OVERCOME by horror and exertion, Keven lay on the sand, his face upturned to the oncoming storm. At length he sat up, panting, wet, trembling. The river swept by, out into the darkness whence pounded and threshed the surf.
“Oh, my—God!” he cried, in dreadful realization. “He saved—me! … He’s gone! … Garry! Garry!”
Even if Garry were alive when the skiff drifted out he would soon be drowned in those wild waters. Mulligan had sunk. He would drift out to sea. But the sea gave up its dead. It would cast the half-breed up with that knife stuck in his neck. Keven would be branded a murderer.
The instinct to escape arose in him. Staggering up, he gazed fearfully at the pale sand beach, across the gloomy bay toward the town. Thunder was crashing nearer. The storm would soon break. When the lightning flashed he saw boats with the dark figures of men. Fishermen at their nets! They might find Mulligan’s drifting empty boat. He slunk over on the seaside of the beach until he drew under cover of the wooded hill, when he swung around to the bay shore again. As he hurried on he gathered strength. No person saw him reach camp.
It was in his mind to go up the river. He packed a small bag of biscuits, cooked meat, dried fruit. He donned his rubber coat, which had the wool lining. Then he removed it and also his wet shirt. Finding his remaining one, he put that on, and the coat over it. But he would not leave the wet shirt behind. It might somehow be a clue. What else would he take? As he stripped off a blanket from the bed, Garry’s gun fell out from under the pillow. Keven heard it, then felt it. The cold steel sent a shiver through him, followed by a swift gust of hot blood. He would make his way up the river trail to Grant’s Pass and kill Atwell before he was caught. That was what he would do. All the passion and hate, the bitter consciousness of foul wrong done him, welled up to fix in grim, unalterable decision. Rolling the blanket lengthwise, he slung it over his shoulder. The shirt he stuffed in the bag. Then he thought of his watch, comb and brush, his little mirror, and other small articles, which he stowed in his pockets. He was ready. But he turned back once more for his tackle.
He peered through the gloom. A dim light shone in Stemm’s cabin. Keven strode off silently, his nerves taut, his eyes roving everywhere, his throat contracted. He got by the few remaining fishermen’s shacks.
It would be necessary to cross the river. On the opposite side a road led up some miles, he did not know how many, to the government trail. He could cross in one of the Indians’ boats, but he rejected that idea because it might direct attention to his flight. The river was rising; however, it had been low, and a few inches or even a foot would not prevent him from crossing at a wide rocky island bar some distance upstream.
Flashes of lightning aided him to make his way along the shore. Drops of rain splashed on his face. How slow the storm in coming! But if it were as heavy as the roll of thunder portended, if it raised the river overnight-—that might be well for him. He found the rocky bar and made out the island. The river was rising and salmon were running. As he waded across the wide shallow channel he heard the big Chinook thumping and ranting upstream. Not now did they have power to thrill him! The Rogue had ruined him, betrayed him.
He crossed without difficulty, but had trouble over the boulders and through the brush. He pressed on to come out into the road. Then the thunder crashed and the clouds burst. Heavy, warm rain flooded down. He welcomed it. His tracks would be washed out.
Exhaustion had left him. He felt strong, enduring, swift. He could have run. The blanket and bag hung easily on his shoulders. He carried the rod in his hand. The reel had been stowed in one of his pockets. Funny he would not leave them behind! He strode on, free, through the downpour, with the lightning flashes blinding him, the rolling, booming thunder deafening him. This was no passing shower, but a mountain cloudburst. The Rogue would rise as if by magic. Midnight would see it in flood. By dawn there would be no fishermen on the bay. Keven had no hope of ultimate escape. All he asked were days enough to make the long tramp up the river and to consummate his revenge. Then let what would happen! But freedom tasted sweet. He would die before surrendering, to be thrown behind bars, to languish and wait for worse than death. He might even escape after killing Atwell, to flee into the fastnesses of the Rogue wilderness, where he could never be apprehended and captured. Bloodhounds could not trail him through the fir forests and the canyons along the river.
Thus with active and grim mind he strode on through the storm. Its fury and ceaselessness seemed to beat in time with his thoughts. Hour after hour must have passed, but time was not significant. In the gray of morning he came to the end of the road. A house and some cabins marked this terminal. From there the government trail climbed to the mountainside above the river. Daylight delayed long. The rain fell steadily, though its violence had departed. The Rogue roared below. When he could at last discern it down through the firs and the mist it looked like a dark brown swirling torrent. Uprooted trees, their foliage green against the water, told the tale of the mountain storm.
Toward noon the rain ceased and the clouds began to lift. Long before he reached it, he espied the hamlet of Agness, which he recognized by the white suspension bridge that spanned the river. Here he plunged into the woods and made a slow wide detour, to come out on the trail far beyond. He began to be aware of sensations of fatigue and hunger. But he kept on, meaning to pass Illahe, the second and last little hamlet on the river, before he halted to rest and eat. Late that afternoon he came out into a widening of the valley in which Illahe was located. It consisted of a few scattered outlying farms and a few houses clustered together near the river. This detour took longer, but he did not have to climb uphill. At last he came out again on the trail. Dusk overtook him, and he felt that he had gone his limit. While there was still light enough to see he made off the trail into a pine thicket. He felt too weary to eat, yet he forced himself. He had walked forty miles or more without food or rest. When he rolled in the blanket night seemed to shut out his senses.
When he became conscious of them again the forest was full of golden light and slanting rays. The trees had ceased to drip. Birds were singing. The mellow roar of the river stole dreamily through the woods.
Keven lay like a log, his mind quick to grasp this was no enchantment of sleep. When he attempted to move there followed only a painful spasm of his muscles. They were stiff. He had driven himself to the limit and then had slept in wet clothes and blanket. It required effort to roll over and get up on his hands and knees, then to stand up. Moving about a bit, he discovered that some animal had overturned his canvas bag, to make off with his little store of food. This serious mishap struck him with panic. It would take days to reach Grant’s pass, and without food he never could make it. Then it dawned upon him that he was only eight miles from Aard’s cabin at Solitude, and Aard was a man he would not be afraid to trust. Rolling his blanket and taking up the bag, he set out, dragging one foot after the other. Before stepping into the trail he glanced back and forward. Squirrels were frisking across it. The river hummed below. All seemed locked in solitude. He turned south.
Presently he came out in a sunny glade through which ran a clear stream, splashing and babbling over rocks. Depositing his things on the ground, he drank deeply, then washed his face in the icy water and combed and brushed his tangled hair. After which he sat motionless on a mossy log, conscious of nothing except that the light, the smell, the sound and feel of the woods were working upon him. Then he arose to plod on.
Soon the trail emerged on a high slope above the river. The scene somehow burst upon him, halting him in his tracks. The river was in turgid flood, bank-full, covering the rocks, swinging swiftly around the green gap above and sliding the same way out of sight below. It had been a very quick rise—so quick that only vigilance on the part of the fishermen at the mouth of the river could have saved their nets and boats.
Then a shocking memory, like a blade, stabbed through him. Faithful, simple, rough Garry had died for him. And he had killed a man. The latter seemed nothing. It was self-defense, justice. No qualms of conscience weighed upon Keven. He would have done the same thing again. But who would believe his story? He would be branded a murderer and he would be hanged. He was a fugitive who would be hunted. Then his deadly project returned, stronger than ever, possessing him utterly, driving him on, the lust to kill stealing along his numb nerves, through his sluggish blood, even into his aching bones.
But spirit was one thing and physical strength another. Less than a half mile up the trail he had to rest again. He wanted to drop down and never get up again. So, toiling on, and resting oftener, he covered a few miles. The sun now shone hot; the leaf-strewn trail had become dry; from the slopes floated up the sweet fragrance of myrtle, and the pungent odor from patches of pinewoods clogged his nostrils. Birds and squirrels were unusually gay this fresh, bright, golden morning. Only when deer met him on the trail, to stand and gaze with long ears up, did he remember that he was penetrating the wilds of the Cascades. Thereafter he watched with the eyes of a hunter, because it was not possible for him to pass along blind and deaf to the creatures of the wilderness. Only there was no thrill, no joy, no consciousness of beauty, no thought of the glory of nature. Also he listened for a hoof thump on the trail behind.
The trail entered what appeared to be a green tunnel under the forest, shady, silent, drowsy in the noonday heat. Presently the hoof-beats he had been listening for vibrated on Keven’s sensitive nerves. Stealthily as an Indian he slipped into the brush, to crouch in a shaded covert, his heart thumping, the roof of his mouth dry. But soon he ascertained that the horse was approaching from the north, which fact instantly released the clutch of terror.
Tramp of hoofs, merry whistles, rough gay voices of men, swelled upon Keven’s ears. Soon he caught a glimpse of packers going down the trail with their pack train. Seldom were any other travelers encountered along the river. These were half-breeds, happy and carefree. Keven wondered dully how anyone could whistle, and he envied these natives of the Rogue wilderness. When they had passed on out of hearing he entered the trail again, pondering whether or not they would see his tracks. It was unlikely, for the trail was hard and dry; only a hunter on foot could have discerned the slight disturbance of dust and leaves. Keven toiled on.
He rested oftener, sitting idly on logs or stones he came to, or at the trunk of a stately fir, conscious of some strange lagging of resolve, of the will to force his weary body further.
Midafternoon found him within sight of the great V-shaped valley which marked the entrance to Solitude. Not once along this stretch did he rest. Indeed he tried to hurry, as if his desire were to reach Solitude and get it behind him. The trail descended, crossing the old flumes left by the miners who had long years before passed on, leaving these eloquent reminders of their dream, of their passion. Endlessly the left-hand slope of the valley slanted toward the blue sky, plowed by dry gullies, here bare and red where avalanche had scored the earth, there gray with long slide of weathered rock, and above sunny with wide grassy plot merging in the oak forest of the summit. Across the river, at the water’s edge, began the forest of firs, so densely grown that only the spear-point tips could be discerned; and it sheered up, black and wild, to the mountain peaks.
But when Keven got round the bend to Solitude he fell victim to infinitely more than fatigue. Sight of Solitude broke his gloomy and rancorous mood. It brought something nameless back to him. Was it youth, was it love of the river, was it this most lonely and fascinating stretch on all the wayward Rogue, was it the dead joy of fishing—that he would know no more? The mile-long channel, the cliff wall, the foaming bend, the dark bench of tan oaks across the river, where under their shiny tight foliage moldered the old moss-roofed gold mill of the miners—these seemed nothing to him now. The tranquil and unbroken solitude—was that dimming his eyes? High above him in the fir tops moaned the wind, the restful sound, the song of the trees. He sought to grasp the old beauty, the dream and the glory of Solitude. But for him they had vanished. He wept. His heart seemed to break. He surrendered to he knew not what. It would be better for him to plunge into the river and find peace there under the lichened shelving cliffs. He had courage to do that—but a hellish resolve had clutched him. He would be what they had made him. He had been trained to kill and he would kill. But not even this recurrent and augmenting hate could subjugate his grief.
Keven shouldered his burdens and plodded on. The trail wound among huge mossy boulders, skirted the sandy shore, went on into the brown-matted and pine-scented forest, to emerge in the open above the bench where Aard lived. Keven saw two cabins now, one above the other, and the higher, with its peeled logs, its yellow stone chimney, its wide sloping eaves and porch, appeared unfamiliar to him. But the lower cabin, old, mossy, vine-covered, nestling under a grand fir, strangely called to that vague, haunting, faulty memory. He heard the ring of an ax; he saw a curling column of blue smoke. Aard must be home. Keven meant to rest awhile, ask some food of this backwoodsman, tell him nothing, and go on to the fulfillment of his last task.
The deep bay of a hound startled him. It pealed up the slope, returned in hollow echo. How that, too, pierced into the closed chamber of his mind! He went down the sunlit, shadow-barred trail. Presently up in a green-gray notch behind the cabin he espied a white lacy waterfall. Sight of it gave him the same perplexity; likewise the succeeding low mellow hum of tumbling stream, like the murmur of innumerable bees. Again the fragrance of sweet myrtle struck his nostrils. The smell pierced deeper than other sense stimulations. He remembered that waterfall—how he had climbed to it—to the fern-choked source of the stream. Yet there seemed something more.
Keven mounted the bench, over which the giant fir stood sentinel. The trail forked. He kept to the left, coming out suddenly into the colorful open. Asters bloomed along the path, in the clean hard-packed sand on which Keven caught a trace of little moccasin tracks. The first cabin stood on the river end of the clearing. Back of it fenced gardens and orchards reached to the mountain slope. Beyond this cabin, and higher, stood the other, on the brink of the green gorge down which the stream hummed.
The hound bayed again, and a chorus of yelps and barks from lesser dogs filled the air. A voice silenced them. Keven directed his gaze back to the first cabin. Someone stood on the porch surrounded by dogs.
Keven halted to sit down on a huge log that lay between the path and the edge of the clearing. He was spent again, and it might be better to wait until Aard came out. He laid aside his burdens and removed his cap.
Suddenly a wildly sweet, piercing, trilling cry rent the silence, Keven jerked up in startled surprise. A girl came running swiftly down the path, followed by the dogs.
“Kev! Oh, Kev!” she screamed.
He was as if thunderstruck. He stared. She came flying on winged feet, her dark face and dark hair shining in the sunlight.
“Oh, Kev! I thought you’d—never, never—come back,” she panted, and reaching him on the run, without giving him a chance to look at her, she clasped her arms round him and held him close, her head over his shoulder, her face against his. “But, thank God—you did come. I knew you would someday.”
Keven essayed to find his voice, but in vain. He doubted his senses. Yet he felt a clinging of tender arms, though strong as steel, of a throbbing, heaving breast, of hot tears wetting his cheek. They affected him even more strangely than the surprise of this onslaught. For a moment he was as if almost paralyzed, his thoughts hopelessly jumbled.
Then she released him and stood erect, her hands on his shoulders. He could see her now—strong, beautiful face, smooth and clear-skinned, with scarlet showing under the dark golden tan, eyes piercingly black for all their brimming with tears, and hair like an Indian’s.
“You nearly broke my heart, Kev,” she said, smiling through her tears.
Keven racked his clouded brain. He stammered: “Aren’t—haven’t you—mistaken me—for someone else?”
“Kev Bell!” she cried reproachfully, and she shook him ever so slightly.
“You have my name pat. But who——”
“Don’t you know me?” she interrupted, deeply hurt and shocked.
“I—I’m afraid not.”
“Oh, Kev, you are teasing me.”
“Indeed, no, Miss.”
“I am Beryl,” she said simply.
Beryl! That name knocked at the gate of closed associations: “Beryl! … Beryl who?”
“Aard, of course…. You are teasing me. It’s mean of you—almost as mean as your going by here last May without stopping to see me.”
“I’m sorry, Miss——”
“Miss! How can you call me that? How can you sit there sober-faced, making me feel ridiculous—when I—I’m dying to be kissed?” she protested, in doubt and fear, yet obviously so overjoyed at his presence that she could scarcely refrain from embracing him again. She blushed, too, at that bold conclusion.
Keven gazed at her more bewildered than ever, though he realized now that this was no case of mistaken identity. She knew him if he did not know her. And he was involved somewhere, somehow. In these few thrilling moments her face had grown strangely familiar.
“Well, I wouldn’t let any girl die for want of so simple a thing,” said Keven, sparring for time. “But I—I see you are earnest. And I just can’t place you.”
“Oh, it must be true, then,” she cried poignantly. “You don’t remember me!”
“Ought I to?” asked Keven.
“Indeed you ought, unless you’ve become a fickle, faithless soldier.”
“I assure you I’m not that. But if you had said a crippled, broken soldier, you’d be right…. I was injured by the bursting of a gun. The breechblock blew back into my face. It was many weeks before I recovered enough to know what had happened. Then I lay in a camp hospital for months. I’m nearly blind in one eye. My lower jaw was blown off. See the scars on my lip and chin? Then I suffered other injury to my head, and so my memory fails sometimes. That must be why I don’t remember you—if it’s true that I should.”
Keven did not expect that his lengthy explanation would bring about any other result than to calm this magnificent young woman and earn palliation if not forgiveness for his offense. But it did far more. Her face blanched, her eyes dilated and softened, expressing unutterable sorrow, her red lips quivered. And her hands went with exquisite tenderness to his chin and cheek, and then over his brow, finally to run in sudden wild rapture through his hair and to lock back of his neck. Then she kissed his cheek and drew back.
“Kev, does that help—you to remember?” she asked, with a break in her rich voice.
“I—yes—that is, the way you mussed my hair—somehow I—I sort of remember that,” he replied, in tremendous embarrassment.
“Kev, it’s not that you’ve forgotten me,” she went on earnestly. “I was horribly hurt. But then I didn’t know how you’d suffered. I will come back to you presently.”
“If you’ll let me ask you questions, perhaps that might help.”
“Ask away…. Kev, you smiled then for the first time. Oh, you poor soldier boy!”
“You’re Aard’s daughter?” began Keven.
“Of course. I was born in that cabin. My mother died last winter.”
“I remember Solitude better than any other place on the river,” went on Keven. “I have been here twice, fishing. Once for what must have been a good while. Only a little over four years ago! But now it seems so far away and long ago…. You must have been here when I stayed with Aard that last time.”
“Yes, Kev, I was here,” she replied wistfully. “I spent every hour of the livelong day with you—and often far into the night.”
“Did—I——?” asked Keven haltingly, almost afraid to go on. “But weren’t you a—a mere child?”
“I was not. I was sixteen years old and large for my age,” she returned emphatically.
“Did—did I make love to you?”
“Terribly…. No girl ever had such wonderful love made to her.”
Keven felt as if a gulf were about to open up and swallow him. She held her head up proudly, as if she had been vastly honored. Poor Keven was in a quandary. He could not doubt her. Simplicity and honesty breathed from her.
“Did I kiss you, Beryl?”
“Did you?” She trilled a happy laugh of incredulity. “You teased me, coaxed me, begged me for one little kiss…. And when I gave in you took ten thousand.”
A thrill shot through Keven, and something snatched away his breath.
“It seems I must have been—wild and bold,” he continued, gravely trying to meet her black eyes. “I hope—I—I didn’t lay a hand on you.”
“Kev Bell! Your memory is gone. A pretty fresh boy you were. You laid two hands on me—and if you’d had a third that wouldn’t have been enough.”
Keven bowed his head under this startling admission. He felt the slow hot blood sting his cheeks. What had he done to this girl—when she had been a child of the wilderness?
She touched his head with gentle hand and smoothed his hair.
“Don’t feel badly about that, Kev,” she returned, in shy earnestness. “You weren’t all to blame…. I—I loved you. And you did me no harm…. Only you made me worship you—made me so I could never look at another boy—made me wait and wait for you to come back.”
“Did I promise to come back?” asked Keven.
“Yes. But the United States was forced into war,” she went on. “You did not wait to be drafted. Dad had the newspapers from Portland, Grant’s Pass, Seattle. I read of you going to training camp. But I never knew where. Always I expected to hear from you. We thought you had gone to France. That nearly killed me. I could not stay here at Solitude. It drove me mad…. Then I read of your accident. Scared and sick as I was at that, I was terribly glad you’d never gone to war. I waited and prayed—knowing you’d come back to me some day…. Oh, how long—the weeks, the months, the years! No news! No letter! … Still I trusted and waited.”
Keven writhed under the enormity of this thing that was befalling him.
“You say—you couldn’t stay here? Where’d you go?”
“I went to Roseburg, to my aunt’s,” she returned. “There I attended school. Vacation times I came home. I ran wild. I fished, I hunted, I chopped wood, I worked. I helped build a log cabin. But I couldn’t be happy. I longed for you…. Then when Mother died Dad fetched me home.”
“Tell me something more about what I did, when I was here that last time,” said Keven, determined to damn himself utterly and forever in his own sight.
“Oh, there are a million things,” she jubilated, in contrast to her former pathos. “We climbed the trails. We used to watch the deer in the oak groves. Once we were treed by wild pigs! How funny that was! We gathered flowers and ferns. We used to wash the sand for gold. I have a little vial full of gold dust that we washed. But the river was your god. I was jealous of the river. You loved it best, and then the water ouzels and the steelhead…. All the time since you’ve been away, while I was home, when I heard the ouzels in the mornings and evenings I would cry.”
“Water ouzels? These little elfish Rogue River birds that build their nests under the cliffs, so when their young ones hatch they’ll fall in the water?”
“Yes, yes, Kev,” she cried eagerly. “We used to try to get to those mud nests sticking on the walls. But we never could…. Don’t you remember how I first took you to the rock ledges where the steelhead lay? No one ever knew them but Dad and I. But I showed you. Don’t you remember one lovely morning that I saw a big steelhead rising? And I showed you where. You cast and cast. You tried every fly you had. And at last I let you try one I had tied myself. It was buff and black. The old sockdolager rose up and fastened to that fly. Then he leaped—a monster. Sixteen, perhaps eighteen pounds. And he took you down around the bend. You ran, you waded, you swam the river over and back again, while I flew and screamed along the bank. Oh, don’t you remember, Kev? … How I met you at the head of the rapids where you lost him? Your rod was broken and so was your heart…. It was then, Kev, that I let you—no, that I gave you my first kiss.”
A door seemed to jar and shock back on the dim threshold of that closed chamber in Keven Bell’s brain. He saw again that monster rose-and-silver trout, leaping and tearing down the swift river. He saw again a girl, black-eyed and blackhaired, flying barefooted over the sand and stones, screaming in wild abandon.
“Beryl, I remember—I remember!” he exclaimed, his eyes closed in a rapture that had its inception in the past. The next instant the girl was on his breast, weeping, crying out her thanksgiving for his deliverance from oblivion. Instinctively, unconsciously his arms closed round her. And when he opened his eyes there he stood with a dark head on his breast, with fragrant hair at his lips. He could not realize it. The dogs wagged eager tails and gazed up wonderingly at this stranger. Then Keven looked up. Was that waterfall, like downward-flying lace as white as snow, anything real and tangible? Did cloud ships sail across the blue sky and drop moving shadows along the mountain slope? Was that scent of sweet myrtle a delusion? Were the purple asters swaying in the breeze flowers of a dream? Was he only mad or dead?
It was she who released herself.
“Dad is away from home,” she said. “He goes to Portland sometimes. He said he would stop over at Gold Beach to see you. Oh, won’t he be glad!”
The horror of the fate that had overtaken Keven swept over him again.
“You are pale—tired. You look so strange,” she said tremulously.
“I’m all in, Beryl,” he replied, suddenly weak. “I wasn’t strong—and I walked too far. Then I slept in my wet things and it cramped me. I’m starved, too.”
“Oh, dear! And here I’ve been wearing you out with my fury!” she exclaimed self-accusingly. “But, oh, the joy of having you back! My Keven! My soldier home from the war! … Come. I shall rest you and feed you and nurse you till you are the Keven of old.”
She led him toward the cabin. He espied an Indian woman peering at them from the porch. The dogs trotted on ahead, assured now that all was well. The blue smoke curled up from the stone chimney. Keven caught the odor of a wood fire and baking bread. He seemed powerless to resist, though he knew he could flee like a madman into the forest.