the dark was coming on swiftly, earlier than usual.

“Tired, girl?” Gary asked, as they swung into the good trail.

“A little. I didn’t sleep very well last night.”

“Let’s stop then, and rest.”

“We’d better not, Gary. It’s later than we’ve ever been out, and Dads is probably worrying about us already.” She took his hand, as the trail led them into a drogue of black spruces, and her fingers tightened upon his “Gary—?”

“Yes, sweet.”

“Are we going to tell Dads anything about—about ourselves and this evening?”

“What do you think?”

“In a way I’d like to. But he’s not awf’ly dependable at keeping a secret, and he’s going in to Saghelia in a day or two, and if anybody should pump him about us. We mustn’t have that, Gary.”

“You’re thinking about Hugh Ludlow?”

“Yes. If he ever hears about this, ever hears the slightest whisper about it—!”

“He surely suspects already, Lee. In fact, he probably is imagining a lot more than… I mean, he knows how you nursed me when I was under the weather and how we go hunting together every day. But I guess it’s just as well not to confirm his suspicions. We’ll keep this evening to ourselves. It’s ours, anyway.”

“Yes, ours.”

As they walked along through the black spruces, an idea, born of desperate necessity, slowly took shape in Gary’s mind. With every road blocked, nothing was left to him except to turn and face his outlawry and fight it. Instead of waiting till the law nailed him or Hugh Ludlow rubbed him out, he himself would take the initiative and force a showdown. His idea was to deliberately give himself up to Rhodes and tell the sergeant the whole story about that evening in Winnipeg two months ago.

The evidence against him in that murder case was deadly, and he knew that his story would sound flimsy. But there was a chance that Rhodes might know the truth when he heard it.

What the silent inscrutable officer would do if he did believe—that was a question. One thing certain, he would have to act, one way or other. And another certainty, he would never allow a personal opinion, however favorable and friendly, to swerve him from his sworn duty. Whatever his own belief, he would never help a man condemned for murder to escape.

He might take the easy course—handcuffs, the Police butter-tub and a wire to headquarters announcing the capture of Gary Frazier. Or, in his silent fashion, he might figure out some line of action that would neither circumvent the law nor deliver an innocent man to death.

The whole idea was so fearful a gamble that Gary made no final decision. And he said nothing about it to Leda. She would never let him go to Rhodes. The mere thought of his taking that irretrievable step would drive her panicky.

Beyond the black spruces they came to a good-sized opening on the mountainside. With the setting of the sun a chill night wind had sprung up. As they crossed the boulder meadow they felt its cold nipping breath more strongly than in the timber. Noticing that Leda was shivering a little, Gary paused and took off his jacket and put it around her shoulders. “That better?”

“Lots.”

With that miracle still so new he wavered a moment, hesitant and awkward; but Leda’s face was upturned to him, and on a courageous impulse he bent and kissed her. “And you thought I didn’t like you, Lee! Girl, girl!”

“But how could I know, Gary—when you were so aloof and kept calling me ‘partner’ all the time?”

Arguing that point, they went on, down into a deep couloir scattered with big granite blocks. All around them they heard the night sounds of the wilderness; the sleepy twittering of golden-crowns safely tucked away in thickets of devil’s-club; the scream of a rabbit owl; and once, startling near, the surly ouf-ouf of a bear crashing through a briar tangle.

On the breeze came the muffled noise of the big overfalls. Like the scenes in a crystal-gazer’s ball, in which one could see whatever was in his mind, the far-away sound kept changing to their ears, now seeming like the murmur of voices, now like the low wailing of many winds, now like some unearthly chorus chanting a primitive minor song.

As they reached the bottom of the rock couloir and drew near the little torrent in its middle, Gary felt Leda’s hand suddenly grip his arm.

“Gary! I thought I heard something—a flip of brush—right ahead—there by that big rock!”

They stopped dead-short, peering into the black shadows.

“Maybe we’d better go around,” Gary whispered, though he heard or saw nothing. “That’s a good place for an ambush. Let’s back out—” He broke off, and his hand dropped to the pistol at his belt. Beside the big boulder and scarcely three paces from them, a dark object rose up, a man-figure took on outline and stood there, blocking their path, with his arms raised in a command to halt.

After a moment or two the man moved toward them, not menacingly at all but with his arms folded and no weapons about him; and when he spoke, his voice was friendly enough, though a little exulting.

“How do, m’sieu; how do, mees,” he greeted them; and Gary, covering him with the gun and alert against the first hostile move, recognized the voice as that of Hugh Ludlow’s big half-breed, Eutrope. “Don’ be alarm’, m’sieu; I don’ hurt nobody.”

“What d’you want?” Gary snapped at him. He realized that he and Leda had walked into a deadfall; but what sort of trap it was he did not yet know, and he stalled for time till the move developed a little more.

“Moi, I don’ wan’ nut’ing,” the ’breed answered. “But M’sieu Hugh, he wan’s to have a leetle talk wit’ you. A leetle talk and mebbe a leetle somt’ing else. Down to valley at our camp. Dere won’ be no rough stuff from us onless you get kontrary. If you do, we have to hogtie you and carry you on a pole, lak breenging in to camp a beeg yo’ng moose.”

Gary caught that “we.” This ’breed was not alone. There were others with him, other men in those black shadows.

“Lee!” he whispered sharply, with quick presence of mind. “Slip out of this! Step behind me and fade. I’ll keep ’em busy till you get away.”

Leda refused point-blank. “They’re not after me. They want you! You make the break.” She tried to take the rifle from him. “Gary! Hurry it! I’ll hold them back.”

Gary pried her hand loose from the gun. “You might get killed!” Out of the corner of his eye he saw a blurred movement from behind a boulder just off the trail, and to his ears came the metallic sn-ii-ck of a rifle being cocked. “Don’t move, Lee! They’re all around us! We walked right into the middle of them.”

The ’breed spoke again. “We been tryin’ dozen tams—ever’ evening—to meet op wit’ you two, but you wise lak trap-line carcajou, and take differen’ trails on way home. But dis tam our guess about your trail, it hit de bull right on de eye. S’pose now, frien’, you jus’ let Eutrope tie op your han’s good and tight. Skunk-Bear wen’ after you wan tam and he didn’ come back, and we don’ wan’ you to try any of your fonny treeks on us. So we tie you op and den hyak to camp. Dis gal, she goes ’long wit’ us. M’sieu Hugh say very streectly dat we fetch her ’long.”

Gary shivered, and it was not from the chill wind. The avalanche which he had been expecting for days had at last let loose, and not only himself but Leda too was caught in the slideway. In spite of the tumult of those moments he wondered why Hugh Ludlow wanted Leda brought to that camp down valley. And with a shudder of vague premonition he wondered what was in store for himself.

Without weighing the frightful risk or the hopelessness of her act, Leda seized the rifle again and tried to pull it away. Cool-headed, Gary kept the gun in his own hands. Against those unseen rifles and enemies, she would only get herself killed. These men were taking no chances, were not even showing themselves. They were too mindful of the oblivion which had hit Skunk-Bear.

Eutrope stepped closer, holding a thick babische thong in his hand. “Jus’ turn ’round’, frien’i. I tie your wrists behin’ your back so’s you don’ peecli yourself loose on de trail.”

In quick flashes of thought Gary debated what to do. If he had been alone, he would have smashed the huge ’breed and leaped for shelter of the big rock and tried to break out. But Leda, beside him… One wrong move from him and those rifles would crack down on him and her.

He stepped back from the métis, fighting for a few seconds, fighting to think, to seize on some way of outwitting these enemies without danger to Leda. He felt that he would rather be shot outright than taken prisoner and led down to Hugh Ludlow’s camp.

Impatient—and afraid of him—the métis spoke up raising his voice and speaking to one of those hidden men.

“Cézar! Show dis feller dat we don’ mean no monkey beezness. Show heem w’at chance he’s hees fonny treecks.”

From behind a boulder which Gary had not even noticed, a rifle cr-aa-ck-ed sharply, a rope of fire lashed out, and Gary’s hat flipped off his head as though knocked off by invisible hands. Leda screamed and seized Gary’s arm, all oblivious of danger to herself. Behind the boulder the man Cézar rammed a fresh cartridge home; and from three other points in the dark shadows around him Gary heard the ominous sn-ii-ck of rifle triggers earing back.

His hands dropped in a little gesture of surrender. He was no quitter. In his death battle with Skunk-Bear he had hung on through black hopelessness, fighting with his last flicker of strength. But here he dared not fight. Leda’s cry, and that bullet zz-ing-ing past her, murderously close, showed him what he had to do. Regardless of what awaited him down at Hugh Ludlow’s camp, he dared not hesitate or make one move to save himself.

“Put up your guns,” he commanded in steady tones. “You’ve got me. I give in.” He turned to Eutrope. “Go ahead with that rawhide.”

When Eutrope had finished tying him up, the others of Hugh’s outfit left their hiding places and stepped close—two Indians, another half-breed and two white men.

“Better tie that rawhide tight,” Gary advised scornfully, as one of the men poked a rifle against his back. “There’s only half a dozen of you against me.”

“I t’ink you’ll stay tied aw-right,” Eutrope assured. “But don’ make no s’picious move, frien’. Cézar, he lak to shoot off dat rifle of hees. Now s’pose we hyak.”

They started down the dark couloir toward the valley bottom.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

It was near midnight when the strange little cavalcade—Eutrope in the lead, then Gary, then Cézar with the rifle, then the two Indians and Leda and the two nondescript whites—reached the camp. As Gary saw the fireglow through the trees ahead, he maneuvered himself close to Leda and whispered a last caution:

“Whatever we come up against here, Lee, keep cool and keep your own self out of it. Hugh’ll treat you decent, of course. What he’s got on tap for me I don’t know, but it won’t be pleasant, and we’d better make up our minds to that beforehand. Keep remembering, all the time, that if you stick up for me it’ll only inflame Hugh all the worse. What I say or do won’t matter. And just because you’re not tied up, Lee, don’t think you’ve got any chance against these men. For heaven’s sake, don’t lose your head and try any fast play here. These slinkers would shoot us as quick as a wink. They’re scared of us, scared all through.”

They came out of the dense woods into the small camp open, where the trees had been cut and the ground cleared of underbrush. By the light of the big fire Gary saw three tents; one equipped with mosquito door and stove, for Hugh Ludlow; another, larger, for his men; and a third for cooking and general utility.

Together with the fire the three tents formed a little quadrangle, with a sward of moss in the middle.

Except for Hugh Ludlow’s silk tent, the place seemed to Gary as barbaric and savage as though it were the camp of Chilcote Rusk and his pack, seventy-odd years ago. In a bent sapling at the woods’ edge, out of reach of prowling bears, hung part of a caribou, and a white goat, unflensed, blood-splotched, grotesquely stiff as it dangled.

The midnight hush, the black woods all round, the fire-glow on the swart faces of the men, the shifting shadows from the large bright fire—all this made him feel as though he had indeed been whisked back across the decades to the time when Chilcote Rusk and his killers had lived here in Little Saghelia and taken their grisly toll of human lives and gold.

From the pile of sawed birch by the cook tent Hugh Ludlow was carrying wood to the fire: but as the party came out of the timber, he saw them and whirled around; the wood dropped from his arms; and for long moments he stood there stock-still, staring at them as though he could not believe that his men had at last brought in the two he wanted.

Presently he started toward them. Eutrope said something to him in bush-French; but Hugh did not seem to notice. Silent, his face a curious mixture of elation and festering jealousy, he came on up and confronted them, staring at Gary, ignoring Leda except for a nod and glance.

In a vague fashion Gary knew what was coming to him. Three hours ago, on the way to the tarn, he had prophesied to himself that Hugh Ludlow was not aiming now at any plain killing. Sooner than he had thought, his prophecy was coming true.

He fancied that Hugh’s attempts to pin the Skunk-Bear death on him had failed, and Hugh’s other attempts had all failed, and now the man was resorting to brute criminal force. It seemed, in fact, that Hugh had had little faith in those other plans and had been trying for nearly two weeks to capture Leda and him and bring them here.

In cold hard tones Hugh demanded of him:

“I warned you, didn’t I, to clear out of Little Saghelia?”

Gary nodded curtly. “Yes, you warned me. What about it?”

“And you didn’t go, did you?”

“I have as much privilege in here as you. What right have you got to order people out of the country and boss ’em around to suit yourself?”

Hugh brushed the question aside. Because of Leda he was trying to hide his rage and jealousy and appear coldly commanding.

“I told you,” he went on, “to get away from Leda Barton and stay away. Why? Because, as her friend, I knew that if you lived up there at the cabin, you’d have the whole damned town talking about her. Well, they’re talking, as I said they would. I tried to shoot square with you—bought you a railroad ticket, would have given you money. But you didn’t listen, don’t care a whisky-damn about the shame and disgrace you’d cause her.”

Gary could well imagine the vicious talk in Saghelia. A strange man living at that isolated cabin and going on long trips every day with Leda Barton—it was like a confirmation of all the evil gossip about her. Plainly that talk had come to Hugh’s ears and galled him intolerably. For the girl he loved to be the subject of coarse street-corner jokes had infuriated him. That was understandable.

But the man’s proprietary air toward Leda and his pose of being her protector made Gary smile. Long before he himself had ever known Leda, Hugh had had a chance to be her true friend and blast that talk. But he had not been man enough. Afraid that he might be disinherited and have to make his own way in the world, he had wavered between Mona Casper and Leda; between his desires and a cowardly sort of discretion.

“Don’t attempt to justify yourself, Ludlow,” he said. “There isn’t any justification for hiring a bush-sneak to rub me out, or for what you’re aiming to do here now, with the help of half a dozen men. You’re trying to make Leda believe it was all done for her sake.”

Hugh’s face reddened as Gary, with this one thrust, punctured the whole argument. He was getting distinctly the worst of the clash, and he broke it off short. With a curt gesture to one of the Indians, he bade, “Cut him loose.”

The Indian drew a belt knife, stepped up behind Gary and slashed the babische thongs; and Gary stood free.

Without having to be told what to do, the other Indian brought more wood, threw it on the fire and stirred the flames till the whole little quadrangle was lighted up brightly. One of the nondescript whites stepped into the large tent and came out with a whip, a heavy black-snake. Three of the men backed up to the spaces between the tents, one man to each space, and crouched down, guarding against any break on Gary’s part.

To make doubly sure on that score, the man called Cézar, evidently the crack shot of the outfit, stepped back far enough to command the entire quadrangle, and stood watching alertly, his rifle ready.

There was something about these methodic preparations which told Gary that this whole affair had been planned days ago—planned to the last detail.

At first sight of the black-snake he thought that Hugh intended to give him a brutal flogging. But then he realized that flogging a defenseless man would hardly raise Hugh Ludlow in Leda’s esteem. And that esteem was chiefly what this evening’s business was aimed at.

As he waited for the next move, he glanced at Leda. Though she was pale and trembling, she was valiantly holding onto herself and keeping silent, as he had asked her.

Hugh stripped off his jacket, flung it across a tent rope and turned to Gary.

“The first thing I’m going to do,” he said, “is to show you I don’t need any hired help in handling you. After the shame you’ve put Leda to, I’m going to have the satisfaction of knocking hell out of you personally. Suppose you get ready.”

Gary was astounded. Ever since the afternoon when Hugh Ludlow whipped him, there in Saghelia, he had been aching for a chance to settle that score. Now his wish had suddenly come true, but under circumstances which he had never imagined. And he was astounded, too, at this fulfillment of his prophecy—that Hugh would try, in some unpredictable way, to raise himself in Leda’s eyes and win back his lost ground.

“Oh, I see,” he said to Hugh. “You want to show Leda who’s the better man. Doesn’t that strike you as being a rather primitive way of impressing a girl, Ludlow?”

“Are you yellow? Are you afraid of a fair-square fight?” He added, “If you beat me, you own the valley.”

Gary laughed scornfully at this promise of safety if he won. When and if he stretched Hugh Ludlow out, these six men would gang him and maul him half to death and horse-whip him out of Little Saghelia. At least, he hoped they would do nothing worse than that.

“Since you’re calling the play,” he said, “I guess a fight will have to be all right with me. But,”—he motioned to Leda—“does she have to see this? What you and these men are planning to do here—d’you believe it’s anything for a girl to have to watch?”

“What d’you think I had her brought along for?”

“All right. What’s the rules of this so-called fair-square fight?”

“Anything goes!” Hugh rasped at him. “Quit stalling and get ready.”

Gary tossed his hat aside and looked at Leda, who had been hovering close to him throughout these preparations.

“Better step out of the road, partner,” he suggested. “And for heaven’s sake, remember what I told you a while ago.”

With a final glance around to get his bearings he turned to Hugh Ludlow and nodded.

A few minutes ago he had been thinking that it would be wisdom, if he wanted to live, to take a beating from Hugh Ludlow and not whip the man under any circumstances. But that mood had passed. Whether he won or not, the cards were hopelessly stacked against him; and as he squared away he swore he was going to mess Hugh Ludlow up all he could before those other men jumped in and stopped the battle. Confident, Hugh came at him, feinted cleverly, jabbed in a short left to the ribs that drew Gary’s guard down, and then drove in a hard smashing right to Gary’s jaw—a terrific bare-knuckle blow that sounded like the crack of a flat board on canvas.

The smash jolted Gary to his shoes but it did not stagger him. He was not the hunger-weak fugitive of a month ago. Instead of wilting, he clipped in a jarring uppercut that snapped Hugh Ludlow’s head back.

Something of Hugh’s confidence ebbed. As he glared at his opponent, he seemed to realize that in this fight he might get more than he had bargained for.

Closing in warily this time, he began boxing skillfully, watching for a good opening. Gary backed up and took half a dozen punches, waiting for that feint and left jab again. It finally came. Tensed and ready, he caught Hugh off guard and nailed him with a right cross to the jaw—so hard that he sent Hugh staggering backward.

In the second or two while Hugh was pulling himself together, Gary took a swift glance around, thinking that Leda might have a chance to dart into those black woods a few steps away. Excepting Eutrope, who had commandeered her light Savage, and the man Cézar, who was still holding his rifle at alert, none of the men had guns handy. Watching the battle, they seemed oblivious of her.

He tried to catch her glance and give her a sign to vanish when the next savage clash drew the attention of Cézar and Eutrope. But Leda did not seem to notice or understand; and in the next moment Hugh Ludlow lunged at him again.

Swinging wildly, Hugh closed in and tried to grapple, fighting with the blind fury of a person who had felt his enemy’s power and knew himself outmatched. He was breathing heavily and he came in cursing and snarling.

Gary stopped his lunge with a jolting left, tore out of the grapple and backed off once more—toward the tent rope where Hugh’s jacket was hanging. The big suspicious bulge in the pocket of that jacket was an automatic, he knew; and he was maneuvering for a chance to grab the gun. He probably would be killed before he could put both Eutrope and Cézar out, but that was better than what he was going to get here at the hands of these men; and Leda at least could get away in the confusion.

Hugh closed in a third time and started slugging. Only a jump from the tent rope, Gary stopped, stood leg-to-leg with him, and slugged back.

It was a fierce hot mêlée, so murderous that in twenty seconds Hugh Ludlow was backing away and swiping the blood from his eyes. Gary closed in, braced himself; and as Hugh lunged once again, Gary caught him a solid crash to the jaw, with all his strength behind the swing.

The smash sent Hugh reeling backwards, dazed and staggering—so dazed that he stumbled and fell to his knees. As he went down, he instinctively flung up his arm in a gesture, almost a plea, for his enemy not to hit him again. His face was bloody, his puffed eyes were nearly shut, he was so limp that Gary expected him to topple and sprawl on the ground.

Snarling an inarticulate oath, Hugh managed, in a few seconds, to stagger to his feet and stand up. Instead of coming in, he turned, tried to see where his men were, swiped at his eyes again, and motioned a command to those others.

Watching him, Gary knew that the gesture was an order for the men to rush into the fight and stop it. He backed up and whirled for the tent rope, to grab out that automatic and start shooting. In kaleidoscopic flashes he visioned the gang-beating, the whip, and all the revenge that Hugh Ludlow would treat him to for this mauling; and he wanted to go down fighting. Before he got it himself he intended to put Hugh Ludlow out. The man had hounded him for a month, tried to kill him, and now, beaten in this “fair-square” fight, Hugh was motioning those six bush-sneaks to rush in and gang a lone-handed enemy.

In the instant that he whirled, a sharp-speaking rifle cr-aa-ck-ed, over to his right—in front of Hugh Ludlow’s tent. He heard the vicious splaat of a steel-jacket smashing into metal, and heard a yelp of pain from the man Cézar across the quadrangle. Jerking his head around, he saw Cézar’s shattered gun fly out of his hands; saw the man sprawl backward, still yelling in pain and thunderstruck astonishment.

Bewildered himself by that mysterious rifle crack, Gary whirled to see where it had come from. He stared wide-eyed… Near the door of the small tent, between Eutrope and one of the nondescript whites, Leda was backing off, backing toward those black woods, her own rifle smoking in her hands as its muzzle swept the stunned men.

“Gary! Break free! Here—here with me! I’m holding them. I’ll kill the first man that moves!”

In spite of his daze and the turmoil of those giddy moments, Gary realized that somehow, while Hugh Ludlow was stumbling to his knees and Eutrope was all oblivious of her, Leda had edged close to the big ’breed, seized her gun, leaped aside and driven a bullet at Cézar before the man could lift his deadly rifle at her.

As Gary snapped out of his daze, he saw that the white man nearest Leda was sidling closer, to lunge and knock her rifle down and overpower her. She did not see the man or guess his intentions. She was too busy covering those other six.

Grabbing out the automatic, Gary shot point-blank.

The bullet spun the man around, and sprawled him flat, clutching at his shoulder.

Not one of the other men stirred. As though rooted in their tracks, they stood paralyzed, watching helplessly, as Gary joined Leda and the two of them backed away—out of the fireglow, into the sheltering blackness of the woods.

CHAPTER TWELVE

With slow reluctant footsteps Gary trudged up the main-street sidewalk in Saghelia, through a gray dreary rain.

He was sore from his fight last night, his face was bruised, his burst knuckle smarted; but of that and the cold rain he was totally unaware. He was thinking, only, that with every step he was drawing nearer his salvation or doom—the Mounted Police quadrangle at the south edge of town.

It had been nearly morning when he and Leda finally got home—cold and weary but thankful to be alive. When he thought back upon the ambush last night, the overwhelming odds, his fight with Hugh Ludlow, the black-snake, and all that those men intended doing to him, he shuddered.

From the shelter of awnings and doorways people stared at him as he went by. A few made remarks, and once he caught Leda’s name linked insultingly with his own. But he paid no attention. His visit to Sergeant Rhodes was more momentous business than punching a pool-hall idler.

More than anything else, it was his hour last evening at the tarn which had brought him in to Saghelia. As things stood, he was helpless to do anything for Leda or himself. But if Rhodes could deliver him from his outlawry, then he’d be free to take Leda away from Saghelia.

As he trudged along through the rain, he tried to plan what to say to Rhodes and just how to tell the story of that calamitous Winnipeg night. Only a fool—or an exceedingly wise person—would ever believe so fantastic an account.

He felt that if Rhodes did believe him, the officer would put up a hard fight in his defense. But what, in the Lord’s name, could Rhodes do? His duty gave him little leeway or discretion; he was two thousand miles from Winnipeg; the case was two months cold.

“Short of pulling a rabbit out of a hat,” Gary thought, “I don’t see how he can lift a hand to help me. When he hears my story he may just smile that queer smile of his and jerk his thumb at the butter-tub.”

As he passed out of the business section of Saghelia, his footsteps dragged. He realized that this might be the last free walk of his life. When he turned occasionally and gazed into the gray mist at the invisible mountains of Little Saghelia, all his instincts clamored at him to whirl around and get back there, before it was too late.

Three blocks from the Police quadrangle, he came to the Ludlow home; and through the high iron fence he looked at it thoughtfully, as he went past. The grounds were lavishly landscaped, with rock gardens, imported trees, bird fountains and neatly patterned shrubbery. The landscape artist, working with flowers and greenery, had fashioned a very lovely scene, Gary thought. Too lovely, in fact. Too correct and stiffly perfect. There was no wildness about it, and wildness was the very heart of nature’s mystic beauty.

It seemed ironic to him that a man should turn a whole lovely mountain valley to ugly desolation and then surround himself with this formal and lavish “nature.”

The home itself, a big mansion of brick and marble, ivy-clad, half-hidden by sweeping Tibetan pines, had an air of cold emptiness about it. With something of pity Gary thought of the old man living there, whose wife and two daughters had been in Europe for years, whose fortune was about to crash in ruins, whose son gave him no loyalty, help or comfort. Truly and profoundly the split-log cabin up Little Saghelia housed more human happiness and joy in life than this place dreamed of.

As he walked past the drive entrance, a long black limousine came purring up the street from the mills, and turned in at the arched stone gateway. Gary glanced uninterestedly at the lone man occupant in the rear seat.

“Why, gosh,” he breathed, taking a second look, “it’s the old Blizzard himself! It’s Hugh’s daddy!”

He noticed that old Ludlow gave him a long stare, then leaned forward and asked the chauffeur some question. But he thought nothing more of this, and went on past.

When he was a little way up the walk, he heard the squeal of brakes, and glanced around. The car was backing out of the drive.

To his surprise the automobile glided up the street and stopped at the curb beside him, and the chauffeur motioned him to come over to the car.

“You want me?” Gary asked.

Old Ludlow lowered the window panel. “Yes, you!” he barked, without removing the cigar from his mouth. “Come here.” And to the driver: “Leave me alone a minute.”

As the chauffeur obediently stepped out into the heavy drizzle and moved off, Gary approached the car, still believing this was a mistake. Why under the sun should old Hugh Ludlow want a private talk with him?

Through the open window he looked at young Hugh’s father, a hard-faced man of sixty, with iron-gray hair and bulldog jaw. In voice and feature and domineering gesture the two were strikingly alike. But the father seemed much more a man than the son. He seemed to have strength of purpose and character about him, where young Hugh had only willfulness and undisciplined appetites.

With cold disdainful eyes old Ludlow stared at Gary, at his patched clothes, battered hat and muddy shoes.

“Are you the fellow who’s living up Little Saghelia at that old ground-hog’s shack?”

Gary’s sympathy of a few minutes ago went glimmering. The man’s stare and tyrannical tones irritated him, and he resented that reference to old Nat.

He retorted: “Nat Higgens isn’t a ground-hog, and he doesn’t live in a shack. When you mention him to me, try to be civil, even if it doesn’t come natural.”

“Answer my question. Are you the fellow?”

“I am, and what about it?”

Old Ludlow paid no attention to anger in a person so far beneath him.

“Good. Been wanting to see you. Been intending to send a man to bring you to town. Got a proposition to make.”

“Yes?” Gary fenced. A “proposition,” was it? Probably had something to do with this struggle between himself and young Hugh.

“Yes! Money in it for you.” He paused, watched Gary; and when the latter showed no excitement at this mention of easy money, he frowned in surprise. “You listening to me?”

“I’m not deaf. Let’s have your proposition.”

Old Ludlow chewed on his cigar for a moment, then demanded bluntly: “What d’you think of this Barton girl up there? You and her get along all right, do you?”

Gary colored a little. “You don’t mind prying into a person’s private affairs! What I think of Miss Barton is my own business.”

“Answer my question!”

“Why, you old piece of impudence, go to hell!” Gary flared out. He turned away. “Take your proposition, whatever it is, and go jump!”

“Wait a minute. Come back here. I’m talking big money to you. You’d better listen.”

Gary got hold of himself and stopped. “Why,” he thought, “I’m acting like a boob, letting that old hard-face rile me. If I was sensible, I’d listen and maybe learn something worth knowing.” He walked back to the car. “All right, I’ll listen. Make it snappy.”

Old Ludlow was forthright. He demanded, point-blank: “What’ll you take to marry that girl?”

Gary nearly fell over. “Marry her?” he gasped. “Is that your—your proposition?”

“That’s it! Marry her, get her out of Saghelia, get her clear out of the country! Come on! What d’you say?”

As he stared at old Ludlow, Gary realized that the offer was genuine; and in spite of his amazement he saw the motive behind that offer. If Leda Barton was out of the country and entirely out of young Hugh’s life, the latter would have to write her off, and then he would turn to Mona Casper. With those mines closing down and the Ludlow fortune toppling to disaster, old Ludlow was offering a price to anyone who’d get Leda away!

Not a bad move. Quite sensible and shrewd, even if blunt. Certainly a far more decent and worthy move than young Hugh’s resort to criminal weapons.

“When I say ‘marry’,” old Ludlow rapped, “that’s what I mean. No sham stuff. Legal and court-tight. This Rhodes person can do it. What’ll you take, I say?”

Gary-almost laughed aloud. Mercy of heaven, money for marrying Leda. Getting paid to marry his Lee partner!

“You’re right about it being easy money,” he said, “but,”—he shook his head decisively—“I have to turn you down. Besides the fact that I’m not exactly free to do what I want to, I wouldn’t care to get married on Ludlow dollars.”

Old Ludlow snorted. “Huh! Trying to squeeze a stiff price out of me, are you? I’ll pay you five thousand, cash, and if you stall around any I’ll hire somebody else to marry her!”

Gary did laugh at that. “I tell you, there’s nothing doing.” He turned away. “I’m not stalling or jacking up any price.”

“Hold on.” Old Ludlow clambered out of the car, followed him to the sidewalk and caught his arm. “Are you crazy? You don’t have to live with her. Just marry her and get her out of the country.”

Gary freed himself. “I told you no! That’s flat and final.” He started on, for the Police quadrangle.

“But wait!”—old Ludlow was following him down the walk. “I’ll make it seventy-five hundred, and you have her out of here tomorrow. Seventy-five hundred dollars!”

“Go on back and get out of the rain,” Gary called, over his shoulder. It seemed an odd twist, an incredible thing, that old Hugh Ludlow, master of all these mines and mills and timber limits, should be following a penniless “bum” down a rainy sidewalk, arguing, begging. And stranger still, the strangest twist in all his life, that he was actually being offered a small fortune to marry Leda!

“Wait, you!” Old Ludlow shouted. “Listen to me. Wait.”

Without turning, Gary motioned at him to go back.

“Hey! Stop!” There was a note of the frantic, now, in old Ludlow’s voice. “Let’s talk it over.”

Gary walked on, rapidly outdistancing the older man.

“You there!”—the words came to Gary indistinctly. “Ten thousand! D’you hear me? You damned fool. Ten thousand dollars—just for marrying that little huzzy—”

At that, Gary took one final glance back at old Ludlow, gave him an emphatic thumbs down, and then strode on.

* * * *

Across the desk in Sergeant Rhodes’ cottage, Gary confronted the enigmatic officer.

“Well, here I am, Sergeant.”

“So I perceive,” Rhodes replied. If he was at all surprised by Gary’s visit, he showed no sign. He motioned at the comfortable wicker chair. “Sit down.”

Gary refused. “I’d rather take it standing up,” he said. Through the window, where a clump of wild roses brushed against the screen, he saw the Police butter-tub, a small gray structure of cement and steel; and its likeness to a death cell gave him a bad jar. “I guess there’s no use beating around the bush. I came here to give myself up.”

That seemed to surprise Rhodes a bit. But he said nothing; merely looked at Gary.

“You’ve known all along who I am,” Gary went on. “You’re harder to read than Chinese in the dark; but that first day, when I had the run-in with Hugh Ludlow, I had a hunch you recognized me. Why didn’t you nail me then, Rhodes? You were waiting for my buddies to show up, weren’t you?”

For a little time Rhodes eyed Gary narrowly, as though debating what answer to make. At last he nodded slightly.

“Well, that was once, Rhodes, when you made a mistake. There aren’t any buddies, never were, never will be.”

Rhodes thrummed casually on the desk, still eying Gary. “You mean you handled this job entirely by yourself.”

“No! I mean to say I didn’t have a cussed thing to do with that robbery and killing. Rhodes, I actually didn’t know what happened till I read it in a newspaper. I do know some facts about the business—which I never got a chance to tell; but except for that I’m no more implicated than you are.”

At that word “killing,” Rhodes stiffened a little and stopped thrumming. His curious eyes puzzled Gary.

“What’s the matter, Rhodes?”

“Nothing. You were telling me that you’re not implicated.”

“And that’s what I mean! This information here”—he pointed to a Frazier poster tacked on the order board—“it’s so cock-eyed crazy that I’d laugh at it, only a fellow can’t very well laugh with a noose around his neck.”

Rhodes looked at the poster; his eyes opened widely; he looked again at Gary, and came to his feet.

“You? You’re Gary Frazier?”

The question fairly stunned Gary. He stared dumfoundedly at the officer.

“Why—why,” he gulped, “didn’t you know?”

In silent amazement Rhodes stepped over to the board for a look at the picture. Presently he turned around.

“I do see a resemblance, now that you’ve told me who you are. And you’re Frazier. And you’ve been around here for a month! I’ll be damned!”

“But—but hell’s bells, man, you just got through saying you knew me, knew everything!”

“I hadn’t the faintest idea who you were or what you wanted to give yourself up for. But I did suspect it might be important, so I merely allowed you to tell me.”

Gary mopped his forehead. “And you didn’t know! You strung me along and let me blurt it all out! I’ve seen a lot of poker-faced so-and-so’s, but you beat ’em all, Rhodes!”

The sergeant smiled faintly at the compliment. Across the desk they gazed at each other, officer and outlaw. Gradually, as he realized that his visitor was a man facing death for a double killing, Rhodes’ smile faded. At last he inquired:

“What made you so sure that I recognized you, Frazier?”

“I don’t know; I guess it was just your way,” Gary said, groping for words to express the officer’s mesmeric silence. For a whole month that silence and the memory of the sergeant’s uncanny eyes had preyed on him, till he felt dead-positive that the officer knew everything. “I guess you just hypnotized me, Rhodes.”

“But why did you walk in here like this? Surely you realize what’s against you. You had little chance to escape, but why did you throw that little away?”

“I came here to tell you my story, Rhodes. If you don’t help me out, I’m going to swing.”

Without answering, Rhodes turned to a steel cabinet, unlocked a drawer and sorted out a brown envelope. “Pardon me,” he said, taking out the enclosed papers. “I want to glance over the details of your case again. I wasn’t exactly looking for you to show up here at Saghelia.”

While Rhodes read the secret departmental data from headquarters, Gary leaned against the desk and waited, fighting hard to be steady. On this hour hung life or death or him; and the quiet of the little cottage was more terrible than the silence when Skunk-Bear had stalked him on the ledge. Then his life had depended upon his own brains and courage, but here he was helpless, his fate wholly in the hands of this officer.

When Rhodes finally folded the papers and looked up his face was grave; and the pity in his eyes struck a chill into Gary.

“It’s—it’s pretty bad, isn’t it, Rhodes?”

“Yes, bad. Didn’t you realize that I’d have to take you up?”

Gary’s hands gripped the desk top, and he battled against the paralyzing conviction that he had lost his fearsome gamble. Past Rhodes’ shoulder he caught another glimpse of the cement-steel butter-tub; and as he thought of Leda and the cabin and the wild freedom of Little Saghelia, something near to panic shook him.

“Yes, I knew you’d have to act,” he managed. “But I thought that with your experience and Police connections, you might figure some way to help me. That is, if you’ll believe my story.”

“I’d like to hear it, of course,” Rhodes said gently. He proffered cigarettes.

Gary shook his head, scarcely noticing. The monotonous rain drumming upon the cottage roof was bringing him vivid memories of that Winnipeg night when, in the space of a few hours, the whole course of his life had been changed.

“I’ll make it short,” he said, forcing himself to speak calmly to the man across the desk. “Here it is:

“I got out of law school in Chicago on the tenth of June. Besides needing money, I wanted an outdoor summer, so I headed north for Canada.

“At Fort Frances, there on the Border, I buddied up with three young fellows, transients like myself; and we caught a rattler on to Winnipeg.

“While we were living in a hobo jungle there, waiting to get shipped to a job we’d signed up for, another fellow joined us, a person we called Greenie. I think Winnipeg was his home—he seemed to know all the ropes around the town.

“Those other three fellows thought Greenie was pretty hot stuff, but he and I didn’t get along. I sized him up as a chiseler and small-potato crook. One evening we had a quarrel and a fight, and I threw him out on his ear. He stood outside in the rain cursing me. I went to sleep with him standing outside that tin shack spewing oaths at me.

“Along about midnight I was waked up by a flashlight in my face, and there was a cop and a Mounty bending over me and just ready to snap the handcuffs on. The Mounty said, ‘Are you Gary Frazier?’ and when I said ‘Yes,’ the cop blurted, ‘My God, he blows two fellows’ brains out and then goes to sleep like a baby!’

“That sure jarred me plenty. I didn’t know what it was all about, and I didn’t hang around to find out. I slugged those two, snagged a blind and got away.

“The next noon, at Brandon, I bought a morning paper to find out what had happened. I knew there’d been a killing and I was somehow involved, but I wasn’t really scared yet. I imagined the mistake would be cleared up quick, and I was thinking, I’d go back and let ’em take me.

“But then I read that paper. I read how the bomb had been tossed at that mail truck, how the truck plunged over the railroad embankment, how the driver and clerk were shot down as they were crawling out of the wreck, and how the car was then plundered. I read how I’d been positively identified by the rail-crossing flagman as the person who murdered those two men, and how my hat and those other things were found on the spot.

“When I finished reading that newspaper account, I didn’t have any more notions about going back and giving myself up. I saw that whoever had framed me had done a thorough job and I’d swing while he was enjoying that twenty-two thousand.

“I hid in a culvert all day, and at dusk I caught a fast rattler to Saskatoon. From there I headed on west. Over in the mountains I got leery about the Coast towns, so I dodged north and landed in Saghelia, and that’s all.”

For long moments Rhodes sat silent, regarding Gary through the smoke of his cigarette, without the slightest betrayal of whether he believed the story or not. A Mounted constable came in the door, but Rhodes motioned him away. The telephone jingled, but he merely lifted the receiver and said, “Sorry, busy,” and hung up.

The silence grew unbearable to Gary; and he burst out: “Do you believe me? Have I got a chance?”

Instead of answering him, Rhodes tapped the brown envelope. “You were positively identified, Frazier,” he stated, “by this flagman. On two occasions you had talked to the man, and he knew you well. He felt friendly toward you. Yet he swears that he saw you follow the truck over the embankment and saw you actually shoot those men. I should like you to explain that.”

“I can’t,” Gary confessed. “I noticed in the newspaper accounts that he mentioned my slicker. It was an old brown thing with a black belt—a rather odd-looking raincoat. I had it on that afternoon when I last talked to him. My only guess is that the person who did the job was wearing my slicker, and this flagman jumped to conclusions.”

“A jury would consider your explanation a bit thin, I’m afraid,” Rhodes commented. “How about your hat and the straw suitcase with your name on it?”

“Those things were planted, Rhodes. They were taken out of the tin shack while I was asleep, and were planted on the job. They didn’t get there by themselves.”

“Hmmph. Your argument, then, is that somebody framed you to draw suspicion from himself.”

“Yes.”

“And you blame this Greenie person, I gather.”

“I won’t say positively that he’s the man. I know what it feels like to be charged with a crime when you’re innocent. But I do suspect Greenie. He knew about my things in the shack, and he hated me.”

“What did you and Greenie quarrel about?”

“We had several quarrels. The day before this crime, I caught him talking around with the other three fellows and sounding them out about sticking up a gas station. Those three were young and impressionable and broke, and I told him to can that stick-up talk or I’d sock him. The next evening he stole a quarter out of my jacket pocket. That’s what the fight was about.”

“I see. How much of a fight was it?”

“Well, it was short but pretty hot,” Gary said, wondering at the question. “He was big and could hit. I heard that he’d once been a bouncer at some dance hall.”

Rhodes merely nodded. The reason of that query dawned on Gary. In a shrewdly indirect way Rhodes was fishing around to find out how big this Greenie was and whether the man might be taken, on a rainy dark night, for Gary Frazier, especially if he was wearing the latter’s slicker.

“Why, gosh,” Gary thought, and his hopes went soaring, “that looks as though he’s believing me!”

Rhodes’ next question brought him to earth again. “In my opinion,” the officer stated in cold even tones, “an innocent person doesn’t skip the country and make an outlaw of himself. And in all my personal experience, no innocent person has ever resisted arrest. Yet you, Frazier, in the shack that evening, you sprang right up out of sleep and started slugging. Why?”

As best he could, Gary explained his bewilderment when the flashlight glare woke him, his fright when he saw the officers and the glittering handcuffs, his panic when the cop spoke of those two murdered men, his blind instinctive dread of the unknown trap closing upon him…

At the end of a solid hour of grilling, of sharp shrewd questioning that seemed to Gary like the flash and play of a rapier seeking to puncture his story, Rhodes abruptly pushed back his chair, walked over to the window and stood looking out, into the rainy grayness.

The minutes lengthened. In a cold sweat Gary waited, his face haggard and white from the ordeal. It seemed to him that if only he could get past this hour of his life, all other troubles would be of no consequence.

After an eternity Rhodes finally turned around.

“Frazier,” he said, without preamble, “I can’t believe you’re guilty of killing. I’m backing your story as the truth.”

Gary slumped down in the wicker chair. He wanted to go across and shake Rhodes’ hand and thank him, but he could think of no words to express his wild rush of gratitude and joy. The let-down was so sudden that he felt weak.

Rhodes saw his haggard face. “Sorry I kept you dangling. But I didn’t care to rouse any hopes till I saw my way a little more clearly.”

“It’s—s’all right,” Gary said jerkily. “It was—was worth waiting for.” He looked up. “What are you—what step—how are you going about this, Rhodes?”

“I’m going on the assumption that this Greenie person, with or without help from those other three, committed the crime. I intend to get in touch with Winnipeg headquarters and tell them these facts which you’ve told me.”

“Will they know that I’m here?”

“I must report that.”

Gary’s joy ebbed a little. “What if they order you to ship me back East? You’d have to do it. And what if they can’t pin anything on Greenie? They may never even find him. He’s gone, he’s faded. He’d hit across the Border.”

Rhodes nodded. “I guess so, too. You may have waited too long to come to me. The trail’s cold, and those other men have probably disappeared also. If headquarters orders me to arrest you and send you East, I’ll have to do it. But—I’m going to get in touch with a personal friend of mine at Winnipeg and ask him to work on this case. He’s a sergeant on the Secret Squad. If anybody can help you, Spencer can. I’ll phone him at once.”

“Shall I stay—I mean, d’you want me here, in jail? Can’t I go back to—to old Nat’s and wait? I’ll be there, Rhodes, when you want me. I won’t let you down.”

With his hand on the telephone receiver, Rhodes hesitated a moment, debating. Then, once again, he jerked a thumb at Little Saghelia, and spoke those two words:

“Go ahead.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

“Mebbe you two’d better stay home today,” old Nat suggested, as he and Leda and Gary sat at breakfast the next morning. The sky was overcast, and from the western ranges came the distant hollow rumble of heavy thunder. “The ole potato wagon is a-rollin’ in the west, and looks to me like a hiyu bad storm is brewin’.”

“We want to do some more searching in that overfalls stretch,” Gary said, “while we still can. We’re banking on that place. If a storm does come up, there’s no end of caves to dodge into.”

Leda glanced up and nodded, and as Gary met her eyes he knew she was thinking the same thought as he. Between their feud with Hugh Ludlow and their knowledge that Sergeant Rhodes might come for Gary at any hour, they realized that their days together on Little Saghelia were numbered. This trip or any trip might be their last.

“If you two haul off and find that cache,” old Nat complained, “it’ll leave me in an awful bad row of stumps. I declare I don’t know what I’d do.”

“Why, Dads,” Leda remonstrated, “surely you don’t think we wouldn’t split with you?”

“’Course you would, Leedy. Tain’t that. But if you find ole Chilcote’s cave, I wouldn’t have no call to go on a-stayin’ here on Little Saghelia. And if I had scads of money, I’d have to go down to town and live in a hotel, and have a herd of people around, and—wear a necktie.”

Leda and Gary smiled at each other. Leda patted old Nat’s wrinkled and work-gnarled hand.

“Don’t worry, Dads. That cache is safe, all right.”

Through the open door Gary glanced across the little meadow at the trail leading down to Saghelia. Half expecting to see Sergeant Rhodes come walking up that trail with a peremptory order from headquarters, he was impatient to get away so that he and Leda might have at least this day of grace.

When they were finishing breakfast, Jinny came tearing out of the woods beyond the meadow, and streaked for the cabin at break-neck speed. As she skidded to a stop at the cabin door, Gary caught a glimpse of a big grizzly over at the edge of the gloomy woods. Old Nat went out to soothe the burro and shoot off the horse-pistol at the silvertip.

“You know, Lee,” Gary remarked, “sometimes I think Dad would be happier here just by himself. He likes you and me, of course, but he seems to be getting restless. After all, two people are a tremendous lot of company for him.”

“I’ve been thinking that same thing, Gary. If your trouble is straightened out, we ought to go away.”

“Where would we go, Lee?”

Leda touched his arm. “Would it matter where?”

Gary tried to vision himself and Leda going away together, shaking the bitter dust of Saghelia from their feet and facing new horizons as wide as the world itself. But between that picture and his eyes hung a gallows shadow, closer to him now than it had ever been. His visit yesterday had really altered nothing. Rhodes was his friend, true, and at faraway Winnipeg a sergeant of the Secret Squad was reworking the case. But now the law knew where he was, and it did not believe in him, as Rhodes did. The odds were ten to one that before today was over, Rhodes would be coming up to the cabin with tragic news…

When they reached their little tarn, an hour later, a phalanx of inky-black thunderheads had reared up from behind old Sentinel, and a queer yellowish twilight lay over the valley. In spite of the storm threat they paused beside the dark still pool.

Looking down into the mirror-quiet water, Gary stared at Leda’s reflection, so clear, so astonishingly lifelike, that she seemed gazing up at him from those dark depths like some dryad of the beautiful tarn. Or like some bewitching and illusive creature wholly of his imagining—a shadowy partner for a few brief weeks of his life, and after that only a poignant and haunting memory.

The thought jolted him, because it seemed so prophetic of what was to come; and he put his arm around the real girl beside him to banish that feeling of her insubstantiality. As he smoothed back Leda’s hair and kissed her, he saw her dash away a big tear and felt her arm tighten about him as though she too was thinking of that hovering black shadow and fighting to keep him with her.

When they reached the valley head at nine o’clock, the storm, which had been massing its strength slowly all that morning, was about to break in fury on Little Saghelia. The valley was hushed; not a whisper of air was stirring; the aspen leaves, peculiarly tense and rigid, were slanted straight up and down.

The big overfalls itself was unusually quiet, and the apron of water pouring over it was perceptibly thinner and narrower than Gary had ever seen it. For several days the weather had been rainy, and the mountain creek was at an exceptionally low stage. Its waters came chiefly from melting glaciers and snow-fields, and so it was highest and most turbulent in dry hot spells.

Leda glanced up at the thunderheads above old Sentinel. In the black cloud-masses, lightning flashes were darting around like quick white snakes; and clashing winds were tearing the lower woolpack to shreds and flinging it down the gale like fluttering ribbons.

“This storm is going to be a howler when it does break,” she remarked. “Little Saghelia is a kind of vortex for high winds, and it always catches the worst of things when these ranges get mad. If you’ve never seen a mountain storm, Gary, you’ve got something coming.”

“The worse the better, Lee. If any of Hugh’s two-legged carcajous shadowed us away from the cabin this morning, he probably has knocked off and is hunting a dry hole to crawl into. If it rains all day, we’ll let the cache hunting go.”

At the rim-rock foot they went into a small cave just east of the overfalls, and gave it another searching—looking for side tunnels and rock cracks which they might have missed on their hunt two days ago.

When they came back out to the mouth, the rainstorm was charging down the long western slope of Little Saghelia. A grayish-white wall, it was sweeping in their direction like a galloping obliteration, engulfing and hiding the timber belts and mountainside torrents as it rolled nearer.

A slight wind moaned in the pines. A terrific crack of lightning smacked into a towering Douglas fir down the creek, and echoed away in bellowing thunder. A few drops of rain splattered into the dust where Gary and Leda stood.

Then the treetops began pitching and tossing, though the wind was scarcely discernible. The charging wall of grayish-white swept down into the valley bottom and up toward their cave, in liaison with the flash and boom of a lightning barrage. A little vanguard blast of wind smote them with spume and cold invisible mist. And then, with a rip and a howl—like a mixture of hurricane and cataract deluge and cannon-play all rolled into one—the storm broke.

Half smothered and gasping for breath, they backed farther inside the cave, to escape the lash of the wind and spray, and stood looking out, awed by the might and fury of the forces being unleashed. In the blind raging turmoil beyond the cave mouth they could see barely twenty paces. The world outside seemed a chaos of water and howling wind, of flying branches and whipping trees, all churned up together and lit to a livid silver by the flashes of lightning.

Gary took Leda within the shelter of his jacket. “Lord above us, Lee,” he marveled, “these mountains really can do things when they try! Did you ever see a howler like that?”

“It’s a bang-up rain even for this country,” Leda agreed. In the dim light of the cave the lightning glow made her face pale and ethereal; and the flashes touched her wet auburn hair to a magic spangle.

“A rain, you say?” Gary snorted. “Don’t call that thing a rain! And it’s no cloud-burst, either. That’s a part of the Pacific Ocean out there, Lee! This storm scooped up a hunk of the Pacific and whizzed it across the mountains and dumped it on us. I’d bet my watch against a turnip that when this slackens and we go outside, we’ll find fifty-pound salmon lying around and maybe a few walrus to boot.”

In half an hour the worst of the lightning had passed, and the rain had settled to a heavy downpour. Though the wind was as strong as ever, it was not so club-like and changeable; and they ventured out under the overhang where they could gaze down across Little Saghelia and watch the storm.

In the fury of the wind the trees were pitching and writhing, branches were tearing off and whirling away like straws, and occasionally a tree went crashing to the ground.

For a time, as he gazed at the strange spectacle, Gary wondered how any forest, especially the vigorous and beautiful woods of Little Saghelia, could thrive in a valley and country subject to such ravaging storms as this. But then, watching with observant eyes, he saw that the storm was giving this timber a needed testing—bowling over the poorly rooted trees, combing out dead wood and weaker branches, snapping trunks that could not stand the strain, trying each tree for its fitness to live, and toning up the whole woods.

He wished, musingly, that some wind like this could blow across humanity. Storms did come, indeed, but they were the evil winds of war, destroying the best instead of the worst. By those evil winds the unfit and weak were spared while the young and the select were sorted out for destruction.

A sudden cry from Leda broke into his thoughts.

“Gary! Oh-hh! Look!”

Gary’s first thought was that she had glimpsed one of their enemies, stalking up for a point-blank shot; and he grabbed for the rifle. Leda stopped him.

“No! Not that! The overfalls! Do you see what I see?”

He whirled, looked, saw nothing, and glanced again at Leda. “What’s over there?” he demanded, all puzzled by her excitement. She was staring wide-eyed and gripping his arm till her fingers were white. “Lee!—what is it? You look as though you’re seeing a ghost!”

“It’s more than a ghost!” She pointed at the overfalls, at the thin apron of water. “Watch! Don’t you see it?”

Gary looked along her outstretched arm. The storm was buffeting the sheet of water back and forth, slapping it against the rock, swaying it like a white tapestry in a wind; and the big caldron pool beneath had been whipped to froth.

But he saw nothing extraordinary about all that.

“Watch it!” she cried. “It’s gone now but it’ll be back.”

As Gary watched, a heavy blast of wind smashed the sheet of water against the seventy-foot cliff; and for an instant the falls ceased to flow. In that instant, through the swirling spindrift, he caught one dim glimpse of a dark cavernous opening in the rock, low down, near the caldron pool, and squarely in the middle of the cascade.

In the next moment the plunging waters hid it from him.

“It’s a cave!” Leda breathed. “Look. You can’t see a thing now. But it’s a cave! I saw it plain!”

“So’d I! It’s a cave, all right!” Another blast of wind gave him a second glimpse of the yawning black hole behind the cascade. “Lord, what a hiding place, Lee!”

“It’s the cave! The water hides it. That’s why it’s never been found! It’s the old Rusk hangout!”

“We’d better not build castles till we know for sure.”

“We’ll never know for sure by standing here!” She tugged at his arm. “Let’s go and search it. I know it’s the place! Back there behind that water—no human on earth could ever find it just by looking for it! Every other cave in this valley has been found and ransacked, but this one.”

Oblivious of the storm, they left the overhang and made their way out along the rim-rock foot, fighting the gale-like wind and drenched by the heavy rain.

At the east edge of the caldron pool they stopped, looking at the apron of water and shielding their eyes from the spume. A flat sheet of rock, slippery, steeply slanted, led up to the cascade and into the dark unknown beyond.

“We’ll have to walk right through that overfalls, Lee,” Gary said. “But we can’t get any wetter than we are now.”

“Let’s go! We don’t mind a cold splashing.”

Gary hesitated. If the Rusk cache was anywhere in the whole valley, it was in this cave. Hidden through spring, summer and autumn by those plunging waters, and hidden in winter behind a mantle of ice and gigantic seventy-foot icicles, the place was a rendezvous without equal, a hideaway where Chilcote Rusk and his pack could well have laughed at the Vigilant posses scouring Little Saghelia. A score of times Leda and he had passed within a few rods of the place, without the remotest suspicion that it existed.

“What’re you waiting on?” Leda demanded, brushing the spindrift from her eyes. “I tell you that cache is in there!”

Gary glanced around at the rim-rock and the woods, dim through the heavy rain. “I believe so myself, Lee. But that’s just the point. We wouldn’t want to find the cache and then have it snatched away from us. Maybe we shouldn’t go in there now. It might be better to come back tonight.”

“You think somebody may be watching?”

“It’s possible.”

“Not in this rain. Look—you can’t see a hundred yards. If I had to wait all day I’d—I’d—”

“—bust,” Gary completed. “I’d doggone near, myself. All right, let’s go in. Gosh, Lee, if we’ve actually found that cache, after people have hunted seventy years—”

“Don’t talk about it! Let’s go in and see it!”

With their hearts pounding and their thoughts a little dizzy, they stepped across the slippery rock, hand in hand. At the curtain of water they paused, took a deep breath, bent their heads, and dashed through the buffeting deluge.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Behind the sheet of water, they found themselves in a stygian darkness, with the roar of the overfalls in their ears.

Gary took the flashlight from his knapsack and snapped it on. As he played the yellow beam on the roof and walls and dank slimy floor of the cavern, disappointment seized him.

Wet and chill, the place seemed wholly uninhabitable to human beings. The cave led on back; he could see a black tunnel of good size leading beyond the limit of the flash; but a little streamlet of icy water flowing down that tunnel dashed his hopes of finding anything back there but this same darkness and slime. The place was so cold and the air so dead that his frosted breath hung around his head in wisps of cloud white.

By the glow of the flash he saw tears gather in Leda’s eyes and roll down her cheeks. As though to complete her misery, when she turned to look around at the dripping wall behind her, her moccasins slipped and she fell to her knees.

Forgetting his own disappointment, Gary lifted her up, wiped the mud from her dress and kissed away her tears.

“Don’t cry, honey—anyway not yet. Let’s go on and see what’s back in there. It may get better, or turn off.”

With the icy streamlet gurgling around their ankles, they started on back through the tunnel.

As they went further from the spume and wet of the overfalls, the ceiling and walls gradually became dry. Their hopes perked up a little at this; Leda stopped crying; and they hurried along, watching for side tunnels.

Thirty paces back in, they came to a small step-up where the streamlet tumbled over a miniature ten-inch overfalls. As Gary pointed the flash downward to show Leda where to step, he noticed a dull-colored object, somewhat larger than a corncob, lying in the crystal water of the tiny “caldron pool.” Though he believed it merely a rock fragment, its odd shape made him curious, and he picked it up.

“Lee! This thing’s heavy, like metal! It is metal!”

“What is it?”

“Here—hold the flash! We’ll see!”

With trembling hands he washed the mud from his find and held it up. Metal, back in this cold black catacombs—some human had been in here!

Half a foot long and two inches thick, the object looked like a plain block of iron with a row of small holes drilled down the middle. He could make nothing of it.

“Can you figure this out, Lee?”

She took the object, examined it, poked a finger into one of the holes, started to shake her head, then gasped.

“It’s a bullet-mold! Gary, that’s an old-fashioned bullet-mold! Look—that line of rust—that’s where it splits down the center.”

In the yellow glow they stared at each other, silent, shaken. The hunk of rusty iron, decades old, brought them a breath of those frontier days when buffalo herds thundered on the plains, when the headwater hills of Saghelia were yielding their golden spoil, and this land was a wilderness.

Gary put the mold down. “Lee, this hunk of iron molded bullets that killed men. It’s old, old. It’s a relic of Chilcote’s pack. They must have been back in here.”

With Leda grasping his arm, shivering from the cold and sepulchral dark, he started on.

Though the bullet-mold was dead-certain proof that he and Leda had stumbled at least upon the trail of the Chilcote outfit, he had been disappointed so often and so bitterly in this hunt that he refused to build any castles. He swore to himself that he would have to look at the cache of gold with his own eyes before believing he had found it.

Ten paces farther, they came to a side corridor, branching off to the right. They turned into it.

In the dust of the floor they saw faint impressions, all but obliterated; and, in the center, a path like a firm beaten trail. When they stooped to examine the signs closely, they saw that the impressions were of moccasins, shoe-pacs and cleated miners’ boots.

In comparison with these dim imprints, the tracks which they had seen in other caves—tracks of search parties five or ten years old—seemed to have been made but yesterday.

“It’s their tracks, Gary!” Leda whispered. “It’s the tracks of Chilcote and his men!”

“Maybe so, Lee. But I’m wanting to see more than tracks before we do any celebrating.”

Twisty and hard to follow, the tunnel led them on and on, till the roar of the overfalls became a low uncertain whisper. They passed through several room-widenings. A confusion of side corridors branched off. But always they had those old tracks and the path to guide them.

With their flash getting feeble and no cord stretching behind them to the world outside, they grew afraid of becoming lost in that black underground maze; and several times they stopped and held whispered consultations about turning back. But each time, lured by that dim old path they went on.

Around a last sharp bend the tunnel abruptly widened into a big room, low-vaulted but of good extent.

As they halted at the entrance-way, staring around with wide eyes, they knew, beyond mortal doubt, that they had found the rendezvous of Chilcote Rusk and his pack.

Against the far wall they saw fuel wood, nearly two cords of it, chopped by human hands and brought in from the outside. With a rude pine-twig broom the dust of that room had been swept into one corner, in the rough-and-ready way of frontier men; and the broom itself, with its needles crumbled to brown dust, lay in the corner where the last man had flung it. The floor had been covered with hides of deer and caribou, but the hides were little more than a film of gray ashes, after those seventy-odd years.

They saw no signs of the cache of gold.

With Leda still holding to his arm, frightened by the ghostly quiet of that ancient murderers’ den, Gary stepped across to the woodpile, selected a stick of resinous pine, struck a double match and lighted a torch. When it was burning well, he snapped off the flash, to save it for their return back the long tortuous tunnel.

“Let’s have a better look at this gear, Lee,” he said, trying hard to be matter-of-fact. The dead quiet and the eerie haunted feeling of the place weighed on him more than he cared for Leda to know. He would not have been wholly surprised if the brutal Chilcote Rusk, with pistol and belt knife, had come leaping at him from the flickering shadows. “This room looks to me like a place where they stored things. I don’t think they lived in here at all.”

By the light of the smoky pine they moved around the room, staring at the queer old mementos of a bygone life. Against a wall leaned half a dozen canoe paddles, handmade, of tough ash-heart. In a corner lay an assortment of snowshoes, the babische netting rotted but the wood frames still strong enough to be used. In a big side pocket of the room, they came upon a confused unsorted pile of utensils, whisky flasks, ropes and chains, bar lead for making bullets.

As they looked at the pile they realized that it was plunder taken from those murdered men and carelessly flung there, against a possible need.

Near that pocket, in a cabinet-like niche in the wall, they paused and stared at a strange collection of guns, half a hundred or more, also plundered from those hapless victims. Needle guns, early breech-loaders, big pistols and awkward revolvers, big-bore rifles for bear and caribou and buffalo, long heavy muzzle-loaders with powder flask and ramrod, fancily mounted fowling pieces for ducks and geese, cheap trading-store guns—it was like a museum collection of old firearms, long antedated, and inexpressibly clumsy in comparison with Leda’s trim light .25-35.

From the storage room one corridor led away—straight on; and when they had stared around for a little time, trying to shake off the dreamlike spell that lay upon them they moved over to the corridor and entered it.

In less than ten paces the tunnel broadened into a second room, large and high-vaulted; and they knew that they had penetrated to the main quarters of the bandit outfit.

In the center of the room was a fireplace, partly an open fire for warmth, partly a stove crudely fashioned of flat rocks and sheet-iron, for cooking purposes. On top of the stove lay a couple of rusty pots and kettles and a huge frying pan, precisely as those men had left things seventy-odd years ago. To one side stood a big slab table, with several goose-tallow candles upon it and with the dishes unwashed from the last meal of the pack, before they walked into the annihilation of the Vigilant trap. On a chair lay a man’s hat; on the table edge, a pipe filled, ready to light.

Everything about the place gave impression that Chilcote Rusk and his killers had walked out of there only a few hours ago and presently would be tramping back in with the plunder taken from some traveler of old Paradise Trail.

And everywhere—on the crude chairs, leaning against the walls, hanging on iron pegs in the soft rock—they saw more guns, rifles and hand guns, dozens of them, along with spears and ram-horn bows for silent hunting. The place looked like an arsenal.

In comparison with the other room and the tortuous black tunnel, the air of the main hall seemed fresh and alive; and Gary noticed that the flame of his pine torch swayed slightly as though moved by some faint current. Holding the torch behind him, he looked around at the walls and roof.

High up in one corner, fully fifty feet over his head, he saw a dim gray glow where a few feeble rays of light straggled in from some fissure or frost crack. The opening not only supplied air but made a good smoke-draw.

Whether there was any egress by that opening, any way for a human to reach the outside world, he did not know; but he doubted. The gray glow looked wholly inaccessible; and the beaten trail of the tunnel indicated that the Rusk pack had come and gone by way of the overfalls.

Just a few feet to their right, as they stood in the entrance-way, they saw a sleeping platform of balsam branches, dry and sere. The crumpled blankets, the leather sleeping pokes, the tousled pillows of caribou hide stuffed with rags and hair and feathers—these too gave impression that here the Chilcote Rusk men had slept only last night, and would return with the shadows of evening.

Fearfully, almost afraid to set foot in that main den, they moved over to the table; and Gary touched a match to all of the five large goose-tallow candles there.

As the candles spluttered and then brightened into steady flame, driving back the shadows and tomblike dark, he was jolted to his boots by the sight of a skeleton, a man skeleton, stretched on the floor and scarcely three paces from him.

With quick presence of mind he stepped in front of Leda, to keep her from seeing it. The long black tunnel, the ghostly quiet, the old guns and the haunting knowledge that here a pack of murderers once dwelt, had shaken his girl partner badly; and he was afraid she might go completely to pieces if she saw that grisly thing on the floor.

He was too late. Even as he moved, Leda glimpsed the whitish bones, took one horrified look, and whirled to Gary, with a startled cry. Burying her face against his breast, she clung to him, trembling violently.

“Gary! T-take me—out of h-h-here,” she pleaded, her teeth chattering till she could hardly talk. “I d-don’t want to see anything m-m-more. Let the gold g-g-go.”

“Don’t be scared, honey,” he calmed her, holding her close to him as though she were a small frightened child. “That thing there won’t hurt us. It’s just some old bones, that’s all. We mustn’t go back out, Lee, till we see whether the gold is still here or not. You sit in this chair, sweet, and let me look around, won’t you?”

“No, no! Don’t you g-go off from me! Let’s l-l-look, q-q-quick and get out of this p-place.”

“All right, honey. We’ll just take a minute.”

With Leda still hiding her eyes, he stepped up closer to the skeleton and looked down at it, thinking that one or maybe more of those Rusk men must have escaped the Vigilant trap and returned to the rendezvous. Perhaps one of them, this one, had been mortally wounded, and had died here. Perhaps those others, if there had been others, had fled the country, taking the gold with them.

As he gazed at the skeleton he saw that when death came the arms had been folded on the body, and the legs had been drawn up as though from cold or suffering. The clothing had fallen away, except for a few tatters.

Around the bones of the wrists and ankles he saw, to his puzzled surprise, small lengths of chain, rusty, the rivets still in place; and from the skeleton itself a five-foot length of chain led to an iron staple driven into the floor.

In a moment or two the puzzle cleared up for him, and he pieced together the story of this solitary skeleton in the old rendezvous. The man had not been a member of the Chilcote outfit at all, but a prisoner of the pack. Less lucky than those miners who had been murdered outright, the poor devil had been captured and brought here by those old killers. For some unknown purpose—whether to torture information out of him, or use him as a decoy on their murderous sallies—they had kept him here in chains. Here he had been when they walked into the Vigilant annihilation; and when they failed to come back, here he had died.

With a pitying glance at the skeleton, Gary moved on, with Leda, across to the far wall of the room where the candles dimly lit up a good-sized wooden box, made of slabs, and bound with angle-and strip-iron.

The heaviness of the slabs, the time and evident pains taken with that iron-work, told him that when he and Leda lifted that dusty lid, they would see the hoard of gold—if it was anywhere in this cave.

“That’s the cache, Lee,” he whispered, his voice a little jerky as he stared at the coffin-like box. “It’s your privilege—you hunted for this gold months before I ever came—to lift the lid from that half a million.”

“N-no. You d-d-d-o it, Gary.”

“Go ahead, honey. Then we’ll get out of here. We need help, Lee. We’ll get back home, we’ll hire some good men that we can trust, and then we’ll come back. This has been here seventy years, and it’ll stay a couple days longer.”

Leda bent over. Her teeth were still chattering, and she kept one hand on Gary’s arm; but with the other she took hold of the iron handle and lifted the lid.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

With his eyes still big from wonder of what he had seen, the half-breed Eutrope came hurrying in to Hugh Ludlow’s camp late that same afternoon. Without a word to the other men there, he made straight for Hugh’s tent and burst into it unannounced.

In a savage mood, Hugh was sitting on the cot, head in hands, cursing the monotonous rain and his evil run of luck.

In the past forty-eight hours one disaster after another had tumbled upon him, with dazing suddenness. Yesterday his chances with Mona Casper had come to an abrupt and unexpected end. Courageous in the face of heartbreak, Mona had severed all relationship with him and was getting away from Saghelia for good; and he realized, too late, that his stalling game with her had not exactly worked.

And yesterday Marl Casper, with control of the narrow-gauge completely in his hands, had stopped all Ludlow shipments—lumber, metals, coal and everything—out to the Grand Trunk. The Ludlow timber crews had come in; the mines and mills were closed; the crash which had been impending for weeks and months had at last come.

This was the picture which Hugh was staring at, as he sat in his tent that murky afternoon. Almost overnight he had lost Mona, and his inheritance had been swept away.

He cursed himself and Mona and his father and Marl Casper, but mostly himself. If he had married Mona and stopped that war, instead of gambling like a fool on finding a cache of gold that maybe never existed, today he would be wealthy. With all that money and power, it would have been easy enough to ship Mona off to the Riviera, which she was prattling about, and bring Leda around to his wishes.

He realized now that unless he did find the Rusk cache and somehow smashed Gary, he would come out of this debacle without a dollar to his name, with neither Leda nor Mona, without a vestige of the affluence and power and ease which had been his all his life.

But he had completely lost faith in ever finding the cache; and the incident two nights ago, when Leda had risked death to save Gary, had showed him at last that he stood no chance whatever with her so long as Gary was alive.

The disaster to the Ludlow fortune had demoralized him badly, with its frightening specter of being cut off from wealth; but the shattering of his personal self-confidence about Leda was worse still. Whenever he thought of her and Gary up yonder at the cabin together, taking those long trips together, living together in unmistakable and intimate partnership, it was like a slow knife sliding home.

Sleepless and haggard, he had kept to his tent all day, brooding over futile and desperate ways to get rid of Gary and salvage something out of the general crack-up.

At Eutrope’s entrance he glared at the ’breed and snarled: “Who the hell asked you to come barging in like this? Why aren’t you shadowing that pair today?”

His snarl went past Eutrope unheard. Fairly bursting with his tremendous news, the big métis broke out:

“Hey! Dose two pipple, dey foun’ it!”

“Who found what?” Hugh growled, not understanding. “Spill it and get out of here.”

“I tell you, dey foun’ it! Mees Leda and dat Gary feller. Dey foun’ dat cache of gol’! Don’ you understan’ dat?”

Hugh sprang to his feet as though a bullet had whizzed past his throat. “W-h-a-t?” In drop-jawed astonishment he stared unbelievingly at the muddied, rain-soaked ’breed.

“Dat’s w’at I’m telling you,” Eutrope swore. “Dey foun’ it dis morning. Op de valley by dat beeg overfalls.”

Hugh laughed sardonically. “What’re trying to feed me, you?” he demanded. He had hunted so long and futilely for the cache that he doubted its very existence; and now, suddenly, Eutrope was telling him that it had been found.

“You don’ believe me, hein? I t’ought mebbe you wouldn’. Lookit!” With a flourish the métis whipped out his tobacco pouch, opened it, dumped its contents upon the brim of Hugh’s hat. “Dere! Mebbe you don’ b’lieve dat!”

The little pile of dust and wheat-grain nuggets took Hugh’s breath away. Dazed and staggered, as though Eutrope had exploded a bombshell in the tent, he stooped over, looked at the gold, poked at it with his finger.

“It—it is gold!” he jerked out, as he straightened up and stared at Eutrope. “But that little bit—it’s only a handful, only a thousand dollars—that can’t be the whole cache, can it?”

Eutrope roared. “Sacre donc! W’y, man, dis leetle pooff, it ain’ even a good sample of w’at’s op dere! I jus’ brung it ’long so’s you couldn’ t’ink I’m crazy. W’y dat gol’ half fills a box beeg enough to bury a feller in!”

Hugh had to believe him, then. For moments, as he stared at the heavy gleaming dust, he could only realize that someone else had found the cache, his cache—the gold hoard for which he had hunted all summer and on which he had staked all his hopes. He felt stunned, sickened; and it helped none to hear that the person who had found it was his mortal enemy, and to know that his hated rival was no longer a penniless bum but a rich man.

He turned around, to the little table beside his cot, and poured himself a tin of brandy. Eutrope interposed.

“Better t’row dat stuff out. You look lak you carrying too much of it now.”

“Keep your gib to yourself!” Hugh flared at him. Nevertheless he held the tin of brandy in his hand untasted. “Where is this cache?”

“It’s op dere behin’ de main overfalls. In a cave back behin’ dat water.”

“But if those two—if they found it, how did you get this stuff here? Didn’t they take the gold away with them?”

“Take dat beeg cache—two pipple?” Eutrope snorted. “W’y, she make four, five portage load for any man!”

“D’you mean they found the cache and then walked off and left it?”

“W’at else? Dev couldn’ take it!”

Hugh wetted his lips and tried to get hold of himself. “Where are they now?”

“Back home. I swung op pas’ dat cubane a w’ile ago to make dead certain w’ere dey are.”

“Home? What the devil are they doing at home—with half a million dollars lying up there in a cave?”

“I t’ink dat dis Gary feller is leery. He knows we been watching heem, so he jus’ leave dat cache stay put.”

Hugh nodded. Beyond any question the ’breed’s guess was right. Afraid that their enemies might be shadowing them, Gary and Leda had wisely left the cache undisturbed and had quietly gone home. Undoubtedly they would lay very careful plans and move very cautiously in handling their tremendous find. When they went back to that cave they likely would take plenty of help along.

Outside, one of the nondescript whites, who had seen Eutrope come in to camp, was edging up to the tent to find out what the excitement was all about. With an idea slowly taking shape in his mind, Hugh set his tin of brandy on the table, closed the flap-front of his tent and turned to Eutrope.

“Sit down,” he said, in cautious tones. “Tell me about this business. How did they happen to find the cache?”

“I don’ know. Dis morning I follow ’em op to de valley head. During dat beeg blow, I was in a cave across de crick, and I don’ see ’em. Bimeby I look out and see ’em standing down dere at de falls. Den, bigar, dey walk right into dat water and disappear, sneep-snap—jus’ lak dat!

“Dey stay in dere long, long tam. I watch and t’ink, ‘W’at de hell’s fire?’ W’en dey come out and go ’way, I put a coupla pine knots unner my coat and go t’rough dat water myself for a look-see. I fin’ a tunnel, follow it back into de rock, fin’ a leetle cave, den de beeg main cave, w’ere dat old-tam camp was and w’ere dat cache of gol’ is. Sacre-bleu, she wan skeery place, back in dere.”

The métis shuddered as he recalled the weird shadows, the dead quiet, the skeleton on the floor of the old murderers’ rendezvous.

“You say that the gold is in a big box?” Hugh questioned. “Tell me exactly how much there is.”

“She don’ look lak much, but she’s heavier’n hell! I try to heft a coupla pokes inside dere, but dey bust. Den I try to lif’ dat box but I couldn’ budge it. I tell you, dat gol’ is four, five portage load.”

Hugh’s last doubt vanished. The gold was up there, all right, and a staggering amount of it. Four or five portage loads, and a strong man could carry a hundred thousand dollars in raw gold—that hoard must run close to half a million, as the old stories all insisted.

With his idea swiftly growing on him, he parted the flap-front and looked out. The steady rain and gray gloom gave promise of a black rainy night, with twilight falling early.

“That’s free gold,” he said, half to himself. “It belongs to anybody that finds it and keeps it. Those two may have found it, but if we’d snake it out of that cave tonight and hide it somewhere it’d be ours, b’God!”

The ’breed’s eyes lighted up. “Nom de Nom! Dat’s a fine-dandy idee. I was t’inking somet’ing lak dat myself.”

“Look here,” Hugh demanded, “did you tell these other fellows about this?”

“Non, I come hyak right to you.”

“Good. Don’t tell ’em anything. Keep it absolutely to yourself. Besides paying ’em good wages, I promised ’em a split if this cache was found. I thought they’d get busy and hunt. But all they’ve done is lie around camp and lap up grub and let somebody else walk in on that gold. They can go to hell. You and I’ll handle this ourselves. We’ll go up there at dusk and yank that gold away from those two.”

“But w’at if dey come back tonight and fin’ us dere?” Eutrope objected. “Dat Leda gal can do t’ings wit’ a rifle; and dat Gary feller—I don’ have to tell you he can fight.”

Hugh’s face reddened at this reference to the mauling that Gary had given him. “Hell,” he deprecated, “I’d take her rifle away from her and lap it around that hobo’s neck! But I’ll fix it that they won’t bother us. I’ll have Cézar—without telling him why—slip up to their cabin this evening, and take a pot-shot at it every now and then. That’ll hold ’em there! They don’t know that we’re onto the cache; and they won’t venture out or take any chances on mixing it in the dark with our bunch. Besides, they wouldn’t leave that old coot by himself when somebody’s shooting at the place.

“While Cézar is holding ’em, you and I can get up to that cave and have the gold hidden in two hours and be back here long before midnight.”

Eutrope nodded. “Dat shooting’ll keep ’em home, awright. Okay, we go. It’ll be plenty dark in two hour.”

“Then let’s start getting things ready. We’ll need ropes, tump straps, a coupla flashes and several canvas bags. Get some of that extra canvas out there and stitch up enough sacks to hold the stuff. Good strong ones, now.”

“Jus’ wan meenit,” Eutrope interrupted. “You ain’ said nut’ing ’bout how much I’m going to get out of dis deal.”

“You’ll get your slice, don’t worry,” Hugh promised evasively, angered that the ’breed should presume to haggle with him.

“But how much of a slice?” Eutrope demanded, point-blank. He had just seen Hugh doublecross those other men in the matter of a split, and plainly he was thinking he would get the same sort of a scuttling unless he guarded against it beforehand. “Don’ forget I’m de feller w’at saw deni two fin’ de cache. If I hadn’ tol’ you ’bout it, you wouldn’ know nut’ing. You’ll split feefty-feefty wit’ me, hein? ’Stead of coming to you, I coulda kep’ my mout’ shut and got dat whole beezness myself.”

Hugh colored furiously and doubled up his fists. “Fifty-fifty?” he echoed, in a rage. “I’ll see you in hell first! Who d’you think you are, anyway—trying to hold me up like that? Aren’t you working for me?”

Eutrope’s swart face darkened ominously. “You heard w’at I said. It’s feefty-feefty, or… If you don’ lak de idee of splitting wit’ jus’ me, mebbe you’d lak to split wit’ all dem fellers out dere! Wan word out of me, and dat’s w’at you’d have to do. You tol’ ’em you’d split. Dey’re hot for dat gol’, jus’ lak you.”

The threat frightened Hugh, and he backed water, realizing that the big ’breed held a whip over him. On the job up at the valley head he needed the métis; needed the man to guide him to the cache and help hide the gold securely. But afterward… The mere thought of splitting fifty-fifty with a hulking ignoramus of a half-breed made him furious; and he swore vengefully that because of this brazen attempt to hold him up, the big métis was going to get nothing!

“How ’bout it?” Eutrope insisted, eying him narrowly.

With an effort Hugh hid his anger. “All right,” he agreed, confident that once he had the gold in his possession, he could outwit this slow-thinking bush-loper. “We’ll split fifty-fifty. Now let’s get busy planning. We don’t want any slip-up when we’ve got half a million dollars hanging on the next few hours.”

He looked through the flap-front again, made sure that none of the other men were listening, turned around, dumped out the tin of brandy, handed the half-empty bottle and a flask of whisky to Eutrope.

“Give it to ’em out there!” he ordered. “It’ll help ’em pass the time this evening!”

As the ’breed left him, he lit a cigarette and started pacing the little tent. A fierce exultation was running like high wine in his blood. After all his defeats of the past month; after his despair of finding the cache; after his hopelessness about Leda, and the disasters of the last two days—suddenly, like a lightning bolt of miraculous good luck, that hoard of gold was delivered into his hands. And by his very enemy! That was the sweetest part of it all. Those two had found it, but he was getting it! Tonight he was snatching that half a million away from them—scoring a terrific triumph for himself and turning their discovery into the most heartbreaking disappointment of their lives.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

In the rainy blackness Hugh followed Eutrope around the caldron pool, swearing at the brush and slippery rocks.

The two of them drew near the overfalls and stopped just in front of the plunging cascade.

“You say the tunnel is back behind that?” Hugh demanded, playing his flash on the sheet of tumbling white waters. “I don’t see any opening.”

“Dat don’ prove nut’ing,” Eutrope retorted, with an arrogance that made Hugh want to hit him. “De tunnel is dere, wedder you see it or non. Dis Gary feller, he see it.”

“Stop talking about that damned bum!” Hugh flared out. “You’ve been wa-waning about him all afternoon and evening, every half chance you got. And just because you know where this cache is, don’t get sassy with me, or—”

Eutrope swung around and faced him. “Or w’at?”

“Don’t forget,” Hugh snapped, “that I know why ’Teeste Roi never came in from his trap line last spring. Maybe Sergeant Rhodes wouldn’t like to hear about that!”

“And don’ forget,” Eutrope countered, “dat I know w’at you tol’ Skunk-Bear to do to Gary. Mebbe Sarjon Rhodes wouldn’t lak to hear ’bout dat, too! And ’bout how you intend’ to give Gary a feest-mauling and den have us bump heem off, coupla nights ago—only he hand’ you de mauling, and Leda shot heem loose from us.”

The threat sobered Hugh a little. In spite of his smoldering fury at the fifty-fifty split and the ’breed’s increasing arrogance, he tried to smooth out the quarrel.

“All right, you keep quiet about what you know, and so’ll I. We’ve got to hang together on this job. If those other men back at camp get wise to us, they’ll slit our necks. They’ve talked up this cache so much and what they’re going to do with their shares, that they’re as pelton as a loon about it.” He glanced around at the mountain slopes, invisible in the wind-torn blackness. “Where’s this lake that you said we could sink the gold in?”

Eutrope shifted the burden he was carrying—ropes, canvas bags, and two broad tump straps for the portaging; and pointed up the west slope.

“Op dere. In a bunch of pines.”

“Hard to get to?”

“Non. She only two, t’ree hondred yard; and de game trail leading op dat way makes easy toting.”

“You’re sure the lake’s deep enough?”

“She twenty-five foot deep at de lower side. You can’ see no bottom on de brightes’ day. Don’ worry; if we jus’ get de gol’ in dere, she stay dere aw-right.”

Hugh nodded. Yes, the dust and nuggets would be plenty secure. This rain and heavy wind would blot out all tracks beyond the eye of any human; and once the gold was lowered into the still cold depths of the lake, there it would stay, safe from Gary and those slinkers down at camp; safe till he himself got ready to fish it out. Only two people on earth, himself and Eutrope, would know where the gold had vanished.

“And you big bush-rat,” he vowed silently, with a glance at Eutrope—“after we get this stuff out and cached, you’d better stop yammering about a fifty-fifty split and threatening me with blabbing to Rhodes, or there’ll only be one person who knows!”

“Le’s be getting back into de cave,” Eutrope urged. “I don’ wan’ dis Gary catching me here. You go firs’.”

“I don’t know the way,” Hugh objected. “You lead.”

The big half-breed raised his flashlight to the white man’s face, and for several moments they stared at each other. It dawned on Hugh that the métis was refusing to go first because he was afraid of a bullet in the back. Suspicious and on guard, the man seemed to sense that the half a million in gold had made them enemies, bound together only by their need of each other on this job.

As his own flash glittered on the hand ax at Eutrope’s belt, he realized that he had better keep his eye on the man through the work of this black rainy night. The ’breed had no deliberate intentions of killing him, but the man was nervous and dangerously taut. At one wrong word or move he might snap. A blow from that ax would brain a person.

Keeping side by side, they stepped across the slippery rock shingle, and dashed through the cascade.

In the darkness beyond, Hugh shook the water from his slicker and glanced around at the dank walls. How any pack of men, even Chilcote’s hardened pack, could live in so wet and cold a place, he could not imagine. And how Gary and Leda had found this entrance, hidden by a sheet of water a foot thick, was a dark mystery to him.

Impatient to get at the cache, he and Eutrope hurried back the tunnel and turned into the dry corridor.

In the dust of the passageway Hugh noticed two fresh tracks, a small dainty moccasin and a man’s shoe; and he observed that yard after yard, both going in and coming out the two kept close together. The sight of them exploded a paroxysm of jealousy in him. Every day for weeks, Leda had been alone, like this, with Gary. Down at the camp she had gambled with her life to help him break free; she had stood with him through this whole feud; she would stick with him as long as he was alive and breathing.

He felt that tonight would be only half a triumph, a bitterly unsatisfying victory, unless he blasted Gary out of her life and won her around to himself. After all, she had known the fellow only a few weeks. If he was out of the picture, then marriage and half a million dollars would loom pretty big with her.

They came to the first room-widening, and he flipped the light around at the strange old gear. The queer guns, the clothing and other relics of a bygone frontier, stirred his curiosity, but he did not stop. The gold fever and his torturing thoughts about Leda obsessed him, crowding out everything else. He wanted to lay eyes on that fortune of half a million, get it hidden, then plan a dead fall against Gary.

Without pausing, he hurried on with Eutrope to the high-vaulted room where the Rusk men had lived.

After they had glanced around at the sleeping pokes and table and array of old guns, Eutrope turned the sharp beam of his flash on the box across the cave.

“Dat’s it, over dere,” he grunted, keeping close to Hugh. Filled with dark superstitious fears, the ’breed seemed less in dread of the living, just then, than of those men long dead. And for that Hugh was glad. As long as the two of them were in this ghostly place and the métis had need of human company, he was not likely to try any sudden trick.

They moved over to the table, and Hugh lit the candles on it, as Gary had done. The strange shadows and haunted air of the old den, on top of the demoralizing blows of the last two days, had made his own nerves shaky; and the lights helped him keep hold of himself.

As the candles flared up, he saw the skeleton on the floor, and it sent a shudder through him, though Eutrope had told him about it beforehand. The crossed arms, the rusty chains, the grinning skull, resurrected in his mind a host of stories about treasures guarded by dead men and about the doom which would strike down any one who touched a hoard so guarded. Now he himself was violating that taboo and inviting the curse of the dead.

With an oath at his overwrought imaginings, he strode up and kicked the skeleton, to reassure his own self and impress the trembling Eutrope.

“Stop dat you!” the métis blared at him, his teeth chattering. “Ain’ you got more sense’n to keeck a dead man? Now dat feller’ll h’ont you all your life!”

Hugh laughed harshly. “Let him ‘h’ont’! Who cares? Shake yourself together and come on.”

He stepped across to the box and lifted the lid.

Inside the box, nearly half filling it, he saw a mass of dull yellow, and unlike yellow sand and dust and tiny pebbles. A part of the gold had been poured in helter-skelter, like so much yellow grain of a bloody harvesting; but most of the plunder had been stored there in the original pokes, taken from those victims on old Paradise Trail. The canvas pouches were still entire, but the leather ones had dried and cracked under the pressure of their heavy bulging contents; and the gold was trickling out of them.

In one corner of the box he caught the cold blue gleam of a diamond and saw several other odds and ends of jewelry.

At his first glance at the hoard he was terrifically disappointed by its smallness. Eutrope had described it to him, and he had estimated its value roughly; but still he could not quite realize that there lay five hundred thousand dollars.

He reached down and took hold of a poke, a smaller one, no larger than a saucer. Its heaviness startled him, despite his experience with raw gold from the Ludlow mines. It was heavier than a granite boulder several times its size, and he saw he and Eutrope could not lift the box off the floor.

As he hefted the sack, the old leather broke open, a shower of dust and nuggets splashed out, and he was left holding the empty burst pouch.

“Why, hell,” he swore, with a jerky laugh, “that’s our Gary—a busted poke! I’m taking his cache, and he doesn’t even know it. And if I play my cards right, he won’t ever find it out! He won’t live that long!”

For a little time, oblivious of Eutrope, of the black night outside, of all the crime and human tragedy which had gone into the garnering of this plunder, he stared down at the gleaming yellow hoard. He was used to money, to thinking in big sums, but the hard physical actuality of five hundred thousand dollars set his imagination afire. Half a million! His fortune! His own money. To do with as he pleased. Live where he pleased. Let Marl Casper take over the Ludlow mills and mines and limits, now! Let Mona get out of Saghelia and go back to the Riviera, if she wanted to! He’d be getting out of this jerk-water country himself—and he’d go further than the Riviera! And he’d be taking Leda Barton along with him! She’d go, all right. She’d have nothing of Gary but a memory, and that was a weak reed against the luxury half a million could bring her…

Eutrope spoke up. “We’d better be yanking dis gol’ out and caching it in de lake. Moi, I don’ wan’ dat Gary walking in here, by gar! He’d cache us, dat feller would!”

Hugh shook off the spell of the gold. “All right, let’s get busy. Bring the bags, and we’ll ladle this stuff into ’em.” Eying him warily, the ’breed sidled up, glanced into the box, looked thirstily at the dust and nuggets, then raised his eyes to his companion. The peculiar glint in his stare frightened Hugh; and the hair-trigger tautness of the ’breed warned him that the fellow might explode at any instant. Glaringly plain, the big métis was thinking that now, when he had taken the white man to the cache, he stood in imminent danger of getting killed and flung into one of these side caves, along with the other useless gear.

As they stared at each other, the ’breed’s hand unconsciously dropped to his belt, and felt of the ax and loosened the sinister little weapon in its sheath.

Surreptitiously, as he walked over to the table for a tin mug to scoop up the gold, Hugh reached into his slicker pocket, touched the automatic nestling there, shifted it so that it lay ready for a quick grab, and slipped the trigger safety on red.

* * * *

Working swiftly, they poured the gold into the eight double-canvas bags; tied the bags together two by two for easier carrying; and toted them, four at a trip, down the corridor and slippery tunnel, through the overfalls and across the shingle to a thicket of deerbrush.

When all the gold was safely out of the cave, they rested a few minutes; then toted the bags up slope to the lake.

All this took far longer, in the rain and dark, than Hugh had reckoned on; and it was near midnight when he flung the last bag down at the edge of the deep black water.

He was wet to the skin, despite the slicker, and tired from the unaccustomed work; and three solid hours of constant alertness against Eutrope had strained his nerves to the breaking point. But for all that, a wild elation burned in him. He had carried his plan through without a slip; and in a few minutes more the Rusk plunder would be cached once again, in a place even more undiscoverable than where it had lain for nearly four generations.

“And it’s mine now!” he thought, over and over. “It belongs to the person that’s got it, and I’ve got it!”

As he and Eutrope were trussing the bags up with short lengths of rope, a vague but startling idea jigged across his mind. All evening he had been trying to think of some dead-certain way to blot Gary out. Now he believed that he had it—a plan which would keep himself clear of any murder charge and yet obliterate Gary like a rock avalanche.

Suppose that tomorrow he should take these men of his up to the cave, show them where the cache had been, fire them to fever pitch over the half a million—and then tell them that Gary had snatched the fortune away from them and hidden it somewhere else. What would they do?

“Hell,” he thought, imagining their hot-blooded fury, “I wouldn’t have to do anything but stand back and watch! They’d do the rest! They’d slip up to that shack, the bunch of ’em, and overpower him, and try to make him say where that gold is. If he wouldn’t tell, they’d make a memory out of him quickly! And he couldn’t tell! He doesn’t know!”

With his eyes on the glittering knife in Eutrope’s hand as the ’breed slashed the rope, he thought out the plan in a little greater detail. Those two previous attempts—Skunk-Bear’s and the other night—had been wavering and indecisive, but not this scheme. It was a stark and forthright plan, as deadly as a stick of dynamite with short fuse. This time he would not be sending one man against Gary or ordering him brought in alive. Whatever their faults, those men at camp were vicious fighters. Against the pack of them Gary wouldn’t have a chance in a thousand.

But in spite of the deadliness of the scheme and its complete safety to himself, he could not quite make up his mind to launch it. It was a little too stark and explosive. When he told those men about the cache, he would be loosing forces which he could not control afterward.

Using a double strand of rope so that they could pull it back up each time, he and Eutrope lowered the heavy canvas sacks one by one into the lake.

The night was pitch-dark, stormy; the rain was falling in a gusty downpour; the wind had risen and was moaning dismally through the pines. Eutrope’s flash, snapped on, was lying upon a near-by rock, lighting up their work; but Hugh had dropped his own flash into his pocket to avoid any unnecessary twinkling. The chances that anybody was abroad in the wild upper valley at this midnight hour were next to nothing; but even so he was taking no risks.

The thought occurred to him, as the last poke sank into the water, that it would be easy, the work of a few minutes, to plug this big ’breed and weigh him with rocks and tumble him into the lake. The temptation clamored at him. No more danger of having to split this fortune, and no danger that Eutrope would go whispering things to Rhodes.

And by charging Eutrope’s death to Gary, he could inflame those men with a personal vengeance and further his own plan!

But he could not quite nerve himself to draw his automatic and shoot. If he failed to kill Eutrope instantly, the métis would brain him with the ax. Besides, it was one thing to order a man killed, and an abysmally different thing to do the job with one’s own hand.

With a suddenness that caught him unawares, the decision was forced upon him. In the space of two seconds all the mistrust of the last several hours, all the mutual suspicion between him and Eutrope, came to its inevitable end.

As the ’breed was pulling up the rope from the last sack, Hugh stepped back and reached into his pocket for his flash, meaning to help smooth out any signs and then get away.

Before he could draw the flash from his pocket, he saw the métis straighten up with a jerk, and heard an animalish snarl from the man. The ’breed’s hand dropped to his belt and whipped out the little ax.

In the split-second as the ’breed’s arm arched back for a swing, Hugh realized that his innocent act of reaching into his pocket had been a spark to the métis fear of him. All evening the man’s suspicion and fears had steadily mounted, till his nerves were shot and now his control had snapped.

“Stop it!” Hugh cried at him. “I wasn’t reaching for a gun—”

He bit the words off short. As the ’breed leaped at him and struck, Hugh flung himself aside, escaping by inches the swishing blow of the ax.

In his maddened lunge and miss, Eutrope stumbled and fell to his knees. Hugh jerked out his automatic; and as Eutrope sprang to his feet again, flashing a long-bladed skinning knife, Hugh whipped his gun up and shot point-blank, pouring a blast of bullets into the métis.

The flashlight, knocked down as Eutrope sprawled forward, fell to the rock and went out. In the storm-torn darkness Hugh heard a choking gasp, the thud of a body falling heavily, and a short convulsive thrashing. Then quiet, with only the funereal moan of wind in the pines, and the whispered lap-lapping of black waters…

Long after he had weighted the body and rolled it into the lake. Hugh sat huddled on the boulder fighting panic, fighting to pull himself together and go back to camp and face those men with his story.

It occurred to him, as he sat there shaky and unnerved, that once again a dead man would guard the hoard of that old bandit pack. The curse which he had thought about in the cave had materialized; and only by a miracle of luck had it missed him and taken Eutrope.

And he saw, in spite of his quaking fears, that now he would have to carry through his plan against Gary, whether he wanted to or not. He had gone too far to draw back or even hesitate. Eutrope’s vanishing would have to be explained, and he himself would have to do that, for the ’breed had left the camp with him. If those men ever suspected the truth about this death or suspected that he knew where the gold was, they would gang him and kill him without qualm or scruple. He could no longer hope to hold back the avalanche of their vengeance and gold lust and ungovernable fury. He would have to shunt that avalanche away from himself and upon the man in the cabin down valley.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

For the hundredth time that day, Leda moved over to the door and looked out at the woods and mountain slope.

“I wish something would happen.” She stamped her foot in distraction. “Anything!”

“You’ll probably get your wish,” Gary prophesied. He was sitting at the table, cleaning their pistol and rifle. “And it’ll be plenty when it does come. Today looks to me like the calm before the storm.” He glanced up at Leda. “Girl, you don’t know when a lead bumblebee might come singing out of those balsams. If you don’t get away from that open door and stay away, I’ll—I’ll—”

“Oh, those men aren’t even around here today. And besides, they don’t want me. You know that.” She came across the table and gazed thoughtfully at the handful of battered rifle bullets which she and Gary had picked out of the cabin logs. “I wish I knew what to make of that shooting last night. Can you figure it, Gary?”

He shook his head in a puzzled way. From dusk last evening till long after midnight, some enemy had skulked in the surrounding woods, shooting at the cabin. A strange perplexing attack. The man had not ventured close, had not even cared much whether he hit the cabin or not, for a lot of his bullets had splaated harmlessly through the trees.

“If I had to guess, Lee,” he said, “I’d say that for some reason or other Hugh wanted to throw a scare into us and make us hug this cabin. If that’s so, and if he expects me to sit around and twiddle my thumbs till he gets his dynamite all laid and ready to touch off—well, he’s got another think coming. As soon as it’s dark enough, I’m fading out of here and ankling down to Saghelia. You and Dad will be safer without me than with me. I’m a lightning drawer.

“Down there in town I’ll tell Rhodes about this whole business, and I’ll get us some help to lift the cache. It’d be plain suicide for you and me to go after that gold ourselves. I’ll get three or four good men like Alec Bergelot, and by tomorrow we’ll have ourselves half a million bucks, Lee!”

Leda’s eyes lighted up at mention of the fortune. “Did we really and truly find that gold, Gary! I just can’t quite believe it. Five hundred thousand dollars, up there waiting for us—it seems like something I dreamed about.”

“I feel sort of that way myself. But gosh, girl, we haven’t had a chance to do any dreaming—with us getting shot at all night. See here, Lee, why don’t you give in and go over there to the bunk and catch some sleep?”

“It wouldn’t be a bit of use trying, Gary.” She took the cleaning rod from his hands and sat down on his lap, leaning her tired head against his shoulder. “We’ve got so many troubles hanging over us I couldn’t sleep one wink.”

Gary smoothed back her auburn hair and closed her eyes with a kiss. “All right, then, just lie quiet and snag a bit of rest.” As she nestled against him, her hand clasping his, he looked down and smiled. “Comfortable?”

“Awf’ly”—a sleepy whisper, without opening her eyes. “But don’t let Dads come in and catch me like this Gary?”

“Okay. I’ll watch.”

Through the open door he looked out at the trail to Saghelia and at the balsam drogue, dark and forbidding in the gloom of late afternoon. The rain had stopped, but the lowering sky and the pall of clouds scudding across the mountains promised another storm that evening, worse than the rain and heavy wind of last night.

“That’ll be all right with me,” he thought, visioning his lonely ten-mile gantlet in to town. “If it’s raining pitchforks and blowing like sixty, I won’t be so apt to meet anybody behind a boulder or a pile of windfall.”

At the far meadow edge old Nat was cutting wood—sawing away listlessly at a dead jackpine and talking to Jinny, who was scratching herself against the saw-horse. Restless and moody, old Higgens had cleared out of the cabin early that morning and had come back in only for a few minutes at noon.

“You know, Lee,” Gary said quietly, “the sooner Dad is by himself here, the better. Look how he’s stewing around out there. He doesn’t realize what’s wrong, but it’s as plain to me as that biggest freckle on your nose. He’s so used to living alone that he simply can’t stand to have people around. If my trouble with the law ever smooths out, you and I’ll pitch off and hunt our own roost.”

Leda stirred slightly but made no answer.

“Did you notice,” Gary went on, “how completely floored he was yesterday when we told him about finding the cache and showed him the dust in our knapsack? It positively crushed him. That search has been his whole existence for twenty-five years, and he’s pretty old to take up something new. Last evening he said to me. ‘This Chilcote gold was the purtiest thing to hunt fer on the whole Pacific Coast, and now you two have went and sp’iled it!’”

Still no answer from Leda. Gary looked down at the girl in his arms, and a slow smile came to his lips.

“So!” he muttered. “‘It wasn’t a bit of use,’ and you ‘Couldn’t possibly sleep one wink’—and in three shakes you’re dead to the world!”

He waited a few minutes longer, till he felt Leda’s hand slowly relax and heard the quiet even breathing of a person plunged into deep slumber. Then, very gently, he carried her to the bunk, spread a blanket over her.

As he bent down, fixing the pillow more comfortably, he was immensely glad, for Leda’s sake, about that yellow hoard up valley. “You’ll have more pretty clothes, girl,” he whispered, “than you ever dreamed of. Tomorrow you can throw away your moccasins and patched corduroy dresses and old bear-scratched packets, and buy a whole Miranda Shoppe all for your own self! Wouldn’t you like to see the look on Hugh Ludlow’s face, Lee, when he finds out that you and I grabbed off that half a million?”

Back at the table, he finished oiling the rifle and loaded three extra clips, to have them handy.

As he was hanging the gun on its wall peg, he caught a glimpse of a man, in the timber beyond the meadow, striding up the trail toward the cabin.

Startled, he hurried over to the door for a better look.

With a jolt that made him gasp, he recognized the visitor’s soldierly walk, Stetson hat, uniform.

“My Lord! Rhodes! To see me!”

He could not believe that Rhodes was coming with good news; that Sergeant Spencer of the Secret Squad had nailed Greenie and those other three and had dragged a Crown confession from one of them. It was too soon for any such miraculous tidings. Sergeant Spencer had been working on that case for only two days. To round up four wandering foot-loose men in that time was humanly impossible.

“Rhodes has got a wire from headquarters,” he thought; and for a moment the meadow and woods went reeling before his eyes. “They ordered him to take me.”

He was seized with the impulse to grab Leda’s rifle and make a break, before the steel jaws of the law closed upon him. But in every direction except Saghelia lay impassable ranges. Escape from the Police was a fool’s delusion. And he had given Rhodes his solemn promise to be ready if his call came. Now that promise had to be honored.

With a long glance at Leda, he silently picked up his hat and jacket—his only earthly possessions; walked out of the cabin, and started across the little meadow, to go away quietly and without cringing.

At the meadow edge Rhodes paused for a kindly “hello” to old Nat, and then came on. Besides a boulder in the middle of the open, Gary confronted him.

The pleasantness of Rhodes’ smile puzzled Gary, and the friendly handclasp puzzled him even more. How could any person smile and shake hands like that if he came on a hangman’s mission?

“I’ve had a trickle of news from Winnipeg, Frazier,” Rhodes said, in his point-blank way. “It’s good news, and I came up here to tell you about it immediately. Also to get some more information from you.”

“Good news?” Gary cried, hearing only those two unbelievable words. He shook Rhodes by the arm, thinking the officer merely was trying to soften the blow with an encouraging falsehood. “Tell me the truth, man. I’ve been expecting it; I’m set for it. Don’t lie to me. Not about this.”

“I am telling you the truth, Frazier. The news is not much, but such as it is, it’s favorable. I have a wire from Spencer at The Pas. He traced one of those three lads, this Calloway boy, up there, flew up by plane, found him throwing money freely, and arrested him. Spencer is breaking his story down now. So far there have been no developments about this Greenie or those other two.

“I also have a wire from headquarters ordering me to hold you in technical arrest so that you can be sent East, if necessary, to identify those men.” He paused a moment, then added, “From my knowledge of Spencer’s ability, I feel rather safe in predicting that he’ll hang to this case till he takes you off the blotter, Frazier, and puts the right men on it. He’s the Mounted’s finest bloodhound.”

Gary could not answer. Could not even say “thank you” to the gray-eyed sergeant who had befriended him in his hour of need. Weak and shaky, he leaned against the boulder for steadiness, trying to believe this news.

Rhodes regarded him with sympathy. “I can’t exactly blame you for wilting a bit. If a person ever had a rope around his neck, you’re the man. But now pull yourself together. Spencer wants me to go over your story again and wire him every tag-end of data which you remember about those four men and that Winnipeg night. Then, I want to ask you about Hugh Ludlow. This situation between him and you looks ugly, from what I can gather about it. Hugh’s gone pretty badly to pieces, and there’s no telling what he might attempt. I don’t want you to get killed, or have any killing tacked onto you. Let’s go sit down and have a talk.”

Gary hardly heard. As he followed Rhodes over toward the woodpile, his thoughts were a confused giddy whirl. Free, after two long months of nerve-shattering outlawry. Free, after being hounded day and night by the gallows shadow. Free to go among men again without fear of a sudden hand on his shoulder. Free to live and hope and work like other humans… It was all too staggering for him to grasp. He felt as though a black weight as big as old Sentinel had fallen upon him at far-off Winnipeg, crushing heart and courage out of a man; and now, in this tiny meadow that mountainous weight had suddenly rolled away.

* * * *

When Rhodes had gone, an hour later, Gary went into the cabin and tiptoed to the bunk where Leda was asleep.

He wanted to tell her, instantly, the tremendous news which Rhodes had brought. Wanted to see her wild joy over it and feel her ecstatic hug. But she was sleeping so soundly, she seemed so worn out by the stormy events of the last several days, that he had not the heart to rouse her. He could tell her when she awoke—he was not going to leave the cabin that evening, as he had planned.

Yet he simply could not keep the news wholly to himself, and so he compromised, unaware that his compromise was absurd. Bending down, he whispered to her, very softly:

“Did you hear what Rhodes said, Lee? In a coupla weeks at the most I’ll be off the blotter! Can you believe it, honey? I can’t, quite—just as you can’t quite believe that the cache of gold is really ours. We’ll go away; we’ll start doing all the things we’ve talked about; we’ll leave Saghelia and go ’way off where you’ll never hear a word of slander in all your life. But we’ll roll up old Paradise Trail and take it along and have it with us wherever we go. After what we’ve been through, any sort of trail would look mighty fine to us, Lee.”

His whispering threatened to wake Leda, and he stopped.

At the door, shielding himself against a possible bullet from the woods, he looked out at the first faint twilight settling over Little Saghelia. Though he was thankful that now he would not have to run the long dark gantlet in to town, he wished that the next few hours were over with. It would be midnight before Rhodes could reach Saghelia, gather three or four men and get back here. Those hours were going to be dangerous.

As he gazed into the thickening gloom, a little chill crept over him—of uneasiness, of premonition. In choosing to stay here he might have made a fatal mistake.

Far away across Big Saghelia Valley he could dimly see the high pass, a great V-notch in the ranges, where the narrow-gauge led south to the Grand Trunk. “That’s the trail which Lee and I’ll be taking,” he mused, remembering the day when he had come through the pass to Saghelia, alone, penniless, fugitive. He could not see beyond the blue V, or say where their trail would take Leda and him, in the world outside; but he did not greatly care.

He did know that he and she would never head for the city. The mountains, the freedom of the open, had claimed him, as it always had claimed Leda’s wild-born spirit. In a vague way he believed that eventually he would go back to a school, not to finish his law studies but to get a solid and substantial grounding in forestry, a calling which he had thought about longingly since his earliest childhood.

In the past month he often had felt that he had turned a corner of his life on the morning when he climbed to the top of old Sentinel. Those black acres and the ruined valley had dwelt with him ever since; and in his mind’s eye he saw other ranges and valleys, hundreds of them up and down the continent, despoiled by that same blind and ruthless destruction. There was room for men on the other side, room and limitless horizons for a man’s life work—rebuilding what old Hugh Ludlow and his kind had laid waste.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

In the dark cabin, lighted only by a few red gleams from cracks in the old stove, Leda groped across from the table to the window, where Gary was looking into the stormy darkness outside.

It was long after supper. Night had come on early, the darkest night Gary had ever known; and a wild willawaw out of the northwest—rain, snow, sleet and flying debris, all mingled in one—was lashing the trees till the tops of the nearest balsams were beating upon the cabin roof.

“Gary?”

“Yes, honey.”

“Do you think those men are around here tonight? Have you seen anything suspicious out there?”

“Not a thing, Lee.” He put his arms about her, to drive away her fears. “Let’s not borrow trouble, sweet. I don’t believe those slinkers would stir an inch out of camp in a storm like this. Besides, Rhodes will be here in two or three hours, and that’ll be the end of all our worries.”

Leda tried to look through a rain-splashed pane. “Gary, why hasn’t Dads come back? He’s staying out too long.”

Gary drew her back from the window, out of danger. “He went to see about Jinny, Lee. Jinny was all worked up over something—probably the grizzly that’s been prowling around here, lately.”

“I know, but he’s been gone half an hour.”

Gary believed he knew what had happened to old Nat, in the storm-torn dark out yonder. The wind and raw cold and slashing rain should have driven old Higgens indoors long before this. If those men were out there—and he was all but certain of it—they had pounced on old Nat, made a prisoner of him, and were holding him till this grim business was over. They wanted no unnecessary killing on their hands, and killing was their errand here tonight.

But he said nothing to Leda about his suspicions. It would only drive her frantic, to no good whatsoever. Neither he nor she could lift a hand to help the old man.

Personally he hoped that old Nat had been taken. As prisoner of those unscrupulous men, the old fellow would be far safer than in this cabin.

While Leda was across at the stove, putting in fresh wood, he stepped over to the door and made sure that the heavy beam was in place so that the Ludlow pack could not burst into the cabin with a sudden overwhelming rush.

Back at the window, he flattened himself against the split-logs again, watching and listening for his enemies. With no factual grounds for believing so, he felt, he knew, that Hugh’s men were scouting the cabin out, were planning their swoop and strike; and that tonight the long struggle between him and Hugh Ludlow was going to end.

So far he had seen or heard nothing whatever of a single enemy, but that was little reassurance. The night was so black that a person could not see his hand before his face; and the storm was howling down the valley and through the timber like a million-throated loup-garou.

He wished now, too, late, that he had slipped away from the cabin at twilight, as he had debated doing, and had hidden in the woods till Rhodes came with the men from Saghelia. To walk off and leave old Nat and Leda alone would have looked cowardly of him yes; but it would have been the sane and sensible thing to do.

He reproached himself savagely: “I didn’t have the courage to damn appearances; I fell down over my manly pride; and now look at the fix we’re all in! If Lee gets hurt or killed, it’ll be my fault.”

That was what harassed him the worst—Leda’s great peril. Here in this cabin with him, she was facing the same fearsome danger as he. Those men had nothing against her save that she was his friend and partner, and they would not harm her deliberately; but in the passion of a life-death battle they would hardly pause to make sure who was shooting at them.

Leda came back from the stove and rejoined him, afraid to be alone in the creepy darkness. The black storm outside, the creaking of the lodgepole rafters, the whistle and moan of wind past the eaves, had preyed on her imagination; and as she groped for his hand, she whispered, quaveringly:

“Gary, I’m—I’m scared! I know those men are around here. That shooting last night was a preparation for—for something.”

Though his words sounded hollow to his own ears, Gary tried to comfort and steady her.

“Honey, those men are hugging their tents down at camp. If they weren’t, if they were up here, they’d have been blazing away through the windows at us a long time ago. For that matter, you and I could stave them off till Rhodes comes. I don’t think Hugh Ludlow has got the nerve for a brazen attack on this cabin.”

“I do! It isn’t a question of nerve but of—of desperation. He’s got to act. Everything has gone crashing with him. I can imagine the temper he’s in. And he’ll try to take it out on you. That’s his way.”

As she paused, Gary felt her small fist clench, in his hand; and he wondered what thought was in her mind. Presently she burst out:

“I wish Hugh Ludlow was dead! I wish I’d shot him, the night he was trying to kill you! If I had it to do over again, I’d do it! He’s vicious all through. He hasn’t got anything but evil in him—evil to other people. Everybody that comes in contact with him suffers for it. Look what he did to Mona! Look how his selfishness and willfulness broke and ruined his dad! Look what he’s tried to do to us—and has done! He’s put us through a month of constant misery just because he thinks he owns Little Saghelia and me and that cache and everything!

“If it wasn’t for him, you and I’d be in the clear now. But we can’t draw a safe breath as long as he’s alive. We can’t be happy about the cache or Sergeant Rhodes’ news or about anything else! Because of Hugh!”

“That’s all very true, Lee, but no person can go smashing and crashing through other people’s lives without paying the fiddler eventually. It may sound like moralizing, but those who take up the sword—”

“I don’t believe that! Hugh won’t perish by it! He sits clown there safe at camp and has his men do his killing.”

“You wait and see what happens to him, girl. He’ll get it in the neck as sure as sun-rise. He couldn’t stand pressure, he turned criminal, and he’ll get what any criminal gets in the long run—and usually it isn’t very long, either. Where I came from I saw dozens of his tribe; and not one of them was big enough, shrewd enough or lucky enough to break the human code and get by with it. I happen to know what the wrath of the law feels like, Lee. The retribution of the law and society is a very dreadful thing.”

“But I don’t want retribution! I want you to be safe. What good’ll retribution do me if you should get killed?”

“It won’t happen, Lee. We’ve got not only the law on our side—and one practical consequence of that is Rhodes and his men—but the right, too; and the right is a pretty powerful shield, Lee.”

“I don’t believe that, either! There’s no right or justice or reason in this fighting and bloodshed. It’s brutal and inhuman, and it’s a matter of plain luck. When I remember how near Skunk-Bear came to killing you, I can’t feel any certainty that these men won’t do it, the next time.”

As Gary was thinking of words to still her fears, he heard, or thought he heard, a queer muffled noise at the window.

Bending down, he looked cautiously past the casement, trying to peer into the intense blackness. For a moment or two he saw nothing. But the noise persisted, puzzling and strange—sounding as though something was rubbing against the glass. And then, in the dimmest sort of way, he saw some object moving back and forth across one of the panes.

Leaning still closer, he finally made out that the object was a man’s hand—wiping the rain from the glass for a clearer look into the cabin. And beyond the hand he vaguely distinguished a man’s head, the eyes of a Siwash.

Leda tugged at his arm, whispering, “What are you looking at, Gary?”

He did not move or answer till the man had drawn back and the evil eyes had vanished. Then he straightened up.

“Nothing,” he said. “Just one of your flowers scraping against the window, Lee.”

It was a cool convincing lie, and he kept his voice steady; but he was glad that Leda could not see his face. Those men had come, as he instinctively had known all evening. He had stayed and got caught. Tonight they were not keeping a distance and taking harmless pot-shots at the cabin. They had surrounded the place to cut off any escape.

There was no doubt in his mind, no ghost of a doubt, that they had marked him for death. He had smashed Hugh Ludlow’s plans, taken Leda away, fought Hugh to a standstill, and now the revanche had come.

He stepped across to the stove and glanced at his watch, by the red glow from a crack. Nine o’clock. Three hours till Rhodes would reach here. Those men would never wait three hours. They had no reason to wait longer at all. They had seized old Nat and scouted out the cabin, and the storm had risen to its full-lunged fury. Long before Rhodes and the Saghelia men could arrive, the fight would be over.

No person to delude himself, he knew that his chances of whipping that whole outfit or even staving them off were next to nothing. There were six or seven of them. They had guns, belt axes, knives; and likely they had brought dynamite cartridges to blow their way inside. They had the advantage of attacking when and how they wished. They had the crushing advantage of being able to maneuver around in the blackness outside while he was trapped and cornered in a little cabin. When the rush came, he and Leda might put out two or three of them, but the others would finish him off. And Leda was doomed along with him.

A thought flashed into his mind. “If I could make a break and get out of this cabin, I could fade into the storm. That’s my chance to get out of this alive.”

But he did not stop, just then, to think about his breakaway. Before those men sprang their attack, there was something to be done, and little time to do it in.

He hurried back to Leda.

“Lee,”—in spite of his feverish haste he spoke casually—“I’m beginning to believe, myself, that old Nat should have come back. Something may have happened to him.”

“That’s what I’ve been thinking for half an hour! One of us ought to go out there. He may have hurt himself.”

“Yes, one of us must go,” Gary agreed. He paused an instant, then forced himself to add, “Do you mind going, Lee?”

In the darkness he heard Leda catch her breath in sharp surprise. He could not see her face, but he knew his suggestion had astounded her, almost as though he had struck her a physical blow. Her silence made him wince. Plainer than words, it told him that she was wondering whether he had lost his courage. Wondering whether he was afraid to go himself and was sending her into danger in his stead.

Her astonishment and that throbbing silence hurt Gary as few things in his life had ever done. But he clamped down on himself and waited for Leda’s answer.

“Why—why, yes,” she finally said, and her voice was a little strange. “I’ll go. Surely. Someone has to.”

Gary stepped across to the caribou horns for her old raincoat and an extra sweater, found the flashlight on the table, came back to her; and in silence he helped her put the garments on.

At the door as he lifted the heavy beam and the latch, his lips touched her hair.

“Don’t be scared, Lee. It’ll be all right.”

Leda stepped across the threshold without answering.

When she was a few feet from the cabin, Gary called out to her—spiking the last slight danger that those men might mistake her for him.

“Leda?”—he called loudly, above the howl of the storm.

Leda stopped. In the swirl of rain and sleet and whipping gale he barely could see her, by the flash glow—a dim girlish figure, with the wind molding the old slicker about her. She was so frightened that the light trembled in her hand, but nevertheless she was courageously going out into the night to look for old Nat.

“What is it?” she called back.

“He’s probably at the lean-to. Look there.”

“That’s where I was going,” Leda said.

She turned and went on.

Holding the door open a scant inch, Gary waited, listened, shutting his eyes to blot out the sight of that bobbing flash. It was an ordeal to see Leda go, to let her leave him. Now he would be alone in the cabin, facing death by himself, without friend or partner or human company. Not until that moment did he realize how much Leda’s presence had strengthened him against his fears and the creepy blackness.

Sooner than he expected—when Leda was scarcely halfway to the lean-to in the balsams—he heard a sudden frantic outcry from her:

“Gary! G-a-r-y!”

Then the cry was stifled and cut off, as though a coat or blanket had been flung over her head.

When he heard that, Gary closed the door and dropped the beam into its notch again.

As he backed away from that danger spot, he said silently: “At least you’re safe, Lee—now. When this is all over, you’ll understand why I sent you out there.”

Half a minute later, while he was deciding on a plan for his get-away, he heard some one fumble quietly with the door latch and then heave against the heavy wood beam.

Knowing that the door was securely barred, he hurried across to Leda’s small room and crept up to the window, praying that his hasty plan of escape might work. If it did, if he could get only a few steps from the cabin, the storm would swallow him up. He could hit down the Saghelia trail, meet Rhodes and lead those men back to free Leda.

With his face against the glass, he tried to look outside, suspecting that the window was guarded. The storm and blackness were against him, and he saw nothing.

Taking a gamble on a bullet or a deadly smash from a belt ax, he raised the sash, as noiselessly as possible.

The storm soughed in, a cold blast of icy rain and club-like wind. With a quivering awareness that the next few seconds might mean the difference between life and death for him, he unfastened the screen and tensed himself for a leap and headlong dash.

As he swung the screen out and the wind banged it against the cabin logs, a dark form, crouching unseen beneath the ledge, sprang up like a jack-in-the-box, lunged halfway through the window, and seized him with a bearlike grapple.

“Cézar!” The man yelled wildly at the others, struggling to pinion Gary. “Shushaugh! Here! Hyak!”

Gary tore free from the grappling arms, pushed his enemy back and swung at him; but he missed the man, and his fist cracked against the head of Leda’s cot. As he heard the answering yells of the other men, near at hand, he slammed the window down and bolted it, and sprang back into the room, expecting a hail of bullets through the glass.

No bullets came. Except for the eerie noises of the storm, the silence fell again.

Cursing his failure to escape, he flipped the blood from his broken knuckles and moved over to the table, wondering why those men hadn’t shot. And why hadn’t the guard at the window pumped a clip of bullets into him or smashed him with an ax, instead of grappling? The man had had a wide-open chance to kill him, and had passed it up. Were they trying to take him alive?

He could not believe this. Those men were acting under Hugh Ludlow’s orders, and Hugh was so crazed with jealousy that nothing short of a killing would satisfy the man.

Though escape by the door or windows was impossible, he doggedly refused to give up his idea of a break-away. Wasting no time trying to puzzle out the strange acts of his enemies, he swept the candles and flower creels from the heavy block table, picked it up and lugged it across to the northeast corner of the cabin.

From the box behind the stove he grabbed up three sticks of wood, carried them to the table and laid them handy on a high shelf there.

His plan was to pry up a corner of the roof, squeeze through, drop to the ground outside and vanish. His enemies would not be expecting that move or guarding against it. If he could lift those two end rafters and make an opening a foot wide, he would be hurrying down the Saghelia trail while this pack smashed their way into an empty cabin.

Vaulting on top of the table, he straightened up till his shoulders were pressing against the lodgepole rafters. With his legs planted wide and his right hand gripping the split-logs, he braced himself, and began pushing up.

The two rafters, groaning and creaking, gave a little and finally started out of their notches. From the caves to the ridgepole the chinking of mud and sphagnum broke loose and fell to the floor. Through the crack above the top beam the storm came whistling in as he heaved upward.

With heart pounding wildly, he realized that he could make an opening big enough to escape by. If those men would only hold off their attack a few minutes longer.

When the crack was three inches wide, he slipped a stick of wood into it, chocked it securely, paused a moment to get a new purchase and catch a breath. His lungs seemed bursting; and in spite of the raw cold wind beating against him, the weight and strain were so tremendous that he had broken into a sweat.

As he started to ease into the lift again, he heard a bang-whanging on the door, as though some one was trying to catch his attention and draw an answer from him.

He kept silent, thinking that his enemies were attempting to find out where he was in the cabin so that they could pour a blast at him through the window.

The sharp hammering came again, then a voice hailed him. “You in dere! Speak op!”

Gary recognized the voice as that of Cézar, Eutrope’s half-breed partner. The man wanted to palaver him.

For a moment he debated whether to answer or not. Why on earth should that pack wish to palaver? But if they really did, he might turn it to his own advantage. Might stall them long enough to make certain of his get-away. Another minute or two, another good heave or two, and he’d be slipping through that opening into the oblivion of the storm.

“You hear me?” Cézar called again. “Say somet’ing!”

Gary stepped off the table and crouched beside the stove, where he was shielded from the window.

“What d’you want?” he demanded. It seemed strange to him, strange and a little unreal, that he should be talking to men who intended to blot him out of existence.

“We wan’ a leetle wa-wa wit’ you.”

“Go ahead! If you’ve got anything to say, let’s have it!”

“It’s jus’ dis: you’ll give up to us wit’out making no fight, or you’ll fin’ yourself laying in de brush tomorrow morning, wit’ a whisky-jack pecking at your eyes! Put your gun down, open dis door, and den do w’at we say; and we’ll deal fair-square wit’ you. Dat’s a promise.”

Gary laughed at him, harshly. “D’you think I’m that crazy, you slinker? A hell of a lot of trust I’d put in a promise from you killers! I’ve had a coupla experiences with your ‘fair-square’ dealing. You’re out to bump me off.”

“We coulda bump’ you dere by de winner,” Cézar came back. “But we didn’ wan’ dat. W’at we wan’ is a leetle talk wit’ you, and dat’s w’at we’ll have if we got to blow dis cabane to hell’n gone and peeck you out of de spleenters!”

Gary could not deny that they could have killed him at the window a few minutes ago. But they didn’t want that. They wanted him alive! At least for a time.

Their unguessable purpose bewildered him. Though he begrudged the precious seconds, when he might be making a get-away, he checked himself from breaking off the strange palaver. He was bewildered, too, by the violence and feverish excitement in Cézar’s voice.

“Whatever you’ve got to say, hurry it up,” he ordered. “What’s it about?”

“About dat cache!” Cézar blazed, his tones throaty with emotion. “We wan’ to know w’ere dat gol’ is at!”

Gary came to his feet in sheer astonishment, all oblivious of danger from a rifle blast through the window. In the name of heaven, how did these men know anything about the cache? Had they been shadowing him and Leda on the morning of the big blow? Or had one of them slipped into this cabin, somehow, and seen the little poke of dust which he and Leda had brought home from the overfalls cave?

Maybe they really knew nothing about the cache at all. Maybe they only suspected that he might have found it. Or maybe Hugh Ludlow had spun a lie out of whole cloth, out of merely his imagination, to bring them here tonight.

Trying to draw the ’breed out, he demanded: “What cache? What’re you talking about?”

“In dat cave behin’ de overfalls!” Cézar snarled; and Gary realized, then, that the man and his companions did know about the Rusk cache. “Don’ try to stall wit’ us. You foun’ de cave yesterday morning, you and dis Leda; and you foun’ de box of gol’ back in dere! Den, las’ night, you wen’ back op dere by yourself and took de gol’ out and hid it somew’eres. Dat box is empty, de pokes is laying ’round in de dirt, de gol’ is gone, and you’re de person dat stole it.”

The man’s words so dumfounded Gary that for moments he was speechless. Not only did these men know about the cave, the cache, the staggering fortune of dust and nuggets—not only that, but the gold had been taken out of the cave and had vanished! That was the plain and unmistakable meaning of Cézar’s snarling accusation. Beyond any question these men had actually been back in the cave and with their own eyes had seen the box where the plunder had lain. And the box was empty now.

“Lord!” he gasped. “Lee and I have lost that fortune! Somebody has snaked it away from us. Last night—it happened then! The shooting last night around the cabin—it was aimed to hold us here while that half a million was being lifted!”

But who had lifted it? Not these men outside. All too clearly, the loss of the fortune had stirred them to a murderous rage. And they genuinely believed that he was the person who had taken it.

Cézar spoke again. “We wan’ to know w’ere you cached dat stuff. You give op, take us to de place and show us de gol’, and den—den we’ll turn you free.”

The ultimatum showed Gary why he had not been killed a few minutes ago and why these men were not shooting into the cabin. He was worth half a million dollars to them—or so they thought. They meant to take him prisoner, make him lead them to the new cache, then dispose of him.

He strode over to the door, where he could talk better with Cézar. The ’breed’s threat to blow the cabin “to hell’n gone” betrayed that the pack had brought dynamite cartridges along and could blast their way inside almost when they wished. And they’d be doing it unless he could convince them that he had not lifted the gold. If he could talk to them calmly and marshal his evidence, he could prove where he had been and turn their fury away from himself.

“Cézar, listen to me,” he said earnestly. “You’re right about our finding that gold. We did. Only yesterday morning, as you said. But we walked away from there and left it, and we haven’t been back since. If it isn’t there now, somebody else took it out. I’m as much in the dark as you.”

An ugly growl from the métis cut him short. “I s’pose,” Cézar fleered, “dat you didn’ keel Skunk-Bear a mont’ ago, hein? And didn’ shoot Eutrope las’ night, op at de valley head, hein? Your bluff don’ work wit’ us.”

“‘Eutrope—last night’?” Gary echoed, thunderstruck. “Are you telling me that Eutrope got killed? And that I did it? Why, you fool, you damned fool, I was here in this cabin all last night, getting shot at. I can prove—”

Again that ugly growl. The hard unshakable disbelief of it chilled Gary’s blood; and he began backing away from the door, feeling the uselessness of any palaver or any attempt to convince those men of the truth. They were in no mood to listen. He could throw facts at them as big as mountains, and those facts would be like pebbles glancing off a granite boulder. Nothing he could say or do would break down their belief that he had plundered the cache.

He shuddered at the thought of falling into their hands alive, and of their attempts to make him talk. He couldn’t talk. But they fully believed he could. They’d try to torture out of him a secret that he did not know.

In those few moments as he backed from the door to the table in the corner, the dark riddle of last night’s happenings cleared up for him; and in a hasty flitting way he pieced together the story of how that gold had disappeared. These men had not taken it; Leda and old Nat were equally out of the question; Eutrope was dead; one person remained:

Hugh Ludlow.

Somehow Hugh had found out about the overfalls cave. Last night he had sent one of his bush-sneaks to shoot at this cabin while he himself slipped up the valley and grabbed off that half a million. He had not only double-crossed his own men but had used them, cunningly, as pawns in his private vengeance game. Sometime today he had taken them up to the cave, showed them the rifled cache, roused them to fury with his story about that gleaming hoard and the fortunes it would mean for them all. And then, with utter heartlessness both toward them and toward his enemy, he had pointed them at the isolated cabin in the balsams.

And they had come.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Outside, Cézar kicked at the door. “Hyak, you! W’at-ever you wan’ to do, be saying it. You open dis door and take us to w’ere you cached dat gol’, or we’ll blow ourself in dere and carve it out of you.”

In the dark Gary bumped against the table. “Let me think it over,” he called to the ’breed, fighting for time to break away. “Give me five minutes—”

“We don’ give you nut’ing. You don’ cook op any of your fonny treecks on us. You have dis door open ’fore I coun’ twenty, or bigar we open it wit’ an earthquake steck! Wan, two, t’ree…”

Gary sprang upon the table, as that ominous counting started, and heaved with all his strength against the lodge-pole rafters. From his enemies outside he heard a quick excited jabbering in bush-French, and he knew they were preparing a dynamite stick and placing it against the door.

With maddening slowness the eaves crack widened, inch by inch, till it was seven or eight inches high. Battling desperately for the seconds, he grabbed another chock, thrust it into the opening, and took a new purchase.

“Twelve, t’irteen”—the count was steadily mounting. A silence had fallen, outside, as though the other men had scrambled away and only Cézar remained, tolling off the seconds before he touched a match to the “earthquake stick.”

At “seventeen” Gary felt of the opening, saw it was wide enough for him to skin through, seized his third chock, and thrust it under.

In his frantic haste he failed to plant the chock solidly. A club-like blast of wind hit the cabin and shook the loosened corner of the roof; the chock jarred out and fell… As the rafters banged down into their notches again, one of them took Gary a hard smash on the head and shoulders.

For a moment he leaned weakly against the wall, a little dazed by the blow and this end to his hopes for a breakaway.

Then he noticed that the counting had stopped and a sinister silence had fallen.

Gathering himself together, he stepped off the table, crouched down beside the wall bench, groped around in the darkness for some weapon, found old Nat’s bootjack, and then waited, shielding his face with his arm. Still doggedly refusing to give up, he believed that when the door was blown down he might be able to leap outside and vanish, in the confusion and storm, before the rush came pouring in.

In the tumult of his thoughts he realized that it would be better for him to get killed outright, a quick merciful oblivion, than to fall into the power of those men.

He fancied he could hear the spluttering fuse of the “earthquake stick” outside the door. The seconds seemed hours long, and he began thinking the explosion would never come.

But it came at last, suddenly—a terrific bellowing kr-oo-mm. The concussion deafened him; a rush of acrid air snatched his breath away; the explosion knocked him bodily against the wall, dazing him. The door was broken from its heavy hinges, flung across the cabin like a piece of cardboard, and banged against the stove. The stove itself seemed to explode—breaking into half a dozen pieces and collapsing; and its mass of glowing red coals rolled out upon the floor. The glass of the two windows shattered to bits; Leda’s dishes flew from the shelves like things alive; the stove pipe clattered down; a rain of mud and sphagnum fell from the chinks against the logs; and the whole cabin inside was turned to a mass of ruin and wreckage.

Shaking off his daze, Gary got to his feet, a little wobbly for a moment, and made for the doorway, with the bootjack in his hand. Going to take him alive, were they? That might be their little mistake. With guns and axes they could put him out easily enough, but a knock-down battle with fist and club was a game he could play at too.

As he reached the door, one of the nondescript whites, swinging a clubbed rifle, came lunging out of the stormy blackness and leaped across the threshold, leading the rush. The red mass of coals, fanned by the wind that was swirling into the cabin, lit the man up, dimly—a strange reddish figure that seemed scarcely human.

With one swing Gary took him—smashing him so hard that the man wilted in his tracks, collapsed and spread-eagled on the floor without a grunt.

Like a hostile wave the others came surging in, leaping over the sprawly form in the doorway. Cézar, brandishing a rifle. The second nondescript white, who had been wounded at the Ludlow camp, with one arm in a sling, and a broken ski staff in his good hand. The two swart-faced and brutal Siwash, each with a long-bladed kiliutok in one hand and a short heavy club in the other.

One of the Indians, a jump ahead of the rest, leaped at Gary and slashed at him with the knife. In the blind fierce melee the Siwash seemed to forget that a dead man would never lead them to that gold; and his knife slash was aimed at Gary’s heart. Gary flung up his left arm and warded off the deadly thrust; but the steel cut through the leather of his jacket and burned into his forearm like a hot stab of pain.

Above the oaths and yells Cézar cried out: “Shushaugh! Drop dat kiliutok! Grab heem!”

But the Indian was given no chance to grapple or to slash again with the knife. With a jab of an elbow Gary fended him off, swung on him with the bootjack, and took him a solid smash along the temple. The Indian’s knife and club dropped from his nerveless hands, he reeled backward against Cézar and fell like a poled ox.

Before Gary could swing again the other Siwash leaped in, seized the bootjack, tried to wrench it away; and the crippled white man whipped up the broken ski staff one-handed and struck Gary a glancing blow on the head. Instead of wrestling for the bootjack with the Indian, Gary let go of it, lunged at the crippled white man and tore the ski-staff out of his hand, and swung at the Indian.

The swishing murderous blow missed the Siwash but struck the crippled white across the face and knocked him backward, stunned and limp. Clutching futilely at the door jamb, he slumped down across the threshold stone.

The doorway was clear at last—clear for a leap outside and a dash into the swirling black storm. But Gary did not notice. Battling for his life, he was fighting in a blind unthinking fury, swinging to smash and kill. In less than twenty seconds he had put out three of his enemies, knocking them so cold that they lay where they had tumbled. Escape did not even occur to him. He was thinking only to smash those other two before one of them got in a solid blow.

The Indian had grappled him around the waist, and was struggling to drag him down, but Gary’s eyes were upon the ’breed Cézar. The ’breed had arched his rifle up for a swing, then checked himself, and now was backing away, backing out of the fight, and ramming a cartridge into the chamber of his gun. Tearing loose from the Siwash, Gary kicked at the Indian, knocked him aside against the cabin wall, and lunged at Cézar.

He closed with the ’breed just as the latter was whipping up the rifle.

With a twist and a violent wrench he tore the weapon away from Cézar, flung it to the floor, and then bore down on the ’breed bare-handed, like an avenging annihilation. Dazed by this calamitous turn to the battle, Cézar shrank back, with a yell of fear and panic, and headed for the doorway. Blocking him, Gary reached out and grabbed him by the jacket front with his left hand, held him at arm’s length, and swung at him, once—a terrific fist smash…

* * * *

As he tied up the Indian who was not unconscious, and threw him beside Cézar, and then dragged the crippled white man back into the red glow of the coals, Gary cursed at his enemies, jerking the words out pantingly:

“You’ll listen to me now, by God! I’ll do the talking now, you killers, you throat-slashing carcajous! I’ll go get Leda and the old man; and then I’ll tell you who took your damned gold; and when Rhodes comes he’ll have some pug-ugly customers for his butter-tub! And I’ll have a showdown right tonight with the big cowardly hunk, down there at camp, that sent you here!”

When he had finished tying them up and had pushed the coals back on the tin shield to keep the cabin from catching fire, he stood for a few moments looking down at the men he had whipped, at the pack who had made the mistake of trying to take him alive. His fury and blind anger had ebbed; he was beginning to see beyond this battle; and a cold wrath was mounting in him at a man not there at all—a man sitting safe at camp down Little Saghelia.

As he gazed at the bleeding Shushaugh and the crippled white, at limp Cézar and that first man, writhing and moaning in pain, something near to pity stirred in him. Ignorant and poor and easily swayed, these men, whatever their weaknesses and their bush-sneak crimes, were hardly to be held responsible for this month-long feud and the brutal murder which had barely been averted here tonight. They had been but tools for another man. If evil had fallen upon them, it was because Hugh Ludlow, as Leda said, brought evil to every one whose life he touched…

* * * *

In his tent at the camp down valley, Hugh was waiting for his men to return. Waiting impatiently, and yet confidently—certain that tonight his enemy would die.

The black woods, the screech and howl of the storm, the nameless fears which had been haunting him since he killed Eutrope, had shattered his nerves badly; and in front of his tent he had built a huge bright fire, as though to drive away the dark specters of his overwrought imagination.

Above the storm he had heard a hollow reverberating kr-oo-mm, almost two hours ago. He had known what the explosion meant, and it had banished his last small uneasiness that his plan might miscarry.

He was wondering now whether those men had finished yet with Gary. For all his jealousy and hatred, he himself shuddered as he pictured their methods of trying to make Gary tell them a secret which Gary did not know.

Through the black tossing timber he saw the twinkle of several flashlights up the valley trail; and he sprang to his feet. His men! Coming back! They had finished with Gary!

Utterly unaware of the wind and slashing rain, he hurried out of his tent and started across the small open quadrangle.

At the edge of the woods he met them—and at the sight of that little procession he stood rooted in his tracks.

His men, his own men, returning; but not as his feverish imagination had been visioning. It was no triumphant procession that he saw. Two of the party had their heads bandaged; the Indian Shushaugh was being helped to walk; the other two were limping along… All five of them looked like wrecks—a wreckage of the party which had left camp at twilight.

And at the head of those men, his own men, leading them to this camp, came the man Gary—with his head bandaged and his left arm in a crude bloodstained sling.

One look at their faces, at the grim and vengeful faces of those six, and Hugh realized, in a moment of paralyzing fear, that his plan had smashed to pieces; that the avalanche of fury and hot-blooded passion which he had launched at Gary, had somehow been turned back upon himself.

He stayed to see no more. That one look and one moment were enough. As the men caught sight of him and a yell burst from them, he whirled and started to flee, blindly—to escape the avenging wrath of those hard faces.

In his panic-stricken terror he headed back across the brightly-lighted quadrangle instead of leaping into the dark woods just at hand. Stumbling, crying out something inarticulate, he dragged out his automatic as he ran, but he was too stunned and terrified to whirl and shoot.

At the sight of him getting away, four of the men—even the staggering Shushaugh—broke out of the woods, and surged after him, across the quadrangle. But Cézar did not. With a snarling oath the ’breed tore Leda’s rifle out of Gary’s hand, sprang ahead to the edge of the open, and whipped the rifle to his cheek.

“Cézar!” Gary yelled frantically at the ’breed. “Hold that! The gold! The cache! He knows where it is! He’s the only man on earth—”

He got no farther. In the moment that he lunged at the ’breed, the sharp kr-ii-ng of Cézar’s rifle rang out, and a bullet screamed across the camp clearing.

At the woods edge beyond the huge bright fire, Hugh Ludlow stumbled, clutched at his breast, slumped over against a boulder, and slid slowly to the rain-soaked moss, with a bullet through his heart.

CHAPTER TWENTY

For a second time Gary found himself a visitor at Sergeant Rhodes’ green-and-white cottage, where once the whole course of his life had hung on a word from the gray-eyed officer.

As he chatted with Rhodes, he glanced through the window occasionally at the cement-steel butter-tub. Vividly all the details of that previous visit—that somber rainy morning, his meeting with Hugh Ludlow’s father, his story to Rhodes and the long grilling which Rhodes had given him came trooping into his mind. He was still so unaccustomed to his new-found freedom that the stern forbidding cell disquieted him whenever he looked at it.

“If it hadn’t been for you, Rhodes,” he thought silently, “I’d be back in Winnipeg, staring doom in the face.”

Beyond his profound gratitude to the man across the desk, he was thankful now for having had the courage, in that hour, to turn on his outlawry and fight it, instead of trying hopelessly to get away.

It was mid-afternoon of an early September day, two weeks after the tempestuous night of the battle at the cabin and Hugh Ludlow’s death. The first faint kiss of autumn was in the air; the wild-rose briar that brushed against the window had dropped its petals, and the high aspen drogues on the surrounding ranges were turning yellow. But the sun was still warm and lazy, and up Little Saghelia the mountain meadows and berry thickets were at their lush height.

Somewhat awkwardly, in a man’s way, Rhodes had prepared his cottage for the company and the occasion which he and Gary were awaiting. He had draped the steel filing case with an Indian narhkin, placed some ferns in the windows, spread a green plush cloth over the desk, with a simple small vase of asters in the center; and in an adjoining room the Chinese cook for the Mounted detachment was setting out tea for several guests.

Through the south window Rhodes glanced at the pass where the narrow-gauge led out to the Grand Trunk.

“I’m sorry to see you leaving Saghelia, Frazier,” he remarked, in the constrained manner of a person who felt more than he spoke. “I was rather wishing that you might put down roots and stay here. Marl Casper could and would offer you something worthwhile. I was talking to him yesterday, and he seemed more than interested in you.”

Gary shook his head. “I like Saghelia; I’d like to stay, myself; but Leda simply must get away. Here she’ll be eternally encountering those lies and slanders. I wouldn’t let her live any place where she can’t hold her head as high as the next person. This town is her home, and she wanted its good opinion desperately, but that’s something she just can’t ever have.”

Rhodes nodded. “I believe you’re right. May I inquire, just where are you going?”

“We don’t exactly know,” Gary confessed. “We haven’t figured very far ahead. That is, definitely. We’re going to step across to the Coast and knock around a while up and down the Inside Passage; then I’ll probably go to bat with a forestry school and learn something about woods besides how pretty they are. After that,”—He made a little gesture which seemed to say their plans were wide-open.

“I envy you your freedom—among other things,” Rhodes commented. He lit a cigarette, and inquired, casually, “By the way, how are you fixed for money, Frazier?”

Gary suspected the motive behind that question, and he answered evasively. “Well, I’m leaving this town in a whale of a better financial condition than when I landed here. I had exactly a nickel then, Rhodes—one of those dinky little thin nickels, at that!”

Rhodes smiled but refused to be sidetracked. “I don’t imagine you’ve got a great deal more than a nickel now. You yourself could make out, I presume, at boiling cabbage under a railroad bridge, but after this afternoon it won’t be you by yourself. It’s none of my business, but do you have enough to get along on?”

“I think so. We could have more, of course, but we have enough. The dust we brought away from the cache amounted to eleven hundred and sixty-odd dollars. That’s sure been a life-saver, Rhodes. When I stuck that little blob into my knapsack—just on second thought, to show old Nat—I never imagined how important it would turn out to be. After paying the royalty on the dust, we put Nat’s cabin back in shape, refurnished it, and added some conveniences he needed. Besides that, we salted him down a little nest egg against a rainy day. Then I made Leda go to the Miranda Shoppe and buy herself the clothes and so on that she’s been wanting and needing a long time; and I snagged myself enough of an outfit to look respectable in. We sure squeezed that eleven hundred till it squawked.”

“So it would seem. But tell me, in plain language, have you got any of it left?”

“Almost two hundred.”

“Humph! Two hundred dollars, for two people, no job, a honeymoon and this school business.” He thrummed on the desk, looked at Gary, and ventured hesitantly: “If you’d care for a loan, Frazier, you merely have to say so. It might smooth things a bit for you.”

Gary stopped him. “I thought you were coming around to that. Gosh, Rhodes, it’s mighty fine of you, but after all you’ve done for me, if I’d take a loan from you to boot—well, I just wouldn’t think of it. Two hundred will be plenty till I wangle myself a job somewhere. In fact, that’s more money than Leda or I either ever had in our lives.”

“As you wish,” Rhodes agreed. “But you needn’t feel obligation to me about this Winnipeg matter. Sergeant Spencer did the real work and deserves the credit.” He toyed musingly with the buckle of his gun belt. “Personally, I have to arrest so many people and do so many distasteful jobs that I’m glad of the occasional chance like this to give a person a little lift.”

Gary thought of those nightmare weeks of his outlawry. “Is that what you call it—‘a little lift’? Well, I’ve got another word for it! I’m obliged to Spencer, naturally; but you’re the person who believed in me.”

Rhodes waved his gratitude aside. “One thing more about the Winnipeg matter, and then we’ll drop it. This Calloway boy’s confession takes you off the blotter, of course, and I’ll wager that Spencer will have those other three before the month is out. But headquarters has directed me to see that you are available if you’re needed at the trial. So I wish you would keep in touch with me.”

“Why, sure. I’ll write you often, Rhodes. I was intending to anyhow.”

Rhodes regarded him a moment. “You don’t seem entirely pleased about this business over East, Frazier. If you’re worrying at all about yourself, you can dismiss it. You’re cleared of any implication whatsoever.”

Gary did not answer. It was not himself he was thinking about but those four men in Manitoba. One of them was already in the dread power of the law, and the other three were enduring the hunted existence, the torturing fears, which once had been his own. Guilty though those men were, he could feel for them.

Through the open door Rhodes glanced down the street, looking for the other four guests, but they were not in sight. From the street and the town his gaze traveled across the main valley to Little Saghelia, half veiled with a blue-misty haze that presaged Indian summer.

“I suppose you feel pretty keenly, Frazier, about having that Rusk cache right in your hands and then losing it. Don’t you think you’re giving up the hunt a bit hastily?”

“Leda and I did hunt some, but we hadn’t much hope. There’s no telling where Hugh cached that stuff. He was skating on mighty thin ice, and he hid the gold plenty tight. He and Eutrope toted it out of the cave—we studied their tracks and made sure; but where they took it, only the Lord knows. And it’s my hunch that only the Lord ever will know.”

“But you and Leda found it once. You ought to be able to find it again.”

“I don’t think so. Originally it was stowed in a cave, a place large enough for a pack of men to live in; but now it might be anywhere. It’s not very big in bulk. Hugh could have stuck it anywhere—into a rock crack, or under any old log, or even in a hole in the ground. We found it by plain luck—that storm—the first time; and it’d take a miracle of luck to find it now.”

“It’s half a million dollars,” Rhodes reminded.

“I know, and I’m not sneezing at it. But a person might comb Little Saghelia for a lifetime and never find a trace of that dust. Besides, it’s tainted gold, and it seems to bring bad luck to everyone who touches it.”

“‘Tainted’—?”

“Worse! It’s soaked with blood. And if you don’t think it brings bad luck, look at its story. The prospectors who panned it in the Saghelia headwaters were murdered, on old Paradise Trail. Then Chilcote and all his men got wiped out. Then Hugh and Eutrope had it next, and they both were killed. I don’t want to sound superstitious, but when Leda and I found the stuff, a dead man was guarding it; and unless I miss my guess, there’s a dead man guarding it again.”

“Eutrope?”

“Yes. Whether they had a quarrel or Hugh wanted all that fortune for himself, I don’t know; but he killed Eutrope, after they’d cached the stuff, and the chances are that he tumbled Eutrope’s body in on top of it, rather than waste time and run risks of hunting another hiding place. Isn’t it odd, Rhodes?—in the end it’s a dead man who’s got that gold! Well, he can keep it, as far as I’m concerned.”

Down the graveled walk Rhodes caught a glimpse of his other guests—Régina Bergelot and Leda, big Alec Bergelot and old Nat Higgens—turning into the Police quadrangle. As he stood up, to go and receive them, he commented:

“I can understand your feeling about it. Well, at any rate old Nat can keep on hunting for the Rusk gold. And if it’s as secretly hidden as you think, he’ll have the hunt for the rest of his days.”

Gary slowly nodded. All through the past two weeks, while Leda and himself were fixing up the cabin, old Nat had been gone from dawn till the mountain twilight, searching for the cache. Yes, the hunt would last him, all right; and now he would know that the gold of the Chilcote Rusk pack was no myth but a solid actuality. For the rest of his old years he could go on living up Little Saghelia, poking around in the rocks and woods of that beautiful valley, till his twilight settled down and night came peacefully across the range.

* * * *

Despite himself as he stood with Leda before the cloth-covered desk, Gary could not keep his mind on what was happening.

In slow voice, touched with solemnity, Rhodes was reading to Leda and him. Behind them stood Alec and Regina Bergelot, almost their only two friends in Saghelia. Old Nat, fidgety and restless in the mossy-green suit, necktie and celluloid collar which he had resurrected for the occasion, seemed to have one eye on blue-hazy Little Saghelia and one on the rites which were making man and wife of the two young people who had found haven in his crude wilderness home. His whole manner seemed to imply that he had had a very narrow escape indeed from being a wealthy man and having to come down and live in the town and wear clothes like these all the time.

Though he realized vaguely that he really ought to be listening, Gary scarcely heard what Rhodes was reading. For him the marriage ceremony had resurrected the memory of a rainy sidewalk, a purring limousine, and a harassed old man barking impetuously: “What’ll you take to marry that girl?… No sham stuff… Legal and court-tight… This Rhodes person can do it.”

Past Leda and through the rose-cluttered window he could see the Tibetan pines of the Ludlow home; and a deep pity stirred in him for old Hugh Ludlow. Blind to all values except seizing and possessing, Hugh’s father had never really lived. How different his way of life from old Nat Higgens’! He had sought happiness in grasping and acquiring, and had found only bitterness and defeat. But old Nat, caring little about actually acquiring the cache of gold, found happiness in the hunt itself. For him there was lots of hunting—and lots of happiness.

Rhodes paused in his reading, Leda nudged Gary’s arm and brought him out of his thoughts, and he became aware of a strained silence.

Ashamed of himself for woolgathering at such a time, he answered hastily: “I do!”

Again as Rhodes read on, his thoughts went straying. A shaft of that afternoon sun was touching Leda’s auburn hair, lighting soft fires in it, and that started him thinking of the hundred times when he and she had sat together on rock or mossy log or mountainside meadow up Little Saghelia. In her dainty new clothes Leda seemed so strange, so different from his bush-loping Lee partner, that he almost wished she were clad again in her moccasins, corduroy dress and old jacket of their cave-hunting trips.

When the ceremony was over and Rhodes was ushering his guests into the adjoining room for tea, he and Leda lingered behind the others and had a few moments to themselves. As they looked at each other Gary tried, gropingly, to express his feeling of their one-ness now.

“Gosh, Lee, we’re—we’re married!”

Leda’s hazel eyes were reproachful. “Are you positive? You didn’t pay a bit of attention. I’m ashamed of you.”

“Well, so’m I, Lee. But—but I was thinking things.”

“You might have saved them for some other time. A person doesn’t get married every day. Anyway, I don’t.”

“Well, I don’t either. In fact, one of the things I was thinking was that this once was for our whole lives, Lee. Anyway, I know it’ll be for mine.”

Leda relented. “It’ll be for mine too, Gary. But haven’t you forgotten—something?”

As she stood tiptoe and Gary kissed her, it came home to him how utterly Leda’s happiness lay in his hands. Except himself she had no friend or kin on earth. He and she were partners now on a longer trail and trip than any they had taken yet, and they could not expect their trail to lead them always in so auspicious a place as Little Saghelia.

* * * *

Near six o’clock that evening the small narrow-gauge train—a few cars of mixed freight and lumber and ore-mill products, with a remodeled caboose for the half-dozen passengers—stopped on top of the high pass, as though the diminutive engine had to wheeze and puff for a time, after the long winding climb out of the valley.

While the train crew was lashing a car of lumber more securely, Gary and Leda slipped away from their fellow-travelers and wandered out through an aspen drogue to a bold cliff overlooking Big Saghelia. On the edge of the rock they stood gazing down—Leda, at her girlhood home; Gary, at the isolated country which had been kinder to him than he had ever imagined when he had come through this pass alone, a hunted fugitive, two months ago.

The town far away below, the lifeless river, the slag heaps and blackened acres of the main valley were unlovely even in the dusk of evening; and he lifted his eyes across the miles to Little Saghelia. The wilderness valley was filling swiftly with purple shadow; the overfalls and hanging lakes were already veiled from him; but he could still faintly see the whitish rim-rock and the tiny dot of a meadow where old Nat’s cabin nestled.

He noticed that Leda was shivering in her dainty silk frock, and put his jacket around her shoulders.

“Do you remember our tarn, Lee, over yonder?”

“I couldn’t ever forget it, Gary.”

“And how shy you were that first night when I came? We never thought, Lee, that in less than two months, we’d be going away like this, together.”

They lapsed into silence, gazing at the distant valley and watching a snow cloud blanket Sentinel Knob with white. When the creeping twilight finally had shut the meadow from sight and mantled Little Saghelia in soft owl-dusk, they turned away slowly, and walked back, hand in hand—sorry over their farewell to old Paradise Trail and old Nat Higgens and Sergeant Rhodes, but eager, with the zest of youth and love, to face the unknown trail ahead of them.